But I thought that afternoon that perhaps I had always loved him, always wanted him, and merely made do, with others. With him, I believed, I might have achieved the synthesis of most of the things in which I believed. Of lovers and friends, he seemed the only one who had not discarded everything and found nothing. Unlike me, he loved his parents enough to accept their deep differences from him, and so he had not suffered the guilt of breaking the unreasoning ties of the blood. He had not placed upon any relationship with human beings the burden of the proof of an ideal. And now, he had the purpose and the hope of realizing a concrete expression of his creative urge, in doing his work in a society which in itself was the live process of emergence, instead of decay. All this came to me in shock and turbulence, not the way I have written it here, but in a thousand disconnected images, in the piecing together of a thousand things said and felt and half-remembered.
Yet I believe that although no part of one’s life can be said to come to an end except in death, nothing can be said to be a beginning but birth, life flows and checks itself, overlaps, flows again; and it is in these pauses that a story is taken up, in these pauses that there comes the place at which it is inevitable to set it down. And for this, my story, it seems to me that place comes not on the afternoon on which Joel sailed, but a little later, a matter of hours, in fact.
I must have been very tired that night and, my mind throbbing with exhaustion, had fallen asleep early and slept deeply. I woke to hear soft rain; to smell it. I lay quite still a minute and then I got up and went over to the open window. It was, I suppose, about midnight, and although there were still cars on the Marine Parade, they were muted by the rain and their feelers of light were mistily dowsed. The sea was entirely gone behind the rain. As I stood there, putting my hands out into the surprising warmth of it, I heard a faint sound beneath its own soft sounding, and I thought it was the ringing of my own ears. But it came nearer, clearer, and it was the drowned jingle of a tambourine against small sad voices. I saw in the street below the huddled figures of some little native minstrels, singing as they padded along in the rain. The song was a popular dance tune of a few years before, “Paper Doll,” but they made it infinitely mournful, infinitely longing. I stood there quite still, for a minute or more. I shall never forget how I felt. A feeling of extraordinary calm possessed me; I felt I could stand there in full possession of this great calmness forever. It did not seem to me that it would ever go.
My mind was working with great practicalness, and I thought to myself: Now it’s all right. I’m not practicing any sort of self-deception any longer. And I’m not running away. Whatever it was I was running away from — the risk of love? the guilt of being white? the danger of putting ideals into practice? — I’m not running away from now because I know I’m coming back here.
I was twenty-four and my hands were trembling with the strong satisfaction of having accepted disillusion as a beginning rather than an end: the last and most enduring illusion; the phoenix illusion that makes life always possible.
For a long time after I had lain down in my bed again, I could hear the native children, still singing and shaking their tambourine as they were washed away, fainter and fainter, into the soft rain and the dark.
A Note on the Author
Nadine Gordimer’s many novels include The Lying Days (her first novel), The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, None to Accompany Me, The House Gun and, most recently, The Pickup, winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Africa. Her collections of short stories include Something Out There and Jump. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in South Africa.