Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  Ann met Gideon Shibalo when she and Len were invited to take their travelling art exhibition round African, Indian and Coloured high schools. She had heard all about him before, of course; he was the man whose painting had attracted attention overseas and won him a scholarship to work in Italy, but he hadn’t been able to take it up because the South African Government refused him a passport—he was involved in politics, the African National Congress movement. He came in during the school break and stood looking at his two pictures with the removed yet fascinated air with which one glances through an old photograph album. “Talented chap,” said Len, at his elbow.

  “That’s a fact.” They burst into laughter and pushed each other about a little.

  “My partner in crime,” Len indicated Ann.

  “Again and again, I’ve wanted to see if we couldn’t get something more from you,” she said to Shibalo, “but he said it was hopeless, you don’t paint any more.”

  Shibalo chuckled, considering himself. “Hopeless. Quite right.” He and Len had an exchange, punctuated by laughter, in Sesuto. “You should have come to see me anyway.” Shibalo turned to Ann.

  “Why?” she said cheerfully. “Any hope? We’ll come if you’ve got something for us, any time.”

  “I’ve put away childish things,” he said.

  “Don’t you worry, he can still knock out a picture if he wants to,” Len encouraged and reproached, resentfully.

  “Do you dislike being probed about not painting, or do you enjoy it?”

  They all laughed. “Good God, I live on it. Where has my inspiration gone? Don’t I feel light, shape, colour, thickness, thinness, what-not? Don’t I want to express the soul of Africa? Don’t I want to make the line vibrate? Don’t my guts wriggle and send new forms to my finger-tips? That chap Gauguin started at forty, I’ve stopped long before.”

  He scarcely looked at the other pieces of painting and sculpture that Len and Ann were modestly proud of, and when he sat drinking coffee with them remarked that the exhibition was really “a waste of time”. “The shock of modern art—we don’t need it around here, man. You can’t shock my kids in there, in my class we’ve got three who smoke dagga, and two pregnant. Not bad, eh? And they’re not even in matric yet.”

  “Sounds like a very advanced class,” said Len to Ann.

  She wagged her head: “He’s done wonders with them.”

  But Shibalo’s tone changed suddenly and obstinately; he stood up now, apparently bored, and made some excuse to leave. “The ah—the headmaster wants to talk to me. I promised to drop in. About sports day.” He didn’t seem to care about them being aware that he was lying; he looked the last man in the world any headmaster would choose to organise a sports day.

  As he left he said: “I might change my mind.”

  “About what?” said Len.

  “Painting something.”

  “Oh, really?” said Ann.

  “Under certain conditions.”

  She was alert to amusement, but unsure; his voice was serious, impersonal, bargaining.

  “I might paint you,” he said. And stooped his head under the doorway, and was gone.

  Ann was used to the admiration and interest of men; it was only the absence of these things that she noticed. Ten days later, when the exhibition was at an Indian school, the headmaster invited Len and her to tea in the staff room, and introduced Shibalo among the other teachers. Shibalo did not say they had met before.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Inter-school sports. Some arrangements have to be settled.”

  At lunch-time he was still there, and they saw him coming slowly across the field, smoking, and blinking as if the sun hurt his eyes. Len went and waited in the doorway for him. He sat with them and picked at the ham rolls they had bought on the way out to the school, and drank the coffee Ann made. He had the confidence of someone who is wanted everywhere, the moody ease of the man who pleases everybody but himself. Within the week, he turned up again; he had happened to meet Len in a shebeen the evening before, and had taken him on to the Bantu Men’s Social Centre to provide an audience for his snooker game. Len had then had a lesson from him—Len’s first. The casual chances of city life had thrown the younger man into the company of Shibalo, and Len was rather proud, as quiet, studious people invariably are, to be taken up by someone bold and amusing. He described his efforts at the billiard table, giggling apologetically, rather enjoying the new business of making a fool of himself. “But when you pocket your white ball does that wipe out your whole score? Or what?”

  “No, no, boy, don’t you remember, last night, when Robert Duze pocketed his, he just lost the points he should have made with that shot—It’s a good thing I’m a born teacher,” Shibalo complained to Ann.

  “Good Lord, to think I had to come to the townships to get into the company of clubmen. Len—you know I do believe there’s a billiard table lying around somewhere in the Stilwells’ house. At least it looks like a billiard table, only very small.”

  “Yes, yes, they do make half-size ones.” When she talked, Gideon Shibalo watched her rather than listened.

  “Where did you see it?” Len was deeply interested and sceptical.

  “In that sort of cellar or boot cupboard under the stairs. I’m sure they don’t want it—you know what that house is like. Perhaps you could buy it from them?”

  Len and Shibalo laughed. Shibalo was delighted. “Can you see it? A donkey cart comes along 16th street in Alex and delivers a billiard table to his house. First they take the door down to get it in. Then they take down the inside walls … Then his landlady comes home …”

  “Then they use the billiard table for a floor and build the house again on top. —But we could go and look at it, anyway?” said Len.

  “I’ll ask Jessie what they think of doing with the thing, if anything.”

  “You want to come and play tonight?” Shibalo asked Len.

  “Thanks—I’m going to a concert with Ann and Boaz.”

  Gideon was wandering about the caravan, quite at home now; he took down two pictures and exchanged their positions. “I might be there. I’m supposed to be there. —Who’s this guy out of the Bible?”

  “Ann’s husband.”

  “I’d like to meet your husband.”

  She grinned at him. “He’d like to meet you.”

  He had already turned to something else, in the manner of people who do not want to make the effort at real communication but toss a remark, like a small coin, as a signal of passing attention.

  At the concert at the university they saw him on the other side of the hall, tall and carefully dressed, with a white woman whose short, flying grey hair and high pink brow made an authoritative head. He bent with her over the programme and seemed another person in this company.

  Ann pointed him out to Boaz: “That’s Shibalo over there.” Boaz twisted in his seat to see; he knew the story of Gideon Shibalo’s scholarship and how he’d had to give it up for political reasons. There were quite a number of people that she knew, and her attention was caught, this way and that, as people came down the aisles. “Callie Stow, with him,” said Len. At intermission they saw the backs of Gideon Shibalo and the woman, in a group that rather held the floor. He did not turn his head.

  Next day he came to the exhibition—which had moved on to another school—at lunch-time and brought a large bottle of beer with him. “What about some cheese for a change?” he said, looking at the ham rolls.

  “How’d you like the music?” Len wanted an opening in order to give his own views on it.

  “Wasn’t there.”

  “We saw you.” Ann laughed at him.

  But he was unperturbed. “One can go to a concert and not be there. Sometimes you just don’t hear the music.” He shrugged.

  “Well, you missed something good.”

  “No doubt, no doubt.” He was overcome by weariness at the reminder of the evening, and slid his legs out across the small space of the carava
n. Ann was obliged to step over them to get past.

  He began to appear sometime nearly every day. Len bought cheese rolls, and if he were not there by one, the two of them sat smoking and talking without a mention of lunch. If he had not come by a quarter to two, one of them would say, at last, “Well, I’m hungry,” and then they would eat hastily, as if they had forgotten the meal.

  One night the three of them went to a boxing match together; Ann had never watched boxing before. “Put on your best dress,” Shibalo ordered. “I mean it. A woman’s got to look like it at the ring-side.” They sat in front among the black promoters and gangsters and their girls. The girls in their drum-tight dresses, heels thrusting their haunches this way and that, swaying earrings beside brown cheeks and full red lips, made a splendid, squealing show; Ann pounded her knees with excitement like a schoolboy. Shibalo held her elbow as if to hold her down and explained in a swift and urgent commentary all that was going on between the two forces struggling in the ring.

  Shibalo had seats for a match in a nearby town, and they went in Ann’s car to see it. Ann was delighted with the extravagant descriptions of the fighters on the handbills and posters. The brutality of the sweat-slippery black bodies, colliding and heaving apart, the bloodied eyes and the grunts of pain had for her the licence of a spectacle; she enjoyed being swept up, bobbing and buoyant, in the noise and show-off of the crowd. They went a third and a fourth time, following the African boxing promotions from town to town. Then Len said, “I’ve had enough of this craze—no thank you.” Ann and Gideon went anyway, on their own. “You won’t leave me stranded in the middle of the night in Germiston location, or wherever it is?” she asked, smiling at him. “Come on. You’ll be all right.” He made no personal assurances.

  She had dropped the joke of dressing-up by now and looked even more conspicuous in the black crowd, in jeans and a leather jacket. There was a dirty fight, and a close one, and the crowd first snarled and reviled and then celebrated wildly. Gideon Shibalo got his tickets free because he knew the promoters, but apparently he considered this sufficient honour for them and never spoke to them. He pushed a way through the crowd as if he knew they would make way for him; but his indifference was met, as he and Ann passed, with glances and remarks of recognition: the regulars had seen them before, now; the white girl and the teacher were part of the circus. A brazen little caricature with stiff straightened hair darted out long red finger-nails to feel Ann’s coat; someone smiled into her face.

  The looks, the casual remark of faces in the crowd, set them together; it was a picture imposed from the outside, like a game that partners off strangers. Shibalo drove the car home that night. They laughed and talked all the way; neither had ever been so amusing when Len was there.

  Next morning Shibalo telephoned her at the Stilwells’ house. Oddly, she was greatly surprised when she heard his voice; with Africans, she still expected to take the initiative in any attempt to keep up a friendship: they seldom did, perhaps to show you that they didn’t need you.

  “Where’re you having lunch today?”

  She was supposed to be out with the exhibition, as he must know. “I don’t know, Gid, I’ve got to go into town to do some shopping this morning.” “What about the Lucky Star or Tommie’s, then.” Those were the two places where coloured and white people mixed. “Oh, Lucky Star, I think.” She at once chose the one where she went often, where everyone she knew went and was seen.

  She simply did not turn up at the Agency office, where Len usually picked her up with the caravan. At half past one, rather late, Shibalo came into the Lucky Star; she left the people she was talking to and went to him: “Come—” They had something so important to discuss that there was no need for pleasantries. He went swiftly to a table at the wall. “I felt bored stiff at the school today. Ugh, the smell of the place gets me down, the ink, the musty old books.” “Let’s have curry, then, Gid, that’s a good smell.” He looked at her slowly, resentfully, with a smile that was an open, blatant declaration, cock-sure of welcome, full of guile. “You’re the one that has the good smell. Everything you touch in the caravan is full of it. Even the coffee-cup. You hand someone a cup of coffee, and as he puts it up to his mouth there’s the smell of lilies.”

  She gave the laugh that is as female as the special note that birds find when they want to call to their young. “Remember, lilies that fester smell far worse than old books.”

  “Oh, I remember all right. I’m always careful not to keep them too long.”

  They began to go about together. It was another craze, like the boxing one. Every day they ate at the Lucky Star; there was not much choice of places where they could eat, and the food was crude, but this did not worry them: they chose the same table each day, and had their tastes anticipated by the waiter just as, in other circumstances, they might have done at the smartest restaurant in town. And the habitués noted the beginnings of a new grouping in their composition, just as, if Ann had lunched with a white man at the Carlton Hotel, the daily presence of a champagne bucket at the table would have made the necessary announcement. There are certain human alliances that belong more to the world than to the two people who are amusing themselves by making them; this diversion taken up by Shibalo and Ann was one. She was not the first white woman who had been interested in him, but she was perhaps the best-looking, and certainly the least discreet. The open flirtation, for the fun of it, meant more than going to bed with a white woman who was frightened to be seen with you in the street.

  Ann was scarcely attracted to him at all, in the strong and sudden way that she had felt matters settled beyond protest between herself and other men. Yet when she saw that he was aware of her, keenly but casually, granting her the power of her sex and beauty but in no way over-valuing her—she was like someone who has no intention of playing the game but finds his hand go out irresistibly to return the ball that comes flying at him. Her sex and her beauty were her talent, her life’s work, the grace of her being that other human beings felt in her; whatever else engrossed her was, in all innocence, mere pastime. The vivid sense of life that she felt when people saw her walk in with Shibalo, laugh at private jokes with him, drive away with him in her little car, came as much from a subtle use of her gifts as from his company. It was a new and amusing variation of their employment to show other men, simply by a companionable silence with Shibalo over a cup of coffee, that she could ignore them for a black man, if she pleased, in addition to all the other incalculables the hazard of her desirableness contained. Even in the restricted clandestine fringe of the city’s activities that was open to Shibalo and her, this was an attitude that carried some subterranean force and audacity, and was seen in the context of the white city, to which, after all, she belonged, and to which she could return whenever she chose.

  One afternoon Shibalo remembered the billiard table: “What have you done about it?”

  Len made a gesture that suggested the idea had never been serious.

  “Ann, eh? What’s happened?” Len seemed always in a lower key than the other two, now, and Shibalo instinctively tried to counter this by an impatient quickening of his own vitality.

  “I forgot all about it—so did you,” Ann said to Shibalo.

  “I want to have a look at it. Come on, let’s go.”

  They were packing up the exhibition; Patrick wanted his caravan back. Everything was dismantled, and lay about, ready to go into the crates. The sun made a structure of hazy blue bars out of the cigarette smoke.

  Ann was examining her dirty hands with absorption. She looked up at the stacked pictures and the mess, from Len to Shibalo.

  “Come on.” Shibalo was on his feet.

  A mixture of opposition and indulgence characterised Ann’s response to him: “I haven’t said a word to the Stilwells, you know.”

  But though Shibalo took it for granted that the whole interest in the billiard table was on behalf of Len, and Len found himself suddenly assumed to be taken up again, he would not go with
them. “Look at this”—his satisfaction in the work to be done was obstinate.

  As they were driving, Ann said, “You know Jessie Stilwell, don’t you?” “I suppose so.” When they got to the house there was silence, anyway. Not even the children were there, and the servant was in her own quarters. Ann’s voice sounded through the rooms and up and down the stairs; Shibalo’s was a murmur behind it. She lugged aside broken toy wagons, frayed baskets, mud-stiffened gardening shoes and an old chandelier, and there was the billiard table, wedged against the wall, on its side. “Match size. That’s what I thought. Most of the felt’s finished.” They tried to pull it upright, but there was no room to turn it over. “I’m sure they’ll be glad to get rid of it. Would you really take it?” She knew that he lived in Alexandra township, but she had never wondered how, in what sort of place, though she knew the cabins, shacks, backyard rooms and occasional neat houses of Alexandra. His shoulders hunched with his inward chuckle. “I might.”

  “Have you got somewhere to put it?” On her haunches, she smiled at him in the gloom. “I’ve got a place—maybe. There’s a flat in Hillbrow.” “Hillbrow?” It was a white suburb. So often she felt he simply gave her an answer, any answer, while he was thinking of something else. “Yes,” he said, with a touch of reserve, “Couple of chaps I know. I stay there sometimes.” He chuckled again: “It might be a good idea to give them a present of a billiard table.” “It’s supposed to be for Len.” “Oh of course, I can take anyone there I like. They don’t play.”

  They pushed the table back into position, grunting and laughing; Ann was in her element at this kind of headlong activity. A splinter from the leg went into Shibalo’s thumb, and though he said nothing beyond the first exclamation, when they came out of the storage-place she saw that his hand was trembling with pain. “Oh look, it’s an awful one.”

  He held up his hand; the splinter was driven like a wedge into the smooth dark skin beside the second thumb joint. She tried to get it out, and while she did so, concentrating on the broken butt of wood that could be felt sharp, dead and hard against the live, cold thumb, his hand came alive to her. This was he, this big slim hand half-curled and slack, like a living creature itself. The fingertips throbbed faintly, their skin showed their own unique engraving of whorls. There was an expression in the set of the fingers as there is an expression in the features of a face.