He should give it up, I said resentfully. Give it up. Nobody can go on doing something he believes is fruitless. And now I felt like an angry child who wants to kick something, to kick something and spill over with angry tears.
Then what would he do? How live, then, with himself?
— Then he must accept what he does now for what it is. My job is this that and the other. It will not give a single African an education, a skilled job, a voice in the way his people are to be disposed of, or even the right to build a house for himself when he hasn’t anywhere to live. But he can’t go on struggling and arguing and conniving to give his job the scope it hasn’t got, all day, and sneering at and deriding everything he’s done, the moment he pauses.
I told myself, putting the plates and cutlery quickly on the tray: I will tell him this. The statement had the air of an ultimatum. I will tell him this. It was not a piece of advice; people so close to each other cannot give advice, any more than one can advise oneself.
And so we ate our supper, out on the little balcony. The fat clumsy moths fell against the lamp and taxied lamely between the plates. Paul searched up and down the theater page of the paper, irritable for somewhere to go. I ate slowly, and often paused; but my hand went out for my glass of water; I drank; went on eating.
He threw the paper aside. “Nothing—”—but already indifferent to whether he went out or not. The moon was not up yet and outside the dusty edges of the lamplight the summer night was thickly dark. We put out the lamp to get rid of the insects, and from where I sat, smoking, I saw down away to the left the still darker bulk of buildings, solid as mountains of rock, become fragile as shells, brittle and delicate towers of tracery as the lights went on, hollowing them out, chipping out rectangles and oblongs. Now if you had flicked them with your thumb and finger they would have given back the flat airy sound of fretwork infinitely fine and thin. If you leaned over and picked one up you would be startled by the lightness of it, like picking up a teaspoon made of tin. …
He said: “I saw Edna Schiller today.”
“Did you?”
“She’s not in the second batch, either, though Hugo is.”
“I think she’s disappointed. She gives me the impression of being distinctly peeved. She feels she’s been done down.” The bill for the suppression of Communism had been passed in Parliament, and several of the people we knew had been “named” and informed that they would be charged under the new act. Edna, who had lived on a fantasy of danger for so long, was now apparently to be denied this first real martyrdom: so far her name had not appeared on the lists. When I had spoken to her I could not help feeling that she regarded this omission as a real slight.
“You’re developing a brand of venom all your own, you know. Polite and peculiarly nasty. And always for people like Edna. Perhaps it takes some courage to take the risk of turning out merely to look ridiculous,” he said wearily.
The sudden defense of Edna was sheer perversity of mood; he had laughed about her a hundred times, joined with Isa in the baiting of Edna’s secretive pomposity. But the silence into which his words sank said something quite different. After it was said, his last sentence echoed between us as a comment purely on himself. With it he had chosen to take my attitude toward Edna on himself; snatching up the amusement, the mild scorn in a compulsive determir ition to spare himself nothing. He was determined to make me feel that I had been ridiculing him. I was infuriated with the unfairness of the guilt he was making me feel; a guilt which he was inventing, for which I was not culpable, a piece of twisted interpretation for which he wanted me to give him the pleasure of my inflicting pain.
There was real enmity between us in the darkness. I was glad of the dark because I should not have wanted him to see my face as I felt it was and could not have made it otherwise, stiff with resistant anger, I would not even light another cigarette, although I wanted one, because I could not trust the light of a match, showing my face.
After a long time I burst out: “Why do we all live in a perpetual state of crisis? — ‘This is not my real life, of course, it’s just the way we live now.’—But it’s nonsense. We should all see it’s nonsense. However you live day after day is your real life. You can’t keep the substance of it intact meanwhile — like a child saving a sweet whole to be eaten under special conditions.”
He was interested. He flickered out of his listless restlessness. “The times aren’t good enough to merit the expenditure of our living. That sort of feeling, I suppose.”
I said: “Isn’t it idiotic? We know that life doesn’t keep. Yet we all have the feeling that the present is something to be got over with, and then … How long have the Nats been in power? Nearly two years. So for two years now everyone who isn’t a Nationalist has been going around in the kind of released state of disaster. Going around saying, Well, until this is over and we get them out again, or: Perhaps we won’t stay to see what happens — what about going to Rhodesia? Or Kenya? — Even if they haven’t the slightest intention of going anywhere, it doesn’t matter: the state of mind is the same. If you are waiting for something to alter, something to happen, if you possibly may be going to go away and live somewhere else, your whole life now becomes a state of suspension. It is like disaster: the same feeling of urgency, putting aside of normal incentives, making do temporarily with what you can. But the big thing about a disaster—”
“What exactly do you mean by disaster? Politically, the Nationalist regime is a disaster all right.”
“Not the way I mean. — A flood, say. Or an earthquake. The big thing about a disaster like that is that it passes. You are existing temporarily, you will begin to live again when it is over. But with us the state of mind of disaster is becoming permanent. At this rate it can go on for years. We could sit for twenty years, like flies paralyzed but not killed by a spider, so long as the Nats stay in power. An unfortunate interruption. Shelving this, shelving that, because ‘things are so uncertain here,’ ‘we never know what will happen.’ “
“There’s an election every five years, you know. There’s just a chance they might get thrown out.”
I moved impatiently in my chair. “—Well five years, then. A year, ten months, if you like. It makes no difference. The state of mind’s still fraud, a piece of self-delusion. This is our life and it is being lived out now the way we don’t like it. This is not time out.”
“Ah, that’s true,” he said slowly, “that’s true.” Then he said, in the quick tone of remembering a point he had wanted to question: “To go back a minute — the fly and spider business. — You talk as if everyone’s resigned himself to Nat rule. And you know that’s not so; you talk as if we weren’t kicking like hell.”
“Oh politically, yes. I grant that politically we’re protesting madly. Even in ordinary private talk we’re protesting. But you know that wasn’t what I was talking about. It’s inside. Inside ourselves in the — what’s the word I want — the nonpolitical, the individual consciousness of ourselves in possession of our personal destiny: it’s that which we’ve put aside, laid away in lavender; postponed.”
I took a deep breath and we both laughed suddenly at my vehemence. I was roused by what I had been saying and I felt, for a few minutes, a glow, a relief of talk that was like the satisfaction of something accomplished.
But in a short while it faded.
That was all I had said. The relief, the satisfaction came to me spuriously, out of stimulation; they belonged to the conclusion of the saying of what I had not said. I had meant to say, but had not said.