A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Well, as I say, we’re going to use the old Mofokeng woman as a test case, and we need her son to help us for a day or two – the old lady’s a bit bewildered about this business and she wants to have him around as moral support, to interpret for her and get dates straight and so on. I want to ask you to give him the necessary time off from work.’

  ‘But of course,’ I said. ‘He could’ve asked me himself, for that matter. He can go off whenever he’s needed.’

  ‘That’s very nice of you, Mr Hood. I think he didn’t want to ask in case you thought it was just another one of the grandmother tales, and refused.’

  ‘Grandmother tales?’

  ‘You know – I’ve had a letter saying my grandmother’s sick, and I must go home. . . .’ She stood up to take her leave.

  I said, conversationally, ‘I must say, Amon is about the last person I’d imagine as a cause célèbre.’

  ‘It’s not quite that’ she said.

  ‘I mean I haven’t felt much interest in him, as a person; he’s simply a part of the office set-up.’

  ‘Of course’ she said. But I felt sure she misunderstood me; surely that very non-committal politeness stemmed from a sense of moral superiority; she would be one of those for whom every utterance was a move to a black square or a white square.

  ‘He reminds me of someone in our London office – only, of course, he happens to be an old chap of sixty-eight or nine, he’s got too old for his job in the dispatch room, and he’s gone full circle back to a kind of working second childhood, making tea and licking stamps. But he’s like Amon; doing his work, but scarcely there at all. So it’s difficult to believe that he’s there anywhere else, either. You couldn’t imagine meeting Johnson in a pub, having his pint of beer, for example.’

  ‘Well, you certainly won’t meet Amon in a bar!’ She spoke gently, with her head a little on one side.

  ‘I’m coming down too’ I said, as she walked to the door. ‘Let me collect my parcels and we’ll continue this in the lift.’

  ‘Isn’t it finished?’ she said, laughing.

  She stood waiting for me; she had no hat, no gloves, none of the usual paraphernalia that women usually have to grapple with before they are ready to go out into the street, and so, oddly, the roles were reversed, and she stood as I was used to standing, while I loaded myself with packets and boxes. Miss McCann had the cover on her typewriter and was setting off with soap and towel for the cloakroom down the corridor. I asked her to lock up, and said good-bye. ‘- Where’s Amon?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s run down to the Post Office with that registered letter for Better Books in Cape Town.’

  But in the lift we talked of other things. ‘I’ve just got myself a flat,’ I told the neat dark head and little, tough face beside my elbow. The drop of the lift gave her that apprehensive, listening air that I often notice in people in lifts. I thought, irrelevantly, but with pleasure at being reminded of something I’d forgotten so long, of a Rilke poem I had once regarded as something awful and comforting:

  And night by night, down into solitude

  the heavy earth falls far from every star.

  We are all failing. This hand’s falling too -

  all have this falling-sickness none withstands.

  And yet there’s always One whose gentle hands

  this universal falling can’t fall through.

  When we got outside, the street was full of men and women hurrying with the bent backs of city people, hurrying against the crowded bus, the brief evening of leisure. It was the time to seek the delay of a pub. I wondered whether I should ask her to have a drink with me; I felt in myself the restlessness, the inclination to let myself be carried away by cheap music, the shoddy titillation of dim corners, the swimming, fish-eye view of the world after a few drinks, that usually presages in me that other and deeper hunger, for love; so I pass from being too easily pleased to the greatest of all dissatisfactions.

  She said ‘If your car’s a long way, I can take you to it. Mine’s just on the corner.’

  ‘Thanks, but I have no car. I’m going to the bus.’

  ‘Oh, then I’ll give you a lift; it’s easy for me.’

  I decided that her company would be better than nothing; even if she annoyed me a little, she was pleasant. ‘Thank you very much. I wasn’t looking forward to bashing my way through the bus with this lot. But if you’re not in a great rush, won’t you come and have a drink first?’

  We went, of course, into the Stratford; we were standing almost at the door, in any case. We went into the bar lounge – bars are for men only, all over South Africa – and sat at one of the yellow wooden tables with the scratched glass tops. The chairs had plastic-covered seats but the tall backs were stoutly Tudor and pressed hard between your shoulder-blades. Henry VIII in a muffin hat and a beard that looked superimposed on his face, like the beards small boys scribble on the faces of women on advertisement hoardings, stared at a gilt plaster lion that was the symbol of a South African brewery. Rings of wet shone up from the table.

  She had two brandies and I drank gin, and we talked about flats – she had lived in three or four, and now had a cottage in the grounds of someone’s house – and about her Legal Aid Bureau. She told me some amusing stories about divorce cases she had handled for the Bureau, and I found myself telling her something of the lighter side of my mother’s and Faunce’s preoccupation with the world’s wrongs. I told her how Faunce had invited an ex-prisoner to dinner who entertained us by teaching us how to pick a lock, and how, another time, my mother had dashed all over London to get chickens killed according to Muslim ritual, in order to provide appropriate food for some Indian guests, only to find that the guests were Hindus and didn’t eat meat anyway.

  ‘It’s so easy to be ridiculous when you’re trying to identify yourself with the other person.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, smiling reminiscently. ‘But it’s a risk you have to take, sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, there are ways and ways. Thing is, not to presume too much on your own understanding; never meet the other one more than half-way.’

  She continued to smile attentively, looking down into her glass; she was clearly the land of person who often disagreed, but seldom argued: the sort of person who lets one run on.

  My case for reserve against presumption began to take on some of the eager bombast I was decrying. I was aware of this, but, because she gave me the space of her attention in which to go on and make a fool of myself, somehow I could not stop. What did stop me instantly, what took my mind from what I was saying as surely as if a nerve had been cut between my brain and my tongue, was a snatch of voice that I knew. ‘We could do some mud-slinging, too,’: the phrase came to me clearly out of all the criss-crossed sibilants, laughs, and exclamations of the room. Who had spoken? In this town where I was a stranger, how could I know a voice? While I went on talking, my attention went all about the room, over the faces and the glasses and the cigarette smoke. And there was Cecil Rowe.

  I hadn’t even noticed, that day at Hamish Alexander’s what sort of voice the girl had. She was sitting, half-turned away from me, at a table with two men; they must have come in after we had, but people were going and coming all the time, and her entry must have been screened from us. She looked, too, quite different from the way she had looked at the Alexanders’. Even her hair was a different colour. She wore a very small black hat in a straight line on her forehead, and a black dress that showed her collar-bones. From where I sat, her face had the poster-like vividness of a woman who is heavily made-up. She was talking and gesturing animatedly, conscious of success with her companions.

  She did not see me, but when Anna Louw and I rose to go, and had to walk past her half-turned back as we went out, she turnned and stopped me, looking up. She had just taken a sip of her drink, and her mouth was parted. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘And how are you?’ The commonplace greeting was spoken like a challenge; as if I were someone from whom she had last parted in some extrem
e situation: drunk, angry, or in love.

  ‘Why, well, as you see . . .’ I said, foolishly. She did look different. Standing a foot or two from her upturned face, I saw that her eyes were orientalized with blue shading and black lines, her hair showed her ears and lay in short, silvery feathers against the velvet of her hat, the shape of her mouth had somehow been altered by lipstick. I noticed that just in front of her right ear she had a raised mole; it had been covered with the warm-looking extra skin provided by an opaque make-up, but it showed itself just the same. So, oddly enough, beneath all this, the woman showed herself too. She looked very attractive; knowing, greedy, unsentimental. I wondered which of the men, the thick fair one with the tight-filled skin, or the thinner one, also fair, was her husband. She did not introduce me, and so, although I was about to do so, I did not introduce Anna Louw, either, and, with a smile, walked on. But she remained turned in her chair and included Anna Louw in the smiling movement that said good-bye. When I saw her looking at Anna Louw, I remembered how, a month ago, I had thought that I would only have to be in the Stratford once, with a girl, in order to feel attached to the place. Cecil Rowe was that kind of girl. Sitting there among the men in their office suits and the briefcases laid by the Tudor chairs, she was as much the charm of the queer, public yet furtive life of town as a shepherdess, all ribboned crooks and roses, is of a pastoral idyll.

  Even Anna Louw’s car bore the signs of a woman who was accustomed to look after herself; in the dashboard cubby-hole there was a road map, a first-aid kit, and a card of fuse wire.

  She said: ‘What’s your time?’ And when I told her, five past six, ‘Would you give me my cigarettes – they’re in there somewhere.’ I gave her one of mine, and she drew the first breath of it deep in as she drove, so that her small, compact body seemed to grow. ‘That’s the great thing about denying oneself something – the pleasure of having it again at last,’ I said.

  ‘Oh this first cigarette!’ she said. ‘The whole day seems to melt away.’

  ‘I think perhaps that’s why people make these rules for themselves; the emotional, equivalent of dumping thousands of tons of coffee in the sea, in order to keep the price up.’

  ‘That’s a nice idea,’ she said.’ It’s much nicer than saying that you do it for your liver, if it’s drink, or your lungs, if it’s cigarettes.’

  ‘But I believe it’s true; mostly the health reason is the least of it. And it’s the sort of subterfuge titillation that only arises out of plenty. The Africans you deal with – I’m sure they don’t have to break a diet in order to appreciate a good meal, or go on the wagon for a week to make a drink taste wonderful. It’s only people like us, who are sated with comfits of one kind and another, who have to go in for these dodges.’

  ‘Poverty without boredom.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She smoked concentratedly for a moment before she took the cigarette out of her mouth and said, with her customary mildness (as if she had added up a line of figures and found an error), ‘I think there’s something wrong there. Poor people’ – I wondered if she deliberately broadened the reference – ‘can’t afford things; and that makes anything you want seem marvellous. Wouldn’t a cigarette seem just as wonderful to a man who couldn’t afford to buy himself one all day, as it does to me, who have kept myself from one all day on purpose? – You see?’

  ‘Ah, but his has been a real situation of want – yours is play.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to want; I do?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  She laughed and shifted expressively in her seat: ‘Oh, my friend, you don’t know a thing about how I feel about smoking.’

  A minute later she went on, ‘But I think, so far as other things are concerned, there’s something in what you say. I often think how it is that Africans don’t have as many made-up troubles as my white friends. – You know the sort of troubles that people have, women particularly, women with not much to do. – Anyway, it’s nonsense to generalize.’

  ‘Do you know a lot of Africans?’

  ‘I told you, most of our clients are Africans.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I know some. Quite a few.’

  I offered her another cigarette, and there was the business of lighting it and throwing the match out the window.

  ‘Why don’t you want to talk about it?’

  She said, for time, as people do, ‘What. Oh, it’s not that I don’t want to talk about anything. But you must understand that you are in a country where there are all sorts of different ways of talking about or rather dealing with this thing. One of the ways is not to talk about it at all. Not to deal with it at all. Finished. That’s possible, you know; you’ll find out.’

  ‘I have. I’ve seen it. And apparently functioning perfectly,’ I said. Archie Baxter poured the drinks, the twins dived into the Reckitts-coloured pool, someone blew a cloud of cigar smoke through which a Courbet landscape appeared as a mirage. Uranium, cannon bones, Kit’s own regiment. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t shocked at all. It was pleasant. It was like being anywhere else, only perhaps more comfortable.’

  ‘There you are’ she said, as if I were a child who had followed so far in a difficult lesson. In turn, I thought I recognized sweet reasonableness, that wide-eyed dissembler at Faunce’s dinner-table; but, in all fairness, I had to admit that she did seem quite bluntly to agree.’ There you are. And there are the other ways. . . . You’re a person I don’t know, someone from whom I’ve asked a favour for a client. Isn’t it better for me to leave it at that, rather than force upon you a consideration of my particular way? Force you into hostility, perhaps, because yours may be another?’

  ‘But you must know that I haven’t a way. I’ve only just got here.’

  She looked at me quickly, as she drove. ‘You will have, soon, and that adds up to the same embarrassment. Anyway, you must have arrived with some idea, all ready. Even if it’s one that’s impossible now you’re here.’

  I thought how steadily she spoke. The people whom I knew, I myself, seemed always to speak in rushes and checks, as if nothing ran clear in us, but struggled past uncertainties, squeezed thinly through doubts, and kept bursting the banks of conviction. She had an intonation and a rhythm of speech that was foreign to English, too, but was not the nagging sing-song of Miss McCann, the sing-song that seemed to me to be the dialect of Johannesburg.

  I said, ‘It’s like love, or God; and I thought that here everyone would be discussing it over coffee cups, the way we do Russian foreign policy or expense accounts.’

  Chapter 4

  The car had come to a standstill under the jacarandas in my street; we sat in a natural silence for a moment or two. There ought to be some punctuation mark specially to indicate such pauses, like the sign that indicates a rest in music. ‘Where are you?’ she asked. ‘Oh, just over there, the one with the pillars.’

  She started up the car again. ‘I’ll turn round and get right outside the door.’ ‘No, don’t please, this is fine.’

  ‘Do you find it very dull here?’ she said, as she handed my parcels to me through the window.

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I don’t seem to have any definite sort of life, yet. There are very few cities in the world that can stand up to being taken neat.’

  ‘We always feel so apologetic about it,’ she smiled. ‘You get used to hearing people from England and Europe telling you that there’s nothing here – rolling their eyes and throwing up their hands. . . . You don’t know exactly what they mean, but you feel they’re right.’

  ‘What do they mean, d’you suppose?’ The gathering darkness was like blotting-paper into which one shape ran into another; only her hands, resting on the steering wheel, and her face, showed in the car, and the street-lamps made pastel corollas for their luminous pistils out of the black mass of the trees.

  ‘I used to think it was because everything in town life here relates to another world – the plays are the plays of Euro
pe, the cabaret jokes are those of London or New York. . . . You know what I mean? Johannesburg seems to have no genre of its own. . .?’ She put her hand on the window in appeal. ‘That’s what people feel. Partly. But now I think there’s something else. Loneliness; of a special kind. Our loneliness. The lack of a common human identity. The loneliness of a powerful minority.’

  ‘I was told that no one walks in the streets here, at night,’ I said. She said candidly, ‘It’s not so much that we’re in danger, but that we’re so terribly afraid.’ We both laughed. ‘You’re not,’ I said, convincedly. ‘Oh yes I am,’ she said. ‘Afraid of the dark.’ A lighted balcony sprang out from the flat building opposite and a man walked out on to it, holding a bottle of beer and a glass. He knocked the cap off the bottle against the railing, and when he had poured the beer into the glass, stood looking out into the evening like a horse put out to grass after a day’s carting. From somewhere in the block of houses and shoddy flat buildings a voice screamed to the children playing below: ‘For the last time, I say . . .’ An African servant woman came out of an alley fluidly as a cat; she went barefoot along the pavement, clutching a newspaper parcel, and then suddenly threw back her head and gave a great shouting laugh of greeting to someone we couldn’t see.

  The woman in the car and I had the reluctance to part company of two people with no particular commitments who have suddenly got on quite well together. There was no tension of attraction between us; no reason why either should pretend the demands of other, more private plans. Like most young men, I took for granted the aimless freedom to decide simply from one moment to the next what I would do. Even at home in England, the evenings were foreign ports through which I, a sailor off a ship of unknown destination, wandered, not very curious, not very expectant, yet always, somewhere below my rational self, aware that round some corner, one day, would be the face or the street-fight that would do as my destiny.