Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“—What is it—?”

He frowned. And after a moment when we both listened, I not knowing for what: “It’s nothing. That ticking again. Must be something in the mechanism of the clock, that vibrates at a certain speed.” He settled back and after a short silence the dusty bright hall began to light up in my mind again. “It must be a hell of a surprise to a man like Carter Belham to find himself answering awkward questions on the methods of the press, to old Fube. And Fube was at him and at him, with his, I’d like to ask you further, and There’s just one more point. … Did you see. Once or twice Belham simply blustered. There just wasn’t anything he could say.” My voice sank into my thoughts. Carter Belham, the big, brandy-suave editor of one of the newspapers belonging to a powerful conservative group, nipped into discomfiture by the dry voice of the native schoolteacher (the kind of “decent” scholarly African he was accustomed to pleasing by calling him “Mister”) asking if he could tell him if any directive was given to newspapermen reporting affairs affecting Africans? — The editor trying to turn the advantage to himself by putting on that air of good-natured helplessness which is intended to suggest the bulldog worried at by something small and sharp-toothed: the bulldog restrained in his very possession of his own invincible jaw. “I’ll bet he would never have come if he’d known it was going to be like that?”

But Paul seemed suddenly very tired and he let my talk drop. In a little while he said, out of silence: “Half of them weren’t there. Sipho and Fanyana and the others. The ones who count weren’t there.”

“Oh, I don’t know. How can you say that—”

He lifted his hands off the wheel in a slight shrug. “You get all enthusiastic. The reign of the ear of corn.” (He was referring to the line of a poem by Lorca that I liked—“a black boy to announce to the gold-minded whites the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn.”) “But they don’t come any more. And they’re the ones who count, the ones who’ve really got something. Without them the others don’t get anywhere, their ideas will remain where they were. It’s always like that; there are a few who … you know, you see the same thing among ourselves, in a crowd like Isa’s. The hangers-on and the boys whose heads move somewhere. The hangers-on can only go so far as the heads take them.” He said after a moment: “Sipho would have asked some questions, all right. Belham and Dr. Lettica would have heard some calm cold logic from that black boy. … That look of making allowances for the poor inarticulate savage — the way Belham looked encouraging every time anyone black got up to speak — by God, that would have dropped off his red face as if Sipho’d suddenly taken a rabbit out of his own mouth. — Hell, if they’d been there. — I wanted a chap like Belham to see that his conception of the thinking African is out of date and third hand, bears as much relation to the real thing as a circus-trained ape to a man.”

“But wasn’t Sipho at the debate last week?”

“I’ve told you, they don’t come any more.” There was a growing movement, among the Africans, of non-co-operation with the whites. It had started with the policy of the Communists and the leaders of African Nationalism as a semiofficial affair, but now it was spreading and becoming something quite different: a kind of distaste, even in those Africans who had European friends with whom they could mix on decent dignified terms, for anything that was inspired or assisted by white people. Sipho was a friend of Paul’s; it was he who (in his person and what he told) in the first place showed Paul the refinement of frustration that comes to the educated African. He had asked Paul to help him arrange lectures and music recitals for the small group of his own kind who were starved for some sort of diversion in a society where the only pleasures allowed to Africans were old Wild West films (specially chosen as suitable for the primitive mind), all-night jive sessions on what was imagined to be the Harlem pattern, and illicit drinking dens.

“Well, he’s cutting off his nose to spite his face.”

“He’s right — he’s perfectly right—” Paul’s profile was closed against me. He spoke as if he were impatient with himself. “Anyone with any guts must do the same.”

The ticking noise — which was not the running of the clock, for that had stopped at fourteen minutes to five some day long before I had even met Paul — was the only consciousness we shared for the rest of the way. It was somehow impossible for us to go on talking of Sipho because we sensed it would not really be talk of Sipho, but a dragging up and examination of what we had settled to live by: Paul in the job he did every day, I in the symbol I had made of him for myself. Shut off from each other by this, something else that was unshareable, but this time for different reasons, took me up and washed me that much further away from this loved person whose familiar head, like a beautiful shell from which the inhabiting creature is absent, was only a little higher than mine in the dark, and whose elbow, as he changed gear, touched against my arm unnoticed. A light sick nervousness for tomorrow flowed back to me from where it had been waiting. Anything connected with home always brought up with it the emotional reactions of childhood, so that if I thought of something pleasurable related to Atherton and my parents, I would not feel the mild, easy sense of the pleasant with which I would be impressed by a pleasure on the same level arising out of my adult, independent life, but the high-flown excitement with which a child invests the trivial. Now, when I was entirely independent of my parents and their mores, the thought of going home to Atherton tomorrow and explaining that I was living with Paul reduced me to the feeling of chilly hollowness, damp-palmed and with my stomach tightened inside me, that I had known the day before a music examination. The fact that I was ashamed of this feeling, and could refute it utterly over and over in my reason, did not shift it. It remained sitting there inside my body like some old genie, released by the word “Atherton” to possess me.

And I could not speak of it to Paul. It did not belong with our life and I did not want to show it to him. It could only show him a girl I might have been whom he could not have loved; whom he would never have bothered to know — whom, in fact, he would never have met.

From the corner of the car into which I had curled myself I looked at him, tightening and releasing the corner of his mouth at his thoughts. Of Sipho. Of the evening. If he thought about my silence at all, thinking it to be the same as his own. As we came through the town (people were winding out of the cinemas, breaking up like confused ants round the parked cars) an astonishing loneliness came out of me. I say came out of me because that was how I became aware of it: as the thin-drawn music of a street musician comes out of the noise of a street. You lift up your head as if all the clamor had been silence and this sound is the first you have heard for a long time.

In the lift I said to him: “What are you going to do tomorrow?” and he looked up and smiled and then looked inquiring for a moment and said: “—Oh, of course—! You won’t be here. Well, then, I think I’ll ring John in the morning and see if they’d like to see a picture. Have to be a late show.”

“Why, what’s happening in the afternoon?”

“I’m going to plant grass. Really. The new sports field at Jabavu.”

We eyed each other in the distorting greenish light of the lift and we both laughed, as people do when they have not forgotten a quarrel. In the morning we woke very early and I began to talk as I could never resist doing when I knew he was awake, no matter what the time. He slid his thigh between mine and scratched my neck with his beard. “Hell, darling, why do you have to go for a whole week end?” I began to kiss him and caress him with a desire born of reluctance; of the empty excited nausea that was back with me again the moment I wakened, making my very presence there with him unreal. Yet there was the familiar miracle I could never take for granted — how, from sleeping so close together, when we wakened our bodies were always both at exactly the same temperature of gentle warmth, so that for a few drowsy minutes it was difficult to tell the touch of your own limbs, one against the other, from the touch of the other’s.