Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“Well, I’ll ask her—” I said to Isa.

A little man of twenty-four behind curly balding hair and glasses thick as bottle ends, said: “It’s a confusion of social and color barriers, surely? To Africans, if you entertain an African, you’re entertaining a houseboy or a cook. You see? Nathoo Ram’s not a lawyer, he’s the vegetable hawker known by the generic of ‘Sammy.’” But the young man was someone whom Isa “allowed” to be in her flat, one of those persons who fail to catch the imagination and so to whom no one listens. They ignored from him suggestions that, coming from someone else, would have provoked an evening’s wrangling. Now they were already talking of something else. He was left, as often, with the subject on his hands, discarded just when he had something to say on it. I should have liked to have heard him further, because what he had begun to say was a change of focus of the kind that interested me. But he was not interested in carrying on for me; already he was sitting silent and following the zigzag swerve of their new discussion with the quick eyes of a fan at a tennis match.

“Aren’t we going to hear the Couperin?” John Marcus was asking from among the records. Only his wife seemed to hear him, and pulled a face at him across the room. With a tremendous shrug he put the record down and squatted at her side. She bent, hanging her hair over their faces, and they whispered and laughed into each other’s ears and necks. Her mouth changing and her eyes crinkling with the look of someone being tickled, she looked out into the room but took no notice of it while he cupped his hand round her ear and she kept screwing up her face and saying, What? What?

I was still being talked about by two people behind me. Or rather my acquaintance with Mary Seswayo was being used by the resourcefulness of Edna Schiller to illustrate her Communist argument. She was a good-looking Jewess with an intensely reasonable manner and eyebrows that raised up a little at their inner limits, inquiringly, like the puffy eyebrows of a puppy. Her attractive clothes and the large collection of earrings that she wore seemed an abstraction; you could not imagine her among hairpins and lipstick, choosing which she would wear, before a mirror. There was the feeling that somebody else dressed her. It was the same with the young man she had with her, a handsome young American who despite a yellow pull-over and a pair of veldschoen had his big head and neck set with the dummy like perfection of Hollywood. Some other Edna must find time for him, too.

Now she was talking of me as if I were not in the room at all. “She befriends this girl, but what does it mean? — Like you and your sports grounds and recreation centers and sewing classes. A waste of effort on charity. That’s all it is, a useless palliative charity, useless in the historical sense. It’s damaging, even. The simple African who is not yet politically conscious is lulled into another year or so of accepting things as they are—”

“But this native girl probably is politically conscious. She’s seeking education, and the two go together. She may be one of the potential leaders you people are always looking for.”

Edna, once she had discovered the shortest distance from any subject to her own — and she had only one — was not to be deflected. “Unlikely. She will become a teacher and a bourgeoise and feel herself a little nearer to the whites instead of closer to the blacks. African leaders will come from the people.”

“Funny, in practice I thought that revolutionary leaders had usually come from the middle class?”

There was a groan from a young man lying on the divan near them. “For Christ’s sake, don’t start that. …”

“What it amounts to, then, is that you don’t approve of ordinary, nonpolitical friendship between black and white individuals?”

“Approve, nothing,” said Edna, coming forward in her seat. “It’s quite immaterial who your friends are, or what color. What I’m saying is, that even if they’re black, it’s unimportant to the struggle of the blacks against white supremacy.”

The young man sat up suddenly, with the dazed look of someone changing too quickly from the horizontal. “Christ, must everything be important to the struggle! Can’t I sleep with a girl, get drunk …” He fell back and muffled his face in the cushion.

Edna used the same degree of intensity to bring home a small point in a casual discussion as she did faced with the defense of a whole doctrine before the snap of a dozen shrewd dissenters. Her zeal released her like liquor and she did not seem to know the rise of her own voice or the persistence of her vehemence. “If people would take a look at what is to be done. The work that a handful of us have to do. You can’t tackle it in terms of soup kitchens. But, of course, I suppose people are afraid; can’t blame them. But you get used to it, it’s amazing. I know my telephone’s tapped. Twice last week there was a man asking questions in our building, some excuse about a survey, but we’re so used to it now. As Hester Claasen says (Hester Claasen was a trade-union leader of great courage and the cachet of toughness), you can smell a dick a mile off.”

Isa, who was easily bored, and so had a reputation for sharpness, came wheeling a tea wagon from the kitchen. “Edna,” she asked, bending down to pick up a spoon, “exactly what is it you do? I mean, I know you hold meetings and so forth.” She stood up looking at Edna with a rather childish expression of simple inquiry.

“Do,” said Edna, “how do you mean? One can’t answer a question like that offhand. It’s difficult to know where to start. Assuming you know what we want to do—”

“Ah, yes,” Isa interrupted as if she had suddenly remembered the answer for herself, “I thought so. You sell three dozen copies of the Guardian in a native township once a week. Yes, Mike told me, you are pretty good as a newspaperboy, you sell at least three dozen. …” And she proceeded to hand round coffee in an assortment of containers from beer mugs to nursery beakers. I got a tarnished silver-plated one, inscribed DOWELL MACLOUD BETTER BALL FOURSOME ROYAL JOHANNESBURG CLUB 1926, with an unprintable comment scratched by pin underneath.

“She’s intelligent, but she has no grasp whatever of politics, and that infuriates her.”—Edna was stirring her coffee and, with a flicker smile at her American, was now asking her companion if she was aware of what was really happening in China, and in the Indies? Like all Edna’s questions, it was rhetorical.

“Who’s got my dirty mug?” Laurie Humphrey accused Isa.

“What mug?”

“I think I have.” I waved it at him.

“Oh, Laurie.” Isa held it up, twisting her head to read and slopping the coffee over. “It was the pride of my aunt’s mantelpiece.”

“You have no Aunt Macloud.”

“Well it was the pride of somebody’s aunt. We got it in that Claim Street junk shop, near the apfel-strudel place, you know. It was in a job lot that Gerda wanted because of an old straw-covered bottle. Isn’t it nice? Everytime I used it I used to see Dowell on his big day, beaming on the green in plus fours with freckles coming out on top of a shiny bald head. Now it looks like an Oscar designed for Henry Miller.”

I laughed along with the others, but I could see by the face of the young man on the divan that he knew I didn’t know who Henry Miller was. He used it as a small blackmail between us. “Come and share my couch, Titian,” he said, “come on.” I sat on the end, near his feet, and he studied me. He was the kind who says, Don’t tell me — and, appraising you, proceeds to answer his questions for himself. “You’re Scotch, hey. Scotch red.” He indicated my hair. “When something rough touches your neck your skin gets all patchy and annoyed. And you’re prim. Scotch prim.” He smiled at how right he was.