Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘No, but we’ve come to the wrong place—’

‘You having any trouble?’ insisted the police-boy. The other shrank away into the light. He stood hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, looking at the car from the street light.

‘We’re supposed to be giving a play — concert — tonight, and we were told it would be at the Polyclinic. Now there’s nobody there,’ the girl called impatiently from the back seat.

‘Concert, sir? It’s in the Hall, sir. Just follow me.’

Taken over by officialdom, they went through the gates, saluted and stared at, and up the rutted street past the Beer Hall, into the location. Only a beer-brazen face, blinking into the car lights as they passed, laughed and called out something half-heard.

Driving along the narrow, dark streets, they peered white-faced at the windows, wanting to see what it was like. But, curiously, it seemed that although they might want to see the location, the location didn’t want to see them. The rows of low two-roomed houses with their homemade tin and packing-case lean-tos and beans growing up the chicken wire, throbbed only here and there with the faint pulse of a candle; no one was to be seen. Life seemed always to be in the next street, voices singing far off and shouts, but when the car turned the corner — again, there was nobody.

The bicycle wobbled to a stop in front of them. Here was the Hall, here were lights, looking out like sore eyes in the moted air, here were people, more part of the dark than the light, standing about in straggling curiosity. Two girls in flowered headscarves stood with their arms crossed leaning against the wall of the building; some men cupped their hands over an inch of cigarette and drew with the intensity of the stub-smoker.

The amateur company climbed shrilly out of their car. They nearly hadn’t arrived at all! What a story to tell! Their laughter, their common purpose, their solidarity before the multifarious separateness of the audiences they faced, generated once again that excitement that so often seized them. What a story to tell!

Inside the Hall, the audience had been seated long ago. They sat in subdued rows, the women in neat flowered prints, the men collared-and-tied, heads of pens and pencils ranged sticking out over their jacket pockets. They were a specially selected audience of schoolteachers, who, with a sprinkling of social workers, two clerks from the administrative offices, and a young girl who had matriculated, were the educated of the rows and rows of hundreds and hundreds who lived and ate and slept and talked and loved and died in the houses outside. Those others had not been asked, and were not to be admitted because they would not understand.

The ones who had been asked waited as patiently as the children they taught in their turn. When would the concert begin?

In an atmosphere of brick-dust and bright tin shavings behind the stage, the actors and actresses struggled to dress and paint their faces in a newly built small room intended to be used for the cooking of meat at location dances. The bustle and sideburns of a late-Victorian English drawing room went on; a young woman whitened her hair with talcum powder and pinned a great hat like a feathery ship upon it. A fat young man sang, with practised nasal innuendo, the latest dance-tune while he adjusted his pince-nez and covered his cheerful head with a clerical hat.

‘You’re not bothering with make-up?’ A man in a wasp-striped waistcoat came down from the stage.

A girl looked up from her bit of mirror, face of a wax doll.

‘Your ordinary street make-up’ll do — they don’t know the difference,’ he said.

‘But of course I’m making-up,’ said the girl, quite disstressed. She was melting black grease paint in a teaspoon over someone’s cigarette lighter.

‘No need to bother with moustaches and things,’ the man said to the other men. ‘They won’t understand the period anyway. Don’t bother.’

The girl went on putting blobs of liquid grease paint on her eyelashes, holding her breath.

‘I think we should do it properly,’ said the young woman, complaining.

‘All right, all right.’ He slapped her on the bustle. ‘In that case you’d better stick a bit more cotton wool in your bosom — you’re not nearly pouter-pigeon enough.’

‘For God’s sake, can’t you open the door, somebody,’ asked the girl. ‘It’s stifling.’

The door opened upon a concrete yard; puddles glittered, one small light burned over the entrance to a men’s lavatory. The night air was the strong yellow smell of old urine. Men from the street slouched in and out, and a tall slim native, dressed in the universal long-hipped suit that in the true liberalism of petty gangsterdom knows no colour bar or national exclusiveness, leaned back on his long legs, tipped back his hat, and smiled on teeth pretty as a girl’s.

‘I’m going to close it again,’ said the fat young man grimly.

‘Oh, no one’s going to eat you,’ said the girl, picking up her parasol.

They all went backstage, clambered about, tested the rickety steps; heard the murmur of the audience like the sea beyond the curtain.

‘You’ll have to move that chair a bit,’ the young woman was saying, ‘I can’t possibly get through that small space.’

‘Not with that behind you won’t,’ the young man chuckled fatly. ‘Now remember, if you play well, we’ll put it across. If you act well enough, it doesn’t matter whether the audience understands what you’re saying or not.’

‘Of course — look at French films.’

‘It’s not that. It’s not the difficulty of the language so much as the situations. . The manners of a Victorian drawing room — the whole social code — how can they be expected to understand. .’ — the girl’s eyes looked out behind the doll’s face.

They began to chaff one another with old jokes; the clothes they wore, the slips of the tongue that twisted their lines: the gaiety of working together set them teasing and laughing. They stood waiting behind the makeshift wings, made of screens. Cleared their throats; somebody belched.

They were ready.

When would the concert begin?

The curtain screeched back on its rusty rings; the stage opened on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest .

At first there was so much to see ; the mouths of the audience parted with pleasure at the sight of the fine ladies and gentlemen dressed with such colour and variety; the women? — gasp at them; the men? — why, laugh at them, of course. But gradually the excitement of looking became acceptance, and they began to listen, and they began not to understand. Their faces remained alight, lifted to the stage, their attention was complete, but it was the attention of mystification. They watched the players as a child watches a drunken man, attracted by his babbling and his staggering, but innocent of the spectacle’s cause or indications.

The players felt this complete attention, the appeal of a great blind eye staring up at their faces, and a change began to work in them. A kind of hysteria of effort gradually took hold of them, their gestures grew broader, the women threw great brilliant smiles like flowers out into the half-dark over the footlights, the men strutted and lifted their voices. Each frowning in asides at the hamming of the other, they all felt at the same time this bubble of queerly anxious, exciting devilment of over-emphasis bursting in themselves. The cerebral acid of Oscar Wilde’s love scenes was splurged out by the oglings and winks of musical comedy, as surely as a custard pie might blot the thin face of a cynic. Under the four-syllable inanities, under the mannerisms and the posturing of the play, the bewitched amateurs knocked up a recognisable human situation. Or perhaps it was the audience that found it, looking so closely, so determined, picking up a look, a word, and making something for themselves out of it.