A World of Strangers Read online

  Anna hurried back to the circle of the lamplight after seeing her off. ‘Toby! Now please pour yourself a drink!’ ‘Got one,’ I held it up. She was carefully dressed, in red, and she looked suddenly pretty in the vivid way of dark women. Perhaps because she was at home, she seemed to have relaxed, too, that measured seriousness of manner that I associated with her.’ I’m sorry!’ she said.’ She’s not a bad old thing at all.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh it was before you came. You wouldn’t notice it so much.’ She turned to the others, apologetic, but confident that they would share her amusement at the same time.

  ‘Going, going, never gone,’ said Steven, putting down his glass and waving his hands.

  ‘I think she’s a nice lady,’ said little Sam. ‘Nothing wrong with her.’

  ‘She came in – she occasionally comes in just about this time, or after supper, for coffee with me – but when she saw Sam and Steven she kept saying, all the time, I must go, I must go.’

  ‘But she didn’t!’ said Steven.

  Anna asked me how I’d got there, and then we got talking about the car I needed, and what kind it should be, and where I should get it. The subject of cars is paraffin on the fire of talk among most men, and Steven and Sam lit up at once in passionate discussion. Sam said that I should get a new small British or Continental car that would be cheap to run. Steven plumped for a good second-hand job, a big powerful American car, a model of a reliable year, that, once overhauled, would go like new. ‘What’s a good of a car without power? What d’you want a machine without power for? May as well walk,’ he cried flamboyantly to Sam. ‘Steven, man,’ said Sam, planting himself before him to get a hearing, ‘a second-hand car spends more time in the garage than on the road.’

  ‘You find a good American car,’ said Steven to me, over his head.

  We all began to talk at once: ‘Listen to me . . . look here . . . so long as it goes, I don’t. . . .’

  Steven burst through. ‘I’ve got a friend who works in the biggest garage in town. You know the Ford people? You know the Chev people? He’s worked with their crack mechanics for years. He can buy and sell them, ten times over. You get your second-hand car and don’t you worry. I’ll get him to do over the whole engine for you. It’ll cost you half. Maybe even nothing. You leave it to me.’

  They had come in to see Anna on their way home from work. We all walked out to Sam’s little car to see them off, and I said to Steven, ‘What happened to you that Saturday, anyway?’ He smiled charmingly, utterly culpable and self-reproachful: ‘I’m awfully sorry about that, Mr Hood, really I’m sorry. I suddenly had to go off to Klerksdorp. I asked some chap to let you know, but you know what these people are. . . . I want you to come to my place to a party tomorrow night. Yes, there’s a big party on tomorrow and I want you to come. You’ll both come. We’ll fix it tomorrow.’

  They went off, waving and talking. I had the feeling there was no party; or there was not going to be one until a few minutes ago.

  ‘Silly ass,’ said Anna, as we entered the house again. She picked up a couple of official-looking letters from the table where the lamp was. ‘He bought a woman’s watch and a camera from some place in town, and he hasn’t paid for them. Now he’s being sued. Don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. It’s hardly a thing for legal aid.’

  I smiled. ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Of course, Sam always thinks I can fix everything.’ She sighed and sat down, gazing accusingly at the lamp.

  ‘I should think he’s pretty well right.’ This confirmation of the confidence she inspired seemed to distress her; as if, for a moment, she saw a diminution of herself in the habit of capable response which was expected of her.

  ‘What’s Steven’s excuse?’ I asked, curious.

  ‘The girl ran away with the watch, and the camera had a faulty lens, anyway – so he felt it was justice all round if he didn’t finish his payments.’

  We both laughed, but there was an edge of irritation to her amusement.

  ‘It’s part of the Robin Hood code that a lot of them like to think they live by, just now. It’s an elastic code that can be stretched to cover even gangsters with a moral justification of some kind. And, of course, it’s romantic. There’s terribly little that’s romantic in location life. That part of it I understand very well. In the Karroo dorp where I grew up there was nothing romantic, either.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I understand what “romantic” means to you,’ I said.

  ‘Well, what does it usually mean? – Something foreign, something outside your familiar life? That’s what I mean, anyway. Even if it’s only an unfamiliar way of looking at your own life, another interpretation of it. Then you’re not just a black man doing down a white man, you’re robbing the rich to give to the poor.’

  In the kitchen she did everything unhurriedly but practisedly. When she lifted the lid of a pot, there was the comforting vegetable scent of a home-made soup, and there were two thick pats of fillet lying on a board, ready for grilling. I hung about, talking to her, getting in the way rather than helping, as you do in a kitchen when you don’t know where things are kept.’ I’m glad to hear that you’re not too down on Steven’s romantic view of life – although I’m not sure, yet, that I agree about it being romantic.’

  ‘It’s romantic, all right,’ said Anna, sending tomatoes seething into a hot pan,’ and I am down on it. I understand the need to be romantic in some way, but I’m down on this way. It’s a waste of energy. You won’t catch Steven working with Congress or any other African movement, for that matter. He never defied, either – I’m talking about the defiance campaign, the passive resistance movement of a year or two back. The only defiance he’s interested in is not paying his bills, or buying drink. He’s got this picture of himself as the embittered, devil-may-care African, and believe me, he’s making a career of it. He doesn’t care a damn about his people; he’s only concerned with his own misfortune in being born one of them.’ The sizzling of the tomatoes in butter spat angrily around her.

  ‘Why should Steven have to be involved in these movements and congresses and what-not?’ I said. ‘I must admit, the whole idea would fill me with distaste. I’d run a mile at the thought.’

  Over the tomatoes, she smiled the private smile of the old hand: the stoker when the ship’s passenger marvels at the fact that anyone can work in such heat, the foundryman when someone says, ‘How do you stand the noise?’ ‘Somebody’s got to do it. Why should you expect somebody else to do it for you? Nobody really wants to.’

  ‘Ah now, that’s not so. I’ve always thought that there are two kinds of people, people with public lives, and people with private lives. The people with public lives are concerned with a collective fate, the private livers with an individual one. But – roughly, since the Kaiser’s war, I suppose – the private livers have become hunted people. Hunted and defamed. You must join. You must be Communist or Anti-Communist, Nationalist or Kaffirboetie’ – she smiled at my pronunciation – ‘you must protest, defy, non-co-operate. And all these things you must do; you can’t leave it all in the infinitely more capable hands of the public livers.’

  She turned from the stove with her answer all ready, but then paused a moment, filling in the pause by gesturing for me to pass her the soup bowls, and said, as if she had suddenly discarded her argument, ‘Yes, there’s less and less chance to live your own life. That’s true. The pressure’s too strong.’

  ‘From outside, as well as within, that’s my point,’ I said, obstinately, not wishing to claim common ground where I did not think there was any. ‘The public life people have always responded to pressure from within – their own conscience, sense of responsibility toward others, ambition, and so on; but the private livers, in whom these things are latent, weak, or differently directed, could go on simply going their own ways, unless the pressure from outside became too strong. Well, now it’s just bloody irresistible. It isn’t enough that a chap like
Steven has all the bother of being a black man in this country, on top of it he’s expected to give up to political action whatever small part of his life he can call his own.’

  I followed Anna into the living-room, where she carried the soup. ‘He wants the results of that political action, doesn’t he?’ she called, over her shoulder. ‘He wants to be free of the pass laws and the colour bar and the whole caboodle? – Well, let him fight for it.’ She laughed, indignant in spite of herself.

  All the old, wild reluctant boredom with which I had borne with this sort of talk all my life was charged, this time, with something more personal; a nervous excitement, a touchiness. I felt the necessity to get the better of her; to punish her, almost, ‘My dear Anna, you’re so wrong, too. The private liver, the selfish man, the shirker, as you think him – he’s a rebel. He’s a rebel against rebellion. On the side, he’s got a private revolution of his own; it’s waged for himself, but quite a lot of other people may benefit. I think that about Steven. He won’t troop along with your Congress, or get himself arrested in the public library, but, in spite of everything the white man does to knock the spirit out of him, he remains very much alive – getting drunk, getting in debt, running his insurance racket. Learning all the shady tricks, so that, in the end, he can beat dear old white civilization at its own games. He’s muscling in; who’s to say he won’t get there first? While the Congress chaps are pounding fiercely on the front door, he’s slipped in through a back window. But, most important of all, he’s alive, isn’t he? He’s alive, in defiance of everything that would attempt to make him half-alive. I don’t suppose he’s been well fed, but he looks wiry, his schooling hasn’t been anything much, but it seems to me he’s got himself an education that works, all the same, well-paid jobs are closed to him, so he’s invented one for himself. And when the Congress chaps get in at last, perhaps they’ll find him there, waiting.’ I laughed.

  ‘Oh my God! What a horrible idea.’ She pressed her napkin against her mouth and drew in her shoulders.

  I was perversely triumphant. I added, with some arrogance ‘Well, don’t underestimate the Sitoles of this world, anyway. They’re like history; their progress is inexorable. Let that be a consolation to you when your Congresses and protests don’t seem to be getting very far.’

  When we had finished our dinner and she was out of the room, getting her coat, I wandered about, looking at books and objects that I had been noticing since I had arrived. The books were what I would have expected to find, political books on Russia, China, and India, all the books I had ever read about Africa, and a great many more besides, some old Left Book Club editions, a couple of books of reproductions of paintings, and no poetry or novels at all, so far as I could see, except a paper-back mystery. But some of the objects were unusual, and, to me, highly interesting. There was a huge, benign African mask of black wood, and a small, evil one with a grey ruff of what I guessed must be monkey fur, there was a beautiful hide drum, and a clay pot blackened with stove polish and studded with red lucky beans; there was a little brass Shiva, and a Chinese marriage fish hanging from a nail on the wall. All these things were brought together in intimacy in the small space, and each retained, absolutely unmodified by the presence of the others, the look of authority of its place in the life from which it had been taken. I have noticed this before in objects which have been created for utility or ritual: even out of the context of their use, they never take on the banal look of ornaments. I had just picked up a snapshot of Anna, standing beside a smiling Indian woman, and herself wearing Indian dress, when she came back into the room.

  ‘A sari suits you very well. Have you been in India?’

  She shook her head. ‘I was married to an Indian. He gave me this, too; isn’t it beautiful?’ She showed me the white Kashmir shawl she was wearing. I admired it and we talked about it for a few minutes, while she went round locking up the cottage.

  In the car, she said, ‘Were you surprised about my marriage?’

  ‘Well, yes. I suppose I was.’

  ‘But of course, it doesn’t seem so very extraordinary to English people.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not the way it is here.’ She added, in her matter-of-fact voice, the voice of the conscientious committee member drawing the attention of the meeting to something she does not want them to overlook: ‘It was before the Mixed Marriages Act, of course.’

  I suddenly choked with the desire to laugh; I couldn’t help it, it came spluttering out. ‘I can’t think of a marriage in terms of legislation. That’s all I mean.’ Did she think of anything in any other terms?

  ‘Was it very difficult, being married like that in this country?’ I asked, as I might have asked about the cultivation of some plant in her garden.

  She hesitated a moment. ‘A bit. Didn’t seem so then; seems so now.’

  She changed gear with a typical, neat, considerate movement. And I had a sudden sense of loneliness, her loneliness, that appeared unsummoned behind her flat, commonplace talk like a face at the window of a locked house.

  Chapter 6

  Steven, in a graduate gown, was at the centre; the party spun round him, slowly at first, then whipped up by the black skirts and flailing sleeves that flew from the mast of his energy. When I arrived at the house in Sophiatown (Sam had come all the way to fetch me, because Anna Louw was not coming to the party) there were a dozen or so young men standing about against the walls of the room. Some leaned on each other’s shoulders, and a cigarette was passed up and down for each to take a draw. They murmured among themselves now and then, laughed suddenly, or dreamed, as loiterers do. Steven swept among them a few times, clutching the arm of one enthusiastically, bending his head for an explosive, confidential joke with another. They were dressed in anything they could find, it seemed: one, in a laundry-creased white shirt and new flannel trousers with a fancy belt, hung on a friend in a sweater almost completely unravelled and tattered brown pants whose turn-ups, stiff with motor-oil, were held round his bare legs by bicycle clips. They wore loose, hairy tweed jackets, suit-jackets that might have been filched off a scarecrow, filthy old caps, fancy gilt tie-pins, torn laceless sandshoes, impeccably brushed suède shoes. Their faces had the glazed look of youths who have spent their lives in the streets, watching; watching the earth-mover eating out the vacant plot, the fire-engine screaming by, or the drunk, weaving along the gutter.

  On a few benches and old dining-chairs, there were some women in haphazard cheap-jack finery and one or two men in business suits and glasses. The room itself was as empty of objects as the shebeen had been; and in it, everyone simply stood or sat, without awkwardness, and without any tension of expectation. More poeple kept coming in all the time; Steven seemed to make sorties beyond the door and return triumphantly each time, gathering new arrivals. Sam was his lieutenant, speeding and skidding about him with twinkling importance. A piano was pushed in; its strings jarred and jangled and died away. Steven was in conference, his arms spreading his gown about two other men; he dashed out, dashed in, grinned at me, raised his brows at someone else. A yellow boy with girl’s hands and a huge, pitch-black man with the weight of his body resting on the tight belt of his pants brought brandy round in coloured lemonade glasses. It was offered to me, and to all the others who, like me, sat on the benches or hard chairs. A second serving came in, this time in cups. But it did not get as far as the chaps hanging round the wall, and they did not seem to expect it; only watched. Talk rose, as the volume of people displaced the silence. They kept sauntering in, girls hand in hand, with the little breasts and big haunches that I noticed in very young African women, pretty tarts with faces broad with pleasure, powder showing dull mauve like the bloom on a black grape, on their skin, thin young men whose shoulders hunched-in their chests, gangling young men with the benign look of the very tall; pale, yellow fat faces, bony, reddish-skinned faces, shining black faces. They spoke to each other in the monosyllabic, subdued way of an audience, and threw in a few words of dated A
merican-English, as if that were the fashionable thing to do. ‘Doing all right there, Dan?’ ‘Sure, boy. How’s it with you, these days?’ ‘Hullo, baby -’ ‘You in good shape, honey?’

  There was a little breeze of notes on a saxophone; it died down. A clarinet gave a brief howl. Somewhere behind the press of people, the big bass began to pant. Music grew in the room like a new form of life unfolding, like the atmosphere changing in a rising wind. Musical instruments appeared from underfoot; people who had been talking took to another tongue through the object they plucked or blew. Feet moved, heads swayed; there was no audience, no performers – everyone breathed music as they breathed air. Sam was clinched with the piano in some joyous struggle both knew. A yellow youth in a black beret charmed his saxophone like a snake, with its own weaving voice. The bass thumped along for dear life under the enchanted hand of a man with the bearded, black delicate face of an Assyrian king. A fat boy with a pock-marked face jumped with rubber knees into a little clearing; girls began to swing this way and that from their partners’ hands, like springs coiling and uncoiling.

  I had seen jazz-crazy youths and girls at home in England, in a frenzy of dance-hall jive. I had seen them writhing, the identity drained out of their vacant faces, like chopped-off bits of some obscene animal that, dismembered and scattered, continue to jig on out of nervous impulse. But the jazz in this room was not a frenzy. It was a fulfilment, a passion of jazz. Here they danced for joy. They danced out of wholeness, as children roll screaming down a grass bank. Now and then a special couple would make space for themselves, and gather the whole swirling vigour of the room into their performance. They laughed and shouted to the others who danced around them, corollary to their rhythm; comments and challenges flew back.

  One of the men in business suits came up to me and said confidentially, ‘I suppose this must all seem rather crude.’

  ‘Crude?’