Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

There was a little difficulty in getting myself enrolled in the faculty of arts halfway through the academic year, and my father had to go into Johannesburg to interview the Dean, but it was done and I was a student. My mother was reassured that a B.A. graduate could command a number of good jobs and, unexpectedly, made quite a dining-out, or rather “afternoon,” tale of the way I had marched into the University without a word after refusing to go earlier in the year, telling the story with a shrug of the amused, victimized indulgence of those mothers who pride themselves in their children by seeming to discredit them. My father, of course, was delighted. He convinced himself that the eighteen-months’ break in my education between school and university was an intentional maturing process, a kind of parental system of his own. He told me continually of the advantages I should have over others who had gone straight from school.

Well, perhaps he was right, if not in the way he thought he was. Certainly I did not go now for the blazer or the prestige. I went out of doubt and boredom and a sense of wonder at life: the beginning of all seeking, the muddled start of the journey toward oneself. And I was unaware of this, and excited. I wanted to read and I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to bury myself in the great cool library where no one spoke, and where, on the day I had looked in, people had lifted their heads like deer lifting their heads over water, and in their eyes was the intense blank of concentration; running through them, the endless stream of questions, suggestions from books, a live current from last year or four hundred years back. I was absorbed from minute to minute in the busyness of working out my timetable of lectures, buying prescribed books, and my mother and I suddenly met warmly again in the fittings and discussion of the clothes I would need. Seeing her face hot-looking as she bent over the sewing machine, or anxiously looking up at me as she pinned a hem from the neat row she always kept stuck in the collar of her dress as she sewed, I remembered the smell of her warm from cooking, when I came home from school as a child.

And so in August I began the first of many hundreds of daily journeys from Atherton to Johannesburg by train. When the line left Atherton station, it ran out in the direction of the Mine, and there was a siding just outside the limits of the Mine property. Here the train stopped for a minute or two and here I boarded it, every morning, waiting with a handful of other people, poised like starters at a race for its screeching arrival, and getting off in the early winter dark in the evening, dropped from the day with a soft thud to the dust of the platform. The siding was a bare place of deep red dust and coal grit, where the wind fought torn newspapers and the tin ticket office seemed perpetually to be closed, the man in charge sat so far inside it, and the little bleary window had such a look of ignoring everything, like a closed eyelid. Where the platform ended, man-high khaki weed began. In the summer it was lurid khaki-green and bitter-smelling, and in autumn it bristled with seeds like black pins that fastened to anything that brushed by, and blew and seeded and found their way to every inch of bare soil, but now it stood in black, dead stooks, scratching through the wind. That was all there was to hear on winter mornings. A few natives, swathed in blankets as in the silence of a cocoon, waited around the ticket office. Sometimes it did not open at all before the train came in, and so they missed the train, but other times the little window would snatch up and I would see the face of the man behind it, hating the natives for the winter morning and the tin shed, hypnotizing them into fumbling timidity with his silence and his sudden shout: Yes? Yes?

Sometimes there was a native who sat on the ground, shrouded like a Mexican in his poncho, and from his hidden mouth beneath the blanket came the thin grandeur of a mouth organ, being played to himself. Around him two or three white men in business suits turned the morning paper awkwardly with gloved hands, a shopgirl clutched her knitting in a chiffon scarf. Basil Tatchett and his friends, who had just bought themselves pipes, stood comparing boles and tobacco pouches.

At night the siding was very dark. Only one lamp, high up, lifted the steel rails like streaks of water out of the dark, and often a stone was thrown at it and for a few days there would be no lamp at all. There were more natives about, sometimes a great many, and they shouted, carrying trunks on their heads, balancing their bicycles in and out. Plunging down through the khaki weed to get to the road, the evil smell of it was like the smell of a swamp, and the dark figures with their strong body-smell and their great knobkerries passed silently. Down in the ditch in the khaki weed the body of a Mine boy had once been found, with a knife in his back. He had lain there for a whole day before someone had tried him with a foot and found that he was not simply lying asleep and close to the ground in the sun, the way the Mine boys did.

My father was always there to meet me in the evenings; I would see the rim of light on his glasses turned to the carriages as the train drew in in the pale dusty radiance of its windows. Then with our coats drawn round us we would huddle off to the car parked at the roadside, walking quickly through the dark and the shouts of the black men for whom we were not there, so that they stumbled and bumped into us as if they stepped through the bodies of pale ghosts. Thinly and quickly the few white people dispersed, leaving the cries that in the dark and in a strange language sounded savage and the whiteness of eyes that in their dumbness seemed like the eyes of slow beasts in the darkness, beasts who are dreaming or preparing to charge, one cannot tell. And within a few hundred yards we were all home, in houses that smelled of food cooking, the radio was on, and the telephone kept up its regular spaced ring for the friends who choose mealtimes to make plans.

The same people traveled on the train every day. Most of them got in at Atherton and by the time I climbed into the carriage they were settled in what were their places rather than their seats: for everyone returned day after day to the carriage originally boarded by chance and made familiar by habit, and everyone disposed himself automatically in the seat, in the relation to the other occupants of the carriage, in which timidity, a taste for reading in solitude, looking out of a window, or the desire to sit where the view of the head of a particular girl — long since disappeared or forgotten — had dictated. When a new traveler, like myself, got into the train for the first time, certain circumstances and forces set to work immediately making a place for him too, though he might believe he had simply sat himself down in the nearest seat. I walked through the first carriage because that, I saw, was where Basil Tatchett and his friends gathered and, hesitating at the next, I passed through that one too because an old man with a thickly clouding pipe sat beside a determinedly closed window. In the second coach of the third carriage, I sat down. Eyes turned with a pretense of no curiosity on me, and later, when they were looking elsewhere, I turned mine on them. A pretty girl with sternly ridged blond hair bit her nails and read an Afrikaans novel beside me, two others knitted, the one hunched over the ceaseless bite of needles, the other talking low and confidentially in her ear, while her own knitting rested often in her lap. A young man stared into his window, a lunch tin dangling between his knees. A woman’s legs were crossed beneath a paper; the hands that showed holding it had long red nails, a beautiful ring that slipped round on a thin finger. Opposite me was another pipe-smoker; but he was young, with a pleasant bulldog face over a yellow muffler, and he was reading Anthony Trollope beside an open window.