Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

I said good-by to Daddy on the platform. There was a tranquillity in him, as if he were seeing his daughter off to school after a week end at home; there is the certainty that there will be many other week ends when she will be coming home. As I kissed his cool shaven cheek, the cheek of an aging man with little tendrils of broken vein under the thin skin, I had again the queer feeling I had had in the main street of Atherton. I would keep coming; but the way I came would never be coming back.

The train rocked into speed, clacked through the Mine siding without stopping. The tin shelter marked EUROPEANS ONLY, the fading shout of Mine natives jumping back exaggeratedly as we passed, the dark, ragged gum plantation that hid the Mine, the Recreation Hall, the rows of houses and my parents’ house itself. A single dusty light burned already above the siding, although it was not yet dark.

There were a great many natives on all the stations, but that was nothing unusual for a Sunday night. Neither was the air of excitement, which one like myself, deaf to the meaning of the words, found in their voices. Sunday clothes, beer, and the still greater intoxication of leisure commonly accounted for that. At one of the larger stations I noticed several men wearing rosettes. The train jolted them away; the outcrop of the gold reef which ran along under the ground began to pass my window again: shaft heads, old untidy mine dumps with the cyanide weirdly hardened and fissured by years of rain, new dumps geometrically exact as the pyramids, towns like Atherton, brickfields, smoking locations, mines, clumps of native stores on the veld — the windows wired over for Sunday — another dump, another mine, another Atherton. Everywhere, gradually sparsened by the increase of human rubble, the cosmos which sprang up every autumn. Even when first I had started traveling to University, they had been a thick wake in the path of the train, in many places. Now they showed pink and white among the khaki weed which was stifling them out; when the train stopped at a small station I could smell it, rank on the cooling air and the smell of water. Below the station was one of the dams that chemical infiltration from the Mine colored mother-of-pearl, making, by incidental artifice and a strange reversal of the usual results of man’s interference with nature, something beautiful that was not.

At this little station a newsbill stood against the wire fence, though apparently the paper boy had sold out his stock of papers and left. It was rucked up under the wire frame that held it to a board: STRIKE SITUATION: POLICE PREPARED FOR TOMORROW. Of course not — those were not rosettes: no wonder the men weren’t dressed like a football team. Freedom Day badges. Yet I could not feel anything about the strike that was coming tomorrow, the. strike that, the whole of the previous week in Johannesburg, we had talked of. Neither fear nor apprehension nor curiosity at the nearness of this threat — to ourselves? to the Africans themselves? — that would soon be here; soon now. Tomorrow something might get up on its feet that was being fed for such a moment every day. Nobody knew what it would be like, what it could do; this thing to the Africans a splendid creature of their own power, to the white men a monster of terror. Even people like Paul, Laurie, Isa, myself, had to say to ourselves: Maybe this will be the day when the patient hands will come down in blows, when our mouths will be stopped for the things we have not said.

But seeing the bill, the station, the dam, the cows which stood up to their knees in the painted water, begin to move past, none of that was real to me. I thought, The last time, the last time I came back from Atherton, I sat with my eyes closed all the way. I remembered how, the last time, I had kept my eyes closed to block out the distance between myself and Paul, to get to him faster. I had lain against the seat saying inside myself, Paul, Paul. I closed my eyes again for a second to remember it.

But it was not there in the dark.

I sat like a person who is physically tired, letting the movement of the train shudder my hand against the window ledge, letting the landscape slide by under my eyes. I might have been looking down upon it from a plane; it was so familiar, this repetition of mine, town, dump and veld I had known so long, from so many journeys; and so far away. As far from me as the first stars, seeming to catch the light rather than give it off, like the turn of a woman’s ring faintly flashing a prismatic gleam.

Nothing happened on Monday. I know. Not only because it was true in fact, the papers said so; but because I felt in the anticlimactic calm of that day a kind of guilty reflection of my own state. It seemed to me that the fact that nothing happened justified my lack of interest, made it excusable.

It was my first day — I will not say of leisure, it was not that, but of lack of work.

Paul had been out when I arrived back at the flat the evening before. I had made myself some Russian tea and gone to bed (how the Mine fed one to extinction, truly to extinction — all the blood comfortably deflected from one’s doubting brain to one’s satisfied stomach). Much later he had come home. The light was already out and I listened to him moving softly about the room, not telling him I was awake. When he slid into bed beside me I put out my hand as one might do in sleep; he put his hand on my waist as one comforts a child who stirs. I did not ask him where he had been. Neither of us spoke. We lay, he with his meeting in some location shack that I guessed he must have been to, I with the pleasantries and best china cups of the Compound Manager’s lounge, like people who do some highly secret work and so even in intimacy are alone, each with an aura unpenetrated and unquestioned by the other. At last he put his hand up round my breast and shifted his body close along the length of my back, the way he had slept always since our first night together. Or perhaps, out of habit, and halfway to sleep, I only thought I felt him there.

In the morning he did not say anything about where he had been. As I trailed about in my dressing gown — since I did not have to go out to work I had not bothered to dress — I thought how odd it was; by pulling so hard the other way, one always seems to find oneself, at some point or other, arrived at precisely that condition of life from which one shied so violently. The women of the Mine, making a virtue of what was really the comfortable expedient of the kitchen and the workbasket, rather than accept the real, vital meaning of living with a man. Jenny, this first woman I had ever known who had kept her own identity, and left that of her husband uncrushed — now so enamored of her reproductive processes that she habitually mouthed John’s opinions rather than allow the interruption of thinking out her own; had apparently shelved as thankfully as any shopgirl leaving the cheese counter for the escape of marriage, the stage designing in which she had once been so passionately interested; and preserved her radical views in suburban moth balls.

Here I was, back where they were, cooking a man’s breakfast and keeping my mouth shut. Not for the same reasons — but what consolation was there in that? Turning the egg over because that’s the way he likes it, done on both sides. Even my hair, hanging uncombed, seemed to confirm the picture. When we both worked — and that was only last week — we had snatched our breakfast together, feeding each other like birds, at the kitchen table. But this Monday morning, the first of May, I stood about while Paul sat down and ate; plenty of time for me to breakfast.

It was a beautiful morning; the sun sloped down past the balcony. I went out and looked over. The buildings were pale in the early light, the rising hum came from the city.