I even thought I might go out for a while, go down to one of the Hillbrow clubs where people I know are likely to be on a Saturday night. I do that, sometimes, when Graham has gone home. I put on a coat and some lipstick and go to one of those noisy dark places he’s never seen the inside of. He talks about ‘the white laager’ but this is really it, in a way: all the German and Italian immigrant men, looking for the street-life of Europe, and the young white South Africans and their girls, playing at low life, while outside in the lanes the black prostitutes and male transvestites hang about for those who are serious. In some of these places there are lean young men with guitars, and you hear everyone join in the singing of ‘We Shall Overcome’, just as if it were ‘My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean’. I ought to take Graham there sometime. But that would be an encroachment on my private life.
I have left everything in the room as it was — the onion rings congealed on our plates, Luke’s table napkin thrown on the floor when he turned away from the table, the cheese for the mice to climb up and get at, the monkey lying on the sofa. Tomorrow, for an extra half-crown, Samson will clean it all up and take away the leftovers in an old jam tin. I cream my face as I do every night, as a man carefully cleans and oils his gun after use. I lie in bed, in the dark, and my body follows the routine ritual preparation for sleep: left side with right leg drawn up; belly-down, head to left; left leg drawn up, head to right, weight slowly given to the right side.
Perhaps he’s talking now in the language I don’t understand, full of exclamations and pauses for emphasis, telling them he’s found a white woman who’ll do it. But that’s nonsense, there’s no possible way he can know about my grandmother’s account. It’s not written on my forehead. He’s gone. In three or four months’ time he’ll turn up again, and it’ll be as if the whole thing has been resolved. Africans are instinctively tactful in these matters. He knows that all my talk about trying to think of someone, asking for time, etc., is just a face-saving way — for him and me — of saying no. He knows it. He must know it well. And next time he’ll want something else from me, a fiver again perhaps, or even just a meal, and it won’t be expedient to bring up what he asked for the last time.
The headlights of a car making the steep turn into the street send a great pale moth of light travelling slowly round the room; I turn on my back to follow it. Then there’s darkness again, but some other light, a streetlamp perhaps, casts a wavering panel, spattered and blobbed (the shadow of the branch of a tree?) like the reflection of light in water. But water is heavy and dark, under its own weight, there’s no light down there. I know they must have brought him up when they recovered the suitcase full of papers; but he’ll always be down there, where he chose to go, where he had his last conscious thought. Max was dropped from the late final edition, crowded out by the astronauts. They are still up somewhere above my head. The moon, next time.
I should have kept the front page, with pictures, to send to Bobo. I must remember in the morning. I don’t know what time it is. Often you can tell from the quality of the darkness and silence whether you have woken deep in the night, or towards morning. It can’t be much before morning, I went to bed late and I seem to have come up from a long sleep. Yet it is quite dark and still, layer on layer of sleep suspended in the building between the earth and the open dark … and now, very far off, I heard quite distinctly the shuffle and clash of couplings falling into place between the coaches of a train; the railway yards are about two miles from here and one never knows they’re there.
Since I’ve been awake I’ve been thinking very clearly. It’s as if sediment has settled in my mind during sleep, and, like my hearing, all my faculties are perfectly acute. If I moved at all, the stir might produce cloudiness, as a snowstorm comes up in Bobo’s paperweight; but all my muscles are in perfect tension, too, and I am not aware of what position I’m lying in. I’m clear as a fish in a lighted bowl, as their (silvery?) capsule up there in the empty night that stretches even further than the lilac goes. ‘From the Pacific to the Atlantic in twenty minutes’; when Max drowned today, a man walked about in space.
Why the moon?
There’s no moon tonight, or else the room couldn’t be so dark.
Isn’t it the same old yearning for immortality, akin to all our desires to transcend all kinds of human limits? The feeling that if you bring such a thing off you’re approaching the transcension of our limits of life: our death. We master our environment in order to stay alive, but this is mastery only over the human span, whether that’s measured by three-score-and-ten or its prolongation for a few years — as with the old lady — by medicine. We’ve learnt how to stay alive — until it’s time to die.
You can go down after love or up after the moon.
But if you master something outside our physical environment, isn’t it reasonable to believe you are reaching out beyond the fact of death? If you master that beyond, as those men up there have done, isn’t that the closest we’ve ever got to mastering death? Won’t it seem the prefiguration, the symbol of that mastery?
They are alive, up there.
The very scene of operations is significant. We call the nothing above me ‘the sky’; and that way it’s became the roof of our environment, part of our terrestrial and finite being, witness of our moment of eighty-seven years or thirty-one (he would have been thirty-two next month). But we know that that ‘nothing’, beyond the layer of cloud I’ve seen for myself from a plane, that wrapping of atmosphere that others have soared above — that ‘nothing’ is space. Twin of time, the phrase goes. I hear it in Graham’s voice: together they represent, in the only conception we’re capable of forming of it, infinity. Nightly, lilac infinity.
If that man over my head can get out of ‘the sky’ into space, step from his man-devised, man-controlled casing into an environment beyond man’s, move of his own volition into the vortex our planet was flung from and in which its cooling and bringing forth of life and the emergence of man and all his works together occupy (if you try to think of it in terms of time) a moment — if he can do this, can he really be still mortal? If God is the principle of the eternal, isn’t he near God, tonight? Nearer than Max — who tried love — at the bottom of the sea. After all, religions teach that the kingdom of God, of the spirit, is not of this world. Flesh is of this world; death is of this world, but only by death we shall enter eternal life. Space is not of this world, either, and yet you can walk about alive in it, up there. You don’t need to be dead in order to enter. Is there anything surprising that there should be a deep connection in our subconscious between the eternity of God and the infinity of space? In fact, some scientists set out to prove that these are one and the same, and nearly all believe that there is some identity, at least, between religious myths and the evolutionary drive towards higher forms of life.
What’s going on overhead is perhaps the spiritual expression of our age, and we don’t recognize it. Space exploration isn’t a ‘programme’ — it’s the new religion. Out of the capsule, up there, out of this world in a way you can never be, gone down to the seabed; out of this world into infinity, eternality. Could any act of worship as we’ve known such things for two thousand years express more urgently a yearning for life beyond life — the yearning for God?