Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

She had stood up without knowing it. ‘What’s the matter, Eileen?’ Waldeck looked up. As she opened her mouth to tell him, to tell them both, a strange thing happened. It seemed that her whole mind turned over and showed her the truth. And the truth was much worse than what she had wanted to tell them. For they were right. Carlitta had not changed. They were right, but not in the way they thought. Carlitta had not changed at all , and that was why there was a sense of horror about meeting her; that was why she was totally unlike any one of the other friends they had met. Under that faded face, in that worn body, was the little German girl of the twenties, arrogant in a youth that did not exist, confidently disdainful in the possession of a beauty that was no longer there.

And what did she think of Ohio? Of good Edgar Hicks? Even of the boy who raised chickens and didn’t look at television?

‘Nothing,’ said Eileen. ‘I’d like a little more wine.’

It so happened that a day or two later, Stefan’s business took him to Philadelphia. ‘Don’t forget Carlitta and her husband are staying at the Grand Park,’ Waldeck said.

‘Oh, I’ll find them,’ said Stefan.

But when he came back to New York and dined with his wife, Waldeck and Eileen the same night, he seemed entirely to have forgotten his expressed intention. ‘I had a hell of a job dodging that Edgar Hicks,’ he said, by the way. ‘Wherever I went I seemed to bump into that Elk convention. They were everywhere. Every time I saw a panama hat with a paisley band I had to double on my tracks and go the other way. Once he nearly saw me. I just managed to squeeze into an elevator in time.’

And they all laughed, as if they had just managed it, too.

Jake Alexander, a big, fat coloured man, half Scottish, half

African, was shaking a large pan of frying bacon on the gas stove in the back room of his Johannesburg printing shop when he became aware that someone was knocking on the door at the front of the shop. The sizzling fat and the voices of the five men in the back room with him almost blocked out sounds from without, and the knocking was of the steady kind that might have been going on for quite a few minutes. He lifted the pan off the flame with one hand and with the other made an impatient silencing gesture, directed at the bacon as well as the voices. Interpreting the movement as one of caution, the men hurriedly picked up the tumblers and cups in which they had been taking their end-of-the-day brandy at their ease, and tossed the last of it down. Little yellow Klaas, whose hair was like ginger-coloured wire wool, stacked the cups and glasses swiftly and hid them behind the dirty curtain that covered a row of shelves.

‘Who’s that?’ yelled Jake, wiping his greasy hands down his pants.

There was a sharp and playful tattoo, followed by an English voice: ‘Me — Alister. For heaven’s sake, Jake!’

The fat man put the pan back on the flame and tramped through the dark shop, past the idle presses, to the door, and flung it open. ‘Mr Halford!’ he said. ‘Well, good to see you. Come in, man. In the back there, you can’t hear a thing.’ A young Englishman with gentle eyes, a stern mouth and flat, colourless hair, which grew in an untidy, confused spiral from a double crown, stepped back to allow a young woman to enter ahead of him. Before he could introduce her, she held out her hand to Jake, smiling, and shook his firmly. ‘Good evening. Jennifer Tetzel,’ she said.

‘Jennifer, this is Jake Alexander,’ the young man managed to get in, over her shoulder.

The two had entered the building from the street through an archway lettered NEW ERA BUILDING. ‘Which new era would that be?’ the young woman had wondered aloud, brightly, while they were waiting in the dim hallway for the door to be opened, and Alister Halford had not known whether the reference was to the discovery of deep-level gold mining that had saved Johannesburg from the ephemeral fate of a mining camp in the nineties, or to the optimism after the settlement of labour troubles in the twenties, or to the recovery after the world went off the gold standard in the thirties — really, one had no idea of the age of these buildings in this run-down end of the town. Now, coming in out of the deserted hallway gloom, which smelled of dust and rotting wood — the smell of waiting — they were met by the live, cold tang of ink and the homely, lazy odour of bacon fat — the smell of acceptance. There was not much light in the deserted workshop. The host blundered to the wall and switched on a bright naked bulb, up in the ceiling. The three stood blinking at one another for a moment: a coloured man with the fat of the man of the world upon him, grossly dressed — not out of poverty but obviously because he liked it that way — in a rayon sports shirt that gaped and showed two hairy stomach rolls hiding his navel in a lipless grin, the pants of a good suit, misbuttoned and held up round the waist by a tie instead of a belt, and a pair of expensive sports shoes, worn without socks; a young Englishman in a worn greenish tweed suit with a neo-Edwardian cut to the waistcoat that labelled it a leftover from undergraduate days; a handsome white woman who, as the light fell upon her, was immediately recognisable to Jake Alexander.

He had never met her before, but he knew the type well — had seen it over and over again at meetings of the Congress of Democrats, and other organisations where progressive whites met progressive blacks. These were the white women who, Jake knew, persisted in regarding themselves as your equal. That was even worse, he thought, than the parsons who persisted in regarding you as their equal. The parsons had had ten years at school and seven years at a university and theological school; you had carried sacks of vegetables from the market to white people’s cars from the time you were eight years old until you were apprenticed to a printer, and your first woman, like your mother, had been a servant, whom you had visited in a backyard room, and your first gulp of whisky, like many of your other pleasures, had been stolen while a white man was not looking. Yet the good parson insisted that your picture of life was exactly the same as his own: you felt as he did. But these women — oh, Christ! — these women felt as you did. They were sure of it. They thought they understood the humiliation of the pureblooded black African walking the streets only by the permission of a pass written out by a white person, and the guilt and swagger of the coloured man light-faced enough to slink, fugitive from his own skin, into the preserves — the cinemas, bars, libraries that were marked EUROPEANS ONLY. Yes, breathless with stout sensitivity, they insisted on walking the whole teeter-totter of the colour line. There was no escaping their understanding. They even insisted on feeling the resentment you must feel at their identifying themselves with your feelings. .

Here was the black hair of a determined woman (last year they wore it pulled tightly back into an oddly perched knot; this year it was cropped and curly as a lap dog’s), the round, bony brow unpow-dered in order to show off the tan, the red mouth, the unrouged cheeks, the big, lively, handsome eyes, dramatically painted, that would look into yours with such intelligent, eager honesty — eager to mirror what Jake Alexander, a big, fat slob of a coloured man interested in women, money, brandy and boxing, was feeling. Who the hell wants a woman to look at you honestly, anyway? What has all this to do with a woman — with what men and women have for each other in their eyes? She was wearing a wide black skirt, a white cotton blouse baring a good deal of her breasts, and earrings that seemed to have been made by a blacksmith out of bits of scrap iron. On her feet she had sandals whose narrow thongs wound between her toes, and the nails of the toes were painted plum colour. By contrast, her hands were neglected-looking — sallow, unmanicured — and on one thin finger there swivelled a huge gold seal ring. She was beautiful, he supposed with disgust.