A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  I got home to the flat and found it nearly as hot as the crowded room I had just left, and, a little before six, I half-undressed, lay on my bed, and fell asleep. When I woke, it was not, as I thought, early evening, but morning. So it was that I seemed to go straight from the township to the High House; sleep was a blank moment that scarcely separated the rutted township track that I had learned to ride like a roller-coaster, from the smooth driveway – a tunnel of feathery green and flowers – where the car drew soundlessly toward the fountain of voices rising beside the Alexanders’ house.

  I had picked up Cecil at her flat. Her little boy hung round the doorway as she prepared to leave. ‘Are you going in the car?’ ‘Are you going to swim?’ he kept asking me.

  ‘Why not bring him along?’

  She signed an impatient warning. ‘No, no. He’s going out later. He’ll be fetched after lunch.’

  In the car, she grumbled about the time she had spent with her family, but before we reached the Alexanders’ she had sighed, stretched, fidgeted, lit a cigarette in pleased relaxation. She lifted her arm and put her hand round the nape of my neck, pinching my ear. One of her ways of making love was to lick my ear, like a dog, and I supposed she wanted to remind me. I slid my left hand into the warmth behind her bare knee, just to remind her. She laughed and demanded: ‘And where did you decide to go, after all?’ At once, it seemed absolutely necessary to belong along with her, I did not want to be even the remove of a surprised or baffled look from her. I mentioned the name of a bookseller and his wife of whom she had heard me speak before.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Couldn’t have been as bad as my collection of old crows.’

  She sat on the grass beside the pool, opening the presents that had been kept for her from the day before. There was a piece of jewellery from Hamish and Marion that she unwrapped with a deep sigh of achievement; while she exclaimed and hugged them, while she cried to Kit and others with perfect surprise, I had the feeling that she had been almost sure she would get the ring, had made sure she would get it. Coloured and tinselled packages lay, burst open, all round her. Perfume, cosmetics, smoking gadgets, satin, and nylon; John Hamilton picked out a giant pencil that looked like bamboo and had a fur tassel, and began autographing the legs of the women sunbathing; Kit went through the loot with expert fingers; one of the Peever twins came over, hale and dripping, smelling of wet hair and the chlorine of the pool, and kissed Cecil in a scatter of water. ‘Sweetie! My one and only! Happy Chrissie!’ Donald Alexander had a girl at last, a soft little girl of twenty or so, who slithered away into the pool with a splash when John tried to write on her brown thigh. Archie Baxter called encouragement; in swimming trunks he exposed a stricken-looking body and dwindling legs, like a splendidly-furred dog shorn of its pelt Kit seemed guardedly snappy with him; perhaps the strain of a three-day party made the front of the handsome, amusing couple wear thin. She had made as good a job of herself as usual and was bright as a cinema façade where the name of the next ‘attraction’ has just been newly put up in lights. John Hamilton was paying her a good deal of attention. His was a practical kind of court: ‘Look here, Kit, d’you know what you want to do? You want to get one of your boys to blow through that pipe, a bicycle pump’d do it. . .’ he said, advising her with the air of wanting to get down and do it himself, about the maintenance of the filter plant just installed for the swimming pool she’d had built at the farm.

  I’d been given a silk shirt (from Marion), an expensive bottle of after-shave lotion (from the Baxters), and, from Cecil, one of those sumptuous-looking picture books that publishers bring out specially for Christmas, and which go vaguely under the name of ‘art’. I’d never worn a silk shirt, never put scented stuff on my face, would probably never open the book again after that day. I lay idly in a big chair, talking now and then, listening; listening, sometimes with my eyes closed, to the slap and plunge of people in the water, and the talk of the Christmas Handicap that had been run the previous Saturday. There was a woman with blued white hair, the upper half of whose body swelled splendidly as a caryatid’s; she had an affected, absent way of talking – ‘Absolutely glamorous’ was her standard comment. But the moment someone mentioned racing, I heard her voice change, her languor drop, and she spoke shrewdly, intelligently, and imaginatively; I opened my eyes because I couldn’t believe my ears – and even after only a minute in the shelter of the explosive dark of my eyelids, the garden and the people sprang up with strong variety and brightness, a deep texture of colour and shadow through which I seemed to look down. I went into the pool before lunch, floating in a stream of pleasant sensations, a current that touched only the nerve-endings; the lave of cool water, the astringent prickle of midday sun, the smell of plums and hot grass, and the perfume on the skin of a woman as she rose out of the water a moment, beside me.

  I succumbed completely to such moods. This one took me on the instant, enclosing as a bubble, and I did not compare or relate it to what had gone before; an Orpheus, I passed from one world to another – but neither was real to me. For in each, what sign was there that the other existed?

  Cecil and I left about five o’clock and drove home in gathering silence. The summer sun was at a level to strike us right in the eyes, an impaling glare you couldn’t escape. Cecil was like a bird suddenly quenched by the blanket thrown over its cage; all her gaiety went out under the sense of the holiday over. The ebb of animation from drinks and the atmosphere of playful admiration with which she and her friends surrounded each other, left her stranded. The idea of the New Year, only a week away, seemed to depress her. ‘I’ll be twenty-nine,’ she said. She wondered what the year would be like; I said, meaning to reassure her, like any other year. She hardly spoke again.

  I realized that I was incapable of generating the kind of atmosphere that we had just left, and which, like some drug without which an addict cannot live, though it brought her to the doldrums in which she was now, was also the only thing likely to float her clear again. I fell silent, too. And she sat like a child for whom the end of the party is the end of the world; that was how she lived, from one treat to the next, free of a job, free of her child, free of all the every-day ballast that, I suppose, makes life possible for most people.

  Her flat smelled stale from being shut up through the heat of the day. She treated me with the absent, dependent, grateful manner of the convalescent who wakes and is glad to find someone sitting at the bedside. When we had opened the windows and the balcony doors, we simply sat about, for a while, talking desultorily and looking through a couple of the American picture magazines to which she subscribed and which usually lay about unopened. The building, the whole street, were not so much quiet as abandoned, with the gone-dead feeling of places awaiting the return of holiday-makers. She came and sat beside me and leaned against me, kicking off her shoes and putting her feet up on the stained table where I and my predecessors had rested their glasses. It was one of those hours when you feel that you will never be hungry again, nor want to make love again.

  I got interested in an article that whipped familiarly through the Stone Age with a character named Prehistoric Jones, the prototype man-in-a-grey-flannel-suit, and Cecil decided to go off and have a bath.

  I didn’t realize how long she’d been gone – she must have been soaking for more than twenty minutes, the sun had dropped and the air seemed to breathe again – when she suddenly appeared at the doorway wrapped in her bath-towel and looking stunned, as if she could not believe what had alarmed her. ‘Come and listen,’ she said. ‘Quickly.’

  She took my hand tightly and led me to the bathroom. ‘Listen.’ She jerked my hand to be still. There was nothing, for a moment, except the drizzle of a tap, but when I made to speak she stopped me urgently. Then I heard the panting of a dog, somewhere on the other side of the wall, in the street. But as I identified the sound it grew, it was the panting of something else. What? It grew in volume, it quick-ended
, it harshly filled and emptied some unimaginable cavern of a breast, while Cecil, dripping wet, stared at the wall in horror. Then, as she turned to warn me of the anguish of what was to come, it came: the last roaring pant, a breath taken in hell, burst into a vast, wailing sobbing, the terrible sorrow of a man. A man! I jumped up and opened the window, and she leapt up behind me to see me do what she had been afraid to do for herself. I looked. The street seemed empty, commonplace, peaceful. Some broken paper streamers, yellow and pink, lay in the road. A bicycle was propped against a tree. And then we saw him sitting with his head on his arms, in the gutter, just below us. He was a tall Zulu – the stretched lobes of his ears hung loose where he had once worn fancy disks in them – and he had on only a pair of trousers.

  ‘It’s William!’ said Cecil, with an hysterical laugh of relief, as if the identification of the man as the familiar servant who cleaned the flats on her floor automatically put an end to the horror.

  But as she spoke, the man got up, his back to us, and began to pace back and forth across the road, and in his splendid chest the hideous panting began again, working up to a gasping climax, and ended in the raucous and frightful sobbing that left him crouching in the gutter with his head bowed on his hands. ‘William!’ Cecil called. ‘William!’ -the voice of authority and reproof that never failed to bring him to the kitchen door. We saw his face, looking directly at us as he began to pace and pant again; saw that he did not see us, or anything.

  ‘William! William!’

  Cecil was shaking as if she had just been struck in the face. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she begged me. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ She felt the threat of a disaster she had never heard of, the dread of the discovery of some human sorrow unknown to her, hidden as the New Year, something that was neither death, poverty, or divorce.

  She thought of sorrow, I thought of madness. It seemed to me he must have gone crazy. I wanted to go out and try to talk to him, but she would not let me go without her, she flung on her clothes grimly and made me wait for her.’ You don’t want to go. You watch through the window.’ ‘No, no.’ Her hands could hardly put her clothing together.

  She stood beside me on the pavement, looking down at the man, her one trembling hand with the nails scarlet against her temple, holding back her hair. We called his name, but the man did not know we were there. We clattered up the ringing iron of the back stairs to the roof, where the servants lived, and fetched one of the other flat boys. He was a small, bow-legged Basuto, who smoked a pipe as crooked as his legs. He stood looking at the man in the gutter, admiring his extremity. ‘He been smoking. Dagga make him like that.’

  ‘Speak to him, go on, speak to him,’ ordered Cecil angrily; she might have been telling him to scrub the floor.

  The little man didn’t move. ‘I don’t touch him,’ he said. ‘He know nothing, nothing. Sometime three day he won’t know nothing.’ He enjoyed giving information.

  ‘Dagga! But he’s in agony!’ Cecil covered her face, up to the eyes, with both hands.

  It was true that the man in the gutter knew nothing; could not seem to find his way back to himself. His was an unspeakable anguish of alienation, lostness, the howling of the wolf of the soul in a waste. The ghastly ritual went on: tearing anxiety of pacing and panting, climax of sobs, then panting again.

  Cecil took her hands from her face, and I saw that the palm of one was indented with the marks of her teeth.

  She went into the flat and made some strong black coffee. When I approached him with a cup he flung himself away like a wild beast for whom food, in the hand of a man, is overlaid with the scent of fear.

  Cecil never took her eyes off him; when he panted, her hand flew to her breast, when he sobbed, her mouth twitched. ‘Should we send for the police?’

  ‘They’ll arrest him.’

  ‘Get a doctor?’

  It did not seem possible that any human being could reach him, where he was.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ she kept saying.

  A few Africans had wandered down from the building, drawn by the spectacle. They talked and pointed, standing back, the way they might at a zoo. ‘That’s his Christmas,’ said a tall man with speckless black-and-white shoes, a Stetson, and a happy way of chewing a match. Christmas. The word was echoed in agreement, indulgently. When they had seen the whole thing through two or three times, they went back up the stairs, or strolled off up the street talking in their own language and detaining each other with the sort of gestures described in the air that people use when they are capping each other’s anecdotes.

  We went inside, too, and in the living room, which did not face on the street, you could not hear the man. But Cecil kept going to stand in the bathroom, where you could. She sat on the edge of the bath and shushed me as if she must hear what there was to hear; the tap dripped and the steam parted to liquid runnels on the tiles while the frenzied travail sounded on, bestial and wretchedly human at the same time, a monstrous serenade from some medieval hell. It was all the cries we do not cry, all the howls we do not howl, all the bloody furies in our hearts that are never, must never be, let loose. Even I was afraid, hearing it; not of the man, but of a stir of recognition in myself. We sat in a kind of shameful fascination, and did not look at each other. She was tight-lipped, her long hands were clenched on themselves, the spikes of both blood-red thumbnails folded back on the fists.

  The sobs died; whistled away like a wind in a broken, empty place. There was a roaring cry that brought tears to attention in Cecil’s eyes, turned fiercely to me. Then the sound of a man running, running up the street, running away with the grit of the street powdering beneath his power. At the bathroom window, we saw him, past the leaning bicycle, past the stragglers, up the hill where the curve of the street lifted him behind the foreground of the Jacarandas.

  It was a gentle evening, as it so often is after a grillingly hot day in Johannesburg. Scraps of pastel floated about the sky, between the buildings, the trees and the chimneys of the street. Cecil went into the kitchen to get some ice and there I found her, her head against the grey dish towels that hung on a nail.

  ‘Are you crying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  She turned and she still had the look she had had when she couldn’t stop listening to the dagga-crazy man. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

  ‘How d’you mean? What about?’

  ‘This year.’ She stood in the kitchen as if it were a ruin. But the cheap alarum ticked and the engine of the refrigerator broke into a run; it was as I had always remembered it.

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  She said, ‘What have I got to show? Twenty-nine. Not enough money to live decently. What on earth can I do with myself? The whole – thing – frittered away.’ She pushed the child’s tricycle aside with her foot, and began to run the hot tap over the ice-container. The cubes tumbled into the sink, and above the clatter she said savagely,’ Hamish’s is a terrible place, your whole life could go there, like one of the lunch parties.’

  She began to talk of what she would do if she had money, if she didn’t have the child, if she lived in Europe. For the first time since I’d known her, I heard the South African accent come out in a phrase, in a word, beneath the carefully acquired upper-class English stereotype of her voice. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she would find the same parties, the same rich indulgent friends, the same thoroughbred horses, everywhere.

  ‘His Christmas!’ she said, suddenly. She was sitting on the divan beside me and I felt a convulsion move her body, like the shudder a dog gives before it is sick. ‘What other country is there where you’d have a thing like that on your doorstep? What a Christmas for anybody! Nothing but a beast! How can you live with savages around you!’

  I said to her, ‘But you cried. You made coffee for him.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. They said it was his Christmas. What would make anyone choose that Christmas?’ Like evidence, s
he began to gather up the presents, with their coloured and tinsel wrappings, their ribbons and sprigs of holly and extravagantly affectionate cards, that we had brought from Alexanders’ and piled on the table when we came in.

  Chapter 13

  Often, in the letters written to me from England, I would come across the phrase ‘the life out there’: the people I knew read of strikes, of beer-hall riots, and arrests for treason, they saw pictures of smiling black babies dressed in beads, of tall buildings, of politicians whose defiantly open mouths might be prophesying doom or development. Out of all that, I suppose they rounded off some sort of sphere to contain me, vague to them but of course certain to be perfectly clear to me.

  They would have understood a city of many different ways of life, all intermingled, but would they have understood the awful triumphant separateness of the place I was living in? Could I tell them how pleasant it was to be lulled and indulged at The High House? Could I explain the freedom I felt where I had no legal right to be, in that place of segregation, a location? I supposed that to have a ‘life out there’, a real life in Johannesburg, you’d have to belong in one or the other, for keeps. You couldn’t really reconcile one with the other, the way people were, the way the laws were, and make a whole. The only way to do that was to do what Anna Louw had done – make for the frontier between the two, that hard and lonely place as yet sparsely populated.

  In any case, I had no particular wish to explain myself, or the irreconcilables of the way I was living, to anybody, even myself. All my life I had lived among people who found it necessary to explain. If they hadn’t given me any tradition but doubt and self-examination, then I had chosen to prefer to trust to instinct. In Johannesburg, at least, it had proved a fairly lively way to live.

  Steven’s gusto renewed itself as naturally as the sun rose every morning. Living by his wits kept them skinning-sharp; his whole life was an endless outwitting of authority. Sometimes he was a child playing cops and robbers; sometimes he was a lawyer cunningly, constantly, watchful for loopholes in a case that built up more formidably every day. He would slip into my office with his well-brushed suède shoes and his well-cut suit hanging fashionably loose, looking down his nose as he smiled, the way he had seen filmstars do.