The young man Charles said: “I’m damned if I know how to get out.” And certainly, although he had turned and turned again, we were not leaving Mariastad the way we came in. We were now rocking and bumping through the rutted streets of what must have been the oldest part of the location. The closeness of the place, the breath-to-breath, wall-to-wall crowding, had become so strained that it had overflowed and all bounds had disappeared. The walls of the houses pressed on the pavement, the pavement trampled into the street, there were no fences and few windows. Fires in old paraffin tins burned everywhere, and women stood over them among the screaming children, cooking and shouting. I was accustomed to seeing Africans in ill-fitting clothes that had belonged to white people first, but these people were in rags. These were clothes that had been made of the patches of other clothes, and then those patches had been replaced by yet others. They must have been discarded by a dozen owners, each poorer than the last, and now, without color or semblance of what they had been, they hung without warmth, fraying in the fierce flicker of flames that seemed greedy to eat them up, return them at last to the nothing their frailty had almost reached. The children were naked beneath one garment cast off by a grownup; streaming noses and gray bellies to show that under the old army jacket there was something alive instead of a cross of sticks to frighten birds.
All movement seemed violent here. The lift of a woman’s elbow, stirring a pot. Their red eyes when they looked up. Their enormous, yelling laughter above the smoke. The grip of their bare feet on earth worn thin as the rags they wore. The men went about as if they were drunk, and perhaps some of them were; the strong, fermented smell of kaffir beer fought with the smoke.
“Christ, what a place,” said the young man, annoyed with himself for losing his way. Some of the people stared curiously through the smoky confusion as we passed, and children yelled, Penny! Penny! jeeringly. Behind the crooked outline of their mean roofs held down with stones and pumpkins a magnificent winter sky turned green and bejeweled, and as it arched away from their gathering darkness the hovels seemed to crawl closer to the earth beneath it, and their tins of fire became the crooked eyes of beasts showing. I was afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of in the people, no menace in their shouts or their looks: like their shacks, their bodies, they were simply stripped of gentleness, of reserve, all their bounds were trampled down, and they only moved or cried out in one need or another, like beasts. Yet I was afraid. The awfulness of their life filled me with fear.
He said: “What a noisy lot of devils they are, eh?”
But I did not answer and he was so busy peering his way through the unlighted streets that he did not notice. On the banks of a trickle of stream that smelled of soda and rotting vegetables, and that, in the light of the car, showed the earth caked with dried soap scum, Mariastad petered out. We followed a man on a swaying bicycle over a bridge and drove up a rise to the main road.
“Light me a cigarette,” he said. I found the packet and some matches and lit the cigarette in my mouth. As I handed it to him I looked back over my shoulder and saw Mariastad, a mile away. It rose in smoke and the pale changing light of fire like a city sacked and deserted behind us.
Presently he put his hand lightly on my thigh, just above the knee, and squeezed it gently once or twice as if he were trying a fruit. Then with an air of calm decision he stopped the car at the side of the road, right under a street light, and kissed me with deliberate passion. I felt, as I always did when someone kissed me for the first time, what a stranger he was, and how far, in our mingled lips and saliva, we were from each other. We sat back in our own corners of the car and he said: “Can’t you stay over in town tonight? It’s so late as it is.”
I looked uncertain; I did not know what I wanted to do.
“Let’s go and have dinner and we could see a show.”
“—Well, I suppose I could. I could phone home. But I’ll have to find out if the woman I usually stay with can have me.”
So we drove quickly into town and when I had done my telephoning I found him already seated at the bright little table of the hotel restaurant. For the first time, he looked young and nervous. As I passed the bowing maître d’hôtel and the pianist who played as if she were asleep and her music was a sentimental dream, and the buffet where the turkey wore frills, the ham was the delicate pink of petals, and the lobsters lay ornate in silky bouquets of lettuce, I felt a kind of voluptuous thrill at the chanciness and irreconcilable contrasts thrown up to me in Johannesburg. The guilt, the desire to assume my part of the human responsibility for it all, sharpened the assertion of my self opposing greedy claims for pleasure, love and admiration. I ate whatever looked prettiest and drank some sour white wine that made me feel so full that I had to unfasten the hook of my skirt. We sat through the cinema holding hands, with our knees and calves touching, and afterward struggled together in the car. I was shocked and fascinatedly excited by the way his stranger’s hand went firmly under my clothes as if it were a live thing in itself, an animal finding its burrowing way. And the hand was cold, from the steering wheel and the winter night air, on my warm sheltered skin. I had never believed love-making could be such a casual thing for me. When I went into the house and crept into the room where I was to sleep, I found that beneath my coat all my clothes were unbuttoned, unfastened, ready to take off. But I did not feel ashamed and instead laughed, suppressing the laugh with my hand, and flung the coat to a chair in a kind of independent satisfaction.