Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

“Got a store, the last I heard, somewhere near where they lived before.” I rolled over. “Were you thinking of Ludi Koch, now?” I smiled, curiously, indicating the setting.

“Funny, I suppose the combination of you and this, put it into my mind. What you’d told me, I mean.”

I giggled and began smoothing the dry sand off my legs, with pleasure; I could feel, like a secret flaw, the bristle of the reddish-fair hairs which I depilated. “Love in the sun.” I laughed at myself at this distance, remembering for the time nothing of the pain, the intensity; perhaps I was even boasting a little. I think we dozed a while, after that. I woke because a fly was tickling its way along my leg; at least, that was what it felt like: I brushed at it, but there was nothing there but more sand. Joel’s eyes fluttered open but for the moment he was still asleep; I do not think he knew I was there. And then I saw from the movement of his mouth as he swallowed that he was awake, and looking up at the sky. What was he thinking, this closed and bone-familiar being breathing beside me? Was he really there at all, can a person be said to be present to one when it is to be only for a few days, a time so short it could be computed in hours, and human beings are apprehended only in flashes, over a long evenness of years. I don’t remember Ludi, I thought tranquilly. Perhaps I shall again at another time; but I don’t now. The tranquillity trod firmly down on it: I don’t think of Paul. What I do remember, I don’t think of.

Joel was looking away, up into the sky, seeing nothing. That time when I opened my eyes, I thought, he was looking at me and I was sure he had been looking at me a long time. — I watched him a moment longer, but he was not aware of it.

So I rolled back onto the sand, and lay there, in the warmth of it. I was aware in my mouth of the want of a cigarette and in my hand, of the movement that would touch Joel’s arm and get it for me. At this point he said: “Cigarette?” and while still I had not moved, it was coming to me. “I was asleep,” he said. I felt myself smiling at him indulgently. He yawned with the daze—“What was I saying, before?” I smiled again and shook my head, as if to say “Nothing. No matter.” “Talk must have been in my dream,” he said.

“I’m so happy where I am,” I said.

When we were driving back to Durban I found myself doing a curious thing. “I was looking at you when you were asleep just now,” I lied deliberately. “I was thinking how much like your mother you are, just around the eyes.” He murmured some casual, politely questioning assent—“Yes?” or “Really …?”; but I think he understood perhaps better than I did myself, that I was trying to say I feared I might have hurt him by some of the things I had said the night before; and that I accepted him, humbly, wholly.

We went to dance that night. In the pleasant, spurious, sentimental atmosphere of a night club that had so little to do with Joel Aaron, I talked to him as I have never talked to any living being: as I have talked to this pen and this paper. Perhaps more truthfully, for here I have myself to contend with, and Joel took away from me the burden of my ego, just as Paul had once lifted from me the burden of my sex.

I remember some of the things we talked of: Joel saying, “It’s not only your own failure with Paul you’re running away from, it’s also what you conceive to be Paul’s failure with himself. It’s what I spoke of yesterday; you can’t bear anything to be less than the creation you’ve made of it in your mind.”

And at some point, myself saying, “In a way, it seems right that one shouldn’t be happy in South Africa, the way things are here. It seems to me to be that as well; a kind of guilt that although you may come to a compromise with your own personal life, you can’t compromise about the larger things ringed outside it. It’s like — like having a picnic in a beautiful graveyard where the people are buried alive under your feet. I always think locations are like that: dreary, smoking hells out of Dante, peopled with live men and women. — I can’t stand any more of it. If I can’t be in it, I want to be free of it. Let it be enough for me to contend with myself.”

He did not answer, and what I said seemed to stand in the air, with a guilty defiance. And it seemed to take point, if not quite the way I should have wished it, from the warm sham twilight of the night club; outside this tepid and muted-lit enclosure, where the weird and useless aspects of civilization, like the extra fins on effete tropical fish, were kept alive under special conditions, there was the beautiful city cleaned and fed and planted by the Indians who originally had been imported as indentured laborers, and were hated; and the natives, who had been there before the white men, and were feared. And outside the city were some of the worst slums in the world, where all these people who were another color lived; and beyond that the reserves, where an old order of life had died, and a new order presented a slammed door; and beyond that still, the gold mines which had made the white man rich and the black man wretched.

We danced easily in this bubble blown up precariously, even a little sadly, above the reality. He said, smiling down at me: “Those University dances we used to go to weren’t ever much of a success, were they?”

“Well, we only went to one, I think. — I wonder why? — I always felt so stiff with you. Not exactly physically, I mean. You always became so serious.”

“I know. So did you, I felt. Not in anything you said—”

“No, I know. That’s what I meant. — A kind of solemnity in the body.”

“In the presence of your body, that is. I used to watch you with other people, and marvel at how calmly they took your weight and presence.” He looked at me and smiled.

“And now it’s so easy. I suppose we’re older.”

When the music trailed off and we were making our way back to the dim little sofa, I said chattily: “Joel, do you really think it might have been because you are a Jew and I’m a Gentile?” The idea of this distinction, at this stage in my life, made me laugh a little. He nodded, pouring me a drink. “Of course.”

“But we were so close. Such good friends.”

“Not close,” he said, “just good friends. You were closer to Danny McLeod, who danced with his cheek on your hair the first time he met you.”

“Did he?” I laughed with mock indignation. “I don’t remember him. — Anyway that’s not fair; just because he had a Scottish name and you know my mother’s Scotch—”

“Still—”

“You thought at the time that that was Danny what’s-’is-name’s advantage — I thought you weren’t attracted to me. I think I was a little hurt. No — disappointed.”

He handed me my drink. He watched me a moment, his mouth curved in what was not quite a smile, gentle, but a little wry.

“Yes, I suppose I was a fool. What I feared would offend”—he stopped and made an appealing gesture of confession—“was exactly what was needed.”

“I wanted to be loved,” I admitted, still feeling it in the nature of confession, half-ashamed, because it was to Joel that it was being made. “I wanted to be touched and kissed as well as talked to. D’you think that was bad?”

“Bad,” he said. “Bad. What would the Isa Welsh intelligentsia have to say if they heard you say a thing like that?” But when our laughter died away, he said: “Often and often, I used to feel, now I’m going to kiss her, now I’m going to lift up that hair and kiss the nape of her neck — Many times; but I never did.”

“That’s just exactly what I felt. Sometimes I felt myself making you want to kiss me, and then I’d stop myself, because I was afraid. I had the idea it would never be the same again. … So”—I suddenly became a little embarrassed, and was flippant to cover it—“other people kissed me.”