So, from the first — and life was wickedly divided in the early years of the apartheid era — Nadine wrote of race relations, and her black characters were as carefully delineated as her white ones. One of the hallmarks of her prose has always been its intense physicality, the pleasures of sex, of food, of sunshine, or the converse of these, frustration, hunger, bad weather.
It seemed puzzling to me in Johannesburg to reflect that I had never been there before, for the city seemed so familiar. There was a reason. The voices, the faces, the smells, the slur and twang of speech, the dissonant combination of sunshine and strife, the sense of place in Nadine’s work had made Johannesburg seem like a city I was returning to, as Mahfouz’s work had done for me in Egypt. For an author, there was no greater achievement than this, the successful recreation in prose of the texture and emotions of a real place, making the reading of the work like a travel experience, containing many of the pleasures of a visit. How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there, or even better — because reading about being shot at and poisoned and insulted was in general less upsetting than the real thing.
Blossom-filled jacaranda trees hung over Nadine’s garden, big scalloped-leafed monstera vines clung to their trunks. Her garden wall was softened with bougainvillea and thorny whips of rose bushes. The bedding plants were velvety violets and spongy primroses. Nadine’s work was also full of closely observed flora.
I had called the day before and invited her to dinner — she could choose the restaurant. My idea was to enjoy a pleasant meal with a good friend as a secret celebration of my birthday. I went to the iron gate at the driveway, and got barked at by a big brown dog until an African woman at the kitchen door howled at the dog to shut up. An African man in a white shirt and blue pants swung the gate open for me. Something possessed me to thank him in Chichewa, which was widely spoken in southern Africa because of the wandering Malawians, looking for work.
‘Zikomo, bambo.’ Thank you, father.
We talked a bit and I asked him his name.
His name was Albino. He was from Mozambique.
The house was servant-tidy, mopped and spare and rather shadowy. As I was led from one room to another, the kitchen with its tableau of elderly servants (old women sitting, old man standing), through narrow corridors, I could just make out African masks and shadowy baskets and a hat rack piled with wide-brimmed hats.
Then I was propelled through a door, as though onstage, into the sitting room, which was well lighted and hung with family photos and lovely paintings, and Nadine was standing there, very straight, rather small, with piercing eyes. She kissed me, welcoming me with the first good hug — she was strong for her size — 1 had had since leaving home.
‘That looks familiar,’ I said as we kissed for I saw just behind her head, over the fireplace, a framed picture, three vividly drawn figures, heads and shoulders, and you knew it had to be a Daumier the way you knew a certain paragraph had to be a Gordimer.
And turning to size up the room, looking for a place to sit, I saw another brilliantly colored picture, a lithograph of Napoleon flanked by a lancer and an Arab sheik.
‘Toulouse-Lautrec,’ Nadine said. ‘Isn’t Napoleon handsome? I always think he looks like Marlon Brando.’
That was when I saw the other person in the room — motionless, seated with a blanket over his knees, so quiet I had missed him. He was hooked somehow to a breathing machine, tubes to his nostrils, and he was smiling — apparently had been smiling the whole time at the apparition of big badly dressed American ogling his paintings. He was Reinhold Cassirer, bright and friendly, and clearly frail. He was ninety-three years old and ailing, but fully alert, with good color, and even though he was sitting in a wheelchair I could see that he was a tall man.
‘He came from Cairo — on the bus!’ Nadine said sharply to her husband.
Reinhold smiled at me and raised one hand in salute and murmured, ‘Good, good, good.’
He had a beautiful smile, the sort of smile that indicates great generosity and a capacity for pleasure. He sat in the center of the room seeming to enjoy the warmth, the light, the talk. He hated the confinement of his sickroom and the ministrations of his nurse. What he liked best, Nadine told me later, was what he had liked best throughout their marriage, drinking a pre-dinner whisky at the end of the working day.
A young African arrived, Raks Seakhoa, a poet and a former political prisoner.
I said, ‘I want to hear about your imprisonment. I’ve been meeting ex-convicts all along my route.’
‘Paul came from Cairo — on the bus!’
‘I’ll be glad to tell you about it. I served five years on Robben Island.’
‘With Mandela?’
‘Yes. We passed notes secretly, on philosophical subjects.’
Nadine said smartly, ‘Isn’t it your birthday?’
I tried not to look deflated. I said, ‘How did you know?’
‘Someone saw it on the Internet.’
‘Oh, God, the world of useless information.’
Raks Seakhoa said, ‘It’s my birthday, too.’
The rumbling of my secret seemed less awkward then, for someone who shares your birthday shares much more, a certain kinship and characteristics. Raks was turning forty-two. He looked older — another former prisoner whose time in jail had added years to his life, made him gaunt, grayed his hair. I liked the thought that we two Aries were brothers under the skin, but he had suffered in his life and my life had been a picnic.
Another guest entered, hugged Reinhold, hugged Nadine, hugged Raks, and was introduced to me as Maureen Isaacson, literary editor of the Johannesburg Sunday Independent.
‘Happy birthday,’ she said.
‘He came from Cairo — on the bus!’
We drove to the restaurant in two cars; I went with Maureen, Nadine with Raks. Maureen carefully hand-locked each door before we set off, and said, ‘I’ve had robbery attempts. But I refuse to be intimidated by the violence, so I’m vigilant.’
‘What happened?’
‘People trying to get into my car on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge-one bloke taps at the windscreen and distracts me, while another snatches at the back door. Pretty soon I’m surrounded by these men, six or eight of them.’
‘God. What did you do?’
‘I screamed at them. “Fuck off!” ’ Maureen said, sounding fierce. She added quietly, ‘Now I lock everything.’
The restaurant — lovely, furnished with antiques, very large — was almost empty: a consequence of the crime in the city center after dark, muggings and car hijackings. Of perhaps thirty other tables, only one was occupied. The owners warmly welcomed Nadine. She commiserated with them about the crime in the city that kept their restaurant empty. Then she introduced me.
‘Paul came on the bus — from Cairo!’
Over dinner, Nadine said she was weary from spending the day reading the galley proofs of her new novel, The Pick-Up.