The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  I passed her with a deep frown; it was on my face all the time now. My heart ran fast and trembly, like the heart of a kitten I had once held. I held my buttocks stiffly together as I went along, looking, looking. But I felt my eyes were not quick enough, and darted here and there at once, fluttering over everything, unable to see anything singly and long enough. And at the same time I wanted to giggle, to stuff my hand in my mouth so that a squeal, like a long squeeze of excitement, should not wring through me.

  Even when I was smaller, fairy tales had never interested me much. To me, brought up into the life of a South African mine, stories of children living the ordinary domestic adventures of the upper-middle-class English family—which was the only one that existed for children’s books published in England in the thirties—were weird and exotic enough. Nannies in uniform, governesses and ponies, nurseries and playrooms and snow fights—all these commonplaces of European childhood were as unknown and therefore as immediately enviable as the life of princesses in legendary castles to the English children for whom the books were written. I had never read a book in which I myself was recognizable; in which there was a “girl” like Anna who did the housework and the cooking and called the mother and father Missus and Baas; in which the children ate and lived closely with their parents and played in the lounge and went to the bioscope. So it did not need the bounds of credulity to be stretched to princes who changed into frogs or houses that could be eaten like gingerbread to transport me to an unattainable world of the imagination. The sedate walk of two genteel infant Tories through an English park was other world enough for me.

  Yet now as I stood in this unfamiliar part of my own world knowing and flatly accepting it as the real world because it was ugly and did not exist in books (if this was the beginning of disillusion, it was also the beginning of Colonialism: the identification of the unattainable distant with the beautiful, the substitution of “overseas” for “fairyland”) I felt for the first time something of the tingling fascination of the gingerbread house before Hansel and Gretel, anonymous, nobody’s children, in the woods. Standing before the one small window of the native medicine shop I no longer could be bored before the idea of the beckoning witch and the collection of pumpkins and lamps and mice that shot up into carriages and genii and coachmen or two-headed dogs. Not that these dusty lions’ tails, these piles of wizened seeds, these flaking gray roots and strange teeth could be believed to hold tight, like Japanese paper flowers, magic that might suddenly open. Not that the peeled skin of a snake, curling like an apple skin down the window, could suggest a dragon. But the dustiness, the grayness, the scavenged collection of tooth and claw and skin and sluggish potion brought who knows by whom or how far or from where, waiting beneath cobwebs and neglect … the shudder of revulsion at finding my finger going out wanting to touch it! It winked suddenly like the eye of a crocodile that waited looking like a harmless dry log: you did not know what you might be looking at, what awfulness inert in withered heaps behind the glass.

  It was at this moment that a small boy came skipping down the pavement white and unconcerned with a tin pistol dangling against his navy blue pants, and a bicycle bell tringing importantly in his hand. He walked straight past me with the ease of someone finding his way about his own house, and dodged through the Mine boys as if they were the fowls, making up their minds for them when they did not seem to know whether they wanted to step this way or that. He was dark, but his eyes were big and light beneath childishly rumpled eyebrows: he was gone, into a doorway farther up.

  I could not have said why the sight of another child was so startling. He seemed to flash through my mind, tearing mystery, strangeness, as a thick cobweb splits to nothing brushed away by the hand of a man. I was interested now in the native customers inside the medicine shop who were buying roots and charms the way people buy aspirins. I watched one boy who took his money from a yellow tobacco bag and then had a measure of greenish flakes poured into a second tobacco bag. Another was turning a tiny empty tortoise shell over in his hand; I wondered how much such a thing would cost, then remembered that I had no money. It was a charming little mound of brown and amber medallions, so neatly fitted. … Perhaps I could come back and get one someday. I felt a longing of affection for the tortoise shell which was to me a creature in itself; I would carry it everywhere with me, look at the light through its stripy shell the way the light looked through a leaf or the stained-glass window that the Millars had put up to the memory of their son, in the church.

  The boy did not buy the shell. It went back onto the wooden shelf. I pressed nearer the window and made a spy hole with my hand against the rheumy glass to see in better, and as I did so my eye was caught by another eye. Something was alive in the window: a chameleon, crouched motionless and matching on a bundle of gray-green sticks until then, was making its way slowly up the rib of wood that seamed the corner of the window. Its little soft divided feet, each one like two little slender hands joined and facing outward from the wrist, fluttered for a hold and swayed, feeling the air. One eye in the wrinkled socket looked ahead, the other swiveled back fixed on me. Ah-h! I cried, scratching my finger at the glass and leaning my whole weight against it. I followed the creature all up the window and down again, when it walked across the floor high-stepping over the piles of herbs and objects. Then it stopped, swayed, and a long thin tongue like one of those rude streamers you blow out in people’s faces at Christmas shot unrolled and curled back again with a fly coiled within it. The thin mouth was closed, a rim of pale green. Both eyes turned backward looking at me.

  I turned away from the medicine shop and went on along the pavement, past a shoemaker’s, two more outfitter’s and a bicycle shop which had a bicycle cut out of tin and painted red and yellow hanging in the doorway, and sold sewing machines and portable gramophones. Inside the shop the small boy leaned with his stomach against a battered counter. The bottom of his face was heavy with concentration and he had an oilcan and a length of chain in his hands. A baby of about three scuffed the dust on the cement at his feet and said over and over, liking the sound of the words and not expecting an answer, “Let me! Letme, letme, letme.” There were only two more stores. Then the bare rubbed dust that had been veld but had worn away beneath ill-fitting mine boots and tough naked toes (the skin of the natives’ feet was like bark, the nails like thorn). There native vendors squatted beside braziers offering roasted mealies and oranges arranged in pyramids. They sat comfortably, waiting for custom to come to them; they looked levelly out at the Mine boys looking around with money to spend, parcels from the stores under their arms, sometimes a loaf of bread white under the black hot armpit. The gramophones from the stores made music and there was gossip and shouting above the tiny hammering of a man who sat crosslegged beating copper wire into bracelets:—they caught the sharp winter sun like the telephone wires. Fowls hung about the mealie braziers, and just where the stores’ pavement crumbled off into the dust, a boy sat with a sewing machine, whirring the handle with his vigorous elbow jutting. Beside him were khaki and white drill trousers, neatly patched over the knees with crisscross strengthening in red and blue. He himself wore a curious loose garment, like a nightshirt.

  Even though it was winter there were flies here (one settled lovingly on me again, this time bumbling my ear) and above the gusts of strong sweet putrescence enveloping suddenly from the eating house, the smoke of burned mealies and the rotten sweetness of discarded oranges squashed everywhere underfoot, there was the high, strong, nostril-burning smell of stale urine. It had eaten the grass of the veld away, it had soured the earth with a crude animal foulness. I could not place it (a faint whiff, overlaid with disinfectant, came out of the public cloakroom near the bus terminus where my mother would not let me go); but my lip twitched up in distaste. The shouting seemed part of the smell and the twirl of flies; I felt suddenly that I wanted to bat at my clothes and brush myself down and feel over my hair in case something had settled on me—some horrible dirt, somethi
ng alive, perhaps.—A child had once crammed a locust down my back at school, and for days afterward I had sudden attacks of shuddering all over the surface of my body so that I had wanted to tear off my clothes and examine every inch of my skin.

  I looked at these dark brown faces—the town natives were somehow lighter—dark as teak and dark as mahogany, shining with the warm grease of their own liveness lighting up their skin; wondering, receptive, unthinking, taking in with their eyes as earth takes water; close-eyed, sullen with the defensive sullenness of the defenseless; noisy and merry with the glee of the innocent. And to me, in my kilts and my hand-knitted socks and my hair tied with neat ribbon, they were something to look at with a half-smile, as I had watched the chameleon in the window.

  I crunched to the path and the road over burned veld that dissolved crisply in puffs of black dust round my shoes and I passed a Mine boy standing with his back to me and his legs apart. I had vaguely noticed them standing that curious way before, as I whisked past in the car. But as I passed this one—he was singing, and the five or six yards he had put between himself and the vendors was simply a gesture—I saw a little stream of water curving from him. Not shock but a sudden press of knowledge, hot and unwanted, came upon me. A question that had waited inside me but had never risen into words or thoughts because there were no words for it—no words with myself, my mother, with Olwen even. I began to run, very fast, along the tar, the smooth straight road. And presently the run slackened and calmed, and I skipped along, jerking my hair over my ears, one foot catching behind the other.

  I did not go back to the house but across the Recreation Hall grounds under the trees and round to the tennis courts where, before I could see the wires sparkling filaments of silver, I heard beyond the pines and the clipped hedge and the deep cooing of doves the pomp! pomp! of the balls.

  Round the dark hedge in the clear sun I saw them suddenly as a picture, the white figures with turning pink faces running on the courts, the striped blazers lying on the pale grass, the bare pink legs and white sand shoes sitting in the log house. They were having tea. The young men sat on the grass. Alec Finlay panted, one leg stretched, resting on his elbows. He saw me and waved. Then my mother looked up over a big enamel urn, a little puzzled, as if she had heard a familiar sound. I smiled at her. “Well, young lady?” said Alec, screwing up his eyes and his smile. I walked into the shade, the smell of hot tea, lavender water, and fresh white clothes. “Are you going to join us, Helen?” a pretty grown-up girl asked me. “New blood for the second league!” said someone, and they all laughed, because they had just lost their match. “Just in time for tea, I’d say.” My mother was in the grown-up conspiracy of banter, nodding her head mockingly as she smiled. They all laughed again. My mother’s hand felt over my damp forehead, lifting the hair back. “D’you want some tea, darling?” Her head was on one side, smiling down into my face, the little springs of red hair escaping. She was pleased to be able to ignore the argument, the vague anxiousness that had ended up satisfactorily in a loneliness that had sent me tailing after her, after all.

  I sat beside her, thirstily gulping tea, feet not quite reaching the ground. “No, no, you don’t,” said a fat fair man, waving back the crumpets. “Do you want to weigh me down and give yourself an advantage?”—They laughed helplessly again; he was the comedian of the crowd, he was always coming out with something. In fact, he had such a reputation for being amusing that they laughed, found their mouths twitching in reflex every time he opened his, no matter what he said. I laughed with them. Soon I was handing round the crumpets, helping with fresh cups of tea. They teased me and talked to me playfully; I blushed when the young men chaffed me in a way that seemed to deepen some secret between them and their girls. But recklessly, I could answer them back, teasing too, I could make them laugh. They said: “Listen to her!—Did you hear that—?” I stood bridling with pleasure, looking wide out of my eyes in the face of applause.

  I went there often on Saturday afternoons after that, accepted as one of them, but with the distinction of being the only child in the party. It was easy to be one of them because I soon knew their jokes as well as they did themselves and, beside my mother, sat a little forward as they did, waiting for each to come out with his famous remark. Then when they rocked and shook their heads at getting just what they had expected, I would jump up and down, clutching at my mother’s arm in delight.

  I was quite one of them.

  Chapter 2

  The road on which I had hesitated before going down to the Concession Stores that Saturday afternoon was the road between Mine and town. I passed along it going to school every morning. I came back along it at two o’clock every afternoon in the bus which had shaken past first the Town Hall in its geometrical setting of flower beds and frostbitten lawn and municipal coat-of-arms grown in tight fleshy cactus; the dirty shopblinds of the main street making a chalky dazzle; the native delivery boys sitting in the gutters, staring at their broken shoes; the buildings, like a familiar tune picked out silently on a keyboard: one, one, two-story, two, one, one-story—then the houses of the township, long rows of corrugated iron roofs behind bullet-headed municipal trees shorn regularly to keep them free of the telephone wires, the Greek shop with its pyramid of crude pink coconut buns and frieze of spotted bananas, the doctor’s house with a tiled roof and a tennis court; and out at last, past the last row of houses turning their back yards—a patchwork of washing, a broken dog kennel, the little one-eyed room where the servant lived—to the veld.

  Seen from the bus, this stretch of road between town and Mine was featureless with familiarity. A few natives sauntered along, trailing their blankets in the red dust; very occasionally was there a diversion—one day, the figure of a small boy on a bicycle, holding a big live red hen under each arm, and scudding along over the dips and mounds of the dust-deep path from the Concession Stores like a surf rider. And even he had interested no one but me, though as he passed and the yellow scaly legs of the fowls showed sticking out mutely under his elbows, I rose and pressed my forehead against the window, making my gaze felt on the whorl of dark hair on the crown of his head. … Mostly there was no focus of attention between the last of the town of Atherton and the point where the bus approached the line of a signboard that widened to spell out ATHERTON PTY. MINES LTD., and the trees separated into gray trunks reaching up in swaths of bark like muscle, and shifting shapes of spilling leaves that, leaves on leaves, moving always, as the sea moves, thinning and thickening as cloud changes, showed and then closed over a flickering of white-painted tin fence, the dim red roofs orderly as tents.

  Daily, when the bus put me down here, I was home. Past the first three rows of houses and up alongside the fourth. All built of the same dark brick with low roofs, small windows and porches enclosed with a fine-meshed wire screening which had a tinny dazzle like the sheen off a piece of moire when it was new, but now was tarnished, and darkened each entrance with homely gloom. Even in the middle of the day, little glowing points of orange light showed behind the windows: inside Mine houses it was always dark. The houses of the officials in the fourth row were bigger than the others, set well back from the road with a tall row of pines screening their long narrow gardens. They looked out across the road upon an untidy square park, deeply bordered with great solemn pines which had cast their needles and dark shade so long that beneath them the grass had worn away and died, and the earth was theirs, cut off by them from the sun. Small children fluttered about their nursemaids like butterflies, and in the middle stood the Recreation Hall. Like everything else it had been built by the Mine and it belonged to the Mine; cut-out steel letters spelled ATHERTON RECREATION HALL across the chipped portico, and posters advertising dances and bridge drives long past hung peeling from the pillars.

  There our house was; and I lived in it as I lived in my body. I was not aware of the shape of it, of its existence as a building the way the school existed or the houses in the town; nor of its relation to the other house
s of the Mine about it and again the town about them: I had begun within it, at the pin point of existence, and hollowed out within it my awareness. When I came home the authority of school—my uniform, the black stockings, the blazer which held the smell of ink and dust and classrooms curiously cold as if they had been steeped in water, of orange peel and curling egg sandwich in my lunch tin—became invalid. There there was no need of an exterior, a way to smile and talk and listen to other people, the little suit of consciousness a child climbs into the very first time he is led in to be shown to someone from outside; there I did not have to put on that to show I was alive, for there was the path, pressing gravel up to my soles, there was the leafless frond of the jasmine bush, touching my ear like my own hair, there was the drift of brown pine needles held in the guttering of the veranda as in the palm of my hand.

  Every afternoon, our native girl Anna, eating her lunch: tearing off chunks of bread and washing them down with great gulps of tea from an old jam tin. The voice of my mother, high, questioning, accompanied by an arpeggio of spoons gently striking delicate china; coming out of the house like the voice of the walls: “Helen?” Under the light in the dark little sitting room, the willow pattern tea-things out. Embroidered cloth and tea cozy in the shape of a china doll in a wool crocheted crinoline, crumpets polished with yellow butter, the whole covered with a square of green net weighted with beads. My mother’s footsteps in high heels quick and loud down the pasage. A little burst of voices: Come in! Hu-llo … so I thought we’d just … yes, I’m glad you did … no, not at all, just right, of course not—and my mother’s voice and my mother’s sharp heels leading up the passage, past the half-open door behind which I would flatten myself, while the little troop filled my mother’s bedroom with movement and gasps and laughter, like the commotion of swimmers rubbing themselves down after cold water.