The Lying Days (44 page)

“I was tired.”

“If
that
job tires you …” He smiled, sighing, pouring out our drinks.

I took my glass in silence.

“Oh, don't start, now, for Christ's sake,” he said. “I can't even joke. If you're that bored, you can change it. The Department will go on without you. There probably isn't anything it couldn't go on without, that Department. It matters so little whether it goes on or not, and whether it goes forward or backward. …—You wanted it badly enough. You pestered me to get it for you, and I told you at the time—” He stopped, looking at me over his drink with annoyance that I felt was more at himself than at me.

Yet I said, watching the way he always sat, one shoe rolled over underneath the sprawl of his leg: “I'm not bored.”

“Disappointed. Well, I'm sorry. I told you it'd be as dull as ditchwater. You might as well sit and knock out brewery orders. Sell ladies' underwear.”

We said nothing.

His eyes traveled round the room for the ash tray which he expected not to be, and was not, there; he dropped two dead matches into the neck of the empty soda bottle. I stood against the window sill, taking my drink in regular gulps, like medicine.

At last he said suddenly, as if he was giving in to an insistent importunity he had refused to hear: “Oh, come on. Come here—”
And his voice was impatient, sullen and pleading, all at once. He drew me down to him awkwardly, pulling at my arm, and we kissed anxiously. When we kissed out of longing his mouth was warm and firm, drawing me in softly; now he tried to impress the kiss upon me so hard that it was not a kiss, but a distinct awareness of certain separate things, his lips, the wetness of his saliva, the sharp edges of his teeth. Yet his eyes were a little dazed, as when we had been kissing in passion, although he looked at me keenly, almost suspiciously, as if to dare the appearance of something he was watching out for. Close to his face, I gazed at him unashamedly, watching him watch me, and the alien quality of this moment between us, the incongruity of it, a moment so detached, lonely and critical that it had no place in the merging exchanges of love, surprised us both in quick guilt at the same instant, as if one, resigning himself to his own untrustworthiness with the regret because of the unquestioned integrity of the other, went to steal a treasure known to both and found the other in the act of stealing it. … He slid his hand over the smooth material that covered my thigh, and smiled with the corner of his mouth. “Pins and needles? Shame. Shame. … I'll wake it up, this little rump. … These bloody Indians. I spent an hour and a half trying to persuade a Diagonal Street fruit merchant to let a colored family stay on in his house in Vrededorp. He's got an eviction against them and they can't find anywhere else to go. After seven years or so. Says he wants the place to turn it into workrooms for his brother who's a tailor.
He
can't find anywhere.” He was looking at his hand on my thigh with close attention, his eyelashes showing against his cheek, his nostrils drawn down toward his mouth, the way an artist regards a composition assembled for a painting. He pressed his fingers gently into the flesh, watching his nails whiten, then slowly relax into pink again. “Quite true of course. Where can an Indian get a shop? He was sorry, but family must come first. If we can find his brother a shop … Swine. Wouldn't give them even another month.”

After a moment he shook his head and said: “See …?”—placing himself before himself and me.

I knew what he meant; how he had caught himself out, thinking, almost by infection, the way that he fought all day against people
thinking. He was annoyed with the landlord because he was being hard and unreasonable: the fact that the man was an Indian had no bearing on the hardness or the unreasonableness.

I gently detached myself from him—I could never bring myself to move away from Paul's lightest caress abruptly; it was as if I feared always to break something that might never be made intact again—and went to the kitchen. Steak in the refrigerator, two tomatoes, half an avocado pear. Paul had balanced the pip on matchstick supports over a marmalade jar filled with water. The steak looked bright red, tough, long fibered. As I pounded it with the handle of the bread knife to soften it, I saw that the pip had already parted and let one pale string of root down into the water. Nearly half-past seven. You're a rotten wife, Helen.

As I cooked and all the small noises of cooking rose up around me in the little dark kitchen that smelled always of curry, I thought, It's funny, we hardly ever talk about marriage now. Neither of us has mentioned it for months. We were going to get married when my parents came back.

Yet I could not imagine it. Moving with mechanical deftness that was not without a certain pleasure in the doing of a number of simple things at once—turning the steak, freeing the eggs from the edge of the pan, keeping an eye on the toast—I said to myself, Feel it; just like this, yet you would be married. Another name; I smiled at this schoolgirl realization of it. The first thing it implies is some sort of common future. And that was what stopped me. I know how we are now, I can go into the next room and put my hands on Paul's shoulders, speak to him (and at this point I called out absently, Shall I lay the table, or put it on a tray?—No, it's too hot. On a tray. We can eat outside), but we seem to be living a kind of interim period. I caught my breath in a little gesture of distress to myself, for the difficulty of understanding this feeling that was more knowledge than feeling. How to explain this feeling of not having started; of something in oneself crying in excuse: Wait! We are nowhere, not ready, so many things to be settled, so many things taking our attention, swerving out lives this way and that. … Yet how can human beings wait? Wait to live until an atom bomb explodes, a
government is overthrown, a white man knows a black man to be just such another as himself?

Then there would be no world. Human beings cannot wait for historical processes, I thought with dismay and anger. Then why must we. … But the cry comes out, a head lifted from the preoccupation of confusion—Wait! Please wait! Paul throws himself more and more violently into a job in which he believes less and less. So where does that lead? Where does that find a future? It has only a now; it cancels itself out.

It cancels itself out!—I was afraid of this thought I had stumbled on. I was appalled at the frame of it in words.

My mind sought to distract itself from the contemplation of our state; this place where we wished to stay in order to convince ourselves that so much that was in us and our circumstances was temporary, to be overthrown, and then …

He should give it up, I said resentfully. Give it up. Nobody can go on doing something he believes is fruitless. And now I felt like an angry child who wants to kick something, to kick something and spill over with angry tears.

Then what would he do? How live, then, with himself?

—Then he must accept what he does now for what it is. My job is this that and the other. It will not give a single African an education, a skilled job, a voice in the way his people are to be disposed of, or even the right to build a house for himself when he hasn't anywhere to live. But he can't go on struggling and arguing and conniving to give his job the scope it hasn't got, all day, and sneering at and deriding everything he's done, the moment he pauses.

I told myself, putting the plates and cutlery quickly on the tray: I will tell him this. The statement had the air of an ultimatum. I will tell him this. It was not a piece of advice; people so close to each other cannot give advice, any more than one can advise oneself.

And so we ate our supper, out on the little balcony. The fat clumsy moths fell against the lamp and taxied lamely between the plates. Paul searched up and down the theater page of the paper, irritable for somewhere to go. I ate slowly, and often paused; but my hand went out for my glass of water; I drank; went on eating.

He threw the paper aside. “Nothing—”—but already indifferent to whether he went out or not. The moon was not up yet and outside the dusty edges of the lamplight the summer night was thickly dark. We put out the lamp to get rid of the insects, and from where I sat, smoking, I saw down away to the left the still darker bulk of buildings, solid as mountains of rock, become fragile as shells, brittle and delicate towers of tracery as the lights went on, hollowing them out, chipping out rectangles and oblongs. Now if you had flicked them with your thumb and finger they would have given back the flat airy sound of fretwork infinitely fine and thin. If you leaned over and picked one up you would be startled by the lightness of it, like picking up a teaspoon made of tin. …

He said: “I saw Edna Schiller today.”

“Did you?”

“She's not in the second batch, either, though Hugo is.”

“I think she's disappointed. She gives me the impression of being distinctly peeved. She feels she's been done down.” The bill for the suppression of Communism had been passed in Parliament, and several of the people we knew had been “named” and informed that they would be charged under the new act. Edna, who had lived on a fantasy of danger for so long, was now apparently to be denied this first real martyrdom: so far her name had not appeared on the lists. When I had spoken to her I could not help feeling that she regarded this omission as a real slight.

“You're developing a brand of venom all your own, you know. Polite and peculiarly nasty. And always for people like Edna. Perhaps it takes some courage to take the risk of turning out merely to look ridiculous,” he said wearily.

The sudden defense of Edna was sheer perversity of mood; he had laughed about her a hundred times, joined with Isa in the baiting of Edna's secretive pomposity. But the silence into which his words sank said something quite different. After it was said, his last sentence echoed between us as a comment purely on himself. With it he had chosen to take my attitude toward Edna on himself; snatching up the amusement, the mild scorn in a compulsive determir ition to spare himself nothing. He was determined to make me feel that I had been ridiculing him. I was infuriated with the unfairness of
the guilt he was making me feel; a guilt which he was inventing, for which I was not culpable, a piece of twisted interpretation for which he wanted me to give him the pleasure of my inflicting pain.

There was real enmity between us in the darkness. I was glad of the dark because I should not have wanted him to see my face as I felt it was and could not have made it otherwise, stiff with resistant anger, I would not even light another cigarette, although I wanted one, because I could not trust the light of a match, showing my face.

After a long time I burst out: “Why do we all live in a perpetual state of crisis?—‘This is not my real life, of course, it's just the way we live now.'—But it's nonsense. We should all see it's nonsense. However you live day after day is your real life. You can't keep the substance of it intact meanwhile—like a child saving a sweet whole to be eaten under special conditions.”

He was interested. He flickered out of his listless restlessness. “The times aren't good enough to merit the expenditure of our living. That sort of feeling, I suppose.”

I said: “Isn't it idiotic? We know that life doesn't keep. Yet we all have the feeling that the present is something to be got over with, and
then
… How long have the Nats been in power? Nearly two years. So for two years now everyone who isn't a Nationalist has been going around in the kind of released state of disaster. Going around saying, Well, until this is over and we get them out again, or: Perhaps we won't stay to see what happens—what about going to Rhodesia? Or Kenya?—Even if they haven't the slightest intention of going anywhere, it doesn't matter: the state of mind is the same. If you are waiting for something to alter, something to happen, if you possibly may be going to go away and live somewhere else, your whole life
now
becomes a state of suspension. It is like disaster: the same feeling of urgency, putting aside of normal incentives, making do temporarily with what you can. But the big thing about a disaster—”

“What exactly do you mean by disaster? Politically, the Nationalist regime is a disaster all right.”

“Not the way I mean.—A flood, say. Or an earthquake. The big thing about a disaster like that is that it passes. You
are
existing
temporarily, you
will
begin to live again when it is over. But with us the state of mind of disaster is becoming permanent. At this rate it can go on for years. We could sit for twenty years, like flies paralyzed but not killed by a spider, so long as the Nats stay in power. An unfortunate interruption. Shelving this, shelving that, because ‘things are so uncertain here,' ‘we never know what will happen.' “

“There's an election every five years, you know. There's just a chance they might get thrown out.”

I moved impatiently in my chair. “—Well five years, then. A year, ten months, if you like. It makes no difference. The state of mind's still fraud, a piece of self-delusion. This is our life and it is being lived out now the way we don't like it. This is not time out.”

“Ah, that's true,” he said slowly, “that's true.” Then he said, in the quick tone of remembering a point he had wanted to question: “To go back a minute—the fly and spider business.—You talk as if everyone's resigned himself to Nat rule. And you know that's not so; you talk as if we weren't kicking like hell.”

“Oh politically, yes. I grant that politically we're protesting madly. Even in ordinary private talk we're protesting. But you know that wasn't what I was talking about. It's inside. Inside ourselves in the—what's the word I want—the nonpolitical, the individual consciousness of ourselves in possession of our personal destiny: it's that which we've put aside, laid away in lavender; postponed.”