Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Laurie was sitting with his great heavy arm stretched out pressed back against me like a barrier, as if he were restraining me from jumping out of the car. Behind it I breathed like an animal that has been caught and is being held down for branding. I thought I should burst with horror. I do not think I was afraid, I had no room for fear because I was so mad with horror. Again I was overwhelmed by an emotion whose existence I had not ever thought about, every bursting blood vessel pushed full with a racing blood I had not counted in the emotional scope of my life. Everyone fears fear; but horror — that belongs to second-hand experience, through books and films.

Even while the darkness doused the crowd a new light came up, and with it an ecstatic shrill scream, a note out of the normal range of the human voice. The crowd drowned it hoarsely, cutting across it with rasping throats: the municipal office was burning. People were running past us all the time now, summoned by the success and passion of the flames. The firelight ran excitedly all over them. And I saw that the owner of the scream was a woman who stood out in the road apart, a woman with a hump that must be a baby tied on her back. She leaned forward with her hands on her thighs and sometimes the scream was only a contortion of her face, sometimes it jetted out against the massive bellowing. Other sounds, too, came in flashes of lucidity out of the confusion. The deep panting of the shapes which ran past us. I felt a cringed stiffening in Laurie’s arm and the side of his body that was pressed against my side, every time this sound was flung to us — so personal as opposed to the anonymity of the bellowing, in passing. Laurie was afraid. He was not horrified, he was only terribly afraid. I do not mean that he was cowardly, but that he had been in a war, he knew what men were like, and it was not what was shown to be in them that affected him, but the practical calculation and fear of what this might threaten toward others. “All right. It’s all right,” I remember he kept saying. “All right. It’s all right.”

I don’t know which way they came, whether it was from behind the crowd or from behind us — it is strange how in confusion a large, important happening, that you must have seen clearly, is sometimes impossible to remember, while a minute detail survives perfectly, like a tiny ornament left standing after an earthquake — but suddenly the police were there. They came like a tidal wave churning through the crowd. And the crowd smashed and boiled back against them. The woman was screaming without stopping now; I heard her distinctly. Stones hailed down. A man wriggled out of the turmoil of the crowd and darted waveringly across the road, pausing every now and then to snatch up a stone. I saw him clearly for a moment, isolated, his collection of stones held in the pouch he had made of the corner of his jacket, his face at the downward, intent angle of a child on a beach gathering shells. Just at that instant there was a kind of scuffle in the midst of the struggling mass of people; a shot cracked like a whip above their heads. There were more shots, shots and their echo, clearing a split second of silence in the space of the retort. The man with the stones looked up with a movement of surprise, as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder. Then he fell, the stones spilling before him. I knew I had never seen anyone fall like that before.

That was the last thing I saw. All that happened from that moment on — the police who came angrily to the car and questioned us, escorted us out of the location; the screams, the running, shouting, gaping people; the way Laurie tried and tried to start the car, the engine leaping into life and dying out again — all this was a dragging backward from the sight of the man in the road. I was pulled away with my eyes still fixed on the only thing that I saw: the man lying in the road. Perhaps they picked him up, perhaps they took him away, perhaps they trampled him where he lay; for me he will remain forever, quite still in the midst of them, lying in the road.

And that was all. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes. We were out on the road back to the city, we were still in the big English car, we were unhurt. Not even the dust raised by the feet of the rioters or the flying ashes from the burning building had touched us, protected by the closed windows of the car. We drove straight to the nearest hotel, and sitting in a close, dingy bar lounge, with a dry old palm crackling in the draft every time the door opened, we smiled at each other with a ghastly strangeness, like people who have just been dragged up out of the water.

I suddenly began to shudder as I drank my brandy. I shuddered so violently that I could not swallow. “Violence”—the word burst upon my mind like a shell—“Violence.” “Laurie, it’s the most terrible thing in the whole world. Nothing, nothing like it. …” All at once I was terrified, I was chattering with fear.

“Come. I’ll hold it for you, you drink.” Laurie did not look at me, but kept his eyes lowered down his heavy face as he held the glass to my lips.

Paul spoke about it afterward as my “adventure.” “Helen’s adventure at the barricades,” he called it. Laurie and I were in considerable demand at the homes of our friends; people saw to it that we were invited at the same time so that we both might be present when the tale was told; and told it always was. Laurie developed quite a technique in the telling; I got to know the exact points at which he would drop his voice, “throw away” an aside, pause, and place the emphasis of hesitancy on a particular sentence. After the first two or three times the progression of the story came to me to be the unvarying order of this delivery; it was his technique only that I heard. Had he related some other incident in its place, but raised and lowered, quickened and slowed his voice at the same intervals, I should not have noticed the difference.

One night when Paul said again something about Laurie’s having told someone “your adventure,” I said, after a little while: “I don’t know why you always say that. — It wasn’t. I feel as if I never was there at all. Only that I saw a man killed. And what was real about that was only the unreality.” At the mention of a man killed, there came a look into Paul’s face that made me feel, more than ever, isolated; even that real death, dropping on its victim before my eyes, seemed unreal to me because it was not my idea of death; even in the midst of a brutal reality, I was not involved, I remained lost, attached to the string of a vanished idea. I looked at Paul out of this lostness, like someone who is too far away to make himself heard and must rely on the mute appeal of his tense body. But he only nodded, as if to say: “That’s reasonable enough”—feeling along the rim of his ear with absent fingers.

On the night of the riots he had not come home at all. The anxiety for him which had flooded into me after the relaxation into fear in the hotel lounge had not waited long for reassurance. When Laurie and I walked into the flat the telephone was ringing. It was Paul, speaking from the Mission School near the Richardson Center, and he had been ringing and ringing for me, at Isa’s and at the flat. He was breathless, only his voice was there, and he did not give me time to explain. “Someone’s hurt,” he said, “There’s been some trouble. I’m going along to Baragwanath.”

He telephoned again later, from the Baragwanath Native Hospital, but he did not come in until nearly seven the next morning. It was raining softly. I got up when I heard him at the door, but he walked slowly, quietly, almost awkwardly past me, standing there in my thin rumpled nightgown, and lay down on the bed, where the covers were still flung back from where I had risen. After a moment he sat up, pulled off his shoes, and lay back again. His eyes closed, flickered, closed again. In his stillness, they would not be still.