The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  “Anna’ll stay in the yard. I’ve told her. She’ll take Wednesday off instead. But if you go out at all lock up the front in any case. A drunk boy came over from the stores last week right up to Mrs. Ockert’s dining-room window; she got the fright of her life.—It’s terrible, you’re no safer on the Mine than in the town, anymore—” my mother complained to my father.

  “I’ve told you, you should let me get out my Browning.”

  “No, no, there are too many accidents with those things. Only the other day, I saw in the paper—little boy of five lost his arm.”

  “Yes, but where there are no small children.”

  “I wish they’d do away with those stores.—All the flies come from there, too. …—George, you’ve got hair on your collar, wait a minute—Don’t forget, Helen?”

  With one of those curious looks that mothers give their children—the same look, whether they are babies or grown men and women—half-abstracted, mind on the outing, half-smitten with the pang that is all that is left of remembrance of a time when the child was in the body and an accompaniment of all ventures, sleeping and waking—they were gone. I wished I could have gone with them; wished I could have wanted to go. My other life, my life at the University, turned me loose at week ends. And I wandered about, wondering what I had been sent back for, for everything that I picked up seemed a relic, sometimes pleasant and loved, but outside the direction of my life, washed up on the bank. The face of our house, of our whole row of houses following every bend and bush of my memory behind the pines, reproached me like the gentle expression of some forgotten person whom you have come back to see but find you have nothing to say to. I opened my mother’s accounts drawer, which as a child had been my safekeeping place, and found at the back some gilt transfers that had been saved for some occasion that had never come, and the little crocheted hat, a thimble cover, that I remembered Mrs. Mitcham giving me when I was about ten. In the front of the drawer was Ludi’s Christmas card of many months back. “Are you married yet, miss?” his beautiful handwriting said on the inside corner.

  No, I hadn’t written. At the end of the war, the Kochs had bought a little store in the village, I had heard through my mother; lending library one side, fishing tackle and hardware the other. I thought, with love and guilt of neglect which both would come to nothing, of Mrs. Koch. And sitting on the cool floor where I could see beneath the dresser the stencil of quiet dust with which Anna defeated my mother, of Ludi. Again the dumb pressure of his breast, that was driven, and the informed pressure of his thighs, rose to the surface in my body. More than eighteen months ago. My body was ready, mistook signals, was deluded into stillness. I thought again, with a catch of deep pleasure that was like a hook, buried deep in my entrails and forgotten, now pulled, so that it moved queerly, disturbingly all the secret inertia of flesh gathered about it, how his tongue reached into my throat and the wetness on our mouths seemed to come neither from him nor from me. …—This capacity for feeling had become buried under so much; like leaves, the days, little and big, fluttered down upon it. Yet though they were piled so high, like leaves, there was no substance to them: lean on them heavily and sharply once, and the whole pile flattened lightly away—there it was, alive.

  My eyes must have closed as I hunched there, for when the telephone began to ring through the house, I shot up startled and bumped into a chair, rocked my own photograph off the dresser. I had the sudden guilty fear that it might be anybody; anybody. But it was Joel. Joel’s voice, as unsuspected, as reassuring—Would I do him a favor? Would I take a parcel of working drawings to University for him tomorrow morning?—He wouldn’t be going in as he had to drive his father to the Free State on business.

  When we had concluded the arrangement there was a little pause, in which there seemed nothing to say; when we spoke to each other from our two separate homes, across the mile of veld that held the Mine apart from the town, there was always slight constraint. One did not know in what atmosphere the other stood: who was talking around, what sort of things they were saying. When I thought about the Aarons privately, alone in their own family, they became two curious wooden dolls whom I could not make speak the casual exchange of Mine intelligence, the mild gossip, the reiterated opinions that occupied us round our table. Whenever I met Joel’s parents they seemed to lapse into a kind of heaviness, sitting about as if they did not know where to put themselves. I could not imagine them more at ease, any more than I could imagine the demeanor of the lion I saw blinking behind bars, back in its own jungle.

  “So?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What are you doing with yourself?” In his voice there was the suggestion of an afternoon being passed, pleasantly enough, out of his sphere.

  “I mean nothing. All on my own … my people went off to a braaivleis.”

  He was genuinely surprised. “Well then come out into the country. Really. I’ve got my brother-in-law’s car for tomorrow. Will you? We’ll go out into the veld—” We laughed.

  “All right. Come and fetch me. … I said I was going to work.”

  When Joel came he looked different. He slammed the car door and bounded up the path, rat-tatting knuckles in a summons on the porch. He wore an old pair of gray flannels and an old-fashioned fugi silk shirt, washed thin, open at the neck. There were drops of water on the shining ends of his hair, where he had pulled a wet comb quickly through it; still it was glossy as a black horse’s flank. His face was newly burned, with the slick of health that the South African sun dabs on in an hour. He had the delighted look of someone who surprises.

  “Bernie said to me at lunchtime, you can have the car this afternoon. Most amazing thing! You know how often I get an offer like that. And I said there was nowhere I wanted to go, so we’d decided to go to Cloete’s Farm.”

  I went about locking the front of the house, as I had been told. “What’s that?”

  “Not a tea place. It’s a training farm for young Jews who want to go to Palestine—or at least it used to be; now we’re at war they secretly train them to use guns.”

  I nodded. The way he had said “we’re at war” drew from me the momentary silence of respect for one who is involved by allegiance: it seemed odd to hear him say it; to me, the war between the Jews and the Arabs and the war in Indonesia were pieces of deplorableness equally remote. “—I must go and tell Anna.” He followed me to the back yard, where, despite the rich autumn warmth with which the sun brimmed the enclosure of grass and bright, thinning fruit trees, Anna sat formally in her dim little room with an old black man in vaguely clerical garb and two fat women who wore shoes and stockings for Sunday. She ducked out of the dimness, a bossy figure in the dirty jersey and overalls worn colorless across the behind and frayed over the breasts, in which she would never have dared appear before my mother. My mother had seen to it that she had proper false teeth made, and written a note to the dentist so that she would be fitted with the same care as a white person, but Anna never wore the bottom plate and had developed the busybody jaw of a very old man. “Miss Helen?”

  When I told her I was going out she looked at Joel as one eyes an enemy to whom one has not been introduced, and said: “Where you going?”

  “Out with the young master—” I gestured.

  “And when you’ll be back?” She was shrill; she gave me up, grumbling. “If the missus she comes, what I’m going to tell her? She tell me I must stay in, you’ll be here—” She ignored the presence of Joel, hostile in proxy for her mistress. It came to me that perhaps my mother really did disapprove of and dislike Joel; I had not until then believed that her uncommunicativeness about him meant anything more than her usual distrust of the unfamiliar.

  We left Anna grumbling and went back through the house to the car, Joel stopping a moment in the dark passage to look at an old photograph of a blazered team with my father cross-legged near the trophy. “I thought it was some school thing of yours,” said Joel. And added, interested, “Is your father there?” I pointed him o
ut, ashamed, and said: “Come on—” closing the front door finally behind us.

  When we were settled in the car, I could see his mood of enthusiasm lying upon him. “Really.” He smiled, shaking his head at the dashboard. “It’s the strangest way it happened—”

  “You look different today,” I said. “You look like an Indian, you know.”

  “Yes, I know I’m black.”

  “No, an Indian in a hotel we used to go to in Durban. He used to bend over the menu, a really lovely head, such black hair, and a skin that looked liquid, like some kind of metal that had just been poured smoothly over the bones—”

  “Right. I’m greasy, too.”

  “No, I don’t mean that—” We laughed at the impossibility of getting it clear, and as we turned the corner past the Recreation Hall, I saw a group of young men and girls from the Mine office walking along in their tennis clothes, and waved so warmly that they turned in the road to see whom I was with and I saw the curiosity and blankness with which people recognize, however fleetingly, the set of a stranger’s head.

  We drove a long way, to where one end of the Reef of gold mines and their attendant towns petered out. Here a low range of hills that lifted your eyes like mountains after the flatness of veld broken only by shaft heads and dumps of yellow sand, hid a deep, gradual ravine. It was as if the earth, ugly, drab, concealing great riches for sixty miles, suddenly regained innocence where it no longer had anything to conceal, and flowered to the surface. All down the inner sides of the ravine low trees and bushes were curly green. At the bottom, where perhaps once a great river had spread, the municipality of the near-by village—it was a real village, not a Reef town, a village with a peaked church raising a finger, little bridges interrupting the roadway where willows closed over streams—had built a swimming pool and fenced it in with wire. This gave the place a name: Macdonald’s Kloof, named by Afrikaans-speaking farmers after a Scotsman who was connected with it in some way by local legend. Lorries were parked in the dusty cleared earth round the fence, and children ran about in makeshift bathing costumes, shouting in Afrikaans; as usual, there was a Sunday-school picnic or orphanage treat clustered there.

  But the sides of the Kloof remained uncultivated, and people could climb up leisurely and lose themselves in the scraggly foliage and the rusty-looking boulders, finding a level to sit in the sun where it was quiet with the quiet of high places, and the occasional human voice floating up from below in a scarf of wind sounded more like the cry of a bird. It was not a beautiful place, but the broken planes and rather tame wildness that it offered our eyes forever resting on the level and the treeless, made it seem so to us, or gave us pleasure by reminding, in its poor way, how beautiful the country could be. Joel said: “I wouldn’t mind being at the Cape, now.”

  We left the car at the bottom and clung and slithered up. The dry season was beginning, and although the leaves were still fleshy and bright, the barks of the trees were scaly as the lichened rocks, and warm dust fluffed round our feet and seemed part of the sunlight. It was a dust that smelled of eucalyptus and now and then of some mauvish herb-bush that reverberated with bees. We grunted as we pulled each other up, breathing earnestly. “What are you looking for?” he asked. “No flowers,” I said, disappointed. “—You should know the Transvaal.”

  But there was a big lizard, moving off as if a streak of the rock had liquefied. We stopped and felt disinclined to go on. Lifting our heads after the concentration on footholds, we came out clear above the lorries and the children and the valley, clear above half the fall of treetops. “Ah—hh.” Joel was satisfied to sit down on the lizard’s rock, and I sank down, too. He unrolled himself onto his back after a moment or two and had on his face the strange smile of people who look up at the sun. Everything seemed to sheer off into the space, the emptiness; my mind drained clear. The steady winter sun hunched my shoulders the way the warmth of a low-burning fire does. Then thoughts began to trickle back, unconnected by logic, but by links that I did not inquire or bother to understand. Mary Seswayo at the washbasin: a tingle of feeling toward her; what?—She is a girl, the discovery came, like me. It was not the rather ridiculous statement of an obvious fact, but a real discovery, a kind of momentary dissolving of obvious facts, when the timid, grasping, protesting life of my own organism spoke out, and I recognized its counterpart in her, beneath the beret and my kindness and her acceptance. Then my mother. She would say, “Helen had such a pile of studying to do;—yes, very hard,” proud as she could never feel in my presence, with its reminder of all I was not. For a fanciful second I saw her at the braaivleis, tried to turn her face toward me and could not. You are a very clean people, of course. Who said that? Daddy to Joel, the first time. A clean little woman, clean little place, my mother would say seriously; it came before godliness with her. Of course, all Jews are circumcised; but my father hadn’t meant that. How embarrassing for Joel if he thought it. … But that was months ago. …

  “Did you ever speak to the girl about her notes?” He spoke suddenly.

  “D’y’know, I was just thinking about her!”

  “Did you, though?”

  “I thought I told you? On Friday. I showed her some other notes—not mine, they’re too scrappy—but someone else’s I borrowed.”

  After a moment I said: “She was horribly grateful. I felt like a bossy missionary presenting a Bible to a little savage who has no shoes and chronic hookworm.”

  “She’s going to teach?”

  “Of course.”

  “Helen, what are you going to do?” He knew I planned a librarianship or perhaps some job of vaguely imagined interest in a consulate, but the question cut past that.

  “I don’t know … I sometimes wonder what I’m doing it all for—Other people want to teach … and it’s not as if I write. All this reading; just for pleasure and curiosity, really.”

  “Not that. You really have the honest itch to know.”

  I lay back, too; we spoke dreamily, the kind of parenthetic exchange people have on the edge of sleep. The rock offered us to the sky, Joel Aaron and me, side by side, but not touching. “But what?”

  “That’s it.” He turned the question into an answer, as if it were satisfactory.

  “Sometimes I think I should have done social science. …”

  “You’ll take too much in from other people,” he said to the sky. “That’ll be your trouble. You’ll bolt it all. …”

  I wanted an answer: “I think I should have done social science. I could still do it.”

  “Helen, perhaps you should get married, I mean sometimes there are women with a kind of—how can I put it—vivid feeling for life. They push it into things that waste it; activities that could run on something colder. So it’s lost; they change. Because it’s something for between men and women.” He became vague: “If you cut it up, parcel it out …” He shook his head at himself.

  I felt queerly hurt, indignant. It was as if I discovered in the expression of someone’s face some defect in myself that I was not aware of. “So that’s all you think I’m good for. Married. But I’ll marry as well …” There was a silence. I said, still half-offended, “Joel, I don’t understand you. You’ve done more than anyone to get me out of my rut—I’ve always felt we were escaping Atherton together; you understood because you were stuck in it, too, and when I talked to you I found someone who was struggling out of a kind of comfortable mediocrity that I was dimly aware of wanting to break—and that made it possible for me to put my finger on it. I’ve learned to look, to hear. … Now you say a thing like that.”

  Whatever he had been thinking, he had put it aside, out of my sight. He lifted his head from the rock, straining his neck to smile at me. “It’s just the way Jews are. There, it comes out in me, too; we really only want girls to marry.—It’s like my Indian hair—You don’t lack the brains, my girl, it’s not that.”

  I smiled, as I always did, apologetically, when he became aware of his Jewishness.

  �
�Helen,” he said after a pause, “do you mind my being a Jew?”

  I sat up, with the smile again. “Why? You know—”

  “No.” His hand twitched where it lay on the rock. “I mean really. And your people. Does your mother say anything?”