Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

So he drove us home to the flat rather fast and the great need to talk, to tell him, became curiously not urgent, but something that could rest in the surety that it could be told at any time; I did not want to speak at all. He swirled down into the basement garage and, in the gloom pungent of petrol, pulled me over to him and kissed me passionately. “Was it bad—? Me, too. …” I kissed him back in the dissimulation — not something you do not feel, but something that you do not feel at the particular time when perhaps the other does — that webs over the great spaces between the moments of identity which create love. And out of the knowledge, half guilt, half regret, that it had not been possible to miss him in this way during the week end, all the irritation and anger and resentment of the very things that had made it impossible, that pushed it out in the much stronger need of something else from him, burst up urgently in me again.

I said: “Oh, Paul, do you know what she said when I told her—”

He was leaning into the back of the car, where we had thrown the parcels. “Told her what? What’s all this loot?”

“Told her about us. She said I was disgusting. She said: ‘You’re a filthy beast.’ “The ring of my own voice came back from the low concrete girders of the dark place … thy beast.

There was a snort from the car. He slammed the door, looked over the parcels, laughing explosively. “Oh, Christ, no! Did she? Did she call you a Magdalen, Jezebel? Did she? Did she really—?”

His laughter came back, too, rings of sound thrown smaller and smaller until they closed in on my ears again. He jerked his chin over the parcels to urge me up the steps. “Come on, what’s the matter with you—?”

He said, walking where I could feel him, just behind me up the dingy narrow flight: “Hell, that tickles me. … Didn’t you want to laugh in her face?”

“Yes,” I said.

I felt, like some secret horror walled up inside me, beating on the walls with cries that nobody but I should ever hear, the panic and anger of being under my mother’s eyes. I saw her gaze hardening over me. … (The minute before, she had called to the bird, and the bird had answered her. …) Woman who … Filthy beasts.

I said, in that tone of laying something before the other which one uses when one no longer knows what one is saying will mean to him: “She says she doesn’t want me in the house again.”

“Naturally. Even the turn of phrase — not ‘want you in the house’—Come here, beast”—he caught me by my hair and, putting his head round over my shoulder, kissed me clumsily, a little roughly, not quite finding my mouth in the semi-dark. Amused, he whispered to me some private little formula of endearment, the kind of thing that can only be spoken and never written down.

Tears came up in my eyes, and when we came to the light of the ground floor and the lift, I held my eyes very wide and glassy so that he should not see.

But already he was talking of something else, and as I put my things down in the flat, hesitantly touching at this and that, I roused myself to what he was saying—“So what did you do after that?”—He had just said that the grass-planting had gone on until after six.

“Guess where I had supper?” The ridge of his nose was burned, he looked at me challenging, smiling.

I don’t know why — out of weariness, out of depression, perhaps, it flew into my mind: “Isa’s.”

He laughed impatiently. “With Sipho.”

“Oh? How did that happen?”

“He turned up at the field at about half-past five — just happened to be strolling by, of course. … Came straight over to talk to me, but we couldn’t really talk there, so I went home with him.”

“But isn’t he against the field?”

Paul sat down in the big chair. He said with an air of grudging pride: “They’re going to boycott the field. Nobody will use it. They held a meeting afterward — on the field. Sipho spoke damn well. And the colored man from Newclare I told you about. But I don’t trust him, he’s too glib, he’s already picked up all the catch phrases of international politics. Inevitable rogue getting on the band wagon. But there were a lot of simple blokes in the crowd — good crowd — and they just blinked back at him the way they do. Sipho — I don’t know how to explain it — he’s got compassion, that’s it, real compassion. He can afford to say simply what he feels because he really does feel. And you can’t fool a crowd like that. They seemed to smell out the truth in him. Not that he isn’t clever, too; but he does the dramatic thing instinctively, not calculating its effect. Like the field. The field just naturally handed to him the perfect example of the useless good will — the good old Christian kindness, the pat on the head to reconcile the dog to the kind master holding the chain (pretty good? that’s Sipho’s own) — that is no longer any good to the African. ‘We don’t want kindness, we must have freedom. …’ “He fell into restless silence, his glance wavering from object to object in the room, composing an horizon of its own out of the shapes of my parcels (that peak contained the plaques of London); the drop to the floor where the shoes that I had kicked off lay; the jagged rise past the desk to the window. There was an irritation in him, waiting for me to say: so you were planting grass for the field one hour and applauding its boycott the next. …

Bewilderment and a sense of confusion close to fear came to me so strongly that I stood there, unable to go through even the mechanical motions of hanging away my clothes, finding something for supper. This feeling, like an overwhelming lethargy, seemed to come from the room itself; all the ordinary things I had used, taken and put down thoughtlessly in my happiness, filled me with depression. The lamp, the faded quilt, the yellow cushion I had bought, the Egyptian cotton hanging, the ebony mask from the Congo in whose mouth there hung the flower I had stuck there last week, now dead, dangling like a cigarette stub. Where is he? How will one half of him spend his life working at what the other half opposes? How will he do it? How can you do it? Where will he be himself, all the time? The mask. The quilt. Calendar ringed in red (last month’s date so that I shall make no mistake this month). Stitched Egyptians with their long cold eyes. Plant in pot that didn’t let anything grow. Nothing has anything to do with anything else, I thought. How can he do it. What will become of him, while he does …

And at the same time, my mother’s mouth saying, Filthy beasts. The living room with the cushions plumped and the curtains drawn and the clock striking alone, like a sleeper speaking suddenly in a dream.

Nothing fits, I repeated to myself. Ridiculous, one side; horrible, hurtful, the other. But of course it was ridiculous. I could see my mother and me in that scene now and of course it was ridiculous, flinging about like puppets. Of course it was ridiculous. …

Paul said, with the attention of his eye, his mind sunk deeply somewhere else: “What is in there, anyway.”

I looked at the parcels. “Some things they brought me. Put them on top of the bathroom cupboard.” I felt I should never open them.

The next day I was walking out of a theater booking office during my lunch hour when I came face to face with Joel Aaron: with a little start of horror, as if Atherton, the Mine, my mother, had suddenly opened before me in the Johannesburg street. I covered this recoil which even in the second that I knew it must be showing on my face shamed me, by pretending an exaggerated surprise. — That in itself was unconvincing, I realized as I feigned it, because why should I find it a shock to meet someone whom I knew to be fre quently in town? — But one awkwardness leads to another, and I could only say with an effusiveness which did not belong with Joel, and did just exactly what I wished not to do: put him in the category of a stranger: “What are you doing now? — Why don’t I ever see you!”