The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  “Yes, Helen,” he prompted me, gently attentive. He was sitting back with his glass in his hand, in no hurry to drink.

  For a moment I looked back into his inquiring eyes in discomfiture. “I’ve got an awful nerve. I greeted you this afternoon as if nothing had ever happened. I mean here I am, taking up your time as if it belonged to me. Just as if nothing had ever happened. I realized it suddenly while I was dressing—here I am, gaily dressing because you’re coming to eat with me—” (As I spoke I seemed to see in his eyes the recognition of the odd little verbal taboos which had overlaid my own way of expressing myself, and of which, perhaps, I should never be able to rid myself now, though the desire for emulation which had led me to assume them had lost its gods; in the circles of John and Jenny the middle-class indulgence of a regular nightly meal cooked and served by a servant was given the romantic aestheticism of wine and garlic salad in a Left Bank café and the decent frugality of a workman’s bread and cheese by the simple expedient of never saying “come to dinner” but “come and eat with us.”)

  “Not that I wasn’t pleased.”—I made another start. “That’s the whole thing. Because I was pleased. I realized that I have no right to be. In fact, it’s an awful cheek. I haven’t seen you for months and months and it was all my fault that I haven’t, I know. I’ve greeted you at a concert as if you were someone I’d met casually somewhere. I didn’t come to your graduation and I fumbled for words like a fool when I met you in the street. … And when I meet you this afternoon I’ve got the cool nerve to assume I’ll be treated as if nothing has happened.”

  He had been looking at me quite seriously, as if he were listening to an anecdote about two other people, but now he smiled. “And you were.”—He made a last attempt to keep up the casual surface intimacy of the afternoon. There was a moment when I might have taken up the cue of an easy, slangy, social patter; have said, using the old privileges of arch femininity which have become the frank gambits of sex: “Then I’m forgiven?” And if I had, we might have passed the following two days together using each other as pure distraction, have danced and drunk and perhaps slept together like cut flowers blooming in water—no one, not even ourselves, need have noticed that the stems were severed, that there was no plant beneath from whose root and dirt and drought we had taken shape, and from which, still, all growth must come.

  But I said: “I had a dreadful feeling that morning I met you in front of the theater. I’ve never forgotten it.”

  He said very slowly: “Why?” And he tasted his drink.

  “When I left you, I got into a sort of panic. I can’t explain it. I saw how I had wanted to go to your graduation, I really had wanted to very badly, and yet I didn’t. There was nothing to stop me. But I didn’t go. I forgot. It seemed to me that some other person had forgotten. Myself—but some other person. And I felt I didn’t know who I was—bewildered. Of course you didn’t know, but I’d had a ghastly scene in Atherton with my mother the Sunday before. Over Paul. Over living with Paul. And all the time coming back to Johannesburg in the train, I had managed to fight the-the feeling of this scene—the things it made me feel, I mean—with the thought that the person who felt these things was no longer me; the real me was the one with Paul. I was flying back to her. And when I got back and found that for Paul this really was so—he discounted my Atherton self—he laughed at the scene as if it had been something that couldn’t have touched me—I understood at once that it had. That creature in Atherton shouting at her mother was me. It all switched round horribly, and the person who lived with Paul only thought she was real. I slept and pushed it away, the way one does, and then meeting you like that the next day started it all up again, only worse. There was another twist. How can I put it? I subdivided again. I saw this smiling, nodding, gaping, oblivious creature talking to you, apologizing with insulting graciousness for something that couldn’t be apologized for. Something that had nothing whatever to do with her. It belonged to the person she had supplanted. That’s the only word for it. Supplanted, that’s what I felt. And then that person seemed to me to be me, a creature come to life again with such distress at what had been done and left undone in her name.”

  When once you have spoken like this there is no ending. Sitting forward on my chair in the hotel lounge with my hand tightly round the base of my glass, I did not know for a moment what I had begun by talking about; knew only that everything that was heaving up in my mind, apparently disparate, unconnected by chronology or subject, was relevant to and belonged indisputably with it.

  When Joel spoke it was unexpected. “It was a tossup with me whether I’d speak to you or not that day,” he said. The pinkish light of the room swimming with talk hooded his eyes. Now that he was older, I saw that they resembled his mother’s, that remote old woman coming to life only when she was serving or preparing food for others, that old woman sitting in the corner with her shabby shoes crossed, watching me. “When I saw you I was angry. I suddenly wanted to tell you to go to hell.”

  There was a twinge of hurt in me at his words. They were casual enough in themselves; a natural reaction from hurt or irritation which would have brought a confessedly sympathetic smile from me, spoken by anyone else. But it was as if, for that moment in the street months ago, Joel had looked for something common, ordinary, blunted by use on everybody and anybody, with which to strike me, to show me by the choice of weapon rather than the blow the extent of my worth.

  “I was angry. I was hurt … I suppose that’s why. And you stood there all smiles, effusive, looking just as you always did.” He paused, bent a match in two and fizzed his whisky and soda. We were both seeing me again, standing on the pavement in Commissioner Street, tilting my head at him. “But as you kept on standing about and playing with those theater tickets you had, I noticed something about your face—I don’t know what it was, really. You seemed to be—put together too consciously. Does that sound silly?” He looked at me, seeing me now, not then. “I didn’t want to say it any more.”

  There was a moment’s pause, and we both drank. “You had your hair drawn back then,” he said, and I knew he was remembering the piece that had blown down against my lips, and that I had kept pushing away. Somewhere inside me this was handed to me as a slip of paper on which is written a word of power; but the chastening of a minute or two before kept me humble.

  Looking round at the people about us who were rising to go into dinner, I had a moment of dark illumination, far from Durban and the pleasant anticipatory buzz and the hushing of the night sea outside. I said fearfully: “I don’t know what would have happened then, if you had. Told me to go to hell, I mean. Cast me off.”

  “Why?” he said.

  I looked for words. “I think I should have screamed. Oh, I don’t mean then and there, in the street. But inside myself. I should have lost control.”

  Later we stood on the jetty, leaning over the rail. Under the planks beneath our feet, we could feel the sea flinging its weight again and again. But it was too dark to see the water; a night without a moon. Looking back, there was the bright claw of Durban, reaching into the black. I could smell the hissing water down below, prickling up air to my cheeks like the sizzling of soda water.

  “How do they feel about it?” I said, speaking of Joel’s parents and of what he had just admitted, that in Israel he would be more likely to be planting potatoes than designing buildings.

  “They wouldn’t be too happy, if they realized it, I think. They would think it a waste—”

  I smiled down to the dark sea. “A waste.”

  “—But, fortunately, they don’t realize it. The idea of Israel dazzles out everything else. They see me going home.”

  I said after a minute: “You know, Joel, I think you might have gone anyway. Even if you hadn’t been a Jew.”

  He looked round at me in the dark though I couldn’t see his face. “Yes, maybe.—I suppose that’s true.”

  “D’you remember what you said once, about belonging only to the cr
ust in South Africa.”

  He laughed softly. “That Sunday outing.”

  The sea, drawing back its immensity of waters like a great sigh, poised a moment of silence.

  As it burst forward, I began to speak again. “I don’t feel even that any more. Even that night in the township—at the time it was terrible and immediate and I was there, in the thick of it. But afterward the worst thing about it for me was the fact that I was in it was only by physical accident. It happened around me, not to me. Even the death of a man; behind a wall of glass. …” The water lapped back at me, took my words away. “I envy you. A new country. Oh, I know it’s poor, hard, but a beginning. Here there’s only the chaos of a disintegration. And where do people like us belong. Not with the whites screaming to hang onto white supremacy. Not with the blacks—they don’t want us. So where? To land up like Paul with a leg and an arm nailed to each side? Oh, I envy you, Joel. And I envy you your Jewishness.”

  At this he made a little noise of astonishment. “Why that, for God’s sake?”

  “Because now I’m homeless and you’re not. The wandering Jew role’s reversed. South Africa’s a battleground; you can’t belong on a battleground. So the accident of your Jewish birth gives you the excuse of belonging somewhere else.”

  Joel had turned his back to the rail and was leaning on his elbows. In the dark I could feel him looking at me, I felt he was looking somewhere other than my outward self, he saw penetratingly, with a kind of powerful instinct, where light was not needed. So he said, without a trace of irrelevancy: “Your people. You’ve finished with them, for good?”

  “Oh, yes. I see that. … And yet when I went back there, that last time, I found a kind of comfort in those old ladies with their knitting and those men all comfortably notched on the official scale. Like letting the moss slide over your head in a stagnant pool. It’s terrible to find yourself reduced to taking comfort from the thing you despise.”

  “Despise is a hard word,” he said.

  “Yes, I know. John and Jenny and Isa”—I avoided the inclusion of Paul’s name. “But I shouldn’t put the blame on them. Anyway, I can’t ever go back to the thing I cast off in favor of what they had to offer—Atherton makes me shudder. But you, it beats me how you’ve done it. You’ve lived just as you wished, you do as you must, and you’ve managed to hang on and hurt nobody. And yet your people are as far from your kind of life as mine are from mine—if I can be said to have a kind of life. …”

  Joel said, in a tone of voice I had heard from him before, long ago: “Helen, they did seem pretty impossible to you, didn’t they?—My mother and father.”

  There was a second’s hesitation before I answered. “Yes,” I said. “Impossible for you.”

  “You mean the store and the things that make up their life and the way they look?”

  “Yes-yes, I suppose so. I have to admit that’s what I really mean. You’re so different. Money is their standard.—No, that’s not it—Money is their civilization.”

  “And what do you think mine is?”

  “Yours isn’t anything so ready-made. I should say it was the full exercise of human faculties.”

  “Good, good,” he said, of the phrase. And then in a wary, half-bantering, questioning voice: “The good life … eh?”

  “The good life,” I said. “Don’t say that. The good life.”

  “You thought Jenny and John and the others had it. Now you think I have.”

  “I don’t say you’ve achieved it. But I believe you know what it is.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not any more. I’m not sure. Anyway, I know what it isn’t. It isn’t the hypocrisy of considering that something has been done to right wrongs because you yourself act as if they have been righted. The color bar isn’t down because you’ve invited an Indian to dinner; you haven’t struck a blow for the working classes because, like Jenny Marcus, you don’t wear a hat.”—I laughed with him. “Oh, yes, it’s true. I think for me that was the beginning of the end, with the Marcuses. Jenny actually told it to me. John wouldn’t let her wear a hat, because the bourgeoise women do.—That was the choice I’d made for myself. The life of honesty and imagination and courage.”

  “The full exercise of human faculties.”

  “Yes. I’ve got all the phrases, haven’t I? But the things I’ve fobbed off on myself, under those names … Whatever I think about seems to bring me back to that dead native in the location: the good life and the thing that’s actually lived, the idea of death and the actuality of the man potted down so quietly in all that racket. … There’s the same hiatus there. Joel”—it was getting cold now, in a rising wind off the water, and my hands were stiff in the pockets of my coat—“why does it trouble me so much, this awful feeling I have of being at a remove from everything?”

  He did not answer.

  “Even over the riots. Paul and I had talked about the strike. It was something that belonged right in our lives, it wasn’t a piece we’d read in the papers or a mild interest justifying someone’s pretensions to liberalism. But that Monday I felt nothing at all; really nothing. No concern, scarcely any interest. All I thought about was Paul and the week end in Atherton.”

  Joel said: “D’you remember Brabantio?—Neither my place, nor aught I heard of business hath rais’d me from my bed; nor doth the general care take hold on me; for my particular grief is of so floodgate and overbearing nature, that it engluts and swallows other sorrows, and it is still itself.”

  The wind blew away the words and I had to ask him to repeat it.

  “And what do you mean by that? What I think about myself—that in the end I’m too small-minded to have the capacity to feel for anything outside the sticky mess of my own sordid little emotions?”

  “Only that it’s a simple human fallibility to put one’s own affairs—specially love affairs—first. In fact, it’s one of the things that helps to ensure the survival of the human race.—You always set yourself such a terribly high standard, Helen, that’s the trouble. You’re such a snob, when it comes to emotion. Only the loftiest, the purest, will do for you. Sometimes I’ve thought that it’s a kind of laziness, really. If you embrace something that seems to embody all this idealism, you feel you yourself have achieved the loftiest, the purest, the most real.”—He felt that his choice of adjectives had missed the dual goal of my aspirations and added the two last with emphasis.

  I said, rather painfully: “My own high-falutin’ version of Jenny’s little flirtation with the hat.” I looked down again at the water, which I could not see. I seemed to be talking to a voice out of the darkness; Joel was so still and dim beside me, and the sharp salt wind stiffened my cheeks. Of course it was Paul whom he meant. Or whom, out of their truth, the words made him mean. But I did not want to bring Paul out into this exchange of thoughts in the dark. An odd loyalty (to what it would be disloyal to put the thought of him into words, I did not know; there are blind loyalties of the blood which are slow to conform to changes in the mind and emotions) made me keep silent. The wind seemed to ruffle the lights on the shore, so that they glittered once, as I looked, like scales. “I’m cold,” I said, and as we turned to walk back to the land, “Joel, you were never taken in by the John and Jenny crowd. Were you? And yet you spent a great deal of time with them. Well, they were your friends—it was you who took me there. But you didn’t swallow it all, the way I did. Yet I think you wanted just as much as I did”—I italicized it half-sadly, half-mockingly—” ‘the good life.’”

  “Oh, yes, I want it,” he said. “Just as much. Too much, Helen, to expect to find it, first shot, just like that.”

  I went in front of him down the wooden steps back onto the promenade. “Joel”—I rounded on him with a sudden accusing discovery, curious—“why didn’t you ever warn me about them—tell me. You could have told me.” I paused as if to coax him. “I might even have listened.” We were under the looped lights of the promenade now, and met with each other’s faces. He hesitated a m
oment beneath a lamppost, checking our progress, so that we must have looked like two people who pause to decide on their direction. “No …,” he said, looking at me rather hard. His eyes were in the shadow of his brows, but I saw his cheeks move, as if he screwed up his eyes against a harsh light. “No. Not now. Perhaps some other time. It’s a long story.”

  I laughed. “But there isn’t much other time. It’s Thursday night—pretty late Thursday night, too, I should imagine—and the Ostia sails on Saturday.”

  The next morning he arrived at the hotel soon after breakfast. He had walked all the way from the docks, because it was such a lovely day, and he was carrying a small parcel. Inside it was a carved ebony head I had admired in the window of the native curio shop the day before. “It’s from the Congo, they told me,” he said, as I set it down with delight amid the string and paper on one of the hotel veranda tables. “Joel, it’s beautiful! I love it!” And he was as much pleased at my pleasure.

  There is something about the spontaneous exchange of a gift that creates a special kind of ease between people; that Friday morning in Durban it seemed part of the general freshness and good temper of the day. We sat on the veranda with the rich and lazy assumption of the whole day before us. The waves lifted their shining backs and paused a moment, fixed in their own reflections, before rolling evenly to the sand; the whole sea glittered and hung, alive and beautiful behind the cars and busses and the clipped green spaces of the Marine Parade. I stretched out over the balustrade and twisted my neck up to the tall buildings which seemed to disappear, toward the top, in the bright air. “Makes you dizzy”

  He came and hung out, too. “Terrific sweep of horizontal”—his hand went out over the sea—“contrasted with sheer vertical. Makes you really see what modern architecture is getting at.”

  “Or what the sea is getting at!” We both laughed. “Shall we go to the beach?” I said, wiggling my toes in my sandals.