Occasion for Loving Read online

  “Wait a moment, wait a sec … we don’t want to have to use guns, that’s the difference, but they don’t see any other way—”

  “But we don’t see any other way, either, do we? Isn’t that exactly what we’ve been talking about all this time? We’re a banned organisation, man—you can get arrested tomorrow if you hold up your pants with a Congress badge.”

  The young woman cut the bread and the meat. She did not take part in the talk, except to laugh occasionally, but she listened with the air of one who hears her own views expressed, and when she was in other company she always repeated what Shibalo said. She was a nurse, which, along with school-teaching and social welfare work, had been the ambition of most African girls with intelligence and drive above the average until a few years ago; now such girls wanted to be models or actresses. Influenced by them, she dressed in the latest fashion to filter down to mass-production, but had not straightened her hair and wore it grown long into a high bun on top of her head. There was no indication in her face of how old she might be; it was simply a statement of adult womanhood, that would last fresh and firm for a comfortable time. Shibalo had paid a lot of attention to her at a party one night, and then people had begun to ask them to parties together, as a couple. He was always affectionate with her at parties; there was something about her that fitted in with a light mood, that demanded that one should tease her about her gilt choker necklace and put one’s head on her shoulder after too many drinks. She knew that this display was misleading; they were not really a couple, that she could tell, though she had lived with him on and off for a year, and she did the things—like taking his washing away for him—that a casual bed-companion does not do, but that a woman does for her man.

  “Ida—you want to sit here?” Sol made as if to get up when she brought him a plate of food. “Stay there, stay there—” she sat on the bed next to Shibalo. She felt very friendly and easy and fond, with Sol; to be one of them produced a welling-up in her, relaxing and secure. If they joked, she felt witty and lolled back on the bed; if they were at each other, hammer and tongs, she was excited; when they spoke of what she thought of as “taking over”, she felt an intoxicating superiority, the stiffness of face of one who has witnessed prophecy.

  Sol was made slightly anxious by a certain shift in Shibalo’s thinking that he himself had not caught up with; this was how it occurred to him, but he was also aware that it might mean that Shibalo was moving off, abandoning a position that he, Sol, had thought was as immovable, for both of them, as the earth they stood on. He continued to argue disbelievingly: “You’re not serious about wondering why you’ve stayed with Congress? If you just like to talk, man, then it’s all right.”

  Shibalo settled himself quietly and patiently. “I’m used to the people I work with. We’ve gone through a lot together—there’s this business of loyalty, eh?”

  “Sure, sure.” Sol was warming, but wary.

  “Right. But I didn’t begin to work with Congress as a friendship club, eh? I wanted to work to get things moving for us, eh? So why should I, or anyone else with an eye on the real objective, the only thing that counts, stick with any crowd if I see that some other crowd is getting something done? What does another name and another slogan mean to me? I’ve got no ambitions to climb up a party ladder, Sol. I just want to see the blacks stand up on their hind legs, that’s all. I don’t care if they give the thumbs-up or bow three times to the moon. The chaps in the street have got the right idea, man; I used to get wild when I’d see them join any campaign that looked like scaring the whites. If it was a Congress thing, yes, they were Congress men; if it was a PAC thing, yes, they were Africanists. But why not? I’m not sure I shouldn’t do the same thing.’

  “Ah-h, you’re crazy,” Sol said disgustedly; his voice touched upon the idea again, the toe of a boot gingerly up-turning a dubious object. “What do you call that?”

  “Guerilla politics, that’s what it is.”

  “Again you talk as if there were no principles. Do I have to spell it out for you?”

  Shibalo handed the brandy bottle to him. “Good God, Sol, no one’s going to care a damn for our principles in this business, in a hundred years’ time. They’ll simply write it down—they took control at such-and-such-date. They made a go of it, or they made a mess of it.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You used to go on about ends determining means, now you only scream for results. What about the difference in principles between the Africanists and us?”

  “There isn’t any in the long run. There won’t be any. They want to get rid of the white man any way they can; Congress wants to submerge him in a non-racial state without cutting his throat first. The Africanists will find it necessary to hang on to the white man and employ him and his cash, Congress will find that he won’t come quietly. See?”

  Sol began to laugh with savour at the neatness of it, and they laughed together. He felt that they had landed up side by side on the solid ground of accord, and said again, as they ate, “My God, it is something to feel the whole continent of them free up there—whenever I pick up the paper, man—”

  But the death-embracing surrender of his will to paint had given Shibalo, in some unsought exchange, by a law of balance, a firm assurance and detachment in his approach to other things. He had gone through a form of submission so final that he could manage very well without illusions of any kind about the other circumstances of his life. He said serenely, “My brothers. My brothers. I’m not so sure about that.”

  Later the two men went out to the house of a third friend. He was out, at the house of a fourth, and so they went on there. It was a night like others before and after, that ended neither late nor early, since no one thought of such conceptions; eventually, no one came in or out any more, and the last knot of talkers dissolved into the dark.

  One evening some months later, when Ida was packing Shibalo’s dirty clothes into a department store paper carrier of the kind she carefully saved for this purpose, she found paint on a shirt. She said nothing; only wondered, in her practical way, how she would get it off.

  Ten

  In the Easter holidays, Shibalo was free all day. There was nowhere they could go together in town. Ann drove him out into the veld, kicking up a wake of dust in the face of the city where everyone was droning away at their jobs, and sending the little car scudding along the empty, week-day highways and lurching over dust roads and farm tracks. They never knew where they were making for, only what they were looking for, and if they saw a kloof, or the concentration of trees along a declivity that meant a hidden river, Ann found a way to it. They were safe from other picnickers during the week; only once a little troop of passing piccanins stood on the further bank of a river and looked with dull astonishment on the sight of a white girl and a black man eating together.

  Ann was seized with the desire for water and grass and willow trees, sun and birds. She swam in the brown rivers, waving to him where he lay sipping beer; she emerged seal-wet and dried off in the warm smell of water-weed rising from her skin. She picked the fragile and sparse flowers of the tough veld with enthusiasm and then let them wither, and she brought a book with her that she never read. He watched her activities with the amusement of novelty. He was born in the townships and had never lived the traditional African life of raising crops and herding cattle, neither had he known the city white child’s attachment to a pastoral ancestry fostered from an early age by the traditional “treats” of picnics and camping. He belonged to town life in a way that no white man does in a country where it is any white man’s privilege to have the leisure and money to get out into the veld or down to the beaches. He could not swim, and felt no more urge to get into the water when she did than if she had had some special equipment for the environment—gills or fins—that he did not naturally possess.

  Intense physical silences arose between them. Her smile, his lazy voice filled space no longer fretted and pressed in upon by the jostling of others outside
the walls of the flat. The vision of each for the other was not broken up—like a pack of picture cards thumb-shuffled in quick succession—as it was in the clandestinity of the streets. And they had the touch of lordliness of people who are breaking the rules out of no stronger reason than mere inclination.

  Yet even in the innocence of one of these Edens each retained something watchful of the other. When Boaz’s name came naturally into her conversation, neither paused; once when he mentioned something about his child, she betrayed no curiosity about the child’s mother, but only asked, with affectionate interest: “What’s he like?” The one time when each was not making an amused and attracted audience of the other was when they talked of the possibilities of his going to Europe to study and paint. The basis of an exciting sympathy between two people is often some obstacle that lies long-submerged in the life of one; he thinks he has accepted it until the resurrection of fresh feeling, the swaggering assertion of self, that comes with a love affair. She heard from him again and again, in the piece-meal way of such revelations, details of the story about the scholarship he had been unable to take up in Italy, because his record of political activity had prevented him from getting a passport. At the time he had turned his back on the alternative of signing away, on the exit permit that was offered him, his right to come home again. He had decided that he did not want to be a painter at the price of giving up his right to fight the system that demanded that price. He had made the decision long ago, in all the ways that a decision like that is made and ratified and accepted and forgotten—except by the one whose life is ringed by it as a tree is ringed, so that as time swells it must be taken into the flesh. He had talked it out in the fire of approval that warmed the group he worked with in politics. He had entered, through it, the solidarity of the wronged, with their pride in their formidability; he had been the cause célèbre, in demand at parties at the homes of leftist and liberal whites; he had boasted, drunk, when everyone was tired of him, and the others around him in the shebeen didn’t even know what he was talking about, of his defiant sacrifice. But lying with her head on his arm in a eucalyptus plantation while she described a life that might be possible for him in Italy or France, Greece, perhaps—he did not pay much attention to the geography, and she did not always identify the strange place-names—the whole balance of his existence seemed to fall on that side, and the weight of a struggle that was other people’s as well as his own did not count against it. He forgot he was an African, burdened, like a Jew, with his category of the chosen, and was aware only of himself as a man who was one of those who, even if they are only drawing pictures on the pavement, choose for themselves.

  The eucalyptus plantation was not more than twenty minutes from town; it belonged to one of the dying gold-mines near Johannesburg. Ann was sure they couldn’t be seen there, though, leaning on her elbow, she could see men cross the veld from the shafthead not far away. The little old houses of the white married quarters near by were not lived in. She got up and began to pick the narrow leaves from her dress. “This is a good place to dump a body,” she said, with a laugh. “You know. You see those photographs on the front page with an arrow next to a tree—that’s where it was found after a three-day search.”

  The dry, clean smell of the eucalyptus was strong; under the trees it was cool as menthol, in the hot sun it had the live fragrance of burning wood. There was no stir in the air but the leaves moved silently in the evaporation of heat as if unseen insects clambered among them. A dove throbbed regularly in the heart of the manmade wood. The city was so near they might have put out a hand and touched it.

  “Do you think you are the kind that gets murdered?” he said proudly.

  “… Nobody ever thinks they’re the kind. Who does get murdered anyway?” She appealed to him when she talked; he challenged her—that was their game of communication. Her eyes were lazily following the blanketed figure of a man on the veld path; he bent to pick up something, probably a safety pin he had dropped, and then took off the blanket, cast it out round himself, and secured it closely under his neck. They were both watching him now, and they laughed. “That’ll keep out the cold.” “He’s come up off shift,” Shibalo said. “It’s dark and wet down under the ground and now he’s going back to the compound for his phuthu and his nyama.”

  “I wonder where he comes from,” she said. “These mines are worked out, or just about. We came this way one day when I first arrived—with the Stilwells and everybody. We saw them dancing at one of these mines.” The man walked on, unaware of their eyes on him, and disappeared out of sight round the yellow pyramid of a mine dump.

  “People get murdered for money,” he said, lying back. “Where I come from it’s money. And women get murdered by men,” he added.

  She looked at him, and smiled, and gave a brief toss of her head, to settle her hair and liven the angle of her neck.

  Presently she came over and squatted beside him as if she were making herself comfortable at a fire, and said, “Boaz is coming home soon.”

  “Wasn’t he home last weekend?”

  “I mean he’s coming home to stay. For a while.”

  “Your husband is your affair,” he said, stroking her ankle.

  She liked to be free, but not as free as that. She smiled brilliantly and her forehead reddened. “I know,” she said, with an uprush of confidence and gaiety. Then suddenly: “Let’s go and buy lunch at Baumann’s Drift Hotel.”

  “Oh yes,” he said, “I’m sure that would be lovely.”

  “Why not? I mean it. I can go in and tell them I want lunch packed up to eat on the road, and a bottle of wine.”

  “You can send the boy in to get it,” he said, grinning.

  “That’s right.”

  They got into the car and drove off over the veld to the track; the man they had seen, or another in a blanket like his, was sitting on an old oil drum, smoking a pipe. He was talking to another man who still wore his tin helmet and yellow oilskins from underground, and as the two looked up, unhurriedly and incuriously as the car brushed them, Shibalo slowed down and hailed them. They were suspicious and startled, and then their faces opened in delight. Whatever it was that he said seemed to shock them and make them laugh; they called back after him, still laughing. Ann was excited by the ease of this communication. “How did you know they’d understand?” “I talked to them in Shangaan. It’s the first language I ever spoke, up at my grandfather’s place. I could see they were Shangaans, they’re chaps from Moçambique. They were very polite.” “Did you see, the one had clay ringlets in his hair,” she said, her eyes shining. “Of course, that’s the right thing for a young man.” He was laughing with her, in a kind of pride.

  They stopped just off the main road to eat the lunch they got from the hotel, and sat under a tree where any passing motorist who looked twice might see them. Neither mentioned the dangerous carelessness of this, or suggested that they might be more discreet. Ann met with the insolence of disregard the outraged curiosity of a woman who kept her face lingeringly turned toward them from a car window; she must have drawn her companion’s attention to the sight, for the car faltered before taking up the speed of its approach again.

  That evening, on the way home from a party, some white friends that they were with tried to get Gideon into a night-club with them. Someone’s brother was a member and had a bottle there, and there was a black cabaret act: these were the grounds on which, rather drunk, the party thought they would bluff their way into admittance. The story was that Gideon was a singer himself and brother of the leader of the act. “He’ll sing for you, you’ll see”—the amiable insistence of one of the young white men produced in the manager, who had been summoned to deal with the crisis, the special shrewd sternness, the clench-teeth lunatic tact, of the man who smiles in the patron face all his life and loathes and despises it. The party stood round him in the dim entrance among gilt mirrors, cigar smoke and muffled music; their appearance, the pretty, animated women, the authoritative, light-h
earted air of the men, was like a distressing caricature of the scene inside, where such people were being subserviently tended, and where drunken whimsicality, fumbling sex, and argumentativeness, were respectfully condoned.

  “You’ll understand, Mr. Solvesen, sir, I can’t do it. I’d lose my licence. I dare not even let the artists sit down at a table after they’ve been on.” The man’s eyes were dead with rage against these arrogant young fools who pretended not to know the vast difference between natives employed to serve or entertain and some educated black bastard sitting himself down, like one of themselves, among the members. He wanted to throw them out, but a long discipline of sycophancy held him back: he had an idea that although the brother was an insignificant member he had been introduced by and sometimes was in the party of a wealthy and important financier.

  Ann, who was leaning amiably against the red velvet wall and pinching the plastic laurels of a fake Caesar on a cardboard pillar, said, “Oh, poor little man, let’s leave him alone.”

  The group left quite calmly, exchanging private jokes. The girl who had spoken was good-looking, sure of herself; could one understand them? Suddenly, for no reason at all, the man in evening dress felt like a lackey—but of course, a black man was good enough for them to laugh with and slap on the back.

  Boaz came home at the weekend again; he had been moving about as much as he could in the Eastern and Northern Transvaal, but the summer—the rainy season—was not a good time for field-work, and at the beginning of April he meant to come home finally to prepare for a long field-trip during the dry winter months. He brought a bottle of aquavit with him, and although it was still warm enough to sit on the old verandah in the evening, he and Ann and the Stilwells drank it instead of their usual gin or beer. Two small glassfuls each produced that stoking-up of social responses that the neat liquor of cold countries is famous for, and by the time the servant Agatha called them to dinner they were ready to open a big flask of chianti that was being saved for a special occasion, and to make a banquet out of the stew. Jessie felt too lazy and disinclined to absent herself from the others to put the little girls to bed, and they ran in and out as they pleased, left out of, but nevertheless infected by, the grown-ups’ mood. Only Morgan, who had arrived from his farm holiday the day before, remained unaffected. “Give him a glass of wine,” Jessie said. But he did not want it. “For God’s sake, you’re old enough now,” she said. “It’s wasted on me,” he said, with a smile. “I don’t like the taste.” He was innocent of the despising look she rested on him. He was going back to school in the morning. His hair was sunburned along the hairline and shone phosphorescent there; brown skin made his face more definitive but his voice was finally breaking and the awkward uncertainty of its pitch seemed cruelly appropriate to him. He made her restless, like a piece of furniture that never looks right in any room. The conversation was lively with anecdote and mimicry and the broad verbal gestures of vigorous people among their own kind. The atmosphere was not cosy, stressing the relationships of the four men and women to each other, but independent: each individual enjoying the licence of an adulthood that had no rules except those of personal idiosyncrasy. Morgan sat quiet, as the bewildered will; he thought that he could think of nothing to say, but the fact was that he had nothing to say in the context of talk that, as usual among grown-ups at home, ran counter to the tenets of adulthood that they taught him. In order to qualify as an adult (they said) one had to be kind, controlled and respectful of human dignity. Yet they criticised their friends and the people they worked with, laughed and shouted each other down, and referred with veiled bawdy cynicism to love. He was afraid to admit to himself that the rules they thrust on him were merely some kind of convenience, some kind of fraud by devaluation; and he had no way of knowing the inner disciplines by which they lived.