Occasion for Loving

by Nadine Gordimer

  “You don’t get fond of her, you discover that she’s human, like yourself, but she’s afraid to touch herself—you know, like a kid who’s been told she’ll go blind if she explores her own body. That’s how she is about her life—she just lets it function without asking how or why.”

  “That would do as a definition of either a hedonist or a silly ass. And you should have left her alone like that.”

  Jessie was honestly astonished, though flattered, as a woman always is when someone who regards her as a force to be reckoned with demonstrates that he thinks she has again been active. “What are you talking about? She hardly knew I existed until the last few weeks in Isendhla. To her anybody over thirty, with a brood of children and a few grey hairs, is a different species.”

  “But she saw you took Gid seriously, didn’t she? Didn’t she see that you thought he was a person, somebody, that you and he talked together as she didn’t talk to him?”

  Her face opened up to defence. “—There you are,” he said, before she could begin to speak. “You said she lived by pure reaction—she flew into this thing as a bat steers into a certain path because it instinctively feels the bulk of objects being set up where other ways were open.”

  “If she was influenced by what we thought of him, it was all of us—you and Boaz and all of us. We all talked to him and listened to him as if he were something special,” and her voice ended in doubt. “Well, he was—he is—”

  “Something special,” Tom said firmly.

  “Somebody special, and also a black man. For all of us there was the happiness that he was also a black man,” she added, slowly, pausing before the sentence. Then she said, “—So why me?”

  “Because you were a woman, and we were not. She could go ahead and sleep with him and fall in love with him, and you could not. She had to become serious about this, because you were serious about the other things.”

  “What rubbish,” said Jessie denying with a flash of the masterfulness of which she was being accused. Defending herself, she mixed up truth and lies picked up simply as if she had reached for a stone. “She was crazy about him. She only used me as a convenience when they had nowhere else to go. I was even jealous of them.”

  In September Morgan came home for the holidays. There was a late cold spell so there was no question of his sleeping on the enclosed verandah, though he tramped straight up there with his things. “Oh no, we’re back to normal,” said Jessie, and then laughed. “—At least, Tom’s using your room, but it is yours again.”

  “The porch is O.K. for me.”

  “No, it’s as draughty as hell, you’ll get ill.”

  “You should feel our dormitories. And in our showers they’ve got vents that can’t be closed.” He grinned at his own stoicism. “Anyway, I want to toughen myself a bit.”

  But he was accustomed to doing what Jessie decided, though he now did it more with an air of good-nature than submission. His suitcase and soccer boots moved in among Tom’s paper towers. Outside a jagged cold wind drew a torn finger-nail across the iron roof and set every loose hinge and wire screeching; the untidy, mouse-nest comfort of the room attracted the three grown-up members of the family and for it they quitted the rest of the house in darkness, after dinner in the evenings. Jessie had put the little radio downstairs in the living-room before Morgan arrived; he lay on the floor beside it, to listen to certain programmes, but he did not seem to miss having it up in his room, or to want to have it playing all day long. At night, while Tom made notes or did reading for his book, and Jessie read or devised the endless adaptations of children’s clothes that were required as outgrown garments were prepared to be handed down, Morgan was engaged in calculations for a model he was building. It was some kind of collapsible canoe; Jessie thought it seemed rather a simple thing, and that if he were going to make a hobby of building model boats he ought to be encouraged to do something more elaborate. She mentioned some impressive kits that she had seen in a hardware shop in town.

  “Oh, those are the sort of things that old men build in their yards. With little plastic trees and things.” Morgan smiled.

  “Yes,” his mother said, “Everything is worked out exactly to scale, authentic and so on—just as if they were real.”

  He put his hand down beside the bits of plywood spread on a newspaper. “This’ll just be the model for a real boat—to see how the idea works out. Some other chaps and I’re each working out a plan, and then we’ll decide which is the best before we begin to build. Greg Kennedy’s father’s putting up the money, and then Greg and I want to see how far we can get down the Rooipoort River. It mustn’t be too heavy, because you’ve got to carry it where there are rapids. But it mustn’t be too small, either, because we want to have our camping stuff with us—that’s why we want to try out making it collapsible.”

  His voice had broken completely since she had seen him at Easter, broken with childhood. She understood that the bits of wood and glue that she had seen in the category of play belonged to life. Morgan and Tom were talking about the possibility of using fibre glass for such a boat, and she remarked, “Boaz would have been your man. I’m sure he knows all about it.”

  Morgan said, “Oh he does. We were going to build one to take up to Moçambique with us.” He still accepted with something of a child’s fatalism the adult’s prerogative of abandoning plans, breaking promises for reasons outside a child’s ken. But a few days later, when he and Jessie were having lunch alone together, and she was going through the post, that Agatha had brought in while they ate, he said: “Any news of the Davises?”

  “Mm-mm.” Jessie shook her head slowly while she read. “Not a word since they left. No idea where they are.”

  “I had a letter—from some place in France; I can’t pronounce the name. But that’s last month.”

  Jessie was reading a long letter from her mother, and she frowned, half-lifting her hand to stay him; then, when she had come to the end of the paragraph that absorbed her, she looked up, confused, and said with great curiosity curbed by a sudden delicacy toward him: “You had a letter?”

  “From Boaz. Wrote to me at school.”

  Jessie laughed, putting her hand over her mouth. “Well!” Then, “And what did he say?”

  The boy said shyly, “They’re O.K. They didn’t like the Seychelles very much. He was going to give some lectures at a music festival the next week.”

  Jessie pushed her letter aside and weighted it down with the salt cellar. She seemed about to speak but only looked intently round the table a minute, and, catching Morgan’s eyes on her, murmured, “Funny … I was just thinking …” She asked him for the jam. “No, the apricot.” The exchange of ordinary objects on the table before them was like an exchange of grips; he remained calm, almost sympathetic.

  “The letter I was just reading, from Granny—from my mother—there’s a fuss about the Isendhla house. The agent wrote and asked her to be a bit careful whom she puts in there in future—” A quick look of amused comprehension passed over their faces, making them look alike for a moment. “Someone saw Gid on the beach with one of the children … the little girls! A black man in bathing trunks carrying a little white girl on his shoulders …”

  “Boaz was terribly worried, all the time. I mean, he was worried about Gideon Shibalo too. You can’t imagine anyone like Boaz, the way he—” The boy was suddenly able to release before her his first comprehension of grown-up ethics, of the private moral structure that each man must work out to hold himself together if he abandons or breaks down the ready-made one offered by school, church and state.

  At once she was tempted to take advantage of this by confessing herself; she almost put in here, I know I shouldn’t have left you in the middle of the whole thing. But her tremendous instinct for survival held her back brutally: she had never taken up the right to the child; if there was to be anything now it must be between two adults. She picked up her mother’s letter and looked at it again, reading over the agent’s account of
the complaint made by “certain local residents”. She put the letter down and turned her face away, opening her mouth stiffly for self-control. “Why is one always having to be so ashamed for these people—why do they have to spit on everything—She needn’t worry, I’ll never go there again—”

  Swelling along the strained line of her neck, contusing her face and distorting her mouth, he saw the tension of feeling that had made his mother’s familiar and yet mysterious face what it was. It drew him more powerfully than any beauty; it was as if the flesh of life had been opened away and the heart bared, not the pretty pin-cushion of love-scenes in films, but the strong untiring muscle that pumped blood in the dark.

  His discovery through Boaz found words again. “If you’re really in love with someone, I mean—I always thought you must hate the other person who wants her. Boaz really liked Gideon Shibalo. I mean, I couldn’t help knowing—he didn’t seem to trust her not to get Gideon Shibalo into trouble.”

  “She’s a bad little girl,” Jessie said, not believing it, but because she was afraid of talking about the nature of love with Morgan. “But she’s very beautiful?” she asked him in sudden curiosity.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “She’s very beautiful.” He was smiling, but he spoke surely, eagerly, from a part of life she had no part of.

  She did not seem to have heard.

  “You’ve got nice hands,” she said. “I wonder where you got them from?”

  Morgan laughed and, withdrawing them swiftly from the table, put them in his pockets.

  “You’re an unbeliever living in the midst of a fanatical cult; you still don’t understand what taboo means.”

  “Gideon taking Elisabeth for a ride. I know what I see; I won’t start thinking like a madman,” said Jessie.

  But Tom came home these days with his mind held ready only for his work; what travelled unavoidably under his mind’s eye was dealt with at the same distance he had set between himself and the peoples and events he was writing about. Jessie was envious, as usual—her life seemed to her by comparison the ball of fur that a cat licks off itself, swallows, and gags on. Tom had been asked to prepare a shorter version of his half-completed history of black Africa for a series of special paper-backs meant to provide an historical background to present-day world politics. He was struggling to condense, into two-hundred-and-fifty pages written in two months, twenty notebooks of material intended for a book that would take perhaps three years to write. He had no time at all to go out, so Jessie and Morgan went to the cinema and to plays together while Morgan was on holiday. Morgan wasn’t keen to go to a symphony concert, but Len Mafolo took him to the sessions of a serious jazz group that he kept wanting to talk about afterwards: enthusiasm was something that ripened out of sight, in Morgan, so that what occasioned it first sank away without appearing to have made much impression, then rose to the surface with some depth behind it. Jessie did not really care for parties without Tom, and Morgan was too young for the parties their friends were likely to have; she was pressed to go to several, but was persuaded only once.

  It was the usual sort of party, and once there, with a thick tumbler full of warm gin in her hand, wandering from room to room in a house disarranged as if for moving, she was at home and even mildly enjoyed herself. Men she never saw except at parties came up and put their arms round her and said, as at a great and private reunion, “Come and talk to me, Jessie” or “Let’s go and have a drink”, and women exchanged with her greetings of exaggerated pleasure: “Oh poor Tom! Poor you! How’s the book going?”

  Someone brought dance-music recorded on tape while in another room little Simon Sofasonke had been pushed to the piano. Couples danced everywhere, white girls in their black sweaters leaning back and then climbing the air, pelvises thrust forward, before their relaxed, encouraging black partners, white men moving in a hushed shuffle black girls with silver fingernails and straightened hair flattened and lacquered into a little black cap cut into ragged points round their faces. Every now and then a slender young black man with a fastidious drunken face came in and switched off the tape-recorder. “Anyone wants that stuff, he c’n tell me.”

  Jessie knew everyone there, and those she did not actually know by name were merely new faces in a familiar context: a bespectacled white leftist down from Rhodesia, a coloured journalist from Cape Town, an addition to the usual girl students from the university, a change in the roster of black bachelors (some of them bachelors because they never brought their wives along) who always outnumbered the women guests. A white woman who had just been charged with incitement and was out on bail was dressed as if for a diplomatic reception, in a midnight-blue velvet coat and antique gold earrings. Someone said: “How she enjoys it all!” A white man who had been in and out of prison for years on political charges, and who worked with one of the African political groups, was attacking an African leader within the same group who was opposed to his influence. The black man said, “And whoever persuaded Sijake to make that statement, he was badly advised!”

  “Badly advised, was he? Shall I tell you why you think so, Mapire? Shall I tell you why? Because you’re a racialist, that’s why …”

  The far-off wail of a baby—a child of the house—seemed to be heard, like a noise in the head, between the music, the talk and the movement, but was always lost before it attracted attention; it was as inconceivable, it had no more relevance, in the clamour of politics, liquor and sex, than the call of a bird in a thunderous machine-shop.

  At about half past ten a fresh influx of guests arrived, mostly Africans, and one white couple who had been somewhere else first. Jessie left the room where the tape-recorder was for the room where Simon played the piano, and, slumped on a sofa with his head against the shoulder of a woman as if against a door-post, there was Gideon. He was drunk; he must have come very drunk. They had put him down there, out of the way, but apparently he wanted, every now and then, to get up and make a nuisance of himself, because the woman had the air of sitting there kindly to restrain him. She was a big black girl with a pretty face and the solid legs and strong arms of a nurse. Jessie had come into the room to get away from the noise, and although the room was not much less loud than the one she had left, she felt the blare displaced at once by a deep, uncomplicated affection for this man. It flowed in in peace, one of the simplest things she had ever felt in her whole life. The experience of the disastrous love affair, to which she was so close, lay like the memory of a battlefield between herself and this battered man—one of the greedy ones, like herself: she knew what he saw, now, when he seemed to look through walls. His face was grey and the dark of his lips was split with red, was flowering patches of bloody colour, scarlet and purple, like some strange streaked tulip. She went up to him, putting aside her old superficial feeling that he would want to avoid the Stilwell household. But he was drunk, and did not answer her. She spoke to him again, and his gaze recognised something, though perhaps it was not her. He mumbled, “White bitch—get away.”

  Somebody said, “Get him out before he spews over everything, for God’s sake.”

  “Even the pigment in his lips has changed—from drinking, you know how horrible it goes. What’s going to happen to him?”

  Jessie stood drawn up before Tom as before a tribunal.

  Tom turned away. “He’ll be all right. He’ll go back and fight; there’s nothing else.”

  When Jessie saw Gideon again, he clearly had no memory of what he had said to her. They continued to meet in a friendly fashion, sometimes in the Lucky Star, occasionally at the houses of friends, but the sense of his place in the Stilwells’ life and theirs in his that she felt that night never came again. So long as Gideon did not remember, Jessie could not forget.

  A Note on the Author

  NADINE GORDIMER’s many novels include The Conservationist,

  joint winner of the Booker Prize, Get A Life, Burger’s Daughter,

  July’s People, My Son’s Story, The Pickup and, most recently,

 
No Time Like the Present. Her collections of short stories include

  The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot and,

  most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She has also

  collected and edited Telling Tales, a story anthology published in

  fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations.

  In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in Telling Times

  and a substantial selection of her stories was published in

  Life Times. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize

  for Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.

  By the Same Author

  NOVELS

  The Lying Days / A World of Strangers

  The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour

  The Conservationist / Burger’s Daughter / July’s People /

  A Sport of Nature / My Son’s Story / None to Accompany Me

  The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life / No Time Like the Present

  STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country

  Friday’s Footprint / Not for Publication

  Livingstone’s Companions

  A Soldier’s Embrace / Something Out There

  Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

  Life Times: Stories 1952–2007

  ESSAYS

  The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (with David Goldblatt)

  Lifetimes under Apartheid (with David Goldblatt)

  The Essential Gesture – Writing, Politics and Places

  (edited by Stephen Clingman)

  Writing and Being

  Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century

  Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008