Still we lay there. I sat up, with my cheek on my knees, and Joel rolled round onto his elbow. With his finger he was tracing out something on the surface of the rock, gently absent. I looked, too. Weather had layered the ancient surface away in a wavering relief. The sidelong glance of the sun caught along the edges, showing them up dark, but within the outline, the warmth of other suns, the wash of rains fallen and sucked up, fallen and sucked up, endlessly, was fixed with delicate, smudged color: ocher into green, rose into gray.
“A map,” Joel was saying. He spoke out of the sky, yet his voice was human; it was lost to the dust, the rocks, the dusty bushes with their little pebbles of animal droppings, like an offering, left under the leaves, but it came to me. I should have heard it even if he had not spoken: the way creatures of the same kind instinctively communicate their identity of presence when they are lost in the enormousness of landscape and sky.
“Here’s a continent, and provinces — the biggest river. There the mountain range, and the sea. An ocean. Some islands … And a long way”—his finger traveled the seas—”another country. This is a small one, latitude due north, a cold one. Snow and seals on this rocky coast, but down here — just about here, the dolphins begin. Here’s a whole group of islands, with a warm current wrapped round them, so they’re the coconut-palm kind. The people sing (you would find out that they’ve got hookworm) and they sail about — all over here — in the hollowed-out barks of trees, with figureheads like ugly sea monsters. Over this side is a huge, rich country, an Africa and America rolled into one, with a bit of Italy thrown in for charm—”
He made up the world, and threw into it all the contradictions, the gradations and clashes of race and face and geography, rearranged to suit ourselves; but it seemed that the physical plan of it, a trial universe idly scratched down by season and chemical in a time before time when the world was actually taking shape, sinking and rising from the sea, exploding volcanically, shifting in landslides, really was preserved there on the rock: an abandoned cosmos, the idle thought of a god. …
Joel paid me the tribute of making a game out of it for me, but there was a tinge of wonder to it. We played with the discovering pleasure of children, ignored and watched by the Kloof and the sky. Quite suddenly, but with authority, the Kloofs own shadow fell upon us. Enough, it decreed. It had closed like an eyelid over the sun. The rock faded; we felt our elbows and hipbones sore. Under the shadow, that was a little chill, but missed the treetops so that they remained alight in the sun, we came down. Joel’s warm brown hand helped me; below every rock he waited, the hand, palm up, receiving me. Its warmth in my own had the comfort of a renewed contact; yet we had not touched each other up on the rock. I felt a vague sadness that was not unhappy. I did not know why. … We were coming down the side of the hill like two people who have kissed and held each other. The elderly Afrikaner packing rugs and empty beer bottles into the boot of his car looked up and saw us that way. We walked past the bitten-out rinds of watermelon, the eggshells and torn paper, back to the car.
Something had stuck to my shoe—”Just a minute—” I held on to the door handle of the car, balancing on one leg, laughing. “Here”—Joel snapped off a twig and pried at the mess on my heel. It fell away and it was a rubber contraceptive, perished and dusttrodden, relic of some hurried encounter behind the trees, inconsequent and shabby testimony. But between us at this moment it was like a crude word, suddenly spoken aloud. In dismay more than embarrassment, we ignored the happening, jumped quickly into the car. Joel, encouraging the reluctant kick-over of the engine, his hand over the gear knob, the frown with which men pay attention to engines drawing down his eyebrows, was my reassurance. The finger of disgust had hovered, but could not make its smudge on us. Again, I did not know why.
Joel began talking of his plans with the cut-and-dried assessment of the future with which people eye their lives after some decision has been made, something has become clear. It was as if he said: Ah, well — and deliberately turned to what remained to be maneuvered, what was malleable, obedient. “If I could get a job in London for say a year—” He was talking of post-graduation. “Then I could walk, hitchhike back, over Europe, down Italy …”—Yet I had the feeling he was thinking of something else.
“You’d want to come back?”
“Yes … Sooner or later, everyone gets the feeling he wants to come back. I don’t know why it should be, for people like us, really: no roots in the real Africa — you can’t belong to the commercial crust thrown up by the gold mines. If you look at it honestly, my roots in the land must be away somewhere in a place I’ve never seen or known, where my parents come from. In Latvia. Or somewhere else, even further back. That’s where they must be”—he smiled—“though I can’t say I feel them. I was born here, right. But on the surface, on the superimposed Africa, this rickety thing, everybody’s makeshift Europe. These Reef towns are hardly more than putting up a shack and making it look like home in some other country. And then the temporary dwelling becomes permanent, is thirty or forty years old (Atherton must be about that? When did the coal mines open up—1900?) and never loses its makeshift character. Our little six-story skyscrapers in Atherton, our little bit of makeshift America — they’re made of reinforced concrete but they look like shoe boxes. It’s hardened into the character of the place — contemporary makeshift.”
“I belong to it, too; I’m only a second-generation South African. — You mean people who’re descended from the 1820 settlers — people whose great-grandfathers trekked, and so on …?”
He nodded as he drove. “Anyone who’s lived directly out of the land; even one generation. If my people had come out here and farmed; if I’d been born on the land that’d be different.”
I had never thought of it: “Never occurred to me that I might not belong in that way.”
He smiled. “I think about it often. It comes up whenever I think of going away, and coming back to Africa. … I correct myself; not Africa, 129 Fourth Street, Atherton.”
“You won’t go on living here, that’s certain,” I said, thinking of myself.
“Well, not quite Atherton, I don’t suppose. Helen, come and have supper with us? Your people won’t be back till late.” Again there was something disconnected, smothered, about the way he spoke, though the words came out ordinary enough; it was as if he had suddenly swerved back through the distraction of his own talk. Yet the look in which he held me seemed to stay any response, keeping me in that sad-happy mood, a kind of self-hypnosis, that falls like a trick of the light on people who are young, sensual, and still in the state where life is imagined and apprehended rather than lived. I smiled, that was all.
“Are you sure?” I questioned inconvenience, but had already taken my acceptance for granted.
“Better get some milk on the way,” said Joel, remembering a chronic Sunday-night shortage. He stopped at the first corner Greek shop when we reached Atherton, and smiled at me through the plate glass as he stood inside waiting to be served. Even in the car, there was a companionable silence that seemed to be of his making; I waited for him to come back. The blinds were down over the pavements: Garter’s THE Tobacconist, Wedding Gifts and Novelties for all Occasions; B.B. Bazaar, 3d. 6d. 1/—; Suliman Ismail Patel, Grocery, Provisions, Fancy Goods; Paris Modes for Latest in High-Class Ladies Wear. And in the empty sawdust arena of the butcher’s shop, a striped fat cat sat like an owl in the window. A woman with an arm about each of two little girls whose skinny legs gave them the look of walking on tiptoe moved slowly along the shop fronts; a way behind, the father in the miner’s Sunday white shirt and blazer came along without interest. One of the little girls broke away. “Oooh, Pappie, ek hou van daardie—” She skipped between the mother and father, in love with something she had seen in a window. “That’s the one I want—” She used a mixture of English and Afrikaans to express the delight of her desire. The mother and father turned their heads blankly above her, neither responding nor refusing, as if her pleasure were something complete and dependent upon them or circumstance neither for denial nor gratification. It was something she would grow out of, as they had grown out of all expectation; they were placid in that.