But the sides of the Kloof remained uncultivated, and people could climb up leisurely and lose themselves in the scraggly foliage and the rusty-looking boulders, finding a level to sit in the sun where it was quiet with the quiet of high places, and the occasional human voice floating up from below in a scarf of wind sounded more like the cry of a bird. It was not a beautiful place, but the broken planes and rather tame wildness that it offered our eyes forever resting on the level and the treeless, made it seem so to us, or gave us pleasure by reminding, in its poor way, how beautiful the country could be. Joel said: “I wouldn’t mind being at the Cape, now.”
We left the car at the bottom and clung and slithered up. The dry season was beginning, and although the leaves were still fleshy and bright, the barks of the trees were scaly as the lichened rocks, and warm dust fluffed round our feet and seemed part of the sunlight. It was a dust that smelled of eucalyptus and now and then of some mauvish herb-bush that reverberated with bees. We grunted as we pulled each other up, breathing earnestly. “What are you looking for?” he asked. “No flowers,” I said, disappointed. “—You should know the Transvaal.”
But there was a big lizard, moving off as if a streak of the rock had liquefied. We stopped and felt disinclined to go on. Lifting our heads after the concentration on footholds, we came out clear above the lorries and the children and the valley, clear above half the fall of treetops. “Ah — hh.” Joel was satisfied to sit down on the lizard’s rock, and I sank down, too. He unrolled himself onto his back after a moment or two and had on his face the strange smile of people who look up at the sun. Everything seemed to sheer off into the space, the emptiness; my mind drained clear. The steady winter sun hunched my shoulders the way the warmth of a low-burning fire does. Then thoughts began to trickle back, unconnected by logic, but by links that I did not inquire or bother to understand. Mary Seswayo at the washbasin: a tingle of feeling toward her; what? — She is a girl, the discovery came, like me. It was not the rather ridiculous statement of an obvious fact, but a real discovery, a kind of momentary dissolving of obvious facts, when the timid, grasping, protesting life of my own organism spoke out, and I recognized its counterpart in her, beneath the beret and my kindness and her acceptance. Then my mother. She would say, “Helen had such a pile of studying to do;—yes, very hard,” proud as she could never feel in my presence, with its reminder of all I was not. For a fanciful second I saw her at the braaivleis, tried to turn her face toward me and could not. You are a very clean people, of course. Who said that? Daddy to Joel, the first time. A clean little woman, clean little place, my mother would say seriously; it came before godliness with her. Of course, all Jews are circumcised; but my father hadn’t meant that. How embarrassing for Joel if he thought it. … But that was months ago. …
“Did you ever speak to the girl about her notes?” He spoke suddenly.
“D’y’know, I was just thinking about her!”
“Did you, though?”
“I thought I told you? On Friday. I showed her some other notes — not mine, they’re too scrappy — but someone else’s I borrowed.”
After a moment I said: “She was horribly grateful. I felt like a bossy missionary presenting a Bible to a little savage who has no shoes and chronic hookworm.”
“She’s going to teach?”
“Of course.”
“Helen, what are you going to do?” He knew I planned a librarianship or perhaps some job of vaguely imagined interest in a consulate, but the question cut past that.
“I don’t know … I sometimes wonder what I’m doing it all for — Other people want to teach … and it’s not as if I write. All this reading; just for pleasure and curiosity, really.”
“Not that. You really have the honest itch to know.”
I lay back, too; we spoke dreamily, the kind of parenthetic exchange people have on the edge of sleep. The rock offered us to the sky, Joel Aaron and me, side by side, but not touching. “But what?”
“That’s it.” He turned the question into an answer, as if it were satisfactory.
“Sometimes I think I should have done social science. …”
“You’ll take too much in from other people,” he said to the sky. “That’ll be your trouble. You’ll bolt it all. …”
I wanted an answer: “I think I should have done social science. I could still do it.”
“Helen, perhaps you should get married, I mean sometimes there are women with a kind of — how can I put it — vivid feeling for life. They push it into things that waste it; activities that could run on something colder. So it’s lost; they change. Because it’s something for between men and women.” He became vague: “If you cut it up, parcel it out …” He shook his head at himself.
I felt queerly hurt, indignant. It was as if I discovered in the expression of someone’s face some defect in myself that I was not aware of. “So that’s all you think I’m good for. Married. But I’ll marry as well …” There was a silence. I said, still half-offended, “Joel, I don’t understand you. You’ve done more than anyone to get me out of my rut — I’ve always felt we were escaping Atherton together; you understood because you were stuck in it, too, and when I talked to you I found someone who was struggling out of a kind of comfortable mediocrity that I was dimly aware of wanting to break — and that made it possible for me to put my finger on it. I’ve learned to look, to hear. … Now you say a thing like that.”
Whatever he had been thinking, he had put it aside, out of my sight. He lifted his head from the rock, straining his neck to smile at me. “It’s just the way Jews are. There, it comes out in me, too; we really only want girls to marry. — It’s like my Indian hair — You don’t lack the brains, my girl, it’s not that.”
I smiled, as I always did, apologetically, when he became aware of his Jewishness.
“Helen,” he said after a pause, “do you mind my being a Jew?”
I sat up, with the smile again. “Why? You know—”
“No.” His hand twitched where it lay on the rock. “I mean really. And your people. Does your mother say anything?”
I lay down again. The rock had the comfort of spareness, resisting the spine firmly, like lying on the floor. I said, timidly, “No. Sometimes you make me feel — ginger. Just because you’re dark.”
“No, even if I were ginger, too, it’d be just the same.”
“My mother never says anything. Daddy neither.”
There was no answer, and when I twisted my head to look at him, I saw that his eyes were closed.
I was still looking at him when he opened them after quite a long while, and I could see them, veined with the gray and green of stones under water, slowly bringing me into focus after the dark of his eyelids. I had the curious feeling that he saw me as nobody else had ever seen me; like when he had said “Helen of Atherton” on the train that day. We lay a moment, looking at each other, and nothing moved but the very corners of his eyes, where his eyelashes lifted together as if they smiled on their own.
A great bird waved across the sky. The sinking sun spread up a fan of radiance; light sprang about the high air like singing spray.