Occasion for Loving (19 page)

The room had the disturbed look of a place that is subjected to quiet neglect alternating with vigorous raids on its resources. A suitcase stuffed with papers had burst a lock on one side, there were paper-backs embossed with candle-drippings beside the bed, four or five different tobacco tins, some bottles of pills and a broken chain that had once been on the door. Sol sat in a smart yellow canvas chair shaped like a sling; it was of the kind advertised for “modern leisure living”. The black iron bed, book-shelf sagging under canvases as well as books, the cupboard where the girl Ida unearthed a tin of pilchards—each held objects that had been turned up in the rummage for something else, and never found their way back where they belonged. The window was overgrown with a briar of strips of wire and tin provided as burglar-proofing by the landlord, and as it gave no light or air anyway was covered with a strange little wool carpet. A primus, a basin of pots and dishes, and a big old typewriter, filled up the space between the legs of a table; there was a clean square on the top where the record player usually rested. The back of the door was covered with a huge travel poster reproducing a Romanesque madonna, and magazine cut-outs of Klee, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Sidney Nolan and the Ife bronzes curled away from the walls. When they fell in an autumn of their own they were replaced by others, but the cutting of a photograph that had appeared in a newspaper when the Italian scholarship award
was announced was stuck back again, and was already yellowed and brittle.

Ida went to the corner shop to get bread and polony and Shibalo took out the brandy bottle. Sol was talking politics—it was about some point that was going to come up for discussion at a meeting that he had wanted to canvass Shibalo—and looking over Shibalo's newspaper at the same time. “There you are”—he chopped the side of his hand against a column. “There you are”—he took the glass of brandy and began again—“they want a conference. ‘Liberals and Progressives urge consultation with all races.' There it is. What do we want to talk about, for Christ's sake? Jabavu talked to them, Luthuli talked to them, talk, talk, what do we want to talk for when we've got the whole continent behind us?”

“A long way off,” Shibalo suggested. “Rhodesia, Portuguese East in between—” Sol stared at him to indicate that he knew better, whatever he might be saying: “Going, going, man.”

“You think Nkrumah's going to sail round to Cape Town and land troops?”

“
No
, man. I didn't say that. You know what I think. I think the guns are going to come in through Bechuanaland and Basutoland and the U.N.'s going to take over in South West.” He stopped at the obstacle of his own impatience because these things had not happened already.

“And the guns are going to come in from Southern Rhodesia and the Portuguese to blow those guns out.”

“So what do you want? You think we'll have a nice talk to the whites and they'll push the Government out and hand over to us?”

“Look—even when you're being smart, you don't get it straight. Most of the whites don't want to talk to you, they wouldn't be ready to talk to you until you've opened their brains with a panga. Make no mistake about it, they won't waste any words on the blacks. They don't want any palaver with black leaders because there are no black leaders so far as they are concerned, understand?
They
are the ones who decide what's going to happen to us. Where we're going to live. Where we're going to work. What bloody stairs we'll put our stinking black feet on—talk! My God, it's only a miserable handful without a place up there in the Government between them, who want to
talk
. The others want to shoot it out, man, once they can't wangle it out any longer with shit about homelands. But when it comes to shooting it out, stop dreaming, that's what I'm telling you chaps. We may need sticks and stones and whatever we can lay our hands on, as well as the promises from our brothers out there.”

Sol, who spent his nights in such talk, could not lean forward in confirmation of points as he wished to, because the yellow chair was one that held its occupant rigidly back in repose, and tipped him out if he tried to make it more accommodating. But his face broadened in the relief of agreement, now and then, and now his lips lifted away from his big, uneven teeth and his mouth opened in a gesture of receptiveness, warm, encouraging. He and Shibalo held one another's eyes for a few moments, drank the brandy, and felt the comfort and reassurance of an old complementary friendship. When Ida came back with the food they were loud in talk again.

“I don't want blood! I don't like blood!”

“… no, be honest, man—what's the real reason? Why have you stayed with Congress, why have I stayed? No, it's not because of non-violence—”

“I don't want blood! I don't like blood!” Sol got carefully out of his chair and took another brandy; this was one of the interjections he always murmured.

“We want guns, like everyone else. We're prepared to fight with guns. We're waiting here for guns, like manna from heaven. We've got round to feeling we can't do anything without guns, isn't that so? The only difference is that Congress doesn't say this out loud, and the Africanists do.”

“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.

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.