The Lying Days (20 page)

“And
she's
never known a sufficiency of ideas?”

“From where?” Joel answered me with a question. “The life of an African—especially of her generation, pressed into a sort of ghetto vacuum between the tribal life that is forgotten and the white man's life that is guessed at—it's the practical narrow life of poverty. All the kinds of poverty there are: money, privacy, ideas. Even suppose she didn't grow up in a two-room shack in a fenced location where her father couldn't go out without a pass from his baas—she probably went to a mission school, at best. In some ways, at worst. Because in a location, in a room in somebody's back yard, she might get some sort of idea of white people's context. But in a mission, shut away in some peaceful white-walled place in the hills, God, her idea of the white world would be the Standard Six reader and Galilee nearly two thousand years ago.”

“Hell, that's true, you know, Joel—” Rupert was suddenly attracted into the conversation. “It's funny, I was talking about the same thing last night—at my sister's place. With that chap Goddard, a pathologist I think he is; he'd been taking some medicals for some oral examinations—”

“A viva.”

“Yes—He was saying that it's bloody difficult with these natives. Bloody difficult for them. No matter how clever they are, there's just that lack of common background knowledge—you know, there's nothing to back up what they've learned out of books. So some white fellow who messes around half the time playing poker has a better chance of bluffing his way through than the poor devil of a native who's worked—well—like a black. …” He laughed at the lameness of his own joke.

“And that's a purely scientific collection of subjects, medicine. Imagine how much more difficult where nothing is certain, everything's a matter of opinion, judgment—” My voice lost itself in the prospect of the rich ambiguity of language and the vast choices of literature.

“Look, if you're a native,” Joel was saying, “you have to be exceptional to do ordinary things. You have to be one of four in ten who go to school at all, in the first place. You have to be able to concentrate on an empty stomach because you haven't had any
breakfast, you have to resist the temptation to nip off and do a bit of caddying for pocket money you never get given to you, you have to persuade your parents, who can't afford to keep you, to go on keeping you after you're twelve or thirteen and could be a houseboy or a nanny and keep yourself. And that's only the beginning. That's what you've got to do to get to the point at which white kids only start off making an effort. Just to get through an ordinary schooling you've got to be a very exceptional kid. And from then on you've just got to be more and more exceptional, although in your school life you've used up enough determination and effort to put a white boy right through to qualification in a profession. That's how it is.” He sat back, looking at us.

“Okay-okay,” said Rupert, staring at his coffee. He had listened with the subdued attention that comes over a shady character in the presence of a person of authority.

Joel began to eat. “Butter, please—Helen and I, here, we never had a chance to hear any music when we were small. You don't, in a little mining place like Atherton. Or you might, if your parents knew about it. But my folks were poor, and in any case they haven't had any education at all—neither of them can even write English. And Helen's—well, they like a bit of musical comedy, but that's all. So now when Helen and I go to a concert we like everything, good, bad, indifferent. We like the noise. The suits the orchestra wear. … You see?” He laughed.

I knew it wasn't true of Joel, but it pleased me not to have to bear my ignorance on my own. “We do not! I don't even have to be stopped from clapping between movements any more!”

“You should hold her hand,” said Rupert. “That's the way to teach her.”

“I should do just that,” said Joel, seriously.

We ate in silence for a few moments, lapsing into that abstracted service to necessity that breaks up the surface of attention. We burrowed away off into our separate thoughts.

I shook my head without knowing.

“What?” said Joel, apologetic, as if he thought I had spoken and he had not listened.

“Nothing—” Suddenly I was embarrassed to speak. “She said
something about the expense of the paper—” The little fact, so bald and paltry, a matter of sixpence or a shilling, was silencing in a different way. It seemed to grow in the dignity, the reality, the harshness of a need, something felt instead of thought, experienced instead of spoken.

“Of course,” said Joel. “Nothing's happened. Just talk. You're right.”

My parents had gone to a braaivleis on a West Rand a West Rand mine, fifteen miles the other side of Johannesburg. My excuse was work. “That's all very well,” said my mother, fastening her pearls. “But you don't get out and meet people.”

“Isn't she meeting people all the time at the University?” My father patronized her a little, smiling at me.

My mother settled the pearls on her neck. She looked herself over in the mirror, shook out her gloves, looked again, herself and her mirror self challenging each other for correctness. “I mean her own kind of people.”

They would be standing under the trees, the corseted women, the thin, gracious women who always dressed as if for a garden party, the satellite young daughters in pastel frocks. Where the drinks were, the men would be, faces red from golf and bowls, voices loud, laughing and expansive in departmental allusions as cosy as family jokes; the older men spry or corpulent with position, the up-and-coming younger men showing here a hinted thickness of neck, there a knee peaking up bony that assured that when the first lot died off, the second would be ready to replace them identically. As the darkness tangled with the trees, and the boys “borrowed” from the office or Compound brought the braziers to the right stage of glow, the daughters and the young sons would stand well away to avoid splashing their light frocks and blue suits and patent-leather shoes while they roasted lamb chops stuck on long forks. The smell of hair oil and lavender water would come out in the heat, mixed with the smoke and acridity of burning fat. They would giggle and lick their
fingers, eating with the small bites of mice. And run over the lawns back to the house to wash their hands and come back, waving handkerchiefs freshly charged with lavender water. I had been there many times. I knew what it was like; a small child in white party shoes that made my feet big and noisy, tearing in and out among the grownups, wild with the excitement of the fire and the smoky dark; and then grown-up myself, standing first on one foot, then the other, drawing patterns with my toe on the ground, feebly part of the feebleness of it all, the mawkish attempts of the boys to entertain, the inane response of the girls: the roasting of meat to be torn apart by hands and teeth made as feeble as a garden party. That was what these people did to everything in life; enfeebled it. Weddings were the appearance of dear little girls dressed up to strew rose petals, rather than matings; death was the speculation about who would step up to the dead man's position; dignity was the chain of baubles the mayor wore round his neck.

“Anna'll stay in the yard. I've told her. She'll take Wednesday off instead. But if you go out at all lock up the front in any case. A drunk boy came over from the stores last week right up to Mrs. Ockert's dining-room window; she got the fright of her life.—It's terrible, you're no safer on the Mine than in the town, anymore—” my mother complained to my father.

“I've told you, you should let me get out my Browning.”

“No, no, there are too many accidents with those things. Only the other day, I saw in the paper—little boy of five lost his arm.”

“Yes, but where there are no small children.”

“I wish they'd do away with those stores.—All the flies come from there, too. …—George, you've got hair on your collar, wait a minute—Don't forget, Helen?”

With one of those curious looks that mothers give their children—the same look, whether they are babies or grown men and women—half-abstracted, mind on the outing, half-smitten with the pang that is all that is left of remembrance of a time when the child was in the body and an accompaniment of all ventures, sleeping and waking—they were gone. I wished I could have gone with them; wished I could have wanted to go. My other life, my life at the University, turned me loose at week ends. And I wandered about,
wondering what I had been sent back for, for everything that I picked up seemed a relic, sometimes pleasant and loved, but outside the direction of my life, washed up on the bank. The face of our house, of our whole row of houses following every bend and bush of my memory behind the pines, reproached me like the gentle expression of some forgotten person whom you have come back to see but find you have nothing to say to. I opened my mother's accounts drawer, which as a child had been my safekeeping place, and found at the back some gilt transfers that had been saved for some occasion that had never come, and the little crocheted hat, a thimble cover, that I remembered Mrs. Mitcham giving me when I was about ten. In the front of the drawer was Ludi's Christmas card of many months back. “Are you married yet, miss?” his beautiful handwriting said on the inside corner.

No, I hadn't written. At the end of the war, the Kochs had bought a little store in the village, I had heard through my mother; lending library one side, fishing tackle and hardware the other. I thought, with love and guilt of neglect which both would come to nothing, of Mrs. Koch. And sitting on the cool floor where I could see beneath the dresser the stencil of quiet dust with which Anna defeated my mother, of Ludi. Again the dumb pressure of his breast, that was driven, and the informed pressure of his thighs, rose to the surface in my body. More than eighteen months ago. My body was ready, mistook signals, was deluded into stillness. I thought again, with a catch of deep pleasure that was like a hook, buried deep in my entrails and forgotten, now pulled, so that it moved queerly, disturbingly all the secret inertia of flesh gathered about it, how his tongue reached into my throat and the wetness on our mouths seemed to come neither from him nor from me. …—This capacity for feeling had become buried under so much; like leaves, the days, little and big, fluttered down upon it. Yet though they were piled so high, like leaves, there was no substance to them: lean on them heavily and sharply once, and the whole pile flattened lightly away—there it was, alive.

My eyes must have closed as I hunched there, for when the telephone began to ring through the house, I shot up startled and bumped into a chair, rocked my own photograph off the dresser. I
had the sudden guilty fear that it might be anybody; anybody. But it was Joel. Joel's voice, as unsuspected, as reassuring—Would I do him a favor? Would I take a parcel of working drawings to University for him tomorrow morning?—He wouldn't be going in as he had to drive his father to the Free State on business.

When we had concluded the arrangement there was a little pause, in which there seemed nothing to say; when we spoke to each other from our two separate homes, across the mile of veld that held the Mine apart from the town, there was always slight constraint. One did not know in what atmosphere the other stood: who was talking around, what sort of things they were saying. When I thought about the Aarons privately, alone in their own family, they became two curious wooden dolls whom I could not make speak the casual exchange of Mine intelligence, the mild gossip, the reiterated opinions that occupied us round our table. Whenever I met Joel's parents they seemed to lapse into a kind of heaviness, sitting about as if they did not know where to put themselves. I could not imagine them more at ease, any more than I could imagine the demeanor of the lion I saw blinking behind bars, back in its own jungle.

“So?”

“Nothing.”

“What are you doing with yourself?” In his voice there was the suggestion of an afternoon being passed, pleasantly enough, out of his sphere.

“I mean nothing. All on my own … my people went off to a braaivleis.”

He was genuinely surprised. “Well then come out into the country. Really. I've got my brother-in-law's car for tomorrow. Will you? We'll go out into the veld—” We laughed.

“All right. Come and fetch me. … I said I was going to work.”

When Joel came he looked different. He slammed the car door and bounded up the path, rat-tatting knuckles in a summons on the porch. He wore an old pair of gray flannels and an old-fashioned fugi silk shirt, washed thin, open at the neck. There were drops of water on the shining ends of his hair, where he had pulled a wet comb quickly through it; still it was glossy as a black horse's flank. His face was newly burned, with the slick of health that the South
African sun dabs on in an hour. He had the delighted look of someone who surprises.

“Bernie said to me at lunchtime, you can have the car this afternoon. Most amazing thing! You know how often I get an offer like that. And I said there was nowhere I wanted to go, so we'd decided to go to Cloete's Farm.”

I went about locking the front of the house, as I had been told. “What's that?”

“Not a tea place. It's a training farm for young Jews who want to go to Palestine—or at least it used to be; now we're at war they secretly train them to use guns.”

I nodded. The way he had said “we're at war” drew from me the momentary silence of respect for one who is involved by allegiance: it seemed odd to hear him say it; to me, the war between the Jews and the Arabs and the war in Indonesia were pieces of deplorableness equally remote. “—I must go and tell Anna.” He followed me to the back yard, where, despite the rich autumn warmth with which the sun brimmed the enclosure of grass and bright, thinning fruit trees, Anna sat formally in her dim little room with an old black man in vaguely clerical garb and two fat women who wore shoes and stockings for Sunday. She ducked out of the dimness, a bossy figure in the dirty jersey and overalls worn colorless across the behind and frayed over the breasts, in which she would never have dared appear before my mother. My mother had seen to it that she had proper false teeth made, and written a note to the dentist so that she would be fitted with the same care as a white person, but Anna never wore the bottom plate and had developed the busybody jaw of a very old man. “Miss Helen?”