A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Never. The French are not the same, or the Germans or the Italians. They’ll do all the things we do, but they’ll be themselves.’

  He laughed, from that private vantage point on which I sometimes felt he was caught, unable to get down. He waved me away, as if I had offered him an evasion. ‘Run their own show? I’d like to see it. I just don’t think the poor chaps have got the brain. They’re limited. It’s just not there.’ He put down the rag with which he had been cleaning his gun. ‘Come on, let’s get some of those papiermâché things from the whisky bottles and stick ’em up on the mealies. See if I can hit a target, if nothing else, today.’ Big, handsome ruin, paunched, pouched and veined; sauntering heavily over the clods he reminded me of one of those splendid houses, thrown open to the public at half-a-crown a time, that seem to regard the trippers amusedly, and are seen by the trippers amusedly, as something over-blown and gone to pot.

  In the bush I usually walked with John. The eager face of the dog, turning suddenly, beckoned us; the tip of her tail bled from the thorns and her ears held the seeds of khaki-weed like a magnet that has trailed through a box of pins; at night she was too exhausted to eat, and lay looking at us over the weight of the death growing in her belly, but in the bush during the day she seemed to outrun it. ‘I don’t think she can be as ill as you think,’ I said to John. ‘No, ‘he said,’ she’s finished. Like a good race-horse, she’ll go on till she drops.’

  These were the clichés of the Alexanders’ world, the curiously dated world of the rich, with its Edwardian-sounding pleasures. They thought of courage in terms of gallantry, spirit in terms of gameness; in the long run, I supposed my mother’s and my father’s definitions were my own, I could really only think of these things in terms of political imprisonment and the revolt of the intellect.

  But beneath John’s social sophistication, his equipment for Johannesburg, there was a strongly appealing quality. He reduced life to the narrative; we trekked through the thorns and the grass and all our faculties were taken up with what we were doing and where we were going. His thin brown face, alert above a bobbing adam’s apple, was a commonplace reassurance, like the image of some simple, not very powerful, household god who serves to hold back the impact of mystery from ordinary life.

  On Monday evening, I lost the others and found myself alone in the darkening bush. I walked about a bit, but was defeated by the silent sameness and thought it more sensible to stay still awhile, and listen; I had discovered that if you forced your hearing capacity, you could very often part the silence of the bush and make out, far away, the sounds – like feeble bird-sounds muffled in the nest – of men talking. I smoked and listened; the ground was pink as warm stone and the thorn trees were wrought iron. Presently I separated from the furtive rustle of the bush, the faint panting of the dog. It seemed to reach me along the ground, on a rill of air. I called, and though there was no answer, in a little while, the dog, held on the leash by the younger Nyasa, appeared. Sometimes, when the dog saw a lot of guinea-fowl moving in a field, she lost her head and wanted to give chase. It was then that if the Africans had been taken along as beaters, John would give her to one of them to hold.

  ‘I can’t find the baas,’ said the African.

  ‘It’s all right, I’m lost too,’ I said. ‘Let the dog lead.’ We followed her half-hearted zig-zag for a few minutes. The thorn bushes were black splotches, like an attack of dizziness.

  ‘I don’t think we should just keep on walking, do you?’

  He stood there with the dog and said nothing. I sat down and he settled a yard away. When I spoke to him he did not answer, unless what I said was a direct question. He wore broken sand-shoes, out of which the little toe stuck on each foot, and a torn dirty khaki shirt and a pair of brown striped trousers that must once have belonged to a man with a big belly – they were folded over in front, under a belt, like a dhoti – and he must have been cold; a kind of feverish chill ran over the ground the moment the sun dropped.

  At last I did not try to talk any more, and we sat there, together. The dog was exhausted, and slept. He did not look at me or at anything; his isolation came to me silently; I was aware of it then, but it must have existed all the time, while we ate and we drank and we sang and we cursed, in our camp. I offered him a cigarette but he would not take it from the packet and he cupped his hands and I had to drop the cigarette into them. Loneliness gathered with the chill, a miasma of the ancient continent; he and I were in hand’s reach of each other, like people standing close, and unaware of it, in a fog.

  After about an hour, Patterson found us – or rather we heard him, and the three of us managed to find our way back through the bush to where, in the mealies, the lights of the car turned on by the others to guide us hung two banners of heavily moted orange light in the blackness. As we stumbled into the colour and brightness, we got an applause of shouts and jeers of welcome. That night was our last and John insisted that we finish the red wine before we went to bed. I did a couple of imitations I had once done in a student revue at Oxford, and spontaneously added a new one to my meagre repertoire – Miss Everard and the Italians on the boat. John, using Patterson as a victim, showed us how he once tried to learn Judo. Hughie sang army songs with Eilertsen, and gave us, with no bones about it, his assessment of what makes a woman worth the trouble. Over at their own fire, the Africans drank their brandy ration and talked in undertones that now and then surged into laughter, or exploded, like a cork out of a bottle, into sudden onomatopoeic exclamations.

  We went out after birds once more, early in the morning, but without much luck; yet the final bag was impressive – fifty-eight birds, not counting those we’d eaten in camp. When we had breakfasted we packed up to go; there was no point in washing or shaving in a tin basin when we could bath at home in a few hours. The camp looked like a house the morning after a party – everything was distasteful and begrimed, the flies sat about on all that was half-clean, half-eaten, half-done with in four days of thoughtless living. When we had loaded the cars, the patch of bush where we had lived simply looked flattened, as if some animal had lain there. We drove away. My arm, on the rim of the car window, was teak-coloured with sun and dirt. Patterson’s heavy face was seamed with white where he had screwed up his eyes against the sun. John had a poll of red hair, dyed with dust. There was an air about us both spent and refreshed; as we came back again among houses and shops, it seemed to me that I had been far away and a long time. The boot of the car was piled with the thick, soft bodies of birds, their plumage tousled and lying brushed against the grain, as it seems to become the moment life has gone. All the way the old setter lay on the back seat, asleep or dead, one hardly knew; both were drawn so close in her now, there was little difference. We stopped at Patterson’s house first, to divide the bag, and the birds lay heaped on the grass while Hughie dealt them out. The dog did not come when John called to her to give her a dish of water. He said to me, ‘Give old Grace a prod, will you.’ But when I put my hand on her rump she felt like the birds I had just tumbled out of the boot.

  Part Five

  Chapter 16

  After I had bathed and shaved the dirt away, and fried myself a plateful of eggs for lunch – I still felt as hungry as I had been in the bushveld – I went to town. The kitchen of the flat was piled with guinea-fowl, there were feathers and the smell of wood-smoke filled the place; I didn’t know quite what to do with the birds and thought I’d decide when I came back in the evening. In the meantime, it was simple to shut the door on it all.

  Saturday’s and Monday’s mail lay on my desk at the office; nothing much, the usual publicity handouts and invoices from Aden Parrot, letters from booksellers who had under-ordered and were now clamouring for stocks of an unexpected best-seller, a note from my sister, on holiday in Spain. There was also a long, hand-written (too confidential even for Faunce’s confidential secretary) letter from Uncle Faunce, telling me that it was possible that Arthur Hollward might ask to be relieved of the South
African representation of Aden Parrot; he seemed to be getting old and to have a hankering to settle down in England. How would I feel about staying on, perhaps for a year or two. Nothing definite; merely a feeler, and so on. It was what Uncle Faunce called ‘playing with the idea’. While I read it, I was thinking about my guinea-fowl – half for Marion Alexander, half for Cecil? Perhaps a couple for Sam and his wife, and, of course, Anna Louw. I put Faunce’s letter away without thinking about it; first I hadn’t known what to do with my birds, now I didn’t seem to have enough to go round. I wrote down the names of the possible recipients on the back of my cigarette box.

  I worked on at the papers around me until nearly five, when the typist, her coat on ready to go home, came in and said, ‘Oh I forgot. There was a mysterious phone call from the police yesterday. Something about stolen property.’

  ‘Stolen property? Whose?’

  ‘Well, I told them that as far as I knew you hadn’t lost anything. You haven’t had a burglary or anything like that at the flat, have you?’ She was a good one, this one; an earnest, rather greasy-haired little girl who was a graduate of the university in Johannesburg, and had taken the humble office job because she was passionately interested in publishing and hoped to get herself a job with Aden Parrot in London, eventually. ‘I’ve got the number, anyway, so perhaps you’d better phone them.’

  Before I left the office, I did. When I had given my name and address, and had been handed from voice to voice until I reached the right one, it said hoarsely, patiently, ‘We got a coat here, sir. There was a card in the pocket with your name and address.’

  I said, ‘A grey coat with checked lining?’

  ‘That’s right. We got it here for you.’

  ‘But I’d lent that coat to a friend.’

  ‘Well, it must’ve been stolen from him. It was found on a native on Saturday night. You’re lucky. All you got to do is come along and sign for it.’

  I said, indignantly, triumphantly, with a laugh, ‘But I lent it to him. He’s Steven Sitole, he’s the friend. Give it back to him.’ The card in the pocket. ‘Whatever you’ve left in the pockets is mine, eh, Toby.’ How Steven must be laughing, over this.

  The voice said, ‘He’s dead, sir. He was with a whole lot of other natives in a car that crashed on the Germiston road, and the coat was on his body. They were making a get-away from an Indian club the police was raiding.’

  How can I explain the jolt of horror, the knowing, the recognition with which, at that instant, I felt, beneath my hand, the dog as I had discovered her on the back seat of the car. Dread passed a hand over my face, cold. I understood. To my bones, I understood.

  I said, ‘What was his name? What was the name of the man? Have you the names there?’

  He had not; ‘You must go and find out,’ I said. ‘You must go and fetch the report or whatever it is and read it to me.’

  He protested, but I made him. I did not think while I waited, I did not think.

  ‘Native called Steven Sitole and another one, Dan Ngobo, both dead. Two other natives and an Indian arrested. Three bottles of brandy in the car.’

  I said, ‘All right.’

  ‘And the coat, sir, whad’ju want us to do with the coat?’

  I went to the mortuary and got permission to see him. The man said, ‘Did he work for you? You won’t recognize him.’ But I knew I must look at him because otherwise I would never be able to believe that he was gone. I would go away back to England one day and it would seem to me that he was merely left behind, he would begin to live again, forgotten by me. I wanted his death to come home to me, as his quickness had done.

  He was broken, that was all. He was still himself. He looked as if he had been in a long and terrible fight, and had lost.

  I said to the man, ‘He had a ring, a cheap ring with a red stone in it, that he always wore on his little finger?’

  But he knew nothing about it.

  I drove out to Sam’s house and found no one there; not even the crones in the yard could tell me where he and his wife might be. I drove back again, through the flare and dark of the night-time township, cries like streamers, smoke and the smells of food, drunken men, children, and chickens, the tsotsis hanging around the cinema – and I had to keep drumming it into myself, he is not there, he is not there. He was made up of all this; if it existed, how could he not? I had to keep explaining death to myself over and over again, as I met with each fresh piece of evidence against its possibility. Despite the war, despite the death of my father, I had never proved the fact of death in my own experience; since I was a man, I had never lost anything that meant more to me than a pet; I understood death only as a child, who has been told the facts of life, thinks he understands love.

  In the city, the white powdered faces of women above fur coats showed under the neon lights of the cinemas and theatres, immigrant youth from Naples and Rome stood about on their thick-soled shoes before an espresso bar, the cars urged slowly round and round the streets, looking for parking-places. I drove slowly through the city, slowly through the suburb that climbed the hill.

  In the flat, there were the guinea-fowl, the smell of wood-smoke and the feathers, floating along the floor in a current of air stirred by the opening door. The sight of the place was like a confrontation with the smiling face of someone who did not know that anything had happened. The amputation of pain severed me from the moment when I had shut the door behind me, not by eight hours, but by the timeless extension of experience; I had moved so far from that moment, that I felt stupidly unable to understand that, relatively, time had stood still, in my flat.

  I knew I could not stay there. I closed the door and went back down the stairs and sat in my car. A hideous sense of aimlessness took hold of me; I sat like a man in an empty, darkened theatre, watching the scene coming down, being taken apart, and carted away. Where were the walls of stone, houses that would stand, a place of worship where you would find God? What had I known of Steven, a stranger, living and dying a life I could at best only observe; my brother. A meaningless life, without hope, without dignity, the life of the spiritual eunuch, fixed by the white man, a life of which he had made, with a flick of the wrist, the only possible thing – a gesture. A gesture. I had recognized it, across a world and a lifetime of friends and faces more comprehensible to me. How could it be true, that which both of us knew – that he was me, and I was him? He was in the bond of his skin, and I was free; the world was open to me and closed to him; how could I recognize my situation in his?

  He had not come into his own; and what I believed should have been my own was destroyed before I was born heir to it.

  At last I went upstairs again and wrapped up the guinea-fowl in newspaper and took them to Cecil. Sam was out; I could not telephone, across the breach of the town between white man and black, to find out if he was home yet. I couldn’t go to Anna Louw; it seemed to me that it would have been, in some curious way, a disloyalty to Steven to do so. I went to Cecil, with whom I could not discuss Steven’s death at all. Not to talk of it, to ignore pity or moralizing about the short, violent life – that seemed the only thing. For with Steven it was not that he was this or was that; simply, he was.

  I drove to Cecil’s flat and found she was, as usual, in the bath. She spent so much of her time lying, smoking, in the bath. She called to me ‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ and I went to the kitchen with my burden of birds. Eveline was washing up the dinner things; ‘Master Toby!’ the woman giggled.

  ‘Where are we going to put them, we got the fridge full with those things already! Master Patterson he brought us six.’ And she showed me. But I left them to her and went away to the living-room and got myself a drink. In a little while, Cecil came in wearing a dressing-gown, the ends of her hair damp with bathwater. ‘Those birds are marvellous! You’re an angel! They’ll be fantastic eating.’

  ‘Eveline says you’ve got more than you need, already.’

  She looked embarrassed, but careless of being found out
in social lies, at once said,’ Oh Guy Patterson brought them. Some nonsense. He begged a stocking of mine to keep his head warm and promised me birds in exchange. How was the trip?’

  ‘Fine. What sort of weekend did you have?’

  ‘You do need a haircut. Look at this frill on your collar. You look dead-beat.’ She came and sat beside me and took my hand in her warm lap. I felt under my hand the cold body of the dog and took my hand away and put it behind her head and kissed her hard. She was pleased as she always was by the rough and unexpected advance, and she laughed and said, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve come back from the bush all randy,’ with the faintest emphasis on the ‘you’ that might have implied an unspoken ‘you too’; it crossed my mind that perhaps she was thinking of Patterson. Yet I turned to her and I kissed her and passion came like a miracle in my numbness, and there was compassion in the love-making. I caught her looking at me, as, in her untidy bedroom with the neck of the bedside lamp twisted to throw its light away from her, on to the wall, we went through the ancient ritual of oneness; gazing back at her paused face, I too, was sorry I had not done more for her, wanted or been able to take her in and make life real for her. Yet, in the end, she seemed to hold back on the brink of her own pleasure; she let me go ahead and then she lay back, her eyes open, smiling at herself in some private justification. I said to her, ‘What’s the matter?’ But she shook her head and still smiling, touched my hair, that she had complained about earlier, with a queer little gesture of finality and tenderness, as a woman might adjust her husband’s tie before they are to go out.

  She said, softly, ‘It’ll soon be time for you to go back to England, won’t it. Perhaps I shall come and see you there.’

  ‘Are you really coming?’

  She closed her eyes and drew her nostrils in, a child making a wish, ‘I shall marry a rich man and have a suite at the Dorchester and come and see you.’