The Lying Days (39 page)

Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. We wanted a quick shock, over and done with, but what we were going to get was something much slower, surer, and more terrible: an apparent sameness in the conduct of our lives, long periods when there was nothing more to hurt us than hard words in Parliament and talk of the Republic which we had laughed at for years; and, recurrently, a mounting
number of weary battles—apartheid in public transport and buildings, the ban on mixed marriages, the suppression of Communism bill, the language ordinance separating Afrikaans and English-speaking children in schools, the removal of colored voters from the common electoral roll and the setting aside of the Supreme Court judgment that made this act illegal—passionately debated in Parliament with the United Party and Labor Party forming the Opposition, inevitably lost to the Government before the first protest was spoken.

When the impact on individual, personal lives is not immediate and actual, political change does not affect the real happiness or unhappiness of people's lives, though they may protest that it does. If the change of government throws you into a concentration camp, then your preoccupation with politics will equal that you might normally have had with your wife's fidelity or your own health. But if your job is the same, your freedom of movement is the same, the outward appearance of your surroundings is the same, the heaviness lies only upon the extension of yourself which belongs to the world of abstract ideas, which, although it influences them through practical expression of moral convictions, loses, again and again, to the overwhelming tug of the warm and instinctual. The people I knew were “politically conscious” and as liberals or left-wing sympathizers they knew more thoroughly and perhaps felt more deeply than the United Party conservatives the reactionary shade into which the country had passed simply by fact of the Fascist Nationalists coming to power. Yet although they talked gloomily, I did not see in anyone's face the anxious concentration of concern I had seen come so quickly over the sickness of a child, or the haggard foreboding that kept pace with the disintegration of a love affair. In the private worlds where people secretly decide the success or failure of their attempt at life, the old battles made or broke; it was only very slowly, as the months and then the years went by, that the moral climate of guilt and fear and oppression chilled through to the bone, almost as if the real climate of the elements had changed, the sun had turned away from South Africa, bringing about actual personality changes that affected even the most intimate conduct of their lives.

In this Paul and I would probably have been much like the
others; but our circumstances were different. Because of the nature of his work, Paul had always been as daily, hourly conscious as of his own aliveness of the silent condemnation of the Africans; that accusing condemnation which others were varyingly aware of, like a distant gaze on their backs. He lived in the midst of it. His life was a reversal of the life of the average Johannesburg person. They went about their own affairs, in a white world, vaguely intruded upon by the knowledge that beyond the city where they had their offices and the tree-hidden suburbs where they lived, there was a scattered outcast city from which the emissaries came—cleaned up to approximate to the white man's standards of decency—and disappeared into again. He went about his affairs in a black world, in those townships (even the word was the white man's generality for something he had not seen—some were the rows of houses the word comfortably suggests, others were huddles of tin and sacking, junk heaps animated by human beings) dumped outside the city, and for him it was the clean, prosperous, handsome white world that existed on the edge of consciousness. He never drove back to it without a sense of incredulity that this city—these girls in fancy shoes coming from offices, the men reversing into parking bays with hump-necked skill—could cut itself so pitilessly in two and close its eyes so completely to half its life. Sometimes he found himself looking with something almost as hot as hate at the white people in the streets, seeing even the most unknowing of them as despots in their very ignorance of what was wrong and terrible where they walked; but at other times he would tell me how he suddenly had the sense of Johannesburg as a beleaguered city, ringed about by all those smoking, wretched encampments which she herself had created. …

Paul began to say things like this now. He had never said them before, and now, although he still laughed and derided what he called the “Hysterical-Histrionical Friends of the Downtrodden African,” there were times when he seemed to struggle with a sense of drama? evil? that made him speak in spite of himself. At first I did not know what to make of it; I even felt half-amused, in a puzzled sort of way, at catching him out in the kind of highly colored fantasy of disgust from which he had so often brought me down to face the unpleasant facts at which my imagination had started up like a covey
at the sound of a gun. But when I realized that these outbursts of his came not from the frightened shying away of a suddenly exacerbated sensibility, but out of a long working familiarity with the facing of ugly facts, I understood that something was changing in him.

The Africans had, of course, more to fear from the Nationalists than anybody. But they themselves felt that they had had so little to hope for under the Smuts Government that all the change had done was to substitute a negative despair for a positive one: lack of hope, for fear. The leaders said in the phrases leaders use, Now the velvet glove is off the iron hand, that's all…; and the simple people who did not understand politics and could only understand the white animus against them if it was personified, as in their tribal days they had made power realizable in the carved image of an idol or a bunch of bones, shook their heads in apprehension of the “bad man” Malan. Paul told me how, in a way, the idea of Malan even became a comfort to them. If there was a shortage of meat: Malan doesn't think we need to eat, they said. If there was no house for a man and his family: Malan wants us to live like animals on the veld, said the woman. Over all that had been wrong, and would continue to be wrong in their lives—This Malan …, they said.

But though in that first year of the Nationalist rule little changed for them materially, and the combination of shockingly sordid living conditions, poverty, and a kind of deeply felt inarticulate horror of their own subjection before
everybody
who was not a native, that resulted in curious, mad, apparently irrelevant bursts of rebellion, arose out of the years of benevolent United Party rule, the very fact that the Nationalists sat up there in authority humiliated the natives. In Parliament cabinet ministers spoke of them as “Kaffirs.” There was continual official talk about the preservation of the “purity of white races of South Africa” and the “sacred duty of the Afrikaner nation to keep itself unsullied.” The Africans had always been kept outcast; now they began to feel it, to feel themselves outcast in their very features and voices. In their bewildered or hostile or mocking eyes there was the self-search for the sores the white man saw upon them. Even the black children, aping the passing of a white woman in the street beneath our flat, expressed unconsciously in their
skinny jeering bravado the attitude: Well what can you expect of me? I'm black, aren't I?

Statutes and laws and pronouncements may pass over the heads of the people whom they concern, but shame does not need the medium of literacy. Humiliation goes dumbly home—a dog, a child too small to speak can sense it—and it sank right down through all the arid layers of African life in the city and entered the blood even of those who could not understand why they felt and acted as they did, or even knew that they felt or acted.

At this stage, when all that was done to implement the plans for apartheid—a carrying to the extremes of total segregation the division of the ordinary lives of white and black that had always existed, socially and economically—was little more than a tightening-up of discriminatory devices, it was often the way in which such things were done rather than the things themselves which was so offensive. When the Nationalists introduced the ban on mixed marriages and also made it punishable for white and black men and women to cohabit, there was something shameful in the manner in which the police hunted up their prosecutions, shining torches in upon the little room where an old colored woman lay asleep with the old white man with whom she had lived quietly for years; prying and spying upon what has always been the right of the poorest man to sleep in peace with his woman.

Other people read of these things in the newspaper, but Paul came face to face with such a happening. He had temporarily taken over Colored Poor Relief, which was administered separately from Native or Indian Poor Relief, when a couple was arrested in Vrededorp, a slum suburb of racial confusion. He knew the woman because it so happened that she had been to see him a few days previously about her brother, a slightly crazy old man for whom Paul was trying to get an old-age pension. The woman herself was one of those milky-eyed, still creatures, roused only to obedience and the cooking pot—more like a work-stunned old native woman than the shriller, more conscious colored. The man with whom she lived was very old, had never heard of the ban, and had lost touch many years before with the white race which he was defiling by lying in this creaking great bed of the poor with this bare-gummed creature
whose slack skin had once been filled with a woman.—The people who lived in the room next door told Paul that when the police came she jumped out of the bed screaming and crawled beneath it. And when they tried to get her to come out, she kept screaming for her “Doek, my doek!” (the piece of cloth she wore round her head) and would not come out until someone had given it to her, and she had struggled to tie it on cramped under the sagging springs of the bed. The neighbors shrieked with laughter all over again at the telling of it.

“Can you imagine the two old things,” said Paul shortly, “a torch shining on their faces. Opening their eyes into it like those poor damn fool hares that get transfixed by the lights of your car on a dark road.”

Later he went to see the woman, because without the man (he had once been a railway worker and had some sort of pension) she was destitute and it seemed that Paul would have to try to get her a pension, too. She said to him: “What is wrong with this man? I stayed with two men before. The one ran away to Capetown. The other one died after thirteen years. Now this one is wrong?”

A kind of minor panic flew round among the colored people. Most of it was ridiculous and unfounded in danger, but its spark of actuality was the special distress and embarrassment that people feel when their sexual privacy is threatened, even by implication. People said to one another that they were afraid to go to sleep in the same room with their wives. The inevitable hooligans played the inevitable joke of climbing up to windows and waking people up by shining torches in their faces. One evening a colored clerk in Paul's office confided, half afraid he would be laughed at, half afraid what he said should be taken seriously, “I used to be so proud of my wife's European looks. You know she's quite often been taken for a white girl? Now I'm wondering—” He stopped, wanting the assurance of Paul's laughter that it was ridiculous to go on. And Paul laughed, but a moment later the thought forced itself up in the man again. “If anything like that happened to us, I'd do… I don't know what—” He had the pleading, tense expression of abstraction that anticipates the doctor's order for some too-intimate investigation. But of course Paul laughed again, and said to him, “For Christ's
sake, Robert, you know you and your wife are both colored, there's nothing on earth to worry about. And anyway, they'll only do this a few times. Just to satisfy the predikants and the Cabinet ministers.”

“Of course you can see a mile off his wife's a colored girl. Only two or three shades lighter than he is,” Paul said to me. He smiled. “Out of a reversal of the very thing he fears now, he's liked to think her that much nearer the distinction of whiteness.”

But later that same evening when we were sitting in a cinema, I had the feeling one learns to pick up so quickly from someone one loves, that his mind was not going along with the diversion of the film. He stirred in his seat now and then as people do when they come to the turning point of their own thoughts and then go back to the beginning all over again. Once he hesitated and then putting his mouth to my hair said: “The funny thing is, he's always seemed—you know, I could talk to him without any mumbo jumbo, the way people like us talk among ourselves.” I nodded vehemently, my eyes still on the film, like a hostess who continues to give polite attention to her guests, while she tries to catch the gist of the urgent confidence someone is pressing upon her in whispers.

When we came out we were both in a rather passive mood—the film had turned out to be bad in a dulling way—and we drank our coffee comfortably, but without speaking much. Once we got home something that often happened suddenly happened again. The sheer pleasure of coming home together alone to sleep in the same bed, the same room, turned our passive mood inside out. Paul got into my bath with me and we fought and laughed and criticized each other's washing technique. In their desire to know each other minutely, lovers return quite seriously to those dull questions to which children give so much weight: Do you wash your face first or last? Do you stand up when you do your legs or sit down and hold them up out of the water? Paul finished his performance, when I was already drying myself, by disappearing head and all under the water in the way that he knew horrified me. He came up laughing and lay there, water streaming from his hair, all his body broken up into wavering and ripples, magnified and distorted. As I gave him a cigarette, Auden's line came to me, “… the bridegroom, lolling there, beautiful.” We got into bed half-damp and made love
so ecstatically and swiftly that I murmured something about …” only over too soon …” and at once Paul began to make love to me again. We lay there with my hand on him lax the way I liked to keep it after he had parted from my body, on the edge of making love a third time or going to sleep, each possibility as delightful as the other. Neither asleep nor making love, we lay there in the balance between the two, our eyes open, not speaking. The lights of cars we could not hear, turning the bend at the top of the hill, perhaps, traveled over us faintly, one after the other, a long pause, then another and another, slipping down the window and the wall and across the floor and over the bed—where each saw the other's face come up silvered and the peaks of the bedclothes like a fold of hills—then up the other wall and over the ceiling into darkness.