The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  The letters I wrote to Ludi became more important to me than those I received from him. In them, I assumed our world in common. His, full of descriptions of places I could not imagine, always written from the moment of the present, seemed to have less and less to do with the Ludi of the South Coast, the bright hair, the shortsighted look, the warm strange breast. In time, the infrequent letters were not the painful thrill, the charged token they had been. I could almost have done without them entirely. … For while believing that I was living Ludi’s way of life by keeping aloof from that of my home and the Mine, I had all the time been creating a third way of my own, as unconsciously as a spider salivates his thin silver lifeline of survival. The frailty of dreams, imagination and memory was changed and churned by some unsuspected emotional digestion into a vanity and cultivation of myself. Like most finished products, nothing could have resembled less the raw material of emotion from which it was processed. And also, like most survival changes, it was accomplished by personality, unrecognized and unrealized by the conscious mind.

  I spent a great deal of time reading, and these were not books about which I would write to Ludi. I began to read poetry, Auden and T.S. Eliot, reading it always for the sound and feel of the words rather than for the meaning, which sometimes I sensed, but seldom knew with my intellect. Then I took Pepys’s diary out of the library, and Tobias Smollett.—There is a theory that, given the free choice to hand of various foods, babies who see them only as blurs of color and shape will instinctively choose those necessary for balanced sustenance; perhaps the same is true of a hungry mind. One book led me to another; a quotation from one author by another, a mention that a character was reading so-and-so, sent me to the source itself, so that I had Hemingway to thank for John Donne, and D. H. Lawrence to thank for Chekhov. But in nothing that I read could I find anything that approximated to my own life; to our life on a gold mine in South Africa. Our life was not regulated by the seasons and the elements of weather and emotion, like the life of peasants; nor was it expressed through movements in art, through music heard, through the exchange of ideas, like the life of Europeans shaped by great and ancient cities, so that they were Parisians or Londoners as identifiably as they were Pierre or James. Nor was it even anything like the life of Africa, the continent, as described in books about Africa; perhaps further from this than from any. What did the great rivers, the savage tribes, the jungles and the hunt for huge palm-eared elephants have to do with the sixty miles of Witwatersrand veld that was our Africa? The yellow ridged hills of sand, thrown up and patted down with the unlovely precision that marked them manufactured unmistakably as a sand castle; the dams of chemical-tinted water, more waste matter brought above ground by man, that stood below them, bringing a false promise of a river—greenness, cool, peace of dipping fronds and birds—to your nose as you sat in the train. The wreckage of old motorcar parts, rusting tin and burst shoes that littered the bald veld in between. The advertisement hoardings and the growing real-estate schemes, dusty, treeless, putting out barbed-wire fences on which the little brown mossies swung and pieces of torn cloth clung, like some forlorn file that recorded the passing of life in a crude fashion. The patches of towns, with their flat streets, tin-roofed houses, main street and red-faced town hall, “Palace” or “Tivoli” showing year-old films from America. We had no lions and we had no art galleries, we heard no Bach and the oracle voice of the ancient Africa did not come to us, was drowned, perhaps, by the records singing of Tennessee in the Greek cafés and the thump of the Mine stamp batteries which sounded in our ears as unnoticed as our blood.

  Only what was secret in me, did not exist before my mother and father or the talk and activity that pursued life in our milieu, leaped to recognition in what I read. The power of love signaled to me like lightning across mountains of dark naïveté and ignorance; the sense of wonder at the pin speck of myself in a swirling universe, a creature perpetually surrounded by a perpetual growth, stars and earthworm, wind and diamond. Out of poetry and the cabalistic accident of someone’s syntax came the cold touch on my cheek: this. You. So that when my father pointed at the winter night sky, not the air-blue infinity of summer, but a roof far off as silence, hard blue as a mirror looking down on a dark room—when he pointed up and said: Orion … that’s the Southern Cross, and over there, on the left, see, I think it’s Saturn—I knew that to know the names is to know less than to know that there can be no names, are no names. The bat-squeak of a man’s voice in the enormous darkness could not explain the stars to me.

  And so, too, when I lay in the bath looking down at my naked body, the sight of it suggesting the pleasures of which it was capable, it was not the touch of Ludi (like the thrilling of a bell that sends messengers running, doors opening, lights up) that I imagined any more, but only the pure sensation: the potentialities of loving that lay there. Constantly relived, Ludi’s love-making had worn transparent with recapitulation, so that now his image rubbed off entirely; but my body was real, and its knowledge.

  Chapter 11

  One afternoon in July I took a train to Johannesburg. I went in after an early lunch to book seats for a musical play which my parents wanted to see, but when I came out of Johannesburg station into the city I took a tram to the University instead. There I walked about beneath an expression of worried purpose, slightly amazed at myself. In the foyer of the main block, where the administrative and inquiry offices were, it was easy to stand before the boards reading faculty notices and posters advertising student dances and debates. But along the wide sloping passages that led down to common rooms and tearooms, the preoccupied faces of girls and young men seemed to me to be a continual challenge to produce my right and identity. Each pair of eyes that met mine seemed to precede a threat of the question: Yes? I stood at last in front of a boldly painted exhortation to support the Student’s Representative Council in some stand it was taking over the Color Bar, seeing nothing but a cigarette butt and a piece of crumpled paper near my left foot, and when a voice behind me spoke my name I melted in alarm as if an expected heavy hand had come down on my shoulder. It was Basil Tatchett, from the Mine. “So? You here too? I haven’t seen you before. Don’t you travel?—Are you staying at the hostel? My folks won’t let me—”

  I did not know what to say—“No, actually I haven’t started yet, I’m just getting fixed up now.”

  “But that’s a waste; they won’t let you take credit for half a year, will they? You’re doing Arts, I suppose.” He had his mother’s long, spade-shaped jaw and way of feeling it as he spoke, as if he were privately wondering whether he needed a shave. I do not think he had ever spoken to me before in his life, in that manly animosity which schoolboys bear toward schoolgirl daughters of their mother’s friends, but now he believed we shared the distinction of the University against the mediocrity of less fortunate Mine contemporaries. “John’s here—John Eagles—he’s with me. And Lester Beckett.” He stood talking for a few minutes of people who were names to me and then, with a shrug toward his bundle of books, was gone.

  When he left me I felt calm, commanding, adventurous. It was as if all the tortuous calculations of a combination lock had been resolved accidentally by the careless twiddle of a passing hand. I did not know him and I had scarcely listened to what he had to say to me. But a door flew open. I knew exactly why I had come to Johannesburg on this particular afternoon, I knew that stepping on the tram had not been an impulse but the decision of the voices from my mother’s tea parties reaching me alone in my room, the aimless silence of the garden, the bent heads of my mother and father under the red beaded lampshade. I walked straight over to the inquiry office, and I did not need to look busy or purposeful.

  There was a little difficulty in getting myself enrolled in the faculty of arts halfway through the academic year, and my father had to go into Johannesburg to interview the Dean, but it was done and I was a student. My mother was reassured that a B.A. graduate could command a number of good jobs and, unexpectedly, made qui
te a dining-out, or rather “afternoon,” tale of the way I had marched into the University without a word after refusing to go earlier in the year, telling the story with a shrug of the amused, victimized indulgence of those mothers who pride themselves in their children by seeming to discredit them. My father, of course, was delighted. He convinced himself that the eighteen-months’ break in my education between school and university was an intentional maturing process, a kind of parental system of his own. He told me continually of the advantages I should have over others who had gone straight from school.

  Well, perhaps he was right, if not in the way he thought he was. Certainly I did not go now for the blazer or the prestige. I went out of doubt and boredom and a sense of wonder at life: the beginning of all seeking, the muddled start of the journey toward oneself. And I was unaware of this, and excited. I wanted to read and I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to bury myself in the great cool library where no one spoke, and where, on the day I had looked in, people had lifted their heads like deer lifting their heads over water, and in their eyes was the intense blank of concentration; running through them, the endless stream of questions, suggestions from books, a live current from last year or four hundred years back. I was absorbed from minute to minute in the busyness of working out my timetable of lectures, buying prescribed books, and my mother and I suddenly met warmly again in the fittings and discussion of the clothes I would need. Seeing her face hot-looking as she bent over the sewing machine, or anxiously looking up at me as she pinned a hem from the neat row she always kept stuck in the collar of her dress as she sewed, I remembered the smell of her warm from cooking, when I came home from school as a child.

  And so in August I began the first of many hundreds of daily journeys from Atherton to Johannesburg by train. When the line left Atherton station, it ran out in the direction of the Mine, and there was a siding just outside the limits of the Mine property. Here the train stopped for a minute or two and here I boarded it, every morning, waiting with a handful of other people, poised like starters at a race for its screeching arrival, and getting off in the early winter dark in the evening, dropped from the day with a soft thud to the dust of the platform. The siding was a bare place of deep red dust and coal grit, where the wind fought torn newspapers and the tin ticket office seemed perpetually to be closed, the man in charge sat so far inside it, and the little bleary window had such a look of ignoring everything, like a closed eyelid. Where the platform ended, man-high khaki weed began. In the summer it was lurid khaki-green and bitter-smelling, and in autumn it bristled with seeds like black pins that fastened to anything that brushed by, and blew and seeded and found their way to every inch of bare soil, but now it stood in black, dead stooks, scratching through the wind. That was all there was to hear on winter mornings. A few natives, swathed in blankets as in the silence of a cocoon, waited around the ticket office. Sometimes it did not open at all before the train came in, and so they missed the train, but other times the little window would snatch up and I would see the face of the man behind it, hating the natives for the winter morning and the tin shed, hypnotizing them into fumbling timidity with his silence and his sudden shout: Yes? Yes?

  Sometimes there was a native who sat on the ground, shrouded like a Mexican in his poncho, and from his hidden mouth beneath the blanket came the thin grandeur of a mouth organ, being played to himself. Around him two or three white men in business suits turned the morning paper awkwardly with gloved hands, a shopgirl clutched her knitting in a chiffon scarf. Basil Tatchett and his friends, who had just bought themselves pipes, stood comparing boles and tobacco pouches.

  At night the siding was very dark. Only one lamp, high up, lifted the steel rails like streaks of water out of the dark, and often a stone was thrown at it and for a few days there would be no lamp at all. There were more natives about, sometimes a great many, and they shouted, carrying trunks on their heads, balancing their bicycles in and out. Plunging down through the khaki weed to get to the road, the evil smell of it was like the smell of a swamp, and the dark figures with their strong body-smell and their great knobkerries passed silently. Down in the ditch in the khaki weed the body of a Mine boy had once been found, with a knife in his back. He had lain there for a whole day before someone had tried him with a foot and found that he was not simply lying asleep and close to the ground in the sun, the way the Mine boys did.

  My father was always there to meet me in the evenings; I would see the rim of light on his glasses turned to the carriages as the train drew in in the pale dusty radiance of its windows. Then with our coats drawn round us we would huddle off to the car parked at the roadside, walking quickly through the dark and the shouts of the black men for whom we were not there, so that they stumbled and bumped into us as if they stepped through the bodies of pale ghosts. Thinly and quickly the few white people dispersed, leaving the cries that in the dark and in a strange language sounded savage and the whiteness of eyes that in their dumbness seemed like the eyes of slow beasts in the darkness, beasts who are dreaming or preparing to charge, one cannot tell. And within a few hundred yards we were all home, in houses that smelled of food cooking, the radio was on, and the telephone kept up its regular spaced ring for the friends who choose mealtimes to make plans.

  The same people traveled on the train every day. Most of them got in at Atherton and by the time I climbed into the carriage they were settled in what were their places rather than their seats: for everyone returned day after day to the carriage originally boarded by chance and made familiar by habit, and everyone disposed himself automatically in the seat, in the relation to the other occupants of the carriage, in which timidity, a taste for reading in solitude, looking out of a window, or the desire to sit where the view of the head of a particular girl—long since disappeared or forgotten—had dictated. When a new traveler, like myself, got into the train for the first time, certain circumstances and forces set to work immediately making a place for him too, though he might believe he had simply sat himself down in the nearest seat. I walked through the first carriage because that, I saw, was where Basil Tatchett and his friends gathered and, hesitating at the next, I passed through that one too because an old man with a thickly clouding pipe sat beside a determinedly closed window. In the second coach of the third carriage, I sat down. Eyes turned with a pretense of no curiosity on me, and later, when they were looking elsewhere, I turned mine on them. A pretty girl with sternly ridged blond hair bit her nails and read an Afrikaans novel beside me, two others knitted, the one hunched over the ceaseless bite of needles, the other talking low and confidentially in her ear, while her own knitting rested often in her lap. A young man stared into his window, a lunch tin dangling between his knees. A woman’s legs were crossed beneath a paper; the hands that showed holding it had long red nails, a beautiful ring that slipped round on a thin finger. Opposite me was another pipe-smoker; but he was young, with a pleasant bulldog face over a yellow muffler, and he was reading Anthony Trollope beside an open window.

  Soon getting into the carriage every morning was like coming down to breakfast at a hotel where you have been staying for some time. Were they all there? Yes. There is the pattern of the Colonel eating his kipper, only the wife down at the young couple’s table, the six commercial travelers smoking expansively over coffee. And with an approving eye they all note you dropping into your place.

  I had a great deal of reading to do in order to find the lectures I was attending intelligible, since I had missed the first half of the year, and so I had time each morning for only this quick glance of reassurance before disappearing into my book. The pipe-smoker and I now and then touched each other’s shoes by mistake, as we stirred over our reading, and we smiled and sometimes exchanged a comment. Another young man, whom I had seen getting in ahead of me one morning and whom I thought a casual traveler, strayed in for a single journey, was greeted aloud by the pipe-smoker and silently by the others, and was, I discovered as the make-up of our carriage became clear
to me in the initiation of day by day, also one of us, although he caught the train only on alternate mornings, and sometimes did not appear for several days. When he was present, he sat beside the pipe-smoker with one stubby shoe crossed over the other and read from large brown-paper-covered books that were evidently borrowed, judging from the care with which he handled them. Nearly always he had a very sharp pencil in his hand, and he seemed to be making little drawings or sketches on the thin sheets he kept as a bookmark; sketches that sometimes he crumpled and stuffed in his pocket, other times folded and put in his case. He was evidently a student, too, for I used to see him disappearing upstairs in the tram as well, and then flying through the gates of the University far ahead of me, the belt of an old blue raincoat that he wore instead of a greatcoat trailing beside his shoe.

  The second or third morning I dropped into my seat opposite him, I greeted him as I did any other of the carriage occupants whose eyes I happened to meet. But instead of the lip-service smile and murmur that one gives and gets from strangers, he lifted his head and looked at me, a slow smile lifting round his eyes and no answer—a curious smile, the smile of remembrance and recollection that you meet on the face of someone whom you yourself fail to remember. And as this look sets you searching yourself for the place, the year, where this face belongs, perhaps now even imagining some familiarity in the features, so for a moment or two I vaguely tried to find this face. … But now with a finger following the bone of his nose as he read, or his head turned toward the window as he lifted it to take in something, as a bird lifts its head to let each sip of water go down, there was obviously no place for it. And I did not think of it again, for he became familiar in any case, and this present recognition overlaid any shadow recollection that might have come to me. Every day I was exploring further into my own ignorance. What I did not know, what I had not heard of—this the University was teaching me. I was slightly dazed, the way one is from days of sight-seeing. Brought up on gossip and discussion of the mechanics of living, I had never heard talk that did not have an immediate bearing on the circumstances of our daily life on the Mine. Words were like kitchen utensils. “Ideas” were synonymous with “fancies.” “She’s getting ideas” was a phrase of scorn for a neighbor who bought a Persian carpet or invited the Mine Manager to dinner too often. Now I found myself with the daily evidence of semantics, philosophy, psychology; hearing the history of art and music when I had never seen a picture other than the water colors by a local schoolteacher which were up for sale in the tearoom at Atherton, never heard any music other than the combined pupils’ yearly concert of the Atherton piano teachers. I had dabbled in books like a child playing in the ripples at the water’s edge; now a wave of ideas threw me, gurgling in my ears, half-drowning and exhilarating. The place where I was washed up, alien, astonished, was as far from the daily talk of my parents as theirs was from that of Anna, sitting over her paraffin-tin brazier in the back yard.