Occasion for Loving (25 page)

Gideon Shibalo got a message one day to go and see Sandile Makhawula at his shop. Sandile was his brother-in-law and they had remained friendly through Gideon's long drift apart from his wife; in fact, all that was left of an old feeling and an old way of life was the uncomplicated ease Gideon felt on those occasional evenings when he remembered Sandile and dropped in on him. Sandile was light-skinned, rather an ugly yellow-brown, with narrow, tight-skinned eyes that added to his slightly Chinese look. He shaved his forearms and, resting on the counter in rolled-up shirt-sleeves, their smoothness, through which the roots of hairs showed dark like faults under tinted glass, betrayed a secret vanity. It was the sort of thing one could not guess at, so little did it match the rest of his character. The shop belonged to the father of the woman he had married; it had always sold sugar and mealie-meal and the cheaper brands of tinned food, as well as sweets and cigarettes and cold drinks—he had branched out into a radio repair business on the side. “Look at it,” he would say, indicating the old-fashioned wooden counter, worn away on top like a butcher's block, the one small glass showcase filled with biscuits, cigarettes, cards of watch-straps, cotton reels and dead flies, and the valves and wires of dismantled radio sets lying among spiked slips of paper and tins of snuff. “I'm trying to make a go of it …” He made fun of his own ambitions to run the place like a shop in town, yet he went on doggedly, persuading the old man to get a modern cash register one year, taking another year to get him to allow the fly-embossed Zam-buk advertisements to be taken down and replaced with three dimensional displays showing hair-straighteners and deodorants.
He would have a house in Dube one day—like all the other well-off shopkeepers, Gideon used to tease him. “Well, maybe; what else is there for me?”

He held Gideon in the special regard that people have for those who are free of their own ambitions; when he was with Gideon he felt that he himself was not entirely sold to and bound over by the goals set up for him and his kind. The fact that Gideon had slipped the moorings of his sister added to rather than detracted from this feeling of releaseful identification with Gideon, though Sandile had quite a strong family affection for her.

Gideon did not know when exactly Sandile had mentioned that he wanted to see him; he was very seldom in the township these days, and he merely happened to hear, from a casual encounter, that Sandile had been asking for him; at least two weeks went by before he remembered about it again, and called in at the shop. It was Saturday, and the place was crowded, and knee-deep in children; everything they had been sent to buy went up on to their heads: bags of mealie-meal, beer-bottles filled with milk. The thin little necks of the girls wobbled once as the burden was settled into place. “
Dumela ‘me
.” Gideon pushed his way through gossiping women, and the fat ones smiled at him while the thin ones merely looked interrupted. Sandile was serving a sullen man in a leather cap with ear-flaps; the face was the thick, deadened face, greasy with drink-sweat, work-sweat, that you saw all over the townships. Sandile gave a little signal acknowledging Gideon, and when he was free for a moment called over, “You see how it is … come in.” He meant into the tiny store-room, a home-made lean-to strengthened like a fortress, at the back of the shop.

Sandile scattered the children—importuning him with their demands for “Penny Elvies” (sweets named for the American rock-and-roll singer) or “Penny atcha”, an Indian pickle—by an exclamation ending in a loud click of the tongue at the back of the throat. They swerved away like hens.

“The happy capitalist, the exploiter of the people,” said Sandile. “Christ, man, this goes on until seven tonight.”

“How's business?”

“Ach, I want to knock out the wall, re-do the whole place, make it self-service; you know—little gate you turn round to go in, plastic basket to select what you want, little gate to go out. But you'd have to frisk them first, that's the trouble. Turn them upside-down and shake them out. Specially the old ones with the big bozies; you'd be surprised what goes in in front there. Last week the wholesaler comes along with a lovely display card with razor blades. ‘Why don't you put this up, it increases sales twenty-five per cent, we've proved it.' —Our people are backward, man, everything's got to be where they can't even stretch for it.”

“Come out for a drink,” said Gideon, consolingly.

Sandile took a cigarette from him and sat down on a packing-case, leaving a broken-backed kitchen chair for him. “How the hell can I? The old man's gone to fix up about his cousin's funeral.”

“Where's Bella?” Sandile's wife was a district nurse, working for the municipal health department, but on Saturdays she was usually free to help in the shop.

“The baby kept her up all night. Have a cold drink?”

“Coffee, that'd be fine.”

Sandile looked put out for just a second, then called to the shop. A very black youth with an open mouth and eyes that reflected the lean-to like convex mirrors brought an open packet of coffee-and-chicory mixture with a brand-picture of a house in the form of a steaming coffee-pot. This house was clearer to Gideon than the memory of any of the rooms he had ever lived in; how many times as a child had he been sent to buy that packet with the coffee-pot house on it. Clara (his wife) had still used it, in the house in Orlando. Callie Stow ground her own beans, and at the flat there was always instant coffee of some special bitter kind; for years now he had been drinking the coffee that white
people drank. The sight of the packet with the picture gave him the sensation of looking at an old photograph.

“Half Nyasa,” Sandile said, of the youth. He was pumping a primus. “At least that's my explanation. Dumb as he's black, that's all I can tell you. Don't you know somebody for me? They can't even measure out a shilling sugar without spilling. You could start operations for the recovery of waste sugar on this damned floor.” He stopped pumping and pointed in exasperation to the cracks in the floor-boards where, it was true, there was a dirty glitter, like mica. Suddenly he grew ashamed of his preoccupation with what—switching to objectivity, as he could—he thought to be the petty matters of shop-keeping.

“So they're thinking seriously about taking up this rent campaign?” he said. “Bella's got an old aunt and she's fallen months behind and been given eviction papers, and—yesterday it was—someone came from Congress and had a talk with her.”

They talked politics for a while. The water boiled and Sandile made coffee. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping you'd come in sometime,” he said, spooning sugar into Gideon's cup.

“Hi, hi—” Gideon restrained him.

“All right, I'll take it.” He poured another cup and Gideon sugared it for himself. “I've been asking for you, but you haven't been around. Nobody's seen you.”

“No, I know, I bumped into K. D. and he told me.” Sandile often had small plans or deals that involved Gideon—he had got Gideon's record player cheaply for him, through one of the wholesalers, and he and Gideon borrowed odd sums of money from each other from time to time. This was the sort of thing they saw each other about. While Gideon put the cup of coffee to his mouth, Sandile said, “Clara was here. She was up here last week and she was talking to me a long time, and, well, she wants to come back to Jo'burg. It seems so, yes.” He was watching Gideon, embarrassed, yet alertly anxious,
as if he hoped to disclaim responsibility for what he might have said.

Gideon had just filled his mouth with the warm liquid and for the moment the impact of its taste, flooding his body, produced by far the stronger reaction. What is the word for nostalgia without the sentiment and the pleasure nostalgia implies? The flavour set in motion exactly that old level of consciousness where, in the house of the old aunt with whom he had been farmed out as a schoolboy, matriculation was drawn like the line of the horizon round the ball of existence; where, later, in the two neat rooms in Orlando, he had paid off a kitchen dresser and drawn “native studies” on cheap scarves for a city curio shop. Threshing, sinking, sickening—the sensation produced by the taste became comprehension of what Sandile was saying. He put down the cup. “What about her job?”

Sandile shrugged and slowly took the plastic spoon out of the sugar; the damp brown stuff moved like a live mass.

“I don't see the sense,” said Gideon, with the face of a man discussing the fate of a stranger.

“Well, she wants to come.”

“To you?” Gideon said.

Sandile looked at him.

“It's not possible. Anything else is not possible. It's absolutely out, that I can tell you.”

Sandile did not answer. Gideon wanted to get him to speak because he could not bear to have the matter, even in the abstract of words, thrust upon himself.

“Bella knows that little girl—from the hospital, of course. She thought it was more or less off with you two, lately. She's seen her with another chap, and so on.” Sandile took a deep breath and stopped.

Gideon felt himself drawing further away every second; the cosy store-room with its high barred window, the deal table and the primus, the smell of paraffin and strong soap, the familiar
face of Sandile and the taste of the coffee—a hundred doors were closing in him against these things.

“Right out, I can tell you.” He wanted to say, “It's all finished with, years ago,” but he felt a horror of admitting that there was anything to talk of about himself and the woman who had been his wife. He said, “I haven't even sent money for the child—not since about last January.”

“I know. I've been letting her have something.”

Gideon nodded. Sandile had never paid him the last hundred pounds for the car; it was fair enough.

Gideon didn't know how to go, but he could not stay, so he stood up, and looked without seeing round the lean-to. “So long, Sandile.”

Sandile remained sitting, holding a stub of cigarette turned inward to his palm.

“That's all,” said Gideon.

“O.K.,” said Sandile in deep uncertainty.

The living presence of his wife, in another town, had never influenced Gideon; he felt neither tied to her nor free of her: she was a curiously negative factor. It did not seem at all odd that he occasionally spoke about his child, as if the boy belonged to him alone. Clara had been young and pretty, and it had been all right for a year or two, while she was a school-teacher's wife. Like most African wives, she stayed at home when he went out at night. She was proud that he could paint a bit and pleased that this sometimes brought in some extra money.

She would have been satisfied to see him go on painting scarves for the white shop in town, all his life; at least that was what he told himself when he began to find that he couldn't talk to her on Sundays, when they were at home together. She looked at his paintings, when he really was beginning to paint, as the wife of a gangster might look at the guns and knives present in the house.
She cared only for prettiness, for the little sweetnesses and frills that clerks acquire to soften the rough chunk of the labourer's life. She was only concerned with covering ugliness and did not know the possibility of beauty. In three years he had outgrown her as inevitably as a child outgrows its clothes. Every time he looked back at her, she was lagging a little further behind. When he thought he was going away on the scholarship, it was natural that she should go to live in Bloemfontein with her mother and sister for the year that he would be away. Then had come the lengthy passport trouble, the postponement of the scholarship, the final refusal of the passport, and the months when he was mostly drunk and had no job. She had stayed on and on with her family, and she had quite a good job in a small factory. He and she simply lost sight of one another.

As he walked out of the shop and along the streets of Alexandra, the naked-bottomed children, the skeletal dogs, the young girls in nylon and the old women who shuffled along under the weight of great buttocks, the decaying rubbish in the streets, the patched and pocked houses, the bicycles shaking as if they would fall apart, the debased attempts at smartening up some hovels that made them look more sordid than those that were left to their rotting drabness—everything around him spoke of her. It was the ambition of her life to be clean and decent, yet this squalor thrust her existence upon him. Isolation rose higher in him every minute, a drug beginning to take effect at the extremities; it was his defence, but it was also alarming. From it he saw, fascinated, that she did not think it impossible to regard as “husband” a man she had lost touch with three years ago; she accepted what any housegirl or cook accepted—that a black woman cannot expect to live permanently with her man and children; she must shift about and live where and how poverty and powerlessness allow. He might have been an indentured labourer, away from home for long periods out of necessity. Three years' absence
had no significance for her so far as the validity of marriage was concerned.

He tried on himself some specific moment of her existence—licking her lips before she spoke, fastening a wide shiny belt round her middle—as a tongue goes to test the sensitivity of a tooth. She could have been one of the women passing him in the street. He was approaching the row of Indian shops at the top of the township, now, and there were some pretty ones about, girls coming from or going to the bus terminus. He saw the thickness of their calves and ankles, the selfconsciousness of their plastic smartness. He had in his mind, mixed with the shapes and colours, the coming together of objects and movement that was always working towards the moment when he began to paint—the thin wrists and ankles, the careless style of Ann. Little breasts of a woman who bore no children. Flat belly with the point of each hip-bone holding a skirt taut. Soft thin hands smelling of cigarette smoke. “What'll we do today?” A woman without woman's work or woman's ambitions. The idea of her possessed his imagination entirely, so that when he went into a shop to buy cigarettes he unconsciously adopted the manner that came naturally to her, of assuming without offence that she must have what she wanted before anyone else's claims of time or precedence.