‘The American proof-readers often try to correct my English,’ Nadine said. ‘They follow the rules. I don’t. I like my sentences.’
I mentioned that I kept meeting Johannesburgers who had amazing tales to tell. She said this was a characteristic of South Africans generally, their lives full of events. My mention of the recent immigrants stirred memories of her father, his arrival here as a thirteen-year-old.
‘Imagine my father,’ she said, and let her voice trail off.
Her mother had been English, from a Jewish family long established in London. Nadine smiled at the memory of her piano-playing mother turning up her nose at her husband’s origins and in a shocked accent of mimicry said, ‘They slept round the stove.’
There is a pitiless description of her parents in the story, ‘My Father Leaves Home.’
In the quarrels between husband and wife, she saw them [the relatives] as ignorant and dirty, she must have read somewhere that served as a taunt: you slept like animals round a stove, stinking of garlic, you bathed once a week. The children knew how it was to be unwashed. And, whipped into anger, he knew the lowest category of all in her country, this country. You speak to me as if I was a kaffir.
‘Sounds like Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers. “I was cut out for better things than this.” ’
‘Yes. That was my mother. Mrs Morel.’
‘But I don’t think I could bear to reread that novel again. What do you reread?’
‘Everything. All the time. I want to reread Dostoievsky.’
I asked, ‘What should I read to understand South Africa better?’
‘There are so many good South African writers,’ Nadine said and she encouraged Raks and Maureen to help make a reading list for me. This included The Peasants’ Revolt, by Govan Mbeki, Hugh Lewin’s Bandiet, Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda, Soft Vengeance by Albie Sachs, and poems by Don Mattera and Jeremy Cronin.
‘And Raks too, I wish he would write more,’ Maureen said.
But Raks got a call on his mobile phone and when Nadine had loudly sighed at the silly noise of the ring, Raks had left the table to talk.
‘I’m glad I read your book about Naipaul,’ Nadine said. ‘The reviews put me off. It’s about you, not him — and unsparing about you. It’s such a good book. I cheered for you at the end. “He’s free,” I thought.’
‘Naipaul always wears such a gloomy face,’ Maureen said,’ ‘But isn’t A House for Mr Biswas wonderful?’
‘Vidia hates it when people mention only that one book.’
Nadine said, ‘The book of mine that everyone mentions is July’s People.’
‘Patrick White complained that everyone praised Voss, which is a great book.’
Nadine agreed and said that she admired White’s A Fringe of Leaves (‘I want to reread it’). Her generous praise for her contemporaries was not in general a writer’s characteristic.
I said, ‘Will it annoy you if I ask you about July’s People?’
She laughed, and I said that the reason people liked it was because it represented their secret fears — having to flee a political cataclysm, losing your home, becoming a fugitive in your own country, finding that the world has been turned upside-down. This was the extreme white South African nightmare, becoming totally dependent upon your black servants, reduced to living in a simple and remote village.
‘I was writing about the present,’ Nadine said, meaning the years of its composition, between 1976 and 1980. ‘It was a very bad time here. Everything was happening. I put all that into the book.’
She said that by the time she finished July’s People she was committed to staying in South Africa. ‘I felt we had been through it all.’ But there had been a period when she had thought seriously about leaving South Africa, in the late 1960s, when she had been writing A Guest of Honor. ‘We traveled around. We had friends in Zimbabwe and Zambia. I felt I might consider one of those places. I’m an African. That’s Africa.’ She needed to be near South Africa.
‘Or so I thought,’ she added. ‘I looked closely at my friends — they were mostly white, mostly expatriates, they had loyalties elsewhere. So what life would it have been for me? I would have been a nice white woman who was interested in Africans, but living in this world of expatriates. I couldn’t do it. And so I stopped thinking of leaving.’
I said, ‘Were you a member of a political party?’
She smiled at the question. ‘I suppose I could have joined the Liberal Party, but they were so weak — and who did they represent? I thought hard about the South African Communist Party. But it was too late for me. I should have joined earlier. Yet I have the greatest respect for the Communists here. We would never have achieved our freedom without them.’
Raks returned to the table, and talked about what it was like to be hearing about the political struggle while serving time on Robben Island as a political prisoner. The news from the outside world came in whispers and scribbled messages, for newspapers were forbidden.
Nadine had been ruminating. She said, ‘I didn’t leave. I stayed. I saw everything. The people who left — well, you can’t blame the Africans. Life was terrible for them. But the others — the whites, the writers’ — she shook her head — ‘after they left, what did they write?’
Maureen said, ‘I feel sorry for anyone who left, who missed it. All those years. And it went on for so long — beyond Mandela’s release.’
I said, ‘Isn’t it still going on?’
‘Yes, it is. You can write about it,’ Nadine said.
Afterwards, driving Nadine’s car — Nadine navigating — I asked about Reinhold’s health. She said it was terrible but that she felt lucky in having had such a happy marriage. ‘Reini smoked a lot,’ she said. ‘Smoking is nice. Did you ever smoke dagga?’ She lamented that the center of Johannesburg was so empty. We talked about our children. And eventually she wished me a last Happy Birthday, and said, ‘Travel well. Travel safely.’
It is all right to be Steppenwolf, or the Lone Ranger, or Rimbaud, or even me. You visit a place and peer at it closely and then move on, making a virtue of disconnection. But such an evening as this, after months of solitary travel, reminded me that a meal with friends was a mood improver, and that a birthday need not be an ordeal. I had been self-conscious, though. One of Nadine’s many strengths was that she noticed everything. The best writers are scrupulous noticers. And since a birthday is an occasion for a summing up, the annual balance sheet, I was sure that she had seen my Ugandan patched jacket, my baggy pants, my scuffed shoes, my tattoos, my thinning hair, how I had changed in the twenty years since I had last seen her. I couldn’t complain: that was life. And yet, alert, bright, fully engaged and funny, she had not changed at all.
The next day, Raks Seakhoa invited me to a poetry reading at the Windybrow Theater. ‘Take a taxi.’ The theater was in one of the most dangerous areas of Johannesburg. And I almost didn’t go at all, because leaving my hotel I met a man who said that the big event that night was a soccer match between the two best teams in South Africa, the Chiefs against the Pirates. As a visitor, I was duty-bound to see these great local athletes. He said, ‘You can buy tickets at the stadium.’
But I met Raks instead in the community center that had once been the mansion of a Johannesburg millionaire (cupola, mullioned windows, porches, wood paneling), and after the poetry reading, plucking at his pebble glasses, Raks told me his story. He had been arrested, aged eighteen, in a township outside Johannesburg, and taken into custody. He was charged with sabotage and belonging to an unlawful organization. While in police custody he had been tortured and beaten. This was in the late 1970s.