A World of Strangers (12 page)

‘Or if they do put him in, they use only the picturesque aspect – they treat a face or a figure as if it were a tree,' said a young man who seemed to have struggled with his clothes and lost – the sleeves of his brown shirt hung over his wrists, but the collar was too small and had popped open under a very big woollen tie.

‘What do you have in mind when you say literary painting?'

‘“When did you last see your father,”' whispered the Englishwoman, who had been introduced to me as Dorothea Welz.

‘And why not?' said the grey-haired man. ‘What's wrong with pictures that tell a story?'

‘Fine for backache pills,' said Naidoo, beaming.

‘I think he means what I call
problem
pictures,' someone else said. ‘A scene that poses a certain situation.'

‘That's what he
said.
That's what literary painting is.'

‘- a white child playing with an expensive toy under the eye of an African in one of those fancy maid's uniforms, and in the street outside the garden you see some tsotsis sauntering past -'

‘Oh Christ!'

‘. . . much abstract painting is, in fact, literary painting, the expression of ideas, what else can you call it?'

‘. . . those nubile Zulu maidens, all boot-polish breasts and flashing teeth.'

‘When are you going to paint again, Dorothea?' said the untidy young man, as if he were in the habit of questioning everybody about everything.

‘Why should I?' she said, as if she really hoped for an answer.

Steven Sitole appeared beside me.' What's Gerard Sekoto turning out these days?' someone turned to ask him. He shrugged, grinned irresponsibly. ‘I wouldn't know. Do you know what's happened to him?' he asked me.

‘Who's that?' I said.

‘I don't think he's known in England,' Anna put in.

‘Oh but he must be,' said the grey-haired man, ‘Isn't he hung somewhere important, the Tate?'

‘Musée National d'Art Moderne bought something,' whispered Dorothea, ‘not London.' Those hands and arms looked as if they had never before been out of long white gloves.

The party formed, broke apart and reformed, like a shoal of fish; Steven was the one that darts about, in and out the body of the shoal at different points; the hostess, Sylvia, burst into the room at intervals, as a wave washes out the formation of a shoal, breaking up a conversation, dragging someone off to talk to someone else, begging another to help her with some kitchen mystery, and withdrew again, as a wave recedes over the bodies of fish, and they gently float back into their order of suspension in calm water.

With the third or fourth drink, I met the two Africans with whom Steven had been talking when we came in. They had long unpronounceable names, but they were also called Sam and Peter. Sam was short, hardly as tall as Anna Louw, and had the little man's neatness – well-shined shoes, a blue suit with a waistcoat, a red bow tie – and the astonishing, beaming face of the picture-book piccanin, the little Black Sambo face. I thought at once how awful it must be for him to know that he bore this face – large, shining brown eyes with curly lashes, the huge happy smile on white teeth, the large round head, uneven and top-heavy, like a tender gourd. It was as if an Englishman should find that he looked exactly like Lord Fauntleroy. Peter was boyish-looking, with a prominent Adam's apple, a pimply skin, and tiny ears that seemed to participate when he talked, and lay flat back against his head when he laughed, like a pleased animal's. He kept putting dance records, from a pile on the floor, on the superior sort of gramophone – part of an intricate high fidelity system with which the room was wired – to which nobody listened. Sam smiled at me over the soup; Anna had brought round a tray of cups of good hot borscht, cups so hot we had to hold them from hand to hand. Peter took one experimental swallow of the sweet-sour, earthy-scented brew and then left his cup behind the records. But Sam and I
drank ours with relish. ‘It's a Russian dish, isn't it?' Out of that small body, he had a deep, strong voice: ‘Tell me, Mr Hood, do you know what Kvas is, perhaps?'

‘Kvas?
How do you spell it?'

We both laughed. ‘Kvas,' he said.' I'm just reading a book where somebody drinks it – she has a sudden longing to drink it. You know how it is, you want to know what this taste is she's thinking about.'

‘A pity it wasn't borscht, now,' I said. Sylvia came up to us with her beautiful raised brows: ‘A-all right? You've had some s-soup?' We showed our cups. ‘It was delicious,' said Sam. ‘But you haven't had a potato? You
must
have potatoes!' She rushed off, magnificently hampered by her dress, to fetch a dish of boiled potatoes. We had no soup left but we each took one.

‘Always have potatoes with kvas,' I said to Sam. ‘Always,' he said.

‘Y-you've been reading Anna Karenina!' she got out, triumphantly. ‘I remember, I remember! What's her name? The girl Levin marries – she drinks kvas.'

‘Wants to drink it,' said Sam, opening up in a smile of pure enjoyment.

‘He has – not me,' I said.

She put her hand on the little man's arm. ‘Ah,' she said, with a deep, exaggerated breath that expressed the enthusiasm she would never get out in words, ‘isn't that a m—' the m hung in the air for seconds. ‘Miracle,' said Sam excitedly. ‘That's what that book is; God, I think about it all the time I'm not reading it.' ‘I hadn't read it for f-fifteen years, and then, only last year, when I was in hospital -' They went into an enthusiasts' huddle.

Some people had plates of food, by now, and there seemed to have been a lavish re-issue of red wine. They wandered in and out of what I had thought was the door to the kitchen, helping themselves. I took my empty soup-cup, and Sam's, and went the same way. The redhead, carrying a full plate and a glass of wine and a roll, called out' Oops – mind me.' We were caught in each other's smiles for a moment, foolishly, like a cobweb. Seeing that she was rather drunk, I
realized that I must be the same. But the hot soup gave me the illusion of a temporary check; weighted me down. I went soberly enough through the door and found it led into a passage, where an old man with misted glasses and the face of an embryo chicken said in a strong Eastern European accent, ‘Is my vife still dere?'

‘Which one's your wife?' I said, as I might have said to a lost child, which one's your mummy?

‘Dorosea,' he said impatiently. ‘Don't you know Dorosea?'

‘I've just met a tall woman in a green dress.'

‘Dat's right. Dat's right,' he said with relief, walking with me into a room fumigated with the stink of ripe cheese rising from a marmite on a Victorian marble-topped washstand that had been painted white. He wheezed a chuckle. ‘To tell you za trus, I fell asleep, ya know. I fell asleep in Sylvia's room, there at the back. Honestly, I had no idea whether it's ten o'clock, three o'clock, one o'clock. Vot's de soup?'

‘Have some.' I felt happily solicitous toward this pixie, strayed out of a Barrie play. He got his soup, and I helped myself to a plateful of risotto – like most arty women of her type, this Sylvia cooked very well, but overdid the garlic in the salad and on the hot bread – and we went back to the party together. He went up to the tall woman with the Bloomsbury elegance, and she looked down and spoke to him with the half-attention of connubial familiarity.

The record planged and faded; was lifted off and replaced with a tango. Suddenly, Steven Sitole and the little old man's wife, Dorothea, were dancing. She was as tall as he was, and they danced perfectly: like professionals, giving an exhibition, unaware of and uninterested in each other, his drunken face in a courteous trance, as if transfixed by the graceful and precise pattern through which his feet were guiding him, her abashed and broken, wilted body recalled to discipline. She danced as she spoke: as if everything were over, for her. Presently he returned her to her coffee.

At some point during the evening, Anna Louw had done something to her make-up and acquired – I suppose from the hostess – a shawl of red silk over the business-like dress
she had been wearing when she walked into my office five or six hours earlier. I danced with her; she had the air of distinctness that a sober person has in a room where everyone else's aura is quickened and blurred by euphoria – as if their souls were in motion while hers was still. ‘Good party,' I said.

‘I'm glad.'

I felt sorry I'd wished her someone else in the bar in the town.

Steven Sitole had been standing over the solitary African girl, one arm on the wall behind her, his back screening her from the room, in the other hand, the glass that was never empty. Yet this show of attention had the perfunctoriness of a joke; it reminded me, somehow, of the absent-minded attentions of the twin to the American beauty at Marion Alexander's lunch.

‘Steven's a charmer,' I said.

She glanced at him a moment, but said nothing. ‘Have you had a chance to talk to Sam, Sam Mofokenzazi?'

‘Not really. That's the little one?'

‘He writes well – I think. I don't mean his job – he's a journalist on a paper for Africans that's published in English. His own stuff, stories and so on. And he writes music.'

‘And Sitole? What's he do?'

‘Insurance agent. He used to be a newspaper man, too. He spent a year in England after the war.'

‘Is that the important thing about him?'

‘Yes.' She looked at me in my innocence. ‘That's rather like returning from that bourne whence no traveller returns. Africans can't pop in and out of Africa.'

The African girl had been persuaded, giggling, away from the wall, and now she sat awkwardly on a table, among the bottles, disposing her head and her hands in the manner of someone who is about to sing. The gramophone was stopped. In the hastily assembled silence (a voice cried out: What's happened to the music, damn it? – a group of talkers were shushed, Sylvia crept grandly about refilling glasses with wine) she assumed a professional coquetry. She sang a popular torch song, in the innocent, sensual voice that I have
always enjoyed in American Negro singers, the pagan voice in which sex is not suggestive and guilty, but overt and fine. She tried to imitate the vocal titillations of white singers she must have heard on records, but the strange shrill of her high notes and the gentleness of her low notes escaped artifice: all the warm, continuous gamut of sensuality was there, from the mother's breast to the lover's bed. Delight was like a sudden, simple happiness in the room; the catalyst that I have sometimes seen come upon the isolated units of an audience at a concert. She sang on; another torch song – a piece of wild, ritualistic swing that sent the young Peter off dancing to himself in a corner, panting and jerking – even a sentimental ballad in Yiddish, and then songs in her own tongue and others that sounded the same to me. Sometimes, from across the room, Sam and Peter would come in like the toll of two big bells, or the low accent of the big bass. Sylvia, who had tiptoed up beside Anna Louw, whispered, ‘Thank God she
sings,
at least. Their women never utter. One simply c-can't have them.'

‘How did she get here?' I asked, since it was obviously not by invitation. ‘The way I did?'

Anna laughed, ‘Steven must have brought her. Quite a triumph; she's very popular. She's Betty Ntolo. She sings with their best band.'

When her songs were over, the African girl was danced round once by the untidy young man who had talked about painting, and then returned to the chair in which she had been sitting all evening. Once she was not performing, an insurmountable naïveté cast her, so to speak, underfoot; it was impossible to rescue her from it, because the moment anyone, with a polite word or an invitation to dance, made an attempt, they threatened to go down with her in the threshing ineptness of her giggling unresponse. I danced with her, for three or four interminable minutes. I had gone up to her to tell her how much I liked her songs, but once I had said this, and she had giggled as if she were going to bring out something paralysingly funny, and then said the single word: ‘Yes,' I was aware that I couldn't simply walk away, and couldn't carry the conversation one monosyllable
further. So I asked her to dance, a request to which she could, and did, respond by getting to her feet, tittering, and saying nothing.

She had a pretty, golden-brown face powdered dull, and a sooty beauty-spot was drawn next to her left eye; her ears, like Peter's, were smaller and neater than any adult ears I had ever seen, and in them hung large gilt hoops. She wore a kind of turban of black chiffon that covered her hair, and was secured with gilt-nobbed hatpins. Every now and then, as she followed me, her pink tongue came out to touch her top lip and looked pleasing against her white teeth. She had large, round, prominent eyes, bovine and rather yellowed. They were quite blank; as if, here, she was frightened to think.

The top half of her body was slight and her waist small, but she was weighted down with great solid hams, monumental calves, and feet that made trumpery out of the high-heeled sandals strapped round them.

I said to her, ‘I hear you sing with a band.'

‘Yes.' Like a child trapped in the kindly interrogation of a well-meaning uncle.

‘What's the band called?'

She answered something unintelligible; her brown hand with its meaningless armour of red-painted nails was cold with pride and misery.

‘I'm sorry, I didn't quite catch it.' I bent my head to her.

Like many singers, who successfully manage half a dozen languages in as many songs, she was not so good when she spoke. ‘The Township Ten,' she said, with a strong accent.

The Indians were going; the wife stood at the door with a camel-hair coat over her sari, patient and bored, while the husband made his conscientious round of farewells. Anna was dancing with the Englishman with the baby teeth, and the redhead, suddenly before me, blew a cloud of smoke between her face and mine. When I had led the African girl to a chair, I went back to the redhead. ‘About time,' she said.