Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Soon getting into the carriage every morning was like coming down to breakfast at a hotel where you have been staying for some time. Were they all there? Yes. There is the pattern of the Colonel eating his kipper, only the wife down at the young couple’s table, the six commercial travelers smoking expansively over coffee. And with an approving eye they all note you dropping into your place.

I had a great deal of reading to do in order to find the lectures I was attending intelligible, since I had missed the first half of the year, and so I had time each morning for only this quick glance of reassurance before disappearing into my book. The pipe-smoker and I now and then touched each other’s shoes by mistake, as we stirred over our reading, and we smiled and sometimes exchanged a comment. Another young man, whom I had seen getting in ahead of me one morning and whom I thought a casual traveler, strayed in for a single journey, was greeted aloud by the pipe-smoker and silently by the others, and was, I discovered as the make-up of our carriage became clear to me in the initiation of day by day, also one of us, although he caught the train only on alternate mornings, and sometimes did not appear for several days. When he was present, he sat beside the pipe-smoker with one stubby shoe crossed over the other and read from large brown-paper-covered books that were evidently borrowed, judging from the care with which he handled them. Nearly always he had a very sharp pencil in his hand, and he seemed to be making little drawings or sketches on the thin sheets he kept as a bookmark; sketches that sometimes he crumpled and stuffed in his pocket, other times folded and put in his case. He was evidently a student, too, for I used to see him disappearing upstairs in the tram as well, and then flying through the gates of the University far ahead of me, the belt of an old blue raincoat that he wore instead of a greatcoat trailing beside his shoe.

The second or third morning I dropped into my seat opposite him, I greeted him as I did any other of the carriage occupants whose eyes I happened to meet. But instead of the lip-service smile and murmur that one gives and gets from strangers, he lifted his head and looked at me, a slow smile lifting round his eyes and no answer — a curious smile, the smile of remembrance and recollection that you meet on the face of someone whom you yourself fail to remember. And as this look sets you searching yourself for the place, the year, where this face belongs, perhaps now even imagining some familiarity in the features, so for a moment or two I vaguely tried to find this face. … But now with a finger following the bone of his nose as he read, or his head turned toward the window as he lifted it to take in something, as a bird lifts its head to let each sip of water go down, there was obviously no place for it. And I did not think of it again, for he became familiar in any case, and this present recognition overlaid any shadow recollection that might have come to me. Every day I was exploring further into my own ignorance. What I did not know, what I had not heard of — this the University was teaching me. I was slightly dazed, the way one is from days of sight-seeing. Brought up on gossip and discussion of the mechanics of living, I had never heard talk that did not have an immediate bearing on the circumstances of our daily life on the Mine. Words were like kitchen utensils. “Ideas” were synonymous with “fancies.” “She’s getting ideas” was a phrase of scorn for a neighbor who bought a Persian carpet or invited the Mine Manager to dinner too often. Now I found myself with the daily evidence of semantics, philosophy, psychology; hearing the history of art and music when I had never seen a picture other than the water colors by a local schoolteacher which were up for sale in the tearoom at Atherton, never heard any music other than the combined pupils’ yearly concert of the Atherton piano teachers. I had dabbled in books like a child playing in the ripples at the water’s edge; now a wave of ideas threw me, gurgling in my ears, half-drowning and exhilarating. The place where I was washed up, alien, astonished, was as far from the daily talk of my parents as theirs was from that of Anna, sitting over her paraffin-tin brazier in the back yard.

I began to look at other students covertly, as the member of an underground political movement might watch for signs that would discover to him others of the same conviction. These mouths pursed round straws over pink ice-cream foam, these heads bent over notes on the grass, these eyes faraway with overheard talk of tennis or dresses for the Engineers’ Ball — were they feeling that they were living inside a half-inflated balloon which had suddenly been blown up to twice its size? Surely there must be someone for whom, too, it had slowly to shrink again every day as the train door slammed behind, the porch door waited, the mouths of home opened to speak. Yet as we talked of lecturers and grumbles and advice, of timetables and clothes, it did not seem so. Or I forgot to look. And it was only afterward, sitting in the train, that I would examine the said and unsaid, and find nothing.

But whether I knew it or not, I never ceased to be looking. This I found one day when I was in the cloakroom, excusing myself toward the washbasins past a knot of girls who hovered concentrically, like insects, attracted by the mirror. It bewildered me afresh to see them powdering and fluffing out their hair, eying themselves and looking without interest at the images of one another. And as I came through I saw on the other side of the washbasins an African girl drying her hands. She stood there in her nurse-girl’s beret and little dark dress looking at me quietly, half as if she expected a challenge of her right to be there, for the University was the one place in all Johannesburg and one of the few places in all South Africa where a black girl could wash her hands in the same place as a white girl, and this fact, so much more tellingly than the pronouncement that there was no color bar, took some getting used to for both the African students and the white. Yet as she saw me — perhaps it was something in my face, perhaps in my walk — the look changed. And I had the curious certainty, that one sometimes gets from the face of another, that what I saw on her face now was what was on my own. I recognized it; it was the sign I had been watching for, not knowing what it would be.

We both left the cloakroom at the same time, and in silence, without embarrassment, she stood back to let me go through the door first.

In the train in the mornings, the faces, the presence of the two students opposite were closed to me. The bulldog-faced one, smoking his pipe as if he were enjoyably cutting a tooth over it; the other, his eyes running a race with the printed page, sometimes meeting my eye with the slight smile that tells a child comfortingly that the grownup is there — there was no secret response from either of them to what was in me. Probably both came from places where university was merely a formal extension of an atmosphere in which they had learned to talk; I returned to my book.

In time I learned that the bulldog-faced one was in fact not a student at all. Sometimes, on the days when the other was not there, the empty seat beside him would seem to make him expansive, eager to talk, and in between deep draws at his pipe — as if he were coaxing a furnace — talk and smoke poured out together. No, he wasn’t a university student, though, like Aaron there — he gestured his head to the space beside him — he was an ex-serviceman. Who? I asked. Young Aaron, he told me, you know, who sits here usually.

His own name (I.P. on his briefcase) was Ian Petrie and he was a Londoner who had emigrated, fought with South Africans in Abyssinia and Egypt, and married an Atherton girl.