Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

More and more I longed to leave the Mine and live in Johannesburg. The very comfort and safeness of home irked me. I felt I was muffled off from real life. I wanted the possibility of loneliness and the slight fear of the impersonality of living in a strange place and a city; the Mine oppressed my restlessness like a hand pressed over a scream. Often I wanted to call out to my mother: Let me go and you will keep me! But it would have been no use; would only have started another cold argument of offense and hurt. Now my parents were planning a visit to England and Europe, the visit of a lifetime which every Mine official waits for, and it was assumed that we should all be going together. When I suggested that they should go, and that I should perhaps like to go alone, or with a student tour, less elaborately, later, gloom fell like a blow on our house. The pleasure had drained out of anticipation, for them. I became guiltily distressed at what I had done, and began to pretend that I wanted to go with them, after all; and all the time resentment that they should force me to feel guilty toward them grew to match my desire to show them love.

The simultaneous experience of a longing for warmth and closeness and a wild kicking irritation to be free bewildered me and made me moody. I seemed to have nowhere to lay my bundle of contradictions, and so I stood a kind of touchy guard over them. To my mother and father I seemed more and more withdrawn and self-willed. They pressed to themselves the sharp belief that I no longer needed them; my mother retaliated with the pretense that she no longer needed me, my father with a gentle sadness of self-blame, a kind of timidity at my distance, as if conceding me a right to it.

Yet with the peculiar power of the inadvertent, the innocent, it was to be Mary Seswayo who blew up this no man’s land between my parents and me. Like a stray dog she ran across it and set off a mine field that threw up depths and plowed chasms which would be there forever.

It was toward the end of the year, when the heat and examinations came together. We all grumbled about the strain but I believe that in a way, I enjoyed it. It caught me up at least temporarily in a sense of urgency and purpose that discounted the strain, and it meant that at home I could shut myself up with my books and, living apart from the household, be respected for it. I do not think there was a home anywhere that did not invest its student with a sense of importance and special consideration at this time.

That was why I said to Mary Seswayo one afternoon, “Why do you hang on here? I like to get home and get down to some real work as early as I can.”—There were no more lectures once examinations were about to start, and we simply came to University to use the library or discuss something with our tutors. But the African girl seemed always to be sitting over a desk somewhere, in the library or a deserted lecture theater, while everyone else was hurrying to get away.

She looked up with the dulled expression that, contradictorily, comes from concentration. “I’d rather work here.”

“Oh, would you?” I said in the polite tone of disagreement.

“The woman I stay with’s got her children at home and you can’t expect them to stay outside all the time. Then she takes in sewing and the books and papers get all mixed up. …” She smiled.

And then I remembered. I stood there looking at her with a kind of appeal of concern on my face and she smiled back at me with the reassurance of resignation. “So I’d rather work here.”

For once I forgot the tacit pretense I kept up in an attempt to spare her feelings, to make her feel less different from me. “It must be like hell. How do you manage at night? Can you get anything done?”

Suddenly we really were intimates at last. “How can I? I sleep in a room with the children. In the other room the man and woman sit and talk, there are always people. So I try early in the morning. But the children are up at dawn.” She laughed at the hopelessness of it.

I shook my head, not knowing what to say. “You couldn’t go home to Natal?”

“No.”

We both knew there was no money for it.

“Isn’t there anywhere else you could stay for a bit?”

She shrugged and moved her brown expressive eyes with their bright whites, lingeringly from one side of the room to the other, as if to say, Where?

But then she said, to remind herself how privileged she was to be at the University at all. “But I can get a lot done here, you know, in the daytime.”

I made a little noise of impatient dismissal; conscious at the same time that this in itself was a luxury only a white person could afford.

And I went home. The train had been standing in the full sun of three o’clock in the afternoon before it left Johannesburg station, and the leather seats were searingly hot to the touch. My clothes stuck to the leather and my body stuck to my clothes, and, with my legs crossed, tears of sweat ran helplessly from my thighs down the backs of my bare knees. The green blinds were down and the thick dusty light brought out the varnish smell of hot leather. I closed my eyes and sank into the sweat and staleness of myself (five wet prints showed where my hand had clutched my books), and the train seemed to pamper me in it, shaking yes, yes, lazily as a fat woman breathing. I saw the old motorcar tire with the fern straggling out of it; the children shouting; the flatness, the dust, the noise. I imagined the woman with the sewing machine stuttering and the bits of material everywhere. Probably she chattered while she sewed. No, probably that was wrong, too; native women are always far more gay or far more serious than white women, so one mustn’t try to visualize their moods from one’s experience of Europeans. They sing and shout in the street over nothing, and they are solemn under the weight of some task we shouldn’t even feel. There was no way of knowing, no way of knowing. And sitting in the physical reality of the heat that tacked my mind down to consciousness of every part of my body, sweating or touching in discomfort against the encumbrance of cloth, I had an almost physical sensation of being a stranger in what I had always taken unthinkingly as the familiarity of home. I felt myself among strangers; I had grown up, all my life among strangers: the Africans, whose language in my ears had been like the barking of dogs or the cries of birds.

And this feeling seemed to transmute itself (perhaps by a trick of the heat, altering the very sensibility of my skin) to the feeling Mary must have, trying to oppose the abstract concepts of her books against the overwhelming physical life crowding against her. What a stranger it must make of her. A stranger to herself. And then again how slight, how stupid, how useless it must all seem, how impossible to grasp, the structure of the English novel, the meaning of meaning, the elegance of exchanges between Beatrice and Benedict — with the woman making mealie porridge over the fire, the man carefully preserving the dirty bit of paper that is his pass, the children playing for a few years before they become nursegirls and houseboys.

When I got down from the train at the siding the Mine property lay like an encampment, dead in the heat. Atherton, just seen over the veld in a watery haze, was another. The horror of full light showed it for what it was. Inside there might be coolness, the illusion of shelter and color, the depth of books, the dignity of enclosed space in rooms, the symbols of fruitfulness in flowers and grapes; but the sun looked down on the bare, stolid huddle of tents that expressed nothing more than complacent survival. And all around, like a child’s revenge of muddy footprints and dirty words scratched on a wall, the natives had fouled the niggling benefits of the white people’s civilization. The siding was littered with bitten-out hunks of stale bread swarming with ants, filthy torn papers and rags clung to the boles of the gum trees, and the smell of stale urine, which had been there as long as I could remember, came up from the weeds along the road.