The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  When the train jerked into motion I thought: Now; I shall soon be there. And my desire to say Paul’s name, as the little girl had to feel the shape of her bangle, I turned into a little movement of a smile with my lips.

  I scarcely opened my eyes again until we reached Johannesburg. In the peculiar bright confusion that comes down with the felty blood-darkness of one’s eyelids, the clear images of the afternoon that had passed, the whole two days, were pushed away in a jumble, like the swept-up bits of a broken mirror. I hung to the thought of Paul that swelled, image, word and sound the way one’s last conscious thought looms and expands before sleep or anesthesia. In that darkness he was my one reality. It seemed that he must be thousands of miles away, unattainable in yearning. I could not believe that in less than an hour I should be standing in an ordinary call box hearing his voice matter of fact and that I should see him walking down the platform looking for me. …

  When we got to Johannesburg station I was trembling and sweating as I jumped down from the train and pushed my way through the people, murmuring nervous apologies and holding my head high and anxious. The telephone in the first box was dead and I rushed into the next one. It smelled bad and I dropped my handbag and parcels and week-end case on the dirty floor and lifted the receiver in anxiety. The dry, snoring sound came back. I dialed and could hear my own breathing, harsh in that small space.

  The bell rang only once and in the middle of the second ring Paul answered it and I heard his hello. I don’t know what I had expected, but even though the fact of its ringing on unanswered would have meant nothing more than that he was out at one of two or three places where I could easily have got him, I knew the moment I heard his voice that if there had been no answer the ringing of the telephone would have dropped me into a fearful despair. There was a second’s shudder at what I might have felt and as my face crinkled in relief at the sound of his voice, I saw the magnifying line of tears lifted in my eyes. Through them the scratched walls of the call box came alive.

  “For God’s sake come and fetch me. Quick. I’m in an awful public telephone thing that smells.”

  “Well”—he was questioning the excitement in my voice—“well, so you’re here. Why didn’t you phone, may I ask?”

  “I did. On Saturday. But you weren’t there—”

  “You knew I’d be at Jabavu.”

  “Yes—I forgot. And then I couldn’t.—I can’t explain now. I’ll come to the front entrance. Eloff Street.”

  “No, come to the side.”

  “The baggage drive-in side? All right. … But be quick!”

  I saw him. He seemed to grow along the street out of my watching. I dropped my things all over the seat and the floor of the car and pulled his head down in my arms and kissed him. It was all very awkward with my one knee on the seat and the end of my handbag sticking into my side. But I felt his warm mouth (I could taste fruit on it) and I dug my fingers into his linen jacket and I shut my eyes for a moment against those eyes and that high freckled forehead and that beautiful nose that I loved more than ever now that I knew its one secret fault, a displacement of the septum that at a certain angle spoiled its line. He pressed his hand tightly into my back, surprised but ready.

  “You’ve been eating a naartje,” I said.

  We both saw him, lying on the bed dropping the curls of fruit skin on the floor.

  “Cursing like hell because you didn’t come home.”

  Quite suddenly we did not know what to say; he feeling the obligation of my smile, that smile of relief and wonder that holds your face with the intensity of a frown and that you are powerless to control.

  So he drove us home to the flat rather fast and the great need to talk, to tell him, became curiously not urgent, but something that could rest in the surety that it could be told at any time; I did not want to speak at all. He swirled down into the basement garage and, in the gloom pungent of petrol, pulled me over to him and kissed me passionately. “Was it bad—? Me, too. …” I kissed him back in the dissimulation—not something you do not feel, but something that you do not feel at the particular time when perhaps the other does—that webs over the great spaces between the moments of identity which create love. And out of the knowledge, half guilt, half regret, that it had not been possible to miss him in this way during the week end, all the irritation and anger and resentment of the very things that had made it impossible, that pushed it out in the much stronger need of something else from him, burst up urgently in me again.

  I said: “Oh, Paul, do you know what she said when I told her—”

  He was leaning into the back of the car, where we had thrown the parcels. “Told her what? What’s all this loot?”

  “Told her about us. She said I was disgusting. She said: ‘You’re a filthy beast.’ “The ring of my own voice came back from the low concrete girders of the dark place … thy beast.

  There was a snort from the car. He slammed the door, looked over the parcels, laughing explosively. “Oh, Christ, no! Did she? Did she call you a Magdalen, Jezebel? Did she? Did she really—?”

  His laughter came back, too, rings of sound thrown smaller and smaller until they closed in on my ears again. He jerked his chin over the parcels to urge me up the steps. “Come on, what’s the matter with you—?”

  He said, walking where I could feel him, just behind me up the dingy narrow flight: “Hell, that tickles me. … Didn’t you want to laugh in her face?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I felt, like some secret horror walled up inside me, beating on the walls with cries that nobody but I should ever hear, the panic and anger of being under my mother’s eyes. I saw her gaze hardening over me. … (The minute before, she had called to the bird, and the bird had answered her. …) Woman who … Filthy beasts.

  I said, in that tone of laying something before the other which one uses when one no longer knows what one is saying will mean to him: “She says she doesn’t want me in the house again.”

  “Naturally. Even the turn of phrase—not ‘want you in the house’——Come here, beast”—he caught me by my hair and, putting his head round over my shoulder, kissed me clumsily, a little roughly, not quite finding my mouth in the semi-dark. Amused, he whispered to me some private little formula of endearment, the kind of thing that can only be spoken and never written down.

  Tears came up in my eyes, and when we came to the light of the ground floor and the lift, I held my eyes very wide and glassy so that he should not see.

  But already he was talking of something else, and as I put my things down in the flat, hesitantly touching at this and that, I roused myself to what he was saying—“So what did you do after that?”—He had just said that the grass-planting had gone on until after six.

  “Guess where I had supper?” The ridge of his nose was burned, he looked at me challenging, smiling.

  I don’t know why—out of weariness, out of depression, perhaps, it flew into my mind: “Isa’s.”

  He laughed impatiently. “With Sipho.”

  “Oh? How did that happen?”

  “He turned up at the field at about half-past five—just happened to be strolling by, of course. … Came straight over to talk to me, but we couldn’t really talk there, so I went home with him.”

  “But isn’t he against the field?”

  Paul sat down in the big chair. He said with an air of grudging pride: “They’re going to boycott the field. Nobody will use it. They held a meeting afterward—on the field. Sipho spoke damn well. And the colored man from Newclare I told you about. But I don’t trust him, he’s too glib, he’s already picked up all the catch phrases of international politics. Inevitable rogue getting on the band wagon. But there were a lot of simple blokes in the crowd—good crowd—and they just blinked back at him the way they do. Sipho—I don’t know how to explain it—he’s got compassion, that’s it, real compassion. He can afford to say simply what he feels because he really does feel. And you can’t fool a crowd like that. They seemed to smel
l out the truth in him. Not that he isn’t clever, too; but he does the dramatic thing instinctively, not calculating its effect. Like the field. The field just naturally handed to him the perfect example of the useless good will—the good old Christian kindness, the pat on the head to reconcile the dog to the kind master holding the chain (pretty good? that’s Sipho’s own)—that is no longer any good to the African. ‘We don’t want kindness, we must have freedom. …’ “He fell into restless silence, his glance wavering from object to object in the room, composing an horizon of its own out of the shapes of my parcels (that peak contained the plaques of London); the drop to the floor where the shoes that I had kicked off lay; the jagged rise past the desk to the window. There was an irritation in him, waiting for me to say: so you were planting grass for the field one hour and applauding its boycott the next. …

  Bewilderment and a sense of confusion close to fear came to me so strongly that I stood there, unable to go through even the mechanical motions of hanging away my clothes, finding something for supper. This feeling, like an overwhelming lethargy, seemed to come from the room itself; all the ordinary things I had used, taken and put down thoughtlessly in my happiness, filled me with depression. The lamp, the faded quilt, the yellow cushion I had bought, the Egyptian cotton hanging, the ebony mask from the Congo in whose mouth there hung the flower I had stuck there last week, now dead, dangling like a cigarette stub. Where is he? How will one half of him spend his life working at what the other half opposes? How will he do it? How can you do it? Where will he be himself, all the time? The mask. The quilt. Calendar ringed in red (last month’s date so that I shall make no mistake this month). Stitched Egyptians with their long cold eyes. Plant in pot that didn’t let anything grow. Nothing has anything to do with anything else, I thought. How can he do it. What will become of him, while he does …

  And at the same time, my mother’s mouth saying, Filthy beasts. The living room with the cushions plumped and the curtains drawn and the clock striking alone, like a sleeper speaking suddenly in a dream.

  Nothing fits, I repeated to myself. Ridiculous, one side; horrible, hurtful, the other. But of course it was ridiculous. I could see my mother and me in that scene now and of course it was ridiculous, flinging about like puppets. Of course it was ridiculous. …

  Paul said, with the attention of his eye, his mind sunk deeply somewhere else: “What is in there, anyway.”

  I looked at the parcels. “Some things they brought me. Put them on top of the bathroom cupboard.” I felt I should never open them.

  The next day I was walking out of a theater booking office during my lunch hour when I came face to face with Joel Aaron: with a little start of horror, as if Atherton, the Mine, my mother, had suddenly opened before me in the Johannesburg street. I covered this recoil which even in the second that I knew it must be showing on my face shamed me, by pretending an exaggerated surprise.—That in itself was unconvincing, I realized as I feigned it, because why should I find it a shock to meet someone whom I knew to be fre quently in town?—But one awkwardness leads to another, and I could only say with an effusiveness which did not belong with Joel, and did just exactly what I wished not to do: put him in the category of a stranger: “What are you doing now?—Why don’t I ever see you!”

  He stood there looking up and down my face as if he were measuring it, faintly smiling. He was getting heavier in the shoulders; he wore the kind of jacket he had always worn, shabby or merely nondescript, one could never decide. He said absently: “Drawing houses.”

  “Joel! You graduated at the beginning of the month.” Shame and regret stunned me like a slap across the mouth. I did not know how to express it. I stood there turning the tickets in my hand. He shrugged, smiling.

  “I should have been there. Oh, I wanted to come. …” But of course the notice of the graduation ceremony had been in the papers. He knew and I knew that I had known about it.

  I kept saying, “… Oh, how could I have … I wanted to, really I meant to … I shouldn’t have missed …”

  He did not answer, but only went on smiling quietly, as if waiting for me to finish.

  My protests petered out into silence between us. People passing jostled against our shoulders so that we seemed to be bobbing toward and away from one another. At once he said over this: “How do you like the work in the Welfare Department? Is it giving you some satisfaction?”

  “It’s not much, you know. Nothing more than a typist really. How did you know?”

  “I was in the shop on Tuesday, and they told me you weren’t working there any more.”

  There was another silence. I pushed back a strand of hair that kept blowing down over my eye with a gesture that, I suppose, to someone who knew me well, was particularly my own: I have always liked my hair tight and smooth. I saw his eyes travel with my hand; come back to rest directly on my face again. I had the curious feeling that I was apparently always to have with him, no matter what distance of time or commitment to others came between our meetings, that he saw in me what no one else did, things, even ordinary, trivial, physical differences of which only I myself was aware. For instance, I felt now that he noticed that I had not penciled my eyebrows that morning (they were heavy, for a red-haired person, but too light in color) and that under his eyes I was tautening the muscle at the left side of my mouth that would show where I had got the faint line, from cheek to mouth, that I had surprised on my face lately.

  “It really isn’t much of a job at all …,” I said again.

  “Paul’s must be pretty damnable now, though,” he said. It was a polite and sympathetic observation that anyone who read the papers and knew Paul might make. But again I had that feeling of the prescience of Joel; something disturbing, that I felt in some obscure way was a comfort, but that I was impelled to struggle against.

  Now suddenly I was impatient to get away from him.

  “With his temperament, it’s likely to make him schizoid.” I turned the question into the exaggeration of a joke. We went on to talk inconsequentially for a few moments.—He must promise to come and see us (he wrote down the telephone number on a cigarette box; I wrote his—he was sharing a flat with Rupert Sack—on the theater tickets).—That was a good play; he had seen it on Saturday night. His job was in the nature of marking time. …—Oh, he didn’t quite know yet: maybe Rhodesia, after all. Maybe Europe, and lately he’d been thinking seriously about Israel. …

  “Well—” I made the little shrugging gesture of collecting myself to go. “Yes …” He pushed the cigarette box into his pocket and touched me momentarily, so lightly it might have been by mistake, on the elbow.

  As I turned, and he was already a little distance from me, I suddenly called back: “I was there yesterday. I spent the week end. …”

  He nodded. “Been away, I know. … See them about again now I suppose.” And he nodded again, deliberately, lingeringly, as if the nod were some message he must get to me silently over the distraction of the passing people.

  So we both stood a moment arrested in the current of the pavement. And then he was gone and I turned quickly and hurried across the street walking fast in the kind of burst of release. The refrain went foolishly inside me: I don’t want to think of the place, I don’t want to be reminded of it.

  But when the relief of fast movement was checked and I stood, panting a little, in the lift going up to my desk in the Welfare offices, remorse, the real pain of wanting back the chance to do something left undone, that I do not think I had ever felt in my life before, filled me with distress; distress maddening and sad in its uselessness. I should have gone to his graduation, how was it I did not go when I had wanted to go so much: now I felt so much how I had wanted to go. How could I have ignored this—forgotten. Yes, I had forgotten. Now I could not believe what was true: that I had forgotten. The thought of it, like awareness of a lapse of memory, an aberration of which you have no recollection; as if there is discovered to be another person in you who mysteriously wrests you fr
om yourself and takes over, thrusting you back to yourself in confusion when the fancy takes it—the thought of it made me sick with dismay. I had the instinct to clutch, searching at my life, like a woman suddenly conscious of some infinitesimal lack of weight about her person that warns her that something has gone, dropped—perhaps only a hairpin, a button—but maybe a jewel, a precious letter.

  As I sat down before my typewriter, I thought: It’s as if I haven’t slept, it’s as if since after lunch yesterday until now has been one continuous day, without the divisions of a normal day, on and on. …

  The line of patient natives waiting to see Paul when he would come in later in the afternoon turned the yellow-whites of their eyes on me, and away again.

  Chapter 28

  Sometimes when I came back to the flat earlier than Paul, I would go out onto the little balcony and sit balanced on the wall, my head against the partition which divided our flat from the one next door. Often I had not even troubled to wash or to put my things away; I simply came in, dropped to the bed what I was holding, and wandered out.

  In the late summer, this was the best hour of the day. And the day usually had been a monotonous one; the offices in the old shadowy building which seemed, as you looked in, as cool as a dairy, were damply stuffy, the odor of old documents tightly stored by vanished tenants coming out in the heat like an invisible stain reappearing on a wall; and the reports I typed, the letters I wrote were the mechanical reproduction of someone else’s record of rigidly circumscribed methods of dealing with certain recurrent situations. The calm repetition of the work that came to my desk every day brought alive for me Paul’s flat statement that no case was ever finished, except by death. They came once, they will come again. The poverty of the Africans was a wheel to which they were tied; turn, and it will run its weight over them again. So the same letter, the same reports. And if you cut them free of the wheel, that will be the end of white civilization, said some. … Anyway, white civilization is doomed, said others. …