Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  “And then?” The appeal did not come from personal identification with their position, but out of something wider, urgent—the concern with human dignity as a common possession that, lost by individuals, is that much lost for all. She felt the same sort of involvement when she saw someone fly into a brutal temper: in any action callow, inadequate, not carried through to the limit of its demands of courage and sensibility.

  “She’s got to get it all finally straightened out with Boaz.”

  Ann said, “I must sell the car.” Everything that ever happened to her was simply announced obliquely and casually, in the form of such practicalities. That was how she dealt with unwieldy emotions, giving her confusion an appearance of headstrong sureness.

  “We won’t be able to see each other for the next week or two anyway,” said Gideon, alluding to her return to the Stilwell house. Now that the love affair was no longer an escapade they would have to become cautious, prudent, fearful, where they had been brazen and careless; they could not risk running into trouble before they managed to leave the country.

  Jessie was thinking of his need for friends and money to smuggle him out. “It won’t be too difficult.”

  “No. But it’s got to be quick and quiet.” He paused. “I know the ropes.” Already passion had become discipline in him.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t like to buy my car?” Ann thought that Jessie had inherited money from Fuecht. “We need cash.”

  Jessie shrugged off the question as something that Ann must know was impossible. “You’ll be all right once you get to England, won’t you? Surely your people will help.”

  “I shouldn’t think so, not this time,” Ann said.

  “We won’t be able to get much further than Tanganyika, to start with,” said Gideon, eager to explain, almost anxious, wanting to have the worst admitted and therefore that much defeated. “If I can get out I’ll wait for her there.”

  Jessie helped him to some more meat and turned with the plate to Ann, but she gestured it away. “I looked for you right up to the third rocks,” she said presently.

  Gideon was opening beer for Jessie and himself. “Yes, but I’d gone further than that, right to where there’s that steep cliff, you know?—and I sat there for a bit, and when I started to come back the tide was so high I had to go through the bush.”

  “You didn’t see the jeep?”

  “I came along a path. Was there a jeep?”

  Jessie remarked, “Ann says some fishermen came along the beach in a jeep.”

  “Well, a jeep couldn’t get further than the third rocks anyway.” He sat down and began to eat. “Fishermen. We’ve been left in peace until now.”

  “It lasted out our time,” Jessie said. “There’s something to be said for having held out for nearly three weeks.”

  “Oh I don’t think a couple of fishermen’re anything to worry about. You’ll be able to make a regular hide-out for your criminal friends down here, Jessie. You say your mother’s not going to use it.”

  “The residents of Isendhla are a vigilant lot. Just because they’re retired you mustn’t think they’ve gone soft, Gideon. I heard this morning in the village that they’re having a meeting to stop the cheeky servants from Johannesburg playing around on the beach in their off-time. Wearing bikinis, too, just like the white ladies.”

  He began to chuckle to himself. “Is that it?”

  “That’s it. On our beautiful Isendhla beach where all tensions are forgotten, and the tolerance and gentleness of a non-competitive life prevail.”

  “What are they going to do with the stinking black brutes?”

  “There’s talk about setting aside a remote bit of beach for them—say, up at Grimald’s cottage.”

  Gideon slid back in his chair, and put a hand over Ann’s to share the joke with her, but she was inattentive.

  “Good old awful Johannesburg, nice and vulgar and brutal, a good honest gun under the white man’s pillow and a good honest tsotsi in the street,” Jessie said. “I think we’ll get going about eight tomorrow morning, all right?”

  Before the house emptied of them, it seemed fuller than it had ever been, for their possessions were piled up in the rooms, and the beds, though stripped, held hair-brushes, medicine bottles, damp bathing suits and toys—things for which there was no place in the Stilwells’ suitcases or that the children did not want to be parted from during the journey. At last they were ready to go. Gideon was making Jason laugh as they loaded the cars, talking Zulu. When Jessie wanted to say goodbye to him he was back in the kitchen, and when he saw that she meant to shake hands with him he became confused, brought his palms together in a kind of silent clap, and then took her hand awkwardly, his fingers damp from the sink.

  When they had gone he brought out his polishing cloths made of squares of old blanket and his two tins of polish, one red and one brown, and smeared the floors thickly, replacing the dusty footsteps and the spoor of the children’s bare feet with overlapping circles of concentric shine that came up under the progress of his hand. He took the few bananas and bruised apples that remained in the bowl on the table out to his room; the smell of fruit was gone from the house. In the bathroom, he found a used blade and put it, carefully wrapped in newspaper, in the blouse pocket of his kitchen-boy suit. He swept out one of Gideon’s charcoal drawings that had fallen under the divan and been forgotten. In the lavatory, he carefully replaced the drawing-pin that had come loose with a curling corner of the declaration that he was unable to read but whose official look he had always interpreted as a sign of importance.

  The lucky-bean seeds remained, month after month and year after year, where the children had spilt them that day and they had dispersed and settled, red-and-black eyes, into the cracks of the verandah.

  Part Four

  Twenty

  The black spring of burned veld stretched for miles beside the road. They came up out of the sappy green of the coast that knows no seasons and remembered that winter had cut down to the bone in their absence. Already the hard, bright land was cleared, cattle hoof-marks dried to stone in what had been vleis, rocks split by frost. The black territory, as if shaded in on a map, ran round pockets of resistance formed by scrubby trees, and blanked out the shallow veins that marked the beds of dry streams. It was the black not of death but of life; peach trees along the railway tracks were blooming crude pink out of it, and there was a frizz of something light, hardly green yet, over a young willow. Jessie was not aware of a change of tone and pace in her being but it took place nevertheless, just as the engines in an aeroplane settle to the number of revolutions which constitutes their cruising speed, once the height of that speed has been reached. She drove without getting tired, and managed the children capably and companionably; a temporary state that made all others seem inexplicable. When they stopped to eat or to stretch their legs, she and Ann and Gideon had the confidence and easy closeness together that people often find only when the experience they have shared is about to be summed up by their return to those who are outside it. Before, Jessie had resented being drawn into the close orbit of Gideon and Ann; now she felt that they had also been drawn into hers. Gideon made a fire, when they had lunch, to please Elisabeth—there was nothing that needed cooking. There was no wood about and he used dry grass and cow-dung and was affectionately praised by everyone. The three grown-ups sat round Gideon’s fire drinking gin and tonic and laughed a lot about nothing in particular; everything that was said seemed a witty private joke between them. Elisabeth stood behind Gideon with her arms possessively round his neck and laughed when the grown-ups did.

  Jessie packed the picnic things back into the boot of the Stilwell car, while Ann handed them to her. The girl stood with her arms hugged against herself, gazing round with the alertness of a last look. “When I think of what it was like driving the other way! Those two days while the car was being fixed! You know, when the man in the garage looked at Gid, and I stood next to him seeing Gid at the same time, it wasn’t the same
person we saw …”

  “It won’t be long.”

  Gideon was trampling out the fire. First he had scooped up sand in his hands to pour over it. “Anybody got a rag?” He came over dusting his palms together. “What’s the matter?” he murmured intimately to Ann. “I want to go,” she said fiercely, sulkily. “Yes, we are going.” He aped her intensity.

  “Oh, not to Johannesburg.” She walked away and got into the car; she drew the old towel that kept the draught off over her knees, and took a cigarette.

  Gideon struggled to close the faulty catch of Jessie’s boot. He clicked his tongue at its recalcitrance, once it was done. “You’ll help her.”

  “Whatever I can,” Jessie said.

  He clicked his tongue again. “I’ll have to keep out of the way. It’s bad, you see.”

  “Ann seems only just to have discovered what it’s all about.”

  He laughed. “I know. She was like a kid playing hide-and-seek. Now she finds there really is something creeping up after her. I want to get her out as quick as I can. She’s got nothing to do with this sort of thing, man.” He was thinking of Callie Stow, who knew how to keep intact, untouched, her loves, her passions and her beliefs, even while the dirty fingers of police spies handled them. But he did not want Ann to change; like many people he confused spirit with bravery, and he saw her old thoughtlessness and recklessness as courage. He did not want to see her acquire the cunning, stubborn and patient temper of a political rebel. To him she was herself, her splendid self, a law to herself, and limited as little to the conventions of opposition as to the conventions of submission. She loved him; she did not love him across the colour-bar: for her the colour-bar did not exist.

  “Come, my girl, let’s push off,” he said, putting a hand on Jessie’s shoulder. The gesture admitted her to the sort of moment she had been waiting for, not consciously, and she spoke. “Gideon, shall I keep in touch with the child—when you’re gone?”

  He was not annoyed at the reminder, he was not indifferent. But he said, as if he took a chance on what was expected of him, “I’ll make some arrangements to send money every month or so, as soon as I can.”

  “No, that’s not it,” she said. “I could give him news of you, and I could send you photographs.”

  “Perhaps it would be better to let it go,” he said. “There’s an uncle looking after him, a good friend of mine. When I’ve got money I’ll see that he gets it.”

  She was looking at him with a trapped, uncertain face. He patted her hand. “It’s all right, Jessie, it’ll be all right.”

  She drove ahead of them, parting an empty countryside where a tiny herd-boy, flapping like a scare-crow in the single garment of a man’s shirt, waved to the car. Little groups of huts were made out of mud and the refuse of the towns—rusty corrugated iron, old tins beaten flat, once even the head of an iron bedstead put to use as a gate. The women slapped at washing and men squatted talking and gesticulating in an endless and unimaginable conversation that, as she passed, even at intervals of several miles, from one kraal to another, linked up in her mind as one. In this continuity she had no part, in this hold that lay so lightly, not with the weight of cement and tarmac and steel, but sinew of the earth’s sinew, authority of a legendary past, she had no share. Gideon had it; what an extraordinary quality it imparted to people like him, so that others were drawn to them as if by some magic. It was, in fact, a new kind of magic; the old magic lay in a personality believed to have access to the supernatural, this new one belonged to those who held in themselves for this one generation the dignity of the poor about to inherit their earth and the worldliness of those who had been the masters. Who else could stretch out within himself and put finger-tips on both touchstones at once? No wonder the girl had turned her back on them all, on Boaz with his drums and flutes, on Tom with his historical causes, on herself with her “useful” jobs, and chosen him.

  But a few days later, when Jessie happened to have to drive through the township where Gideon lived, the continuity of the little communities of mud and tin on the road was picked up again. Mean shops and houses lurched by as she bounced along the rutted streets; her errand (for the Agency, where she had found herself at once temporarily employed again because of some staff crisis) took her first to a decent, two-roomed box of a house between two hovels. She sat among shiny furniture behind coloured venetian blinds; then in an office converted from an old house, where a money-lender and book-keeper, with a manner of business irritability and suspicion, hovered over the scratchings of a girl clerk who went about in slippers between black exercise books and a filing cabinet like a weary woman in her own kitchen. The verandah outside the place was littered with the torn-off sheaths of mealie-cobs, and children with mouths and noses joined by snot watched from the gutter. A mule was being beaten and a huge woman, strident-voiced, oblivious of her grotesque body and dirty clothes, bared her broken teeth at a man. Gideon had someone he loved here; parents, perhaps; friends. Taking Gideon, Ann was claimed by this, too, this place where people were born and lived and died before they could come to life. They drudged and drank and murdered and stole in squalor, and never walked free in the pleasant places. When they were children they were cold and hungry, and when they were old they were cold and hungry again; and in between was a brief, violent clutch at things out of reach, or the sad brute’s life of obliviousness to them. That was the reality of the day, the time being. Oh, it would take courage to choose this, to accept it, to plunge into it, to belong with it; for that was what one would do, with Gideon, even if one were to be living in another country. Even among strangers in Italy or England, Ann’s lot would still be thrown in here, among these men and women and children outcast for three hundred years. Jessie found fear in herself at the idea of being allied to this life, and was uneasy, as if she might communicate it in some way, unspoken, to Ann. She fought it, denying its validity, but fear doesn’t lie down at the bidding, like a dog. Not even for love, that is supposed to cast it out: she remembered how Ann had said “… when the man in the garage looked at Gid, and I stood next to him seeing Gid at the same time, it wasn’t the same person we saw …”

  Jessie was stopped by a policeman just past a cinema gutted in a riot some years before and never restored, and asked for her permit to be in the township. One of the easy lies that even the ruling caste has to learn to tell came readily: “My washgirl didn’t turn up this week, and I had to find out what she’s done with my things—” She had told the tale several times before, and it was always adequate.

  “You really think she wanted him drowned? But you said one must believe she loves him?”

  Jessie talked of Ann and Gideon but there was conveyed to Tom in the telling not only her experience of them but the vein that the experience had opened into herself.

  “She’s in love with him, there’s no getting away from it, whatever we thought about her before.” The familiar background to the Stilwells’ intimacy, that looked the same whether they were in fact far removed from one another or drawn closely together, had been taken up again; she was cutting out a dress, at night, while he worked on some students’ papers. “But I don’t know what she wanted …”

  “Wanted him drowned … you said so”

  “Being in love with him isn’t simple; I mean, the whole business isn’t. We say it’s just like falling in love with anyone, but it isn’t, the whole affair isn’t. Not for us either. You said at the beginning Boaz couldn’t behave just as if this were any man running off with his wife. And Gideon knows it. Boaz wants to treat Gideon like any other man, but he can’t because Gideon isn’t a man, won’t be, can’t be, until he’s free.”

  “About Boaz—all right.” Their attitude in the business of black and white was something they shared completely without individual reservations. Yet now Tom felt the difference between them of two people, both of whom are familiar with a terrain through organised tours, one of whom has been lost there … Jessie went on sticking pins firmly through
paper and material, privately carrying on with her task, while her voice drew him into an admittance of something that existed like a deed committed between them. “Ah, Tom, don’t ask me to postulate it. We don’t see black and white and so we all think we behave as decently to one colour face as another. But how can that ever be, so long as there’s the possibility that you can escape back into your filthy damn whiteness? How do you know you’ll always play fair? There’s Boaz—he’s so afraid of taking advantage of Gideon’s skin that he ends up taking advantage of it anyway by refusing to treat him like any other man.”

  “Yes, yes, but all right—what ‘harm’ could you do or I do to Len or Gideon or anybody else?”

  “But how can you be sure, while one set of circumstances governs their lives and another governs yours?”

  Tom said shortly, “I don’t see Ann thinking about this, though.”

  “One knows things sometimes simply by being afraid, you know that?”

  Later when they had gone to bed, he returned to it, saying in the dark, “If she really loves him, as you say, what harm can she do him?”

  Jessie was silent for a moment, but as Tom put his arm under her head, she said to his profile showing like a mountain range close to her eyes, “First he couldn’t get out on his scholarship because he’s black, now he can’t stay because she’s white. What’s the good of us to him? What’s the good of our friendship or her love?”

  For the Davises there was that withdrawal of people into their own affairs that often comes about when some crisis in which others have been involved shrinks back to the orbit of the protagonists, once a decision has been made. They did not need to discuss the details of their parting with Tom and Jessie; they needed to recover, even from the most sympathetic and familiar understanding, all that they had revealed of themselves in the distress of the last few months. It was necessary for Boaz to forget, at least for the present, the demands he had made on Tom while they were alone together; it was necessary for Ann to forget how close she and Gideon had drawn to Jessie in the house at the sea. It was a relief to the whole house, though when they all met the atmosphere was the drained, numb, considerate one of the railway or airport hall, where the end of something is reduced to the choice of a magazine to take into the void, and the solicitous provision of cups of coffee to while away the remaining half-hour. The help—that is, the continued intimacy—that Gideon had thought Ann would need from Jessie would have been an intrusion; in the end, Ann and Boaz knew each other so well that neither needed, or could be provided with, a defence against the other.