There was a twinge of hurt in me at his words. They were casual enough in themselves; a natural reaction from hurt or irritation which would have brought a confessedly sympathetic smile from me, spoken by anyone else. But it was as if, for that moment in the street months ago, Joel had looked for something common, ordinary, blunted by use on everybody and anybody, with which to strike me, to show me by the choice of weapon rather than the blow the extent of my worth.
“I was angry. I was hurt … I suppose that’s why. And you stood there all smiles, effusive, looking just as you always did.” He paused, bent a match in two and fizzed his whisky and soda. We were both seeing me again, standing on the pavement in Commissioner Street, tilting my head at him. “But as you kept on standing about and playing with those theater tickets you had, I noticed something about your face — I don’t know what it was, really. You seemed to be — put together too consciously. Does that sound silly?” He looked at me, seeing me now, not then. “I didn’t want to say it any more.”
There was a moment’s pause, and we both drank. “You had your hair drawn back then,” he said, and I knew he was remembering the piece that had blown down against my lips, and that I had kept pushing away. Somewhere inside me this was handed to me as a slip of paper on which is written a word of power; but the chastening of a minute or two before kept me humble.
Looking round at the people about us who were rising to go into dinner, I had a moment of dark illumination, far from Durban and the pleasant anticipatory buzz and the hushing of the night sea outside. I said fearfully: “I don’t know what would have happened then, if you had. Told me to go to hell, I mean. Cast me off.”
“Why?” he said.
I looked for words. “I think I should have screamed. Oh, I don’t mean then and there, in the street. But inside myself. I should have lost control.”
Later we stood on the jetty, leaning over the rail. Under the planks beneath our feet, we could feel the sea flinging its weight again and again. But it was too dark to see the water; a night without a moon. Looking back, there was the bright claw of Durban, reaching into the black. I could smell the hissing water down below, prickling up air to my cheeks like the sizzling of soda water.
“How do they feel about it?” I said, speaking of Joel’s parents and of what he had just admitted, that in Israel he would be more likely to be planting potatoes than designing buildings.
“They wouldn’t be too happy, if they realized it, I think. They would think it a waste—”
I smiled down to the dark sea. “A waste.”
“—But, fortunately, they don’t realize it. The idea of Israel dazzles out everything else. They see me going home.”
I said after a minute: “You know, Joel, I think you might have gone anyway. Even if you hadn’t been a Jew.”
He looked round at me in the dark though I couldn’t see his face. “Yes, maybe. — I suppose that’s true.”
“D’you remember what you said once, about belonging only to the crust in South Africa.”
He laughed softly. “That Sunday outing.”
The sea, drawing back its immensity of waters like a great sigh, poised a moment of silence.
As it burst forward, I began to speak again. “I don’t feel even that any more. Even that night in the township — at the time it was terrible and immediate and I was there, in the thick of it. But afterward the worst thing about it for me was the fact that I was in it was only by physical accident. It happened around me, not to me. Even the death of a man; behind a wall of glass. …” The water lapped back at me, took my words away. “I envy you. A new country. Oh, I know it’s poor, hard, but a beginning. Here there’s only the chaos of a disintegration. And where do people like us belong. Not with the whites screaming to hang onto white supremacy. Not with the blacks — they don’t want us. So where? To land up like Paul with a leg and an arm nailed to each side? Oh, I envy you, Joel. And I envy you your Jewishness.”
At this he made a little noise of astonishment. “Why that, for God’s sake?”
“Because now I’m homeless and you’re not. The wandering Jew role’s reversed. South Africa’s a battleground; you can’t belong on a battleground. So the accident of your Jewish birth gives you the excuse of belonging somewhere else.”
Joel had turned his back to the rail and was leaning on his elbows. In the dark I could feel him looking at me, I felt he was looking somewhere other than my outward self, he saw penetratingly, with a kind of powerful instinct, where light was not needed. So he said, without a trace of irrelevancy: “Your people. You’ve finished with them, for good?”
“Oh, yes. I see that. … And yet when I went back there, that last time, I found a kind of comfort in those old ladies with their knitting and those men all comfortably notched on the official scale. Like letting the moss slide over your head in a stagnant pool. It’s terrible to find yourself reduced to taking comfort from the thing you despise.”
“Despise is a hard word,” he said.
“Yes, I know. John and Jenny and Isa”—I avoided the inclusion of Paul’s name. “But I shouldn’t put the blame on them. Anyway, I can’t ever go back to the thing I cast off in favor of what they had to offer — Atherton makes me shudder. But you, it beats me how you’ve done it. You’ve lived just as you wished, you do as you must, and you’ve managed to hang on and hurt nobody. And yet your people are as far from your kind of life as mine are from mine — if I can be said to have a kind of life. …”
Joel said, in a tone of voice I had heard from him before, long ago: “Helen, they did seem pretty impossible to you, didn’t they? — My mother and father.”
There was a second’s hesitation before I answered. “Yes,” I said. “Impossible for you.”
“You mean the store and the things that make up their life and the way they look?”
“Yes-yes, I suppose so. I have to admit that’s what I really mean. You’re so different. Money is their standard. — No, that’s not it — Money is their civilization.”
“And what do you think mine is?”
“Yours isn’t anything so ready-made. I should say it was the full exercise of human faculties.”
“Good, good,” he said, of the phrase. And then in a wary, half-bantering, questioning voice: “The good life … eh?”
“The good life,” I said. “Don’t say that. The good life.”
“You thought Jenny and John and the others had it. Now you think I have.”
“I don’t say you’ve achieved it. But I believe you know what it is.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not any more. I’m not sure. Anyway, I know what it isn’t. It isn’t the hypocrisy of considering that something has been done to right wrongs because you yourself act as if they have been righted. The color bar isn’t down because you’ve invited an Indian to dinner; you haven’t struck a blow for the working classes because, like Jenny Marcus, you don’t wear a hat.”—I laughed with him. “Oh, yes, it’s true. I think for me that was the beginning of the end, with the Marcuses. Jenny actually told it to me. John wouldn’t let her wear a hat, because the bourgeoise women do. — That was the choice I’d made for myself. The life of honesty and imagination and courage.”
“The full exercise of human faculties.”
“Yes. I’ve got all the phrases, haven’t I? But the things I’ve fobbed off on myself, under those names … Whatever I think about seems to bring me back to that dead native in the location: the good life and the thing that’s actually lived, the idea of death and the actuality of the man potted down so quietly in all that racket. … There’s the same hiatus there. Joel”—it was getting cold now, in a rising wind off the water, and my hands were stiff in the pockets of my coat—“why does it trouble me so much, this awful feeling I have of being at a remove from everything?”