Occasion for Loving (18 page)

She said precisely, “I said that you'd have had to discover sometime that you can't do anything for yourself, and perhaps now was the time—that's all.”

He gave his chuckle, and said sourly, “Thank you very much, but I don't feel particularly philosophical about not being able to do anything for myself. Whether it's the time or not.”

“No one would suggest you should,” she said. “It just seems to me that now you've had clearly shown to you that the only thing that means anything if you're an African is politics. You've made the only choice. You don't need philosophy; you've got necessity.”

“You're not a painter,” he said.

“No, I am not a painter—” the tone of her voice granted a demand she respected but could not share. “What's the good of saying that it's terrible that you can't be one? There it is. You've got politics, that's all. Why drink yourself silly, mooning over the other? You're a man of your time. Different times, there are different things to be done, some things are possible, some are not. You're an African, aren't you?”

He laughed but she pressed her chin back firmly: “Having a black skin doesn't automatically mean that, you know.”

As he got to know this woman he made another discovery—one that she would not have been aware of, since she had no more self-consciousness than vanity. Although she shared a kind of life that was familiar to him, some outward identity of outlook as manifested in their being present together in the same room, smiling at the same remarks, at a party, for example, or sitting at the same conference table (as they were later to do) on a political action committee—this outward identity of outlook gave no indication of her control and direction by forces of whose possible existence
he was not even aware. He had never known anyone before who was a rationalist by conviction and education. He was aware, dimly, that his actions were moved by the huge wheels of the need to create, to be free, and, clearly, the small wheels of wanting and taking. But for her nothing was empirical, no instinct was without sound objective backing, no action ran wild and counter to herself. All was codified, long ago, beginning when, as a child, she had listened to discussions between her free-thinking, Victorian socialist grandfather and her missionary father. As children are said to select automatically the foods that their bodies require, she rejected the faith of her father for the tenets of her grandfather, and went on to university to read political philosophy. Then she had studied labour organisation in England, and economics in Sweden. She was one of those who take an actual hand in rigging up the framework of civilisation; she had worked in refugee camps in Europe after the war, and in North Africa later, and had run an adult education scheme among African farm workers in Rhodesia. In South Africa she had written surveys of indentured and migratory labour for a world organisation, and was a standard figure among the organisers of various campaigns for civil rights that came into existence time and again, sometimes comparatively flourished and sometimes did not, and at last were banned, anyway. She had taken out South African papers at the beginning of the Fifties and so could not be deported; but she had had, of course, a spell in prison during one of the States of Emergency declared in times of African unrest.

There were books in her house on butterflies and architecture, cave paintings and birds, as well as the sociology and history and politics you would expect. It seemed to Shibalo that she had books on everything; for her it was not that the birds were simply there, flying around, mushrooms came up in the veld after rain. She possessed the world twice over; once as a natural phenomenon, a second time as a filing cabinet in which all creation existed again
in the form of a name and description, all concurrent, all within the compass of one man's experience. He was aware of this second possession as some kind of power over life; one he didn't have, though he'd got his B.A. at Fort Hare, years ago.

Callie Stow darned his socks and thought nothing of waiting for him on a public street corner; but who would have dreamed that this woman with her tweed skirt and sensible shoes, and her calm white head (he thought of it, all his life, as “the professor's head”), was getting into the small beige Austin driven by her lover? He was not unattracted by her, either; it was again a first time, the first time he had desired a woman mentally, been drawn to her through the processes of her thinking. In the end, the very thing that had made the open relationship possible killed it off, for him. He did not feel like her lover; she came out of prison and he came from “underground” where he had been lying low for a while, and she said, “Hullo my dear, it's good to see you,” with the “ui” sound in “good” that he remembered so well. It was all right to say it, but he suddenly felt cheated and disappointed beyond words. He did not know what he wanted; he had not known it was not this. He moved away from her, taking with him a certain discipline of mind, an ability to get at arm's length from himself, that he had got from her but that he could make use of only intermittently, since it was acquired and not inherent; it continued to be most easily at his command only when he found himself in her company or in the set within a set in which he had moved with her. In time he began to see it as an act that he could do to show how easy it was, really, to belong with them.

White friends like the young advertising men at the flat, who were not much interested in politics except as a subject for argument, enjoyed a black man's joke at their own expense, and in several places Shibalo had quite a success with the well-timed remark, confiding, marvelling, assuming a naïvety they knew to be assumed: “I knew a white woman once who kept a snake-bite
outfit in her car.” Pause: “Never drove through town without it.” (Of course he knew quite well that Callie Stow kept the snake-bite outfit in the car because she used to go climbing in the Magaliesberg on Sundays, with a woman friend.) They would laugh, but he would keep looking at them straight-faced and questioning: “I mean, a snake-bite outfit? The needles? The stuff in the little bottle? The knife to make the cut?” He shrugged and looked impressed. And they laughed indulgently at the calculatedness of the white man's way of living.

He emerged from the mat of people on one side of the street, darted across, was taken in at once in the line of the bus queue. He had spent two or three nights at the flat, and now was lost to his hosts, with their casual friendliness and the excess of equipment which even the most modest or hard-up white person seemed to find it impossible to do without. Ahead of him a woman sat on the kerb unravelling her baby from the wrappings it had worn on her back; it had a hot, wet, but not a bad, smell. People were eating single bananas, bought for a penny from an Indian with a push-cart. The intersection at the corner was one of the main exits from town and great processions of white men's cars and buses pulled up face to face. As the lights changed and the press began to move on, a drunk brown boy walked almost into a bus. He had straightened hair in a crew cut, wore a loose jacket, and carried at the end of his long arm a transistor radio covered with imitation crocodile skin. He wove through the sluggish cars, swinging back from one to bump the nose of another, and shouting modestly all the time, “Ya fuckin' bastard …”

The bus settled low on its wheels as it filled up and then pushed a way into the traffic. Gideon Shibalo's body adjusted itself to the pressure and jar of other bodies like the automatic accommodation of muscles to a bed whose discomforts are so familiar that they have acquired a certain comfort of their own. He read
a column of newspaper between the angle of someone's jaw and a dusty shoulder. The shriek and chitter of penny whistle music came from a loud speaker down on the heads of those, like himself, who occupied standing room; he looked up from the print along the lightly bobbing heads, seeing the amber of stale afternoon sun show dusty on the wool of the bareheaded ones; he thought: like the pin-heads of mould. If you saw us from high enough we would populate the earth like the furry patch spreading on a bit of cheese. He was smiling as he turned back to the paper. The smells of cheap soap, dirty feet, oranges, chips, and the civet smell of the perfume on a girl spooky-faced with white women's make-up, were soon overcome by the warm, strong sourness of kaffir beer, given out from the pores of the men and shining on their faces like a libation.

As he walked through the township he called out to people he knew, stopped to talk, and, as the home-comers dispersed along the streets, passed for whole stretches, before houses, boarded-up shops, a church with uneven windows, a dry-cleaner's, a coffin-maker's, a men's hairdresser's, the insurance agent and the herbalist, without seeing what he passed, though he avoided surely the sudden ditches that sagged down beside the streets, the zigzag of brats and dogs and the occasional mule. He did not see all this, but he could have sat down in a room anywhere on earth and drawn it. If it were to be pulled down, bulldozed and smoothed flat for other occupants, he would not see it any less clearly, or forget a single letter of the writing on the hairdresser's sign that got smaller as space on the board ran out. For years, up until the time the passport was refused, he had hated all such places, but once the passport was refused, once he began to spend most of his time among whites, the strong feeling died away. The passport had slammed in his face; lethargy can produce an effect outwardly very like content. He was drinking a lot then, and the township, with what he had thought of as its muck-heap tolerance, its unbearable
gregariousness, its sentimental brutality, sheltered him. You could die of self-pity in those places; no one would harry you into feeling ashamed, or flog you on to your feet with bull about what you owe yourself, the way whites do to each other.

His relationship with the Stow woman was one that laid great emphasis on self-respect, and yet for him the real fillip of self-respect came when he was finished with her; it seemed possible to live again quite simply, without making a lot of talk about it. He was back at his teaching job, his lousy job; the crowded faces of hungry children facing his own every day; the timidity, earnestness, self-importance and pomposity of the other teachers in the staff-room, with their consciousness of themselves as “educated”. They were very conscious, too, that he was an “artist”, and reminded friends that he was a colleague of theirs. Hadn't he competed with white artists and won a scholarship to go to Italy? In the city, too, in the white houses and flats where he was welcome, he was always accepted as a painter—“the one who was supposed to go to Rome”. He did not paint any more but he realised that this did not matter. It would not matter if he never painted again; he could live for the rest of his life, in the townships on the fact that he had once painted something that competed favourably against white artists, in the city on the fact that he was both a painter who had achieved notice overseas and a black man. The idea coldly frightened and fascinated him. It seemed the real reason why he could not paint. He chuckled over it and at the same time the fact of his amusement was the confirmation, the finish—let him laugh; he would never paint anything again.

After he had turned away from Callie Stow, like a man who goes out for an evening stroll and never comes back, he had come to see his own old view of his home as as inaccurate as hers: she thought of the townships as places exalted by struggle; like treasure saved from the rest of the plundering world in a remote cave, she believed the Africans kept love alive. He went about
the townships again now almost as he had worn the coating of streets there as a child, without any moral or spiritual conception of them. He went in from the white world like an explorer who, many times bitten and many times laid low with fever, can go back unthinkingly into territory whose hazards mean no more to him than crossing a city street.

His room was far down from the terminus. Shoes scuffed and twisted against the uneven ground so that by the time you got there you had taken on again the dust and shabbiness of the place, you were given protective colouring. The room itself was in a row added behind a house that was solidly built for a location, a brick house with a verandah. A piece of bald swept ground before it was fenced in with scrap—railway sleepers, bits of corrugated iron, chicken-netting—and a dog on a chain attached to a wire that ran the length of the fence raced barking from end to end of the scope of its existence. The owners of the house, the old woman and her husband, sat on the verandah behind this fierce frieze and added figures on bits of smoothed sugar bag. There were tins of fire in the yard and the small children called out, some even in English, “Hello”, while the bigger ones, who were no longer friendly and had not yet learned the substitute of politeness, took no notice of who came or went.

Ida was in the room; he heard her gentle, breathy voice with the sound of agreement in it as he put his foot on the thick doorstep. Some shirts and socks were lying on the bed; she had a key and must have brought his washing. Sol was there too, a friend who drove a dry cleaner's van. He challenged, with pleasure: “You're not easy to get hold of, man! I've been here twice, everything locked up. I met the old man and he said he hadn't seen you for two days.”

“Yeh, I know.” Shibalo grinned. He was looking round the room with the roving interest of one who wants to keep up with whatever life has been going on in his absence. “Did Bob do anything about the record player?” he said to the young woman.

“Well, I don't know. I haven't heard from him. He might have tried to get hold of you.”

“Night duty?” he asked her.

She shook her head and moved her feet so that she could admire her patent shoes. “Day off.”

“Where're you people going to eat?” Sol asked.

“I've eaten at my sister's already,” the girl said.

“Well, what about it, then?” Sol gestured as if to set her about preparing a meal. She laughed, “I don't think there's anything.”