A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Well, you’re the answer,’ I said, ‘you’re the one who’s made the trek, this generation.’

  She said, in her measured, downright manner, ‘In a way, I understand my family’s reluctance to own me, their own flesh and blood, reminding them of everything they’re afraid of. And have you ever noticed how dark I am? I’m like a blooming Spaniard. Huguenot blood, they say. Probably true, too, we’ve got La Valles and Dupreez on my mother’s side. But more likely some old boy’s flutter with a black girl in the old days, as well.’

  We talked on past midnight. The child called out once, from the bedroom, and Anna went to her. In the few minutes she was gone, I became aware of the night outside, that suddenly blew up and flung itself in a squall of wind and scratching leaves, at the window. I went to the bathroom and saw there, as everywhere in the little house, the serene order of Anna’s mind; the tidy rows of toilet bottles, the fine soap, the clean thick towels.

  When she came back to the living-room, a heavy, sparse fall of rain on the roof muted some remark she made, and I got up to go.

  She stood, holding her arms in protection against some imagined chill from the sound of the rain. She looked very small and stocky, and tiredness, the burned-out animation of so much talk, marked deeply under her eyes. ‘Wait till this goes over,’ she said. We both had had quite a lot to drink, and a mood of confidential timelessness had settled around us, intensified by the rain, which, too, took a shift in rhythm and settled to a soft, steady, enclosing sound.

  She told me about the visit to Russia in 1950 that had disillusioned her once and for all about Communism, and after which she had broken with the Party in revulsion. Unlike most ex-Communists I knew in London, Anna had not remained in that state of spiritual convalescence which was as far as they seemed able to recover from loss of faith – but she shared with those who would never be able to put themselves together again, a dogmatism of manner, as old military men never again walk quite like other men. Although she no longer had to believe unquestioningly, she could not shed the air of being always right.

  Still later, she said, suddenly, ‘When you go to Neksburg you must go and see the lion.’

  We had been talking about Faunce and my father, but the remark did not seem irrelevant. After a moment, I said, ‘Probably I won’t go at all.’

  She sat back, buried in the big chair and looked at me steadily, with the smiling concentration of vision slowed by brandy, as if she were a star whose light took a million years to reach me. ‘D’you like those people?’ she asked. There was genuine curiosity, not implied criticism, in the question.

  ‘Some of them.’

  She nodded in agreement. ‘The one in the Stratford Bar. She’s lovely-looking.’

  I said,’ None of the people I know here seem to know each other.’

  ‘What are they like?’

  I told her about the people at The High House, colouring the picture a little, at once feeling disloyal and at the same time mildly, enjoyably revengeful, as if I’d just discovered I’d been taken in by them. They were as unfamiliar to her as people of another country; I don’t suppose she would have wanted to know them, anyway, but it was another reminder to me of the boundaries she had left, and probably could never re-enter. Her face, chin lifted to pull at a cigarette, or bent, with the shadows streaking down it, over the glass cupped in her hands, was the face of burned boats, blown bridges; one of those faces you suddenly see, by a trick of the light, in the rock formation of the side of a mountain. I felt suddenly afraid of her, I put out my hand and touched, with the touch of fear, the thing I fled from. I had no desire for her but I kissed her. The rain had stopped as if to listen; the whole night was still. She did not shut her eyes for an instant; every time I opened mine, she was looking at me, as if she were waiting for something to be over, to have done. She went on talking while she took my hand, turned it palm up, then down, then pressed the nails, one by one: ‘You think you’ll keep free, with one foot here and another there, and a look in somewhere else, but even you, even a stranger like you, Toby – you won’t keep it up.’ She stood up and wiped the windowsill dry of the rain that lay on it in a scatter of magnifying lenses, thick and glassy. We were both standing about the room as if the night were breaking up. I thought of Cecil with a flash of longing, but she was like one of those women you imagine before you have ever had a woman. I made love to Anna at last, slowly because I had had so much to drink, and pleasure came to me as if wrung from my grasp. When our excitement was over the rain began again as if it had never stopped.

  I suppose there’s no use trying to explain oneself, so far as one’s feelings about women are concerned. The whole mysterious business may be influenced by, even spoiled by one’s idea of what one should feel, what one’s code is, but the fact remains that old Adam has a code of his own that sometimes makes nonsense of the imposed one. You do something cheap, goatish, or foolish, and it feels right. That’s all. And if you feel right and comfortable, reason – all the reasons why you shouldn’t – cannot discomfit you. My extension of conversation with Anna (that’s no polite euphemism – that was exactly what it seemed to be, the moment it was past) had the effect of deepening my interest in Cecil. For weeks, there was a gentle madness for me in the mention of her name; her faults entranced me, an inch of darker colour grown out at the roots of her hair touched me, her laugh, in the next room, astonished me, like a secret called aloud. A season of love seized me; and it was Christmas, Christmas in midsummer.

  Part Three

  Chapter 12

  A christmas party at The High House seemed to have no beginning and no end. When I picked up Cecil and took her out there for lunch on Christmas Eve – this was to celebrate the arrival, from the Karroo, of the Baxters, whom Marion had talked out of Kit’s idea of a house party in Neksburg – the pool was full of young men and girls, and roars of whisky-released laughter came up from the shade of the veranda, where Hamish Alexander sat in white bowling flannels and brown suède shoes, drum-bellied, bristling with good humour, surrounded by the older guests. When we left in the afternoon, some had gone but others were newly-arrived. Then there was to be a dinner-party in the evening, to which neither Cecil nor I were going. She had to take her child to a children’s party at her parents’; I was going to a celebration arranged by Steven. She was to spend Christmas Day with her family too, and I had plans of my own to fulfil. So I did not see her again until Boxing Day, when we had been invited to go to Alexanders’ again, and arrived at midday to find the party in its third day, the pool still lively as the seal enclosure at a zoo, the veranda still dispensing laughter from the bar.

  It seemed hotter than it had ever been, all summer, so far, in Johannesburg. Sun and wine and beer and whisky made the atmosphere of a fiesta; it was not Christmas, to me, but I liked it. Outside my flat, piccanins shuffled and jerked their backsides to tin whistles and a banging on old tins. While the shops were open, a weary, sweating concourse streamed the streets, thick as a trail of ants following the scent of sugar; then, except for cinema crowds, the city was left to the drunks. Church bells jangled and, on the balconies of flats, the hot sun turned on the baubles of Christmas trees in tubs. Black men who delivered clinking cases from the bottle store wore paper hats. If the place was not gay, at least it had let itself go. At Alexanders’, presents, flowers, glasses, and food covered luxury with abundance; even the garden, in the swell of midsummer sap, was heaped with so much colour, so pollen-thick, so vibrant with bees, criss-crossed by birds, so heavy with peaches and plums whose delicious over-ripeness smelled headier even than the perfumes of the women, that the very texture of the air was plenty. The cornucopia jammed down over your head. Cecil flashed and turned in this atmosphere, a creature in its own element: she seemed to me to exist, and rightly so, for no other purpose than to laugh, her eyes brilliant with alcohol, her lap full of presents, among flowers and drunken bees.

  My Christmas Eve with Steven started at about ten o’clock at a club run by Indians
some miles out of Johannesburg. Lucky Chaputra had insisted that we come, Steven said, but when we left the club, shortly before midnight, Lucky still had not turned up himself, though we had been well looked after, no doubt on his instructions. The club was one of those places one could never find again; I drove to it blindly, turning when Steven told me, following landmarks invisible to me, down dirt-tracks and through dongas, over the dark veld. Steven chattered all the time, and sometimes could not bear to spoil a story by interrupting it with a direction, so that, a minute or two late, he would suddenly call out, sensing something unfamiliar about our progress: ‘Wait a minute! Stop, man! We’ve missed the turning.’

  There was a concert on at the club when we got there. The programme went very slowly, because after every few items the audience, Muslim and Hindu men, drifted out to their cars. They would drift into the hall again in ten or fifteen minutes, each time a little more vociferous and critical in their calls for the entertainment to recommence. The reason was that the club – which had, like other country clubs, a swimming pool and tennis courts – could not, of course, get a licence to serve liquor. The members drank in their cars, fast and neat.

  Steven and I, the only white man and the only African there, were hustled into an anteroom lit by a candle, where, first, the fat, pale organizer of the show, an anxious man named Jayasingh, and a thin business man named Mia and, as the evening went on, a number of other club personages, gave us Haig and water. When the others ate dry triangular sandwiches of the kind served at wedding receptions, we got plates of hot vermicelli with cinnamon and sugar. As usual, there were not enough glasses to go round, and we politely drank up quickly so that the others could get a drink in before it was time to get back into the hall. In this anteroom there was no furniture except an iron bed empty of a mattress and a table. There was a plaster figurine among the whisky bottles on the mantelpiece; I went over to look at it, and Mia, solicitously kind, rushed up with the candle: ‘Ghandiji’ he cried,’ I’ll show you.’ The plaster figure wore a tiny pair of wire spectacles. The candle lit up, too, on the wall, two or three group photographs of Indian business men with striped suits and important expressions.

  In the hall we sat on the floor on spring mattresses. ‘Indian-style,’ my neighbours kept telling me, with an air of novelty. ‘He sings in Hindustani and I only understand a bit of Gujerati,’ someone complained, while the band-leader, a wild, mournful-looking boy whom I would sooner have expected to see giving a performance supine on a bed of nails, sobbed and wailed, exactly like all those other young men who drive adolescents to an adoring frenzy. Presently a girl, with face and body of the most tender grace and beauty, came out to a slurring roar of appreciation. She wore a sari and there were bells round the ankles of her bare feet; the men called and hailed while she danced and rolled her eyes in a rhumba. ‘Lola, Lola, lovely my dear,’ Mia kept saying. And to me: ‘Those pigs can’t shut up. Isn’t she very good?’ I admired her and asked if she ever did any real Indian dancing. Immediately Mia and a number of others began a fervent conversation in which the word ‘classical’ kept recurring like the date of some great discovery, a battle recalled, or a noble name remembered. Classical, classical. After one or two more intervals in the anteroom, it began to go up like a call of despair, a cry in the wilderness – each one of them loved only classical, classical, what did Indians in this country know of classical? Poor sweating Jayasingh, pathetic as only a harassed fat man can be, became offended: his show, the best artists at the greatest expense, did not please. We all went out into the garden with him, like a deputation, and Mia, in an official tone (‘My dear, dear Mr Jayasingh . . .’), and Steven and I with appreciative agreeing noises, tried to reassure him. I don’t think he was reassured, though perhaps he was mollified. A few minutes later, Mia had him in a corner again, while the show went on, and presently we were smuggled out of the hall during the performance of a band number, and, with Mia, Jayasingh, and one or two more, were closeted in the anteroom.

  This time the Indian girl was there. I have never seen anything more beautiful. She had never been in India, and she spoke English with a strong South African accent, but she had an ancestral beauty, she had in flesh the round stone breasts and little round waist of women in Tenth Century Indian sculpture; I had once cut out a photograph of such an image, Vriksaka, the Tree Goddess. The live girl sat on an empty whisky-case, hardly touched by the thick yellow light of the smoking candle, hardly seen, and sang the way a bird sings on a telephone wire. People kept pushing into the room. Some were pushed out again. Those in the room talked admiringly, encouraged more than they listened, but I felt they really were moved by the idea of her singing. She sang traditional Indian songs as long as we wanted her to, which was as long as the important members dared keep her from the general audience, and then she went from among us, listening with attentiveness to the long compliments, slipping inoffensively from the pawings of those who would detain her, ducking her head swiftly beneath the hands, faces, the despairing, longing cries: ‘Classical . . . classical. . . .’ She was made to please: I had not seen a creature like her before.

  Driving back to town, I talked about her to Steven, and soon we slipped from the particular to women in general, and then, inevitably, to the particular again, while Steven told me of his conquests in London. It was an old subject, one we’d come to time and again in the confidential small hours in the townships. It seemed to be a point of honour for a black man who’d made something of himself to boast of how, in his small beginnings as waiter, bell-boy, or some such conveniently-placed menial, he had been coveted by a white woman. Some of the stories rang true, and some of them didn’t. But everybody had one to tell. I suppose that in the country I was living in, in the city I was living in, such tales were sensational, anarchic, and meant far more; but I must say that to me, as a stranger and an outsider, they were simply part of the old sex myth I have mentioned before – the wistful projection of joy not to be had at home.

  We finished up the night at the House of Fame, where Steven was no longer living, but of which he was still master of ceremonies. In the township, singing people, arm-in-arm, filled the streets. The girls, yelling and shaking as they careered along, wore paper dough-boy hats inscribed ‘Hiya Babe’ or ‘I’m No Angel’. The dingy houses, where old people tried to sleep and the smallest children were in bed, showed no life. But there must have been some, like the House of Fame, where people made their own music and danced and talked. From the hidden yards came voices with the particular, chanting quality of beer-drink frenzy. The shebeens were open for a roaring trade – we went into one to look for a friend of Steven’s – and there were more police about than I had known before. ‘A lot of broken heads and stabbings before Christmas is over,’ said Steven, grinning and shaking his head. ‘The Prince of Peace seems to skip us.’

  On Christmas Day I went to church with Sam’s wife, Ella, and their little girl. The child was dressed in a stiff frilly frock and she wore the gilt locket I had brought as a Christmas present for her. We went to the Anglican church in the location where they had their house, and only Ella accepted my going as an ordinary thing to do; Sam was delighted that I should want to go with Ella, but in the manner of someone who approves a piece of intrepid sight-seeing.

  I was glad to be with a friend, instead of among the polite strangers who filled their cosy church near my flat with an incense of brilliantine. In this church in the township the priest was a tubby, untidy Englishman, tonsured by baldness. The church was built of ugly, purplish brick and smelled of the soap with which the congregants had washed, and of the smoke with which their clothing was impregnated from their cooking fires. A choir of small boys and another of women sang with the unearthly voices of Africans: voices that seem to have a register of their own. After one look round at me, the congregants accepted my presence with scarcely a whispered conversation, though I don’t think it likely that a white layman had ever been in their church before. After the service I saw that
the priest wanted to come up and speak to me, but I pretended not to see, and we left quickly. I don’t suppose any church will ever suit me so well as our church at home, where once my grandfathers gathered their families about them in their own pew; so much for me, as a worshipper.

  Christmas dinner was at Sam’s. There was a chicken and everyone who was invited brought something for the table – there was a tinned pudding, a cream-cake, some sausages, nuts, and sweets. It was more like a picnic than anything else, in spite of the stifling little room in which we were confined; the hot, bright day, everyone wandering about the room picking up what they pleased to eat, the pestering flies, the nearness of voices and raspberry squeakers blown in the street outside. I had brought bon-bons and a couple of bottles of wine, and, inevitably, Sam ended up at his piano. Everyone there fell into song as easily as other people drift into conversation; carols, traditional songs, and jazz hummed and thrummed and soared from them. As I drove away in the afternoon, I was stopped by police and told to report to the charge office because I had no permit to be in the location; I was lucky – it was the first time I had been caught, and I had been in the townships innumerable times without a permit.