Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

We three white people stepped round him onto the veranda. I saw his thick tongue back in his mouth and his big teeth close together and looking strong as he yelled.

Inside in the Ockerts’ long serene lounge — there were silky smooth carpets in intricate designs which were the oriental rugs my mother wanted to get someday, and little black tables with thin legs like baby springbok, looking almost alive, ready to leap — tea had been laid on a wide embroidered cloth, and men stood round talking over thin teacups. Mr. Ockert was laughing something confidentially to the Underground Manager, who wore a dotted red silk scarf folded inside his shirt neck. Thin Mr. Mackenzie hadn’t shaved; he was taking a scone from Mrs. Ockert. “Come on in,” she called to us. “You’ll be wanting some tea, I’m sure. We all need our tea after this!” She was laughing a great deal, rather apologetically, as if this was the best she could put up for an impromptu gathering.

Mrs. Ockert is a woman who could carry off any position; she’s always a charming hostess — my mother often said. — Now there was no sugar left for Mr. Bellingan in the pot-bellied silver bowl. Mrs. Ockert bit her lip and hunched her shoulders gaily in guilt: “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bellingan, I’m so sorry. What a house! What chaos this morning!” And she laughed as if it were all her fault, something naughty she had done. “Richard, more sugar at once, please. — It’ll be here in just one moment, Mr. Bellingan—”

“This business of changing the boys’ diet — it always does lead to trouble,” my father was saying to his neighbor, Dufalette. “—No, thanks — Of course, I wouldn’t say it to Ockert, but I’ve seen it time and again. If you’d been giving them boiled rag for years and you changed it to chicken suddenly, they’d be up in arms asking for the rag back again.” Bellingan nodded unsurely in agreement; his eye was on the back of the Underground Manager, standing rather near. He leaned over to put down his cup, taking the opportunity of saying quietly in my father’s ear, “All this to-do over mealie-pap.” My father laughed tightly inside his chest: “A storm in a porridge pot, a storm in a porridge pot.”

“What about another scone? Come on? What about another scone?” Mrs. Ockert was smiling round the room. “These flies! As soon as they’re anywhere around you can be sure they’ll bring millions of flies.”

“They soon quietened down when Ockert came out,” someone was saying. “I was here early, as soon as I saw them crowding along the road toward the house. — Yes, before eight — they came marching along; I tell you, quite a sight!”

“But why come to the house? They could have complained through the boss-boys?”

“The boss-boys!”

“Oh, the Compound Manager or nothing!”

“Did you hear it all, Mac?”

“Well, there’ll be nothing more said now. They won’t make any trouble.”

“Behind it? I shouldn’t say there was, at all.”

The Assistant Compound Manager went out, came in again. “Starting to push off now,” he said, assuring, belittling, comforting, the way one stands between a child and the undesirable, insistingly smiling, “all on their way.”

Soon we left, too, passing the dwindling groups of natives, the emptying garden; my father holding my hand but talking closely to Mr. Bellingan and not knowing I was there.

The boys at the Compound didn’t like the food they were given, and so they all came together to Mr. Ockert’s house to complain. Now they were going back to the Compound and they were glad because, although they had behaved badly, Mr. Ockert wasn’t taking their Sunday ration of kaffir beer away from them. Between the two men talking above my head I heard the word “strike”; “—But it wasn’t a strike, was it?” I said quickly. My father smiled down at me. “Well, yes, it was, really. They didn’t refuse to work, but they wouldn’t eat; that’s a strike, too.” He had told me often about the 1922 strike of white miners, when there were shots in the streets of Atherton, and my grandmother, his mother, had stayed shut up in her little house for days, until the commando of burghers came riding in to restore order. To me the word “strike” carried with it visions of excitement and danger; something for which, alas, I had been born too late.

Those native boys sitting around making a noise the way they liked to in the garden, and the lovely tea all ready in Mrs. Ockert’s beautiful lounge (the scones collapsed into hot butter; I should have liked one more)— That couldn’t be a strike—?

Hunger was whistling an empty passage right down my throat to my stomach. — I twisted my hand out of my father’s and ran on ahead, to bacon and egg put away for me in the oven.

My adolescence and the first years of the war were concurrent; both have a haziness in my mind that comes, I suppose, from the indefinite, cocoonlike quality of the one, and the distant remove from my life of the other.

During that time my life was so much my mother’s that it seemed that the only difference between us was the insignificance of age. The significance of emotional experience that separates the woman, mated, her life balanced against the life of a man, that life again balanced against the life of a child begotten and born, from the girl-child, was as unrealized by my mother as by me. My mother, with her slightly raw-featured still-young face — the blood flowed very near the surface of the thin skin — accepted marriage and motherhood as a social rather than a mysterious personal relationship. Wives and husbands and children and the comfortable small plan of duties they owed to one another — for her, this was what living was. I accepted the outward everyday semblance of adult life, the men father-familiar yet creatures respected and allowed ununderstandable tastes of their own; ministered to because they were the providers and entitled to affection from their own families; women the friends, the co-workers, the companions, busy with one another in the conduct of every hour of the day. My mother’s weeks were pegged out to street collections and galas and dances and cake sales and meetings of this committee and that — remote from battlefields or air raids, with my father’s stomach ulcer excluding him from offering his services to South Africa’s volunteer forces, this was what the war meant in our lives. Outside of school, I too belonged to this busy to-and-fro that went on above the tunneling of black men and white in the Mine. I too had my place, the place of the Secretary’s daughter (my father had been promoted at last), in the hierarchy that divided the Mine Manager and his wife (tall in a clinging skirt, an exiled Mrs. Dalloway) giving the prizes in a certain order of rigid gradations from the busy small woman in the flowered apron stationed at the tea urn — wife of a burly shift boss called Mackie.

I read the books my mother brought home on her adult’s ticket at the library; gentle novels of English family life and, now and then, stray examples of the proletarian novel to which the dole in England in the thirties had given rise. “It’s about the life of the poor in England — but it won’t do her any harm if she wants to read it.”—My mother was sometimes a little uncertain about these books. “I don’t believe a girl should grow up not knowing what life is like.”

A young man and a girl went up on a refuse heap above an ugly city and kissed. There was a drunken father who was horrible in an indefinable way — but all drunk people were horrible, I should have died of fear if … but it could not even be imagined that my father could dribble at the mouth, vomit without knowing. At the same time I read Captain Marryat, Jane Austen, and to Omar Khayyam in its soft skin-feel cover I had added Rupert Brooke. “She’s like us,” said my mother, “we’re both great readers. Of course, George likes his heavy stuff, medical books and so on — and detective stories! I don’t know how he can read them, but I’ve got to bring them home for him every week end.” A book of Churchill’s speeches and another of Smuts’ found a place on top of the special little bookcase which contained the encyclopedia; my father had bought them. The clean-cut shiny dust covers slowly softened at the edges as Anna dusted them along with the other ornaments every day.