The Lying Days (21 page)

When I told her I was going out she looked at Joel as one eyes an enemy to whom one has not been introduced, and said: “Where you going?”

“Out with the young master—” I gestured.

“And when you'll be back?” She was shrill; she gave me up, grumbling. “If the missus she comes, what I'm going to tell her? She tell me I must stay in, you'll be here—” She ignored the presence of Joel, hostile in proxy for her mistress. It came to me that perhaps my mother really did disapprove of and dislike Joel; I had not until
then believed that her uncommunicativeness about him meant anything more than her usual distrust of the unfamiliar.

We left Anna grumbling and went back through the house to the car, Joel stopping a moment in the dark passage to look at an old photograph of a blazered team with my father cross-legged near the trophy. “I thought it was some school thing of yours,” said Joel. And added, interested, “Is your father there?” I pointed him out, ashamed, and said: “Come on—” closing the front door finally behind us.

When we were settled in the car, I could see his mood of enthusiasm lying upon him. “Really.” He smiled, shaking his head at the dashboard. “It's the strangest way it happened—”

“You look different today,” I said. “You look like an Indian, you know.”

“Yes, I know I'm black.”

“No, an Indian in a hotel we used to go to in Durban. He used to bend over the menu, a really lovely head, such black hair, and a skin that looked liquid, like some kind of metal that had just been poured smoothly over the bones—”

“Right. I'm greasy, too.”

“No, I don't mean
that
—” We laughed at the impossibility of getting it clear, and as we turned the corner past the Recreation Hall, I saw a group of young men and girls from the Mine office walking along in their tennis clothes, and waved so warmly that they turned in the road to see whom I was with and I saw the curiosity and blankness with which people recognize, however fleetingly, the set of a stranger's head.

We drove a long way, to where one end of the Reef of gold mines and their attendant towns petered out. Here a low range of hills that lifted your eyes like mountains after the flatness of veld broken only by shaft heads and dumps of yellow sand, hid a deep, gradual ravine. It was as if the earth, ugly, drab, concealing great riches for sixty miles, suddenly regained innocence where it no longer had anything to conceal, and flowered to the surface. All down the inner sides of the ravine low trees and bushes were curly green. At the bottom, where perhaps once a great river had spread, the municipality of the near-by village—it was a real village, not a
Reef town, a village with a peaked church raising a finger, little bridges interrupting the roadway where willows closed over streams—had built a swimming pool and fenced it in with wire. This gave the place a name: Macdonald's Kloof, named by Afrikaans-speaking farmers after a Scotsman who was connected with it in some way by local legend. Lorries were parked in the dusty cleared earth round the fence, and children ran about in makeshift bathing costumes, shouting in Afrikaans; as usual, there was a Sunday-school picnic or orphanage treat clustered there.

But the sides of the Kloof remained uncultivated, and people could climb up leisurely and lose themselves in the scraggly foliage and the rusty-looking boulders, finding a level to sit in the sun where it was quiet with the quiet of high places, and the occasional human voice floating up from below in a scarf of wind sounded more like the cry of a bird. It was not a beautiful place, but the broken planes and rather tame wildness that it offered our eyes forever resting on the level and the treeless, made it seem so to us, or gave us pleasure by reminding, in its poor way, how beautiful the country could be. Joel said: “I wouldn't mind being at the Cape, now.”

We left the car at the bottom and clung and slithered up. The dry season was beginning, and although the leaves were still fleshy and bright, the barks of the trees were scaly as the lichened rocks, and warm dust fluffed round our feet and seemed part of the sunlight. It was a dust that smelled of eucalyptus and now and then of some mauvish herb-bush that reverberated with bees. We grunted as we pulled each other up, breathing earnestly. “What are you looking for?” he asked. “No flowers,” I said, disappointed. “—You should know the Transvaal.”

But there was a big lizard, moving off as if a streak of the rock had liquefied. We stopped and felt disinclined to go on. Lifting our heads after the concentration on footholds, we came out clear above the lorries and the children and the valley, clear above half the fall of treetops. “Ah—hh.” Joel was satisfied to sit down on the lizard's rock, and I sank down, too. He unrolled himself onto his back after a moment or two and had on his face the strange smile of people who look up at the sun. Everything seemed to sheer off into the space, the emptiness; my mind drained clear. The steady winter sun
hunched my shoulders the way the warmth of a low-burning fire does. Then thoughts began to trickle back, unconnected by logic, but by links that I did not inquire or bother to understand. Mary Seswayo at the washbasin: a tingle of feeling toward her; what?—She is a girl, the discovery came, like me. It was not the rather ridiculous statement of an obvious fact, but a real discovery, a kind of momentary dissolving of obvious facts, when the timid, grasping, protesting life of my own organism spoke out, and I recognized its counterpart in her, beneath the beret and my kindness and her acceptance. Then my mother. She would say, “Helen had such a pile of studying to do;—yes, very hard,” proud as she could never feel in my presence, with its reminder of all I was not. For a fanciful second I saw her at the braaivleis, tried to turn her face toward me and could not. You are a very clean people, of course. Who said that? Daddy to Joel, the first time. A clean little woman, clean little place, my mother would say seriously; it came before godliness with her. Of course, all Jews are circumcised; but my father hadn't meant that. How embarrassing for Joel if he thought it. … But that was months ago. …

“Did you ever speak to the girl about her notes?” He spoke suddenly.

“D'y'know, I was just thinking about her!”

“Did you, though?”

“I thought I told you? On Friday. I showed her some other notes—not mine, they're too scrappy—but someone else's I borrowed.”

After a moment I said: “She was horribly grateful. I felt like a bossy missionary presenting a Bible to a little savage who has no shoes and chronic hookworm.”

“She's going to teach?”

“Of course.”

“Helen, what are you going to do?” He knew I planned a librarianship or perhaps some job of vaguely imagined interest in a consulate, but the question cut past that.

“I don't know … I sometimes wonder what I'm doing it all for—Other people want to teach … and it's not as if I write. All this reading; just for pleasure and curiosity, really.”

“Not that. You really have the honest itch to know.”

I lay back, too; we spoke dreamily, the kind of parenthetic exchange people have on the edge of sleep. The rock offered us to the sky, Joel Aaron and me, side by side, but not touching. “But what?”

“That's it.” He turned the question into an answer, as if it were satisfactory.

“Sometimes I think I should have done social science. …”

“You'll take too much in from other people,” he said to the sky. “That'll be your trouble. You'll bolt it all. …”

I wanted an answer: “I think I should have done social science. I could still do it.”

“Helen, perhaps you should get married, I mean sometimes there are women with a kind of—how can I put it—vivid feeling for life. They push it into things that waste it; activities that could run on something colder. So it's lost; they change. Because it's something for between men and women.” He became vague: “If you cut it up, parcel it out …” He shook his head at himself.

I felt queerly hurt, indignant. It was as if I discovered in the expression of someone's face some defect in myself that I was not aware of. “So that's all you think I'm good for. Married. But I'll marry as well …” There was a silence. I said, still half-offended, “Joel, I don't understand you. You've done more than anyone to get me out of my rut—I've always felt we were escaping Atherton together; you understood because you were stuck in it, too, and when I talked to you I found someone who was struggling out of a kind of comfortable mediocrity that I was dimly aware of wanting to break—and that made it possible for me to put my finger on it. I've learned to look, to hear. … Now you say a thing like that.”

Whatever he had been thinking, he had put it aside, out of my sight. He lifted his head from the rock, straining his neck to smile at me. “It's just the way Jews are. There, it comes out in me, too; we really only want girls to marry.—It's like my Indian hair—You don't lack the brains, my girl, it's not that.”

I smiled, as I always did, apologetically, when he became aware of his Jewishness.

“Helen,” he said after a pause, “do you mind my being a Jew?”

I sat up, with the smile again. “Why? You know—”

“No.” His hand twitched where it lay on the rock. “I mean really. And your people. Does your mother say anything?”

I lay down again. The rock had the comfort of spareness, resisting the spine firmly, like lying on the floor. I said, timidly, “No. Sometimes you make me feel—ginger. Just because you're dark.”

“No, even if I were ginger, too, it'd be just the same.”

“My mother never says anything. Daddy neither.”

There was no answer, and when I twisted my head to look at him, I saw that his eyes were closed.

I was still looking at him when he opened them after quite a long while, and I could see them, veined with the gray and green of stones under water, slowly bringing me into focus after the dark of his eyelids. I had the curious feeling that he saw me as nobody else had ever seen me; like when he had said “Helen of Atherton” on the train that day. We lay a moment, looking at each other, and nothing moved but the very corners of his eyes, where his eyelashes lifted together as if they smiled on their own.

A great bird waved across the sky. The sinking sun spread up a fan of radiance; light sprang about the high air like singing spray.

Still we lay there. I sat up, with my cheek on my knees, and Joel rolled round onto his elbow. With his finger he was tracing out something on the surface of the rock, gently absent. I looked, too. Weather had layered the ancient surface away in a wavering relief. The sidelong glance of the sun caught along the edges, showing them up dark, but within the outline, the warmth of other suns, the wash of rains fallen and sucked up, fallen and sucked up, endlessly, was fixed with delicate, smudged color: ocher into green, rose into gray.

“A map,” Joel was saying. He spoke out of the sky, yet his voice was human; it was lost to the dust, the rocks, the dusty bushes with their little pebbles of animal droppings, like an offering, left under the leaves, but it came to me. I should have heard it even if he had not spoken: the way creatures of the same kind instinctively communicate their identity of presence when they are lost in the enormousness of landscape and sky.

“Here's a continent, and provinces—the biggest river. There the mountain range, and the sea. An ocean. Some islands … And a
long way”—his finger traveled the seas—”another country. This is a small one, latitude due north, a cold one. Snow and seals on this rocky coast, but down here—just about here, the dolphins begin. Here's a whole group of islands, with a warm current wrapped round them, so they're the coconut-palm kind. The people sing (you would find out that they've got hookworm) and they sail about—all over here—in the hollowed-out barks of trees, with figureheads like ugly sea monsters. Over this side is a huge, rich country, an Africa and America rolled into one, with a bit of Italy thrown in for charm—”

He made up the world, and threw into it all the contradictions, the gradations and clashes of race and face and geography, rearranged to suit ourselves; but it seemed that the physical plan of it, a trial universe idly scratched down by season and chemical in a time before time when the world was actually taking shape, sinking and rising from the sea, exploding volcanically, shifting in landslides, really was preserved there on the rock: an abandoned cosmos, the idle thought of a god. …

Joel paid me the tribute of making a game out of it for me, but there was a tinge of wonder to it. We played with the discovering pleasure of children, ignored and watched by the Kloof and the sky. Quite suddenly, but with authority, the Kloofs own shadow fell upon us. Enough, it decreed. It had closed like an eyelid over the sun. The rock faded; we felt our elbows and hipbones sore. Under the shadow, that was a little chill, but missed the treetops so that they remained alight in the sun, we came down. Joel's warm brown hand helped me; below every rock he waited, the hand, palm up, receiving me. Its warmth in my own had the comfort of a renewed contact; yet we had not touched each other up on the rock. I felt a vague sadness that was not unhappy. I did not know why. … We were coming down the side of the hill like two people who have kissed and held each other. The elderly Afrikaner packing rugs and empty beer bottles into the boot of his car looked up and saw us that way. We walked past the bitten-out rinds of watermelon, the eggshells and torn paper, back to the car.

Something had stuck to my shoe—”Just a minute—” I held on to the door handle of the car, balancing on one leg, laughing.
“Here”—Joel snapped off a twig and pried at the mess on my heel. It fell away and it was a rubber contraceptive, perished and dusttrodden, relic of some hurried encounter behind the trees, inconsequent and shabby testimony. But between us at this moment it was like a crude word, suddenly spoken aloud. In dismay more than embarrassment, we ignored the happening, jumped quickly into the car. Joel, encouraging the reluctant kick-over of the engine, his hand over the gear knob, the frown with which men pay attention to engines drawing down his eyebrows, was my reassurance. The finger of disgust had hovered, but could not make its smudge on us. Again, I did not know why.