A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  But, the next time, I went to bed with Cecil in her warm, crumpled bed that smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. She argued about the light, but I wanted to see her face, to know what she was feeling. (Who knows what women feel, in their queer, gratuitous moment?) She looked, in the light, like she had that Sunday morning, in her dressing-gown. Pride, bewilderment, vanity, greed, want, and determination were not smoothed out by the banality of make-up; her eyes were faintly bloodshot from sun, smoke, and gin, and the shape of her smile, drawn in knowingly at one corner, was there, marked for ever on her face, even when her mouth was in repose. At the back of her neck, the real smell of her hair came out from under the chemical scents of the processes it was subjected to in that be-curtained shop below my office – the real smell of blonde pigment, waxy and acid, which I always notice at once, perhaps because I am dark.

  ‘I didn’t want you to see my stomach,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear to look at it myself.’

  ‘Why, what’s supposed to be wrong with it?’

  She rolled over face-down with her elbows tight to her sides and said resentfully, ‘Haven’t you ever seen a woman who’s had a child? It ruins the skin of your stomach. It looks like crinkle paper.’

  But whatever the human climate to which she had been exposed in her life had done to weather her face, her body was entirely itself, sure and beautiful. She was a loving woman in bed, clever and full of tender enthusiasm: Now just wait, she would say, just wait a minute . . . as if her caresses were carefully prepared surprises that must not be discovered before the right moment. The narrow bed, intended for a single sleeper, kept her close to me as I wanted, all night; there was no inch away to which she could move, even if she had wanted to. Her whole body burned with a steady warmth of energy, even while she slept, and only her buttocks and her breasts were cool, the way some people’s hands are always cool.

  I got up to leave very early in the morning, so that I should be out of the flat before the servant came in. I was coming back down the passage from the bathroom when I saw, standing in the open doorway of the second bedroom, in the colourless light that comes in before dawn, a little boy. He was barefoot, and in mis-buttoned pyjamas, and he was holding his pillow. He was quite awake, but perhaps not sure where he had awakened: in some grown-up part of the night he did not know. But even as he watched me the light began to golden, and he must have known it was morning. He did not speak and he did not move while I passed his room and disappeared through the next doorway. Cecil turned at the sound of me dressing, moved her mouth as if she were tasting, and put out her hand to me. I said: ‘Your child met me in the passage. What will he make of that.’

  ‘Don’t have to worry about him,’ she murmured. ‘He won’t say anything.’ When I was ready to go, she suddenly woke up properly and called me back to kiss her and reproached me for trying to slip away without saying ‘a proper good morning’.

  There was no one in the passage when I left, and the door of the second bedroom was shut.

  Chapter 9

  I wonder why it is that the life of poverty is regarded as more real than any other life. In books and films, the slice of life traditionally is cut from the lower crust; in almost all of us with full bellies, whose personal struggles are above the sustenance level, there is a nervous, even a respectful feeling that life may be elsewhere. The poor man has got it; he staggers beneath its violent weight, of course; one wouldn’t wish to be in his shoes – but he has it.

  I thought about this idea a lot, at this time, when I was so often in the townships with Steven, and sometimes stayed for a night at Sam’s two-roomed house, sleeping on the divan in his living-room. I thought about it, but I never came to any firm conclusion. What do we mean by real life? That which is closest to the basic trinity, shared by all creatures: survival, food, reproduction? Then we indulge in romantic fallacy, stemming from some atavistic guilt, because, in life, reality is not an absolute, but consists of one set of conditions or another. To regard total pre-occupation with survival, food, and reproduction as the criterion of reality is to ignore other needs that men have created for themselves, and which, in combination with the basic ones, make men’s reality. In a society where laws take care of a man’s survival among his fellows, his part in commerce and industry ensures that he will eat as a matter of course, and his reproductive function is secured by the special mating system of marriage, the greatest reality of his life may consist in his meeting the growth of the financial empire which his brain and energy have created. The greatest reality, for the scientist, must lie in his patient onslaught on the opposition of the formula he can’t get right; for an artist, in accepting that no one, at present, will accept his particular vision. That is ‘real life’; for each man, the demands of his own condition.

  I decided that possibly life in the townships seemed more ‘real’ simply because there were fewer distractions, far fewer vicarious means for spending passion, or boredom. To each human being there, the demands of his or her own condition came baldly. The reality was nearer the surface. There was nothing for the frustrated man to do but grumble in the street; there was nothing for the deserted girl to do but sit on the step and wait for her bastard to be born; there was nothing to be done with the drunk but let him lie in the yard until he’d got over it. Among the people I met with Cecil, frustrated men threw themselves into golf and horse-racing, girls who had had broken love affairs went off to Europe, drunks were called alcoholics, and underwent expensive cures. That was all. That was the only difference.

  But was it? With so much to comfort and distract them, don’t people perhaps learn, at last, to feel a little less? And doesn’t that make life that much less ‘real’? – But, again, this sounded convincing, but seemed disproved in actual fact. For the people who frequented The High House (and also myself, my friends and acquaintances in England) made a great deal of their feelings, nervous breakdowns and other long-drawn-out miseries followed on their misadventures, and they knew that life very easily comes to a standstill; but the men and women of the townships, after brief and public mourning, wiped their noses with the backs of their hands, as it were, and did the next thing, knowing that nothing could interrupt life. There was the woman who lived in one of the houses that shared a yard with Sam’s house. One day she stopped us as we were entering the yard, and spoke to Sam. She was a cheerful, dirty slut with the usual pretty, milk-and-pee smelling baby falling over her feet, and Ella had often complained about her. When she had gone back to her house, Sam said to me, ‘D’you know anybody, any friend of yours in Sandown? That woman’s looking for a backyard room somewhere. She’s got people she washes for there, and she’d like a room nearby.’

  ‘What about her house?’

  ‘Her husband’s disappeared. Perhaps some of your friends have got a servant’s room they don’t use.’

  Then, one night, there was a murder close by The House of Fame. Steven was hurrying home to one of his own drinking-and-talking sessions which I and a number of the hangers-on had not waited to begin (it was quite common for Steven to invite you to his room and then fail to be there when you arrived), and he came upon the dying man, lying in the street. He had pulled him up on to the steps of the nearest house, but: ‘He’d had it. Gone,’ Steven told us when he came in. ‘I’m sorry I’m so darned late, Toby, I’ve been fixing up insurance for an old Indian who owns a string of bug-houses’ – this was what the township cinemas were commonly called – ‘and, you know – he’s the sort of old chap who every time he wants to tell you something, no matter what, he’s got to begin right at the beginning of his life and lead up to it.’ He grinned, said, ‘Mind,’ and pushed aside the legs of the people who were sitting on his bed, so that he could put his smart tan leather briefcase under the bed. He straightened up and peered down at the side of his jacket, twitching at the sleeve. ‘There’s nothing on my suit, is there?’ One of the young men, who had never owned such a suit, jumped up to examine it, hitting at the cloth and saying, in Suto, tha
t there was nothing to worry about. And it was true that there was a only a little red township dust on the suit, that dust that seemed more the powder of decaying buildings than the surface of the earth. But there was a smear of blood on one of Steven’s shirt-cuffs, like bright rust. ‘He’s made a bit of a mess of me,’ he said, and sighed. ‘Never mind, poor chap couldn’t help it.’

  ‘It was a gang, eh?’ someone said.

  Steven nodded. ‘I should think he had it coming to him. It was a knife job, no chances. It must have happened about ten minutes before I came along, that’s all. They’d cleared off. People in the house there didn’t hear anything. When I saw he was finished, I just said, here you are, and skipped out as quick as I could.’ He was sitting down, now, and a glass of brandy dangled in his hands between his knees, in his characteristic fashion. He wrinkled his nose, not at the dead man, but at death. ‘A short life and a happy one,’ he said, and drank.

  When I woke up in the morning in Sam’s house, I did have the strong, vivid feeling that life and death were breathing on me, hot and cold. No doubt in my own flat in a white suburb, or in the Alexanders’ house among the paddocks and the swimming pools and the Jacarandas, you were surrounded by living and dying, too. But there, you were not aware of it outside the personal aspects. In the townships, on a Saturday night, there was only an hour or two, between the late end of the long night and the early beginning of the day, when groans and laughter and fires were out. For the rest of the time, the whole cycle of living made a continuous and simultaneous assault on your senses. ‘There’s never a moment’s peace and quiet,’ Sam would say, standing in his little room with his old typewriter in his hands, as if in the space of those four thin walls there might be some corner of acoustical freak where he could put himself down and not hear the men shouting in the street, a procession of some sort, perhaps a school or a funeral parade, children quarrelling, a baby crying, a woman singing at a washtub, and the rusty bray and slam of the door of the communal lavatory in the yard as people trooped in and out of it. And in my flat, Steven would wander restlessly from the balcony to the living-room, saying, uneasily, ‘Man, I’m used to Sophiatown, there’s always something going on.’

  I would walk with Sam in the early evening out on to the waste ground near his house. It was a promontory of ashes and clinker, picked bald, by urchins and the old, even of the rubbish that was dumped there, and it looked back over most of the township. At that time, the day seems to relent, even the dreariest things take on disguising qualities in the soft light. The ashheap took on the dignity of loneliness; we might have been standing on the crater of a burnt-out volcano, the substance beneath our feet gave no life to anything, animal or vegetable, it was a ghost of the fecund earth. Behind, and down below, everything teemed, rotted and flourished. There were no street-lights, and in the night that seemed to well up like dark water round the low, close confusion of shacks and houses – while, higher up, where we were, the day lingered in a pink mist – cooking fires showed like the flame of a match cupped in the hand. Sam said to me once, in the rather awkwardly jocular manner which he almost always used when speaking English, probably because it had been the way in which he first had managed to bridge the gaps of unease between himself and his first white acquaintances -‘I suppose when you get back, this will seem like an ugly dream.’

  But he was wrong, and it was hard for me to explain to him why, without having him attribute, on my part, too much to the romance of foreignness and poverty, the picturesque quality of other people’s dirt. He had his inner eye fixed quietly and steadily on his and his people’s destiny as decent bourgeois, his curse fell equally upon the roistering wretchedness of life in the townships, and his own childhood, when, as he described to me one evening up on that same ash-heap, he had herded tribal cattle in the Northern Transvaal. I sometimes thought, when I suddenly became aware of him through some expression on his face or something he said, how except when he was playing jazz, there was not one moment when his being was not quietly revolving on this purpose. His manner was a mixture of anxiousness and sad determination. He was full of dogged hope, a person whose life was pinned to a future. Just as Steven was hopeless, a person committed entirely to the present. Sam said of him, sadly: ‘Steven is just a white man in a black man’s skin, that’s the trouble’; which, taking into account the context of Sam’s affection and concern for Steven, was another way of saying what Anna Louw had said when she complained that Steven cared damn all for the African people. The only difference was, Anna saw Steven’s attitude as loss to his people, Sam saw it as a loss to Steven himself. Yet it was Steven who had some affection for the life down there, below the ash-heap, it was Steven who lived it as the reality of the present to which he was born – the only sure destiny any man has.

  It was this aspect of township life, Steven’s aspect, if you like, that would make it impossible for me ever to look back upon it, from another country, as ‘an ugly dream’. It was no beauty, God knows, but it was no dream, either. It would not vanish from the mind’s eye; I should be able to believe in its existence even when I was somewhere else.

  The first time I stepped out of Sam’s house on a Sunday morning, after spending the night there, the men and women stared at me, looked at me quizzically, and passed sniggering remarks – a white man who slept in the house of Africans was unheard-of, and under the greatest suspicion; a concupiscent grin informed the face of an old man, and he moved aside for me, saying’ Morning, baas’, for what could I have come for but sex?; and even when I was well known as an unexplained visitor at Sam’s house, and I took his little daughter by the hand down the road to buy her an orange from the row of vendors’ tin huts and home-made stalls and wares spread out on sacking on the ground, known as the ‘shops’, I was never anything but a stranger. But, as a stranger, I found in these places and among these people something I had never found at home. There were summer nights in Sophiatown, where Steven lived, when no one seemed to go to bed at all. The worse smells were made harmless by the warm, sour smell of beer. Urchins gambled under the street-lights that, spaced sparsely, attracted into their yellow light people as well as moths. There was singing and strolling; now and then one of the big American cars that the gangsters use would tear scrunching over the stones, down the street, setting long tongues of dust uncurling. The girls clicked in their throats with quick annoyance and screamed defiance in defence of their dirtied dresses. There was giggling and flirting. Some were primped and got up in high-heeled shoes, some were barefoot, dressed in a torn series of ragged garments, one overlaying the holes of another, and the last, inevitably, in spite of everything, worn through at the vital places, breasts and backside. On such a night, suddenly, a procession would burst round the corner, swaying, rocking, moving by a musical peristalsis: men and women and children, led by a saxophone and tin whistles, a rehearsal for a wedding due to take place next day. They sang and chanted, a sound to lift stones.

  The life of the townships, at such moments, seemed to feed a side of my nature that had been starved; it did for me what Italy or Greece had done for other Englishmen, in other times. It did not change me; it released me and made me more myself.

  Chapter 10

  ‘You don’t have to worry about him, he won’t say anything,’ Cecil had said of her child, when he saw me walking down the passage of her flat in the early hours of the morning. She was more than half asleep, and her tongue was unguarded when she spoke. Whatever that casual truth implied, I found, after the first automatic twinge of jealousy, that it was powerless to affect me. I had another life, outside the parenthesis of the time I spent with her; she, too, had hers. Each tacitly forwent inquiry into that of the other, because each suspected that the discovery of his own life by the other would make the parenthetic shared relationship impossible. I heard her say, to some people with whom we were having coffee after a cinema, ‘Toby does a lot of work among the natives.’ Later, when we were alone, I asked her, ‘What made you tell the Howards tha
t I do a lot of “work” among natives?’ ‘Well, don’t you?’ she said, yawning. ‘I never have,’ I said. She let it drop; she assumed that anyone who had anything to do with Africans was concerned with charity or uplift, and that was that – she wasn’t going to quibble over what she satisfied herself could only be a matter of definition. And I, I left it at that, too. I had had my little flirt with danger by questioning her at all; thankfully, I hadn’t had to take it any further.

  For I knew that if I told Cecil that my closest friends in Johannesburg were black men, and that I ate with them and slept in their houses, I would lose her. That was the fact of the matter. And I was damned if I was going to lose her. There was a good chance that her sophistication would save her from the classic reaction of horror and revulsion, but her strong instinct for the conventionally unconventional mores of the wealthy ‘smart’ set would have labelled me queer (not in the accepted, fashionable sense) and ruled me out. I knew that it was natural and unremarkable that I should sleep at Sam’s, in the township, on Sunday night, and in Cecil’s bed on Monday, since it is natural and unremarkable for a man to have friends and a woman to love. What did it matter that, because she did not know that it was natural and un-remarkable, she was not told about it. The facts of my having been there, at Sam’s, and being here, at Cecil’s, existed whether accepted or not. So, unaware, in her own life, Cecil demonstrated the truth she would have denied with every drop of blood in her body, had she been confronted with it openly.