Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

He was interested. He flickered out of his listless restlessness. “The times aren’t good enough to merit the expenditure of our living. That sort of feeling, I suppose.”

I said: “Isn’t it idiotic? We know that life doesn’t keep. Yet we all have the feeling that the present is something to be got over with, and then … How long have the Nats been in power? Nearly two years. So for two years now everyone who isn’t a Nationalist has been going around in the kind of released state of disaster. Going around saying, Well, until this is over and we get them out again, or: Perhaps we won’t stay to see what happens — what about going to Rhodesia? Or Kenya? — Even if they haven’t the slightest intention of going anywhere, it doesn’t matter: the state of mind is the same. If you are waiting for something to alter, something to happen, if you possibly may be going to go away and live somewhere else, your whole life now becomes a state of suspension. It is like disaster: the same feeling of urgency, putting aside of normal incentives, making do temporarily with what you can. But the big thing about a disaster—”

“What exactly do you mean by disaster? Politically, the Nationalist regime is a disaster all right.”

“Not the way I mean. — A flood, say. Or an earthquake. The big thing about a disaster like that is that it passes. You are existing temporarily, you will begin to live again when it is over. But with us the state of mind of disaster is becoming permanent. At this rate it can go on for years. We could sit for twenty years, like flies paralyzed but not killed by a spider, so long as the Nats stay in power. An unfortunate interruption. Shelving this, shelving that, because ‘things are so uncertain here,’ ‘we never know what will happen.’ “

“There’s an election every five years, you know. There’s just a chance they might get thrown out.”

I moved impatiently in my chair. “—Well five years, then. A year, ten months, if you like. It makes no difference. The state of mind’s still fraud, a piece of self-delusion. This is our life and it is being lived out now the way we don’t like it. This is not time out.”

“Ah, that’s true,” he said slowly, “that’s true.” Then he said, in the quick tone of remembering a point he had wanted to question: “To go back a minute — the fly and spider business. — You talk as if everyone’s resigned himself to Nat rule. And you know that’s not so; you talk as if we weren’t kicking like hell.”

“Oh politically, yes. I grant that politically we’re protesting madly. Even in ordinary private talk we’re protesting. But you know that wasn’t what I was talking about. It’s inside. Inside ourselves in the — what’s the word I want — the nonpolitical, the individual consciousness of ourselves in possession of our personal destiny: it’s that which we’ve put aside, laid away in lavender; postponed.”

I took a deep breath and we both laughed suddenly at my vehemence. I was roused by what I had been saying and I felt, for a few minutes, a glow, a relief of talk that was like the satisfaction of something accomplished.

But in a short while it faded.

That was all I had said. The relief, the satisfaction came to me spuriously, out of stimulation; they belonged to the conclusion of the saying of what I had not said. I had meant to say, but had not said.

I suppose that that night, like so many others, we went to bed and buried ourselves in each other in the silent, intense love-making that was all we had now. For it was as if where once we had had many different landscapes, many different meeting places; dreamy encounters in the sun, gentle meetings in a shade, the closeness and laughter and excitement of clinging together in a high and windy place — we had now only a strange deepening descent into steeped darkness, like a heavy silent river closing over our heads. We made love too often and I found that I kept my eyes closed tightly, even in the darkness. When it was over I would open them and lie there staring into the dark. When it was over; it ended now, with the ending of the act. So many nights I lay there, still, and noted my own lack of peace, my heavy possession of myself, with a mind as aridly wakeful as I sometimes had had when I was at the University, and had gone to bed after studying too late. Where was that mazy warmth, that lulling completeness, easy, already halfway over into sleep — the one real moment of freedom from self a human being knows? I told myself that love cannot be always the same; there are times when it is not so good as others. I even took comfort in my lack of experience, my youth, and told myself that perhaps it always changed after a time, was like that for everybody, and would change back again. …

And on other nights in the sharpness of my mind afterward I suddenly became aware of and seemed to see again my own greed for my satisfaction, which had just been enacted; I saw the way in which I had performed every caress, every intimacy with my will fixed savagely only on the attainment of that final physical crucifixion of pleasure. For that spasm I would have pierced Paul’s flesh with my nails, forgotten his existence entirely in the determination to have him exact it from me; he, who gave it to me always so beautifully, without any thought from me except my love for him. I saw myself struggling like a beetle or an animal. A horror of myself came upon me; I was disgusted. I hated my inert, sated body, still now, like a drunken thing. And at the same time some other part of my mind started up in fear lest the whole of love-making, that fearful joy I felt with strong instinct I had already only won for myself against some threat which might have withheld it from me for ever, might be tainted with this disgust, and lost. I would turn to Paul and press my cheek against his back and put my hand up to feel the line of his hair, the outline of his gently breathing lips and the warm, beating surface of his neck, as if to assure myself that he was beautiful, desirable, that no shred of disgust could adhere here. …

Yet we made love too often, and while my mind said with dismay, We are not in this wholly, this is bullying something fragile that cannot stand it, like a well-trained animal my body ignored me and mechanically obeyed the summons. When I looked at Paul, reading or shaving or sitting beside me in the car, it was in disbelief; it could not be he; and at the same time a tacitly ignored collusion of guilt made a silence between us on another level than that of speech.

It did not help, either, this love-making. Whatever he hoped to wring out of it, and I, half-reluctant collaborator, must have half-hoped for, too, the tight-stretched fabric of that late summer only tautened and faded. Paul was bewilderingly difficult to live with. He had been put in charge of the housing section, a piece of office machinery which, nightmarelike, existed to administer something which literally did not exist, and all day long he heard the pleading, argument, cajolery, resentment of thousands of Africans desperate for homes — all quite useless; there were 1,100 houses for 20,000 families. “They try everything,” he said. “It’s as if they feel that if only they could find the way to outwit me, the secret, the magic word — there the house would be. When people persist in investing you with a certain power, you begin to believe after a while that you’ve really got it. … I have to keep in mind that there are no houses. …”

The shortage of housing for Africans was not, like the mild difficulties being encountered by white people looking for flats or houses, due to the interruption and material shortages of the war. No new houses for Africans had been built in Johannesburg for seventeen years. The old “locations,” long ago filled to bursting point, simply went on overflowing onto the veld in squatters’ encampments of scrap iron and mud. The government and local authority kept handing the responsibility for providing housing back and forth to each other in horror; recently there had begun a move to make the industrialists, whose expanding need for labor had brought thousands of Africans to town, catch some of the weight. This provided a third set of protests, a third shrug of shoulders, a wider base for stalling and deadlock.