The Lying Days

by Nadine Gordimer

  “Are you coming with tomorrow, John? Bring some food.”

  “No. Not in your car, Laurie—hey, look out! I’ve got a baby in there!”

  The room had broken up in the push to go home. I signaled good night to Joel across the room; he was spending the night with Laurie. I was going to sleep over at the house of an old friend of my mother’s, the usual arrangement when I went out in Johannesburg at night. The house was on the north side of town, while Laurie lived on the east, so I had arranged a lift with someone going in my direction. But as I was getting into my coat the young man of the divan appeared and said: “Which way do you go?”

  “Parkview, but the Arnolds are taking me.”

  “That’s my way, too. You come with me.” And he dragged me off, picking hairs from my coat collar. “Either don’t wear a black coat, or buy yourself a clothesbrush. You’re a sloppy kid, you know.” “But you said I was prim.” “That was the first time I looked. Anyway, I know that primness. You use it because you don’t want to give yourself away. Not even to yourself. But you’re there all right, just underneath, and don’t think you can forget it.” I suddenly felt that he saw me on the beach with Ludi, two years ago, looking at my own breasts against the sand. I laughed with embarrassment and misgiving. “Oh, yes,” he said. As I got into his small object-crowded car, Joel and Laurie came out of the building and I put up my hands and smiled to Joel. But the light of the foyer caged him in, and though he was looking right at me, he could not see beyond it.

  I did ask Mary Seswayo to come to hear some music at the Welshs’ flat, but somehow she never came. When I spoke of it to her she sat very seriously for a moment and then said as if she were replying to the question of an examiner: “The difficulty is how can I get home afterward.”

  I said: “Oh, someone will take you.” Like a rope tied to one’s ankle, the limits of their recognition in the ordinary life of the city constantly tripped one up in even the most casual attempt at a normal relationship with an African. Because I was white I continually forgot that Mary was not allowed here, could not use that entrance, must not sit on this bench. Like all urban Africans she had learned to walk warily between taboos as a child keeping on the squares and off the lines of paving. But everywhere had been mine to walk in, and out of sheer habit of freedom I found it difficult to restrict my steps to hers. I remember once going into town with her to buy some textbooks, and when I wanted to go to a cloakroom, realizing for the first time in my life that because she was black she couldn’t even go to the lavatory if she wanted to. There simply was no public cloakroom for native men or women in the whole shopping center of Johannesburg. Now if she came to the Welshs’ someone would have to take her home by car to the native township seven or eight miles out of town where she lived; their flat was nowhere near a native bus route, she could not travel on a European bus, and if she went home by train (even then someone would have to get her to the main station—there was no suburban underground in Johannesburg), there would be a dangerous walk between the halt and her home at the other end. These details were irksome and tedious and because I found them so I felt irritated with her for thinking of them first. It was not the music or the invitation that her inward eye looked to, but the business of getting from here to there.

  So we drank our coffee and she kept turning back her sheaf of papers and reading a line or two, slowly. She was continually preoccupied with her work as I, in my work, was preoccupied with other things. She had now a friend who worked in a city bookshop (an enlightened tradition seemed to go with the books and it was one of the very few businesses where an African could be something more than an errand boy; he did what was known as “white man’s work” in the stockrooms). Today she had another handbook with her, this time called Effective English, that I guessed he had lent her.

  Watching her opening it the hesitant, expectant way she opened a lecture-room door or the door of the library, and her eyes unraveling its mystery of print as if they were unwrapping a parcel that just might contain something miraculous, final, I suddenly wished for her that she was less harassed and flattened. And that she would not keep hoping for this miracle, finality. As usual, there was nothing I could say. I went on sipping the sweet coffee and her face hung transfixed over the book like a pool in which she would never see herself. She was very dark skinned—there is a theory, probably originating with the Africans themselves, that when they are well fed and fat they are lightest, and it was certain that she was not particularly well fed—and she had the small, good and also slightly projecting teeth of many African girls. Also the lovely round smooth forehead. She took a gulp out of her cup and as she put it down I wondered, Would I drink out of that cup? At home, as in most households, the Africans had eating utensils kept separate from the common family pool. Don’t take that—it’s the girl’s cup. My mother had often stopped some stranger, fetching himself a drink of water.

  But it was a stupid thought I had caught myself out in, and I was learning to recognize them. I was beginning to find that in friendship with an African, a white person is inclined to submit his sincerity to tests by which he would not dream of measuring good will or affection toward another white person. Would I particularly like drinking out of anyone’s cup, for that matter?

  She went off to the library, and I wandered down to the grassy amphitheater in which the swimming pool lay, still and cold with winter, although the sun was hot. It was one of those immense highveld days when the buildings and trees of Johannesburg are all mountaintops, lifting up into a dazzling colorless sky, distanceless, dazing as air that has shaken itself free of the earth and rises just out of reach of the last aspiring finger of rock. It is impossible to look into such a sky. I struggled a little with some Italian. Then lay back on the dead grass. A native gardenboy silently looped strands out of the pool with a long hook; then he stretched out with an old torn stained hat over his face. The hoarse voices of two students in shorts and rugby boots were gruff near me. It was the afternoon the young man of the divan was to take me to tea before I caught my train home. The suggestion had interested me enough at the time it was made, on the impetus of the evening at Isa’s, but the days that had elapsed in between had returned the young man to the haziness of a stranger, and I wondered, as I had before about such enthusiasms gone cold on me, why I had agreed.

  But at four when the shadows of the buildings made chasms of chill I dutifully came out of the cloakrooms with my lips freshly drawn and my hair smoothed with water at the temples, and he was waiting in his black car. At once the inside of it was familiar, the assortment of odd shapes in the darkness appearing in the frankness of afternoon as ampule boxes, a couple of battered instrument cases, and piles of theater programs, empty cigarette boxes and dusty pamphlets put out by drug manufacturers. When he turned to talk to me, he breathed ether like a dragon breathing fire. “Exotic,” he said, “and it’s cheaper than standing a round of drinks.” I saw with a sense of justification that he was attractive, after all, and my mood lifted. We were going down the hill in the gaiety that sometimes springs up between people who are attracted but know each other very slightly when he swerved to avoid a native girl carrying a large brown paper parcel, and I interrupted—“Just a moment”—and turned to make sure.

  I thought I had recognized the coat and beret. It was Mary, even more burdened than usual, so that she could only smile and had no free hand to wave. Charles had pulled to the curb. “Oh, I didn’t mean you to stop,” I said unconvincingly. “Well? What’s wrong? You practically flung yourself out the window.”

  “It’s a girl—an African I’m friendly with. We nearly knocked her over. There she is, just behind—”

  “Nonsense, we didn’t nearly knock anyone down. Where is she?”

  I turned to look through the rear window at Mary coming hesitantly toward us, unsure if we had stopped on her account, and she should approach, or for some other reason, when she would have the embarrassment of answering a signal that was not for her. I nodded
my head vigorously at her.

  But Charles suddenly reversed the car with a rush that brought us level with her and almost knocked her down again.

  “Are you mad?”

  “Well, it’s quicker for us to go backward than for her to go forward.”

  Mary stood at the window, smiling at his air of impulsive calm. Before her, I immediately felt a kind of pride in this young man; my indignation took on the purpose of showing him off. “I hope you don’t always drive like this. Really!—Mary, why are you walking with all those parcels?”

  “It’s the dry cleaning for the people where I stay. I went down to the shop to get it, and when I got back I couldn’t find my bus money.” She was smiling in apology.

  “So what’d’you think you’re going to do? Walk home?”

  “I’m going into town to see if I can find my cousin at the factory where he works. He will lend me bus fare.”

  “Where is this place?” said Charles. He had the patient, practical, uninterested tone of the white person willing to help a native with money or authority, so long as he is not expected to listen to any human details of the predicament.

  “But I’ll give you the money,” I said, and at once became flustered because I felt I should have said “lend.” “I mean, it’s silly to go into town—He may not be there …? Charles—”

  “Where does she live?” he asked again.

  “Oh, in Mariastad—”

  “Well, come on then. Hop in.”

  “It’s seven miles,” Mary told him first, quite simply, not getting into the car because she expected the distance would change his mind.

  “I know where it is. Get in.”

  And now I began to urge her too, feeling a mild intoxication of possession of the young man and his car.

  We went off with another roar, and she settled herself, very quietly as if anxious not to disturb, among the dust and rubbish in the back, clearing a space for herself carefully, and bending down to pick up a pile of pamphlets that had slid to the floor. We drove along one of the big highways that lead out of the city to the north and south, hemmed in with thousands of other cars, the faces of people drawing level behind glass, then snatched away as the lights changed. On the left hundreds of bicycles skidded through, Africans riding home with the yells and something of the exhilaration of skiers, and along every second or third block native bus queues lay like grayish caterpillars. Then there were villas on either side, the cars thinned, a roadhouse took some of them, and we passed our escort of bicycles, panting and riding hard now on the long stretch.

  Many South Africans have never been inside a native location, but I had been with my mother to the Atherton one as a child, when the Mine held its yearly jumble sale of old clothes there, and I had also been with Joel to see the shantytown at Moroka and the experimental housing scheme near by, where the houses looked like sections of outsize concrete pipe and smelled cold as tunnels. One native location is much like another. Mariastad was one of those which are not fenced, but the approach to the place was the familiar one: a jolt off the smooth tarmac onto a dirt road that swerved across the veld; orange peel and rags, newspaper and bits of old cars like battered tin plates, knock-kneed donkeys staring from tethers. All around the veld had been burned and spread like a black stain. And all above the crust of vague, close, low houses, smoke hung, quite still as if it had been there forever; and shouts rose, and it seemed that the shout had been there forever, too, many voices lifted at different times and for different reasons that became simply a shout, that never began and never ended.

  It was something I had known before and yet this time, with Mary Seswayo in the back of the car, it came to me as if the other times I had not seen it. As we bumped down into the township Charles and I stopped talking, as people do when they feel they may have lost their way; animation died into awkwardness. Along the road, he had talked to me but not to Mary (I had turned every now and then to draw her into our chatter) but now he began to try and speak naturally to her, as you do when there is something you do not want a person to notice. The effort was not much of a success, and everytime he got an answer from her he seemed not to know what to do with it.

  The car went slowly through the streets. It seemed to descend into noise that sealed us up inside it. Children changed the outline of the street, grouping in the gutters, skittering over the road, running alongside the car in a fluttering pennant of rags. When there are so many of them, they lose human value; you could have put out your arm and brushed them off, back into the road.

  First we passed the administrative offices, orthodox and red brick in official decency beneath the shabbiness that had washed against them from all around, weathering them to the corrosion of poverty. Chipped brick, dirt and litter disguised the solidity and professional proportions of the place like the ivy a villa pulls over its glaring newness in a stately suburb. A flag clung round a pole, and two fat native policemen stood arguing with an angry man on a bicycle. Then the usual small street of shops, homemade and pushed tightly one against the other so that you felt that if the first were taken away, the whole lot would slowly keel over and collapse. Most were one-eyed, and the pocked whitewash was covered with signs, advertisements and exhortations, but one or two had crooked verandas—mud or homemade brick under the whitewash—and the shoemaker sat outside. The fish-and-chip shop had a proper shop front, and young natives hung about it, city hats pushed back on their heads, drinking Coca-Cola. After the shops there was an empty space covered with ashes, mealie cobs, dogs and children, and at the far end, a tiny church that was the utter simplification of all that has accreted round the architectural idea of a church through the ages: a peaked tin roof, a rounded wooden door, a horizontal bar across two poles with a piece of old railway sleeper suspended from it, and a smaller piece of iron dangling to clang it with.

  We followed Mary’s directions past decent little houses, each as big as a tool shed with a tin chimney throbbing out the life of the house in smoke. In many of them the door was open and a sideboard or a real dining table in varnished wood showed. Outside their bare walls were ballasted with lean-tos made of beaten-out paraffin tins, homemade verandas like the shoemaker’s and porches made of boxwood, chicken wire and runner beans. Each had two or three yards of ground in front, fenced with a variety of ingenuity, and inside mealies hung their silk tassels from the pattern of straight stalk and bent leaf. Some grew flowers instead; as it was winter, rings and oblongs of white stones marked out like graves the place where they would come up again. And some grew only children, crawling and huddling in the dust with only eyes looking out of dust.

  Every third or fourth house there was a communal tap from which everyone fetched his water, and which no one troubled to turn off properly. A muddy stream trickled from the tap’s soggy perimeter out into the street, and we felt it squelch beneath the tires.

  Mary said: “Here it is—” and with quiet and insistent thanks was gone into one of these houses and the car was taking us past again before I had realized that this was the place in which she lived, the house that was individual because one of its components touched my own life. I looked with confusion at the other houses of the row, passing; all alike in the limitations of their humble differentiation. Into a house like this she disappeared: there was a chair on the veranda, I had at least seen, and a sword fern growing in half an old tire, painted silver and hanging from a wire. Inside there might be four chairs round a table on a piece of clean linoleum, pressed for space against a high bed with a white crocheted cover—like this house. Or this one—a kitchen dresser, one or two chairs, something tall and dark with a flash of white—could it be a piano? It might be, without incongruity, for there were not enough of these rooms for each to serve one designation: dining room, bedroom, kitchen—they were all simply living rooms in the plainest sense, whether you must work or cook or sleep or make love. I had suddenly a great regret and curiosity for the room of Mary Seswayo that I had not seen; I wanted to make it up for myself o
ut of the raw material which I saw in flashes in the other houses all about me. Essentially, it could not be any different from my imagining, because there was nothing else, in a place like Mariastad, of which it could have been composed. All else it could contain could be the little pile of books and notes from the University; and those I could supply, too. Just at this point we turned the corner and passed another tap, and there was a neat girl with an ordinary white enamel jug, fetching some water for herself. And at this the grasp of my imagination—that was really more like the entrance into another life through a re-creation of atmosphere, like an archaeologist restoring the arms, trinkets and drinking vessels to the excavated city, so that all that is needed is his own human step through the streets, and it will be as it was again—let go. She, too, came with a jug for water to a tap in the mud. So in how many other commonplaces that I take for granted in my own life shall I be wrong in hers? The thousand differences in the way she is compelled to dress, wash, eat—they piled up between us and I could scarcely see her, over the top. Sitting in the car I was conscious of a kind of helplessness, as if it were taking me away, further and further away, not only in distance. The car that at night must occupy a garage as big as these houses. The house Mary lives in. The bench she can’t sit on, the water that must be fetched from the tap in the street, the physical closeness of her life to the lives of others; these differences in the everyday living out of our lives—could they end there? Or out of them did we love, want and believe, and so could the formula of our loving, wanting, believing, be the same? Further and further. I thought of her eyes into which I seemed not to have looked hard enough. I tried to remember them so that I could try again.

  The young man Charles said: “I’m damned if I know how to get out.” And certainly, although he had turned and turned again, we were not leaving Mariastad the way we came in. We were now rocking and bumping through the rutted streets of what must have been the oldest part of the location. The closeness of the place, the breath-to-breath, wall-to-wall crowding, had become so strained that it had overflowed and all bounds had disappeared. The walls of the houses pressed on the pavement, the pavement trampled into the street, there were no fences and few windows. Fires in old paraffin tins burned everywhere, and women stood over them among the screaming children, cooking and shouting. I was accustomed to seeing Africans in ill-fitting clothes that had belonged to white people first, but these people were in rags. These were clothes that had been made of the patches of other clothes, and then those patches had been replaced by yet others. They must have been discarded by a dozen owners, each poorer than the last, and now, without color or semblance of what they had been, they hung without warmth, fraying in the fierce flicker of flames that seemed greedy to eat them up, return them at last to the nothing their frailty had almost reached. The children were naked beneath one garment cast off by a grownup; streaming noses and gray bellies to show that under the old army jacket there was something alive instead of a cross of sticks to frighten birds.