Occasion for Loving Page 4

  “I did.” She added to Tom as they drove on, “Bruno used to take me to see the boys dancing sometimes on a Sunday. We just walked across the veld from our house to the compound.”

  “I can’t imagine Bruno doing an ordinary fatherly thing like that.”

  Jessie watched the tall gum-trees, the brick bungalows behind their hedges, the traffic circles filled with marigolds, as they drove through mine property. A candle, taken down into the past, swiftly threw light over the bulk and outline of what lay there; and then passed on, to be quenched by daylight.

  The cars skirted the compound—a rectangular barracks that presented blank walls to the outside world, and had all its life turned inward towards the quadrangle it enclosed—and came to a scene rather like a fair. A black man who filled out some sort of uniform with the afflatus of officialdom waved them to a level, grass-grown ground where a great many cars were already parked in neat rows. There were two flags flying; the restlessness of a close gathering was in the air. They trailed over the grass and up whitewashed steps to an amphitheatre partly covered by thatch. There were knots of white people about, wearing their city people’s fancy holiday clothing—the tight linen trousers, the dark glasses and bright shirts—and others with cameras were prowling and peering. Past a rope barrier there was a less homogeneously-dressed crowd of various kinds and colours—Indian families with their profusion of daughters, all pink and yellow nylon, and plaits of oiled black hair, city Africans with bicycle clips on their trousers and Bermuda straw hats with paisley bands on the backs of their heads, mine-workers who had strolled over from the compound but brought with them from much further off the faces, hairdress and blankets or ornaments of other countries in Africa. Just round the elliptical curve of the amphitheatre, on the left, duster-feathers waved; the backs of another crowd hid groups of dancers who were warming up in preparation for their appearance. There was a small rustic building marked REFRESHMENTS—ALL PROCEEDS TO NATIVE CHARITIES, and a white man at a table under an umbrella gave out programmes.

  It was all perfectly neat and clean and orderly. No need for the American and German tourists who, under their guide, obediently occupied a special block of seats, to fear contamination, embarrassment, or the heat of the sun. The Stilwell party filed in where they could; the shadow of the thatch dropped upon them, making them part of the drowned brightness, the blue-dimmed whiteness of those tiers where the white people sat. A hanging garden of faces—black and shining, on the far side of the little amphitheatre—looked on a tarred arena, black where the shade fell upon it; in the sun, a yellow slice of lemon thrown down, startling.

  The party twisted and chattered; Ann studied the programme notes and her questions and comments darted like swallows. Boaz kept saying to her, or explaining to other people that he had said to her, “You must realise that you’re not seeing the real thing at all.” “Oh I know, I know. I don’t expect it,” she said, the obedient pupil. But she was not ashamed of her eagerness to see the dancing, anyway.

  “If they dance, and they enjoy it, why isn’t that real?” A heavy-faced dark girl spoke crossly.

  Tom said, “What Boaz means is that these dances are usually part of elaborate ceremonies. Here you see them just as fragments, lifted out of their context.”

  “And changed!” someone added. “Hotted up to please the audience. They’ve learned to make a performance of themselves.”

  “The best one’s the gum-boot dance. You’ll love that.”

  People related, as people will, unique and wonderful chances by which they had seen the real thing.

  “But it’s nothing to do with the Chamber of Mines,” Boaz was protesting. “The blacks have always done it. The only difference is, it didn’t used to be organised for white people to come and watch. Jessie—isn’t that right?” The argument deferred to her. “When you saw these dances as a child,” Boaz asked her, “do you remember—what sort of impression did they make?” “Very little,” said Jessie, with a laugh. She thought a moment. “I don’t know. You know, the mine boys were not human to me.—Like a cage full of coloured parrots, screeching at the zoo. I watched them dancing and I walked home and forgot about them.” The black-haired girl raised her eyebrows and looked the other way; she had recently discovered the distinction of professing no colour feeling; she was surprised to find such things said among people in a set she aspired to—she had indeed adopted her present views because she wanted to join it.

  Jessie sank into the pleasant, Sunday mood of the crowd; the talk and argument of her friends went on half-heard about her, and her consciousness of self was lost, as it sometimes was when she was surrounded by the common mystery of human faces. The backs of men’s necks, the nostrils and mouth of a woman shown beneath the brim of a hat, a young girl tossing back her yellow hair as the fly of vanity stung her—Jessie’s consciousness became variously these, as the shadow of a cloud, travelling over a landscape, becomes now the shape of a hill, now the colour of a lake. When the dancing began, though she said to Clem and Elisabeth, who were giggling and scuffling, “Sit up straight and look,” she herself was not gathered to attention. A portly African in a white coat and glasses put on an easel a board on which the tribal name of the group of dancers was painted; when they had pranced and yelled and stamped for an allotted time, a shrill blast on his whistle cut them short, and they left the arena, while the name of another tribe was set up, and the next group of dancers came in. So the programme went on—sometimes the dancers began languidly, hesitantly, and worked up to a strong, sustained beat just in time to have it brought down, as if by a shot, by the whistle’s blast, sometimes they burst in in the full force of lungs and feet, and swept out again, undiminished. There were men on stilts who wore, rendered harmless by reproduction in cardboard and poster-paint, the terrible fetish-faces of medicine men’s masks. There were comedians, hoarse, noisy and tumbling, with the ugly faces of all clowns everywhere, who played to the black gallery, where their quips were understood and brought derisive yells and laughter. There was a choir in white drill pants and satin cowboy shirts who sang while their leader, wearing fringed chaps and boots, released and captured again a small cage of cowed white rats. Now and then the parody of the white man’s voice, yelling an order in the jargon of the mines, sent a murmur of delighted recognition through the white audience, who did not know in what light they were being represented, but were glad to be mentioned anyway. Many of the dances were pyrrhic, and the audience and the performers liked these best. With bits of coloured rag tied to old bathing-trunks, lemonade bottle-tops making do for anklets round the legs of those who no longer had strings of rattling seed-pods, and, in their hands, cow-skin shields and wooden assegais, the black men went through the savage motions of warring. They jumped and yelled and shuffled ominously; they found, in their breasts and throats, as the dance took them up, that dreadful sighing grunt that belongs to the ecstasy of death dealt out. They stamped so that a ripple of force passed along the ground under the seats of the watchers.

  Jessie registered the succession of dances mechanically, with half-attention; she had seen them often before, not only as a child, but as part of a dutiful “showing around” for visitors. Morgan was sitting not far behind her, but she thought about him as if he were not there, going over the five minutes she had spent with him in his room the afternoon before. The incident went up and down, like a balloon; now it seemed small and unremarkable; then another interpretation made it rise all round her. Yet while she was thinking of other things, her attention began to fix, here and there, upon what was going on before her eyes. There was a man whose muscles moved independently, like a current beneath the surface of his skin; marvellous life informed his ridiculous figure, and shook off the feathers and rags that decked him. Others emerged from and then were merged with the wild line of dancers. They pranced, leapt, grovelled and shook, taking on their own personal characteristics—tall, small; smooth, boy’s face or lumpy, coarse man’s; comic, ferocious or inspired—and then
adding themselves to, losing themselves in the group again. Their feet echoed through Jessie’s ribs; she felt the hollow beat inside her. The Chinese-sounding music of the Chopi pianos, wooden xylophones large and small, bass and treble, with resonators made of jam tins, ran up and down behind the incessant shrill racket of whistles. Now and then a man opened his mouth and a shout came out that is heard no more wherever there are cities; a voice bellowed across great rivers, a voice that bellies wordlessly through the air, like the trumpeting of an elephant or the panting that follows the lion’s roar.

  And it was all fun. It all meant nothing. There was no death in it; no joy. No war, and no harvest. The excitement rose, like a breath drawn in, between dancers and watchers, and it had no meaning. The watchers had never danced, the dancers had forgotten why they danced. They mummed an ugly splendid savagery, a broken ethos, well lost; unspeakable sadness came to Jessie, her body trembled with pain. They sang and danced and trampled the past under their feet. Gone, and one must not wish it back. But gone … The crazed Lear of old Africa rushed to and fro on the tarred arena, and the people clapped. She was clapping, too—her hands were stinging—and her eyes, behind the sunglasses, were filled with heavy, cold tears. It was no place to weep, she knew. This was no place to shed such tears. They were not tears of sentiment. They came from horror and hollowness.

  She held in her mind at once, for a moment, all that belonged to horror and hollowness, and that seemed to have foreshadowed it, flitting bat-like through the last few days: the night in which she had awakened twice, once to her own sleeping house, and once to that other time and place in her mother’s house; Morgan, lying shut away with his radio in the kernel of the afternoon. Her hand went out, and took another’s; it turned out to be the hand of Madge, her daughter, who never took her eyes from the dancers, and it was as cold as her own. Yet slowly it restored her to the surface facts of life, and she was able, at the interval, to troop out with the others, exchanging the dazed smiles of those who have just been entertained, and make her way to the rustic hut where the ladies of the mine were selling tea and cake.

  After the performance, Boaz wanted to have a closer look at some of the musical instruments. He wanted to see how the miners devised substitutes for the traditional materials out of which such instruments were made. The Africans grinned at him encouragingly while he turned their xylophones upside down, and they burst into laughter when he played one quite creditably. He lost himself; his sallow face closed with complete and exclusive interest. He kept up a patter, not addressed to anyone in particular. “These tins give quite a lively note, in a way. But you lose that light boum! quality, the round, die-away sound that you get from a proper gourd resonator. It’s important to find gourds of exactly the right size and shape to resonate xylophones.” Ann was taking photographs of the warriors with feather-duster tails. They lined up for the photographers like children in class. “Come on!” she wheedled. “Let’s have some life.” But they only stood more stiffly to attention.

  “The art of making some of these things is dying out, even in the kraals,” Boaz said. “Most of them were not originally home-made, in the sense that everyone made his own. There were men who were instrument-makers, and you ordered your timbila or mbira or whatever it was from them. Now the old chaps are disappearing, and the young chaps are busy acquiring other skills in the towns. In time, no one’ll remember how to make certain instruments any more.”

  “Well, these chaps seem to,” said someone.

  “Yes, but they come recruited from tribal life—reserves and so on. They weren’t born in the locations. And look how the instruments they make have changed! They’ve had to adapt them to the material they find around them, here. Tin cans. Store stuff. Soon they’ll be new instruments almost entirely.”

  “Ah well, that’s all right,” said Jessie, speaking suddenly. “Don’t you think that’s the best thing, Boaz?”

  He looked at the woman and spoke almost tenderly. “I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “In my job, I like to find instruments in their true form … But, of course, yes, it must be.”

  “It was marvellous!” Ann came running up to them. “Wasn’t it! I saw you clapping, Jessie!”

  “Madge was enchanted,” said Jessie. “The other two fidgeted and lost interest after a bit, but Madge never moved.”

  “Boaz,” said Ann, biting on the long, phosphorescent-pink nail of her thumb, and narrowing her eyes, “I want to see the real thing. You know? I want to go into the wilds and see—”

  “Oh of course,” he said. He always parried her, quickly became playful, joked. “Bongo-bongo, savage rites, secret ceremonies.”

  “What is it that you’d really like to do?” Jessie asked her curiously.

  And unexpectedly, the girl gave weight to the question. She hesitated, and then looked at Jessie honestly, and said, with a laugh, “Oh I like to find new things. Things I don’t know. People not like the people I know.”

  “Experience outside what you think you were meant for.”

  The girl laughed.

  “That’s just the sort of thing my mother and father said when I told them I was going to marry Boaz and that he was a Jew.”

  As they walked away, the ancient instruments of Africa struck up the Colonel Bogey march.

  Three

  A creature who did not exist any more, the girl Jessica Tibbett aged seventeen, long ago had spent Christmas weekend away at a resort with her mother and stepfather.

  Bruno Fuecht with his European sophistication and Mrs. Fuecht with the assumption of it that she had got from him did not have much taste for the Saturnalian side of the festival; as a rationalist whose only experience of faith had been faith in the political creeds current in his youth, the true occasion did not move him, and although Mrs. Fuecht had once been a devout Anglican, she seemed to feel that through her marriage to him she had lost the right to the meaning of Christ’s birth. Jessie did not remember ever having been taken to church at Christmas (perhaps she had gone once, when she was very small and her father was still alive?) and apart from the excitement in the air, the coloured lights in the streets and the presents in the shops, the occasion was simply a public holiday like any other.

  That year they decided at the last minute that they wanted to get away—the phrase was Mrs. Fuecht’s, and implied a press of guests and gaiety. But the truth was that silent lack of harmony in the house, the deadly peace between three people who did not even guess at each other’s thoughts, became unbearable at the combination of this time of year and this time of the girl Jessie’s life. Even the most vulgar side of Christmas—the family booziness and the money-making sentiment of the shops—was a reproach to them for their lack of human weakness, their disqualification to stand in the comfort of the herd. And the child’s emergence as a grown-up, no longer only victim but also witness of the unexplained state, was something all three must seek protection from in the anonymous safety in numbers of some place, such as an hotel, where they did not belong.

  None of this was admitted between them, but it set all three going: Mrs. Fuecht said they should get away; Fuecht intimated that he was agreeable if not much interested, and the young girl got busy eagerly telephoning various resorts. At last, one was found that could offer accommodation of some sort.

  When they got there, it was at once clear why the place had room for them. It was a gimcrack building, begun perhaps two or three years before and already falling to pieces before it was completed. The pink colour-wash on the outside was deeply stained with the red earth that spread for miles around it. The windows and doors were set in out of true, and ants wavered along the cracks in a row of brick pillars put up to support an upper verandah that had never been built; a twist of steel cable stuck up out of each pillar like a wick. The dining-room stank of Flit, the lounge was furnished with american cloth chairs showing their springs, and a black pianola. The hotel was full of people like themselves who had not been able to get in anywhere else, and when the
Fuechts arrived they were told that there was only one room available for the three of them—an old narrow bed was brought in for Jessie.

  The ugliness of the place would have meant nothing to the girl if she had found there the way to play, to begin a life for herself in the grown-up games of the young people seeking amusement. If she were to dance there, to be teased by young men, to learn to use the fashionable slang of the girls, to rush about in the happiness of laughing too wildly and staying up too late, then she would remember it as a marvellous place, the mere scaffolding of joy. She put on one of the sundresses she had made herself, but though she looked like any one of the group of young people who already, the first afternoon, had clustered together, she did not know how to talk to a boy, or how to form one of those alliances with a girl that boys seem to find an irresistible challenge—her only piece of equipment was the dress.

  Some members of the group actually came from the mining town to which the Helgasdrift mining community belonged, and Jessie knew one or two of them by name. She had even been in the same class, before her mother took her out of school to have her taught at home, with one of the girls, Rose Price. Rose Price was there in a foursome that obviously included her particular boy friend; she waved a friendly recognition from where she sat swinging her legs on the verandah wall, but the greeting did not come from the distance, a few yards of cement, that separated the party of young people from the Fuechts passing on their way to lunch; it came from the distance of the girl’s independence and confidence.

  There were weevils in the porridge next morning and Fuecht pushed his plate away and lit a cigar, not taking his attention from the newspaper; his indifference to discomfort was not stoic or good-natured but due to the fact that he did not expect anything better of arrangements made by his wife. She was well aware of the hurtful nature of his lack of complaint. Jessie had the cheerfulness and automatic sense of anticipation that were simply there for her when she woke up every day, and she walked out between the unfinished pillars with her mother into the haze of a bare, brilliant morning. The shores of the irrigation lake were flat. Stony veld with the bald red earth showing through over-grazed grass spread to the horizon. Some black children clambered on the wheel-less hulk of an old motor car that had come to rest there; it was picked clean of everything but rust, like the horny shell of a beetle that has been eaten out by ants. A single bird of prey hung in the vacancy of a drought sky. As the mother and daughter stood there, the young people set out in a hired boat, oars waving and yells rising as they exhorted each other to sit down. Slowly distance smoothed out their erratic course and they became a fleck no bigger than the bird.