Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Daily, when the bus put me down here, I was home. Past the first three rows of houses and up alongside the fourth. All built of the same dark brick with low roofs, small windows and porches enclosed with a fine-meshed wire screening which had a tinny dazzle like the sheen off a piece of moire when it was new, but now was tarnished, and darkened each entrance with homely gloom. Even in the middle of the day, little glowing points of orange light showed behind the windows: inside Mine houses it was always dark. The houses of the officials in the fourth row were bigger than the others, set well back from the road with a tall row of pines screening their long narrow gardens. They looked out across the road upon an untidy square park, deeply bordered with great solemn pines which had cast their needles and dark shade so long that beneath them the grass had worn away and died, and the earth was theirs, cut off by them from the sun. Small children fluttered about their nursemaids like butterflies, and in the middle stood the Recreation Hall. Like everything else it had been built by the Mine and it belonged to the Mine; cut-out steel letters spelled ATHERTON RECREATION HALL across the chipped portico, and posters advertising dances and bridge drives long past hung peeling from the pillars.

There our house was; and I lived in it as I lived in my body. I was not aware of the shape of it, of its existence as a building the way the school existed or the houses in the town; nor of its relation to the other houses of the Mine about it and again the town about them: I had begun within it, at the pin point of existence, and hollowed out within it my awareness. When I came home the authority of school — my uniform, the black stockings, the blazer which held the smell of ink and dust and classrooms curiously cold as if they had been steeped in water, of orange peel and curling egg sandwich in my lunch tin — became invalid. There there was no need of an exterior, a way to smile and talk and listen to other people, the little suit of consciousness a child climbs into the very first time he is led in to be shown to someone from outside; there I did not have to put on that to show I was alive, for there was the path, pressing gravel up to my soles, there was the leafless frond of the jasmine bush, touching my ear like my own hair, there was the drift of brown pine needles held in the guttering of the veranda as in the palm of my hand.

Every afternoon, our native girl Anna, eating her lunch: tearing off chunks of bread and washing them down with great gulps of tea from an old jam tin. The voice of my mother, high, questioning, accompanied by an arpeggio of spoons gently striking delicate china; coming out of the house like the voice of the walls: “Helen?” Under the light in the dark little sitting room, the willow pattern tea-things out. Embroidered cloth and tea cozy in the shape of a china doll in a wool crocheted crinoline, crumpets polished with yellow butter, the whole covered with a square of green net weighted with beads. My mother’s footsteps in high heels quick and loud down the pasage. A little burst of voices: Come in! Hu-llo … so I thought we’d just … yes, I’m glad you did … no, not at all, just right, of course not — and my mother’s voice and my mother’s sharp heels leading up the passage, past the half-open door behind which I would flatten myself, while the little troop filled my mother’s bedroom with movement and gasps and laughter, like the commotion of swimmers rubbing themselves down after cold water.

Past the Eau-de-Cologne presence of my mother, into the room, putting each patent shoe down from toe to heel, smiling, but my lips tucked together as if something might escape. A place made for me at the table, holding their handbags to their laps as they shifted: Here, see what it is I’ve got for you! Hullo! Was that the tartan my mother had been making up for me one day at the Compound Manager’s? — They would smile down at me, as if I were a surprise. And then when my father came home and walked into the bright close sitting room slapping his folded paper in his palm, they stirred and gave little cries, like busily feeding birds startled by a stone.

“So late already!”

“Look, it’s almost dark.”

The afternoon was their own domain, but the evening belonged to the menfolk. None of them had anything to say to my father; the warm flow of their talk always dried up the instant he walked in. They wanted to pack themselves and the evidence of their close and personal preoccupations — the ridiculous dangle of baby booties, the embroidered crash bags holding tangled silks — out of his way. “A man wants his home to himself,” Mrs. Cluff often said.

And then, before dinner, my mother’s feet different in her everyday shoes again; lying on the rug, I watched them and the long hard black legs of Anna (without the shine her brown face had — blacker with the cold of the yard, roughened with early mornings and biting nights) bare into shoes hollowed out by someone else’s fat ankles, passing and repassing as the table was laid for dinner.…

It was this to which the road brought me back always; and it was from this that we set out, my mother and father and I, when we went into the town on Saturday mornings. Then we went by car, and my father parked in the main street outside the department store where dirty ragged little native boys said over and over, like small birds repeating one note, Look after your car, sah? Look after your car, sah? My father would lock the doors and try the handles and threaten: “No! Now get away. Get away from this car.” Once one boy had pushed another and said, “Don’t take him, sir, that boy’s no good,” and I had laughed but my father had tightened his nostrils and walked through the native children saying Hamba! Hamba! “Something should be done about it,” he often said, “little loafers and thieves, they should chase them off the streets.”

Wherever we went to shop in the town we were known, and when my mother bought anything she would simply say, “G. P. Shaw, Atherton”—and that would be enough. The charge slip would go shooting away up the wire in its little brass cage to the office perched above. If by any chance — there might be a new shop assistant — we were asked to give an address, my mother would raise her eyebrows and say in a high, amused voice, lifting the corner of her mouth a little, “Mrs. G. P. Shaw, 138 Staff Officials’ Quarters, Atherton Proprietary Mines Limited — but really, Atherton’s all that anyone ever wants.”

The little town with its one busy street was alive with the mines on a Saturday. The Mine people came from Atherton, Atherton Deep, Platfontein, New Postma, Basilton Levels and the new mines opening up, but not yet in production, to the east of the town. In the three barbershops behind curtained doorways scissors chattered ceaselessly and the crossed feet of waiting men showed tilted up before newspapers in the outer shop. The bright windows held hundreds of small objects, from razor blades and pipe cleaners to watches and brooches, and the smell of sweet violet oil came warmly out to the pavement. I dragged slowly past, afraid to peep in (barbershops were mysterious as bars, and as unapproachable) but wondering if my father were there. I never found him; but later when we met him at the car his neck would be pink and there would be tiny short sharp fragments of hair dusted into the rim of his ear.

There were two big grocers in Atherton, but Mine people didn’t go to Golden Supply Stores but to Bond and Son. It took at least half an hour to give an order at Bond’s because there Mine women met not only their neighbors from their own property, and women from other properties, but also the surprise of women who had been transferred to some other mine on another part of the chain of gold mines called the Reef, and transferred back again just as unexpectedly. Then Mr. Bond, a short, thick-faced man with many opinions, had known my mother for many years. He liked to lean across the counter on one ham-shaped forearm and, with his eyes darting round the shop as if he didn’t want anyone else to guess at what he could possibly be saying, tell her how if it wasn’t his bread and butter, he could talk, all right. Cocktail cabinets and radiograms and running up big bills for the food they ate. “I could mention some names,” he’d say. “I know. I know.” My mother would smile, in a soft voice, pulling her mouth in. “Only if you’re in business you dare not talk. Smile and say nothing.” “Smile and say nothing,” the grocer took up as if it had been just what he was looking for, “that’s it all right. Smile and say nothing. But how people can live like that beats me. …” “How they can put their heads on the pillow at night. …” My mother shook her head. “But it just depends on how you were brought up, Mr. Bond. I couldn’t do it if you paid me. …”