Nadine Gordimer: The Lying Days

“You’ve been talking to Paul again!” I would taunt. It amused me to see my mother talking to the old gardener just as if he were a friend. Yet there was a touch of scorn in my gibe; other women gave orders to their gardeners, why should my mother talk to hers? “—Honestly, he’s a lot more sensible than a lot of white people,” she would say to my father, as an admittance and a challenge.

Yet I was fond of Paul. I gave him all my discarded games and books for his children, and even my old fairy bicycle, a parting that drew a little string tight inside me, although I did not ride the bicycle any more. He greeted me always as if he were welcoming me back from long absence; a lingering kind of salute, a big smile watching after me as I passed. He fixed things for me, too. And drilled a tiny hole in the shell of a tortoise which, miraculously, he had dug up where it had been hibernating in the dahlia bed, so that I could attach it by a long string to a stake in the lawn. The unexpected discovery of the tortoise was a tremendous excitement, but the pleasure of keeping it as a pet somehow failed to realize. (I had never been back to buy the gold and brown mosaic shell through which I would look at the sun; it had disappeared beneath the overlap of too many impressions of that afternoon, the feeling that something had happened that I didn’t know how to think about.) Now this bitter-mouthed, old-eyed, cold-eyed head and these four dry cold legs feeling slowly out of the shell made me hesitate — froze the impulse of the heart. The fact of the creature, living inside, spoiled the tortoise, domed, gold and brown.

One morning after rain only one neat little segment, the one with the hole in it, lay attached like a label to the long string on the lawn. The tortoise was gone. No one could convince me that it must not have been like pulling one’s nail out by the roots. I kept trying it, secretly, with my thumbnail, and deep guilt humiliated inside me. I felt that the tortoise was someone I had not got to know until too late; now its reproachful face looked out at me from nowhere in the garden.

On a Sunday morning when I was eleven the hooter went quite suddenly just before breakfast. It seemed to suck in the quiet leisure of early Sunday and blow it out again in alarm.

“Well, what on earth—” My mother’s eyebrows raised in amused indignation. Sunday was the only day she wasn’t dressed and busy long before breakfast, and she came in in her dressing gown, looking inquiringly at my father. “Somebody’s idea of a joke,” he said. He was fixing the plug of the toaster for her. There couldn’t be an accident; most unlikely, anyway, because there was no blasting underground on a Sunday, only the pumps kept going. “Somebody at the time office had too much party last night!” My father made a knowing sound.

I went out into the fresh garden. “You mustn’t go down near the Compound Manager’s,” chorused two little Dufalettes, clinging to the fence and peering through the hedge on their side.

“Why not!” They were silly little things; when nobody at home would listen to them, they would call over the fence.

“My daddy says so. My daddy says nobody must go to the Compound Manager’s, and Raymond was going but now he’s not.”

Raymond came bounding round the corner of their house doing something with a cotton reel and an elastic band. “Man, there’s a whole lota niggers round Ockerts’, all over the garden and in the street and everywhere. Just a lot of munts from the Compound. I was going, but, ag, I don’t want to. My dad’s up there. — Look, haven’t you or your mom got some ole cotton reels you don’t want. I’m’na make a whole army of these tanks out of them, I’m’na have hundreds and hundreds, you’ll see them covering the whole lawn.”

“All right. I’ll ask.” I ran round and in the kitchen door. “There’s a whole crowd of Compound boys in Ockerts’ garden.”

“Who said so?”

“Raymond just told me.”

“Mind you!” My mother stood there lighting upon it. “I thought there was something different this morning — there were no drums! I lay in bed wondering what was different.” Every Sunday morning the Mine, and fainter, more distantly, the town, woke to the gentle, steady beat of drums from the Compound: the boys held war dances, decked in checked dishcloths and feathers from domestic dusters now instead of the skins of beasts and war paint, passing time and getting rid of virility the Mine couldn’t utilize instead of gathering passion for battle; stamping the dust of a piece of veld provided by the Mine instead of their tribal earth. But this morning there were no drums. Only, now that we listened, expecting something, a distant flare of the human voice; there; then blown the other way by the wind.

My father and I went out into the garden to listen. Then out the gate and along the road which the pines held in deep cool dewy shadow. Mr. Bellingan joined us, raising his hand from his veranda. As we got nearer to the Compound Manager’s house, the faint blare grew and separated into the clamor of many voices, high and low, shrill and deep. Now and then, the piercing trill of a whistle shrieked some assertion of its own.

The Compound Manager, by virtue of his position, had a very large garden, laid out with the formality of a park and kept shaved, clipped and pared by bands of Compound boys who were always to be seen squatting like frogs on one lawn or another. Now the gates were open, one facing in toward the house, the other the wrong way, toward the street. About two hundred Mine boys blotted out the green and the color as they sat with their elbows resting on their knees, watching the house, and stood, looking up, packed round the veranda steps. If they had brandished the sticks that most of them carried, now they lay set down beside them; the boys smoked their pipes and stared round in the sun, almost as they did on the veld round the Compound and the stores. Nobody trampled the stars of tight-packed pansies, nobody bent the mound of white lilies that gave out their incense as if convinced they honored a grave. Though some sat beneath scythes of shade cast by the fronds of the palms, none leaned against the monster pineapples of the boles. An immense babble, like a tremendous tea party in full swing, filled the morning.

As I came with my father and Mr. Bellingan a little uncertainly onto the driveway, the way visitors come who are not too certain if they have come at the right time, a few of the boys looked up over their shoulders and then slowly swung their heads back again, like cattle. One was trying to catch a fly that kept flying onto his big mouth as he shouted. Another was not listening at all, quietly exploring his nose. Another one said something about us and laughed.

We saw someone signaling, a beckon and the rather foolish smile of excitement, from the bow window. “Come. It’s Mrs. Ockert.” My father shepherded us toward the house, through the standing groups who clotted more thickly round the veranda, slapping one another’s chests and backs in emphasis of argument, shaking heads and turning this way and that in laughter and disbelief. But they moved aside to let us through, absently. As they moved their blankets stirred the smell of flesh and dust.

Right in the center of the veranda steps a heavy boy in low-slung khaki trousers and an old vest torn down under the arms shouted and moved his big full chest as if that were his form of gesture, curiously expressive, as if it came up out of him without volition. His hair was clipped off bald and showed only as a matt shadow where it would have encroached upon his forehead; beneath the oil of excitement he had a marked, lumpy skin. He was shouting, butting his head at two fat Mine boys who stood about with an air of righteous authority, backed a little away from him, though superior.