Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

He stood there looking up and down my face as if he were measuring it, faintly smiling. He was getting heavier in the shoulders; he wore the kind of jacket he had always worn, shabby or merely nondescript, one could never decide. He said absently: “Drawing houses.”

“Joel! You graduated at the beginning of the month.” Shame and regret stunned me like a slap across the mouth. I did not know how to express it. I stood there turning the tickets in my hand. He shrugged, smiling.

“I should have been there. Oh, I wanted to come. …” But of course the notice of the graduation ceremony had been in the papers. He knew and I knew that I had known about it.

I kept saying, “… Oh, how could I have … I wanted to, really I meant to … I shouldn’t have missed …”

He did not answer, but only went on smiling quietly, as if waiting for me to finish.

My protests petered out into silence between us. People passing jostled against our shoulders so that we seemed to be bobbing toward and away from one another. At once he said over this: “How do you like the work in the Welfare Department? Is it giving you some satisfaction?”

“It’s not much, you know. Nothing more than a typist really. How did you know?”

“I was in the shop on Tuesday, and they told me you weren’t working there any more.”

There was another silence. I pushed back a strand of hair that kept blowing down over my eye with a gesture that, I suppose, to someone who knew me well, was particularly my own: I have always liked my hair tight and smooth. I saw his eyes travel with my hand; come back to rest directly on my face again. I had the curious feeling that I was apparently always to have with him, no matter what distance of time or commitment to others came between our meetings, that he saw in me what no one else did, things, even ordinary, trivial, physical differences of which only I myself was aware. For instance, I felt now that he noticed that I had not penciled my eyebrows that morning (they were heavy, for a red-haired person, but too light in color) and that under his eyes I was tautening the muscle at the left side of my mouth that would show where I had got the faint line, from cheek to mouth, that I had surprised on my face lately.

“It really isn’t much of a job at all …,” I said again.

“Paul’s must be pretty damnable now, though,” he said. It was a polite and sympathetic observation that anyone who read the papers and knew Paul might make. But again I had that feeling of the prescience of Joel; something disturbing, that I felt in some obscure way was a comfort, but that I was impelled to struggle against.

Now suddenly I was impatient to get away from him.

“With his temperament, it’s likely to make him schizoid.” I turned the question into the exaggeration of a joke. We went on to talk inconsequentially for a few moments. — He must promise to come and see us (he wrote down the telephone number on a cigarette box; I wrote his — he was sharing a flat with Rupert Sack — on the theater tickets). — That was a good play; he had seen it on Saturday night. His job was in the nature of marking time. … — Oh, he didn’t quite know yet: maybe Rhodesia, after all. Maybe Europe, and lately he’d been thinking seriously about Israel. …

“Well—” I made the little shrugging gesture of collecting myself to go. “Yes …” He pushed the cigarette box into his pocket and touched me momentarily, so lightly it might have been by mistake, on the elbow.

As I turned, and he was already a little distance from me, I suddenly called back: “I was there yesterday. I spent the week end. …”

He nodded. “Been away, I know. … See them about again now I suppose.” And he nodded again, deliberately, lingeringly, as if the nod were some message he must get to me silently over the distraction of the passing people.

So we both stood a moment arrested in the current of the pavement. And then he was gone and I turned quickly and hurried across the street walking fast in the kind of burst of release. The refrain went foolishly inside me: I don’t want to think of the place, I don’t want to be reminded of it.

But when the relief of fast movement was checked and I stood, panting a little, in the lift going up to my desk in the Welfare offices, remorse, the real pain of wanting back the chance to do something left undone, that I do not think I had ever felt in my life before, filled me with distress; distress maddening and sad in its uselessness. I should have gone to his graduation, how was it I did not go when I had wanted to go so much: now I felt so much how I had wanted to go. How could I have ignored this— forgotten. Yes, I had forgotten. Now I could not believe what was true: that I had forgotten. The thought of it, like awareness of a lapse of memory, an aberration of which you have no recollection; as if there is discovered to be another person in you who mysteriously wrests you from yourself and takes over, thrusting you back to yourself in confusion when the fancy takes it — the thought of it made me sick with dismay. I had the instinct to clutch, searching at my life, like a woman suddenly conscious of some infinitesimal lack of weight about her person that warns her that something has gone, dropped — perhaps only a hairpin, a button — but maybe a jewel, a precious letter.

As I sat down before my typewriter, I thought: It’s as if I haven’t slept, it’s as if since after lunch yesterday until now has been one continuous day, without the divisions of a normal day, on and on. …

The line of patient natives waiting to see Paul when he would come in later in the afternoon turned the yellow-whites of their eyes on me, and away again.

Sometimes when I came back to the flat earlier than Paul, I would go out onto the little balcony and sit balanced on the wall, my head against the partition which divided our flat from the one next door. Often I had not even troubled to wash or to put my things away; I simply came in, dropped to the bed what I was holding, and wandered out.

In the late summer, this was the best hour of the day. And the day usually had been a monotonous one; the offices in the old shadowy building which seemed, as you looked in, as cool as a dairy, were damply stuffy, the odor of old documents tightly stored by vanished tenants coming out in the heat like an invisible stain reappearing on a wall; and the reports I typed, the letters I wrote were the mechanical reproduction of someone else’s record of rigidly circumscribed methods of dealing with certain recurrent situations. The calm repetition of the work that came to my desk every day brought alive for me Paul’s flat statement that no case was ever finished, except by death. They came once, they will come again. The poverty of the Africans was a wheel to which they were tied; turn, and it will run its weight over them again. So the same letter, the same reports. And if you cut them free of the wheel, that will be the end of white civilization, said some. … Anyway, white civilization is doomed, said others. …

Perhaps my job was more useful than the one I had had selling novels to leisured women.

I sat on the edge of the balcony, shut out even from the flat. It was like being in a cage suspended from the invisible ceiling of the sky, and what went on in the sky was at my level. If I did not look down I could forget altogether the existence of the street, and the human perspective which is the perspective of the street, and to which, once your feet are on the ground, you are fixed. The new flats going up opposite had reached only the second floor and the building was not yet high enough to block out my sky, to present, like a juggling act, a layer of human activity, figures moving about among chairs, tables, enclosures of light, hundreds of feet up in the air. But the life of the sky, leisured, awesome in the swift changes from calm to storm that human beings can only understand emotionally, in terms of anger and love, beauty and ugliness;—the life of the sky, analogous only to the sea, usually so far above our heads that we have given it to the gods, was suddenly discovered to me. Clouds took the place of trees, and the light, breaking up space in suffusion or falling, falling, straight, sharp, swift, had an architecture of its own. Now and then a bird opened suddenly like a fan past my face. And the soft clouds moved plumped up on their flattened bases like the breasts of birds resting on water. Sometimes they piled into tableaux; held the last of the sun on their gleaming contours; dissolved, with something like lack of interest, into thinning wisps parted and reparted to nothing against the air.