The Lying Days (34 page)

But Jenny and John were regarding the place perfectly seriously; I could see that. They were looking around just as they did when by some chance they found themselves in a typical “nice” middle-class home in one of Johannesburg's fashionable northern suburbs. “It's hardly the sort of thing to interest progressive people—I mean, I should think that if they have any politics at all they're likely to be anarchist and antisocial.” Jenny bent her head to me in the confidential deprecating tone with which she would point out a built-in cocktail cabinet or a baby crib hung with lace and ribbons. “… The obverse side of this is, of course, Houghton,” John was saying to Herby. As a Jew who, by marrying a Gentile girl from England, had completed his assimilation in a society that held as one of its basic tenets a complete absence of race-consciousness, he made his Jewish origin a guarantee of good faith which allowed him to speak of the Jews in a manner which would not have been considered acceptable in a Gentile with the “right ideas.” “These are the children of Market Street merchants, I'll bet. Papa makes a hundred thousand in soft goods, there's a swimming pool and a tennis court and two Buicks, and the kids start up this sort of thing. Petit Trianon of the bourgeois. But you'll notice it's not the rousing drinking songs, the lively dancing and the open-air eating places they try to re-create. Those are in their racial memory, too, but they want to forget them. Their fathers want to forget those; they've spent thirty or forty years piling up money to put them at a distance from everything that was in their lives when they were simple oppressed people in Europe. But their suppression of their working-class origin creates a guilt feeling in the kids which goes the usual way—it manifests itself somewhere else. Here it poisons their healthy fan
tasy; when they want to play at being poor it's not the vigorous, hopeful proletariat they ape, it's the miserable, nihilistic café life of the dispossessed exile. Forgetting one bad memory, they ‘remember' a worse one: they want the darkness, the instinct to hide away, to meet secretly and talk in whispers, of their brothers who survived concentration camps.—The concentration camps for which our Houghton friends have a certain moral responsibility because they were the product of a Fascist-Capitalist society much like the one in which
they
are making their money. …”

The girl whose coat had been lying on the mattress we had taken apparently noticed WC had commandeered her place, and came flying up to see if her coat was still there. She was a bright-haired girl unfashionably dressed in a print frock, and her rounded breasts, not divided and pressed into a uniform pointedness by the American brassière that was accepted as a decree of desirability by Johannesburg women of all classes, suggested a farm girl. She was panting and warm from the dance and the twist and pressure of her body against her rumpled belt and the seams of her sleeves as she caught up the coat had something of the sensuous emanation of the bodies of children sweaty with hard play. She seemed to make nonsense of what John was saying. Not because she was Afrikaans, obviously poor, and neither suffering from nor even sufficiently burdened with sophistication to know that there was such a thing as a guilt feeling, but because she was in a moment of completely unthinking living, and he, a young, good-looking man, was capable only of dry observation.

I felt again the sense of drift, of alienation from the abstractions coming out of people's mouths—my own and others—that came to me sometimes at the highest point of a discussion. It would seem to me that the creaking ropes that attached talk to living raveled out with a thin snap and what I was listening to and saying with such intensity floated away as unconnected with my living being as a kite to the earth from which its string has been cut. Now I felt myself living and aware as part of the dank, dusty dark where contact with other men and women was the brush of a hand or the momentary warmth of a thigh bumped against you, rather than speech. The way they managed to dance on the rough floor, cavorting breathlessly, or
pressed together, the girl's head limp on the man's shoulder, the man's face turned to her hair, in the spell of concentration desire puts suddenly upon people, gave the tomblike place a contrast of warm-blooded life, a sort of human impudence which made the air sensual. I felt closer to the young Afrikaans girl than to the friends with whom I lived.

Herby, too, seemed slightly excited by the Cellar, and gave only a distracted half-attention to John. He had managed to get some wine. There were no glasses so we had to gulp it out of the bottle, and it became clear from the teasing way he pressed it upon me and kept asking me what I thought of the place, that he intended to neglect the girl friend and attach himself to me. When he pulled me up to dance I found myself looking at the line of his jowl, the thick skin uneven with shallow shining holes like the bubble holes in a slice of cheese, and noting without pity or regret his complete lack of attraction and the way my body automatically held well away from his and even my hand, loosely in his, kept a withdrawn formality of its own. He would think that we were dancing like this out of respect for me because I was not an “easy” girl and he would not believe that I would dance pressed close with my legs interlaced with a man's like the people around us. He would go on for years thinking this about all the girls of his own world, all the girls who were proud and good-looking and able to talk on his own level of intelligence: that casual love-making was only to be had where he got it, from girls who were inferior and did not interest him outside the relief of sex.

While I was thinking this about him and we were dancing he was talking to me and I was answering with a certain exertion of charm which was a little unkind, but which the atmosphere brought out in me almost without my volition. Every time we danced near the stair he would crane his neck to see the people still coming in although the place was already crowded, and when this had happened several times he explained: “Isa's having some friends and she said she might come along. I promised I'd keep a look out so's I could get them in.”

It seemed a very long time before they came.

They won't come, I kept telling myself, make up your mind
they're not coming. I never took my eyes off the stair, through the well of which people appeared feet first, so that sometimes they paused with only the bottom half of their bodies visible and I had to wait to make sure that those were not the thin calves of Isa, the brogues of Paul. Jenny said: “Oh good! Do keep a watch out, Herby? They may not see us in this dingy hole.” But I did not know whether I wanted them to come or not: in case Paul should be with another girl; in case he should see me in the context of dancing with Herby. Yet the fact that he might be coming was hardly the surprise of something unimagined, to me. He had been in my mind in the power of his absence all the evening; my sympathetic pleasure in the atmosphere of the place, my warmth toward the odd-looking young men and the cheap, yearning girls, was the softening toward all human frailty that comes from one's own sudden involvement in wanting and loving. Even the cold appraisement of the accepted for the outsider which I had given poor Herby had been really a measure of Paul's irresistibility, of the eagerness of my response to Paul rather than the nonexistence of my response to Herby.

When they did come it must have been at a moment when politeness had forced me to look away from the stair to answer someone, for suddenly the American boy whom I had seen once with Edna Schiller caught Herby by the shoulder and said exasperatingly: “Good God.—You're a bloody fool, Herb? We been battling half an hour to get in without your fraternity pin.” Herby broke out in fusses and apologies like a hen flying up off the nest but before he could convince the American that we had been watching, the rest of the party pushed their way up headed by an Isa stimulated by the argument at the door and glinting sharply, in the dimness and her dark dress, with earrings and some kind of broad metal belt. Her quick eyes and the whiteness of her small face and hands caught the light in the same way as her jewelry; darkness did not put her out, make her a vague shape and scent like the other women. The whole force of her personality was defined against the softness, a little knife showing steely and keen in a wicked ripple on dark ground. With her was Paul and a big, beautiful blonde girl.

We looked at each other for a moment like people who look
across the water between the deck of a ship and the quayside and then he came over to me and sat down next to me. I had made some sort of conventional laughing greeting to him as well as to the others, but though he had answered the rest with his usual fluent gaiety, he had said nothing to me. He leaned across me to speak to them and his hand pressed down firmly on my thigh as he did so. The gesture was not expedience. The grip of his thumb and his four fingers on my flesh made that clear.

When the music started again he got up and held out his hand for me. He edged a way for us through the groups of men who stood laughing, arguing for attention around slowly smiling girls, and neither resisted nor moved as you pushed past, and as we went through a gauze of thin light I saw a girl turn her head swiftly to look at him; a look that opened her lips and showed a glint of teeth, like the hidden pistil in the softness of a flower. We were buffeted by the soft, blind shapes on the floor; now and then a voice said lightly—sorry! All the ugly, mysterious place turned slowly round us; Christ, the bulbous nude, the candles in their tin holders, the vents high up on the wall that, as you passed beneath them, breathed the fresh night like a queer reminder. Men without girls stood watching the dancers, their hands hanging as if something had just fallen from them.

My one hand lightly touched against the texture of Paul's jacket and the other held his, a warm hand, not thin, in which you felt the bones. He said: “I saw a friend of yours today. Joel Aaron.”

“Oh, where?” I asked with pleasure, hardly knowing what he said.

“Bumped him in town.” When he wanted to talk, he had to press his chin back and down away from me, looking at me along his small nose with the beautifully curved nostrils. “I didn't know you knew him. But he seems to know all about you.”

I said: “He's the best friend I've ever had—” It sounded lame and almost insincere. I arched back from Paul a little to give what I had put so poorly the emphasis of my look.

But he was looking at me, smiling, ignoring my look. “Is he, is he. …” he murmured, and drew me back to him.

“Yes …,” I said, and it no longer seemed to matter what we had been talking about. Under the flow of cold air from the vents he dropped his head and kissed me delicately and passionately.

We moved round and round, slowly, among the others. I was sunk in the voluptuous relief of leaning against his body: ah, how I wanted this, I kept saying to myself, how I waited for this from you. A kind of midnight frenzy was on the place now. Smoke made the dark mist and the candlelight radiance, and the lonely young men were a little drunk. Two traffic policemen had wandered in and, with some hazy notion of keeping in with the law, were being made much of. Marcel carried a demijohn of wine above the crush; the one policeman put his foot, with the calf gleaming militarily in its fine high boot, up on a bench. The other man stood jeering amorously with a girl who had put his peaked cap on her huge head of curls that danced like springs as she moved. As we passed we heard his deep voice speaking a coy Afrikaans, egging, insinuating.

Everyone looked at two girls who had begun to sway before each other, each holding the gaze of the other like cocks about to fight. A woman danced with her whole body droopingly suspended from her arms about a man's neck, her face sunk and eyes closed.

I smiled to Paul in the dark half-jokingly: “We're just like the rest.”

He said: “Of course.” And I was suddenly pleased; I felt a kind of loyal partisanship with the crude advances of the traffic policemen, the lonely determination for gaiety with which men without girls passed the metallic-tasting wine, the hoarse, sentimental voice of the gramophone—the whole half-pathetic, half-greedy demand of the place. It seemed to me that all we wanted was music, someone to hold, a little talk. It made all human beings seem so simple; it was the touch of love that sounded so impossible in books and speeches. The one touch of love, of regret for barriers erected, misunderstanding, sneers and indifference, without which all intentions came to nothing. But although it was needed there so badly, it was not a thing that always attended or even, paradoxically, survived the conscious efforts of human beings to reach one another. Look at Mary, I thought; I tried hard with Mary. They try with justice, with declarations of human rights, with the self-abnegation of Christ.
Love one another.—It becomes nonsense when you decree it. An absolute, like black and white, that has no corresponding reality in the merging, changing outlines of living.

When it does come, it comes irrelevantly; out of the unworthy cheap atmosphere of a place like this; out of the deep receptivity of a personal emotion. But it doesn't matter where it comes from. Gods come like that, not in the places prepared for them, but appearing suddenly among the rabble. I only wished it would last, that I could take it with me away from the warmth of Paul and these faces pitiful with the strange strength of the desire to assert life in pleasure.

We went up the stairs and into the quiet street. We could not even hear the music. The night was clear but the blue light of the police station showed as if it burned through a fog. His short, self-possessed profile fascinated me with its detachment. When he had kissed me he said: “I wanted to do that properly,” and we both swayed a little, like people who have just stepped out of some unfamiliar motion, a swing or a boat. I drew his head down and, in the street, kissed him again, pulling the flesh of his lower lip through my mouth with soft ferociousness. When I let him go he gripped my arms with a little shake of pride and gratification, smiling at me. And all his gaiety and restlessness swept back to him with a boast. “Let's get them some hot dogs,” he cried. “Come, there's a stand about two blocks away.” We ran as if the air were nipping our heels.