A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  No one said, ‘Hey, what’s the idea? What about that cigarette?’ No one laughed. No one acknowledged, made of the incident a moment’s absentmindedness on the part of a man who had had rather a lot to drink. We exempted him, and so gave away what he and all black men must always suspect of the company of white men: he was not like us, after all; after all, he was black.

  The girl’s hand came slowly back to her; she covered it with her other one, in her lap. And she too, went on talking, smiling, asking questions with an air of intense interest, confessing her own opinions self-critically and with laughter. A little later, when I had drifted into another group and out again, I heard her say, detaining the host with a dove-like inclination of her head, ‘Sweetie, do you think you’ve got a filter tip in the house for me?’

  At this time, I didn’t really want to go and see Anna Louw. Once I was in her company, I was always glad of it, and couldn’t understand my reluctance; yet no sooner was I away again than I was conscious of a childish relief, and an impatience to get back to my preoccupation with other people.

  I was a bit ashamed that it seemed to work out that the times when I sought her out coincided with the times when I couldn’t be with Cecil, or when Steven had gone to ground on one of his enthusiastic mysteries, which, these days, were likely to be involved with Lucky Chaputra. In the first few minutes, I always felt that I had a left-out air about me that was unmistakable to Anna; my ring of phrase had echoes of the people with whom I had been spending most of my time, my manner carried still the impression of theirs.

  I drove out to see her one afternoon after I had left the office; she was in the tiny part of the garden which was considered hers, and while she dug a thin little Indian girl flitted about her, calling out in a soft twanging voice nasal as a mosquito’s. I heard them across the garden, before they saw me; peaceful sounds, the singing whine of the child and the slow, reasonable answers of the woman, monosyllabic but somehow satisfying in sound, as Anna’s Afrikaans accent tended to make them. I had encountered the child there before, several times – ‘She’s Hassim’s little sister,’ Anna had told me. Hassim was Anna’s divorced husband, whom I had never met, and whom I don’t think she ever saw.

  The child ran away into the house when she saw me coming, but slowly, as a background to the talk between Anna and me, I was aware of her approaching, step by step, hanging back and yet coming on. I called ‘Hullo, Urmila!’ but she was behind a bush; and only when I turned my attention back to Anna, and forgot about the child, did she take up her game where she had been interrupted.

  I had thought I should have to make some excuses for not having come before (the real excuses were the only plausible ones, but though they might tacitly be accepted, they must not be spoken aloud) but, as always, I had forgotten that if Anna spoke little, she was also the easiest person in the world to talk to. All she said was,’ How’re you getting on, Toby?’ and I lay down on the grass while she went on pressing down the soil round the seedlings she was planting, and I told her about the incident of Steven and the cigarette. That was how it was, in her company. I’d wonder what on earth I’d find to say, and then something I didn’t even know I’d been brooding about would come out of my mouth as simply as a remark about the weather.

  She threw no new light upon the incident. ‘He’s an odd customer,’ she said mildly, when I had finished. Yet the very matter-of-factness of her acceptance had the effect of bringing the incident into perspective; a perspective, I realized with surprise, that was not mine. It was the perspective of the frontier, the black-and-white society between white and black, and I was only a visitor there, however much I had made myself at home. Anna was a real frontiersman who had left the known world behind and set up her camp in the wilderness; the skirmishes of that new place were part of the condition of life, for her.

  I rolled on to my back and watched the leaves run together in the magnetism of gathering darkness. Anna went on methodically, digging and planting, making little grunting sighs of effort as she moved round the bed of earth. She had the absorption in her activity of people who are used to doing things alone. For a moment, I had the feeling of not being there; I was aware, as one seldom is in the company of another, of her being, in depth, beyond the surface at which her life had touched upon mine. I asked her, suddenly:

  ‘What made you marry Hassim Bhayat?’

  She shuffled round – she was sitting on her haunches – and picked up a seedling held in its little fist of earth. It was an inquiring gesture.

  ‘Was it because he was an Indian?’

  She was still holding up the seedling, and though her back was to the fading light, and I could not see her face clearly, I sensed her following my face. She said, ‘I was in love with him. But what’s the good of saying, I would have loved him whatever he’d been. He was an Indian. That was part of what made him what he was. A woman who falls in love with a rich man will tell you she’d love him just as much if he was a lorry driver. Of course she wouldn’t. His money, the things he’s done with it and it’s done to him – they’re part of what he’s like and what she’s fallen in love with. Of course, that doesn’t mean to say she couldn’t fall in love, another time, with a lorry driver -’ She turned away and put the plant into the place prepared for it.

  ‘You don’t think there was something of a gesture in it? Nothing like that?’

  ‘No,’ she said, with slow conviction. ‘But it’s terribly hard to keep a marriage like ours personal; it starts off like an ordinary marriage but then everything else, outside it, forces on it the onus of a test case. If you quarrel, you can’t simply be a man and wife who don’t get on, immediately you’re the proof that mixed marriages don’t work. You’ve no idea how this influences you, in time. You get terribly nervous; honestly. You begin to question yourself, all the time: do I disagree about this only because I’m white? Does this depress Hassim only because he’s an Indian, or would a white man feel the same -’ The Indian child called out something, and Anna answered her. ‘It’s a good thing we didn’t have any children,’ she said. I didn’t answer, because I thought perhaps she was hardly aware that she had spoken. ‘It’s a good thing, after all.’ And now her voice broke through her thoughts, so to speak, ‘I used to say, it’s too bad if it’s hard for the children; you just have to make them understand that they’re only misfits in a worn-out society that doesn’t count, that, in reality, they’re the new people in the world that’s coming, the decent one where colour doesn’t matter. D’you think that’s true?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  She laughed.’ It’s not true yet. It’s a hell of a life to impose on a half-and-half child in the meantime; waiting for a kingdom of heaven that probably won’t come to earth in its lifetime. It’ll come. But it’s too big, too far off – you can’t measure an historical process against the life of a kid. That’s what I think now, anyway.’

  ‘It has to start somewhere, of course.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But not with a child of mine.’

  I got up, and realized how damp with coming night the grass had become; my shirt was cold against my back. ‘Anna, I’m glad to find you’re a coward about something. You’ve always impressed me as being brave as a lion.’ She gave a little Afrikaans exclamation of derision, and laughed.

  The Indian child had switched on all the lights in the cottage. From the darkening garden, warm light coloured by the objects on which it shone in the rooms, where all the curtains were open, seemed to swell up and fill the house’s shape like breath in a coloured balloon. We put the garden tools away together, and went up to the house. Anna, in a sudden mood of animation unusual for her, was telling me about the stuffed lion that stood in the hotel in the Karoo village where she had lived as a child. ‘Have you ever heard of the Cape Mountain lion? Well, it’s supposed to have been extinct since heaven knows when. This one was shot round about 1865, and somehow or other they’ve preserved it all this time. An Englishman killed it and sent it to Engl
and and had it stuffed, and it was in some club in London for years. When I was a kid, it was in the lounge of the old Neksburg hotel, right next to the cigarette machine. It doesn’t look much like a real lion, to me; more like one of those funny-looking beasts made in stone, what d’you call them – chimera, is it?’

  ‘Is it still there now? I think that’s the name of the place I’ve been invited to over Christmas – Neksburg, yes I’m sure.’

  Anna gave a long, whistling exclamation: ‘Christmas in Neksburg, you don’t know what you’re in for!’ She seemed much amused.

  ‘Well, it’s not actually in Neksburg itself, it’s a stud farm belonging to some people I know, here – the Alexanders. People called Baxter run it for them, and there’s some idea about a house party – I don’t know if’t’ll come to anything.’

  ‘Ah, that’s a different sort of Neksburg,’ said Anna, smiling. ‘The Chamber of Mines Alexander? Very posh. It must be one of the thousand morgen efforts around there. Swimming pools and heaven knows what.’

  ‘But Neksburg is the village you come from?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it odd? I have the feeling we’ve had this sort of conversation before.’

  ‘We have,’ she said. ‘You remember? The first time I met you. I mentioned that Jagersfontein Location case, and you said, Jagersfontein – my grandfather was killed at Jagersfontein!’

  ‘And we’ve never been to look for his grave,’ I said.

  She waved her muddy hands in distaste. ‘Ach, it was probably my grandfather who killed him. Leave these old wars alone.’ She went off to the little bathroom to wash.

  ‘How much longer is that Jagersfontein case going to drag on, anyway,’ I called. ‘Amon was off again last Friday, it seems to have been going on for months.’

  ‘He was off when?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘The case was dropped a month ago.’

  ‘Grandmother tale, eh?’

  Anna came in, hair tidied, inspecting her nails. ‘You fix him,’ she said, toughly. ‘Ah, how beautiful, Urmila! Toby, see what she’s done?’ The child had decorated the table with garlands of those brass-coloured dwarf marigolds that smell rank. I stayed to supper and smoked all through the meal to kill the weedy reek, since I knew not only Urmila but Anna would be offended if I removed my garland. After supper Urmila brought a book and stood, leaning on Anna’s chair, while Anna read her a chapter. The book was Peter Pan, and I wondered what Urmila made of even such an unconventional English nursery as the Darlings’. But I had the feeling, watching the child’s dark, ugly face, with the nervous lips along which her fingers wandered all the time, as if to read reassurance, and the dark eyes whose expressionlessness never altered, that it was not the story she listened to or wanted, but the fact of being read to. Anna put her to bed herself, and I heard the child murmuring and laughing to her.

  When Anna came back into the room, she said, crossly, ‘They make the poor child so timid. I don’t know what she’ll be fit for – ’

  ‘A good Muslim wife,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe,’ and sighed.

  ‘At least we were brought up to be able to look after ourselves,’ she said. ‘Didn’t always end up doing it the way the old people had imagined, but still. When I was her age I was at boarding-school in Bloemfontein, and I used to go there by train on my own.’ Sometimes she showed a sturdy, obstinate pride in the ways of the family she had, I gathered from what I knew of her, broken with irrevocably. We sat drinking brandy-and-soda and talked about her childhood. Her family owned a tea-room in the Karroo village of Neksburg, ‘Tee-en-koffie-kamer,’ she told me. ‘On the main road that runs through the dorp to Cape Town. It’s for tourists mainly, but since my uncle made it bigger in 1935, it’s also been a gathering-place for the local youngsters on Saturdays, and a place where natives come in to buy a bottle of milk, or bread, or cigarettes. Someone told me that the latest improvement is that natives are not allowed to come in at the front door of the shop. My cousin Toy – he’s running it now with one of my brothers – has another door, in the lane off the street, for natives. I haven’t been home since before I married Hassim, so I haven’t seen it for myself. We used to live behind the shop. There’s a yard, with an iron pergola which has rotted away in the grip of a big old grapevine – the iron’s embedded in the thick stem of the vine – and behind that’s our house. An old house, too, with thick stone walls, a flat roof, and shutters – at least it was, until they built a wooden veranda on to it, and painted the wood orange. My grandmother had tubs with ferns in them put in the yard; that’s where we used to play, with the children of our coloured servants, who were also supposed to look after us. The whole village is along that main street, the baker, the butcher, the two general stores, another café, run by a Greek, the estate agent’s, the lawyer’s, the old hotel and the new hotel, and, of course, an enormous garage. That went up about ten years ago. It’s the only modern building in Neksburg and it really hits you in the eye, all shiny, with a huge plate-glass window, and the chromium petrol pumps, and a couple of the local coloureds got up in blue uniforms. That and the travellers’ big cars outside the new hotel – they’re completely unlike anything else in Neksburg, but their out-of-placeness is part of the place – d’you know what I mean?’

  ‘. . . dust and stones, and a fly-bitten hotel with a couple of shiny cars. . . .’ – Anna’s was the Neksburg Kit Baxter had talked about months ago, that first day at the Alexanders’.

  ‘Right opposite our tea-room there are five pepper trees.’ Anna was picking her way among the significant things of a child’s life. ‘I remember beginning to look at those pepper trees. You know how, to a certain stage, you don’t really look at things? Well, up till then, the pepper trees had been the same as the tea-room and the yard and the house. – I forgot to tell you that on the walls of the tea-room, we had coloured photographs of the members of the family, particularly the children. We went to Bloemfontein specially to have them taken; I mean, if a baby was born, it was taken on its first birthday, and so on. There was a picture of me and my two younger brothers on the wall just above the paraffin refrigerator. I used to look at it for hours, in fact I looked at it every time I walked into the shop, because I believed that that must be the way I really looked, not the way I was when I saw myself in the mirror. In the picture my lips were bright red and my hair had touches of yellow. There was a big picture of my cousin Johannes’s fiancée, with a rose in her long yellow curls – she really did have them – and her hand raised to her neck to show the ring on her finger. And there was an even bigger one of another little cousin, the beauty of the family, and my age, with a mauve crinoline. Well, I don’t remember when exactly it was, how old I was, but I distinctly remember a clear division of time when I suddenly knew for sure that the pepper trees, always outside there, always to be seen, were one thing, and our tee-kamer, with the smirking photographs that didn’t look like us, and the mirrors with the holders filled with dust-covered crinkle paper flowers, and the radiogram that shook when it sang, were another. It was in the season when the pepper trees were – in fruit, would you call it? – when the little pink beads were ripe, and mixed up with the pale greyish leaves, so that the trees looked soft. From then on, whenever I came back from school for the holidays, I found that the things I didn’t mind about Neksburg were the things my brothers and cousins were impatient and ashamed of, and the things they admired and welcomed were the things I was ashamed of. More than anything, I was ashamed of the coloured photographs. I cried over them, once, down in the culvert where the stream was, near the cemetery. They were ashamed when they saw someone carrying a goat tied on his back while he rode a bicycle.’

  I would never have guessed that Anna’s revolt should have begun as a revolt of taste. I asked her when she had begun to be interested in politics.

  ‘When I was working in Bloemfontein and then Johannesburg. You see, my family didn’t think it anything unusual for me to want to go to work in a city. They thought I wanted sma
rt clothes and dances and plenty of boy friends. When I got myself articled to a lawyer, they didn’t take that too seriously. They let me go without a murmur. So long as I went to church on Sundays, that was all right.

  ‘You know, long after I was a member of the Party and a trade union official, my father knew nothing about any of it, he wouldn’t listen to anything about it. He was convinced that I had a nice office job in the big city, and that all I was waiting for was to come home holding hands with some nice Dirkie or Koosie, ready to hang a new picture of myself on the tee-kamer wall.’

  ‘And when did they finally find out?’

  ‘An uncle told them. There are Louws everywhere, all fifty-second cousins, and nosy as hell. I was running a union of coloured women, sweetworkers.’

  ‘What happened?’

  She got up and refilled our glasses. When she was settled again, she said, ‘Oh, I got off quite lucky. They dropped me. They wanted to forget about me, quickly. I think they really did believe that I was crazy; they could be less ashamed of me, that way, it would then be something I couldn’t really help. My mother used to come and see me now and then, but I had never been very close to her. I would rather have seen my father; no chance of that, though. She’s dead. She died when I passed my final law exam, just before I married Hassim. The old man’s still in Neksburg. They’re strange people, really. There’s very little dignity left in them; they’re passionate Nationalists, of course, in the narrowest, most superannuated sense, they hate the English, they hate the blacks, they’re terrified of them all. In fact they hate and fear everything and everyone except themselves – what a miserable way to exist. And yet, d’you know, they’re directly descended from the Voortrekkers – one would expect them to have more guts. The Voortrekkers may have been bigotted, but they had guts.’