Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“No, really, I’m quite all right—”

“Come on—” She made me move. All her own movements were slow, heavy and insistent as her voice, the movements of someone who has been on her feet a long time, like a horse who keeps up the plod of pulling a load even when he is set free in the field.

She went over to the sideboard with a kind of formal dignity, as if in spite of her wrinkled stockings and her feet which defied the shape of her shoes, her slip showing beneath the old afternoon dress as she bent, there was a grace of behavior that existed independently, as a tradition, no matter who performed it or how. Next to three packs of cards was a pink glass sweet dish filled with clusters of toffee-covered biscuit. “You’ll have something? Come on.” I took one, but when she saw it in my hand uncertainty came to her. “Perhaps she’ll rather have a sweet, Joel — Take my keys, and in the bedroom cupboard—” I protested and bit into the sticky biscuit. “—Go on, I’ve got some nice chocolates.”

I sat there eating my biscuit like a child who is being anxiously fattened.

“A bunch of grapes, perhaps? I got lovely grapes today from the market.”

Joel assured his mother that we did not want tea, lemonade or fruit.

She sat down near the door on a straight-backed chair and her swollen ankles settled on her shoes. We had been introduced, and after she had sat breathing heavily, thoughtfully, over her resting bosom for a moment (neither of us spoke; we could hear her) she said with polite, cautious inquiry, as if the reply would really give her an answer to something else: “Your father he’s something on the Atherton Mine — and mummy? Your mummy’s still alive?”

“Yes.” In an awkward burst I made some attempt to make my life real to her. “We’ve always lived there. My father’s Secretary. — I hate the Mine.”

She stirred slowly in her chair. “So? It’s your home, we all got to like our home.”

There was a pause. I was overcome with the theatrical way I had burst out ridiculously: I hate the Mine — and the even acceptance of this old woman’s reply. She got up slowly, stood looking round the room as if to make sure she had forgotten nothing. “Well, you’ll excuse me—” she said, as if I were not there, an air of apology that seemed to throw the onus of my presence on me, and went out slowly and suddenly both withdrawing and yet taking the field at the same time.

“Would you like to wash?” said Joel, getting up. “They leave you rather sticky, though my mother really does make them very well.” He put the dish of sweet biscuits away carefully in the sideboard.

I don’t know why he surprised me; Joel was continually surprising me by ease when there might have been strain, a word where there might have been a vacuum. He said what he thought and somehow it was never what I thought he was thinking: his nature had for mine the peculiar charm of the courage to be itself without defiance; I had always to be opposing myself in order to test the validity of my reactions, a moral “Who goes there?” to which my real feelings as well as those imposed from without and vaguely held suspect must be submitted in a confusion of doubt. And when I answered myself and acted, anxiousness sometimes made me mistake bravado for honesty.

Now I had been ready to make it easy for Joel; to show him that so far as I was concerned, he need not mind about his mother. This was quite a different thing from finding that he did not mind about his mother; that far from being apologetic of the peculiar sweetmeat which politeness had forced me to eat, he seriously commended her skill in preparing it.

Yet, as so often happened with him, what put me out momentarily, set me free as the expected reaction from him could not have done; it was not necessary to pretend anything, even understanding. I could be curious about the old portraits looking down on us. They were his father’s parents: “The old chap was supposed to be a Talmudic scholar. I don’t quite know what the Christian equivalent of that would be. … The Talmud — it’s a kind of book of religious philosophy. Somewhere in every Jewish family they’ve got a Talmudic scholar preserved, it’s a distinction none of us can afford to be without. Like ours, he’s usually dead, but there are stories about how during his life time he spent his days and nights poring over books of wisdom — you know, the Talmud’s rather like Shakespeare or Finnegans Wake now — hundreds of different interpretations of the text and scholastic arguments which die unsolved with their protagonists. — He doesn’t look much of a scholar, does he?”

We looked the old man in the eye.

I laughed. “She looks the brainy one.”

“She was the go-getter. These Talmudic scholars are nice for prestige, but mostly they don’t make a living. With him I really think it must just have been an excuse to get out of working and hang around the synagogue with his pals.”

“You make it sound like the men’s commonroom.”

He pulled his nose down sardonically, laughing. “Now you see where I get it from. The family glories in the education I’m getting myself, while really all I’m doing is learning to play a devastating hand at bridge. — But seriously, as soon as any member of a Jewish family shows any inclination even vaguely connected with learning — it could be stamp-collecting or pornography — everybody starts wagging their heads: he’s just like old Uncle so-and-so, so studious. … She took in dressmaking to keep the family.” Under her eyes, we wandered back to Joel’s room; she had the imagined power of the dead and alien to fasten her look far beyond the frame or carved limits of their presence; like the face of the idol whose symbolism you do not understand — is he to bring rain, corn or protection? — but whose jeweled eye you feel long after you have left the temple.

I left the house just before lunch with two of Joel’s books under my arm — one was always taking something from him, he was one of those people who give out of a sufficiency in themselves, welling up beautifully to a constant level no matter how often dipped into, and quite independent of material possession or the condescension of generosity. His father had come home but I did not see him, although I could hear, in the back of the house, a heavy tread and a moody voice speaking another language. Joel hung on the gate making a ridge of his brows against the sun. There was a fascination about the way he looked in the full sun; the fascination I had felt in the faces of Indian waiters serving food in Durban hotels. That steely darkness of black curly hair — perhaps it was just that his hair was like theirs. But their faces came up in the sun as his did. The quiet-colored faces and neutral hair among which I had grown up had a way of almost disappearing in bright sunlight, only a sear of gleam here and there traced their light-flattened contours, and they blinked laughter, as if the brightness were a hand pushed in their faces. Ludi was something else again; his brightness took on brightness, like metal.

One could not know whether it was the sun or thought that was making Joel frown. His hesitation made me wait. When we had already said good-by, he asked: “Shall I come to you, now?”

I felt I understood what he meant. One could have a friendship in a train that could exist for years outside one’s life as an entity, but once one met and talked at home instead of between here and there, one part of one’s life and another, the friend of the train moved in to one’s life. “Yes, what about one evening? Tuesday — no, that’s the night I get back late. Wednesday, then?”

But he said, as if it suddenly didn’t matter: “Oh, we don’t have to fix it now.” Then he smiled on an inner comment. “Right,” he said, dismissing it, very friendly, and with a little wave, turned up the path. When I looked back as I turned the corner, to take in a last curious impact of that little house, I saw he had not gone in but was still standing there, on the veranda steps, watching me go or staring at some object of his own.