Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Paul went through the farce of his work and, at the same time, doggedly made notes, collected facts, did what he called his own “snooping” and obstinately presented reports, surveys and suggestions that he was always told were “very interesting.” Very interesting — and the councilors and the officials took them away with that air of brave, sober, sad determination which had become the face to be worn, like the special face people keep for funerals, at the mention of African housing. And Paul knew that it was all a waste of time, a waste of breath, a waste of their sincerity or their false concern: no money would be found for sub-economic housing, the Africans did not earn enough to afford economic housing, and in any case, there was no part of the white city, east, west, north, south, that would not raise an uproar at the proposal of a new African township going up anywhere near its borders.

Then at night and at week ends he was involved with the African Nationalists whose edict was non-co-operation, and who, sickened with the neglect of their people under all governments and all intentions, good and bad, mistrusted and refuted even practical good will. For them I saw him sitting over books and tracts about the methods of passive resistance that Gandhi and Nehru had used in India. For them he sent home for his law books and questioned and requestioned Laurie over obscure legal points that he himself did not understand. Twice already his activity with African Nationalists — all lumped together as “Communists” by the government and the police, although the African radicals and rebels were of all kinds: Communist, Nationalist, plain opportunist — had been gently questioned by the head of his department. Employees of the Council’s Native Affairs Department were, naturally, not allowed to involve themselves in the Africans’ internal politics.

In time, it was clear, Paul would lose his job. Perhaps that would not have mattered; perhaps, one could argue, it would be best. But I saw that it would matter, that far from being best, it would be disastrous to him, because he put himself as passionately into his job as he did into his unofficial work for the radical Africans. Equally, if he kept his job by giving up the other association, that would be disastrous, too. He would despise himself either way.

For Paul had made up his mind to do the impossible. I watched him and it was in his face and the way he walked and the way he performed the most trivial of daily actions. To make up one’s mind to do the impossible as a gesture of defiance to a society that has blocked the outlet of one’s energies in the attainable is a catharsis that may have some sour satisfaction. But Paul was not doing it like this. For him it was not a gesture; it was a way of life he had set for himself, a deliberate attempt to treat his own capacities in terms of a man who backs all the horses in a race, contending his hopes and his loyalties and his preferential partisanships one against the other. He cannot lose, and he cannot win. He scarcely knows any more what to hope for. It was more and more difficult to talk to Paul because whatever you said incensed or irritated him somewhere. If I railed, as I did, against the maddening futility of much of the Department’s work, he would fly to defend it from what he sarcastically called the easy attack of ignorance; after all, he knew only too well its limited funds and its scope rigidly circumscribed by the policy of the country as a whole. If, after some uselessly reckless or stupid or arrogant piece of behavior on the part of Fanyana and his crowd, I criticized their lack of plain human consideration, he was angry because he knew them to be as pricked full of hurts every day as a bull inflamed by the picador’s darts, and one small example of careless rudeness toward himself merely provided the instance that showed up the intact and unmarred surface of the white man’s skin.

This calm analysis is clear and easy now. But the facts, before they were sorted in retrospect, were not clear or easy to live with. It did not seem like this to me then. My behavior toward Paul kept me in a spell of anxiety which never left me; I loved Paul and part of my loving him was my belief and pride in the work he had chosen: how was it possible, then, that the difficulties of this work, affecting him, should throw our relationship out of balance? What was the matter with me? Why couldn’t I manage? Why couldn’t I give him what he needed? — why, I didn’t even know what it was, couldn’t find out. … This situation, unimagined at the outset of our relationship, like most of the situations that arise to confound two people (I had sometimes looked at, fingered with a thrill of fear in my mind, the things which I believed happened to men and women: the lover grown fat and coarse-handed; divorce; the jealousy of a woman who is afraid of losing her man), was something for which I had no preparation, even by the precedence of others.

At first I clutched at anything I thought might hold together the torn and tearing garment of our relationship; but while I snatched the edges together with a comfort or a promise to myself in one place, the seams burst, the thread raveled out somewhere else. So in the end I did what so many other women, all through time, have done in situations beyond them. I became afraid to move inside that garment. It was torn in so many places, the seams strained so frailly everywhere, that it seemed that only by keeping quite still, scarcely breathing, would it hold together.

From somewhere a long way back, from the blood that came down to me from my mother perhaps; the blood which ran narrowly and which I hated because it had survived and always would survive by so doing, by draining off the real torrents which bear along human lives into neat ditches of domestic and social habit — from this blood came the instinct to go quiet; shut off the terrible expenditure of my main responses; take, trancelike, into the daily performance of commonplace the bewilderment, the failure. Because this blood was not all of me, but only a kind of instinctive female atavism, this does not mean that I was resigned, that I accepted. Only that my hands took over the command of themselves, taking into the action of pressing peas out of a pod, or moving a pawn on the chessboard (we had begun to play chess when we were alone together; ostensibly because I always had wanted to learn: when we played we did not have to talk), the fears, like an invasion of strangers, which now, never left me.

We saw a great deal of our friends again.

We went very often to the Marcuses, and to Laurie, and particularly to Isa Welsh, because there the same people always would be leavened by new people; Isa liked to expose herself and her friends to unfamiliar opinions and faces, the way people who cultivate the body seek to expose themselves to the sun. We appeared among them all as unremarked as a young couple who, after the self-sufficiency of the engagement and honeymoon period, by the habit of marriage are released again to seek diversion.

In Lourenço Marques Isa had met a young Italian pianist who was about to do a concert tour of the Union, and who knew Moravia, and she had him to stay for a week or two. He was a soft-fleshed young man with the curious combination of a dark, sallow face and very white plump hands, and he was obviously completely bemused by her. She moved in his company with the air of pique and dissatisfaction which showed in her when she knew herself desired and admired by someone who didn’t interest her; I believe she felt it a waste. She only wanted to talk to him about Moravia. At the same time she had a young Indian couple, a trade representative and his beautiful wife, who were not actually staying with her, but with whom she was so enchanted that she kept making occasions, inviting people to the flat to hear Arionte play, to eat a real Indian curry prepared under the advice of the diplomat’s lady, in order to be able to have them there too.