Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

So we drank our coffee and she kept turning back her sheaf of papers and reading a line or two, slowly. She was continually preoccupied with her work as I, in my work, was preoccupied with other things. She had now a friend who worked in a city bookshop (an enlightened tradition seemed to go with the books and it was one of the very few businesses where an African could be something more than an errand boy; he did what was known as “white man’s work” in the stockrooms). Today she had another handbook with her, this time called Effective English, that I guessed he had lent her.

Watching her opening it the hesitant, expectant way she opened a lecture-room door or the door of the library, and her eyes unraveling its mystery of print as if they were unwrapping a parcel that just might contain something miraculous, final, I suddenly wished for her that she was less harassed and flattened. And that she would not keep hoping for this miracle, finality. As usual, there was nothing I could say. I went on sipping the sweet coffee and her face hung transfixed over the book like a pool in which she would never see herself. She was very dark skinned — there is a theory, probably originating with the Africans themselves, that when they are well fed and fat they are lightest, and it was certain that she was not particularly well fed — and she had the small, good and also slightly projecting teeth of many African girls. Also the lovely round smooth forehead. She took a gulp out of her cup and as she put it down I wondered, Would I drink out of that cup? At home, as in most households, the Africans had eating utensils kept separate from the common family pool. Don’t take that — it’s the girl’s cup. My mother had often stopped some stranger, fetching himself a drink of water.

But it was a stupid thought I had caught myself out in, and I was learning to recognize them. I was beginning to find that in friendship with an African, a white person is inclined to submit his sincerity to tests by which he would not dream of measuring good will or affection toward another white person. Would I particularly like drinking out of anyone’s cup, for that matter?

She went off to the library, and I wandered down to the grassy amphitheater in which the swimming pool lay, still and cold with winter, although the sun was hot. It was one of those immense highveld days when the buildings and trees of Johannesburg are all mountaintops, lifting up into a dazzling colorless sky, distanceless, dazing as air that has shaken itself free of the earth and rises just out of reach of the last aspiring finger of rock. It is impossible to look into such a sky. I struggled a little with some Italian. Then lay back on the dead grass. A native gardenboy silently looped strands out of the pool with a long hook; then he stretched out with an old torn stained hat over his face. The hoarse voices of two students in shorts and rugby boots were gruff near me. It was the afternoon the young man of the divan was to take me to tea before I caught my train home. The suggestion had interested me enough at the time it was made, on the impetus of the evening at Isa’s, but the days that had elapsed in between had returned the young man to the haziness of a stranger, and I wondered, as I had before about such enthusiasms gone cold on me, why I had agreed.

But at four when the shadows of the buildings made chasms of chill I dutifully came out of the cloakrooms with my lips freshly drawn and my hair smoothed with water at the temples, and he was waiting in his black car. At once the inside of it was familiar, the assortment of odd shapes in the darkness appearing in the frankness of afternoon as ampule boxes, a couple of battered instrument cases, and piles of theater programs, empty cigarette boxes and dusty pamphlets put out by drug manufacturers. When he turned to talk to me, he breathed ether like a dragon breathing fire. “Exotic,” he said, “and it’s cheaper than standing a round of drinks.” I saw with a sense of justification that he was attractive, after all, and my mood lifted. We were going down the hill in the gaiety that sometimes springs up between people who are attracted but know each other very slightly when he swerved to avoid a native girl carrying a large brown paper parcel, and I interrupted—“Just a moment”—and turned to make sure.

I thought I had recognized the coat and beret. It was Mary, even more burdened than usual, so that she could only smile and had no free hand to wave. Charles had pulled to the curb. “Oh, I didn’t mean you to stop,” I said unconvincingly. “Well? What’s wrong? You practically flung yourself out the window.”

“It’s a girl — an African I’m friendly with. We nearly knocked her over. There she is, just behind—”

“Nonsense, we didn’t nearly knock anyone down. Where is she?”

I turned to look through the rear window at Mary coming hesitantly toward us, unsure if we had stopped on her account, and she should approach, or for some other reason, when she would have the embarrassment of answering a signal that was not for her. I nodded my head vigorously at her.

But Charles suddenly reversed the car with a rush that brought us level with her and almost knocked her down again.

“Are you mad?”

“Well, it’s quicker for us to go backward than for her to go forward.”

Mary stood at the window, smiling at his air of impulsive calm. Before her, I immediately felt a kind of pride in this young man; my indignation took on the purpose of showing him off. “I hope you don’t always drive like this. Really! — Mary, why are you walking with all those parcels?”

“It’s the dry cleaning for the people where I stay. I went down to the shop to get it, and when I got back I couldn’t find my bus money.” She was smiling in apology.

“So what’d’you think you’re going to do? Walk home?”

“I’m going into town to see if I can find my cousin at the factory where he works. He will lend me bus fare.”

“Where is this place?” said Charles. He had the patient, practical, uninterested tone of the white person willing to help a native with money or authority, so long as he is not expected to listen to any human details of the predicament.

“But I’ll give you the money,” I said, and at once became flustered because I felt I should have said “lend.” “I mean, it’s silly to go into town — He may not be there …? Charles—”

“Where does she live?” he asked again.

“Oh, in Mariastad—”

“Well, come on then. Hop in.”

“It’s seven miles,” Mary told him first, quite simply, not getting into the car because she expected the distance would change his mind.

“I know where it is. Get in.”

And now I began to urge her too, feeling a mild intoxication of possession of the young man and his car.

We went off with another roar, and she settled herself, very quietly as if anxious not to disturb, among the dust and rubbish in the back, clearing a space for herself carefully, and bending down to pick up a pile of pamphlets that had slid to the floor. We drove along one of the big highways that lead out of the city to the north and south, hemmed in with thousands of other cars, the faces of people drawing level behind glass, then snatched away as the lights changed. On the left hundreds of bicycles skidded through, Africans riding home with the yells and something of the exhilaration of skiers, and along every second or third block native bus queues lay like grayish caterpillars. Then there were villas on either side, the cars thinned, a roadhouse took some of them, and we passed our escort of bicycles, panting and riding hard now on the long stretch.

Many South Africans have never been inside a native location, but I had been with my mother to the Atherton one as a child, when the Mine held its yearly jumble sale of old clothes there, and I had also been with Joel to see the shantytown at Moroka and the experimental housing scheme near by, where the houses looked like sections of outsize concrete pipe and smelled cold as tunnels. One native location is much like another. Mariastad was one of those which are not fenced, but the approach to the place was the familiar one: a jolt off the smooth tarmac onto a dirt road that swerved across the veld; orange peel and rags, newspaper and bits of old cars like battered tin plates, knock-kneed donkeys staring from tethers. All around the veld had been burned and spread like a black stain. And all above the crust of vague, close, low houses, smoke hung, quite still as if it had been there forever; and shouts rose, and it seemed that the shout had been there forever, too, many voices lifted at different times and for different reasons that became simply a shout, that never began and never ended.