Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

At this time Paul was handling what was officially termed “Poor Relief”—the work of the department was divided into two sections, the other headed “Housing.” The work that his section and in fact the whole department did was in principle the same as that done by similar municipal or government welfare organizations all over the world. Investigation into the homes of delinquent children, maintenance of deserted wives and families, some sort of succor for the extreme situations which breed out of poverty. All this is commonplace in America or Europe. Everywhere in big cities there is a human silt of misfortune, a percentage of waste that through weakness, disability and the inevitable pressure of urban life, is cast out by the city and yet by the city’s guilt and conscience is kept alive. But in South Africa there is one difference; a difference so great that the whole conception of charity must be changed. The people among whom Paul worked were not the normal human wastage of a big industrial city, but a whole population, the entire black-skinned population on whose labor the city rested, forced to live in slums because there was nowhere else for them to live, too poor to maintain themselves decently because no matter what their energy, their skill, their labor was not allowed value above subsistence level. So he spent his days taking to this gigantic artificial pauperdom the palliative measures designed by sociologists for the small percentage of a city’s poor.

He was intensely aware of this and sometimes the knowledge of it, incontrovertible fact kicking away the sense of achievement from beneath the dupe of a difficult day well managed, would throw him into a mood of restless depression. — I noticed that with him, unlike other people I knew, depression did not produce inertia; he would want to go out, tackle things with a kind of anxiety and leave them unfinished, constantly search for someone to talk to so that if you were alone with him he exhausted you with his compulsiveness. “What’s the good of handing them out blankets when they need votes—?” he’d say. “Edna and her crowd are right. I’m wasting my time. Truly. One step away from the dear old ladies of the church, distributing buttered buns and alms.” At this I grew indignant. “We can’t all live historically, and leave it at that. Very comforting if we could. What are you supposed to do, let them freeze or starve while they’re waiting for the millennium?”

“I’m an enemy of progress because I am helping to resign them to their lot. Two-pound-ten a month pension and a delightful hessian shelter, and you’ll be so enchanted with your life that you’ll prostrate yourself before the white man forever.”

“Well, I don’t see why one can’t do both — support their right to emancipation and make their lives a bit more bearable in the meantime. That seems to me the most admirable thing anyone can do.” Paul laughed at my championing of him, but perhaps more than my lover, or a credo, it was the personal myth by which I wanted to live and which I had now embodied in him, that I was defending so jealously.

Paul worked very hard and rarely within the limit of set hours. The fact that there were no telephones in the native townships except in official offices, clinics and schools made it necessary for the welfare workers to make all their visits to the people’s homes, even for the most trivial inquiry, personal ones, and he spent his mornings, at least, driving out on investigations. His life came to me as a perpetual journey through the lives of others; snatches of their personalities, their predicaments, came on his speech and the vividness of his face, and filled me with enthusiasm and the sense of a closeness to life which I had never before known. The Mine was unreal, a world which substituted rules for the pull and stress of human conflict which are the true conditions of life; and in another way, the University was unreal too: it gave one the respect for doubt, the capacity for logical analysis, and the choice of ideas on which this equipment could be used to decide one’s own values — but all this remained in one’s hand, like a shining new instrument that has not been put to its purpose. In my case I sometimes looked at its self-evident efficiency (Miss Shaw has written an intelligent and painstaking paper on the prosody of Gerard Manley Hopkins. This examination of the sources of group conflicts is an excellent piece of work, indicative of a grasp of her subject unusual in a student …) and wondered what the purpose was. What Joel had said once about belonging only to the crust, beneath which the real life lay, came back to me. Paul was rooted in that life, in the rural, slow-gestured past and, more important, the confused and mazelike city life of the present.

He burst into the flat one afternoon at about three o’clock. I was sitting at a space I had cleared for myself at the table piled with Jenny’s sewing, doing some work. He threw down his coat, came over to me with the cold hands and light face of someone who is stimulated by talking to people and driving through a city on a gray afternoon. He put his hands to warm into the hollow of my neck under my dress. “What’s addling your little brain now?”

I looked down at the half-typed sheet, the notebook with its scrawled points. Nineteenth-century English novelists. The kind of paper that thousands of students have written before me, thousands will write after me. The engraving of George Eliot with her massively intelligent horse face and her two bunches of ringlets staring up from an open book.

I felt stale and cramped, suddenly reminded of the woman who sat in the window of the invisible mender’s shop, crouched over old stockings. I dismissed myself. “And where have you come from so early?”

“Sophiatown. One of those erring husbands floored me this afternoon. I used all the classic arguments about responsibility and duty to persuade him to come back to his wife — the poor thing can’t seem to keep him home for more than ten days at a stretch. He’s one of those little men with wise monkey faces who make good craftsmen. He listened to me politely as if he understood it was my job and I had to get my piece over with. Then he said, producing something irrefutable, something we couldn’t fail to agree on—‘But she’s so ugly. Tell me, how can a man live with such a face?’” He shook his head. “—And, my God, she is a damned ugly woman; I couldn’t help feeling some sympathy for him.”

“So what did you say?”

He sat down in a chair and pushed his fingers through his hair. “You’re no oil painting yourself, I told him. — Couldn’t say a damn thing. She is ugly. — And he roared with laughter. We both did. We sat in my office laughing like two men in a pub.”

He laughed again at the thought of it, but I sat looking at my papers.

“Paul, what am I staying on at University for? Why don’t I get a job—?”

“But, my dear girl, you’re going to get a degree?” He knew what I meant, but he liked to test me.

I felt enormously disconsolate. Somehow Paul and the monkey-faced man laughing together in the office made me impatient with myself. “When I’ve got it, what’ll I do? I don’t want to teach. Any sort of academic life — I wouldn’t like it. I’ve never had any desire to write. So what’ll I be? A nicely educated young lady.”

“Darling, why do you ask me? If you want to leave University, if you want to get a job, for Christ’s sake why don’t you? I can’t stand you when you’re timid and uncertain. Damn it all, you’re not under Mummy’s wing now, are you?”

“But I am. So long as I stay at University and they keep me, of course I am.”

I went over to him and put my arms round his knees; he played with my hair, tugging it back behind my ears. “They’re looking for a house again,” I said, speaking of the Marcuses. “Jenny definitely pregnant?” “Almost certain.” We looked at each other as if to say, how can people let these things happen. “That’s the trouble with being married,” he said. I smiled. “But it can happen to any of us.” “Yes, but when you’re married the social sanction makes you careless. People say they won’t be, but they always are. You know … what does it matter, after all, if something should go wrong, we are married. … And there you are. Houses, families, necessity for money and more money, all the things you want to do pushed off into some vague future.” We held each other close in our agreement on this. The idea of domestic life came to me as a suction toward the life of the Mine, a horror of cosy atrophy beckoning, and it was becoming impossible for me to ignore the fact that even the marriage of John and Jenny had some disquieting elements for me.