A World of Strangers (17 page)

‘Oh my God! What a horrible idea.' She pressed her napkin against her mouth and drew in her shoulders.

I was perversely triumphant. I added, with some arrogance ‘Well, don't underestimate the Sitoles of this world, anyway. They're like history; their progress is inexorable. Let that be a consolation to you when your Congresses and protests don't seem to be getting very far.'

When we had finished our dinner and she was out of the room, getting her coat, I wandered about, looking at books and objects that I had been noticing since I had arrived. The books were what I would have expected to find, political books on Russia, China, and India, all the books I had ever read about Africa, and a great many more besides, some old Left Book Club editions, a couple of books of reproductions of paintings, and no poetry or novels at all, so far as I could see, except a paper-back mystery. But some of the objects were unusual, and, to me, highly interesting. There was a huge, benign African mask of black wood, and a small, evil one with a grey ruff of what I guessed must be monkey fur, there was a beautiful hide drum, and a clay pot blackened with stove polish and studded with red lucky beans; there was a little brass Shiva, and a Chinese marriage fish hanging from a nail on the wall. All these things were brought together in intimacy in the small space, and each retained, absolutely unmodified by the presence of the others, the look of authority of its place in the life from which it had been taken. I have noticed this before in objects which have been created for utility or ritual: even out of the context of their use, they never take on the banal look of ornaments. I had just picked
up a snapshot of Anna, standing beside a smiling Indian woman, and herself wearing Indian dress, when she came back into the room.

‘A sari suits you very well. Have you been in India?'

She shook her head. ‘I was married to an Indian. He gave me this, too; isn't it beautiful?' She showed me the white Kashmir shawl she was wearing. I admired it and we talked about it for a few minutes, while she went round locking up the cottage.

In the car, she said, ‘Were you surprised about my marriage?'

‘Well, yes. I suppose I was.'

‘But of course, it doesn't seem so very extraordinary to English people.'

‘No.'

‘Not the way it is here.' She added, in her matter-of-fact voice, the voice of the conscientious committee member drawing the attention of the meeting to something she does not want them to overlook: ‘It was before the Mixed Marriages Act, of course.'

I suddenly choked with the desire to laugh; I couldn't help it, it came spluttering out. ‘I can't think of a marriage in terms of legislation. That's all I mean.' Did she think of anything in any other terms?

‘Was it very difficult, being married like that in this country?' I asked, as I might have asked about the cultivation of some plant in her garden.

She hesitated a moment. ‘A bit. Didn't seem so then; seems so now.'

She changed gear with a typical, neat, considerate movement. And I had a sudden sense of loneliness, her loneliness, that appeared unsummoned behind her flat, commonplace talk like a face at the window of a locked house.

Steven, in a graduate gown, was at the centre; the party spun round him, slowly at first, then whipped up by the black skirts and flailing sleeves that flew from the mast of his energy. When I arrived at the house in Sophiatown (Sam had come all the way to fetch me, because Anna Louw was not coming to the party) there were a dozen or so young men standing about against the walls of the room. Some leaned on each other's shoulders, and a cigarette was passed up and down for each to take a draw. They murmured among themselves now and then, laughed suddenly, or dreamed, as loiterers do. Steven swept among them a few times, clutching the arm of one enthusiastically, bending his head for an explosive, confidential joke with another. They were dressed in anything they could find, it seemed: one, in a laundry-creased white shirt and new flannel trousers with a fancy belt, hung on a friend in a sweater almost completely unravelled and tattered brown pants whose turn-ups, stiff with motor-oil, were held round his bare legs by bicycle clips. They wore loose, hairy tweed jackets, suit-jackets that might have been filched off a scarecrow, filthy old caps, fancy gilt tie-pins, torn laceless sandshoes, impeccably brushed suède shoes. Their faces had the glazed look of youths who have spent their lives in the streets, watching; watching the earth-mover eating out the vacant plot, the fire-engine screaming by, or the drunk, weaving along the gutter.

On a few benches and old dining-chairs, there were some women in haphazard cheap-jack finery and one or two men in business suits and glasses. The room itself was as empty of objects as the shebeen had been; and in it, everyone simply stood or sat, without awkwardness, and without any tension of expectation. More poeple kept coming in all the time; Steven seemed to make sorties beyond the door and return triumphantly each time, gathering new arrivals. Sam was
his lieutenant, speeding and skidding about him with twinkling importance. A piano was pushed in; its strings jarred and jangled and died away. Steven was in conference, his arms spreading his gown about two other men; he dashed out, dashed in, grinned at me, raised his brows at someone else. A yellow boy with girl's hands and a huge, pitch-black man with the weight of his body resting on the tight belt of his pants brought brandy round in coloured lemonade glasses. It was offered to me, and to all the others who, like me, sat on the benches or hard chairs. A second serving came in, this time in cups. But it did not get as far as the chaps hanging round the wall, and they did not seem to expect it; only watched. Talk rose, as the volume of people displaced the silence. They kept sauntering in, girls hand in hand, with the little breasts and big haunches that I noticed in very young African women, pretty tarts with faces broad with pleasure, powder showing dull mauve like the bloom on a black grape, on their skin, thin young men whose shoulders hunched-in their chests, gangling young men with the benign look of the very tall; pale, yellow fat faces, bony, reddish-skinned faces, shining black faces. They spoke to each other in the monosyllabic, subdued way of an audience, and threw in a few words of dated American-English, as if that were the fashionable thing to do. ‘Doing all right there, Dan?' ‘Sure, boy. How's it with you, these days?' ‘Hullo, baby -' ‘You in good shape, honey?'

There was a little breeze of notes on a saxophone; it died down. A clarinet gave a brief howl. Somewhere behind the press of people, the big bass began to pant. Music grew in the room like a new form of life unfolding, like the atmosphere changing in a rising wind. Musical instruments appeared from underfoot; people who had been talking took to another tongue through the object they plucked or blew. Feet moved, heads swayed; there was no audience, no performers – everyone breathed music as they breathed air. Sam was clinched with the piano in some joyous struggle both knew. A yellow youth in a black beret charmed his saxophone like a snake, with its own weaving voice. The bass thumped along for dear life under the enchanted hand of a
man with the bearded, black delicate face of an Assyrian king. A fat boy with a pock-marked face jumped with rubber knees into a little clearing; girls began to swing this way and that from their partners' hands, like springs coiling and uncoiling.

I had seen jazz-crazy youths and girls at home in England, in a frenzy of dance-hall jive. I had seen them writhing, the identity drained out of their vacant faces, like chopped-off bits of some obscene animal that, dismembered and scattered, continue to jig on out of nervous impulse. But the jazz in this room was not a frenzy. It was a fulfilment, a passion of jazz. Here they danced for joy. They danced out of wholeness, as children roll screaming down a grass bank. Now and then a special couple would make space for themselves, and gather the whole swirling vigour of the room into their performance. They laughed and shouted to the others who danced around them, corollary to their rhythm; comments and challenges flew back.

One of the men in business suits came up to me and said confidentially, ‘I suppose this must all seem rather crude.'

‘Crude?'

He waved a hand at the room, that buffeted him where he stood, so that he had the stance of a man on a ship in a high sea.

‘My friend,' I said, ‘you don't know what our parties are like.' And it was true that that very first night I was struck by the strange innocence of their dancing. In all its wild and orgiastic shake and shamble, there was never a suggestion that it was a parody of or a substitute for sex. There was none of the dreamy concupiscence that hangs, the aura of a lean, wolfish sex-hunger, about the scarcely moving couples in a white night-club. For these people, the music and the dancing were not a dream and an escape, but an assertion. Once or twice I took one of the young women in their bright nylon blouses and danced, but it was more than my own lack of skill and half-hearted experience of dancing as a rather embarrassing social necessity that made me feel almost as if I were maimed in that press of dancing people. It was more than my stiff, shy, and unwilling limbs. What was
needed was – at a deeper level – something akin to the feeling I had had when I was swimming with Stella Turgell at Mombasa, the feeling that the age-old crystals of the North were melting away in my blood. The men and women about me had had little to drink, they had none of the trappings of food and ease without which the people among whom I had lived are unable to whip up any sort of mood of celebration; yet it was there, spontaneously. Their joy was something wonderful and formidable, a weapon I didn't have. And, moving feebly among them, I felt the attraction of this capacity for joy as one might look upon someone performing a beautiful physical skill which one has lost, or perhaps never had. Lopped off, gone, generations ago; drained off with the pigment fading out of our skin. I understood, for the first time, the fear, the sense of loss there can be under a white skin. I suppose it was the point of no return for me, as it is for so many others: from there, you either hate what you have not got, or are fascinated by it. For myself, I was drawn to the light of a fire at which I had never been warmed, a feast to which I had not been invited.

I looked at Steven, dancing proudly as a strutting cock before a little round-eyed, painted black girl, calling out remarks that kept admiring eyes turned on him, and I thought of him playing darts in an East End pub. Why should he want that grey, fog-sodden world with its dreary pastimes scaled down to dwindling energies? Yet he did. He was drawn to it just as I was drawn to the abundant life that blazed so carelessly in the room about me. When black men lose that abundance, sink it, as they long to, in the vast vitiation of our world, both the hate and the fascination will be gone, and we will be as indifferent to them as we are to each other.

Like Alice plunging after the White Rabbit, I went with Steven into the townships, the shebeens, the rooms and houses of his friends. I do not want to suggest by this a descent into an underworld, but another world, to which the conditions of the Johannesburg I worked and lived in did not pertain. First, the scale of proportion was reversed: in
the city, and in my suburban street, the buildings rose above, the gardens made a space round the people – we lived, as city people do, in the shelter of the city, in a context that, while overshadowing, also provides the dignity of concealment: figures in the street pass out of sight under trees and shadows, living passes out of sight behind walls and fences. By contrast, an African township looked like something that had been razed almost to the ground. The mass of houses and shacks were so low and crowded together that the people seemed to be swarming over them, as if they had just invaded a deserted settlement. Every time I went to a township I was aware of this sudden drop in the horizon of buildings and rise of humans; nothing concealed, nothing sheltered – in any but the most obvious sense – any moment of the people's lives. A blinding light of reality never left them. And they lived, all the time, in all the layers of society at once: pimps, gangsters, errand boys, washwomen, schoolteachers, boxers, musicians and undertakers, labourers and patent medicine men – these were neighbours, and shared a tap, a yard, even a lavatory.

So convincing was Steven's confidence in himself and his friends that when Faunce advanced me the money to buy a car, I bought a second-hand Chevrolet and took it to Steven's mechanic friend to be overhauled. He lived in Alexandra Township, an abandoned-looking place outside the northern boundaries of Johannesburg, a kind of vast, smoking rubbish-pile picked over by voracious humanity. All the people who lived there worked in Johannesburg, but the town did not own the place, nor was it responsible for it. It had the aged look of all slums – even the earth, the red dirt roads, seemed worn down to their knobbly shins, and there was nothing, no brick, post, or piece of tin that was new and had not been battered in and out of the shape of a succession of uses – but, in fact, like everything else in Johannesburg, it was, in terms of human habitations, young, fresh, hardly begun; perhaps thirty or forty years old. From the beginning, it must have been a proliferation of dirt and decay, the pretty Shangri-la legend in reverse – the place where rot blooms.

A stream that flowed thick, blue-grey dirty wash-water ran by the house of Steven's friend. Children played and screamed in it, and when they came to stand round the car, the scales of scum coated their legs like a disease. Although we went there three or four times (I had to leave the car with this man Alfred for some days) I was never asked to go into his house. It was a brick shack with a dead tree leaning over it; from the tree hung bits of rope and an old tyre on which the children swung, and the yard was a surrealist sculptor's garden of old motor car parts – a yellow bumper, a rusted hood, and other unidentified shapes. While Alfred, a fat, shy man who fingered his nose tenderly while he talked, and Steven who, I am sure, knew nothing about cars, but could not bear to be nothing but a looker-on, lay wriggling along on their shoulder-muscles under the car, the children and I watched each other. When they had tired of giggling about me, they went back to their own absorbing aimlessness. Among them an idiot, a kind of baboon-girl of about fourteen, hunch-backed, grotesquely steatopygous, grunted and squealed in subhuman frustration at their teasing. Two plump, easy-eyed women gossiped and, with a quick hand at the right moment, kept setting to rights a fat baby with bead anklets who kept tumbling down the steps of a homemade clay veranda on the shack opposite. A donkey-cart selling wood screeched and tottered by; people bounced over the rutted road on bicycles, women, endless women, yelled, threw buckets of slop into the road, laughed and thumped at tubs of washing. And the monster was as unremarkable as the fat baby.