Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  The other members of the household had been out of the house since daylight. Later in the morning a strong elderly woman came in from the fields, barefoot, businesslike, her head tied up in a long spotted doek. Mapulane introduced his mother and she stood through the formalities with the face of one already primed for this. Then she plunged into a long harangue with Mapulane’s half-grown sister, full of commands, as they moved about the stove and yard together.

  Once the old woman, passing Ann, stopped as if she had just seen her for the first time, and crossed her arms. “All the way from Jo’burg. A long way. Oh yes … a long way, eh?”

  “Not so bad.” Ann wanted to make the most of this overture. “It was awful to disturb you like that so late at night.”

  But it was not an overture, nor even a conversation, but a set piece, a symbolic politeness to keep her at bay. The good-looking old woman went on with impersonal admiring concern, “Myself I don’t like to journey far. All that way. And cars, cars … Oh yes, a very long way.”

  She turned abruptly back to her own affairs.

  During the two days the visitors were in the house, the members of the family stopped talking and often even left off whatever it was they were doing when Ann came into their presence. They were polite and courteous; she was made conscious of her clothes, her manner, as if she were seeing them from the outside.

  “They’re old country people,” Gideon said, fond of them, of her; bringing them together in his attraction to both. He had spent most of the day talking to James and was alone with her for the first time since morning, walking out over the veld. “They don’t think they have the right to ‘like’ you—I mean, to have personal ordinary feelings about a white”

  “I got on fine with the Pedi women. They couldn’t even talk English, but I used to go in and out of their huts and play with their children—”

  “—Tribal people.” He was stroking her hair in agreement while she was speaking. “These are mission people; the old man’s a preacher, Sophie goes to mission school. They’re nearer to you and so much further away—understand?”

  “When I asked her if the water in that big jug was for drinking she called me ‘madam’.” Ann was accusing, almost annoyed with herself for confessing this.

  Gideon laughed. But he was not really interested in the background members of the household, with whom he exchanged passing talk, easy in his masculinity, the naturalness of his manner towards his own people, and the aura he had about him as the clever friend from the political world that the son of the house shared with him in distinction and risk.

  The village was beautiful if you put out of mind the usual associations that go with the idea of a beautiful place to live. Apart from Mapulane’s house, that they could see standing out so distinctly from the rest, the houses were square mud ones with grass roofs or tin ones held down by bricks. In some there were windows and painted wooden doors; all were a mixture of the sort of habitation a man makes out of the materials provided by his surroundings and the sort that is standard when his environment becomes nothing more decisive than an interchangeable mise-en-scène of his work. They were a realistic expression of the lives being lived in them, lives strung between town and country, between the pastoral and the industrial; in spite of their poorness, they had the dignity of this.

  The village stood on a hill faceted with rocks gleaming in the sun, among other hills like it; they exchanged flashing messages in dry heat and silence and there was no witness but the personages of baobab trees. Ann and Gideon found themselves among these trees as among statues. They did not grow gregariously, in groves, but rose, enormous and distinct, all over the stretch of empty land. Like the single leg of a mastodon, each trunk weighed hugely on the pinkish earth; the smooth bark, with the look of hairless skin, shone copper-mauve where the sun lit up each one in the late afternoon, as it does the windows of distant houses.

  Ann and Gideon could not have been further from the world of ordinary appearances, earth covered with tar, space enclosed in concrete, sky framed in steel, that had made the mould of their association. They walked over the veld and already it seemed that this was as it had always been, before anyone came, before the little Bushmen fled this way up to Rhodesia and the black man spread over the country behind them, before the white man rediscovered the copper that the black men had mined and abandoned—not only as it had been, but as it would be when they were all gone again, yellow, black and white. They did not speak, as if they were walking on their own graveyard.

  Mapulane said, “You’re not too comfortable, I’m afraid—stay as long as you like, man,” but he admitted to Gideon, in an impersonal way, when they were talking about his position in general, that things were “a bit tricky”. The Native Commissioner would be bound to find out Ann was there. Gideon said lazily, “She helps with research about African music, eh—? She’s been in reserves all over the show—”

  Yet he was not seriously opposing Mapulane’s need for caution; he knew that the good chap was already suspect enough on account of certain activities with political refugees on the run that the Commissioner suspected but hadn’t yet been able to pin down. Mapulane had had mysterious visitors before now; they came and went before their presence could be investigated, and that was the best way.

  He and Gideon had long talks about politics and the personalities of politics; whether Sijake was too much under the thumb of the white leftists who advised him, whether he could handle Thabeng, whether Nguni could be counted on in a mess. Listening to Mapulane’s way of speaking, sitting with the tall, thin, “respectably” dressed figure near him (Mapulane kept, perhaps as a protective colouring, perhaps because, despite everything, some part of him corresponded to the image, something of the black teacher’s humble assumption of a status that doesn’t ask too much), Gideon felt the free running of a special, unimpeded understanding that comes with certain friends. Mapulane never said two words to him that did not go deeper than the words and touch off some recognition of an attitude or an idea that lay awaiting some such claim in himself. Yet when they left he saw in Mapulane’s affectionate face what he was thinking now that he was driving away. The small head on the tall body, the glasses, neatly-parted hair and frowning smile—the smile was one of tolerance, helplessness at something that couldn’t be enquired into; there went Gideon, landing up with this white girl, losing himself with a white girl on the way, the hard way that didn’t provide for any detours. Here Mapulane did not follow him; only regretted him.

  The baobabs passed, slowly turning forms as the car approached, then left them behind. The Rhodesian border was only a few miles away. Ann was one of those people who, because of the very casualness with which they regard formalities, are usually equipped to go anywhere. She had her passport lying somewhere in the suitcase she had hastily packed—the passport was simply kept there, anyway; in half an hour they could be over the border—no doubt someone like Mapulane could smuggle Gideon across somehow, if she and Gideon really wanted it. But she said nothing, just sang a little, as a soldier sings on a troop-ship or a transport lorry bound for some destination he does not expect to know. The border was something she and Gideon had not approached; they did not know how far or near they were from it in the real measure of their distance from the life that lay on the other side. They knew one thing: that it was irresistible to be together. Whether they wanted to make this fact responsible for the rest of their lives was not something they had troubled themselves with yet. Neither had she ever asked herself how long they could go on not troubling; not cowardice but a confidence rarely impaired by failure allowed her to come upon such things without preparation. She was bored by self-doubts and anticipations; she trusted herself to know what she wanted as she knew the moment to cross the road in traffic.

  Gideon thought about James Mapulane’s face, but he did not think about the border. He had not thought about the border since the time when he was supposed to be going to Italy, and had thought about it all the time, the form c
onstantly changing like a cloud taking shape from what is in one’s mind—now the actual veld and stones and baobabs, the wide brown river of this border near Mapulane’s, now the sands and the kraals hedged with euphorbia that led to the one in Bechuanaland, now simply the outline and end of something, an horizon over which he was a still smaller dot within the diminishing dot of a silver aeroplane.

  They slept in the car on the way to Basutoland. It was a small car and even the back seat, which Ann had, was very cramped. In the morning they were dazed and stiff-necked and she said, “We’re going to buy a tent.” He had slept in all sorts of places but never in a tent; that belonged again to that world of pleasure jaunts and leisure that black children did not have.

  “Oh look …” A stretch of tall yellow grass, where the sakabula birds flew, trailing their long tails, was passing her window. “A house there—imagine a house in the middle of that …” She had never had a house of her own, but all over the world she saw places where a house might be, and to which she would never go back.

  “I like a place with trees. Right in the middle of trees. You know, one of those houses where the light is striped, all day long.”

  The sluggishness of the cold and stuffy night in the car lifted as they drove, and their responses, that had coiled away back to themselves in separateness, began to warm and open.

  “But grass all round, as high as your head, as far as you can see … Let’s go down there a bit?”

  “What for?”

  “Oh what for, what for.”

  Ann strolled over the whole earth as if it belonged to her, for she did not question, which amounted to the same thing, that there was nowhere where she wasn’t wanted. He brought a blanket out of the car and when they had walked a little way they sat hidden in the grass, leaning comfortably back to back, eating bananas and smoking, coming back to life.

  He said, “What time is it?”

  “Are you hungry?”—because this was his usual way of suggesting they ought to get a meal. She leaned over and broke off another banana, offering it to him. But he wanted somehow to attach this space of existence, which he and the woman both contained and were contained by indivisibly, to what he had all the rest of his life—to that constant bearing away upon actions and desires. He was not hungry—not in any way at all. He wanted nothing, and had in himself everything. He did not need to touch her, even without touching her he possessed her more completely than any woman he had ever had. She lay back and closed her eyes. He watched her a little while as she slept, the pulse in her neck the only moving thing in the silence about him, and then he got up and went in search of a reedy place that he had noticed, not far off, from the car; if there was water there, he wanted to wash. He smiled at the thought of the sight of himself, walking through the veld with her cake of perfumed soap and a nylon toothbrush.

  Ann opened her eyes on one of the beautiful, untidy birds, swaying almost within reach of her hand on a thick dead stalk of the grass that was high as a wall round the nest the blanket had broken into it. She sat up with a cat-yawn. Her body was with lack of it. The strands of the bird’s long tail tangled in panic with the grasses as it took off. She stood up to watch it and saw a man standing a few yards away.

  “Hullo,” she said. “Did I startle you?”

  “You all right, lady?” He had the slow sober speech of the country Afrikaner speaking English, but his voice was the voice of a man of substance, sensible and sure of himself. He did not come closer but watched her smiling her big smile at him, tucking her shirt into her skirt, a beautiful girl with the long brown legs he associated with the city. There was that immediate pause, filled with the balance of sleep, where before it had been hollow quarter taken and given, between an attractive woman of class and a man old enough and just worldly enough to recognise it. He was a farmer, in a good grey suit, thick shoes and the inevitable felt hat that country Afrikaners wear—on his way to the lawyer or the bank, most probably.

  “I’ve just had a lovely snooze, that’s all. You don’t mind, do you?”

  He softened into a more personal manner. “It’s not my land, it’s my neighbour’s, see? But I just thought you was in trouble. The car there, and so on.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “You’re not on your own here? There’s a lot of drunk boys around on Sunday—”

  She snatched the conversation: “No, no, my husband’s here, just gone over the—”

  “Oh well, that’s O.K. then, sorry to disturb you—” He was eager to be affable now, specially friendly in that indiscriminate comradeship that white people feel when they meet in the open spaces of a country where they are outnumbered. Her own voice had tipped over in her some vessel filled with fear that she didn’t know was there; it poured into her blood while she smiled at him, brilliantly, smiled at him to go, and was afraid to look anywhere but at him in case she should see Gideon standing there too. Just as the man left and she heard a car start up away on the road, there was the figure, the hieroglyph in the distance that she could read as the quiet, slouching walk, the narrow khaki trousers, the blue shirt that was her present.

  The car must have been gone five minutes by the time he came up. As he grew nearer a run of trembling went through her several times; she had the dread of something approaching that couldn’t be stopped. She wanted to run back to the little car. When he stood there, paused as he came through the grass to their little clearing, and looked round it as one does round a room where one senses immediately something has happened in one’s absence, she laughed excitedly, braggingly, and half-whispered, half-wept, “A man was here! A farmer! I’ve had a visitor!”

  He looked at her, looked all round him.

  Then, “You’re sure he’s gone?”

  “Oh he’s gone, yes he’s gone, I heard the car, he’s gone.” She was rocking herself with him, digging her fingers into his arms. He had never seen her so emotional, without a gleam of challenge in her. Suddenly it all came to her as if it had happened: “I wanted to run like mad to you when I saw you but I was terrified he might still be looking. —Any minute, any minute, you might have—He thought it wasn’t safe for me, can you imagine, I couldn’t get rid of him. I wanted to rush to you—” She broke off and began to giggle, holding his hands and moving them in hers in emphasis of her words—”A kind farmer. He was, really. A nice man.”

  “Let’s get off his land,” said Gideon.

  “Oh no, it’s not his. He told me, it’s his neighbour’s.”

  He was pulling up the blanket. They fell into a pantomime of crazy haste, dropping their things, struggling and laughing, tussling.

  What she had spilt was like mercury and rolled away into the corners of her being, impossible ever to recover and confine again.

  The car surrounded them with the clutter of their inhabitation, enclosing and familiar as an untidy room where one day is not cleared away before another piles on top of it. Already they had a life together, in that car. Like any other life, it was manifest in biscuit crumbs, aspirins, cigarette boxes kept for the notes on the back, broken objects of use (a pair of sunglasses, a sandal without a buckle) and other objects that had become indispensable, not in the function for which they were intended, but in adaptation to a need—the fluffy red towel that was perfect for keeping the draught off Ann’s knees, and the plastic cosmetic bottle that they used to hold lemon juice. Already the inanimate bore witness to and was imbued with whatever had been felt and thought in that car, the love-making, the hours when nothing was said and attention streamed along with the passing road, the talk, the fatigue, the jokes. When Ann settled in and her eyes dropped to the level of the grey dashboard with its tinny pattern of grilles and dials, the dead half-hours were marked there for her: the time when she did not know why she was here rather than anywhere else. If the exciting silent dialogue of her presence and the man beside her ceased for a moment to sound in that place in herself where she had first heard it, she grew restless, pacing the logic of slots, circles a
nd knobs.

  Gideon telephoned from a dorp post office to tell his friends in Basutoland that he was coming. The people themselves, who ran a store in the mountains, had no telephone, of course, but a friend in a Government office in Maseru would give a message to his brother, who would pass it on to someone else—Ann did not question the circumlocutory mystery by which the warning of their arrival would reach its destination. She was charmed with and proud of the tightly-interlocking life where Gideon was as free and powerful, in his way, as some white tycoon arranging his life by telex. The call took the best part of the afternoon to come through, and then Gideon came back to the car to say that the man in Maseru knew straight off, without any further enquiry, that Malefetsane was away from home, gone to Vryburg on some family business.