The Lying Days (19 page)

Getting to know Mary Seswayo was like gently coaxing a little shy animal to edge forward to your hand.

There was, as Joel had inferred, something of a collector's suppressed eagerness in the trembling bait I held out to her from time to time; and we were afraid of each other, she of the lion-mask of white mastery that she saw superimposed on my face, I of the mouse-mask of black submission with which I obscured hers. Yet there was the moment in the cloakroom; a meeting of inherited enemies in the dark in which they mistake one another for friends. And it is never forgotten: not the fact that enemy could be mistaken for friend, but the shared bewilderment of the darkness each recognized in the other's eye. That is a moment of fusion that cannot be taken back and discussed with one's own side, for it is a moment for which they too are the enemy. It has none of the sentiment of the armed truce, the soldiers of warring armies drinking beer together on Christmas Day and going back to killing one another on Boxing Day, but is more in the nature of an uncomfortable secret.

When after almost six months at the University I started my first
year proper, I found myself in an English tutorial group that included two Africans. One was a fat, pompous teacher-priest “continuing his studies,” the other was Mary Seswayo. When she came in, walking with her head down to the back of Room 325, we knew each other, though I did not look up as she passed the desk at which I was already seated. The native girl from across the washbasin that day. (”African” was an acquired word, preferred by non-Europeans and liberals not only because it was a more accurate designation, but rather because it was as yet clean of the degrading contexts in which the other had been dyed more deeply than with color—in the unself-conscious privacy of my thoughts I still used the old inherited word.) I felt that now and then she looked at me; felt the gentle, curious glance of her recognition touching my back.

She never spoke in class discussions, but the priest did. He used his old manner of the preacher to the layman for the new purpose of the black man to the white man: hearty, hand-rubbing, bright. We are all God's children; let's make the best of it. Sometimes there was the suspicion that he half-clowned his unctuous jolliness, wood-touching for the temerity of his equality, that he snatched with a conjurer's patter and glee while his white audience was being amused, and his own people, in the know, demonstrated his superiority to them in their inability to follow his sleight of hand. So he apologized beforehand for any offense your whiteness might, with its awesome sensitivity, take from the innocuous, like litmus paper mysteriously turning red with immersion. And it seemed to him he got away with it; a trick kind of equality, in a trick kind of way, but still, an equality. “How are we this morning, how are we?—And is our Dr. East not ‘on time'?” He would swing round the door and pile his books on a desk in the front row, beaming at the class through polishing gestures with which he swept his hot face with a handkerchief as someone cleans a pair of spectacles preparatory to settling to work.

He did wear spectacles, but these were permanently misted by the heat of his hands, and he took them on and off as he sat, face poised beneath Dr. East like a seal waiting for the keeper's fish to land in his mouth. The instant Dr. East paused to invite discussion,
the preacher rose to it. (The subject of discussion, on one occasion I remember, was Thackeray's discursive muse.) “Sir, well, I should like to say—in my humble opinion that is—I don't know how my fellow students are feeling about it—but this bad habit of Thackeray's, it makes it very difficult for the student. It is hard for him to know what is the story, if you know what I mean, and in examination it may be that you are asked a question about the story, and you know the book too well and put in what is not the story?” He smiled round the class with a slowly widening gesture, as a conductor acknowledges applause by taking it for his whole orchestra.

Dr. East had faded ginger hair and colorless eyes that had the cold snap of a pair of scissors, impatiently cutting off irrelevancies and idiocies with a look, before they could rise to articulation. After giving the preacher two or three commentless hearings, with the allowance of attention in the face of irritation which would be accorded to any foreigner, he refused any further concession. Yet he was not quite so hard on the African as he would have been on a European student: the viper-flicker of his sarcasm he kept in his mouth. “Just a moment, Mr. Thabo—” He would signal him down and raise his eyes at some other student who was struggling with the desire to speak.

The girl, as I have said, did not speak at all. She listened with the painful intentness of someone who is always balanced on the edge of noncomprehension, and she wrote things down when one could not imagine what had been said that was worth noting. Dr. East had a peculiar affection for those who did not offer dissent or opinion; probably he was grateful to be spared the risk of hearing more banalities. Yet at the same time he had the endearing quality of literary men—those in the exact sciences are much less hopeful—the belief that perhaps something fresh and intelligent is being muffled by timidity. Particularly in the unexplored country—jungle profusion? sweet grassland? silence of rock?—of the other race's intellectual innocence. His compressed lips that twitched at the fly of impatience suddenly opened in his surprising smile; a friendly smile on big even false teeth that altered the whole set of his face and seemed to flatten his ears and his forehead with the
look of pleasure that comes to the head of an animal when you stroke it. “Miss Seswayo, wouldn't you perhaps like to say something about this?” He lifted his head courteously to the back of the room.

She would get up slowly, moving her notebook, putting down the pencil, resting her palms on the desk ledge. She shook her head carefully as she spoke, after a pause in which everyone was silent, “No. … No, thank you.”—Dr. East made a small noise of regret—“Yes, now what is it, Mr. Alder?”—and talk broke again upon the room.

Once or twice, when I happened to sit at the back of the room in line with her, I tried to see what it was that she wrote down so purposefully. But I only caught a glimpse of lines of copybook handwriting, a child's at its most careful, with great round stops and hooked commas. One of these times a paper with the text of a literary-appreciation test was handed out round the room, one for every two students, and as she was my neighbor I moved to share mine with her. Sitting over the same printed sheet, I could see the brown, shiny plate of her breast, moving a little fast with her breathing beneath a necklace of white china beads that she always wore. I could see the very texture of her skin, sliding over the ridge of her collarbone as she lifted her arms. The top of her arm, in a brown coat sleeve, slowly sent its warmth through to where my arm touched against it.

It must have been fifteen years since I had been in such close contact with an African; not since that other breast, longer ago than I could remember, the breast of my native nanny, had I casually felt human warmth, life, coming to me from a black body.

The following afternoon I stopped to speak to her where she sat in a window embrasure in one of the wide corridors, reading a key to Chaucer whose edges were worn round as a stone. I made the usual banal overtures about our work and she answered in the faint, stilted English of the European-educated African woman, out of whom all the buoyancy, music and spontaneity that is in the voices of nursemaids and servants seem to have been hushed by responsibility.

An obstinacy of shyness made it very difficult to talk to her, but
the reassurance of repeated casual meetings slowly thawed her silent, wide-eyed greeting as she hurried past into a smile. We met again in the cloakroom. Alone, this time, in the litter of lipstick-streaked tissues and balls of crumpled paper like cabbages, she was repacking her things on the floor—she always carried about with her a complication of coats, books, notes that she watched and counted with the poor peasant's anxiety for his possessions. The tap frothed out over my dirty hands and I said: “You are loaded up. …”

It was not easy for her to speak lightly. “Sometimes I cannot seem to get it all in. It seems to get bigger and heavier as the day goes on.”

To anyone else I could have said: “But why on earth do you carry all that stuff about, anyway—but with her I could not. “You know, you frighten me with the notes you take; every time my mind's wandering at a lecture, I see you writing away and I get an awful feeling that I've just missed hearing something very important.”

She smiled, and this time it was the sudden, quick, surrendering smile of the piccanin caddies at the golf course. It seemed ridiculous that here was I, talking to a little native girl about lecture notes at a University.

“Well, it
is
a lot …,” she admitted with the shy acceptance of a commendation, “especially with Dr. East. Everyone in the class always has so much to argue about.—The expense of all the paper is something, too.”

She takes down everything that anyone says. She struggles to get down the commonplace inaccuracies, the embarrassed critical shots in the dark, the puerile fumblings toward an opinion.—I was so appalled that I looked at her with the polite daze of someone who has not quite heard, really listened. …

“Do you—do you live here, I mean in Johannesburg itself?” It was not a question I had meant to ask, but I snatched it up as the first thing to hand.

She answered dutifully. “I have a room with a family in Sophiatown. I was at the hostel and then at Alexandra, but I moved.”

“Oh, I live at home—that is, in Atherton, on the Mine.” Questioning
her about where she lived suddenly seemed too much like a mistress expecting to be decently answered by a servant, and I looked for some way to put it right.

“It's a long way,” she said.

“An hour by train every morning.” I always said it with some sort of distasteful pride in the hardness of it.

But to her, living in a native township where people got up at five o'clock to queue for busses in order to get to work by eight, it was nothing to commiserate about. She nodded politely.

“I have to go.” She smiled, with her bundles on her arm, as if she did not want to. She stood like a neat schoolgirl, feet together.

I said: “Bye now. …”—But no airiness could take from that quiet, serious little figure the consciousness of privilege that sent it, alone, down the corridors and down the flanking steps and through the gardens out into the street; into Johannesburg, to be swept aside with errand boys and cooks and street cleaners, still alone.

A susurration of voices—now and then a phrase would land, shrill on our table: “tastes like soap!” … “his FINAL YEAR, I said”—the warmed-over humidity of canteen foods, and the grinding, bursting effort of a box apoplectic with colored lights to release the snarling of a swing band—stood between Joel and his friend, and me.

“Big attraction of this tearoom, now.” The light-haired young man indicated the juke box.

“Big attraction of the other one is no juke box,” said Joel. “Let's go.”

There nothing moved but a lethargic tearoom fly, feeling over the sugar bowl. “What happened to you?” said Joel in the hush, referring to my lateness.

“Joel, I was talking to that girl, the African girl. I discovered she takes down
everything that is said.
She sits at tuts taking down miles of notes. All the rubbish that everyone talks.” I sat back in my chair, looking at him.

He pursed his lips. “Just a minute—” He went up to the counter and came back with our lunch balanced; the steady, heavy approach of his legs, a thoughtful, nervous walk that I watched for assurance.

“Did you tell her, though?”

“Well, no—it was so difficult to know where to begin. If I knew her a bit better … I don't know how not to be officious about it.”

“Showing the poor savage the ropes.”

“Yes, that's just it.”

Joel took a long drink of cold water that made him gasp. He looked as if he had just come up from a swim under water, and somewhere, parenthetically, there was a smile in me that did not reach my face. “Still, it's a damned shame, someone should tell her. The confusion behind it—”

“You mean it's not the waste of effort so much, it's that it means she doesn't know what to take and what to leave?”

“That's the whole thing. That's the whole unwieldy thing.” He looked from one hand to the other as if he saw it, did not know what to do with it, lying amorphous on the table, in the air, between us. “We see only one little corner of it—this native girl needs to be told that one abstracts from lectures, discussions, what-have-you, only what is useful, relevant, illuminating. So then you find that you've solved nothing for her; you've simply twitched up and caught hold of one corner of a dilemma that shifts continually beneath everything she does here. It's the most difficult thing in the world for her to discern simply because she has no comparative values. It's the African's problem all the way up through all struggles with a white man's world. On a higher level, it's the problem of Colley's servant girl, who gives the cat milk out of a saucer from the best tea set, or the old kitchen one, quite impartially. She doesn't know it
is
a best tea set; she simply never has known such a sufficiency of utensils that there could be gradations of use—”

“What's this? The evils of property?” Rupert Sack, whom we had lost between one tearoom and the other, rejoined us. He had dark, theatrical eyebrows that confirmed the suspicion that the bleached streaks of his hair were dyed: perhaps his one gesture of allegiance, if a rather misplaced one, to the art of architecture, since he was sure to leave before completing his course, in favor of his father's business, pleasantly knowledgeable about cantilevers and clear-story lighting for the rest of his life. He was intelligent but his mind wandered. He sat looking elaborately at me, one eyebrow raised in his own convention of idiotic admiration.