Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“—She’s been shut in the kitchen since dinner, discussing me over the dishes with the native servant.” We were sitting on the porch; moths and rose beetles from out the summer night beat a tattoo against the wire gauze that enclosed us in light. Joel sat, looking at but not seeing his hands hanging between his knees.

“Her opinion’s so valuable, you know — Naturally, she’s been absorbing my mother’s personal homespun philosophy for fifteen years — she’s the one person calculated never ever to disagree with a single word; and that’s how my mother likes it. It’s a wonder she doesn’t buy herself a parrot. That would be more dignified, anyway, than discussing me with a servant.”

Joel’s silence annoyed me because its questioning suggested the fear that somehow I might be in the wrong. I stared at him for answer, but he merely widened his nostrils as if he were stifling a sigh as one stifles a yawn. The blood trapped in his forgotten hands showed veins crossed and wound like tendrils of a creeper that has come to life round the fingers of a broken stone hand in a garden. Something in the heaviness of his look, a look passing like a river beneath the dark arches of his eyes, reminded me of his mother; of the way she sank, sometimes, out of the family talk; was her, despite her white shoes that were never cleaned, the big hairpins that fell out of her thin hair and smelled, when you picked them up, of the greenish tinge of metal and old frying. Suddenly I wanted to make him move; I said: “Joel?”—to do that, rather than to urge him to speak.

He said: “You discuss Professor Quail’s shortcomings with Mary Seswayo.” Mary Seswayo was the African girl I had seen in the cloakroom when first I went to the University, and to whom I had begun to speak lately.

I was angry. “Ah, you know it’s not that! — It wouldn’t matter if Anna were white, yellow — whatever she was — she’s a servant, an illiterate. It’s humiliating for a woman to discuss her private family affairs with a servant, someone who isn’t even capable of forming a judgment—”

“You don’t like the way your mother speaks about natives. You told me only the other day that it ‘made your blood boil’ when you heard her describe someone’s way of living as ‘worse than a native.’ To prove your enlightenment as opposed to her darkness, you pursue a poor frightened little native girl who happens to have passed English I, or whatever it is, round the Arts block, offering a rare tidbit of white acquaintanceship—”

“I want to talk to her as I might want to talk to any other student. I don’t see why I should be debarred by my white skin? Why, it’s from you yourself—”

“—And then when your mother puts aside considerations of status and color and talks — as one woman to another, mind — to Anna, your blood boils just as hard again.”

“You’re deliberately choosing to misconstrue. You know that’s just what I cannot stand about my mother’s attitude: making use of Anna as a friend and conveniently ignorant yes-woman, elevating her to the status of a confidante, and at the same time pushing her, along with her whole race, into a categorical sloth — of moral, spiritual — everything — inferiority. It’s a variation on the same old theme — you know; of course, you’re different, you’re my friend, it suits me to like you, even though you’re a Jew. Isn’t it the same, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. And so is your attitude, neatly inverted. Your mother succeeds in the personal relationship; she fails in words, in the theory. Your theory’s sound all right, but you betray it in the heat of personal involvement; your blood lets you down. In fact, it boils when it shouldn’t. You can’t recognize that your mother’s heart-to-heart talks with Anna are the real thing, the thing we’re all piously rolling our eyes to heaven for — a contact between a white and a black simply as human beings — nothing else.”

I felt moody. “Simply, nothing — it’s simply the Trusted Black Mammy situation, that’s all. And you know how much good that sort of good will has done for race relations.”

He gave a little patient smile at the term, hearing it new on my tongue, as one hears someone use the vogue-word of a particular set, and so knows where his affinities, like antennae, are taking him. He shrugged. “None at all. About as much good as those militant liberals who love humanity but can’t stand men and women.”

I was still young enough to lose my temper and be a little ridiculous when I felt I was losing ground. “I’m going to be one of them, I suppose?”

“Don’t be a coy bluestocking,” he said aside, smiling. “—I hope not—” he commented, as if he feared it was something he might be responsible for.

Somehow one of the hard, round-backed beetles had got in. It hit the reflections of light wavering like smoke rings on the ceiling, slithered down the brittle burning surface of the globe itself, and dropped onto Joel’s head. With the calmness of the male, who distinguishes between the biters and the harmless hateful, he scooped it absently into his hand and threw it onto the floor. I put my heel down on it; like crunching a nut. We were in the unsatisfactory listless state of people who have argued about something other than the argument’s cause. I had the sudden impatient feeling that all this talk that I sought after and felt was so important at the time of talking was nothing, was of no interest to me: all that I really cared about was what happened directly to myself; there was nothing and no one in the world beyond the urgent importance of me, of a burning, selfish grasp of what would happen to me, alone. This feeling held me glowering, like a fit of sulks.

After a few minutes Joel began to tell me of a mix-up on the telephone in which he had been involved with his married sister, Colley, but though I accepted the amusing way he told the story, I ignored the change of mood, and flung out, like a challenge and an excuse for a return to disagreeableness: “Joel, why do you always side with my mother against me?” It was spoken as pettishly as it was phrased.

He looked as if he had been expecting it. Again he became heavy, wary. “Do I?”

I waved it aside. “You know what I mean. If I tell you anything about her — not disparaging, exactly, but anything to which one might expect you would agree was unreasonable on her part — you shut up like a clam. I don’t understand it.”

“Look, Helen, I don’t side with her—”

“But so often she’s wrong, quite wrong, and you’ll never give me the satisfaction of admitting it!”

“Of course I know she’s wrong; difficult, anyway. But it doesn’t matter. You can’t do anything about it, so it doesn’t matter. You can’t change them, her or your father, you can’t make them over the way you think — we think — they ought to be or the way we believe we’d like to have them.”

He saw the dissatisfaction in my eyes. “But you can’t get rid of them, either.”

I was shocked, at myself rather than his words. “—What a way to put it.”

“Making them over would be getting rid of them as they are. Well, you can’t do it. You can’t do it by going to live somewhere else, either. You can’t even do it by never seeing them again for the rest of your life. There is that in you that is them, and it’s that unkillable fiber of you that will hurt you and pull you off balance wherever you run to — unless you accept it. Accept them in you, accept them as they are, even if you yourself choose to live differently, and you’ll be all right. Funnily enough, that’s the only way to be free of them. You’ll see — really, I know.”

I protested. “But I tell you I don’t want to ‘get away’ in that sense. I don’t want to change them, really. … I just want them to be a little more understanding … to let me think my way. To have some respect for the things I want to do, the things I think are important.” I was amazed to have put these reasons to Joel, with whom I had discovered the extent of the gulf between the life of my parents and the life I wanted for myself. Joel, with whom I was hearing live music for the first time in my life; who said, Come on, I’ve got something to show you — and, between lectures, pushed me before him onto a tram to town to see exhibitions of painting and sculpture, showed me the inside of the municipal art gallery that all my life till now had been a gray stone exterior from which one might take one’s bearings, like the magistrates’ courts, or a fire station. Joel, from whose books and whose talk I was even beginning to see that the houses we lived in in Atherton and on the Mine did not make use of space and brightness and air, but, like a woman with bad features and a poor complexion who seeks to distract with curls and paint, had their defects smothered in lace curtains and their dark corners filled with stands of straggling plants which existed for these awkward angles between wall and wall, as one evil exists simply for another.