Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

All movement seemed violent here. The lift of a woman’s elbow, stirring a pot. Their red eyes when they looked up. Their enormous, yelling laughter above the smoke. The grip of their bare feet on earth worn thin as the rags they wore. The men went about as if they were drunk, and perhaps some of them were; the strong, fermented smell of kaffir beer fought with the smoke.

“Christ, what a place,” said the young man, annoyed with himself for losing his way. Some of the people stared curiously through the smoky confusion as we passed, and children yelled, Penny! Penny! jeeringly. Behind the crooked outline of their mean roofs held down with stones and pumpkins a magnificent winter sky turned green and bejeweled, and as it arched away from their gathering darkness the hovels seemed to crawl closer to the earth beneath it, and their tins of fire became the crooked eyes of beasts showing. I was afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of in the people, no menace in their shouts or their looks: like their shacks, their bodies, they were simply stripped of gentleness, of reserve, all their bounds were trampled down, and they only moved or cried out in one need or another, like beasts. Yet I was afraid. The awfulness of their life filled me with fear.

He said: “What a noisy lot of devils they are, eh?”

But I did not answer and he was so busy peering his way through the unlighted streets that he did not notice. On the banks of a trickle of stream that smelled of soda and rotting vegetables, and that, in the light of the car, showed the earth caked with dried soap scum, Mariastad petered out. We followed a man on a swaying bicycle over a bridge and drove up a rise to the main road.

“Light me a cigarette,” he said. I found the packet and some matches and lit the cigarette in my mouth. As I handed it to him I looked back over my shoulder and saw Mariastad, a mile away. It rose in smoke and the pale changing light of fire like a city sacked and deserted behind us.

Presently he put his hand lightly on my thigh, just above the knee, and squeezed it gently once or twice as if he were trying a fruit. Then with an air of calm decision he stopped the car at the side of the road, right under a street light, and kissed me with deliberate passion. I felt, as I always did when someone kissed me for the first time, what a stranger he was, and how far, in our mingled lips and saliva, we were from each other. We sat back in our own corners of the car and he said: “Can’t you stay over in town tonight? It’s so late as it is.”

I looked uncertain; I did not know what I wanted to do.

“Let’s go and have dinner and we could see a show.”

“—Well, I suppose I could. I could phone home. But I’ll have to find out if the woman I usually stay with can have me.”

So we drove quickly into town and when I had done my telephoning I found him already seated at the bright little table of the hotel restaurant. For the first time, he looked young and nervous. As I passed the bowing maître d’hôtel and the pianist who played as if she were asleep and her music was a sentimental dream, and the buffet where the turkey wore frills, the ham was the delicate pink of petals, and the lobsters lay ornate in silky bouquets of lettuce, I felt a kind of voluptuous thrill at the chanciness and irreconcilable contrasts thrown up to me in Johannesburg. The guilt, the desire to assume my part of the human responsibility for it all, sharpened the assertion of my self opposing greedy claims for pleasure, love and admiration. I ate whatever looked prettiest and drank some sour white wine that made me feel so full that I had to unfasten the hook of my skirt. We sat through the cinema holding hands, with our knees and calves touching, and afterward struggled together in the car. I was shocked and fascinatedly excited by the way his stranger’s hand went firmly under my clothes as if it were a live thing in itself, an animal finding its burrowing way. And the hand was cold, from the steering wheel and the winter night air, on my warm sheltered skin. I had never believed love-making could be such a casual thing for me. When I went into the house and crept into the room where I was to sleep, I found that beneath my coat all my clothes were unbuttoned, unfastened, ready to take off. But I did not feel ashamed and instead laughed, suppressing the laugh with my hand, and flung the coat to a chair in a kind of independent satisfaction.

During all this time my position at home was slowly changing. What had at first been clashes of opinion, the quick flare of defiance and disapproval that springs from the very closeness of parents and children beneath the difference of age, became something colder, silent and unexpressed. My mother and father and I now lived in the intimacy of estrangement that exists between married couples who have nothing left in common but their incompatibility.

“Helen lives her own life,” my mother told people briskly, as if it were something she and my father had decreed out of a superior and enlightened judgment. It was curious, in fact, how in her relations with other people she now often expressed views and even acted in accordance with ideas that were mine, though these same ideas were part of the way of life that was taking me away from her, and to which, in me, she was bitterly hostile. Suddenly she had begun to grumble about the backwardness of Atherton; of course, here we never get the chance to see a decent play or hear a concert, she would say with a curl of the lip, as if in some other life somewhere else she had been accustomed to these things. She would sneer, too, at some of the innocent diversions she had once enjoyed so much. You can go, she would say to my father, who was a little put out by her lack of enthusiasm over the Pioneers’ Dinner to be given by the mayor of Atherton; I don’t want to be among all those old fossils, thank you. And she had even begun to take a brandy and soda if they went out or had friends to visit in the evening. — It’s ridiculous to be old-fashioned, she said. These days girls of Helen’s age take a drink.

But her casual, almost boastful acceptance of me before strangers had too much determination behind it. At home long despairing silences fell between us when she knitted and looked away when our eyes met, because she was thinking about me, and I read down the page of my book and did not know what I had read. She wandered alone into this strange tract of country with a gun, vague about what she might find while looking for me; and, at a word, there we were seized with the confrontation of each other, I motionless, self-conscious beside a palm tree, she feeling a little foolish at the gun.

“Would you like a peach?” she would ask suddenly. “I went to the market with Mrs. Cluff this afternoon and we shared a box. They’re Cape peaches, big as a soup plate. When I think that I pay Sammy sixpence each for those hard sour little things. Really, I feel I should go more often.” And we would talk politely about the price and quality of fruit for a few minutes, while her interest quickened and mine flagged until she noticed it and the subject died. We were silent again. I thought of how, when I was a little girl, we used to go to the market together on Saturday mornings, I holding on to her arm and carrying the basket, excited among the slippery vegetable leaves and the pushing crowd and the smell of earth. Now she was counting stitches, her lips moving as if she were telling beads. I began to read, starting from the top of the page again. Soon she got up, rolled the knitting neatly away and said brusquely, “Helen, please clear your papers and things away now. Your father’s bringing Mr. Mackenzie from the Group home.” And so, from long habit, I collected my notes and books and helped to make our living room look as if no one had ever done any living there. My mother did not like living to show; all evidence of the casual, straggling warmth of human activity was put out of sight before the advent of visitors as if it were peculiar and private to us, and did not exist in their lives, their homes as well. I noticed now how we were presented to visitors in our own home as creatures without continuity, without a life put down and ready to take up again, like actors placed in a stage-set. And I thought with relief and longing of the way in which one entered into, but did not interrupt, the life of people like Isa Welsh; there were no preparations for your coming, you drank out of the same cups as your hosts did every day, and if they were cleaning their shoes or eating dinner, or having an argument, for the time that you were there, you were part of their stream of activity. My mother, again, liked to have “everything nice” for visitors, and was greatly put out and irritated if someone dropped in unexpectedly or at a time unusual for callers. She could not enjoy their company if my father had his old slippers on and there was only a piece of stale cake in the house.