“The fiancée’s a research chemist—I think she’s from Capetown,” Colley was telling Joel.
“I don’t know what. But they’ll go everywhere, they’ll be in Europe, they’ll do what they like. …” Mrs. Aaron, sawing off another slice of bread in answer to some unintelligible sounds from the old relative, was defiant with the freedom of the two young people. Her body woke up to the swiftness it might have had. “Here.” She gestured the bread on the point of her fork. “Anybody else wants?”
“Joel,” said the aunt, with the coy smile of someone venturing a question she pretends not to remember having asked several times before. “I wonder why you didn’t study doctor. You know, I often say—”
“He could have done it. Just the same as Maurice.” Mr. Aaron—he reminded me of some heavy, thick-skinned animal, a rhinoceros or boar, rising reluctantly and powerfully to the prick of words—flew into an aggressive assurance, staring at Joel. “You could have been like Maurice?”
“Of course. I know.” Joel spoke to him with assurance of another kind. “You let me do what I wanted. I’m not sorry.”
“There you are! It just shows you,” said the aunt, not saying what.
“He’ll also go to Europe, to America,” Mrs. Aaron said. “No, no, sit down—” She gestured her daughter, going round to gather the dirty plates herself.
“Was Hilda Marks at the party, Ma?” Colley wiped her child’s mouth with the firm, hard movements of a cat’s tongue.
“No, I told you, only her mother.”
“I hear they’ve got a stand near ours, they’ve started building already.”
“Is that so?”
“You’re going to build a house?” Again I had the feeling that the aunt’s surprise was feigned; she was one of those women who so intensely enjoy the affairs of others that they can savor being told a dozen times and versions, by a dozen different people. I felt quite sure she already knew the answer to her query. “Where?”
Colley’s irritated smile confirmed my suspicion. “But surely you knew? I mean we bought the ground from Dave … and I’m sure he would be the first to run and tell you.”
“My dear, unless you tell me yourself, it’s not for me to say I know.” She turned to Mrs. Aaron, more at ease. “Where’s it, here in the township?”
Mrs. Aaron drew her mouth up and shook her head. “Here? What for? Who lives here now? It’s in a lovely neighborhood, you know there by the dam, open—”
Her daughter supplied the name of the new suburb, an English county name that the estate agent had taken from an overseas magazine.
“But it’s so near the mine dump, there, isn’t it? Mrs. Friedman would have bought there, only she told me the dump’s stuck in middle …”
So they bridled and argued, their voices rose and fell, cutting one across the other, and tea came round, already poured out into the cups in the kitchen and slopping over into the saucers. It reminded me of my mother, for whom this served as a standard for hotels and people; if she got her tea served in her own teapot, then the hotel was a real hotel and not a glorified boardinghouse, the woman whom she was visiting was at least a social equal by personal habit—the most reassuring and revealing gauge. Telepathically, Joel said to me: “Aren’t you going to phone? They might be home by now, and wondering.” I excused myself—nobody heard me—and went to the telephone, which was in the passage, fixed to the wall, as in a public call box. I had not put the light on, and only the wash from the light room where they all sat made watermarks along the nobbly linoleum. I could hear their voices and the click and clatter of the table, while down the telephone, I heard the bell ringing in my mother’s house; heard it as I did from my own room. It stopped. My mother’s voice said challengingly, faint: “Hullo?”
“Mummy—”
“Daddy was getting worried. Where are you?”
“Have you been back long? I’m sorry. Didn’t Anna tell you?”
“Something about you’d gone out with a young man, but it’s half-past nine—” Her voice became muffled, she had turned away from the mouthpiece; then came clear again. “No, that was Daddy.—What? I don’t know.—He says did you take the key.”
“No, it’s under the sword fern on the stoep.”
“All right. The big one or the new one?”
“The old one.”
“I’ve put away something for you. We didn’t feel like having any more to eat.”
“It’s all right, I’m having supper here.”
“Supper? Where?”
“At Joel’s. With the Aarons.”
“With the Aarons?” There was a pause.
“Did you enjoy the braaivleis? How are the Mackenzies?”
“Very nice,” she said, without attention. “How will you get in when you come home—?” It was a voice ignoring a profession of taste that simply could not be understood; not condemned, but quite incomprehensible.
“Leave the key for me where I put it before.”
“All right, then—”
“I won’t be late,” I weakened. But our voices had crossed; she said good-by and hung up.
I stood there a moment. On a small table under the telephone was the outline of a vase of paper flowers, crazily angular with the look of lifeless things, even in the half-dark. I touched one out of curiosity or compassion for the ugliness I could not see, and a smell of dust came away with my hand. The refrigerator shook away at the top of the passage. There was a different smell about the narrow place, like the passage outside the bedrooms of an old country hotel where you have stopped for one night.
I went back into the living room and nodded to Joel under the talk. “Rubbish! Rubbish!” Colley’s husband was shouting. “They couldn’t do without us here, and they know it. Think Malan doesn’t know it?”
“Nothing’s indispensable in South Africa but the Chamber of Mines and native labor.” Joel smiled.
They ignored him. “Look at medicine, law—even the farmers. The whole economy would collapse.”
“But that’s what they say, Max, that’s what they say. The Jews in everything, they don’t want it. …”
The women were clearing the table, and when it was done the older people remained sitting round it, arms resting on the scratched and ringed surface, under the beat of the light. The mother and father sat with their hands loosely in front of them, the way people do who do not read or amuse themselves in their leisure, but take it as inactivity between labor and labor. Joel was kneeling with the little girl over her collection of sample breakfast foods and patent medicines, spread on the carpet.
The business of eating, which in common with a crisis or danger brings heterogenous incompatibles comfortably together, was over and now suddenly we were all fallen apart. The heaviness, the sense of patiently waiting for me to be gone so that they could resume their life, came over the old Aarons again as I had noticed it when I had been in their house at other times. No one seemed to have anything to say. Mrs. Aaron got up and fetched a dish of preserves from the sideboard; but everyone turned his head away. Even Joel was silent, stretched on the floor with his head against a little stool with a broken riem seat; it seemed that sometimes he was aware of me, and sometimes he was aware of them, but never was he present to all of us together.
I sat alone on the sofa, smiling when someone smiled at me.
Soon he got up suddenly, and raised his eyebrows at me. I said my good-bys and thanks and in an atmosphere of sterile politeness, we left, our footsteps very loud on the boards behind us.
Joel drove me home. It seemed to me it was because I was tired, with that sense of tiredness that keeps one floating just above the surface of reality, but we did not speak. In place of communication there was between us a speechless ease that I have never forgotten. It was as if we had ducked through a crowd and found ourselves alone in a small quiet place.
When the car died out quiet at our gate under the pines, he sat a moment. I said, “Good night …,” gently, to rouse him, and he looked up
slowly, coming awake.
“Don’t come in,” I said. And then: “I’ll be all right.”
He nodded. Smiled, waiting for me to go.
I got out, but a curious sensation overcame me, a physical sensation of distress prickling over my skin. I stood with a kind of helplessness on the muffled feel of thick pine needles. I felt with distress that there was something that I must say now; no, that there was something that had passed unsaid, and that now was too late. … A great bird waves across the sky: look!—but you have not seen it; when you lifted your head it was gone. Something in me clutched: What is it? What is it?
It was dark; Joel could not see my face. There was a moment when we both waited.
I said: “I’ve got the drawings …,” held them up.
The feeble commonplace flung across a bridge. “Good night,” we said, warmly, gently. And by the time I reached the porch door I heard the car, gone.
As I took the key from under the fern and let myself into our house, with the silence and scents and disposition of furniture that flowed into me with the sense of an animal feeling its way back into its own nest, the urgency that had cut me off in pain began to melt, to flow away in my blood like a clot that dissolves. Yet I was weak, empty with the relief. It had been, I thought suddenly, as I took off my clothes, put on a nightgown that slid loosely over my body, as if I had been told without warning that I was never going to see someone again. A hollow premonition of loss.
And how ridiculous, since I should see Joel on Tuesday morning, and in any case, he would be the sort of friend one would have all one’s life.
Chapter 15
I did see him again on Tuesday, and for many other Tuesdays.
A whole year passed, unremarkable, one of those periods of consolidation in change when one is growing and filling out into the spaces of a life the shape of which has been set but not yet seen: the time will come to stop short, and look, up and around at the walls, the ceilings, the staircases leading from here to there, that one has built around oneself out of daily dabs of mud. Or the year was like a ship; inside it seems much the same town you have always lived in—restaurants, shops, the hairdresser, the cocktail bar and the library. But beneath the patterned carpet oceans are moving past your feet; and you yourself have determined this with a ticket you bought months back.
I continued to travel in and out of Johannesburg to the University. I did my work with pleasure, if a certain lack of conviction. The vague, luring promise of childhood persisted, like a whiff of smoke on the horizon, become now the uninvestigated idea that, since the need was there, something would come to coil up my energies like a spring. I should find the people and the life where all that was in me would be released into action. Joel still said to me sometimes: Any ideas? Thought about what you’re going to do? But now I always replied, rather tartly: You remember—I’m going to get married.
Through him I continually met people who seemed to me to put a finger of confirmation on my vague sense of promise. A girl and her husband, both medical students, who talked proudly, with what was almost a sense of adventure, about the clinic they were going to set up in one of the squatters’ townships of African workers outside Johannesburg; another girl who talked of nothing but the literacy campaign on which she was working among the thousands of “wash-Annies” and cookboys and houseboys who had never been to school at all; the young man who was a journalist on a conservative paper but spent most of his leisure helping the gentle, revolutionary-minded wife of a University professor to bring out a liberal weekly that didn’t pay.
And, of course, Joel himself. But Joel’s commitment was not so easily nor so satisfactorily defined. Joel’s raison d’être eluded one. To borrow the definitions of faith, if the others were monotheistic in their grasp of life, he was pantheistic. He worked at his architecture with enthusiasm and a detached seriousness—there were plans about that: an experiment in mass-produced cottages for Africans he was working on privately with the progressive Town Engineer of one of the Reef towns, and that might come to something. The tentative offer of a particularly interesting job with an architect (a friend of his who had been with UNRRA in Europe and now wanted to go back and take Joel walking with him through France and Italy) in Rhodesia. And, most tempting, the chance he might get to work under one of England’s most original and brilliant men on a reconstruction project in London.
All these things he kept calmly in consideration. And yet at the same time he sometimes spoke, with the practical evaluation of plans and not the dash and sweep of dreams, of joining his mother’s brother on a recently acquired citrus farm, or working only part time as an architect when he qualified, so that he could go back to the University to do a course on soil conservation. Looking back on it now, I can see that he could have done any of these, or perhaps several at different times in his life, and that if one had failed he would not, like so many other people, have been lost, because his sense of his own potentialities was so broadly based, and his aliveness was not confined to any narrow aspect, but to the whole of aliveness itself: with everything that grew, that inquired, that illuminated instead of merely perpetuating the human state.
Of course, this did not seem so to me then. I only saw that Joel stood in many rooms, talked or lapsed into the silence of familiar understanding with many different people, but belonged, somehow, not with one group or the other, but with them all. This amounted in the end to belonging only to himself; a puzzling position that was quite the opposite of loneliness. Often he introduced me to a little circle by which I was taken up so that a friendship was formed from which he was excluded and they became my friends rather than his. Yet he did not seem to mind. He almost literally stood at the door of interest, diversion, stimulation, and watched me go in: quietly, inwardly ablaze with pleasure and curiosity.
Most of these people moved in or about the fringe of the life of the University, though many had never been students there. Whatever the diversity of their true interests, or the variation of their sincerity, they had one common condition: all were young people who had overflowed the group, race or class to which they belonged. The sons of Jewish merchants who wanted to paint instead of make money, the daughter of a Nationalist farmer who worked for the establishment of native trade-unions, the boy who incurred all the scorn of a country of tough pioneer stock turned tougher businessmen because he wanted to dance in the ballet, the fiercely intellectual young Afrikaans poets who had more in common with Baudelaire than Paul Kruger—they formed the only society where all the compartments of South African life ran into one another. Even the barbed wire of wealth was down; the sons of the poor found that a certain lack of money was honorable, the sons of the rich escaped the confines of luxury. Loosely attached to the arts and learning at one end, and to politics and social reform at the other, this society is a common phenomenon all over the world. The important difference was that in South Africa, a young, fanatically materialist country with virtually no tradition of literature or art, and, in the problem position of a white minority predominant over a black majority, a socio-political preoccupation that is closer to obsession than to mild academic discussion, this society had far greater responsibility than its counterparts in older countries. Lopsided—tethered to a thin line of culture from Europe on one side, dragged down toward an enormous, weighty racial tangle on the other—they had only the tantalization of recorded music, imported books, reproductions of pictures; but ate, slept, worked and breathed in the presence of the black man, like the child’s monster of inherited guilt always at his back. The desires to which these facts gave rise consequently tended to be even more confused than those of young people in other countries, so that a young man’s passionate eagerness to win the music he was denied hearing in the comfortable torpidity of his home jumped like a little flame from a grass stalk to a great, dry crackling mass of a whole nation of black people denied so much that he had taken for granted. So, if his social conscience was not pure, if in some other country where his parent
s’ money and cultural standards would have been more equitable he would not have concerned himself with the cry of the dispossessed, in South Africa a quick sympathy from his own small struggle struck out and identified itself with the vast one. There were many others like him, who, wanting something for themselves, suddenly found understanding for the yawning want of the Africans—not the clamor of the few leaders and rebellious papers who were articulate for them, but the plain, unremarked want of food, of clothes, of houses, of recognition and friendship that was silently in the thousands of ordinary black people who went about the life of the city.
Of course, this society which excited me much and quite impartially was made up to a large extent of people for whom it was only a stage in the process of becoming placid, conventional citizens. As you have to be fish before fetus, so for a time they were liberal before conformist. They flirted a little with the vague stirrings of a sense of beauty, just as the fetus remembers a prehuman life in the sea, and then put away the Bach Chaconne and the Mozart Mass like toys outgrown, and turned to the real business of having babies and bridge afternoons. They put Balzac and Dante and Martin Buber where they looked impressive in the bookcase, and became family men concentrated on the fluctuations of the stock exchange and the relative merits of Buicks and Cadillacs. Men and women, when they reached forty-five, they would sometimes like to mention that they had gone in for that sort of thing once; they had also had measles or mumps and had at one time thought of going on the stage—this with a kind of helpless, satisfied smile at the children produced and the elegant house apparently grown up round them as unavoidably as a tortoise grows its shell.
They were unimportant. So were a great many others, who would never be writers, never be painters, never bring the legitimate stage to South Africa, or dance at Sadler’s Wells, although they lived, talked and worked in what they believed was the manner of people who did these things. In fact, this set of eager, intense, earnest and gay people consisted mainly of the intelligent pseudo, the hangers-on who at the time were quite indistinguishable from the few who were something: the few who were of them and in their midst and were in reality to become the writers, the painters, the actors, the dancers and even the leaders all believed themselves to be.
The Lying Days Page 18
