Occasion for Loving Page 19

  She did say, with the rudeness of fear, “I don’t want to be private secretary in my own house, Boaz old dear.”

  “Len, I suspect you’ve got your shoes off under the table.” Tom was referring to a report in the morning paper that Rhodesian Africans had started a campaign to give up wearing shoes because “that was the custom before the white man came”.

  “Why stop at shoes? My ancestors didn’t wear trousers either.” He buttered a piece of bread as if it were the object of bored distaste.

  “That’s why I don’t understand politics,” Jessie said. “They never function at my level. Whatever goes on is either rigged by big money and diplomats or clowned about in the streets. Nothing in between seems to work.”

  Ann pretended to lift up the cloth: “And he’s got knobbly toes, into the bargain!”

  “Shaka’s warriors certainly wore sandals,” said Tom. “I don’t know about any others—Boaz? What d’you say?”

  Gideon’s voice, once he had begun to speak, went on through interruptions without emphasis and with an indifference to whether it was lost or not. “People must have something, something not hard, that anyone can do. It may be meaningless (“Not meaningless, this,” Boaz said) but that doesn’t matter much. Take off your shoes. You don’t have to be able to understand what goes on at a meeting. You don’t have to read about it. You don’t have to pay two and six membership. Useless, harmless, but you feel you’re doing something.”

  “It’s not harmless,” Boaz said across the voice.

  “Take off your shoes. People can afford it. You don’t ask too much of them. You hold them together.”

  “Whenever you talk about people—the people—I have the feeling I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Len said to Gideon. “You don’t mean yourself, do you?”

  “Can’t ask them all the time to trust you, trust you. Let them have something they can do by themselves. Even if it’s meaningless and harmless.”

  “No, you never mean yourself.”

  Boaz leaned out across the table like the figure-head of a ship, his clear-cut lips shining wet from the gulp of wine he had just taken. “Not harmless. You know that. You know quite well what it is.”

  “Take off your shoes.” The voice said it to himself, for the sound of it.

  “Oh yes, not harmless at all. Exactly the same meaning as burning down a church or a school or a clinic or a cinema.”

  “Take off your shoes.” Gideon smiled at no one in particular, then gave his little chuckle, and fixed his consciousness of the room on Boaz, like a drunk choosing a point of focus. He said, suddenly, “An act of pure rejection.”

  “Exactly.”

  His cigarette was burning down in the crumbled bread on his plate and he picked it up, saw that it was almost dead, and brought himself back to the company with an effort. “Beautiful, stripped, pure—” The words were unsheathed, one by one, like a man giving up knives.

  “A pure rejection.”

  The phrase held for a second; and then all the talk round the table piled upon it and buried it. “Not harmless to the people who do it, I mean; I’m not talking of the act itself—” “An anomalous glorification of the past, qua past …” “Damned silly to identify …” “More than that, dangerous, you can’t substitute magic for political power …” “… step out of his shoes and out of his power, I suppose.” Everyone said what he always said, in one form or another, in every context, seizing automatically on what there was in the subject for them. For Tom it was institutions—the difficulty, for new, intensely nationalistic black states, of finding institutions of law, commerce, education other than those associated with former subservience. For Jessie it was the notion that people could externalise an influence by making some common object of use symbolic of it, and then getting rid of the object. Ann argued with Len about what the others were saying, and Boaz and Gideon tried to analyse how far it was possible for a political movement to rule with and not become ruled by the release of irrational instincts. “Of course it’s dangerous, but what can we do in Africa?—colonialism was dangerous for the whites, it couldn’t last without a pay-off coming sixty years or so later, but what could they do? We can’t look much further than getting what we want—” No one had noticed that the old man, Tom’s father, sitting at table, had become congealed in expression and posture as if, while all around him was noise, agitation and mobility, he would never move again. Tom took him quietly out of the room and murmured to Jessie as he came back and swung a leg over his chair to sit again, “Just one gin too many, I think—he’s lying down.”

  Len caught the domestic aside. “Passed out? Hell, he’s a nice old man.”

  When Gideon had gone home (in Ann’s car) and everyone was on the way to bed, Boaz came down again to the living-room, where Tom was making notes for a lecture he was supposed to give at a discussion club the next week. They sloshed brandy into two glasses that already had been used and began, at first deliberately, then carried away by real interest, a long discussion about a book on Chinese navigation pre-dating the Portuguese exploration of Africa. Jessie banged with a shoe on the floor overhead; they laughed, so loudly that she banged again. With the drop of their voices, the talk lost momentum. Boaz yawned until he looked quite groggy; he wandered about the room and paused, and wandered again. His face shone waxy and his eyes were hidden like a clown’s in the diamond-shaped darkness made by the recess of shadow under each eyebrow and the triangle of plum-coloured skin cutting down the line of cheekbone from beneath.

  “One thing I can’t stand,” he said, “the way he repeats a phrase or a sentence as if he gets some meaning out of it no one else does. That sort of withdrawal … You know what I mean—he makes you wait for him to return before you can go on with what you’re trying to say.” The moment he allowed himself to speak of Gideon, the brandy he had been drinking without apparent effect took hold of him like an arm hooked roughly round his neck. “If you knew the insane things that’ve been going on … the whole of tonight … ‘black bastard’ … Over and over again, to myself, while I was talking … like a maniac? ‘Black bastard’. All that filthy cock, man.”

  He stretched himself on the sofa, and when Tom finished his work he saw that he was asleep. His head was flung back on a raised arm behind his head. The fingers of the hand moved like tendrils in an effort against cramp that did not break through to consciousness; on the blank face of sleep traces of bewilderment and disgust were not quite erased round the mouth. Tom looked at him for a moment with the curiosity that is always aroused by the opportunity to contemplate suffering without having to respond to the sufferer, and then decided to leave him there, and turned out the light.

  Thirteen

  Gideon Shibalo got a message one day to go and see Sandile Makhawula at his shop. Sandile was his brother-in-law and they had remained friendly through Gideon’s long drift apart from his wife; in fact, all that was left of an old feeling and an old way of life was the uncomplicated ease Gideon felt on those occasional evenings when he remembered Sandile and dropped in on him. Sandile was light-skinned, rather an ugly yellow-brown, with narrow, tight-skinned eyes that added to his slightly Chinese look. He shaved his forearms and, resting on the counter in rolled-up shirt-sleeves, their smoothness, through which the roots of hairs showed dark like faults under tinted glass, betrayed a secret vanity. It was the sort of thing one could not guess at, so little did it match the rest of his character. The shop belonged to the father of the woman he had married; it had always sold sugar and mealie-meal and the cheaper brands of tinned food, as well as sweets and cigarettes and cold drinks—he had branched out into a radio repair business on the side. “Look at it,” he would say, indicating the old-fashioned wooden counter, worn away on top like a butcher’s block, the one small glass showcase filled with biscuits, cigarettes, cards of watch-straps, cotton reels and dead flies, and the valves and wires of dismantled radio sets lying among spiked slips of paper and tins of snuff. “I’m trying to make a go of
it …” He made fun of his own ambitions to run the place like a shop in town, yet he went on doggedly, persuading the old man to get a modern cash register one year, taking another year to get him to allow the fly-embossed Zam-buk advertisements to be taken down and replaced with three dimensional displays showing hair-straighteners and deodorants. He would have a house in Dube one day—like all the other well-off shopkeepers, Gideon used to tease him. “Well, maybe; what else is there for me?”

  He held Gideon in the special regard that people have for those who are free of their own ambitions; when he was with Gideon he felt that he himself was not entirely sold to and bound over by the goals set up for him and his kind. The fact that Gideon had slipped the moorings of his sister added to rather than detracted from this feeling of releaseful identification with Gideon, though Sandile had quite a strong family affection for her.

  Gideon did not know when exactly Sandile had mentioned that he wanted to see him; he was very seldom in the township these days, and he merely happened to hear, from a casual encounter, that Sandile had been asking for him; at least two weeks went by before he remembered about it again, and called in at the shop. It was Saturday, and the place was crowded, and knee-deep in children; everything they had been sent to buy went up on to their heads: bags of mealie-meal, beer-bottles filled with milk. The thin little necks of the girls wobbled once as the burden was settled into place. “Dumela ‘me.” Gideon pushed his way through gossiping women, and the fat ones smiled at him while the thin ones merely looked interrupted. Sandile was serving a sullen man in a leather cap with ear-flaps; the face was the thick, deadened face, greasy with drink-sweat, work-sweat, that you saw all over the townships. Sandile gave a little signal acknowledging Gideon, and when he was free for a moment called over, “You see how it is … come in.” He meant into the tiny store-room, a home-made lean-to strengthened like a fortress, at the back of the shop.

  Sandile scattered the children—importuning him with their demands for “Penny Elvies” (sweets named for the American rock-and-roll singer) or “Penny atcha”, an Indian pickle—by an exclamation ending in a loud click of the tongue at the back of the throat. They swerved away like hens.

  “The happy capitalist, the exploiter of the people,” said Sandile. “Christ, man, this goes on until seven tonight.”

  “How’s business?”

  “Ach, I want to knock out the wall, re-do the whole place, make it self-service; you know—little gate you turn round to go in, plastic basket to select what you want, little gate to go out. But you’d have to frisk them first, that’s the trouble. Turn them upside-down and shake them out. Specially the old ones with the big bozies; you’d be surprised what goes in in front there. Last week the wholesaler comes along with a lovely display card with razor blades. ‘Why don’t you put this up, it increases sales twenty-five per cent, we’ve proved it.’ —Our people are backward, man, everything’s got to be where they can’t even stretch for it.”

  “Come out for a drink,” said Gideon, consolingly.

  Sandile took a cigarette from him and sat down on a packing-case, leaving a broken-backed kitchen chair for him. “How the hell can I? The old man’s gone to fix up about his cousin’s funeral.”

  “Where’s Bella?” Sandile’s wife was a district nurse, working for the municipal health department, but on Saturdays she was usually free to help in the shop.

  “The baby kept her up all night. Have a cold drink?”

  “Coffee, that’d be fine.”

  Sandile looked put out for just a second, then called to the shop. A very black youth with an open mouth and eyes that reflected the lean-to like convex mirrors brought an open packet of coffee-and-chicory mixture with a brand-picture of a house in the form of a steaming coffee-pot. This house was clearer to Gideon than the memory of any of the rooms he had ever lived in; how many times as a child had he been sent to buy that packet with the coffee-pot house on it. Clara (his wife) had still used it, in the house in Orlando. Callie Stow ground her own beans, and at the flat there was always instant coffee of some special bitter kind; for years now he had been drinking the coffee that white people drank. The sight of the packet with the picture gave him the sensation of looking at an old photograph.

  “Half Nyasa,” Sandile said, of the youth. He was pumping a primus. “At least that’s my explanation. Dumb as he’s black, that’s all I can tell you. Don’t you know somebody for me? They can’t even measure out a shilling sugar without spilling. You could start operations for the recovery of waste sugar on this damned floor.” He stopped pumping and pointed in exasperation to the cracks in the floor-boards where, it was true, there was a dirty glitter, like mica. Suddenly he grew ashamed of his preoccupation with what—switching to objectivity, as he could—he thought to be the petty matters of shop-keeping.

  “So they’re thinking seriously about taking up this rent campaign?” he said. “Bella’s got an old aunt and she’s fallen months behind and been given eviction papers, and—yesterday it was—someone came from Congress and had a talk with her.”

  They talked politics for a while. The water boiled and Sandile made coffee. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping you’d come in sometime,” he said, spooning sugar into Gideon’s cup.

  “Hi, hi—” Gideon restrained him.

  “All right, I’ll take it.” He poured another cup and Gideon sugared it for himself. “I’ve been asking for you, but you haven’t been around. Nobody’s seen you.”

  “No, I know, I bumped into K. D. and he told me.” Sandile often had small plans or deals that involved Gideon—he had got Gideon’s record player cheaply for him, through one of the wholesalers, and he and Gideon borrowed odd sums of money from each other from time to time. This was the sort of thing they saw each other about. While Gideon put the cup of coffee to his mouth, Sandile said, “Clara was here. She was up here last week and she was talking to me a long time, and, well, she wants to come back to Jo’burg. It seems so, yes.” He was watching Gideon, embarrassed, yet alertly anxious, as if he hoped to disclaim responsibility for what he might have said.

  Gideon had just filled his mouth with the warm liquid and for the moment the impact of its taste, flooding his body, produced by far the stronger reaction. What is the word for nostalgia without the sentiment and the pleasure nostalgia implies? The flavour set in motion exactly that old level of consciousness where, in the house of the old aunt with whom he had been farmed out as a schoolboy, matriculation was drawn like the line of the horizon round the ball of existence; where, later, in the two neat rooms in Orlando, he had paid off a kitchen dresser and drawn “native studies” on cheap scarves for a city curio shop. Threshing, sinking, sickening—the sensation produced by the taste became comprehension of what Sandile was saying. He put down the cup. “What about her job?”

  Sandile shrugged and slowly took the plastic spoon out of the sugar; the damp brown stuff moved like a live mass.

  “I don’t see the sense,” said Gideon, with the face of a man discussing the fate of a stranger.

  “Well, she wants to come.”

  “To you?” Gideon said.

  Sandile looked at him.

  “It’s not possible. Anything else is not possible. It’s absolutely out, that I can tell you.”

  Sandile did not answer. Gideon wanted to get him to speak because he could not bear to have the matter, even in the abstract of words, thrust upon himself.

  “Bella knows that little girl—from the hospital, of course. She thought it was more or less off with you two, lately. She’s seen her with another chap, and so on.” Sandile took a deep breath and stopped.

  Gideon felt himself drawing further away every second; the cosy store-room with its high barred window, the deal table and the primus, the smell of paraffin and strong soap, the familiar face of Sandile and the taste of the coffee—a hundred doors were closing in him against these things.

  “Right out, I can tell you.” He wanted to say, “It’s all finished with, years a
go,” but he felt a horror of admitting that there was anything to talk of about himself and the woman who had been his wife. He said, “I haven’t even sent money for the child—not since about last January.”

  “I know. I’ve been letting her have something.”

  Gideon nodded. Sandile had never paid him the last hundred pounds for the car; it was fair enough.

  Gideon didn’t know how to go, but he could not stay, so he stood up, and looked without seeing round the lean-to. “So long, Sandile.”

  Sandile remained sitting, holding a stub of cigarette turned inward to his palm.

  “That’s all,” said Gideon.

  “O.K.,” said Sandile in deep uncertainty.

  The living presence of his wife, in another town, had never influenced Gideon; he felt neither tied to her nor free of her: she was a curiously negative factor. It did not seem at all odd that he occasionally spoke about his child, as if the boy belonged to him alone. Clara had been young and pretty, and it had been all right for a year or two, while she was a school-teacher’s wife. Like most African wives, she stayed at home when he went out at night. She was proud that he could paint a bit and pleased that this sometimes brought in some extra money.