The Lying Days (26 page)

“Nonsense, we didn't nearly knock anyone down. Where is she?”

I turned to look through the rear window at Mary coming hesitantly toward us, unsure if we had stopped on her account, and she should approach, or for some other reason, when she would have the embarrassment of answering a signal that was not for her. I nodded my head vigorously at her.

But Charles suddenly reversed the car with a rush that brought us level with her and almost knocked her down again.

“Are you mad?”

“Well, it's quicker for us to go backward than for her to go forward.”

Mary stood at the window, smiling at his air of impulsive calm. Before her, I immediately felt a kind of pride in this young man; my indignation took on the purpose of showing him off. “I hope you don't always drive like this. Really!—Mary, why are you walking with all those parcels?”

“It's the dry cleaning for the people where I stay. I went down to the shop to get it, and when I got back I couldn't find my bus money.” She was smiling in apology.

“So what'd'you think you're going to do? Walk home?”

“I'm going into town to see if I can find my cousin at the factory where he works. He will lend me bus fare.”

“Where is this place?” said Charles. He had the patient, practical, uninterested tone of the white person willing to help a native with money or authority, so long as he is not expected to listen to any human details of the predicament.

“But I'll give you the money,” I said, and at once became flustered because I felt I should have said “lend.” “I mean, it's silly to go into town—He may not be there …? Charles—”

“Where does she live?” he asked again.

“Oh, in Mariastad—”

“Well, come on then. Hop in.”

“It's seven miles,” Mary told him first, quite simply, not getting into the car because she expected the distance would change his mind.

“I know where it is. Get in.”

And now I began to urge her too, feeling a mild intoxication of possession of the young man and his car.

We went off with another roar, and she settled herself, very quietly as if anxious not to disturb, among the dust and rubbish in the back, clearing a space for herself carefully, and bending down to pick up a pile of pamphlets that had slid to the floor. We drove along one of the big highways that lead out of the city to the north and south, hemmed in with thousands of other cars, the faces of people drawing level behind glass, then snatched away as the lights changed. On the left hundreds of bicycles skidded through, Africans riding home with the yells and something of the exhilaration of skiers, and along every second or third block native bus queues lay like grayish caterpillars. Then there were villas on either side, the cars thinned, a roadhouse took some of them, and we passed our escort of bicycles, panting and riding hard now on the long stretch.

Many South Africans have never been inside a native location, but I had been with my mother to the Atherton one as a child, when the Mine held its yearly jumble sale of old clothes there, and I had also been with Joel to see the shantytown at Moroka and the experimental housing scheme near by, where the houses looked like sections of outsize concrete pipe and smelled cold as tunnels. One native location is much like another. Mariastad was one of those which are not fenced, but the approach to the place was the familiar one: a jolt off the smooth tarmac onto a dirt road that swerved across the veld; orange peel and rags, newspaper and bits of old cars like battered tin plates, knock-kneed donkeys staring from tethers. All around the veld had been burned and spread like a black stain. And all above the crust of vague, close, low houses, smoke hung, quite still as if it had been there forever; and shouts rose, and it seemed that the shout had been there forever, too, many voices lifted at different times and for different reasons that became simply a shout, that never began and never ended.

It was something I had known before and yet this time, with Mary Seswayo in the back of the car, it came to me as if the other times I had not seen it. As we bumped down into the township Charles and I stopped talking, as people do when they feel they
may have lost their way; animation died into awkwardness. Along the road, he had talked to me but not to Mary (I had turned every now and then to draw her into our chatter) but now he began to try and speak naturally to her, as you do when there is something you do not want a person to notice. The effort was not much of a success, and everytime he got an answer from her he seemed not to know what to do with it.

The car went slowly through the streets. It seemed to descend into noise that sealed us up inside it. Children changed the outline of the street, grouping in the gutters, skittering over the road, running alongside the car in a fluttering pennant of rags. When there are so many of them, they lose human value; you could have put out your arm and brushed them off, back into the road.

First we passed the administrative offices, orthodox and red brick in official decency beneath the shabbiness that had washed against them from all around, weathering them to the corrosion of poverty. Chipped brick, dirt and litter disguised the solidity and professional proportions of the place like the ivy a villa pulls over its glaring newness in a stately suburb. A flag clung round a pole, and two fat native policemen stood arguing with an angry man on a bicycle. Then the usual small street of shops, homemade and pushed tightly one against the other so that you felt that if the first were taken away, the whole lot would slowly keel over and collapse. Most were one-eyed, and the pocked whitewash was covered with signs, advertisements and exhortations, but one or two had crooked verandas—mud or homemade brick under the whitewash—and the shoemaker sat outside. The fish-and-chip shop had a proper shop front, and young natives hung about it, city hats pushed back on their heads, drinking Coca-Cola. After the shops there was an empty space covered with ashes, mealie cobs, dogs and children, and at the far end, a tiny church that was the utter simplification of all that has accreted round the architectural idea of a church through the ages: a peaked tin roof, a rounded wooden door, a horizontal bar across two poles with a piece of old railway sleeper suspended from it, and a smaller piece of iron dangling to clang it with.

We followed Mary's directions past decent little houses, each as big as a tool shed with a tin chimney throbbing out the life of the
house in smoke. In many of them the door was open and a sideboard or a real dining table in varnished wood showed. Outside their bare walls were ballasted with lean-tos made of beaten-out paraffin tins, homemade verandas like the shoemaker's and porches made of boxwood, chicken wire and runner beans. Each had two or three yards of ground in front, fenced with a variety of ingenuity, and inside mealies hung their silk tassels from the pattern of straight stalk and bent leaf. Some grew flowers instead; as it was winter, rings and oblongs of white stones marked out like graves the place where they would come up again. And some grew only children, crawling and huddling in the dust with only eyes looking out of dust.

Every third or fourth house there was a communal tap from which everyone fetched his water, and which no one troubled to turn off properly. A muddy stream trickled from the tap's soggy perimeter out into the street, and we felt it squelch beneath the tires.

Mary said: “Here it is—” and with quiet and insistent thanks was gone into one of these houses and the car was taking us past again before I had realized that this was the place in which she lived, the house that was individual because one of its components touched my own life. I looked with confusion at the other houses of the row, passing; all alike in the limitations of their humble differentiation. Into a house like this she disappeared: there was a chair on the veranda, I had at least seen, and a sword fern growing in half an old tire, painted silver and hanging from a wire. Inside there might be four chairs round a table on a piece of clean linoleum, pressed for space against a high bed with a white crocheted cover—like this house. Or this one—a kitchen dresser, one or two chairs, something tall and dark with a flash of white—could it be a piano? It might be, without incongruity, for there were not enough of these rooms for each to serve one designation: dining room, bedroom, kitchen—they were all simply living rooms in the plainest sense, whether you must work or cook or sleep or make love. I had suddenly a great regret and curiosity for the room of Mary Seswayo that I had not seen; I wanted to make it up for myself out of the raw material which I saw in flashes in the other houses all about me. Essentially, it could not be any different from my imagining, because there was nothing else, in a place like Mariastad, of which it could
have been composed. All else it could contain could be the little pile of books and notes from the University; and those I could supply, too. Just at this point we turned the corner and passed another tap, and there was a neat girl with an ordinary white enamel jug, fetching some water for herself. And at this the grasp of my imagination—that was really more like the entrance into another life through a re-creation of atmosphere, like an archaeologist restoring the arms, trinkets and drinking vessels to the excavated city, so that all that is needed is his own human step through the streets, and it will be as it was again—let go. She, too, came with a jug for water to a tap in the mud. So in how many other commonplaces that I take for granted in my own life shall I be wrong in hers? The thousand differences in the way she is compelled to dress, wash, eat—they piled up between us and I could scarcely see her, over the top. Sitting in the car I was conscious of a kind of helplessness, as if it were taking me away, further and further away, not only in distance. The car that at night must occupy a garage as big as these houses. The house Mary lives in. The bench she can't sit on, the water that must be fetched from the tap in the street, the physical closeness of her life to the lives of others; these differences in the everyday living out of our lives—could they end there? Or out of them did we love, want and believe, and so could the formula of our loving, wanting, believing, be the same? Further and further. I thought of her eyes into which I seemed not to have looked hard enough. I tried to remember them so that I could try again.

The young man Charles said: “I'm damned if I know how to get out.” And certainly, although he had turned and turned again, we were not leaving Mariastad the way we came in. We were now rocking and bumping through the rutted streets of what must have been the oldest part of the location. The closeness of the place, the breath-to-breath, wall-to-wall crowding, had become so strained that it had overflowed and all bounds had disappeared. The walls of the houses pressed on the pavement, the pavement trampled into the street, there were no fences and few windows. Fires in old paraffin tins burned everywhere, and women stood over them among the screaming children, cooking and shouting. I was accustomed to seeing Africans
in ill-fitting clothes that had belonged to white people first, but these people were in rags. These were clothes that had been made of the patches of other clothes, and then those patches had been replaced by yet others. They must have been discarded by a dozen owners, each poorer than the last, and now, without color or semblance of what they had been, they hung without warmth, fraying in the fierce flicker of flames that seemed greedy to eat them up, return them at last to the nothing their frailty had almost reached. The children were naked beneath one garment cast off by a grownup; streaming noses and gray bellies to show that under the old army jacket there was something alive instead of a cross of sticks to frighten birds.

All movement seemed violent here. The lift of a woman's elbow, stirring a pot. Their red eyes when they looked up. Their enormous, yelling laughter above the smoke. The grip of their bare feet on earth worn thin as the rags they wore. The men went about as if they were drunk, and perhaps some of them were; the strong, fermented smell of kaffir beer fought with the smoke.

“Christ, what a place,” said the young man, annoyed with himself for losing his way. Some of the people stared curiously through the smoky confusion as we passed, and children yelled, Penny! Penny! jeeringly. Behind the crooked outline of their mean roofs held down with stones and pumpkins a magnificent winter sky turned green and bejeweled, and as it arched away from their gathering darkness the hovels seemed to crawl closer to the earth beneath it, and their tins of fire became the crooked eyes of beasts showing. I was afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of in the people, no menace in their shouts or their looks: like their shacks, their bodies, they were simply stripped of gentleness, of reserve, all their bounds were trampled down, and they only moved or cried out in one need or another, like beasts. Yet I was afraid. The awfulness of their life filled me with fear.

He said: “What a noisy lot of devils they are, eh?”

But I did not answer and he was so busy peering his way through the unlighted streets that he did not notice. On the banks of a trickle of stream that smelled of soda and rotting vegetables, and that, in
the light of the car, showed the earth caked with dried soap scum, Mariastad petered out. We followed a man on a swaying bicycle over a bridge and drove up a rise to the main road.

“Light me a cigarette,” he said. I found the packet and some matches and lit the cigarette in my mouth. As I handed it to him I looked back over my shoulder and saw Mariastad, a mile away. It rose in smoke and the pale changing light of fire like a city sacked and deserted behind us.

Presently he put his hand lightly on my thigh, just above the knee, and squeezed it gently once or twice as if he were trying a fruit. Then with an air of calm decision he stopped the car at the side of the road, right under a street light, and kissed me with deliberate passion. I felt, as I always did when someone kissed me for the first time, what a stranger he was, and how far, in our mingled lips and saliva, we were from each other. We sat back in our own corners of the car and he said: “Can't you stay over in town tonight? It's so late as it is.”