Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

It was something I had known before and yet this time, with Mary Seswayo in the back of the car, it came to me as if the other times I had not seen it. As we bumped down into the township Charles and I stopped talking, as people do when they feel they may have lost their way; animation died into awkwardness. Along the road, he had talked to me but not to Mary (I had turned every now and then to draw her into our chatter) but now he began to try and speak naturally to her, as you do when there is something you do not want a person to notice. The effort was not much of a success, and everytime he got an answer from her he seemed not to know what to do with it.

The car went slowly through the streets. It seemed to descend into noise that sealed us up inside it. Children changed the outline of the street, grouping in the gutters, skittering over the road, running alongside the car in a fluttering pennant of rags. When there are so many of them, they lose human value; you could have put out your arm and brushed them off, back into the road.

First we passed the administrative offices, orthodox and red brick in official decency beneath the shabbiness that had washed against them from all around, weathering them to the corrosion of poverty. Chipped brick, dirt and litter disguised the solidity and professional proportions of the place like the ivy a villa pulls over its glaring newness in a stately suburb. A flag clung round a pole, and two fat native policemen stood arguing with an angry man on a bicycle. Then the usual small street of shops, homemade and pushed tightly one against the other so that you felt that if the first were taken away, the whole lot would slowly keel over and collapse. Most were one-eyed, and the pocked whitewash was covered with signs, advertisements and exhortations, but one or two had crooked verandas — mud or homemade brick under the whitewash — and the shoemaker sat outside. The fish-and-chip shop had a proper shop front, and young natives hung about it, city hats pushed back on their heads, drinking Coca-Cola. After the shops there was an empty space covered with ashes, mealie cobs, dogs and children, and at the far end, a tiny church that was the utter simplification of all that has accreted round the architectural idea of a church through the ages: a peaked tin roof, a rounded wooden door, a horizontal bar across two poles with a piece of old railway sleeper suspended from it, and a smaller piece of iron dangling to clang it with.

We followed Mary’s directions past decent little houses, each as big as a tool shed with a tin chimney throbbing out the life of the house in smoke. In many of them the door was open and a sideboard or a real dining table in varnished wood showed. Outside their bare walls were ballasted with lean-tos made of beaten-out paraffin tins, homemade verandas like the shoemaker’s and porches made of boxwood, chicken wire and runner beans. Each had two or three yards of ground in front, fenced with a variety of ingenuity, and inside mealies hung their silk tassels from the pattern of straight stalk and bent leaf. Some grew flowers instead; as it was winter, rings and oblongs of white stones marked out like graves the place where they would come up again. And some grew only children, crawling and huddling in the dust with only eyes looking out of dust.

Every third or fourth house there was a communal tap from which everyone fetched his water, and which no one troubled to turn off properly. A muddy stream trickled from the tap’s soggy perimeter out into the street, and we felt it squelch beneath the tires.

Mary said: “Here it is—” and with quiet and insistent thanks was gone into one of these houses and the car was taking us past again before I had realized that this was the place in which she lived, the house that was individual because one of its components touched my own life. I looked with confusion at the other houses of the row, passing; all alike in the limitations of their humble differentiation. Into a house like this she disappeared: there was a chair on the veranda, I had at least seen, and a sword fern growing in half an old tire, painted silver and hanging from a wire. Inside there might be four chairs round a table on a piece of clean linoleum, pressed for space against a high bed with a white crocheted cover — like this house. Or this one — a kitchen dresser, one or two chairs, something tall and dark with a flash of white — could it be a piano? It might be, without incongruity, for there were not enough of these rooms for each to serve one designation: dining room, bedroom, kitchen — they were all simply living rooms in the plainest sense, whether you must work or cook or sleep or make love. I had suddenly a great regret and curiosity for the room of Mary Seswayo that I had not seen; I wanted to make it up for myself out of the raw material which I saw in flashes in the other houses all about me. Essentially, it could not be any different from my imagining, because there was nothing else, in a place like Mariastad, of which it could have been composed. All else it could contain could be the little pile of books and notes from the University; and those I could supply, too. Just at this point we turned the corner and passed another tap, and there was a neat girl with an ordinary white enamel jug, fetching some water for herself. And at this the grasp of my imagination — that was really more like the entrance into another life through a re-creation of atmosphere, like an archaeologist restoring the arms, trinkets and drinking vessels to the excavated city, so that all that is needed is his own human step through the streets, and it will be as it was again — let go. She, too, came with a jug for water to a tap in the mud. So in how many other commonplaces that I take for granted in my own life shall I be wrong in hers? The thousand differences in the way she is compelled to dress, wash, eat — they piled up between us and I could scarcely see her, over the top. Sitting in the car I was conscious of a kind of helplessness, as if it were taking me away, further and further away, not only in distance. The car that at night must occupy a garage as big as these houses. The house Mary lives in. The bench she can’t sit on, the water that must be fetched from the tap in the street, the physical closeness of her life to the lives of others; these differences in the everyday living out of our lives — could they end there? Or out of them did we love, want and believe, and so could the formula of our loving, wanting, believing, be the same? Further and further. I thought of her eyes into which I seemed not to have looked hard enough. I tried to remember them so that I could try again.

The young man Charles said: “I’m damned if I know how to get out.” And certainly, although he had turned and turned again, we were not leaving Mariastad the way we came in. We were now rocking and bumping through the rutted streets of what must have been the oldest part of the location. The closeness of the place, the breath-to-breath, wall-to-wall crowding, had become so strained that it had overflowed and all bounds had disappeared. The walls of the houses pressed on the pavement, the pavement trampled into the street, there were no fences and few windows. Fires in old paraffin tins burned everywhere, and women stood over them among the screaming children, cooking and shouting. I was accustomed to seeing Africans in ill-fitting clothes that had belonged to white people first, but these people were in rags. These were clothes that had been made of the patches of other clothes, and then those patches had been replaced by yet others. They must have been discarded by a dozen owners, each poorer than the last, and now, without color or semblance of what they had been, they hung without warmth, fraying in the fierce flicker of flames that seemed greedy to eat them up, return them at last to the nothing their frailty had almost reached. The children were naked beneath one garment cast off by a grownup; streaming noses and gray bellies to show that under the old army jacket there was something alive instead of a cross of sticks to frighten birds.