When we talked about the kind of life we should live together I would say: “I want to live with you in the greatest possible intimacy.” I said it with a deep earnest satisfaction that was at the same time apprehensive, lying back on the pillow and looking at him. And I do not know that I knew exactly what it was that I meant; though I knew what it was that I did not mean. I did not want to belong to the women’s camp while my husband belonged to the men’s camp. I did not want to sit talking to women of things that “did not interest” men, while he sat with the men talking of things that “did not interest” women. I did not want him to be a scapegoat, hidden behind a newspaper: “I’ll have to ask my husband,” “I don’t know what my husband will think”—as if he were a kind of human reference work, a statute book on which the state of the household internally and in relation to society was based. … When Paul questioned me, I could only pause, and then say, like another question, an obstinate question rather than an answer: “… This, I want this. It must be like this.” I knew this warmth of physical intimacy—eating, bathing, sleeping, waking together—was not all of two human beings rooted in each other but free, yet it was all I had so far come to know of the state I imagined.
Paul delighted in it for itself; for him I think it was immediate and complete. There was a peculiar charm in loving a woman, a girl as young as I was, whose desire was to identify herself entirely with his being. Older women he had known had, I imagine, wanted to possess him; they took him to themselves. But I wanted to devote myself to him. He felt he owned me, and all the love and pleasure I could give him. It was a sort of young male’s kingdom into which he had come into his own after being the darling page boy of the court. When I put into words the way we spent our time together, he was quite maddened; he kissed me and caressed me and worried at me in enchantment with the way I was made and the things that I said.
I never went back to the Marcuses’. When the week was up and we both descended into the world, like two children who have made a suburban room their secret tower, we could not live apart again. It was senseless to see each other in snatches, to lie at night the distance across the town away from each other, to eat and talk with others. All that was senseless; the only thing that was right and simple was to stay together. It is curious how moral censure never seems applicable to oneself. I would say of others: “Aren’t they living together?—I heard he had some girl in his flat?”—But it never occurred to me that people might speak of Paul and me in the same casual tone, that I might be to them merely some girl who lived with a man. In any case we were as good as married; the marriage was a mere formality we had still to go through. We had wanted to marry at the end of the year, when we had saved a little money and could perhaps go to Europe. But now: “We’ll get married when they come back,” said Paul, speaking of my mother and father. “I want to shoot you down to Natal at Easter to show you to my people. We’ll go for the long week end and then I can take you to the Drakensberg, and we’ll climb.”
My mother and father, writing to me from Devonshire of the “real English Christmas and New Year” they had spent with my father’s stepsister, stood vaguely sentinel in my mind. I did not really think of them; yet they were there. I continued to write to them from the Marcuses’ address. …
Paul could not understand my deceit with them. That I should not want them to know that we were living together, because the knowledge would shock them, he could perhaps admit; it was simply expedient. But that I should be ashamed of my deceit, that I should “pull a guilty face about it”—that annoyed him. “Are you ashamed of living with me?”
“How can you ask?”
“Then if you’re not doing anything you’re ashamed of, what are you feeling so bad about?”
I could not answer.
“You know what you remind me of? A little girl who has been told God is watching her all the time. And if she does something God thinks is naughty, he will know, no matter where she is, no matter how she tries to hide it. … Just look at you.”
And I stood there, in the sudden descent of dismay that came with their letters; fingering the envelope, addressed in my father’s rather beautiful hand (its sweeping flow always suggested some freer, other side of him I had never seen, as the sight of his bare knees, in tennis shorts, suggested to me as a child another existence outside the known one as my father). My mother would sit down and write her pile of letters in her large wavering hand, where the tails of the y’s in one line looped through the crosses of the t’s on the one below, and then my father would address the envelopes for her, consulting the little pigskin notebook where the addresses were all set down. …
“It seems so mean …,” I said, not wanting to annoy him. I saw so clearly in the light of his presence, the set of his head, the small impatient movement of his foot, the childish stupidity of my scruples, that let me lie and yet made me whimper over the lying.
He knew I was troubled but though he wanted to be sympathetic he could not conceal his boredom with the reason; it came through the smile he gave me now. “—Then tell them if it’ll make you feel any better …?” He put on his hat with the air of getting back to the real business of life, picked up his cigarettes and the car key. He was the only young man I knew who wore a hat, and somehow it was part of his sense of vitality, that well-worn but smart and expensive hat clapped unerringly on his head as he went out. It was typical of Paul that his careless love of good clothes was accepted unquestioningly by people like the Marcuses, who would have scorned the manifestation as hopelessly materialistic in anyone else. He came over to me and kissed me before he went, lifting me tightly off the ground although he was not particularly tall, and then setting me down again.
For him the consciousness of being answerable to one’s parents for one’s moral actions was something he could not conceive of in me, even something slightly ridiculous; for to him I was an adult woman, answerable only to her own integrity. When he had gone I felt ashamed and disgusted with myself for being less than this. I had the horrible feeling that the Mine had laid a hand on me again; Atherton had gleefully claimed me as one of its own, lacking the moral courage to be anything else.
I put the letters into the back of the kitchen drawer behind the string and corkscrews and a broken top (how had it got there?) and went out. The flat boy interrupted a conversation on the entrance steps to turn and greet me with a little grunt of friendly pleasure preceding and tailing off after his “Mad-am …”; he was a tiny, big-headed Basuto, wearing, like the clothes of an elder brother, the white cotton kitchen suit provided for the god-bodied great Zulu who had preceded him. I reaped the geniality engendered by long conversations in Sesuto with Paul. Over the road two white men in workmen’s overalls watched me pass and, grinning, shouted something I did not hear because of the noise of the concrete mixer which two natives were feeding.
At the bus stop an enormously fat woman in black sat spread on the seat in the burning sun. She moved her feet a little, like a restless elephant. A woman with a shopping bag that bulged although it was empty, as though in exhaustion, joined us, jumped on and pawed at by a small boy. As I sat between them with my flimsy dress falling away from my bare legs and the scent of my own powder rising from my neck in the heat, I felt a sudden return of power. The pure arrogance of being young; free, risen every day from love, this was the long moment, limitless when you are living it, brief when it has passed or you have never had it, that was conferred upon me by the drab indifference of the women on either side.
Perhaps it is in moments like this, selfish as the laws of life itself, yet humble in the evidence of the flowerlike nature of human beings despite their brain and spirit, that happiness is sharpest. I know that it came to me then as sudden and delightful as a bird sheering up out of nowhere into the sky.
That summer was the second under Nationalist government. (The jokes of the Sunday afternoon when we had all talked over the election-forecast competition had, with the calm irony of event, become fact; Laurie w
as our prophet and not our clown.) As people always do when the unthinkable comes to pass, we had braced ourselves to the curious letdown of finding ourselves on the losing side, looking with a sense of unreality at the flat-faced, slit-mouthed Dr. Malan staring back from under the caption PRIME MINISTER, and had waited for calamity to come down.
Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. We wanted a quick shock, over and done with, but what we were going to get was something much slower, surer, and more terrible: an apparent sameness in the conduct of our lives, long periods when there was nothing more to hurt us than hard words in Parliament and talk of the Republic which we had laughed at for years; and, recurrently, a mounting number of weary battles—apartheid in public transport and buildings, the ban on mixed marriages, the suppression of Communism bill, the language ordinance separating Afrikaans and English-speaking children in schools, the removal of colored voters from the common electoral roll and the setting aside of the Supreme Court judgment that made this act illegal—passionately debated in Parliament with the United Party and Labor Party forming the Opposition, inevitably lost to the Government before the first protest was spoken.
When the impact on individual, personal lives is not immediate and actual, political change does not affect the real happiness or unhappiness of people’s lives, though they may protest that it does. If the change of government throws you into a concentration camp, then your preoccupation with politics will equal that you might normally have had with your wife’s fidelity or your own health. But if your job is the same, your freedom of movement is the same, the outward appearance of your surroundings is the same, the heaviness lies only upon the extension of yourself which belongs to the world of abstract ideas, which, although it influences them through practical expression of moral convictions, loses, again and again, to the overwhelming tug of the warm and instinctual. The people I knew were “politically conscious” and as liberals or left-wing sympathizers they knew more thoroughly and perhaps felt more deeply than the United Party conservatives the reactionary shade into which the country had passed simply by fact of the Fascist Nationalists coming to power. Yet although they talked gloomily, I did not see in anyone’s face the anxious concentration of concern I had seen come so quickly over the sickness of a child, or the haggard foreboding that kept pace with the disintegration of a love affair. In the private worlds where people secretly decide the success or failure of their attempt at life, the old battles made or broke; it was only very slowly, as the months and then the years went by, that the moral climate of guilt and fear and oppression chilled through to the bone, almost as if the real climate of the elements had changed, the sun had turned away from South Africa, bringing about actual personality changes that affected even the most intimate conduct of their lives.
In this Paul and I would probably have been much like the others; but our circumstances were different. Because of the nature of his work, Paul had always been as daily, hourly conscious as of his own aliveness of the silent condemnation of the Africans; that accusing condemnation which others were varyingly aware of, like a distant gaze on their backs. He lived in the midst of it. His life was a reversal of the life of the average Johannesburg person. They went about their own affairs, in a white world, vaguely intruded upon by the knowledge that beyond the city where they had their offices and the tree-hidden suburbs where they lived, there was a scattered outcast city from which the emissaries came—cleaned up to approximate to the white man’s standards of decency—and disappeared into again. He went about his affairs in a black world, in those townships (even the word was the white man’s generality for something he had not seen—some were the rows of houses the word comfortably suggests, others were huddles of tin and sacking, junk heaps animated by human beings) dumped outside the city, and for him it was the clean, prosperous, handsome white world that existed on the edge of consciousness. He never drove back to it without a sense of incredulity that this city—these girls in fancy shoes coming from offices, the men reversing into parking bays with hump-necked skill—could cut itself so pitilessly in two and close its eyes so completely to half its life. Sometimes he found himself looking with something almost as hot as hate at the white people in the streets, seeing even the most unknowing of them as despots in their very ignorance of what was wrong and terrible where they walked; but at other times he would tell me how he suddenly had the sense of Johannesburg as a beleaguered city, ringed about by all those smoking, wretched encampments which she herself had created. …
Paul began to say things like this now. He had never said them before, and now, although he still laughed and derided what he called the “Hysterical-Histrionical Friends of the Downtrodden African,” there were times when he seemed to struggle with a sense of drama? evil? that made him speak in spite of himself. At first I did not know what to make of it; I even felt half-amused, in a puzzled sort of way, at catching him out in the kind of highly colored fantasy of disgust from which he had so often brought me down to face the unpleasant facts at which my imagination had started up like a covey at the sound of a gun. But when I realized that these outbursts of his came not from the frightened shying away of a suddenly exacerbated sensibility, but out of a long working familiarity with the facing of ugly facts, I understood that something was changing in him.
The Africans had, of course, more to fear from the Nationalists than anybody. But they themselves felt that they had had so little to hope for under the Smuts Government that all the change had done was to substitute a negative despair for a positive one: lack of hope, for fear. The leaders said in the phrases leaders use, Now the velvet glove is off the iron hand, that’s all…; and the simple people who did not understand politics and could only understand the white animus against them if it was personified, as in their tribal days they had made power realizable in the carved image of an idol or a bunch of bones, shook their heads in apprehension of the “bad man” Malan. Paul told me how, in a way, the idea of Malan even became a comfort to them. If there was a shortage of meat: Malan doesn’t think we need to eat, they said. If there was no house for a man and his family: Malan wants us to live like animals on the veld, said the woman. Over all that had been wrong, and would continue to be wrong in their lives—This Malan …, they said.
But though in that first year of the Nationalist rule little changed for them materially, and the combination of shockingly sordid living conditions, poverty, and a kind of deeply felt inarticulate horror of their own subjection before everybody who was not a native, that resulted in curious, mad, apparently irrelevant bursts of rebellion, arose out of the years of benevolent United Party rule, the very fact that the Nationalists sat up there in authority humiliated the natives. In Parliament cabinet ministers spoke of them as “Kaffirs.” There was continual official talk about the preservation of the “purity of white races of South Africa” and the “sacred duty of the Afrikaner nation to keep itself unsullied.” The Africans had always been kept outcast; now they began to feel it, to feel themselves outcast in their very features and voices. In their bewildered or hostile or mocking eyes there was the self-search for the sores the white man saw upon them. Even the black children, aping the passing of a white woman in the street beneath our flat, expressed unconsciously in their skinny jeering bravado the attitude: Well what can you expect of me? I’m black, aren’t I?
Statutes and laws and pronouncements may pass over the heads of the people whom they concern, but shame does not need the medium of literacy. Humiliation goes dumbly home—a dog, a child too small to speak can sense it—and it sank right down through all the arid layers of African life in the city and entered the blood even of those who could not understand why they felt and acted as they did, or even knew that they felt or acted.
At this stage, when all that was done to implement the plans for apartheid—a carrying to the extremes of total segregation the division of the ordinary lives of white and black that had always existed, socially and economically—was little more than a tight
ening-up of discriminatory devices, it was often the way in which such things were done rather than the things themselves which was so offensive. When the Nationalists introduced the ban on mixed marriages and also made it punishable for white and black men and women to cohabit, there was something shameful in the manner in which the police hunted up their prosecutions, shining torches in upon the little room where an old colored woman lay asleep with the old white man with whom she had lived quietly for years; prying and spying upon what has always been the right of the poorest man to sleep in peace with his woman.
Other people read of these things in the newspaper, but Paul came face to face with such a happening. He had temporarily taken over Colored Poor Relief, which was administered separately from Native or Indian Poor Relief, when a couple was arrested in Vrededorp, a slum suburb of racial confusion. He knew the woman because it so happened that she had been to see him a few days previously about her brother, a slightly crazy old man for whom Paul was trying to get an old-age pension. The woman herself was one of those milky-eyed, still creatures, roused only to obedience and the cooking pot—more like a work-stunned old native woman than the shriller, more conscious colored. The man with whom she lived was very old, had never heard of the ban, and had lost touch many years before with the white race which he was defiling by lying in this creaking great bed of the poor with this bare-gummed creature whose slack skin had once been filled with a woman.—The people who lived in the room next door told Paul that when the police came she jumped out of the bed screaming and crawled beneath it. And when they tried to get her to come out, she kept screaming for her “Doek, my doek!” (the piece of cloth she wore round her head) and would not come out until someone had given it to her, and she had struggled to tie it on cramped under the sagging springs of the bed. The neighbors shrieked with laughter all over again at the telling of it.
The Lying Days Page 30
