The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  “—Come with me to buy it.”

  The town had taken spring like a deep breath; it showed only in the bright pale brushes of grass that pushed up newly where there were cracks in the paving, the young leaves on the dark dry limbs of the trees round the Town Hall, but we felt it on our faces and I on my bare arms. There was a feeling of waking; as if a cover had been whipped off the glass shop fronts and the faded blinds. When we had been to the bazaar, he said: “You’ve wanted to see my hospital and you’ve heard so much about it—why don’t you come home with me now? If you’re doing nothing, it’s not far—” So we walked slowly to his home in the light glancing sun, talking past the bits of gardens where children scratched in the dust, women knitted on their verandas, a native girl beat a rug over a wire fence.

  It was only when he spoke at the gate that our interested talk dropped lightly and suddenly. The faint sense of intrusion that quietens one when one is about to walk in on someone else’s most familiar witnesses came to me. It was suddenly between us that we really knew each other well; oddly, it seemed that a matter for laughter—Joel’s eyes silently on me from a distance—really had secreted a friendship that it had only been necessary for us to speak to discover. Since that morning on the train we had been companions on every journey, and with an ease that comes to relationships most often as a compensation for the dulling of years, very rarely with the immediacy of a streak of talent.

  Yes, we knew each other well, the young to the young, a matching of the desire for laughter, meaning and discovery which boils up identically, clear of the different ties, tensions, habits and memories that separately brewed it. But this brown front door with the brush hairs held in the paint, an elephant-ear plant in a paraffintin pot below the bell, watched Joel Aaron every day. Inside; the walls, the people who made him what he was as the unseen powers of climate shape a landscape; force flowers, thick green, or a pale monotony of sand.

  He lifted the mat made of rolled tire strips, looking for the key, and dropped it back. “Ma’s home, then.” He smiled, and the door gave way to his hand.

  It was not spring inside the Aarons’ house. The air of a matured distilled indoor season, an air that had been folded away in cupboards with old newsprint and heavy linen, cooked in ten-years’ pots of favorite foods, burned with the candles of ten-years’ Friday nights, rested in the room with its own sure permeance, reaching every corner of the ceiling, passing into the dimness of passages with the persistence of a faint, perpetual smoke.

  Joel was not aware of it as one cannot be aware of the skin-scent of one’s own body; he picked up some circulars that the postman had pushed under the door and threw them onto a chair. The house opened directly into the living room where there was a large dark table with a crocheted lace cloth, high-backed chairs set back against the wall, a great dark sideboard with two oval, convex-glassed pictures above it. A pair of stern, stupid eyes looked out from the smoky beard of an old photograph; the face of a foolish man in the guise of a patriarch. But next to him the high bosom, the high nose that seemed to tighten the whole face, slant the black eyes, came with real presence through a print that seemed to have evaporated from the paper: a woman presided over the room.

  Past a green leatherette sofa with shiny portholes for ash trays in the arms, Joel led me through the white archway into the passage. A refrigerator stood against the wall as if in a place of honor; our footsteps were noisy on thin checkered linoleum that outlined the uneven spines of the floor boards beneath it like a shiny skin. In his room, Joel showed the self-conscious busyness that comes upon one in one’s own home. He put out the little rough dog that had been sleeping on the bed, kicked a pair of shoes out of sight, cleared one or two rolls of plans off the table that held his model.

  To me the model was a cunning and delightful toy and I exclaimed over it with pleasure. I made him take the miniature ambulance out of its packet and place it under the portico.

  “What I’m worried about, you see, is this—” He knew I could not detect the functional pitfalls of his design, yet he hoped for reassurance in itself, even the reassurance of ignorance. I tried to separate my intelligence from my fascination with the perfect little windows, the flower boxes made of cork. “I see. I see …”

  He had a way of looking up penetratingly to see if the face of the person to whom he was speaking confirmed his words. It was quick, earnest, almost a request. “I’ll show you, here on the plan—somewhere here—” His long olive-skinned hands unrolled the paper on the bed, we knelt on it together, rumpling the blue taffeta cover that smelled of dog. The plan shot up again like a released blind. He picked it up, blew down it. He said calmly, as if the thing had dwindled to its proper small importance; “Well, there’ll be no problem getting it back again after it’s seen. I’ll take five minutes to break it up.” I protested, but he only smiled at me, swinging a leg. “You might want to look at this,” he said, “and these”—he was pulling books out of an old high case that stood by his bed—”Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright—the high priests—”

  I bounced his bed. “It’s very soft.” I laughed, looking round. He shrugged, deprecating it. “Feather bed; from Russia. Look, Helen, what do you think about this?” And he brought a book of Danish furniture design to my lap.

  I wandered slowly, curiously round his small room as if in a museum. The glossy books on modern architecture and the poetry of Ezra Pound, Yeats and Huxley, paper-backed John Stuart Mill and Renan’s Life of Jesus were stacked on the hand-crocheted mats which were spread on the chest of drawers, the bedside table and the top of the bookcase. A photograph of a school group hung on a brass wire, and a framed address in what looked like oriental characters and must be Hebrew hung at a lower level beside it. On the other wall a modern print had a frame that had evidently belonged to something else, and did not fit it. The only modern painter I had ever heard of was Van Gogh, from a novelized version of his life which I had taken from the Atherton library. “That’s not a Van Gogh, is it?”

  “Seurat.”

  “Oh.”

  A Treasury of Folk Tales for Jewish Boys and Girls, How to Make It, The Wonder Adventure Book—and on top of this battered pile an army cap. It was easy to forget that Joel had been in the army.

  “Joel, you’ve never told me, why were you discharged?”

  “I got a mastoid and it did something queer to my middle ear. For about a year I couldn’t hear at all.”

  I was curious. “Show me how you looked in uniform?—Oh, come on, you must have a picture somewhere?”

  He was kneeling next to his model, adjusting something with precision, and the light of the window behind him glowed through his ears and made his teeth shine in contrast to the darkness that blurred the rest of his face. “You laughing in anticipation?”

  “It’s the light through your ears—all red.—But put it on, then, if you won’t show me your picture.”

  He came forward laughing, with the air of a good-natured dog that allows a ribbon to be put on its collar. “Wait—wait—” I was knighting him with the cap, and his hand, with the short movements of someone searching by touch, was feeling to arrange it, when a hoarse little voice said softly, like a reluctant question: “Joel …”

  I turned round.

  “No, sit down—you’ll excuse me—I just want to ask something, Joel, d’you know if Daddy’s coming home to lunch or he’s going straight to Colley? He’s coming?” A short round woman stood in the doorway; she held her hands in front of her in the attitude of someone coming for instructions. They were puffy hands with hardened flesh growing up round small, clean but unkempt nails, the ragged-cuticle nails of domestic workers or children. Her body in a cheap silk dress that had the remains of an elaboration of black cotton lace and fagoted trimming round the neck was the incredibly small-hipped, thickened body of Jewish women from certain parts of Europe, the swollen doll’s body from which it seems impossible that tall sons and daughters can, and do, come. The floral pattern of the apron she wore
was rubbed away over the bulge of her breasts and her stomach. She looked at me from under the straggling, rather beautiful eyebrows you sometimes see on the faces of eagle-eyed old men, and beneath arches of fine, mauvish, shadowy skin, her lids remained level, half-shuttered. But the eyes were bright, liquid, water-colored.

  I knew she must be Joel’s mother and I felt acutely the fact that I was sitting casually on the bed, in the house of strangers. This I felt in relation to her, and to Joel, the embarrassment he must feel at her accent, her whole foreignness before me.

  But he answered her: “Colley?—Why should he go there first—Of course he’s coming home.”

  At once I was alone and they were both strangers. Something in the way he spoke to her, something he took from her own voice, as one takes a key in music, put me outside of them. I sat very consciously on the bed; what had been unnoticeably comfortable was now precarious: I had to brace my legs to prevent myself from slipping off the coverlet.

  I smiled at Mrs. Aaron timidly as if to excuse her to herself. But she did not feel the need to be forgiven; she gave herself time to look at me with frank curiosity, as one might stop to finger a piece of material in a shop. “Joel,” she bridled, “why don’t you bring the young lady into the lounge? Must she sit in the bedroom?—You must excuse him, he doesn’t think.” She drooped her head at him in an appraising, irritated smile. He made a little noise of smiling impatience. “No, it’s not nice she should be stuck in this room—It’s not so beautiful, believe me—” Suddenly she and I were both laughing; as usual, I had deserted, in a desire to be liked had aligned myself in a sudden swift turn with what embarrassed or frightened me. We were led back to the living room, his mother talking on as if he were absent: “It’s always like that. Anybody comes, he hides them away in his room.—Come sit down. Take a comfortable chair—”

  “No, really, I’m quite all right—”

  “Come on—” She made me move. All her own movements were slow, heavy and insistent as her voice, the movements of someone who has been on her feet a long time, like a horse who keeps up the plod of pulling a load even when he is set free in the field.

  She went over to the sideboard with a kind of formal dignity, as if in spite of her wrinkled stockings and her feet which defied the shape of her shoes, her slip showing beneath the old afternoon dress as she bent, there was a grace of behavior that existed independently, as a tradition, no matter who performed it or how. Next to three packs of cards was a pink glass sweet dish filled with clusters of toffee-covered biscuit. “You’ll have something? Come on.” I took one, but when she saw it in my hand uncertainty came to her. “Perhaps she’ll rather have a sweet, Joel—Take my keys, and in the bedroom cupboard—” I protested and bit into the sticky biscuit. “—Go on, I’ve got some nice chocolates.”

  I sat there eating my biscuit like a child who is being anxiously fattened.

  “A bunch of grapes, perhaps? I got lovely grapes today from the market.”

  Joel assured his mother that we did not want tea, lemonade or fruit.

  She sat down near the door on a straight-backed chair and her swollen ankles settled on her shoes. We had been introduced, and after she had sat breathing heavily, thoughtfully, over her resting bosom for a moment (neither of us spoke; we could hear her) she said with polite, cautious inquiry, as if the reply would really give her an answer to something else: “Your father he’s something on the Atherton Mine—and mummy? Your mummy’s still alive?”

  “Yes.” In an awkward burst I made some attempt to make my life real to her. “We’ve always lived there. My father’s Secretary.—I hate the Mine.”

  She stirred slowly in her chair. “So? It’s your home, we all got to like our home.”

  There was a pause. I was overcome with the theatrical way I had burst out ridiculously: I hate the Mine—and the even acceptance of this old woman’s reply. She got up slowly, stood looking round the room as if to make sure she had forgotten nothing. “Well, you’ll excuse me—” she said, as if I were not there, an air of apology that seemed to throw the onus of my presence on me, and went out slowly and suddenly both withdrawing and yet taking the field at the same time.

  “Would you like to wash?” said Joel, getting up. “They leave you rather sticky, though my mother really does make them very well.” He put the dish of sweet biscuits away carefully in the sideboard.

  I don’t know why he surprised me; Joel was continually surprising me by ease when there might have been strain, a word where there might have been a vacuum. He said what he thought and somehow it was never what I thought he was thinking: his nature had for mine the peculiar charm of the courage to be itself without defiance; I had always to be opposing myself in order to test the validity of my reactions, a moral “Who goes there?” to which my real feelings as well as those imposed from without and vaguely held suspect must be submitted in a confusion of doubt. And when I answered myself and acted, anxiousness sometimes made me mistake bravado for honesty.

  Now I had been ready to make it easy for Joel; to show him that so far as I was concerned, he need not mind about his mother. This was quite a different thing from finding that he did not mind about his mother; that far from being apologetic of the peculiar sweetmeat which politeness had forced me to eat, he seriously commended her skill in preparing it.

  Yet, as so often happened with him, what put me out momentarily, set me free as the expected reaction from him could not have done; it was not necessary to pretend anything, even understanding. I could be curious about the old portraits looking down on us. They were his father’s parents: “The old chap was supposed to be a Talmudic scholar. I don’t quite know what the Christian equivalent of that would be. … The Talmud—it’s a kind of book of religious philosophy. Somewhere in every Jewish family they’ve got a Talmudic scholar preserved, it’s a distinction none of us can afford to be without. Like ours, he’s usually dead, but there are stories about how during his life time he spent his days and nights poring over books of wisdom—you know, the Talmud’s rather like Shakespeare or Finnegans Wake now—hundreds of different interpretations of the text and scholastic arguments which die unsolved with their protagonists.—He doesn’t look much of a scholar, does he?”

  We looked the old man in the eye.

  I laughed. “She looks the brainy one.”

  “She was the go-getter. These Talmudic scholars are nice for prestige, but mostly they don’t make a living. With him I really think it must just have been an excuse to get out of working and hang around the synagogue with his pals.”

  “You make it sound like the men’s commonroom.”

  He pulled his nose down sardonically, laughing. “Now you see where I get it from. The family glories in the education I’m getting myself, while really all I’m doing is learning to play a devastating hand at bridge.—But seriously, as soon as any member of a Jewish family shows any inclination even vaguely connected with learning—it could be stamp-collecting or pornography—everybody starts wagging their heads: he’s just like old Uncle so-and-so, so studious. … She took in dressmaking to keep the family.” Under her eyes, we wandered back to Joel’s room; she had the imagined power of the dead and alien to fasten her look far beyond the frame or carved limits of their presence; like the face of the idol whose symbolism you do not understand—is he to bring rain, corn or protection?—but whose jeweled eye you feel long after you have left the temple.

  I left the house just before lunch with two of Joel’s books under my arm—one was always taking something from him, he was one of those people who give out of a sufficiency in themselves, welling up beautifully to a constant level no matter how often dipped into, and quite independent of material possession or the condescension of generosity. His father had come home but I did not see him, although I could hear, in the back of the house, a heavy tread and a moody voice speaking another language. Joel hung on the gate making a ridge of his brows against the sun. There was a fascination about the way he looked in the ful
l sun; the fascination I had felt in the faces of Indian waiters serving food in Durban hotels. That steely darkness of black curly hair—perhaps it was just that his hair was like theirs. But their faces came up in the sun as his did. The quiet-colored faces and neutral hair among which I had grown up had a way of almost disappearing in bright sunlight, only a sear of gleam here and there traced their light-flattened contours, and they blinked laughter, as if the brightness were a hand pushed in their faces. Ludi was something else again; his brightness took on brightness, like metal.

  One could not know whether it was the sun or thought that was making Joel frown. His hesitation made me wait. When we had already said good-by, he asked: “Shall I come to you, now?”

  I felt I understood what he meant. One could have a friendship in a train that could exist for years outside one’s life as an entity, but once one met and talked at home instead of between here and there, one part of one’s life and another, the friend of the train moved in to one’s life. “Yes, what about one evening? Tuesday—no, that’s the night I get back late. Wednesday, then?”

  But he said, as if it suddenly didn’t matter: “Oh, we don’t have to fix it now.” Then he smiled on an inner comment. “Right,” he said, dismissing it, very friendly, and with a little wave, turned up the path. When I looked back as I turned the corner, to take in a last curious impact of that little house, I saw he had not gone in but was still standing there, on the veranda steps, watching me go or staring at some object of his own.

  Joel came to the Mine several times and my mother received him without remark. She spoke to him for a few minutes with the usual slightly arch pleasantness which she showed toward my contemporaries—her whole manner on a higher, soprano key, like an actress helping across some lines whose meaning she feels may not be clear—and then left us on the fly-screened porch that was full of the flowered cotton chair covers and embroidered cushions she had made, the sawdust-stuffed stocking cat that held the door open. At four o’clock she came out with a tea tray laid with fresh linen and, not the best cups, but a little twosome breakfast set that was not in common use. I recognized in Joel’s serious, careful manner that she was even pretty, with her thin, dry-skinned face and her red hair only slightly faded by the curls that the hairdresser steamed into it once a week, now that it was cut, and the almost antiseptic scent of lavender water that waved out of the flounces of her dress. She was even well dressed, in what I was now beginning to recognize was the Mine style: the flower-patterned, unobtrusive blues and pinks of English royalty.