Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

How he had come by the place, no one seemed to know. As I have said, it was the idea of seven or eight young people who decided to find some cheap convenient place in town where they could be private from any but their own kind and sit talking and perhaps drinking a little cheap wine until one o’clock in the morning. Each would pay a share of the rent, and this levy would serve as a subscription, so that the whole thing would be a kind of club. They dragged in some old mattresses, lit up the cobwebs with a few candles in bottles, and were probably as cosy as children playing besieged Indians. Unfortunately, they enjoyed themselves so much that they told their friends, and their friends began to come along, too, and bring their friends’ friends, and in no time the original group found their mattresses and their Jeripigo taken over by medical students who had picked up with vaguely arty girls, young men who worked as window dressers or clerks and wanted to paint or write — the whole shoal of restless, vaguely Leftist, mostly innocent Johannesburg youth which escaped to another unreality from the neon and air-conditioned unreality of the cinemas and the shops of their daily lives. It must have been then that Marcel saw his opportunity, and, like the Wolf dressed up as the Grandmother, put on his velvet jacket and relieved the bewildered group of the responsibility for the rent.

The great thing about the place was that it really was a cellar. This was an inestimable advantage that Marcel must have been quick to see. Instead of driving out to a roadhouse or going to a shiny Greek tearoom or a plush-insulated hotel where a trio played blearily from Showboat, we drove down to the area of darkened warehouses. There, where the cement and the paving rang like iron beneath the street lights, almost opposite the central police station which was only a name or a vaguely disquieting joke to us in our white skins and middle-class security, was the old building which once had housed a wholesale liquor business. We went in through the old-fashioned door of an empty shop whose windows were hung with hessian and then down a rickety wooden stair for which a hole had been made in the rotting wooden floor, into the cellar.

It looked and smelled like the workshop of a garage, and we stood looking round with the suppressed giggles of curiosity while Herby was engaged in some sort of argument with an official-looking blonde sitting at a kitchen table. She was flanked by a couple of very young men who established their status as habitués by the extreme casual untidiness of their clothes — no one could be so haphazardly rumpled anywhere but at home. As the place had no license, no charge could be made for admission, but apparently this snag was circumvented by the rule that patrons had to pay a “subscription” which varied on the blonde’s assessment of what they looked as if they might pay. Even when Herby had put down a note and we were officially in, one of the young men sauntered up to the women of our party and said: “Wouldn’t any of you like to give us a donation—? Anything — a piece of your jewelry?” The girl froze terrified as if it had been suggested that she leave her virginity at the door, and Jenny and I burst out laughing at the idea of gravely presenting our “jewelry”—a Zulu bead collar she had bought for 5/6, and a pair of cheap oxidized silver earrings that I wore. “—She’ll leave her wedding ring with you on her way out—” said John, ushering Jenny past.

“Where’re we going to sit ourselves …?” Herby was looking briskly out over the dark, bare place where here and there a candle threw huge shadows on the rough whitewashed walls and the huddles of people with their voices lowered to the dark as if he were entering a restaurant where an obsequious maître d’hôtel would come up to lead us to a white-covered table. All the mattresses on the floor were fully occupied with murmurous burdens and the few wooden forms round the walls were clustered with people sitting and standing, so we all laughed at him. “It’s exactly like an air-raid shelter,” Jenny was saying. “If they’d ever lived in England it wouldn’t be their idea of pleasure. Exactly like a shelter, even the mattresses.” Herby had dashed on ahead and, the perfect host, found a vacant mattress for us, or rather an almost vacant mattress — someone’s coat claimed a corner of it but the owner was not there. As we settled ourselves down, the group around the radiogram near the stair broke away like a football scrum, and a French tango, scratchy, passionate, the musical equivalent of the breath of sweet wine and garlic, swung out.

At once I liked the place; it was ridiculous, self-conscious, pathetic in its attempt to be dramatically sordid, but it was fun: an amusing parody of a kind of life which did not exist in Johannesburg. I was watching the couples who were getting up all around us to dance on the part of the cracked concrete floor that was kept clear, and the tall figure that Herby had pointed out as Marcel, moving about with a way of arresting his head, lifted momentarily in the advantage of a flicker of light, so that you could see his pointed golden-colored beard and the curl of smoke round his head from the long holder in his mouth and the nimbus of his golden-brown velvet jacket. I saw that, rather pointlessly and harmlessly, since the place was so dark, people of diverse talents had been allowed to contribute some wall decorations — just behind our heads there was a horrifyingly emaciated Christ, represented as an African, with the half-finished background of the hovels of Shantytown, and over above the bunch of dancers, where a candle in a tin holder was hung on a nail, a tremendous female figure, bulbous in the magazine manner, covered half the wall. The radiogram, too, was magnificently vulgar and incongruous; a great thing of shiny veneered woods, zebra-striped in imitation of fancy grains — the kind of machine that can only be bought on hire purchase.

But Jenny and John were regarding the place perfectly seriously; I could see that. They were looking around just as they did when by some chance they found themselves in a typical “nice” middle-class home in one of Johannesburg’s fashionable northern suburbs. “It’s hardly the sort of thing to interest progressive people — I mean, I should think that if they have any politics at all they’re likely to be anarchist and antisocial.” Jenny bent her head to me in the confidential deprecating tone with which she would point out a built-in cocktail cabinet or a baby crib hung with lace and ribbons. “… The obverse side of this is, of course, Houghton,” John was saying to Herby. As a Jew who, by marrying a Gentile girl from England, had completed his assimilation in a society that held as one of its basic tenets a complete absence of race-consciousness, he made his Jewish origin a guarantee of good faith which allowed him to speak of the Jews in a manner which would not have been considered acceptable in a Gentile with the “right ideas.” “These are the children of Market Street merchants, I’ll bet. Papa makes a hundred thousand in soft goods, there’s a swimming pool and a tennis court and two Buicks, and the kids start up this sort of thing. Petit Trianon of the bourgeois. But you’ll notice it’s not the rousing drinking songs, the lively dancing and the open-air eating places they try to re-create. Those are in their racial memory, too, but they want to forget them. Their fathers want to forget those; they’ve spent thirty or forty years piling up money to put them at a distance from everything that was in their lives when they were simple oppressed people in Europe. But their suppression of their working-class origin creates a guilt feeling in the kids which goes the usual way — it manifests itself somewhere else. Here it poisons their healthy fan tasy; when they want to play at being poor it’s not the vigorous, hopeful proletariat they ape, it’s the miserable, nihilistic café life of the dispossessed exile. Forgetting one bad memory, they ‘remember’ a worse one: they want the darkness, the instinct to hide away, to meet secretly and talk in whispers, of their brothers who survived concentration camps. — The concentration camps for which our Houghton friends have a certain moral responsibility because they were the product of a Fascist-Capitalist society much like the one in which they are making their money. …”