The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

He had no sooner gone than I flew out onto the balcony with a fastbeating heart; but there was the little car, coming out from under the building, turning into the street and away. He could not even see me.

  When I turned back into the flat I found myself feeling almost self-conscious. I had never before been alone there in the morning; the room looked at me like a servant surprised by an employer in the performance of some work that is always done when the people of the house are out of the way. I saw the room, a disparate collection of inanimate objects, for the first time; in the normal course of my life with Paul it had been nothing but a background for our talk and activity, our sleep and our waking. It had handed things silently and I had taken them without thinking. Now it confronted me and I thought that not only was it like a slightly put-out servant, it was like a servant who didn’t recognize my authority, anyway. This was Paul’s room, these were Paul’s things among which I had been living. In spite of the stockings on a chair, the jar of face cream beside the bed, the mask and the cushions, I had made no mark, no claim on this room. These things which were mine could be packed away just as a hotel room is cleared of the few personal belongings of each successive guest, remaining adequately equipped with all the necessary accouterments of a room and always retaining its own character.

  I made the bed and stacked the dishes in the sink for the flat boy to wash (we had an arrangement with him) and bathed and dressed. I thought of slacks but that would have made it feel too much like Sunday, so I put on a dress instead, noting, as I always did when I fastened a belt, as if it were some relieved discovery that I must keep making, that I was young, that my shape was good. My hips are too narrow, but I’m tall and my breasts are nice. I wonder where I get them from? My father’s side of the family? My mother has no breasts; as if she had forgotten about them.—For a moment I was completely absorbed in this timeless preoccupation. Shut up in this little room in a great city where factories were silent, shops were without messengers or cleaners, and the streets were suspicious of their normality, I contemplated something that would never change, that when it left me, would already be coming to life in others.

  I took the tea and the slice of toast I had made myself out onto the balcony, perhaps to evade the room. Opposite, the half-finished block of flats was empty and silent; the builder, one of the prudent employers I had read about in the paper, must have told his employees not to come to work, because even the white workers were not there. I sat out on the tiny balcony half the morning, and later two little silent children with bare feet and shabby dungarees came to play on the builder’s sand. Perhaps they came from the building in which I was sitting; I realized as I sat there that the tall shabby walls, the brown-painted corridors and the stale, boxed air of the lift did not have an existence solely about Paul and me, but were seen in the same function by a number of other people, all very different from us and one another, whose lives now signaled for recognition. There was the sound of a duster being shaken out on the balcony of the flat below, the bumbling rise and fall of a crooner’s voice, and then the terse nasal barks, very loud, of a radio play recorded in America, coming from a window on the right. I heard a telephone ring for several minutes; stop, ring again, and then cut off abruptly.

  The sun shone steadily on the two small boys: they had found a sifter now, and were busy piling it with sand, letting the sand run through, and then shoveling the same sand into it all over again. The flat boy came in, greeted my explanation of my presence with apparent pleasure at the idea of my being there, whatever the reason, and breathed a song to himself as he rubbed the floor, just as if he had been alone. And over to the left, Johannesburg opened its mouth in its usual muffled roar. I could detect no note of panic—in any case, had there been screams, the howls of the monster at last risen staggering to its feet, they would have been blocked out for me by the indestructible brisk cheeriness of the radio next door.

  I said to the flat boy: “Did you hear if there was any trouble this morning in the locations?”

  He sat back on his knees like an amiable zoo bear and laughed. It was a deep, phlegm-roughened laugh, because he smoked a lot—his pipe stuck out of the pocket of his “kitchen boy” suit even now. He said, with the tolerant grin at a blood sport which didn’t interest him: “Nobody say. I didn’t see nobody. But plenty boys come to town last night, sleep all night where they work.” He lived with the other flat boys next to the boiler rooms on top of the building, leaning over the parapet on warm nights to twang his guitar above the concrete.

  Another one of the good old-fashioned kind.

  I tried to rouse myself to do something. Sitting on the balcony smoking in the sun, I thought, I am like an invalid: between the illness and the cure. Sitting weakly in the sun. It was the state of suspension I had spoken about so heatedly to Paul that night when I had wanted to tell him something else: what am I waiting for, why don’t I go and phone up the Consulate, write a letter about that broadcasting research job? It seemed to me that the strike had something to do with my inertia: waiting for something to happen. (Can’t do anything because you’re waiting for this, that, or the other.—That state of suspension, today in its acute form.) Yet I knew that I was not even really thinking of the strike at all.

  Toward lunchtime I telephoned the office. I don’t know why I was surprised to find that Paul was there, the voice of the girl at the switchboard just as usual. “What’s it like in town?”—My voice had the subdued, hesitant tone of someone tacitly atoning for a piece of shaming disregard; a woman who has ignored some indisposition of her husband’s may speak in just that tone when next she sees him, and if he answers, as he will, as if her concern for him had been consistent, they can both successfully make her lapse nonexistent.

  “Haven’t you been out? It’s all quiet. You know. The rural peace of Johannesburg—” I heard a man’s muffled laugh: someone must be in the office with him.

  “And at the busses this morning?”—We had expected trouble at the location bus and train termini, where we knew there would be pickets.

  “Nothing, so far as we’ve heard.”

  “So if the police can keep their hands to themselves—” I felt awkward as if I were suggesting an aspirin.

  “Yes, we must wait and see.” There was a pause.

  “—But they must be itching on their batons—” I tried again.

  “I haven’t been out in any of the townships yet today,” he said shortly. “Did you phone the Consulate?”

  “No. Perhaps this afternoon. If I don’t fall asleep. You’ve no idea how odd it is, being in the flat in the morning.”

  “Of course I have—when I was sick? Don’t you remember?” His voice chided me in a guarded intimacy, perhaps because of the presence of the other person. At once I revived, stung to naturalness: “Oh, but that was quite different. That’s why I didn’t even think of it.”

  “Look, I must go now, darling.”

  “Are you going to be late—Because if not—” I was eager.

  “I can’t say. I don’t think so. Because there are a lot of things I should do this afternoon that I won’t be able to. Oh, and Isa phoned; she wants us to eat there. So if I’m late I’ll go straight there. If I’m not home by half-past five, say … And you can go up when you feel like it, she’ll be home all afternoon, she said.”

  “Oh, tonight” I said.

  “Why, we weren’t doing anything?”

  “No. All right.” I’m not sure that I feel like Isa, I wanted to say.

  I did fall asleep. I lay down on our bed with the blue quilt over my feet and thought: When I get up in about half an hour I’ll phone her and tell her we can’t come, I’d already made some other arrangement, and then I’ll phone him and tell him. The sun, filtering through the net curtains, warmed the crown of my head through my hair; the woman next door had turned off the radio and a warm space of silence hung above the surge of traffic.

  Chapter 32

  When I awoke it was five o’clock. The sun, moved aw
ay from the room round to the west, had left five heavy drops of honey trembling on the wall below the ventilator brick. Opening my eyes on these I had the familiar confusion that follows a spell of sleep at an unaccustomed hour, felt all the rooms where I had slept rush past my mind before I could seize and steady myself into this one, and then jumped up with a sense of panic. I had the telephone receiver in my hand before I remembered whom I had to ring up and why.

  Well, it was too late to put her off now. A little sick and dazed from getting up too quickly, the nausea transposed itself into a reaction against the thought of going to Isa’s that evening. I thought: I’ll phone Paul now and work out some way of getting out of it.

  “He’s left, I’m afraid. He went out about half an hour ago.” It was a new voice; must be the girl who had taken my job.

  “Have you any idea where he went?” I asked.

  “Just a minute—” She was eager to please, in her newness. “Someone says he said he was going to the Community Center.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Richardson.”

  “Thank you very much.” I was just thinking, Now is the number 52-8529 or 92, when the telephone jangled under my hand. Instantly, I was sure it was Paul. Urgently I said: “Hullo—”

  Laurie’s mild, slow voice, the voice of a fat man, answered. “Helen—hullo …” We exchanged pleasantries, commented on the uneventful way the day had passed off. “Is your man there? I want a word in his ear.”

  “I was just about to phone him. He’s at the Richardson Center.”

  “Oh, blast him. I want to speak to him right away.”

  “Well, why don’t you phone him there?” I said. “I was going to.

  “No, I can’t,” Laurie said, “I can’t explain. … But I can’t tell him what I want to tell, over the phone. I was going to come over to your flat, if he’d been home.” He laughed. “Don’t think I’m crazy.”

  For some reason, I felt vaguely embarrassed. “Well, I don’t know what to suggest. I don’t know when he’ll be back. And if I can’t get him before he leaves the Richardson, he’ll go straight to Isa’s. We’re supposed to be eating there.—You could drop in there later, and see.”

  “No,” he laughed again, a little irritated at having to keep up a mystery. “It’ll be too late. Might be, even now, as he’s already in the township.—Well I’ll have to take a chance on saying what I have to say in some sort of guarded way over the phone. Give me the number, will you? And you don’t mind waiting five minutes so that I can ring him first? I’ll tell him to ring you, if you like.”

  “Yes, do that. The number’s 52-8529.” I was suddenly sure of this. We both rang off. I was tingling with a vaguely alarmed curiosity. But although he had made it clear that it was not from me, but from the telephone, that he was withholding an explanation of the message he wanted to give Paul, I, too, was irritated by the mystery.—He’s getting like Edna and all the rest, creating for himself the importance of dark secrets. Paul won’t thank him for it anyway; he’ll laugh.

  The telephone rang again almost immediately. “Look—” said Laurie, “there’s no reply from the place.” “Of course. The switchboard must be closed. Operator keeps ordinary office hours, there,” I remembered. Laurie said: “D’you think he might still be there?”

  “Very likely.”

  “Or he might be on his way home?”

  I laughed. “Sound deduction!” But Laurie ignored it. “I think I’ll take a chance and go out there,” he said. “That’s if I ever find the place.”

  “Oh, it’s easy, you can’t miss it. When you turn off the main road you keep turning to the left, three times, and then once right past the Apostolic Faith church, it’s a funny little place with a silver-painted roof.” I stopped myself suddenly. “Laurie, take me with you. Please. Come and pick me up? I’ve been in all day and I’ve nothing to do till Paul comes. I wasn’t going to Isa’s anyway, that’s what I want to talk to him about.”

  “Well, at least you know where this place is,” he said. “—All right. If you really want to. But be ready. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Laurie’s car was a long narrow English model, very beautifully cared-for. His fat body sat in it as incongruously as a sack of potatoes dumped in a boudoir. “Just give it a gentle tug,” he said as I pulled the door in behind me; the door closed with an oiled click. I felt suddenly the pleasant relief of being out, anywhere at all, in the air and the moving streets, after the confines of the flat. “It’s about Fanyana, of course,” he apologetically confided at once, as if he was sure he was only confirming what I must have guessed. “I heard today on good authority that they’re watching him. They have to be able to lay their hands on a few ‘inciters to public violence’ when they need ’em, to prove what an efficient police force they are. And Fanyana’s one. He’s only got to wiggle his little finger.” Laurie demonstrated, moving free of the steering wheel a white, dry-skinned hand blotted with the brownish marks of some liver ailment. “If Paul’s got any sense, he must keep away from him. It’d be a much more serious thing for Paul if he were arrested as the inciter of an inciter—” He laughed, moving his shoulders which overflowed the curved back of the seat. “You know how they are—they make up their minds you’re an inciter, so you’re an inciter—What can you do? You could have been teaching Fanyana how to embroider. … You’re an inciter. So. Go and argue with them.”

  “Oh, but it’s all right,” I said, “nothing’s happened. There haven’t been any incidents to be blamed on anyone.”

  “No, but I think Paul shouldn’t be seen even talking to Fanyana today.”

  I shrugged. “He’s probably doing that now.” I couldn’t help feeling that Laurie was getting excited over something that would be no news to Paul; he knew that the police were interested in Fanyana, and had been for some time.

  “By the way, d’you think they’ll let us in?” Laurie asked.

  “At the location? Oh, yes. They know me, I’ll fix it.” For a moment I had not realized what he meant; the strike had already taken on the character of an alarum that had never gone off, and the ban on the entry of Europeans to native townships which would certainly be included in police security methods seemed as nominal as had been the posters illustrating air-raid precautions in our country which had never known a raid. Yet the reminder gave a slight fillip to our little expedition. The fact that I felt Paul would consider Laurie’s urgency a piece of dramatics added to this something of the pleasurable illusion of adventure with which children invest some unnecessary action by pretending to believe it vitally important. We were quite gay, and passing the Criterion Bar, Laurie said: “When we’ve collected Paul we’ll come back and have a drink somewhere.”

  As we shed the city, dusk was falling.

  “At dusk, reports of bloodshed and violence followed in rapid succession. At Orlando, Sophiatown, Alexandra, Moroka, Jabavu, White City, Mariastad. … It was the start of a night of terror after twenty-four hours’ tension.”

  This was how it was described in the papers next day. While we were driving through the dusk that thickened like pollen about the street lights, the trains were going home, some in the direction we took, some toward other townships, carrying workers who had defied the strike and who were being escorted from work by the police to assure their safety. The stones that were to be thrown and were to draw back bullets were lying ready to hand in the unmade streets and the vacant lots filled with rubbish. The men were already restless in the streets, the voices of the women shrill before the dark houses. That was what we understood when we read about it.

  That night, rioters stoned a police squad at Alexandra. The police fired into the mob. A bus queue shelter was demolished, coffee stalls overturned, shops looted and gutted, and a cinema burned to the ground. A crowd attacked the bus depot, and another police squad, hurrying to the scene, met with a road block and was stoned. The police got out of their cars and fired. At Orlando trains were stoned. On the Reef, at Brakpan, a tho
usand demonstrated outside the location, screaming and shouting, and were dispersed by a baton charge of a hundred police. At Atherton location, a large crowd defied the ban on public meetings, refused to disperse, and were charged by the police with fixed bayonets. Then the police fired, and three people were killed on the spot. Everywhere in the townships there were “disturbances” of one sort or another; stones were thrown. Stones were thrown, and one way or another, drew blood. Later that week, one of the Native Representatives (there were three and they were all Europeans) moved the adjournment of the Parliamentary debate then in session, so that the May Day riots could be discussed in the House. The leader of the Opposition, General Smuts, did not support the motion. Letters were published condemning the brutality of the police, praising them for courage, accusing them of incitement; hailing the dead rioters as martyrs, expressing satisfaction at the dispatch of dangerous hooligans, urging black and white to make “this tragic and bitter clash” a basis for the return to Christian tolerance. There was a report of how, over the week end, when the ban on public gatherings in African townships was already in force, a wedding party had been broken up by the police; a group of mourners, sitting in the small yard of a bereaved house after a funeral, as is the custom with Africans, were intruded upon by the police and ordered to go home. An elderly African who had been one of the group said: “They treat us like wild animals. Perhaps after all we can get nothing by peaceable means.” Still later, a commission of inquiry set up to investigate the cause of the riots, said that the anti-police attitude of the Africans was due to liquor and pass raids on their homes in the early hours of the morning, and the treatment of native prisoners by young policemen. This attitude, the commission stated, was not racial—black and white policemen were equally hated, resulting in “a complete disregard of authority of any kind.”

  On that night, eighteen natives were killed, thirty wounded. Two of the dead had suffocated in the burning cinema, sixteen were shot by the police.