The Late Bourgeois World (6 page)

Max's death is a postscript. A postscript can be something trivial, scarcely pertinent, or it can be important and finally relevant.

I believe I know all there was to know about Max. To know all may be to forgive, but it is not to love. You can know too much for love.

When Max and I got married he left the university and took a job – many jobs. None of them lasted long; there were so many other things to do, at that time there were still things you could do whose immediacy appealed to us – discussion and study groups in the rooms of people like ourselves and in the black townships, open-air meetings, demonstrations. The Communist Party had been declared illegal and officially disbanded, but in the guise of other organizations the whole rainbow from politically conservative do-gooders to the radical left-wing could still show itself fairly openly. Above all, African nationalism was at a stage when it had gained confidence and prestige in the eyes of the world through the passive resistance campaigns, and at home seemed ready to recognize Africans of any colour who wanted to be free of the colour bar. In our little crowd, Solly, Dave, Lily, Fatima, Alec, Charles – Indian, African, Coloured and white – Fatima gave Bobo his bottle, Dave laughed at Max's bad moods. The future was already there; it was a matter of having the courage
to announce it. How much courage? I don't think we had any idea.

Max's first job was abandoned because they wouldn't give him three days off to attend a Trades Union conference. Max had been reading politics as a major subject at the university, but there were great gaps in what he felt he ought to know; at the time he was concentrating on trying to give a small group of politically ambitious Africans some of the theoretical background in economics that they wanted. I forget what happened to the next job – oh yes, he got a typist to mimeograph some leaflet during office hours. And so it went on. The jobs came last in any consideration because they were of no importance. He took whatever he could get to do that would help to keep us going. He had no particular qualifications, anyway; he had been studying for an arts degree, which his parents had seen as a harmless alternative to commerce or accountancy, and that he had seen as freedom of mind. The nature of the degree didn't matter much to them; he'd been expected to join one of his father's companies on the accomplishment of it, that's all.

Max was supposed to be going on working for his degree, at night, but at night there was less time than during the day, since the study groups and meetings were all held after working hours, and friends came for sessions of talk that used to last
half the night. I went back to work when Bobo was five months old, and we had a nanny, Daphne, a tough, pretty, real Johannesburg nanny who looked after Max, when he was at home, as well as the baby. Once she and I both suspected in the same month that we were pregnant, and, without my bothering Max or her telling her boyfriend, we managed to mend our situation by promptly taking some pills exacted from my doctor with a warning that they wouldn't work if we were.

I was possessed by the idea that Max must be able to go back to university full-time and finish his course. We wouldn't live off the Van Den Sandts (we'd had to take help from them now and then – over Bobo's birth, for example). I wanted to find some work I could do at night, in addition to my daytime job. We examined the possibilities; I couldn't type. I said at last, ‘A cinema usherette. That's about all. I wonder what they get paid.'

‘Why not? With a Soutine pageboy's outfit and a torch.' I could see that the idea really pleased him. He began to remark to people, as if I had already taken the job, ‘Liz's going to be working in a cinema. Don't think you're seeing things.' I was working for a private firm of pathologists, then, and instead of becoming an usherette I got the writing up of some research notes to do for one of the doctors. It paid better than working in a cinema would have done,
and I was able to do it at home. But Max was often irritated by Dr Farber's notes spread about in the cramped flat where there was not enough room for his own books and papers, and he seemed to lose interest in the purpose of my extra job. To work as an usherette in a cinema was perhaps the furthest point one could possibly get from any sort of activity that Mrs Van Den Sandt or beautiful Queenie could have imagined themselves engaged in. I deprived Max of an opportunity of reaching an ultimate in his distance from them, and a gratification of his longing to come close to other people in a bond of necessity. I was aware of that longing, but I didn't always understand when I failed to further its fulfilment.

Although Max had been a member of a Communist cell at the university, he did not take a strictly Marxist line in his attempts to give Africans some background for the evolution of their own political thinking. And when the Communist Party began to function again, as an underground organization, although he was approached to become active under its discipline, he did not do so. He had been very young and unimportant during his brief experience in the Communist cell; maybe that had something to do with it – he didn't see himself in that limited status, any more. After the Defiance Campaign, in which people of all sorts of political
affiliation took part, he joined the new non-racial Liberal Party for a while, and then the Congress of Democrats. But the Africans themselves did not take the Liberal Party seriously; he saw himself set aside in a white group that Africans felt had the well-meaning presumption to speak for them. Even in the Congress of Democrats, a radical white organization (it provided a front for some important Communists) that did not confine itself to polite platform contacts at multi-racial conferences, he was restless. The COD people worked directly with African political movements, but had come into being mainly because, while identifying themselves with the African struggle, they understood as a matter of tactics that no African movement seeking mass support can afford to have white members.

I hadn't joined the Liberal Party, but I worked in COD, not exactly with Max, but mostly on backroom stuff, printing propaganda for the African National Congress, and so on. You make curiously intense friendships when you work with the fear and excitement of police raids at your back. I believed in what I was doing and in the people I was doing it with. I certainly had enough courage to measure up to what was needed then – before Ninety Days – and I limited my activities only because of Bobo. Other people had children, too, of course, and they put their political work first, but then if Max and I
were both to have been arrested there would have been literally no one to look after Bobo but Daphne, since even the thought of him being taken over by the Van Den Sandts or my parents constituted, for me, real abandonment.

I'm mincing words. After all these years, because Max is lying drowned. It's like putting on a hat for a funeral, the old shabby convention that one must lie about people because they're dead. The fact is, there was no one responsible for Bobo except myself. Max was unable to be aware of anyone's needs but his own. My mother once called this inability ‘horrible selfishness'; whereas it was the irreversible training of his background that she had admired so much, and that she saw him as a crazy deviate from. Driven to school and home again by the chauffeur every day, and then shut out of the rooms where the grown-ups were at their meetings and parties, at the Van Den Sandts he was ministered to like a prince in a tower. Even poverty didn't release him; and we were poor enough. He had the fanatic's few needs, and expected that they should be answered. He bought a pair of shoes or books or brandy on credit and was arrogantly angry when we were asked to pay; or assumed that I would deal with the shops. Max simply did not know what it was to live with others; he knew all the rest of us as he knew Raskolnikov and Emma Bovary, Dr Copeland and Törless, shut
up reading alone in his room on the farm. He would sit for hours analysing a man's troubles and attitudes with good insight and a compound of curiosity and sympathy, but he would not notice that the man was exhausted; nor would he remember that the man had mentioned that he had to catch a train home at a certain time. He used to take Bobo off down to Fordsburg to be handed about among the adoring young daughters of a multiple Indian household, and then, eager to follow up an acquaintance he'd perhaps made the night before, he'd go on to some yard or house and dump Bobo with a set of faces or a pair of arms – anybody's – the baby had never seen before. Once Fatima phoned me to say that the mother of a cartage contractor in Noordgesig, the Coloured township, had rung her up to get my number, because Bobo was yelling and she didn't know what to offer him. Max had left with her son and Fatima's brother; left Bobo as he used to drop a bicycle or toy for the servants to pick up from the Van Den Sandts' lawn.

I tried to explain to Myra Roberts, a woman who seemed to me to have the only ‘saving grace' there is – a natural feeling of responsibility for strangers as for one's own family and friends – that COD couldn't count on both Max and me because of Bobo. She said, ‘Oh we feel we can count on you!' – and the emphasis made first my face burn and then
hers. For a time I showed a certain coldness to her to make up for the disloyalty of that flush.

And yet Max would have done anything. That was somehow the trouble. When he was given a job he would always take it a stage beyond what he had been told was its intended limit. If (he was working on the news-sheet) he were asked to write a leader along certain lines, he would pursue the given conclusions further. He wrote well and would have liked to be editor of the news-sheet; if the executive could have felt assured that he would not use it to follow his own line and commit them where they did not choose to be committed, I think he'd have been made editor. In committee he sat charged with the desire to act – silent, shabby in his undergraduate non-conformist uniform of cracked veldskoen and blond beard, a nervous hand across his mouth. As they spoke – the experienced ones, who knew you must not risk bringing the banning of the organization nearer by one wasted word or step – his bright eyes paced them. And when they had finished he would seize upon the plan of action: ‘I'm seeing the trade union people tomorrow, anyway – I'll talk to them.' ‘This's something that can only be done with the youth groupers. We'll have to get together with Tlulo and Mokgadi, Brian Dlalisa and that Kanyele fellow must be kept clear of –' A febrile impatience came from the sense that
was always in him of being, in the end, whatever was done when working with white people like himself, outside the locations and prisons and work-gangs and overcrowded trains that held the heart of things.

But the others decided who should do what and they knew best who should approach whom. He would come home with the charge banked up glowing within him. The prescribed books on history, philosophy and literary criticism lay about (I read them while he was busy at meetings); what on earth would he have done with a Bachelor of Arts degree, anyway? It was a dead end that would have served a rich man's son as a social token of attendance at a university. Perhaps he might have written something – he had passion and imagination; there were attempts, but he needed day-to-day involvement with others too much to be able to withhold himself in the inner concentration that I imagine a writer needs. He might have made a lawyer; but all the professions were part of the white club whose life membership ticket, his only birthright, he had torn up. He might have been a politician, even (it was in the family, after all), if political ambitions outside the maintenance of white power had been recognized. He might even have been a good revolutionary, if there had been a little more time, before all radical movements were banned, for him to acquire political discipline.

There are possibilities for me, but under what stone do they lie?

Max came home with a man called Spears Qwabe. He was a sodden, at-ease ex-schoolmaster who talked in a hoarse, soft voice. ‘The dangerous thing is we don't look to see what comes after the struggle, we don't think enough about what's there on the other side. You must know where you're going, man. You ask any of the chaps in town how he thinks we're going to live when we've settled with the whites. He's got a dreamy look in his eye thinking he'll get a car and a job with a desk, that's all. The same old set-up, only he's not going to sit in the location or carry a pass. Even the political crowd don't know where they going ideologically. ANC takes advice from the Commies, they willing to use their techniques of struggle, fine, okay, but apart from the few chaps who are Communists first and Africans second, who believes that ANC wants a society along orthodox Communist lines? They haven't got a social doctrine – all right, you can wave the Freedom Charter, but how far does it go …? The same thing with PAC. Thinking just doesn't go beyond the struggle. And if it does – without making a noise about it, what d'you think it is? What's it amount to? Listen to them talk in their sleep and you'll hear they just want to take over
the works – the whole white social and economic set-up, man, the job lot. A black capitalist country with perhaps – I'll say maybe – the nationalization of the mines as a gesture. “The mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.” Nice poetry. But how they really going to work out an equitable distribution of what we've got? Does anybody talk sense about that? Does anybody bother to? And why should we have to take over any of the solutions of the East and West, cut-and-dried?'

‘You will, largely, whether you like it or not, because you'll be taking over various institutions of the East and West, won't you, you're not going back to barter and cowrie currency –' Max wanted to encourage him, show him off.

‘But wait – that's nothing – human institutions are adaptable, isn't it? What we need is to see ourselves as an industrialized people who can break out of the Capitalist–Communist pattern set by the nineteenth century for an industrialized society, and make a new pattern. Break right out.' He talked a long time that first day he came, but maybe I remember as what he said then also what I heard him say later, at other times. ‘We want a modern democratic state, yes? Tribalism will make it bloody difficult, even here, where tribalism's been just about finished off
by the whites, anyway, although this government is playing it up again with Bantustans and so on. We must take the democratic elements of tribalism and incorporate them, use them, in a new doctrine of practical socialism. Socialism from Africa and for Africa. We don't need to go to the West or the East to learn about the evils of monopoly, man – land always belonged to the tribe, grazing belonged to the tribe. You don't have to teach us responsibility for the community welfare, we've always looked after each other and each other's children. All this must be brought into a new ethos of the nation, eh? The spirit of our socialism will come from inside, from us, the technical realization will come from outside.'