Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

The business of eating, which in common with a crisis or danger brings heterogenous incompatibles comfortably together, was over and now suddenly we were all fallen apart. The heaviness, the sense of patiently waiting for me to be gone so that they could resume their life, came over the old Aarons again as I had noticed it when I had been in their house at other times. No one seemed to have anything to say. Mrs. Aaron got up and fetched a dish of preserves from the sideboard; but everyone turned his head away. Even Joel was silent, stretched on the floor with his head against a little stool with a broken riem seat; it seemed that sometimes he was aware of me, and sometimes he was aware of them, but never was he present to all of us together.

I sat alone on the sofa, smiling when someone smiled at me.

Soon he got up suddenly, and raised his eyebrows at me. I said my good-bys and thanks and in an atmosphere of sterile politeness, we left, our footsteps very loud on the boards behind us.

Joel drove me home. It seemed to me it was because I was tired, with that sense of tiredness that keeps one floating just above the surface of reality, but we did not speak. In place of communication there was between us a speechless ease that I have never forgotten. It was as if we had ducked through a crowd and found ourselves alone in a small quiet place.

When the car died out quiet at our gate under the pines, he sat a moment. I said, “Good night …,” gently, to rouse him, and he looked up slowly, coming awake.

“Don’t come in,” I said. And then: “I’ll be all right.”

He nodded. Smiled, waiting for me to go.

I got out, but a curious sensation overcame me, a physical sensation of distress prickling over my skin. I stood with a kind of helplessness on the muffled feel of thick pine needles. I felt with distress that there was something that I must say now; no, that there was something that had passed unsaid, and that now was too late. … A great bird waves across the sky: look! — but you have not seen it; when you lifted your head it was gone. Something in me clutched: What is it? What is it?

It was dark; Joel could not see my face. There was a moment when we both waited.

I said: “I’ve got the drawings …,” held them up.

The feeble commonplace flung across a bridge. “Good night,” we said, warmly, gently. And by the time I reached the porch door I heard the car, gone.

As I took the key from under the fern and let myself into our house, with the silence and scents and disposition of furniture that flowed into me with the sense of an animal feeling its way back into its own nest, the urgency that had cut me off in pain began to melt, to flow away in my blood like a clot that dissolves. Yet I was weak, empty with the relief. It had been, I thought suddenly, as I took off my clothes, put on a nightgown that slid loosely over my body, as if I had been told without warning that I was never going to see someone again. A hollow premonition of loss.

And how ridiculous, since I should see Joel on Tuesday morning, and in any case, he would be the sort of friend one would have all one’s life.

I did see him again on Tuesday, and for many other Tuesdays.

A whole year passed, unremarkable, one of those periods of consolidation in change when one is growing and filling out into the spaces of a life the shape of which has been set but not yet seen: the time will come to stop short, and look, up and around at the walls, the ceilings, the staircases leading from here to there, that one has built around oneself out of daily dabs of mud. Or the year was like a ship; inside it seems much the same town you have always lived in — restaurants, shops, the hairdresser, the cocktail bar and the library. But beneath the patterned carpet oceans are moving past your feet; and you yourself have determined this with a ticket you bought months back.

I continued to travel in and out of Johannesburg to the University. I did my work with pleasure, if a certain lack of conviction. The vague, luring promise of childhood persisted, like a whiff of smoke on the horizon, become now the uninvestigated idea that, since the need was there, something would come to coil up my energies like a spring. I should find the people and the life where all that was in me would be released into action. Joel still said to me sometimes: Any ideas? Thought about what you’re going to do? But now I always replied, rather tartly: You remember — I’m going to get married.

Through him I continually met people who seemed to me to put a finger of confirmation on my vague sense of promise. A girl and her husband, both medical students, who talked proudly, with what was almost a sense of adventure, about the clinic they were going to set up in one of the squatters’ townships of African workers outside Johannesburg; another girl who talked of nothing but the literacy campaign on which she was working among the thousands of “wash-Annies” and cookboys and houseboys who had never been to school at all; the young man who was a journalist on a conservative paper but spent most of his leisure helping the gentle, revolutionary-minded wife of a University professor to bring out a liberal weekly that didn’t pay.

And, of course, Joel himself. But Joel’s commitment was not so easily nor so satisfactorily defined. Joel’s raison d’être eluded one. To borrow the definitions of faith, if the others were monotheistic in their grasp of life, he was pantheistic. He worked at his architecture with enthusiasm and a detached seriousness — there were plans about that: an experiment in mass-produced cottages for Africans he was working on privately with the progressive Town Engineer of one of the Reef towns, and that might come to something. The tentative offer of a particularly interesting job with an architect (a friend of his who had been with UNRRA in Europe and now wanted to go back and take Joel walking with him through France and Italy) in Rhodesia. And, most tempting, the chance he might get to work under one of England’s most original and brilliant men on a reconstruction project in London.

All these things he kept calmly in consideration. And yet at the same time he sometimes spoke, with the practical evaluation of plans and not the dash and sweep of dreams, of joining his mother’s brother on a recently acquired citrus farm, or working only part time as an architect when he qualified, so that he could go back to the University to do a course on soil conservation. Looking back on it now, I can see that he could have done any of these, or perhaps several at different times in his life, and that if one had failed he would not, like so many other people, have been lost, because his sense of his own potentialities was so broadly based, and his aliveness was not confined to any narrow aspect, but to the whole of aliveness itself: with everything that grew, that inquired, that illuminated instead of merely perpetuating the human state.

Of course, this did not seem so to me then. I only saw that Joel stood in many rooms, talked or lapsed into the silence of familiar understanding with many different people, but belonged, somehow, not with one group or the other, but with them all. This amounted in the end to belonging only to himself; a puzzling position that was quite the opposite of loneliness. Often he introduced me to a little circle by which I was taken up so that a friendship was formed from which he was excluded and they became my friends rather than his. Yet he did not seem to mind. He almost literally stood at the door of interest, diversion, stimulation, and watched me go in: quietly, inwardly ablaze with pleasure and curiosity.

Most of these people moved in or about the fringe of the life of the University, though many had never been students there. Whatever the diversity of their true interests, or the variation of their sincerity, they had one common condition: all were young people who had overflowed the group, race or class to which they belonged. The sons of Jewish merchants who wanted to paint instead of make money, the daughter of a Nationalist farmer who worked for the establishment of native trade-unions, the boy who incurred all the scorn of a country of tough pioneer stock turned tougher businessmen because he wanted to dance in the ballet, the fiercely intellectual young Afrikaans poets who had more in common with Baudelaire than Paul Kruger — they formed the only society where all the compartments of South African life ran into one another. Even the barbed wire of wealth was down; the sons of the poor found that a certain lack of money was honorable, the sons of the rich escaped the confines of luxury. Loosely attached to the arts and learning at one end, and to politics and social reform at the other, this society is a common phenomenon all over the world. The important difference was that in South Africa, a young, fanatically materialist country with virtually no tradition of literature or art, and, in the problem position of a white minority predominant over a black majority, a socio-political preoccupation that is closer to obsession than to mild academic discussion, this society had far greater responsibility than its counterparts in older countries. Lopsided — tethered to a thin line of culture from Europe on one side, dragged down toward an enormous, weighty racial tangle on the other — they had only the tantalization of recorded music, imported books, reproductions of pictures; but ate, slept, worked and breathed in the presence of the black man, like the child’s monster of inherited guilt always at his back. The desires to which these facts gave rise consequently tended to be even more confused than those of young people in other countries, so that a young man’s passionate eagerness to win the music he was denied hearing in the comfortable torpidity of his home jumped like a little flame from a grass stalk to a great, dry crackling mass of a whole nation of black people denied so much that he had taken for granted. So, if his social conscience was not pure, if in some other country where his parents’ money and cultural standards would have been more equitable he would not have concerned himself with the cry of the dispossessed, in South Africa a quick sympathy from his own small struggle struck out and identified itself with the vast one. There were many others like him, who, wanting something for themselves, suddenly found understanding for the yawning want of the Africans — not the clamor of the few leaders and rebellious papers who were articulate for them, but the plain, unremarked want of food, of clothes, of houses, of recognition and friendship that was silently in the thousands of ordinary black people who went about the life of the city.