Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“Well, what d’you expect to see?” he said with a smile.

I stood at the side of the table, putting my hands down on it awkwardly. “I don’t know. … It seems just the same. There should be something, I somehow feel.” He went on eating, his gaze following my words out the open glass doors, where he could see nothing but the morning air. He doesn’t talk to me about the strike any more, I thought, he doesn’t tell me what he’s thinking of what he knows and fears out of what he learned last night. He treats me as if it were something out of my ken; the week end at Atherton he hasn’t asked me about has put it out of my ken. We never used to have things that were outside each other’s ken.

“What are you going to do with yourself?” he said.

“Oh, I’ve got lots of little things,” I said with the conviction of someone who has no idea how her time is to be made to pass. He ruffled my hair as he got up to get his hat and a cigarette: a father who cannot be expected to tell a child what he is going to do in the world this morning. “No—” I said, turning my cheek, “not on my mouth — I haven’t cleaned my teeth yet.”

He had no sooner gone than I flew out onto the balcony with a fastbeating heart; but there was the little car, coming out from under the building, turning into the street and away. He could not even see me.

When I turned back into the flat I found myself feeling almost self-conscious. I had never before been alone there in the morning; the room looked at me like a servant surprised by an employer in the performance of some work that is always done when the people of the house are out of the way. I saw the room, a disparate collection of inanimate objects, for the first time; in the normal course of my life with Paul it had been nothing but a background for our talk and activity, our sleep and our waking. It had handed things silently and I had taken them without thinking. Now it confronted me and I thought that not only was it like a slightly put-out servant, it was like a servant who didn’t recognize my authority, anyway. This was Paul’s room, these were Paul’s things among which I had been living. In spite of the stockings on a chair, the jar of face cream beside the bed, the mask and the cushions, I had made no mark, no claim on this room. These things which were mine could be packed away just as a hotel room is cleared of the few personal belongings of each successive guest, remaining adequately equipped with all the necessary accouterments of a room and always retaining its own character.

I made the bed and stacked the dishes in the sink for the flat boy to wash (we had an arrangement with him) and bathed and dressed. I thought of slacks but that would have made it feel too much like Sunday, so I put on a dress instead, noting, as I always did when I fastened a belt, as if it were some relieved discovery that I must keep making, that I was young, that my shape was good. My hips are too narrow, but I’m tall and my breasts are nice. I wonder where I get them from? My father’s side of the family? My mother has no breasts; as if she had forgotten about them. — For a moment I was completely absorbed in this timeless preoccupation. Shut up in this little room in a great city where factories were silent, shops were without messengers or cleaners, and the streets were suspicious of their normality, I contemplated something that would never change, that when it left me, would already be coming to life in others.

I took the tea and the slice of toast I had made myself out onto the balcony, perhaps to evade the room. Opposite, the half-finished block of flats was empty and silent; the builder, one of the prudent employers I had read about in the paper, must have told his employees not to come to work, because even the white workers were not there. I sat out on the tiny balcony half the morning, and later two little silent children with bare feet and shabby dungarees came to play on the builder’s sand. Perhaps they came from the building in which I was sitting; I realized as I sat there that the tall shabby walls, the brown-painted corridors and the stale, boxed air of the lift did not have an existence solely about Paul and me, but were seen in the same function by a number of other people, all very different from us and one another, whose lives now signaled for recognition. There was the sound of a duster being shaken out on the balcony of the flat below, the bumbling rise and fall of a crooner’s voice, and then the terse nasal barks, very loud, of a radio play recorded in America, coming from a window on the right. I heard a telephone ring for several minutes; stop, ring again, and then cut off abruptly.

The sun shone steadily on the two small boys: they had found a sifter now, and were busy piling it with sand, letting the sand run through, and then shoveling the same sand into it all over again. The flat boy came in, greeted my explanation of my presence with apparent pleasure at the idea of my being there, whatever the reason, and breathed a song to himself as he rubbed the floor, just as if he had been alone. And over to the left, Johannesburg opened its mouth in its usual muffled roar. I could detect no note of panic — in any case, had there been screams, the howls of the monster at last risen staggering to its feet, they would have been blocked out for me by the indestructible brisk cheeriness of the radio next door.

I said to the flat boy: “Did you hear if there was any trouble this morning in the locations?”

He sat back on his knees like an amiable zoo bear and laughed. It was a deep, phlegm-roughened laugh, because he smoked a lot — his pipe stuck out of the pocket of his “kitchen boy” suit even now. He said, with the tolerant grin at a blood sport which didn’t interest him: “Nobody say. I didn’t see nobody. But plenty boys come to town last night, sleep all night where they work.” He lived with the other flat boys next to the boiler rooms on top of the building, leaning over the parapet on warm nights to twang his guitar above the concrete.

Another one of the good old-fashioned kind.

I tried to rouse myself to do something. Sitting on the balcony smoking in the sun, I thought, I am like an invalid: between the illness and the cure. Sitting weakly in the sun. It was the state of suspension I had spoken about so heatedly to Paul that night when I had wanted to tell him something else: what am I waiting for, why don’t I go and phone up the Consulate, write a letter about that broadcasting research job? It seemed to me that the strike had something to do with my inertia: waiting for something to happen. (Can’t do anything because you’re waiting for this, that, or the other. — That state of suspension, today in its acute form.) Yet I knew that I was not even really thinking of the strike at all.

Toward lunchtime I telephoned the office. I don’t know why I was surprised to find that Paul was there, the voice of the girl at the switchboard just as usual. “What’s it like in town?”—My voice had the subdued, hesitant tone of someone tacitly atoning for a piece of shaming disregard; a woman who has ignored some indisposition of her husband’s may speak in just that tone when next she sees him, and if he answers, as he will, as if her concern for him had been consistent, they can both successfully make her lapse nonexistent.

“Haven’t you been out? It’s all quiet. You know. The rural peace of Johannesburg—” I heard a man’s muffled laugh: someone must be in the office with him.

“And at the busses this morning?”—We had expected trouble at the location bus and train termini, where we knew there would be pickets.

“Nothing, so far as we’ve heard.”

“So if the police can keep their hands to themselves—” I felt awkward as if I were suggesting an aspirin.