It was only for three or four years that David Palling and I were close friends; but when I look back now it sometimes seems that we shared our entire boyhoods. Season runs into season in the memory; and in all of them I see David’s spare, loose figure, his bright red hair, his freckled face with its tiny nose and pale blue eyes; I hear his high-pitched voice, with its plaintive note when he spoke and its raucous note when he sang. He was a year or two younger than I was, but was of a height with me, and this seemed to wipe out the difference in our ages. Our elder brothers were friends, too; but their friendship was not nearly as close as ours. Being so many years older than David and I, they could not compete as openly and strenuously with one another as we could; they could not cry in front of each other as we were still able to; they tired more quickly of the games of backyard cricket that gave us so much pleasure; they could not laugh as hysterically as we could over puns, scraps of gibberish, the clothing of dandy Africans we passed in the streets, our own grimaces and postures.

Three or four years: how many enthusiasms, in those years? The breeding and racing of homing pigeons was a constant care, a constant, shared source of interest. But there were others, many others. Fruit-stealing was a recurring enthusiasm, every summer, when we—whose parents regularly brought home from the market place crates of grapes, apricots, peaches, plums, and figs; whose backyards were filled with unpruned trees that dropped their small, sweet fruit into a vinous litter at the foot of each trunk—would go out at night to denude the trees of all the suburban houses around ours. Through sandy, dusky lanes, where groups of chattering African servants gathered, we would make our way, until we came to a lane that was clear; then we scrambled over brick or iron fences and climbed into the rustling darkness of the trees; when any back door opened, or a light was switched on, or a voice was raised in challenge, we fled wildly, with pounding hearts, down the lanes, across the tarred, lit streets, into the stretches of unbuilt-upon veld that still lay between each group of houses. The bosoms of our shirts would be full of fruit; if the fruit was soft its juice would trickle down our chests and under our belts, as we ran; if it was hard and inedible we would, when we were safe, throw it at each other, or at street lamps, or give it to the bands of tattered piccanins who also roamed the streets and lanes of the town.

By daylight, during school holidays and over the weekends, we hunted lizards in the veld, mice in the outbuildings in our backyards; we organized elaborate foot and bicycle races; we built wire slides, and slid down them, hanging on for dear life to the piece of iron piping through which the wire was threaded; regularly we stole onions, potatoes, fat, and a frying pan from the kitchens of our houses, and went into the veld to fry potato chips over fires of grass and sticks. Our chips never came out of the pan crisp and brown; we always produced a coagulated, hot mass of stuff, black on the outside and white inside, which was sometimes so nauseating that we turned it over entirely to the piccanins who invariably gathered around us. No matter how isolated was the spot where we chose to do our cooking, these piccanins would appear; their eyes large and black, their shins frail, and their hands so toughened that they could scoop up the chips almost straight from the fire. We took their presence as much for granted as we did the rocks, grass, and thorn trees of the veld around us, and the gleam of iron roofs in the distance. On Saturday afternoons we went to the matinee at one of the town’s three bioscopes, and lit cigarettes when the lights went out; we talked incessantly of girls, but did little about them, except to ride our bicycles round and round the house of this or the other girl whom we had chosen especially to admire; sometimes one of us would join the family of the other for a formal outing—a picnic by the river, a day trip to a farm, a visit to an open mine in the town.

I had a fantasy about the Palling family: I believed them to be “typical.” I suppose the main reason why they appeared to me so typical was simply the fact that they were Gentiles and we were Jewish; it was from this difference that all other differences seemed to spring, more or less directly. It was not just that they celebrated Christmas and Easter, while we celebrated Passover and Yom Kippur. My parents spoke with a foreign accent; the Palling parents did not. Mr. Palling was in employment as the chartered secretary of the local branch of a building society; my father managed his own business. The Palling parents called each other “Mother” and “Father”; mine did not. Mr. Palling went every Sunday morning, in a white shirt, white flannel trousers, and a blazer, to play bowls at the local club; my father did not. The Pallings’ house was always clean and orderly; ours was not. My parents discussed politics endlessly—local politics, Zionist politics, the war in Europe; the Palling parents never did. Our house was full of books and newspapers, and we were constantly going to the town library; the Pallings’ house was altogether bare of reading matter. I and my brothers did well at school; the Palling boys did not. We argued with our parents; the Palling boys did not.

I would not have chosen to live without books or to do badly at school, or to be in fear of my father; but still, I deeply envied the Pallings their typicality, their apparent resemblance to all the families in books and newspaper advertisements. And I envied them because they seemed so much safer, so much more secure, than ourselves. The Palling boys did not have to read in the newspapers about the massacre of their fellow Jews in Europe; they did not have to protest against anti-Jewish remarks made by boorish schoolmasters or uglier things said in the playground by schoolboys; they did not have to bear the burden of guilt and sympathy toward the blacks which we bore as part of our Jewishness; they did not have to flinch inwardly when their parents mispronounced an English word.

How simple it was, it seemed to me, to have Mr. and Mrs. Palling for one’s parents or to be Mr. and Mrs. Palling! Mr. Palling was on first-name terms with everyone on his street and all the teachers at school; his brow was untroubled, his chin was always beautifully shaven; polygonal, rimless glasses rested firmly on his little round nose; his expression was entirely innocent, even obtuse, except for the puckered, prim set of his mouth. (If it hadn’t been for David’s red hair, he would have been the image of his father, everyone said.) Mrs. Palling’s face was more refined than her husband’s: her nose and lips were thinner, her brow was wider, her cheeks were drawn in a little, always, as if in reflection. She was tall for a woman, as tall as her husband. She too seemed to be on first-name terms with all the housewives in the neighboring houses, and drank tea and smoked cigarettes with them in the mornings; in the afternoon she usually lay on one of the beds in the boys’ bedroom, and smoked or dozed or simply stared up at the ceiling. Both she and her husband belonged not only to the bowls’ club, but to numerous other organizations: the Sons of England (though they had both been born in South Africa); the Methodist Social Guild (though neither of them were great churchgoers); the Rotarians and the Rotary Anns. They did things which it was quite impossible for me to imagine my parents ever doing: they went dancing, they played cards, they held each other around the waist and called each other darling, they came home making jokes about how they had had too much to drink at Joe’s or Betty’s or Bill’s or Bob’s. They were typical, typical in every respect, I was sure; and how I coveted the peace and assurance which I was convinced their typicality must give them.

But my envy turned into something else when David and I were playing one day in the garage of the Pallings’ house, and we overturned a box which contained in it, tied with red and blue ribbons, bundles of passionate letters that Mr. Palling had written twenty years before to the girl he was shortly to marry. I read only three or four of the letters before David, who had been busy reading from another bundle, snatched them shamefacedly and fiercely out of my hand, and threw them back into the box, together with the letters he had been reading. What he had read (and whether or not he ever went back to the box) I do not know; but those letters I had seen seemed to me altogether incredible, bizarre, even insane. In the letters Mr. Palling raved, he talked of salvation and damnation and despair, of the moon, the stars, her beauty, his unworthiness; he grovelled, he abased himself, he pleaded; he boasted wildly of “others”; he threatened to commit suicide. Mr. Palling ! To Mrs. Palling! Was it possible? 1 could not imagine them any different from what they were as I knew them; and to my shocked, incredulous imagination it seemed that if he could have written to her like that, then any emotion was possible for anyone, anywhere. Was it typical to write to a woman of her breasts and arms, of prostrating yourself beneath the soles of her feet; typical to swear to her that if she did not yield you would leave her for others who would; typical to speak of that night, her voice, our love, our single heart? And was it typical, too, to conceal and contain these passions within an outward show of respectability, of total conventionality? Then there was no one in the world who was safe; then everyone lived among his own dangers.

But I did not realize what the reading of the letters had done to me until ten or twenty minutes later I went into the house with David, and at my first sight of his mother—who had received those letters, who must have written others like them—my mouth went quite dry and the air seemed to escape from my breast in a single shudder. I was in love with her. It was the last and most passionate enthusiasm I felt during my friendship with David; it was the one that he knew nothing about.

If I were forced to live my life again there are many things I would wish to be spared: among them is the dumb, hopeless lust of puberty and adolescence. Like most of the pains one endures, it is quickly forgotten, once it is over. Only in dreams do we sometimes recall it, in its intensity, shame, and ignorance; only in dreams are we ever so determinedly driven to an end that remains totally mysterious to us, even while we are driven toward it. I loved Mrs. Palling and I did not know what the word meant and could not say it to myself, let alone to anyone else; I could not do anything about the love I felt, except to watch Mrs. Palling, and to make as many occasions as I could for watching her. I could only urge David that we should play in his yard rather than my own; that we should play indoors rather than in the yard; that we should go into his room, where in the afternoons I knew his mother lay, resting.

The room was always warm, summer and winter, for its windows got the afternoon sun. Yellow curtains were drawn across the windows, and the light that came through them was pale gold in color, and evenly diffused over the white walls and the black dressing-table and the patchwork counterpanes on the beds. Mrs. Palling lay on the bed furthest from the window, that of David’s brother; she was always fully clothed, except for her shoes, which lay where she had kicked them off on the floor. On the chair to the side of the bed there was an ash tray, a packet of cigarettes, and her lighter. One arm lay alongside her body, the other was usually lifted; and the smoke from her cigarette, blue at the tip, gray and gold as it thinned and dispersed, rose slowly toward the ceiling. The dress she wore showed the outlines of her legs. In the room there was a warmth and dryness that my senses strained toward, hungered for, as I stood at the door, afraid to enter, unable to go. Dryness is the only word I have for what it was about her that made her seem so unendurably desirable to me. I was afraid I might fall or faint if I moved, if I spoke.

She spoke—sometimes drowsily, sometimes alertly, always in a friendly manner; she asked what we wanted or where we were going to play. At first I was filled with chagrin that she should have spoken to me in exactly the same way as she spoke to all David’s other friends; later, even her indifference became a necessary part of her charm, her attraction for me. I longed for a word or a gesture from her to explain the mysteries which she so potently suggested to me; which I knew she had enacted; which I was sure, at times, must fill her imagination as obsessively as they did my own. But if I caught so much as a curious glance from her pale eyes I was filled with confusion and embarrassment: such a glance was enough to drive me back, away from the room.

It was only for those dazed moments in the bedroom that I now valued David’s friendship; for no others. All the pursuits we had followed together seemed to have become thin, unprofitable, and boring; they had meaning only because they led me to or from the woman I loved. I looked down upon David, because he was so ignorant of what I felt; but, oddly enough, I felt no jealousy of Mr. Palling. Rather, I felt compassion toward him because he had suffered what I was now suffering; at the same time, I was grateful to him for having shown me what it was possible to feel toward his wife. It was to him that I owed the revelation of the length of her limbs, and the piercing dryness of her presence in the bedroom. It was to him, too, that I owed my pride at my own understanding when, “out of the blue” as everyone said, the Pallings’ marriage suddenly broke up.

David announced to me one day, in the middle of a school term, that he and his brother were going to an aunt in Cape Town for a few weeks; then he burst into tears. When I reported this to my parents they exchanged an odd, wry, satisfied glance, and told me that there seemed to be some “trouble” between Mr. and Mrs. Palling, and that I should not make a nuisance of myself by going to their house. What the trouble was they would not tell me, but I soon found out all the same. Quite unexpectedly, Mr. Palling had walked out of the house and had gone to live with an Afrikaans woman in a rundown area on the other side of the town. The scandal was talked about for weeks, and we eventually learned all its details. Apparently, Mr. Palling had been seeing the other woman for months, some said for years. In her distress Mrs. Palling had sent the boys away to a sister of hers in Cape Town; but she continued to live alone in the house. She was begging her husband to come back; she tried to see him, she phoned him, she wrote him letters, but he remained obdurate, he swore he was never coming back.

I felt myself to be the only one in the neighborhood who was not shocked or surprised at the development; I had long known, ever since I had read those letters in the garage, that such things could happen, that anything could happen, to anyone. But I was also sure that there was no one in the neighborhood who could have been more deeply excited than myself over what had happened. Every morning on my way to school, when the sun still skulked behind trees and rooftops, I went out of my way to pass the Pallings’ house; in the afternoons, on my way back from school, when the sun stood high over the town and its own heat sprang back at it from every pitched roof and flat road, I came past once again, more slowly. I lingered at the gate, looking into the garden I had once been able to cross, at the windows of rooms I had once been able to enter; when I reached the corner of the street I stopped and looked back, hoping that Mrs. Palling would come out. The thought of her alone in the house, in the bedroom, for me to speak to (I had not once spoken to her alone; always I had been with David when I had seen her) made me often walk back, if there was no one in the street to observe me, and stand once more at her gate.

One day I simply pushed the gate open. Never, in all my fruit-stealing expeditions with David, not even on the occasion when we had been caught and taken down to the police-station by an irate householder, had I felt such fear as I did when I found myself walking up the little gravel path of the garden. I felt that the sun was watching me; the house was listening to me; the path was ready to roar at me. As I walked I repeated over and over again to myself the question which was to be the pretext for my approach to Mrs. Palling: When was David coming back? When was David coming back? I gained the shade of the stoep, and rang the doorbell. Already, I was exhausted.

I heard the muted trill of the bell, and a little later the sound of footsteps in the hall; I saw a vague shape in the glass in the upper half of the door. But I could not step back. The door opened, and barely six inches away from me stood Mr. Palling. He was dressed in an athletic vest and a pair of trousers. His feet were bare.

I was so surprised that I could not speak, but simply stared forward at him. Somehow, the fact that on a weekday afternoon he should have been at home, instead of at work in his office, seemed to be as shocking as anything else in the situation. For a moment I don’t think he recognized who I was; then, brusquely, he asked me what I wanted.

The shock of his appearance had driven my prepared question out of my head. Instead, I asked blankly after the woman I had come to see. “Where’s Mrs. Palling?”

“She’s gone. She’s not coming back. Why do you want to know?” His expression was peevish; it seemed to me almost menacing. Before I could answer, I heard a woman’s voice—not Mrs. Palling’s—calling from inside the house, “Who is it?” Mr. Palling answered without turning his head. “A friend of David’s.” Then he added, staring directly at me, smiling without a trace of amiability, “My wife’s admirer.”

The shame I felt seemed to burn down to my toes. They knew! She had known, and had told him! I wanted to cry out that it wasn’t true; but another impulse restrained me. I heard myself say, “You admired her too.”

The blow that fell on my cheek was hard, but it did not hurt. I heard him shouting; vaguely, I ducked another blow, then turned and ran down the graveled path. At the gate he caught up with me, while I was struggling to open it. He shook me and hit me again; he almost threw me over the gate. But he could not shake out of me my gratitude to her, my exultation that my secret had been no secret at all to her, those past afternoons. His violence and rage could only prove that what I had begun to learn from her was indeed worth knowing, was worth living a lifetime to know.

_____________

 

+ A A -
You may also like
Share via
Copy link