I took the tea and the slice of toast I had made myself out onto the balcony, perhaps to evade the room. Opposite, the half-finished block of flats was empty and silent; the builder, one of the prudent employers I had read about in the paper, must have told his employees not to come to work, because even the white workers were not there. I sat out on the tiny balcony half the morning, and later two little silent children with bare feet and shabby dungarees came to play on the builder’s sand. Perhaps they came from the building in which I was sitting; I realized as I sat there that the tall shabby walls, the brown-painted corridors and the stale, boxed air of the lift did not have an existence solely about Paul and me, but were seen in the same function by a number of other people, all very different from us and one another, whose lives now signaled for recognition. There was the sound of a duster being shaken out on the balcony of the flat below, the bumbling rise and fall of a crooner’s voice, and then the terse nasal barks, very loud, of a radio play recorded in America, coming from a window on the right. I heard a telephone ring for several minutes; stop, ring again, and then cut off abruptly.
The sun shone steadily on the two small boys: they had found a sifter now, and were busy piling it with sand, letting the sand run through, and then shoveling the same sand into it all over again. The flat boy came in, greeted my explanation of my presence with apparent pleasure at the idea of my being there, whatever the reason, and breathed a song to himself as he rubbed the floor, just as if he had been alone. And over to the left, Johannesburg opened its mouth in its usual muffled roar. I could detect no note of panic — in any case, had there been screams, the howls of the monster at last risen staggering to its feet, they would have been blocked out for me by the indestructible brisk cheeriness of the radio next door.
I said to the flat boy: “Did you hear if there was any trouble this morning in the locations?”
He sat back on his knees like an amiable zoo bear and laughed. It was a deep, phlegm-roughened laugh, because he smoked a lot — his pipe stuck out of the pocket of his “kitchen boy” suit even now. He said, with the tolerant grin at a blood sport which didn’t interest him: “Nobody say. I didn’t see nobody. But plenty boys come to town last night, sleep all night where they work.” He lived with the other flat boys next to the boiler rooms on top of the building, leaning over the parapet on warm nights to twang his guitar above the concrete.
Another one of the good old-fashioned kind.
I tried to rouse myself to do something. Sitting on the balcony smoking in the sun, I thought, I am like an invalid: between the illness and the cure. Sitting weakly in the sun. It was the state of suspension I had spoken about so heatedly to Paul that night when I had wanted to tell him something else: what am I waiting for, why don’t I go and phone up the Consulate, write a letter about that broadcasting research job? It seemed to me that the strike had something to do with my inertia: waiting for something to happen. (Can’t do anything because you’re waiting for this, that, or the other. — That state of suspension, today in its acute form.) Yet I knew that I was not even really thinking of the strike at all.
Toward lunchtime I telephoned the office. I don’t know why I was surprised to find that Paul was there, the voice of the girl at the switchboard just as usual. “What’s it like in town?”—My voice had the subdued, hesitant tone of someone tacitly atoning for a piece of shaming disregard; a woman who has ignored some indisposition of her husband’s may speak in just that tone when next she sees him, and if he answers, as he will, as if her concern for him had been consistent, they can both successfully make her lapse nonexistent.
“Haven’t you been out? It’s all quiet. You know. The rural peace of Johannesburg—” I heard a man’s muffled laugh: someone must be in the office with him.
“And at the busses this morning?”—We had expected trouble at the location bus and train termini, where we knew there would be pickets.
“Nothing, so far as we’ve heard.”
“So if the police can keep their hands to themselves—” I felt awkward as if I were suggesting an aspirin.
“Yes, we must wait and see.” There was a pause.
“—But they must be itching on their batons—” I tried again.
“I haven’t been out in any of the townships yet today,” he said shortly. “Did you phone the Consulate?”
“No. Perhaps this afternoon. If I don’t fall asleep. You’ve no idea how odd it is, being in the flat in the morning.”
“Of course I have — when I was sick? Don’t you remember?” His voice chided me in a guarded intimacy, perhaps because of the presence of the other person. At once I revived, stung to naturalness: “Oh, but that was quite different. That’s why I didn’t even think of it.”
“Look, I must go now, darling.”
“Are you going to be late — Because if not—” I was eager.
“I can’t say. I don’t think so. Because there are a lot of things I should do this afternoon that I won’t be able to. Oh, and Isa phoned; she wants us to eat there. So if I’m late I’ll go straight there. If I’m not home by half-past five, say … And you can go up when you feel like it, she’ll be home all afternoon, she said.”
“Oh, tonight” I said.
“Why, we weren’t doing anything?”
“No. All right.” I’m not sure that I feel like Isa, I wanted to say.
I did fall asleep. I lay down on our bed with the blue quilt over my feet and thought: When I get up in about half an hour I’ll phone her and tell her we can’t come, I’d already made some other arrangement, and then I’ll phone him and tell him. The sun, filtering through the net curtains, warmed the crown of my head through my hair; the woman next door had turned off the radio and a warm space of silence hung above the surge of traffic.
Chapter 32
When I awoke it was five o’clock. The sun, moved away from the room round to the west, had left five heavy drops of honey trembling on the wall below the ventilator brick. Opening my eyes on these I had the familiar confusion that follows a spell of sleep at an unaccustomed hour, felt all the rooms where I had slept rush past my mind before I could seize and steady myself into this one, and then jumped up with a sense of panic. I had the telephone receiver in my hand before I remembered whom I had to ring up and why.
Well, it was too late to put her off now. A little sick and dazed from getting up too quickly, the nausea transposed itself into a reaction against the thought of going to Isa’s that evening. I thought: I’ll phone Paul now and work out some way of getting out of it.
“He’s left, I’m afraid. He went out about half an hour ago.” It was a new voice; must be the girl who had taken my job.
“Have you any idea where he went?” I asked.
“Just a minute—” She was eager to please, in her newness. “Someone says he said he was going to the Community Center.”