The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  Yet I was baiting Paul’s interest, and I knew it. On some other level than speech or conscious connivance, and toward some other end than the social and sexual titillation of a new combination within our group, I was beckoning him with all the thunderous silence of the deep attraction between us. Every time he or I walked into the room where the other was, coming into relation with each other and others like figures in a group of sculpture, there was a tightening of this. Every time we talked, ate together, trooped off to a cinema or a concert, the design of the company shifted a little, re-formed with him and me closer, more apart from them and significant.

  I felt a consciousness of my physical self—the attractiveness of my face as I turned my head and looked along my cheekline, the color of my loose red hair against a lilac-colored dress that created for me in combination a light of my own, fixed, like the light in which a painter has seen his picture—that I had not known since the time of the South Coast with Ludi. And as it had been with Ludi, the warm smell of Paul’s hair as he bent down in front of me to pick up something in the sun, the look of the skin of his arm as he rolled up a shirt sleeve, the damp look of his forehead when he had been running, had for me a pure fascination that needed only touch to become desire. It was difficult to believe that I had felt this before, for some other particular combination of flesh and spirit that makes every man a creature never to be matched, never to be repeated. … Yet it gave me a kind of simple sensual pride to understand out of experience the flow of this current. To wait, till it should take me up again; till I should lay myself down Ophelialike, and be carried by it.

  There the comparison with Ludi ended. As a human being, Ludi was remote: no one could have been more involved with life than Paul. And with him, for those first few weeks, my relationship with the Marcuses was lifted into a new meaning, blazed briefly into something approaching the free, gay, competent intimacy which had been my illusion of adult life when I was an adolescent. My presence with the Marcuses was now balanced out; as a young woman, I had my opposite number, a young man, and the sexual attraction between us lightly underscoring the heavier emotional threat in our own private air corresponded to the sexual ease between John and his wife. We were four friends, and two pairs; also two men friends and two women friends. So I felt myself an equal in the Marcuses’ participation in life both public and personal. If there was a point in understanding at which by gesture or implication John and Jenny ducked beneath the surface to some life of their own out of sight, so I, too, had, in the certain instinct of Paul’s attraction to me, a place they could only guess at.

  And they said no more about the chances of affection or an affair between us. I was sure that they speculated about it in private—was vain enough to wonder, when I heard the murmur of their voices in their room at night, whether they were discussing it—but the confrontation of us, in all the mystery and delicacy with which, though we used the stereotyped gestures of modern sophistication, the irony, the cool banter, the love of argument, we circled round each other in approach, made open comment impossible in spite of themselves.

  When Paul had been back in Johannesburg for nearly three weeks, we spent a dull evening without him. He had had to go to the Welshs’ for dinner, and we had Herby and a friend coming. The friend proved to be a girl in a taffeta dress with a string of pearls round her neck of the graded kind that small girls are given on their ninth or tenth birthday, along with their first bottle of scent, and a lace-bordered handkerchief which she kept clutched in her hand all through dinner. By the time dinner was over it was obvious that conversation with this girl was not only impossible (she replied with yes or no, and dropped her eyes quickly) but that she was as inhibiting to conversation excluding her as a child who listens with round eyes to what she cannot understand but cannot help hearing. Jenny and I, going into the kitchen to help Hilda with the coffee, improvised a seemingly spontaneous dialogue that would bring up the idea of going to a cinema. John was quick to take the cue, and we went into town and saw an indifferent film which I, for one, had seen before. Herby was essentially a useful person; tolerated for this rather than his rather dull manner of presenting his sound ideas, and so, as his friends, we could not help feeling rather impatient at having been used ourselves, by him—for obviously he had been obliged in some way to take this girl out, and had shifted the impossibility of entertaining her onto us. So we felt as if it were only what was due to us, the least, in fact, he could do, to suggest, as he did when we came out of the cinema, this particular night to take us to Marcel’s Cellar.

  Marcel’s Cellar was, as the name implies, the nostalgia of a group of restless young people for the Left Bank Paris of the brief experience of one or two and the imagination of the others. In the idea of the place there met, vaguely as could only happen thousands of miles away from the actuality, the garret of Mimi and Rudolph in the eighties and one of the cafés where Sartre characters talked. Even the name of the “owner” was in character, if out of date—but this was pure fortunate coincidence that Marcel du Toit’s name, common among Afrikaans South Africans with their mixed Huguenot-Dutch antecedents as Smith or Robinson among people of English descent, should be so appropriately romantic. He himself was a willowy, shady character, who with less pretensions would have been running a side show in a traveling fun fair, and, indeed, he presided over his cellar with an air of extreme languid dissipation that was clearly his underworldly bohemian version of the robust flourish he would have used for The Greatest Show on Earth.

  How he had come by the place, no one seemed to know. As I have said, it was the idea of seven or eight young people who decided to find some cheap convenient place in town where they could be private from any but their own kind and sit talking and perhaps drinking a little cheap wine until one o’clock in the morning. Each would pay a share of the rent, and this levy would serve as a subscription, so that the whole thing would be a kind of club. They dragged in some old mattresses, lit up the cobwebs with a few candles in bottles, and were probably as cosy as children playing besieged Indians. Unfortunately, they enjoyed themselves so much that they told their friends, and their friends began to come along, too, and bring their friends’ friends, and in no time the original group found their mattresses and their Jeripigo taken over by medical students who had picked up with vaguely arty girls, young men who worked as window dressers or clerks and wanted to paint or write—the whole shoal of restless, vaguely Leftist, mostly innocent Johannesburg youth which escaped to another unreality from the neon and air-conditioned unreality of the cinemas and the shops of their daily lives. It must have been then that Marcel saw his opportunity, and, like the Wolf dressed up as the Grandmother, put on his velvet jacket and relieved the bewildered group of the responsibility for the rent.

  The great thing about the place was that it really was a cellar. This was an inestimable advantage that Marcel must have been quick to see. Instead of driving out to a roadhouse or going to a shiny Greek tearoom or a plush-insulated hotel where a trio played blearily from Showboat, we drove down to the area of darkened warehouses. There, where the cement and the paving rang like iron beneath the street lights, almost opposite the central police station which was only a name or a vaguely disquieting joke to us in our white skins and middle-class security, was the old building which once had housed a wholesale liquor business. We went in through the old-fashioned door of an empty shop whose windows were hung with hessian and then down a rickety wooden stair for which a hole had been made in the rotting wooden floor, into the cellar.

  It looked and smelled like the workshop of a garage, and we stood looking round with the suppressed giggles of curiosity while Herby was engaged in some sort of argument with an official-looking blonde sitting at a kitchen table. She was flanked by a couple of very young men who established their status as habitués by the extreme casual untidiness of their clothes—no one could be so haphazardly rumpled anywhere but at home. As the place had no license, no charge could be made for admission, but appar
ently this snag was circumvented by the rule that patrons had to pay a “subscription” which varied on the blonde’s assessment of what they looked as if they might pay. Even when Herby had put down a note and we were officially in, one of the young men sauntered up to the women of our party and said: “Wouldn’t any of you like to give us a donation—? Anything—a piece of your jewelry?” The girl froze terrified as if it had been suggested that she leave her virginity at the door, and Jenny and I burst out laughing at the idea of gravely presenting our “jewelry”—a Zulu bead collar she had bought for 5/6, and a pair of cheap oxidized silver earrings that I wore. “—She’ll leave her wedding ring with you on her way out—” said John, ushering Jenny past.

  “Where’re we going to sit ourselves …?” Herby was looking briskly out over the dark, bare place where here and there a candle threw huge shadows on the rough whitewashed walls and the huddles of people with their voices lowered to the dark as if he were entering a restaurant where an obsequious maître d’hôtel would come up to lead us to a white-covered table. All the mattresses on the floor were fully occupied with murmurous burdens and the few wooden forms round the walls were clustered with people sitting and standing, so we all laughed at him. “It’s exactly like an air-raid shelter,” Jenny was saying. “If they’d ever lived in England it wouldn’t be their idea of pleasure. Exactly like a shelter, even the mattresses.” Herby had dashed on ahead and, the perfect host, found a vacant mattress for us, or rather an almost vacant mattress—someone’s coat claimed a corner of it but the owner was not there. As we settled ourselves down, the group around the radiogram near the stair broke away like a football scrum, and a French tango, scratchy, passionate, the musical equivalent of the breath of sweet wine and garlic, swung out.

  At once I liked the place; it was ridiculous, self-conscious, pathetic in its attempt to be dramatically sordid, but it was fun: an amusing parody of a kind of life which did not exist in Johannesburg. I was watching the couples who were getting up all around us to dance on the part of the cracked concrete floor that was kept clear, and the tall figure that Herby had pointed out as Marcel, moving about with a way of arresting his head, lifted momentarily in the advantage of a flicker of light, so that you could see his pointed golden-colored beard and the curl of smoke round his head from the long holder in his mouth and the nimbus of his golden-brown velvet jacket. I saw that, rather pointlessly and harmlessly, since the place was so dark, people of diverse talents had been allowed to contribute some wall decorations—just behind our heads there was a horrifyingly emaciated Christ, represented as an African, with the half-finished background of the hovels of Shantytown, and over above the bunch of dancers, where a candle in a tin holder was hung on a nail, a tremendous female figure, bulbous in the magazine manner, covered half the wall. The radiogram, too, was magnificently vulgar and incongruous; a great thing of shiny veneered woods, zebra-striped in imitation of fancy grains—the kind of machine that can only be bought on hire purchase.

  But Jenny and John were regarding the place perfectly seriously; I could see that. They were looking around just as they did when by some chance they found themselves in a typical “nice” middle-class home in one of Johannesburg’s fashionable northern suburbs. “It’s hardly the sort of thing to interest progressive people—I mean, I should think that if they have any politics at all they’re likely to be anarchist and antisocial.” Jenny bent her head to me in the confidential deprecating tone with which she would point out a built-in cocktail cabinet or a baby crib hung with lace and ribbons. “… The obverse side of this is, of course, Houghton,” John was saying to Herby. As a Jew who, by marrying a Gentile girl from England, had completed his assimilation in a society that held as one of its basic tenets a complete absence of race-consciousness, he made his Jewish origin a guarantee of good faith which allowed him to speak of the Jews in a manner which would not have been considered acceptable in a Gentile with the “right ideas.” “These are the children of Market Street merchants, I’ll bet. Papa makes a hundred thousand in soft goods, there’s a swimming pool and a tennis court and two Buicks, and the kids start up this sort of thing. Petit Trianon of the bourgeois. But you’ll notice it’s not the rousing drinking songs, the lively dancing and the open-air eating places they try to re-create. Those are in their racial memory, too, but they want to forget them. Their fathers want to forget those; they’ve spent thirty or forty years piling up money to put them at a distance from everything that was in their lives when they were simple oppressed people in Europe. But their suppression of their working-class origin creates a guilt feeling in the kids which goes the usual way—it manifests itself somewhere else. Here it poisons their healthy fan tasy; when they want to play at being poor it’s not the vigorous, hopeful proletariat they ape, it’s the miserable, nihilistic café life of the dispossessed exile. Forgetting one bad memory, they ‘remember’ a worse one: they want the darkness, the instinct to hide away, to meet secretly and talk in whispers, of their brothers who survived concentration camps.—The concentration camps for which our Houghton friends have a certain moral responsibility because they were the product of a Fascist-Capitalist society much like the one in which they are making their money. …”

  The girl whose coat had been lying on the mattress we had taken apparently noticed WC had commandeered her place, and came flying up to see if her coat was still there. She was a bright-haired girl unfashionably dressed in a print frock, and her rounded breasts, not divided and pressed into a uniform pointedness by the American brassière that was accepted as a decree of desirability by Johannesburg women of all classes, suggested a farm girl. She was panting and warm from the dance and the twist and pressure of her body against her rumpled belt and the seams of her sleeves as she caught up the coat had something of the sensuous emanation of the bodies of children sweaty with hard play. She seemed to make nonsense of what John was saying. Not because she was Afrikaans, obviously poor, and neither suffering from nor even sufficiently burdened with sophistication to know that there was such a thing as a guilt feeling, but because she was in a moment of completely unthinking living, and he, a young, good-looking man, was capable only of dry observation.

  I felt again the sense of drift, of alienation from the abstractions coming out of people’s mouths—my own and others—that came to me sometimes at the highest point of a discussion. It would seem to me that the creaking ropes that attached talk to living raveled out with a thin snap and what I was listening to and saying with such intensity floated away as unconnected with my living being as a kite to the earth from which its string has been cut. Now I felt myself living and aware as part of the dank, dusty dark where contact with other men and women was the brush of a hand or the momentary warmth of a thigh bumped against you, rather than speech. The way they managed to dance on the rough floor, cavorting breathlessly, or pressed together, the girl’s head limp on the man’s shoulder, the man’s face turned to her hair, in the spell of concentration desire puts suddenly upon people, gave the tomblike place a contrast of warm-blooded life, a sort of human impudence which made the air sensual. I felt closer to the young Afrikaans girl than to the friends with whom I lived.

  Herby, too, seemed slightly excited by the Cellar, and gave only a distracted half-attention to John. He had managed to get some wine. There were no glasses so we had to gulp it out of the bottle, and it became clear from the teasing way he pressed it upon me and kept asking me what I thought of the place, that he intended to neglect the girl friend and attach himself to me. When he pulled me up to dance I found myself looking at the line of his jowl, the thick skin uneven with shallow shining holes like the bubble holes in a slice of cheese, and noting without pity or regret his complete lack of attraction and the way my body automatically held well away from his and even my hand, loosely in his, kept a withdrawn formality of its own. He would think that we were dancing like this out of respect for me because I was not an “easy” girl and he would not believe that I would dance pressed c
lose with my legs interlaced with a man’s like the people around us. He would go on for years thinking this about all the girls of his own world, all the girls who were proud and good-looking and able to talk on his own level of intelligence: that casual love-making was only to be had where he got it, from girls who were inferior and did not interest him outside the relief of sex.

  While I was thinking this about him and we were dancing he was talking to me and I was answering with a certain exertion of charm which was a little unkind, but which the atmosphere brought out in me almost without my volition. Every time we danced near the stair he would crane his neck to see the people still coming in although the place was already crowded, and when this had happened several times he explained: “Isa’s having some friends and she said she might come along. I promised I’d keep a look out so’s I could get them in.”

  It seemed a very long time before they came.

  They won’t come, I kept telling myself, make up your mind they’re not coming. I never took my eyes off the stair, through the well of which people appeared feet first, so that sometimes they paused with only the bottom half of their bodies visible and I had to wait to make sure that those were not the thin calves of Isa, the brogues of Paul. Jenny said: “Oh good! Do keep a watch out, Herby? They may not see us in this dingy hole.” But I did not know whether I wanted them to come or not: in case Paul should be with another girl; in case he should see me in the context of dancing with Herby. Yet the fact that he might be coming was hardly the surprise of something unimagined, to me. He had been in my mind in the power of his absence all the evening; my sympathetic pleasure in the atmosphere of the place, my warmth toward the odd-looking young men and the cheap, yearning girls, was the softening toward all human frailty that comes from one’s own sudden involvement in wanting and loving. Even the cold appraisement of the accepted for the outsider which I had given poor Herby had been really a measure of Paul’s irresistibility, of the eagerness of my response to Paul rather than the nonexistence of my response to Herby.