A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  I sat with her in the bar on the hard Tudor chairs under the sign of the plaster lion and the picture of Henry the Eighth, without a trace of the triumph and pleasure I had imagined, but male opportunism, with the farsightedness of instinct, saw to it for me, in spite of myself, that I behaved just as I would have if that triumph and pleasure had been alive in me.

  As we sat down, she said, with a careless air of wanting to get it over with, ‘About the husband; I have no husband, idiot or not. I’m divorced.’ And as we both laughed, she added: ‘I never know whether to tell people or let them find out. If I say nothing, they say something that embarrasses them, sooner or later, and if I come out with it, it always sounds like an announcement.’ She was rather forlornly lively (perhaps my own subconscious inert state affected her) and she clutched a young Englishwoman’s bright social manner about her as if it were a disgusting old coat that she’d love to throw away. Now and then, when I was talking and she was listening, she would lapse, quite unconsciously, I was sure, into perfect mimicry of the part she was dressed for – the languid object that is the mannequin, showing herself off like a diamond whose facets must be turned in the light. She told me that she lived in a flat with her three-year-old child; the modelling work was something quite new to her, it seemed to be fun; she would like to go to Rome and be a model there. There was a girl who’d done quite well – but she was dark and had an angry tom cat’s face. That was the fashionable face to have, just now, she assured me. When we parted, she said, ‘Why don’t you come out to Alexanders’ on Saturday and ride?’ I said I might; unable to project myself into the imagined scene as to the milieu of the moon.

  I wanted to see Steven Sitole again, quickly. I had no idea where to find him, so next day I telephoned Sam at the magazine offices where I had been told he worked. His big voice sounded surprised, then obliging: ‘Oh, Mr Hood-were you all right the other night?’ ‘Of course. Fine.’ ‘Well, I’m glad to hear that. I was a bit nervous about letting you go off with old Steven.’

  He couldn’t tell me, right off, where I could telephone Steven, and a third person, someone in the office, was drawn into the conversation. ‘-Eddie, where’s Steven operate from these days? What? No, man, the phone number. Where can you get hold of him?’ Back into the telephone, he said, ‘You can try him at this number, Mr Hood. He’s not there all the time, but they’ll take messages for him. It’s a printer’s; 31-6489 – got it?’ I thanked him and said I hoped I’d see him again some time. He laughed embarrassedly and said, ‘I wonder if we will,’ as if it were not a simple matter that would be likely to be brought about without any particular effort on our part.

  Steven was in when I telephoned the printer’s. ‘Wha-at? Oh, that’s O.K. And me too, I’m O.K.,’ he said, when I thanked him for taking me with him the other evening.’ The taxi was magnificent,’ I said. ‘Got me in well before the milk.’ ‘Wh-at?’ he said again. ‘The what? Oh, old Dhla-mini. Good. Good.’ He was one of those people who, over the telephone, always sound as if they are not listening. Some small tension of novelty and excitement that had drawn tight in the recollection of the unexpectedness of the night I had spent with him, gave way; for him, the incident was part of unremarkable experience to which my presence had perhaps given a mild fillip. I said guardedly, because I meant it, as I had said merely as a piece of meaningless politeness to Sam, I hoped I should see him again some time. But he said, ‘Sure thing. Whenever you say?’ ‘Could we have lunch together, Friday, perhaps?’ He laughed at me in a leisurely fashion. ‘But where can we go together for lunch, man?’ Of course, I hadn’t thought; he couldn’t go into any restaurant or tea-room in town. ‘What about one of your places?’ I said.’ Would I be allowed in one of them?’ Now he roared with laughter. ‘You haven’t seen them,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t suggest it if you’d seen them.’ ‘All right, all right. Where do we eat?’ ‘I could come over to your place if you make it Saturday instead of Friday,’ he suggested. ‘Jolly good. We’ll knock up some lunch at the flat. What time? Half past twelve-ish? I usually leave the office about eleven on Saturday mornings.’ As I agreed, I suddenly remembered the half-promise to go riding at the Alexanders’; and dismissed it. I told Steven where the flat was, and we hung up.

  I also telephoned Anna Louw before the weekend. She said, ‘I hear you went with Steven to Sophiatown. Where’d he take you?’

  ‘I don’t know, exactly,’ I said, stiffly.

  ‘That shebeen-lizard,’ she said mildly.

  ‘You know, I like him. He’s unexpected, I suppose, that’s it.’

  ‘What had you expected?’ she asked with patient interest. With her you felt that your most halting utterance was given full attention. This scrutiny of the clichés of perfunctory communication, the hit-or-miss of words inadequate either to express or conceal, embarrassed me. Like most people, I do not mean half of what I say, and I cannot say half of what I mean; and I do not care to be made self-conscious of this. Much that is to be communicated is not stated; but she was the kind of person who accepts nothing until there has been the struggle to body it forth in words.

  ‘I don’t know, really,’ I said, confused by pressure and irritated by my confusion. Confusion brought a momentary blankness, a blotting out, and I thrust forward the image of this blankness itself for answer, and it served: ‘I hadn’t expected anything, I didn’t know what I could expect. I hadn’t thought about it.’ But of course, that wasn’t right, it wasn’t true; what I had done, in fact, was purposely not to think about the only expectations I could have had from my second-hand information; I had shrunk from the idea of meeting an earnest, bespectacled black man who would talk, over the tea-cup balanced on his knee, of the latest piece of discriminatory law against his people – Uncle Faunce’s black man, my mother’s black man. A man who would bore me and bring to the surface ponderous emotions of self-righteousness and guilt. I suppose any real, live black man would have seemed unexpected to me after this cipher. Certainly a young man who took me drinking with him.

  On Saturday morning I bought some cooked ham and salami (there was beer in the flat) and set it out on the table when I got home; it had the forlorn look of food that has been processed rather than cooked. Then I opened a bottle of beer and sat down by the open window with my unopened Observer and Sunday Times, that followed me to Johannesburg by airmail, only a week late. The noises of the suburban street came up to me sociably; I found that I heard not just voices, shouting children, barking dogs, but the fading screech, as it went away up the street, of the tricycle belonging to a particular small boy, the shrill hysteria of the collie dog forever patrolling the fence of the house hard pressed between two flat buildings, half a block away, and the laughter of the two Italian immigrant children from the building next door. Between half past twelve and one, I looked out a few times to show Steven, if he should come round the corner, where he was bound for, but there was nothing but the relaxed Saturday life of the street – different, I imagine, from the week-day life which I was seldom there to see: cars disgorging working couples piled with their weekend food supplies, men carrying bottles of brandy and cases of soda and Coca-Cola out of the boots, small boys in the shabby khaki or violently jazzy American shirts that South African children wear, kicking and straggling their way to the municipal swimming bath, with their bathing trunks pulled on their sunburned bullet heads of spiky fair hair. I read on and finished the bottle of beer and then found it was two o’clock. The street was almost empty now, everyone was indoors, at lunch; Isaac, the flat boy, had begun his Saturday afternoon washing of one of the tenants’ cars, and was sloshing buckets of water over a blowsy chromium beauty now several years out of date and badly in need of decarbonizing. Steven didn’t come; and at last I sat down and ate. I found I was so hungry I could have eaten all the meat, but I thought he might still turn up. He didn’t come. At three o’clock the young couple from the flat above mine emerged in clean tennis shorts and drove away in their little car, business-like and preoccupied
as they were when they went off to their offices in the mornings. Gradually the street was almost cleared of cars; Isaac gathered his group of sophists from the aimless and the delivery men cycling by, and, as he flapped his chamois about the big car, delivered an off-hand oration to them where they squatted on the kerb. A sentimental song skirled out of a high window, was snatched back out of the air by the turn of a knob somewhere, and replaced by the mad chatter of race-course commentary, like a quarrel between parrots. And on all this, round all this, a splendid afternoon shone, clear and brilliant, dwarfing the thin smoke of boiler-room chimneys and the small dirty breath of car exhausts.

  I felt a little flat and foolish, as one does when a guest fails to present himself. If Steven had had a telephone, and if I had known where to find him at his home, I should have phoned and said ‘What the hell has happened to you?’ and perhaps not minded at all that he hadn’t come. But he had no telephone and I had no idea where he lived. A whole complex of streets like this one, and beyond that a place half-imagined (tin huts, sacking over doorways in a newspaper picture), half-remembered (between mean houses, narrow darkness crowded with the sleeping presence of too many people, pumpkins on the roof, and an old nag sleeping): all this seemed to blot out the possibility of communication between us.

  I might just as well have gone to the Alexanders’ after all; the afternoon, too beautiful to be contained by the suburban street, suggested this. But it was too late to do anything about it, anyway. I dragged the chair I had taken from the office out on to the little cement box that was my balcony, and sat there with my feet up, reading and dozing; all up the street there were men doing the same, like canaries hung out to get the sun. The Alexanders, on their side of the town, did not claim me. Steven, away on his, had not claimed me, either. Up on the roof of the flat building opposite, two African nursemaids in the dishabille of dirty woollen headscarfs instead of workday white caps, and three or four flat boys still in their cleaners’ dress of cotton shorts and tunic, danced and yelled to the scratchy, repetitive music of one record, played on a portable gramophone. In amorphous, anonymous suburbia I lay low; not a stranger, but a man who, for the moment, belongs to himself.

  It was true that a black man and a white man, though acquainted, were unlikely to run into each other again by chance in Johannesburg. The routine of their lives might run parallel most of the time, but it was astonishing how effective were the arrangements for preventing a crossing. But I did see Steven Sitole again, simply because I knew Anna Louw; had it not been for this, perhaps we should unremarkably have lost sight of each other at once.

  I was kept busy about the affairs of Aden Parrot all the next week; I even had to take work home to the flat in the evenings. During the day, I was mostly out of Johannesburg, visiting booksellers in the small towns strung along the path of the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. It was the East Rand I went to that week, I remember, and I went by train, because Faunce was still hedging about letting me have a car, though it was clear enough that in a country with poor public transport, I must have one. I was struck at once by the queerness of the landscape; man-made to a startling degree – as if the people had been presented with an upland plateau and left to finish it, to create a background of natural features instead of to fit in with one – and at the same time curiously empty, as if truly abandoned to man. Between the factories that thinned out from the perimeter of one town, almost meeting the last industrial outpost of the next, there was a horizon of strange hills. Some of them were made of soft white sand, like the sand of the desert or the sea, piled up in colossal castles. Others looked like volcanoes on whose sides the rolling yellow larva had petrified; fissures stained rust-coloured, and eroded formations like the giant roots of trees, marked their bases. There were others, cream, white, buff-coloured, and yellow, and worn into rippling corrugations by the wind, built up in horizontal ridges, like the tombs of ancient kings. Where coal mines had been, black mountains of coal dust glittered dully.

  There were no valleys between these hills for they were simply set down, on the flat veld. Patches of tough green grass and short waving grasses showed, but mostly the growth was weird, wet and thin; a few cows would stand in the reeds of an indefinite swampy patch where the ooze shone mother-of-pearl, like oil; a rectangular lake out of which pipes humped had sheets of violet and pink, like a crude water-colour. In some places there was no earth but a bare, grey scum that had dried and cracked open. And there was black earth, round a disused coal mine, where somone had once thrown away a peach pip, and it had grown into a tree, making out of the coal dirt some hard, hairy green peaches.

  There were trees; eucalyptus trees, confined to plantations that formed grey geometrical shapes in which, as you passed, you caught a glimpse of white, peeling branches like the flash of flesh. A few spindly outcasts, eucalyptus and wattle, got some sort of living in tortured angles against the steep sides of the yellow hills.

  It was a man-made place in quite a different sense from that of a city. (Quite a different sense from that of the midlands in England, too, or the Welsh coal-country.) If it had not been for the hills, the horizon would have been a matter of the limitations of the human eye. Men themselves had made their own spatial boundaries, themselves had created the natural features of hills, water, and woods. What they had made, in the emptiness, was the symbol rather than the thing itself. The cyanide dumps were not hills, the dams of chemically-treated water pumped from underground were not lakes, the plantations were not woods: but they suggested them, they stood for them. And like all true fantasies, this one had been created subconsciously. The people who had made this landscape had merely been concerned to dump above ground, out of the way, the waste matter that was incidental to the recovery of gold.

  The towns themselves were quite another matter. They were conscious creations, all right. They were ugly, cheap, and jazzily dreary, got up in civic ‘beautifying’ efforts on the taste level of a housemaid’s Sunday-best. The main street invariably led in one end of the town and out the other, and on the way were the lines of shops, offering, in coloured neon, fish-and-chips and furniture on terms and building-loans and gents’ outfitting, grinning brides and kiddies in the photographer’s, dingy bars in the brewers’ chain of hotels, a cinema with Cinemascope and, of course, the town hall with the municipal coat-of-arms picked out in pansies between fat palms like pineapples. One of these places had coloured lights on fancy wire frames arched across the street at twenty-foot intervals; at the end of the diminishing vista, you could just see the headgear of the nearest mine-shaft. In each town I visited the local booksellers – there was a newsagents’ chain, like the brewers’ chain, running through them all, and usually one other independent shop-and talked shop to them as best I could before getting to the business of taking their orders for new Aden Parrot books. Most of them were nice chaps, who stuck doggedly to what they knew they could sell, and were as nervous about ordering a new author as the proprietor of a grocery shop might be of offering his customers an unfamiliar kind of cheese; they reminded me of the comfortable pipe-smokers who kept the local bookseller and stationer’s in the English seaside towns of my childhood.

  I had felt that I owed Anna Louw some sort of entertainment or hospitality, and so I had asked her to come to a cinema with me on the Friday night. When I got back to Johannesburg from my last day’s journeying about the East Rand, I felt too tired to bother with her instructions about buses and routes (she had asked me to dinner) and took a taxi to where she lived. The address was north of the town, on the way to the Alexanders’, in the pocket of a half-developed suburb that lay surrounded by, but neglected by contrast with, other suburbs. There she had a cottage in the grounds of a larger house; a kind of paste-board cottage that had been formed out of a reversal of the onion-peeling process: first there had been one room and a bathroom, weekend shelter for a casual guest from the big house, then someone had added a kitchen, and so a more stable existence was possible there, then a veranda, and, final
ly, the veranda had been closed-in and subdivided to make a small, cellular house. The first thing I noticed was the lowness of all the doors and ceilings; I had to dip my head to step into the softly-coloured complexity of Anna’s house. It was like stooping to look into a nest or a cave, a hidden, personal place that exists unperturbed under the unnoticing eye of the passing world.

  Two or three people were sitting about the small living-room; the windows were open wide, and I had a sense of the light running out, moving from the room like a tide. ‘Hullo, Mr Hood,’ said little Sam, welcomingly. Anna introduced me to a dumpy, grey-haired woman in slacks, who kept saying, in a strong Hollands accent, ‘I got do go, now, my deer, eh? I got do go now.’ Steven was there. He got up from the divan under the windows, where he had been sitting, and backed away in invitation to me to sit down. He shook hands. ‘Hallo, how are you? This is a very comfortable place.’ He was grinning, with his glass dangling in his hand, held by the rim. Glasses and a porcelain vase shone once, as the ebb in passing sometimes turns over bright objects to gleam for a moment out of the mud.

  ‘I can’t make out what I’m pouring,’ said Anna, and switched on a lamp.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, perhaps it’ll turn out something interesting,’ said Steven. They all stirred in the sudden warm light; started a little in themselves as shadows jumped out at once at angles from the objects in the room. ‘No!’ said the Hollander, standing up and shaking her thick body inside her slacks; I saw that her coarse hair was streaked with its original yellow, like the nicotine stains on the fingers of heavy smokers. ‘I must go, Anna!’