Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Later he went to see the woman, because without the man (he had once been a railway worker and had some sort of pension) she was destitute and it seemed that Paul would have to try to get her a pension, too. She said to him: “What is wrong with this man? I stayed with two men before. The one ran away to Capetown. The other one died after thirteen years. Now this one is wrong?”

A kind of minor panic flew round among the colored people. Most of it was ridiculous and unfounded in danger, but its spark of actuality was the special distress and embarrassment that people feel when their sexual privacy is threatened, even by implication. People said to one another that they were afraid to go to sleep in the same room with their wives. The inevitable hooligans played the inevitable joke of climbing up to windows and waking people up by shining torches in their faces. One evening a colored clerk in Paul’s office confided, half afraid he would be laughed at, half afraid what he said should be taken seriously, “I used to be so proud of my wife’s European looks. You know she’s quite often been taken for a white girl? Now I’m wondering—” He stopped, wanting the assurance of Paul’s laughter that it was ridiculous to go on. And Paul laughed, but a moment later the thought forced itself up in the man again. “If anything like that happened to us, I’d do… I don’t know what—” He had the pleading, tense expression of abstraction that anticipates the doctor’s order for some too-intimate investigation. But of course Paul laughed again, and said to him, “For Christ’s sake, Robert, you know you and your wife are both colored, there’s nothing on earth to worry about. And anyway, they’ll only do this a few times. Just to satisfy the predikants and the Cabinet ministers.”

“Of course you can see a mile off his wife’s a colored girl. Only two or three shades lighter than he is,” Paul said to me. He smiled. “Out of a reversal of the very thing he fears now, he’s liked to think her that much nearer the distinction of whiteness.”

But later that same evening when we were sitting in a cinema, I had the feeling one learns to pick up so quickly from someone one loves, that his mind was not going along with the diversion of the film. He stirred in his seat now and then as people do when they come to the turning point of their own thoughts and then go back to the beginning all over again. Once he hesitated and then putting his mouth to my hair said: “The funny thing is, he’s always seemed — you know, I could talk to him without any mumbo jumbo, the way people like us talk among ourselves.” I nodded vehemently, my eyes still on the film, like a hostess who continues to give polite attention to her guests, while she tries to catch the gist of the urgent confidence someone is pressing upon her in whispers.

When we came out we were both in a rather passive mood — the film had turned out to be bad in a dulling way — and we drank our coffee comfortably, but without speaking much. Once we got home something that often happened suddenly happened again. The sheer pleasure of coming home together alone to sleep in the same bed, the same room, turned our passive mood inside out. Paul got into my bath with me and we fought and laughed and criticized each other’s washing technique. In their desire to know each other minutely, lovers return quite seriously to those dull questions to which children give so much weight: Do you wash your face first or last? Do you stand up when you do your legs or sit down and hold them up out of the water? Paul finished his performance, when I was already drying myself, by disappearing head and all under the water in the way that he knew horrified me. He came up laughing and lay there, water streaming from his hair, all his body broken up into wavering and ripples, magnified and distorted. As I gave him a cigarette, Auden’s line came to me, “… the bridegroom, lolling there, beautiful.” We got into bed half-damp and made love so ecstatically and swiftly that I murmured something about …” only over too soon …” and at once Paul began to make love to me again. We lay there with my hand on him lax the way I liked to keep it after he had parted from my body, on the edge of making love a third time or going to sleep, each possibility as delightful as the other. Neither asleep nor making love, we lay there in the balance between the two, our eyes open, not speaking. The lights of cars we could not hear, turning the bend at the top of the hill, perhaps, traveled over us faintly, one after the other, a long pause, then another and another, slipping down the window and the wall and across the floor and over the bed — where each saw the other’s face come up silvered and the peaks of the bedclothes like a fold of hills — then up the other wall and over the ceiling into darkness.

I took my hand away.

I took it away instinctively, in answer to some other withdrawal. Paul did not move, but with each wash of light I felt come into my mind through his own, the real pain and strangeness of that conversation with the man Robert, and even the jokes of the others. And I knew Paul was thinking of it; feeling for himself the impossibility of a white man understanding these things out of his own security.

Just as I went off to sleep I had one of those curious starts in my mind — the mental equivalent of the jump of a leg or an arm momentarily jerking your body back to wakefulness — that flips up a piece of past consciousness. I did not remember that incident of the Sunday afternoon I went with Joel to Macdonald’s Kloof; for a moment I was there. The sun was down and the air smelled of dust and eucalyptus. I walked past the old Afrikaner packing up baskets and rugs. I called to Joel, Wait, there’s something stuck to my shoe — and he picked up a little piece of twig and scraped at my heel. And the torn thing was there.

The only difference was that this time, unlike the real time that it happened, we were not safe from disgust. We got into the car full of shame and I kept my face turned away from Joel, although I seemed to see his face all the same, as you do in a dream. And perhaps it was here that it all really became a dream, and I was asleep.

I often ask myself now whether I was ever really happy at this time; and I find I must believe that I was. My measure of happiness so far — it changes all through life, like one’s idea of what age is getting old — is the intensity of my identification with living; those periods when I have known myself to be crawling through summer and winter like a slug falling listlessly from leaf to leaf have been the seasons of misery. And by this standard I was happy, though perhaps it was the kind of happiness that you can stand only once, and when you are very young.

The revelation of being well loved in the body is an astounding experience. It carried me along, buffeting through everything else that weighed in on me or harassed me, even the practical worries attendant upon itself. And there is no experience that gives one a closer feeling of being in life; in fact it is like an explanation without words that turns an abstraction into possessed reality.

Then, too, not only was Paul the source of this joy, he was also at grips with the huge central problem of our country in our time, something that had oppressed me not only in my intellect since I had grown old enough to have a concept of man’s freedom, but in my blood. What he could do was pitifully little and pitifully inadequate, but I was at that stage in idealism when the gesture was satisfying in itself. I believed then that the only way for a man to fulfill himself in South Africa was to pit himself against the oppression of the Africans. It did not matter in what way he did it; the thing was so sinister that there was hardly a job or profession where it was not implicit and the question did not come up, if not in so many words, a dozen times a day: Are you for them? Or will you add your weight against them, along with all the others? — And I believe this still, although I understand now the consequences of such a way of life, as I certainly did not do then; something that makes all the difference between one’s right to hold such a belief, and one’s unfitness to do so.