A World of Strangers Read online

He waved a hand at the room, that buffeted him where he stood, so that he had the stance of a man on a ship in a high sea.

  ‘My friend,’ I said, ‘you don’t know what our parties are like.’ And it was true that that very first night I was struck by the strange innocence of their dancing. In all its wild and orgiastic shake and shamble, there was never a suggestion that it was a parody of or a substitute for sex. There was none of the dreamy concupiscence that hangs, the aura of a lean, wolfish sex-hunger, about the scarcely moving couples in a white night-club. For these people, the music and the dancing were not a dream and an escape, but an assertion. Once or twice I took one of the young women in their bright nylon blouses and danced, but it was more than my own lack of skill and half-hearted experience of dancing as a rather embarrassing social necessity that made me feel almost as if I were maimed in that press of dancing people. It was more than my stiff, shy, and unwilling limbs. What was needed was – at a deeper level – something akin to the feeling I had had when I was swimming with Stella Turgell at Mombasa, the feeling that the age-old crystals of the North were melting away in my blood. The men and women about me had had little to drink, they had none of the trappings of food and ease without which the people among whom I had lived are unable to whip up any sort of mood of celebration; yet it was there, spontaneously. Their joy was something wonderful and formidable, a weapon I didn’t have. And, moving feebly among them, I felt the attraction of this capacity for joy as one might look upon someone performing a beautiful physical skill which one has lost, or perhaps never had. Lopped off, gone, generations ago; drained off with the pigment fading out of our skin. I understood, for the first time, the fear, the sense of loss there can be under a white skin. I suppose it was the point of no return for me, as it is for so many others: from there, you either hate what you have not got, or are fascinated by it. For myself, I was drawn to the light of a fire at which I had never been warmed, a feast to which I had not been invited.

  I looked at Steven, dancing proudly as a strutting cock before a little round-eyed, painted black girl, calling out remarks that kept admiring eyes turned on him, and I thought of him playing darts in an East End pub. Why should he want that grey, fog-sodden world with its dreary pastimes scaled down to dwindling energies? Yet he did. He was drawn to it just as I was drawn to the abundant life that blazed so carelessly in the room about me. When black men lose that abundance, sink it, as they long to, in the vast vitiation of our world, both the hate and the fascination will be gone, and we will be as indifferent to them as we are to each other.

  Like Alice plunging after the White Rabbit, I went with Steven into the townships, the shebeens, the rooms and houses of his friends. I do not want to suggest by this a descent into an underworld, but another world, to which the conditions of the Johannesburg I worked and lived in did not pertain. First, the scale of proportion was reversed: in the city, and in my suburban street, the buildings rose above, the gardens made a space round the people – we lived, as city people do, in the shelter of the city, in a context that, while overshadowing, also provides the dignity of concealment: figures in the street pass out of sight under trees and shadows, living passes out of sight behind walls and fences. By contrast, an African township looked like something that had been razed almost to the ground. The mass of houses and shacks were so low and crowded together that the people seemed to be swarming over them, as if they had just invaded a deserted settlement. Every time I went to a township I was aware of this sudden drop in the horizon of buildings and rise of humans; nothing concealed, nothing sheltered – in any but the most obvious sense – any moment of the people’s lives. A blinding light of reality never left them. And they lived, all the time, in all the layers of society at once: pimps, gangsters, errand boys, washwomen, schoolteachers, boxers, musicians and undertakers, labourers and patent medicine men – these were neighbours, and shared a tap, a yard, even a lavatory.

  So convincing was Steven’s confidence in himself and his friends that when Faunce advanced me the money to buy a car, I bought a second-hand Chevrolet and took it to Steven’s mechanic friend to be overhauled. He lived in Alexandra Township, an abandoned-looking place outside the northern boundaries of Johannesburg, a kind of vast, smoking rubbish-pile picked over by voracious humanity. All the people who lived there worked in Johannesburg, but the town did not own the place, nor was it responsible for it. It had the aged look of all slums – even the earth, the red dirt roads, seemed worn down to their knobbly shins, and there was nothing, no brick, post, or piece of tin that was new and had not been battered in and out of the shape of a succession of uses – but, in fact, like everything else in Johannesburg, it was, in terms of human habitations, young, fresh, hardly begun; perhaps thirty or forty years old. From the beginning, it must have been a proliferation of dirt and decay, the pretty Shangri-la legend in reverse – the place where rot blooms.

  A stream that flowed thick, blue-grey dirty wash-water ran by the house of Steven’s friend. Children played and screamed in it, and when they came to stand round the car, the scales of scum coated their legs like a disease. Although we went there three or four times (I had to leave the car with this man Alfred for some days) I was never asked to go into his house. It was a brick shack with a dead tree leaning over it; from the tree hung bits of rope and an old tyre on which the children swung, and the yard was a surrealist sculptor’s garden of old motor car parts – a yellow bumper, a rusted hood, and other unidentified shapes. While Alfred, a fat, shy man who fingered his nose tenderly while he talked, and Steven who, I am sure, knew nothing about cars, but could not bear to be nothing but a looker-on, lay wriggling along on their shoulder-muscles under the car, the children and I watched each other. When they had tired of giggling about me, they went back to their own absorbing aimlessness. Among them an idiot, a kind of baboon-girl of about fourteen, hunch-backed, grotesquely steatopygous, grunted and squealed in subhuman frustration at their teasing. Two plump, easy-eyed women gossiped and, with a quick hand at the right moment, kept setting to rights a fat baby with bead anklets who kept tumbling down the steps of a homemade clay veranda on the shack opposite. A donkey-cart selling wood screeched and tottered by; people bounced over the rutted road on bicycles, women, endless women, yelled, threw buckets of slop into the road, laughed and thumped at tubs of washing. And the monster was as unremarkable as the fat baby.

  Sam’s house was in another township, a rather better one. The core of most of the houses was brick, even if the usual extensions of tin and hessian had accreted round them. I went there with Steven one night for supper, and when we walked through the yard-smell of ammonia and wood-smoke, to which I was by then accustomed, with the strange, conglomerate night-cry of the township about us, and the dim lights and the sudden, intimate voices of the houses that shared the yard, close to us, and through the door that opened abruptly from two uneven concrete steps, I was bewildered. I might have stepped into a room ‘done over’ by some young couple in a Chelsea flat. Green felt deadened the floor underfoot. There was a piano, piled with music. A record player in what all cabinet makers outside Sweden consider to be Swedish style. A divan with cushions. A red lamp. All along one wall, a bookcase made of painted planks and bricks. At the window, a green Venetian blind dropped its multiple lids on the township. Sam’s wife, Ella, pretty and shy, served a roast lamb and potato dinner with a bottle of wine, and afterwards the four of us listened to a Beethoven quartet and then to Sam, playing some songs of his own composition.

  Steven wanted to go to a shebeen when we left. It was run by a man who was part Indian, part African, part white, and a Basuto woman with the proportions of a whale who called me ‘master’ in the intimate obsequiousness of a house servant who knows the family too well. Steven knew everybody there, flirted with the shrill coloured tarts who, drunk, reminded me of pantomime dames, and had about himself generally an air of sophistication and relief. He stood beside me, at last, twisting his cheap signet ring with the bit of red glass in
it fondly, as if its shoddiness pleased him. ‘A place like Sam’s is all right,’ he said, ‘but it costs too much.’

  ‘His wife’s got quite a well-paid job, too, I gather, so I suppose they can manage,’ I said. I had already got over the bewilderment of the difference between what was well-paid for blacks and what was well-paid for whites; just as one becomes accustomed to translating values from one’s own currency to that of a foreign country in which one has lived for a little time. And I had learned to accept too, without embarrassment, the fact that I, with my not-very-generous salary, and my flat all to myself, was a rich man when I was in the townships.

  ‘I don’t mean just money. The effort and trouble. Keep up a place like that in a location. All the dirt, the easy-going, all round you. Imagine the way the neighbours look at you; you’re like a zoo! All the old women want to come and peer in the door to see what people do in such a house.’ Like most exhibitionistic people, Steven was a good mimic.

  I laughed. ‘Still, it’s an achievement to manage to live that way, in a location.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Steven, ‘that’s it. It’s a showplace.’ He assumed a high falsetto, parody of some white woman’s voice he must have heard somewhere: ‘“. . . an oasis of culture, my dear!” Is it a king’s house, a millionaire’s house? Man, it’s just an ordinary way to live.’

  I saw what he meant. If living decently, following a modest taste for civilized things, meant living eccentrically or remarkably, one might prefer to refuse the right masquerading as a privilege.

  ‘Why should I guard like a cave of jewels,’ he said, changing his sharp-eyed fake ring from one finger to another, ‘a nice little house that any other man can have anywhere he likes in a street full of such houses?’ And he grinned at me with that careless aplomb, shrugging his shoulders and looking down his nose at himself, that gave him such an air, and always, wherever we went in the townships, drew the young bloods about him to hear what he would say next.

  He was, without question, the most ‘popular’ person I have ever known. I put the word popular between the quotes of the suspect, because to me it connotes a man who gets the most votes in a presidential election at a golf club, and I don’t mean that sort of popularity. Perhaps ‘loved’ would be a better word. But he wasn’t exactly loved, either; he was too impersonal and elusive for that. I think they gloried in him, those hangers-on – they gloried in his white man’s ways produced unselfconsciously in their company, like a parlour trick that looks easy enough for anyone to learn. Looking always as if they’d just sheepishly awakened from a sleep with their clothes on, they sought something: was it the gum they pushed ceaselessly from one side of their mouths to the other, like the Americans do? Would the latest slang, in English, do it? Or the sports shirt with the pink and black collar? They did not know; they had not found out yet. But Steven had; they could see it, there he was. He had not gone under beneath his correspondence college B.A. the way black men did, becoming crushed and solemn with education, and the fit and cut of that aspect of the white man’s Johannesburg that dazzled them most hung on him as comfortably as his well-tailored jacket.

  Feckless, aimless, like creatures flopping in the sand in evolution from water to land, they saw his slippery-footed ease between the black man’s element and the white. He was something new, and they worshipped the new, which lack of possessions made them believe must always be the better. He was a new kind of man, not a white man, but not quite a black man, either: a kind of flash – flash-in-the-pan – produced by the surface of the two societies in friction.

  It never seemed odd or extraordinary to me that Steven himself, free of so many rooms, houses, shacks, and shebeens, had no particular place to live, during the time I knew him. He once told me that he had no idea how many times he had moved, in his lifetime; he had lost count. He had been born in a location in one of the Reef gold-mining towns, and except for his year in England, he had been moving from one township to another, from one room to another, ever since.

  I could not imagine what sort of place would have been right as home, to Steven.

  Chapter 7

  It was on a Sunday morning, after a party to celebrate the first of Steven’s moves since I had known him, that I went to see Cecil Rowe. The party was a warming- and naming-party for a house in a rakishly dingy part of Sophiatown where Steven had taken a room, in the company of his other bachelor cronies. It seemed to me highly unlikely that they were really living there, for there was little evidence of furniture or clothes – in fact, the place had the stunned and stripped look of a house that has been moved out of, rather than into – but it was blessed with jazz and brandy (someone even brought along a birthday cake) and it was duly named The House of Fame. (‘What’s it famous for?’ I asked, and Steven said, ‘Me, of course.’) The party ended about one on the peculiar note of promise of African parties, with all the men drifting off cheerfully into the dark to other assignations. I gave one or two of the lesser hangers-on lifts to various parts of the township, whose steep streets were still alive with strollers, tsotsis, lovers, quarrels, people singing, and drunks, and drove back to the shut-down quiet of the white town. My steps rang up the stairwell of the flats, and I had a sudden wave of homesickness that took the form of a vivid sense of a corner off Ebury Street, just below a little garden with wall-flowers smelling sweet and cold at night, where I used to go, one spring, to the flat of a girl with whom I was in love.

  In the morning this mood of alienation persisted slightly – like most homesicknesses, it was for what I should have liked to have had, rather than what I really had left behind – and I thought I would go to church. There were bells ringing tangledly through the clear air while I bathed and shaved carefully and put on a blue suit. I walked vaguely in the direction where I remembered having seen a small Anglican church, and found myself there in less than ten minutes. Little girls with curled hair, dangling handbags, hung about their mothers; there was a strong smell of brilliantine in the group outside the church, and a strong smell of floor-wax inside. It was a cottagey-looking building and the priest was to match; he seemed embarrassed by the prayers he offered, and doubtful about the intercession of his blessing. He took as his text ‘Without me ye can do nothing’ and he advocated Christ as if he were suggesting a course of vitamin pills; the congregation listened politely. The whole service was very Low, and I decided that I would try the Cathedral in town, next time.

  But at least when I came out I was prepared to accept the fact that this place in which I found myself was not the blue-grey Cotswold village, calm as a shadow, where, of my family, only my grandmother and I sometimes sat in church in the empty pew that had once belonged to our family; and I respected the flat statement of the sunlight, hitting everything full on, and the chipped façade of the corner Greek shop opposite the church, and the two Africans sitting with their feet in the gutter, drinking lemonade and carrying on a conversation that could have been heard three blocks away, and the pretty plump Jewish girls swinging down the road in their Sunday shorts, and the shoddy suburban houses, ready for the knockout of the demolition gang after only twenty or thirty years – respected the place for being itself.

  It was then that I noticed the street-name and realized that I must be quite near where Cecil Rowe had told me she had a flat. On an impulse I let the steep gradient push me down the hill like a hand in my back, and, half way down, there it was – a building that was newer and more pretentious-looking, if not better than the one in which I lived. In the front, there were wind-torn rubber plants in bright pots, and a mosaic mural in the foyer representing a Zulu girl, a water-pot, and a beehive hut against a lot of saw-tooth greenery; but, as I thought, the open corridors behind, which led to the flats, were the usual grimly functional thoroughfares, full of drifts of soot and dirty fluff, empty milk bottles and garbage bins.

  The Rowe girl’s flat was on the ground floor. I rang and rang and was just about to turn away, when I heard the soft slap of bare feet coming down a passag
e and someone struggled with the lock, giving muffled exclamations of exasperation, and at last flung the door open.

  ‘My God, I thought it was the Salvation Army,’ she said. ‘Hullo, it’s you – come in. Where’ve you sprung from?’

  ‘I’ve been to church, it’s just near here.’

  She looked at me as if I were joking; then her expression changed to one of curiously feminine curiosity, that expression women get when they think you may be about to give away some aspect of yourself you really had not intended to let slip.’ Church? You don’t mean to say you go to church?’ She sounded most disbelieving.

  ‘Yes of course I do. At home I go quite regularly.’

  She burst out laughing; embarrassed, gleeful laughter, as if she’d discovered that I wore corsets.’ Well, I’m surprised at you,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’re such an intellectual and all that.’

  I can’t explain why, but I was somehow touched and reassured, in myself, by her out-of-date, six-thousand mile distant, colonial notion of an ‘intellectual’ as a free-thinking, Darwinian rationalist. It pleased me to think that to her, God was simply old-fashioned; it was better than to suspect, as I sometimes did of myself, that God was merely fashionable again.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, and certainly she was not dressed for lingering conversation in the doorway. She trailed before me into the living-room, in a splendidly feminine but grubby dressing-gown, and settled herself on a hard chair at the table, her bare feet hooked behind the bar of the chair, and her hand going out at once for a cigarette. (I imagined how it was with just that gesture that she would grope for a cigarette the moment she woke up in the morning.) It was over’a month since I had seen her, and if she had appeared in a different guise each time I had encountered her before, these were nothing to the change in her now. I suppose no man ever realizes how much of what he knows as a woman’s face is make-up; I know that my sister has often hooted in derision when I have remarked on some girl’s wonderful skin (You could take an inch off with a palette knife, my poor simpleton!) or the colour of another’s hair (It costs pounds to keep it like that!). This waxy, sunburned face with the pale lips and the sooty smudges round the eyes was older and softer than the other versions of it I had seen, there were imperfections of the skin, and habits of expression which grew out of the prevailing states of feeling in her life that I did not know, had made their fine grooves. Yet I recognized this face instantly; it was the one that had attracted me, all the time, beneath the others.