Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

After a moment he shook his head and said: “See …?”—placing himself before himself and me.

I knew what he meant; how he had caught himself out, thinking, almost by infection, the way that he fought all day against people thinking. He was annoyed with the landlord because he was being hard and unreasonable: the fact that the man was an Indian had no bearing on the hardness or the unreasonableness.

I gently detached myself from him — I could never bring myself to move away from Paul’s lightest caress abruptly; it was as if I feared always to break something that might never be made intact again — and went to the kitchen. Steak in the refrigerator, two tomatoes, half an avocado pear. Paul had balanced the pip on matchstick supports over a marmalade jar filled with water. The steak looked bright red, tough, long fibered. As I pounded it with the handle of the bread knife to soften it, I saw that the pip had already parted and let one pale string of root down into the water. Nearly half-past seven. You’re a rotten wife, Helen.

As I cooked and all the small noises of cooking rose up around me in the little dark kitchen that smelled always of curry, I thought, It’s funny, we hardly ever talk about marriage now. Neither of us has mentioned it for months. We were going to get married when my parents came back.

Yet I could not imagine it. Moving with mechanical deftness that was not without a certain pleasure in the doing of a number of simple things at once — turning the steak, freeing the eggs from the edge of the pan, keeping an eye on the toast — I said to myself, Feel it; just like this, yet you would be married. Another name; I smiled at this schoolgirl realization of it. The first thing it implies is some sort of common future. And that was what stopped me. I know how we are now, I can go into the next room and put my hands on Paul’s shoulders, speak to him (and at this point I called out absently, Shall I lay the table, or put it on a tray? — No, it’s too hot. On a tray. We can eat outside), but we seem to be living a kind of interim period. I caught my breath in a little gesture of distress to myself, for the difficulty of understanding this feeling that was more knowledge than feeling. How to explain this feeling of not having started; of something in oneself crying in excuse: Wait! We are nowhere, not ready, so many things to be settled, so many things taking our attention, swerving out lives this way and that. … Yet how can human beings wait? Wait to live until an atom bomb explodes, a government is overthrown, a white man knows a black man to be just such another as himself?

Then there would be no world. Human beings cannot wait for historical processes, I thought with dismay and anger. Then why must we. … But the cry comes out, a head lifted from the preoccupation of confusion — Wait! Please wait! Paul throws himself more and more violently into a job in which he believes less and less. So where does that lead? Where does that find a future? It has only a now; it cancels itself out.

It cancels itself out! — I was afraid of this thought I had stumbled on. I was appalled at the frame of it in words.

My mind sought to distract itself from the contemplation of our state; this place where we wished to stay in order to convince ourselves that so much that was in us and our circumstances was temporary, to be overthrown, and then …

He should give it up, I said resentfully. Give it up. Nobody can go on doing something he believes is fruitless. And now I felt like an angry child who wants to kick something, to kick something and spill over with angry tears.

Then what would he do? How live, then, with himself?

— Then he must accept what he does now for what it is. My job is this that and the other. It will not give a single African an education, a skilled job, a voice in the way his people are to be disposed of, or even the right to build a house for himself when he hasn’t anywhere to live. But he can’t go on struggling and arguing and conniving to give his job the scope it hasn’t got, all day, and sneering at and deriding everything he’s done, the moment he pauses.

I told myself, putting the plates and cutlery quickly on the tray: I will tell him this. The statement had the air of an ultimatum. I will tell him this. It was not a piece of advice; people so close to each other cannot give advice, any more than one can advise oneself.

And so we ate our supper, out on the little balcony. The fat clumsy moths fell against the lamp and taxied lamely between the plates. Paul searched up and down the theater page of the paper, irritable for somewhere to go. I ate slowly, and often paused; but my hand went out for my glass of water; I drank; went on eating.

He threw the paper aside. “Nothing—”—but already indifferent to whether he went out or not. The moon was not up yet and outside the dusty edges of the lamplight the summer night was thickly dark. We put out the lamp to get rid of the insects, and from where I sat, smoking, I saw down away to the left the still darker bulk of buildings, solid as mountains of rock, become fragile as shells, brittle and delicate towers of tracery as the lights went on, hollowing them out, chipping out rectangles and oblongs. Now if you had flicked them with your thumb and finger they would have given back the flat airy sound of fretwork infinitely fine and thin. If you leaned over and picked one up you would be startled by the lightness of it, like picking up a teaspoon made of tin. …

He said: “I saw Edna Schiller today.”

“Did you?”

“She’s not in the second batch, either, though Hugo is.”

“I think she’s disappointed. She gives me the impression of being distinctly peeved. She feels she’s been done down.” The bill for the suppression of Communism had been passed in Parliament, and several of the people we knew had been “named” and informed that they would be charged under the new act. Edna, who had lived on a fantasy of danger for so long, was now apparently to be denied this first real martyrdom: so far her name had not appeared on the lists. When I had spoken to her I could not help feeling that she regarded this omission as a real slight.

“You’re developing a brand of venom all your own, you know. Polite and peculiarly nasty. And always for people like Edna. Perhaps it takes some courage to take the risk of turning out merely to look ridiculous,” he said wearily.

The sudden defense of Edna was sheer perversity of mood; he had laughed about her a hundred times, joined with Isa in the baiting of Edna’s secretive pomposity. But the silence into which his words sank said something quite different. After it was said, his last sentence echoed between us as a comment purely on himself. With it he had chosen to take my attitude toward Edna on himself; snatching up the amusement, the mild scorn in a compulsive determir ition to spare himself nothing. He was determined to make me feel that I had been ridiculing him. I was infuriated with the unfairness of the guilt he was making me feel; a guilt which he was inventing, for which I was not culpable, a piece of twisted interpretation for which he wanted me to give him the pleasure of my inflicting pain.

There was real enmity between us in the darkness. I was glad of the dark because I should not have wanted him to see my face as I felt it was and could not have made it otherwise, stiff with resistant anger, I would not even light another cigarette, although I wanted one, because I could not trust the light of a match, showing my face.

After a long time I burst out: “Why do we all live in a perpetual state of crisis? — ‘This is not my real life, of course, it’s just the way we live now.’—But it’s nonsense. We should all see it’s nonsense. However you live day after day is your real life. You can’t keep the substance of it intact meanwhile — like a child saving a sweet whole to be eaten under special conditions.”