The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  “What exactly do you mean by disaster? Politically, the Nationalist regime is a disaster all right.”

  “Not the way I mean.—A flood, say. Or an earthquake. The big thing about a disaster like that is that it passes. You are existing temporarily, you will begin to live again when it is over. But with us the state of mind of disaster is becoming permanent. At this rate it can go on for years. We could sit for twenty years, like flies paralyzed but not killed by a spider, so long as the Nats stay in power. An unfortunate interruption. Shelving this, shelving that, because ‘things are so uncertain here,’ ‘we never know what will happen.’ “

  “There’s an election every five years, you know. There’s just a chance they might get thrown out.”

  I moved impatiently in my chair. “—Well five years, then. A year, ten months, if you like. It makes no difference. The state of mind’s still fraud, a piece of self-delusion. This is our life and it is being lived out now the way we don’t like it. This is not time out.”

  “Ah, that’s true,” he said slowly, “that’s true.” Then he said, in the quick tone of remembering a point he had wanted to question: “To go back a minute—the fly and spider business.—You talk as if everyone’s resigned himself to Nat rule. And you know that’s not so; you talk as if we weren’t kicking like hell.”

  “Oh politically, yes. I grant that politically we’re protesting madly. Even in ordinary private talk we’re protesting. But you know that wasn’t what I was talking about. It’s inside. Inside ourselves in the—what’s the word I want—the nonpolitical, the individual consciousness of ourselves in possession of our personal destiny: it’s that which we’ve put aside, laid away in lavender; postponed.”

  I took a deep breath and we both laughed suddenly at my vehemence. I was roused by what I had been saying and I felt, for a few minutes, a glow, a relief of talk that was like the satisfaction of something accomplished.

  But in a short while it faded.

  That was all I had said. The relief, the satisfaction came to me spuriously, out of stimulation; they belonged to the conclusion of the saying of what I had not said. I had meant to say, but had not said.

  Chapter 29

  I suppose that that night, like so many others, we went to bed and buried ourselves in each other in the silent, intense love-making that was all we had now. For it was as if where once we had had many different landscapes, many different meeting places; dreamy encounters in the sun, gentle meetings in a shade, the closeness and laughter and excitement of clinging together in a high and windy place—we had now only a strange deepening descent into steeped darkness, like a heavy silent river closing over our heads. We made love too often and I found that I kept my eyes closed tightly, even in the darkness. When it was over I would open them and lie there staring into the dark. When it was over; it ended now, with the ending of the act. So many nights I lay there, still, and noted my own lack of peace, my heavy possession of myself, with a mind as aridly wakeful as I sometimes had had when I was at the University, and had gone to bed after studying too late. Where was that mazy warmth, that lulling completeness, easy, already halfway over into sleep—the one real moment of freedom from self a human being knows? I told myself that love cannot be always the same; there are times when it is not so good as others. I even took comfort in my lack of experience, my youth, and told myself that perhaps it always changed after a time, was like that for everybody, and would change back again. …

  And on other nights in the sharpness of my mind afterward I suddenly became aware of and seemed to see again my own greed for my satisfaction, which had just been enacted; I saw the way in which I had performed every caress, every intimacy with my will fixed savagely only on the attainment of that final physical crucifixion of pleasure. For that spasm I would have pierced Paul’s flesh with my nails, forgotten his existence entirely in the determination to have him exact it from me; he, who gave it to me always so beautifully, without any thought from me except my love for him. I saw myself struggling like a beetle or an animal. A horror of myself came upon me; I was disgusted. I hated my inert, sated body, still now, like a drunken thing. And at the same time some other part of my mind started up in fear lest the whole of love-making, that fearful joy I felt with strong instinct I had already only won for myself against some threat which might have withheld it from me for ever, might be tainted with this disgust, and lost. I would turn to Paul and press my cheek against his back and put my hand up to feel the line of his hair, the outline of his gently breathing lips and the warm, beating surface of his neck, as if to assure myself that he was beautiful, desirable, that no shred of disgust could adhere here. …

  Yet we made love too often, and while my mind said with dismay, We are not in this wholly, this is bullying something fragile that cannot stand it, like a well-trained animal my body ignored me and mechanically obeyed the summons. When I looked at Paul, reading or shaving or sitting beside me in the car, it was in disbelief; it could not be he; and at the same time a tacitly ignored collusion of guilt made a silence between us on another level than that of speech.

  It did not help, either, this love-making. Whatever he hoped to wring out of it, and I, half-reluctant collaborator, must have half-hoped for, too, the tight-stretched fabric of that late summer only tautened and faded. Paul was bewilderingly difficult to live with. He had been put in charge of the housing section, a piece of office machinery which, nightmarelike, existed to administer something which literally did not exist, and all day long he heard the pleading, argument, cajolery, resentment of thousands of Africans desperate for homes—all quite useless; there were 1,100 houses for 20,000 families. “They try everything,” he said. “It’s as if they feel that if only they could find the way to outwit me, the secret, the magic word—there the house would be. When people persist in investing you with a certain power, you begin to believe after a while that you’ve really got it. … I have to keep in mind that there are no houses. …”

  The shortage of housing for Africans was not, like the mild difficulties being encountered by white people looking for flats or houses, due to the interruption and material shortages of the war. No new houses for Africans had been built in Johannesburg for seventeen years. The old “locations,” long ago filled to bursting point, simply went on overflowing onto the veld in squatters’ encampments of scrap iron and mud. The government and local authority kept handing the responsibility for providing housing back and forth to each other in horror; recently there had begun a move to make the industrialists, whose expanding need for labor had brought thousands of Africans to town, catch some of the weight. This provided a third set of protests, a third shrug of shoulders, a wider base for stalling and deadlock.

  Paul went through the farce of his work and, at the same time, doggedly made notes, collected facts, did what he called his own “snooping” and obstinately presented reports, surveys and suggestions that he was always told were “very interesting.” Very interesting—and the councilors and the officials took them away with that air of brave, sober, sad determination which had become the face to be worn, like the special face people keep for funerals, at the mention of African housing. And Paul knew that it was all a waste of time, a waste of breath, a waste of their sincerity or their false concern: no money would be found for sub-economic housing, the Africans did not earn enough to afford economic housing, and in any case, there was no part of the white city, east, west, north, south, that would not raise an uproar at the proposal of a new African township going up anywhere near its borders.

  Then at night and at week ends he was involved with the African Nationalists whose edict was non-co-operation, and who, sickened with the neglect of their people under all governments and all intentions, good and bad, mistrusted and refuted even practical good will. For them I saw him sitting over books and tracts about the methods of passive resistance that Gandhi and Nehru had used in India. For them he sent home for his law books and questioned and requestioned Laurie over obscure lega
l points that he himself did not understand. Twice already his activity with African Nationalists—all lumped together as “Communists” by the government and the police, although the African radicals and rebels were of all kinds: Communist, Nationalist, plain opportunist—had been gently questioned by the head of his department. Employees of the Council’s Native Affairs Department were, naturally, not allowed to involve themselves in the Africans’ internal politics.

  In time, it was clear, Paul would lose his job. Perhaps that would not have mattered; perhaps, one could argue, it would be best. But I saw that it would matter, that far from being best, it would be disastrous to him, because he put himself as passionately into his job as he did into his unofficial work for the radical Africans. Equally, if he kept his job by giving up the other association, that would be disastrous, too. He would despise himself either way.

  For Paul had made up his mind to do the impossible. I watched him and it was in his face and the way he walked and the way he performed the most trivial of daily actions. To make up one’s mind to do the impossible as a gesture of defiance to a society that has blocked the outlet of one’s energies in the attainable is a catharsis that may have some sour satisfaction. But Paul was not doing it like this. For him it was not a gesture; it was a way of life he had set for himself, a deliberate attempt to treat his own capacities in terms of a man who backs all the horses in a race, contending his hopes and his loyalties and his preferential partisanships one against the other. He cannot lose, and he cannot win. He scarcely knows any more what to hope for. It was more and more difficult to talk to Paul because whatever you said incensed or irritated him somewhere. If I railed, as I did, against the maddening futility of much of the Department’s work, he would fly to defend it from what he sarcastically called the easy attack of ignorance; after all, he knew only too well its limited funds and its scope rigidly circumscribed by the policy of the country as a whole. If, after some uselessly reckless or stupid or arrogant piece of behavior on the part of Fanyana and his crowd, I criticized their lack of plain human consideration, he was angry because he knew them to be as pricked full of hurts every day as a bull inflamed by the picador’s darts, and one small example of careless rudeness toward himself merely provided the instance that showed up the intact and unmarred surface of the white man’s skin.

  This calm analysis is clear and easy now. But the facts, before they were sorted in retrospect, were not clear or easy to live with. It did not seem like this to me then. My behavior toward Paul kept me in a spell of anxiety which never left me; I loved Paul and part of my loving him was my belief and pride in the work he had chosen: how was it possible, then, that the difficulties of this work, affecting him, should throw our relationship out of balance? What was the matter with me? Why couldn’t I manage? Why couldn’t I give him what he needed? —why, I didn’t even know what it was, couldn’t find out. … This situation, unimagined at the outset of our relationship, like most of the situations that arise to confound two people (I had sometimes looked at, fingered with a thrill of fear in my mind, the things which I believed happened to men and women: the lover grown fat and coarse-handed; divorce; the jealousy of a woman who is afraid of losing her man), was something for which I had no preparation, even by the precedence of others.

  At first I clutched at anything I thought might hold together the torn and tearing garment of our relationship; but while I snatched the edges together with a comfort or a promise to myself in one place, the seams burst, the thread raveled out somewhere else. So in the end I did what so many other women, all through time, have done in situations beyond them. I became afraid to move inside that garment. It was torn in so many places, the seams strained so frailly everywhere, that it seemed that only by keeping quite still, scarcely breathing, would it hold together.

  From somewhere a long way back, from the blood that came down to me from my mother perhaps; the blood which ran narrowly and which I hated because it had survived and always would survive by so doing, by draining off the real torrents which bear along human lives into neat ditches of domestic and social habit—from this blood came the instinct to go quiet; shut off the terrible expenditure of my main responses; take, trancelike, into the daily performance of commonplace the bewilderment, the failure. Because this blood was not all of me, but only a kind of instinctive female atavism, this does not mean that I was resigned, that I accepted. Only that my hands took over the command of themselves, taking into the action of pressing peas out of a pod, or moving a pawn on the chessboard (we had begun to play chess when we were alone together; ostensibly because I always had wanted to learn: when we played we did not have to talk), the fears, like an invasion of strangers, which now, never left me.

  We saw a great deal of our friends again.

  We went very often to the Marcuses, and to Laurie, and particularly to Isa Welsh, because there the same people always would be leavened by new people; Isa liked to expose herself and her friends to unfamiliar opinions and faces, the way people who cultivate the body seek to expose themselves to the sun. We appeared among them all as unremarked as a young couple who, after the self-sufficiency of the engagement and honeymoon period, by the habit of marriage are released again to seek diversion.

  In Lourenço Marques Isa had met a young Italian pianist who was about to do a concert tour of the Union, and who knew Moravia, and she had him to stay for a week or two. He was a soft-fleshed young man with the curious combination of a dark, sallow face and very white plump hands, and he was obviously completely bemused by her. She moved in his company with the air of pique and dissatisfaction which showed in her when she knew herself desired and admired by someone who didn’t interest her; I believe she felt it a waste. She only wanted to talk to him about Moravia. At the same time she had a young Indian couple, a trade representative and his beautiful wife, who were not actually staying with her, but with whom she was so enchanted that she kept making occasions, inviting people to the flat to hear Arionte play, to eat a real Indian curry prepared under the advice of the diplomat’s lady, in order to be able to have them there too.

  “Aren’t they beautiful—” She came up, ignoring with the authority of her enthusiasm her interruption of the conversation of Paul and myself with Arionte and Jenny. “Really, they make the rest of us look bilious. Oh, it’s not that I’m just enamored of any color but my own—there are millions of Indians more hideous than we’re monotonous. But they’re just two lovely people, and their color happens to suit them perfectly … (—Have you talked to him?” she asked Paul. “You must go and talk to him, he’s got a mind as incisive as a knife, a pearl-handled silver one—) like you, Jenny. When you first came from England. Your color suited you perfectly.”

  “And don’t you think it suits me any more?” said Jenny crossly, although the rest of us were laughing. She had developed a touchiness toward all women who were not, like herself, somewhere in the process of creating a family. She had made up her mind in this, as in every other stage of her life, that the stage in which she happened to be involved was the only decent and worth-while way to live. So at present, unless a woman was pregnant, suckling a child, or pondering the psychological mysteries of toddlers, Jenny regarded her with a mixture of irritation and self-righteousness.

  “I’ve told you; it suits you admirably. But you haven’t got it any more. You’ve taken on the protective coloring of the country; can’t distinguish you from any other Johannesburger, today.”

  She was moving off (Isa never waits to see where the arrow falls, whether it goes home or not. …—D’you notice?—Paul had once said to me—I’ve never been able to decide whether it’s callous or vaguely honorable, in a chivalrous kind of way …?) when she was stopped by a young man who had come up behind her.

  “I just walked in. Could have walked out again for all the notice you take of me—” It was Charles Bessemer.

  “Hullo, Charlie—ah, you smell nasty. Is it the perfume only brave men dare wear?” She drew him round to us.<
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  “Nuit de Gastrectomy,” he said, sniffing at the cold smell of ether which clung about his clothes.

  “You still use the same old kind?” I said.

  “Oh, hul-lo.” He turned.

  “You know Helen. … And this is her Paul. Jenny you know; and this is Arionte, we don’t call him by his surname because he gets preferential treatment here, or because we can’t say Guiseppe, but because he’s on the way to being a Solomon or a Schnabel—”

  A kind of extra shininess came to the pianist’s smooth forehead, in place of the blush of pleasure impossible to anyone of his complexion. His shy quick look was the laying before of us of the fact: you see? the wonderful way she is?

  The “And this is her Paul” was one of Isa’s little experimental darts, tossed just for fun, in the course of more important preoccupations; I caught the faint quirk of the side of her mouth, like a private wink to me, careless and not malicious, as she said it. It was for Charles, who she knew had once been interested in me (Was there a twitch? No? Well then, the thing just glanced harmlessly off), and to tease Paul, who continually told her how disgraceful it was that Tom had no designation other than “Isa’s husband.”

  Charles thought a moment and then said to me unexpectedly: “What happened to your friend from Mariastad?”—Isa was not really disappointed; she poured him a drink from the little stained table loaded with bottles, beside us.

  “You mean Mary? I don’t know really. She’s teaching somewhere; I haven’t seen her for ages.”

  “And you, too?—Teaching?”

  Paul laughed as I said: “Do I look as if I am?”

  Charles said, looking straight at me with his faint sharp smile: “You look like I always told you.”