Free The Lying Days by Nadine Gordimer

people looked like; once I had mentioned meeting at the Post Office an old gentleman who I thought might be Dr. Patterson, a friend of the Koches’, and I asked Ludi whether Dr. Patterson was a fairish man with a large nose. He hardly seemed to know, and was a little irritated at my incredulity at his lack of observation. Yet places, beaches and rivers and the sea, he saw with all the sensuous intensity with which one might regard a beloved face. All the core of his human intimacy seemed, apart from his mother, to be centered in the large impersonal world of the natural, which in itself surely negates all intimacy; in its space and vastness and terrifying age, shakes off the little tentative human grasp as a leaf is dropped in the wind.
    I felt this in the form of a kind of uneasy bewilderment that nowand then rose up like a barrier of language between myself and the young man. I could not fit him into the inherited categories of my child’s experience, and this made me obscurely anxious. … Two days before his leave was up I was alone with him for perhaps only the second or third time since I had arrived. We walked into the village together on a dull afternoon to get our hair cut and he said to me suddenly on the way back: “I suppose you’re going to go back and live there?—That life on the Mine is the narrowest, most mechanical, unrewarding existence you could think of in any nightmare.”
    I was so surprised, shocked, that I stammered as if I had been caught out in some reprehensible act. “Well, Ludi, of course. I mean I live there—!”
    He shook his head, walking on.
    I felt indignant and unhappy at the same time. “I’ve always lived on the Mine.—I know you don’t like towns, you hated working underground, you like to be at the sea, who wouldn’t—” But even as I said it I was aware that no one I knew would dream of wanting to live buried away on the South Coast, not working. Why? It was an existence at once desirable because of its strangeness, yet in some way shameful.
    He made a noise of disgust. “Grubbing under the earth in the dark to produce something entirely useless, and coming up after eight hours to take your place in the damned cast-iron sacred hierarchy of the Mine, grinning and bowing all the way up to the godly Manager on top, and being grinned and bowed at by everyone below you—not that there ever was anyone below me, except the blacks and it’s no privilege to sit on them since anyone can.”
    â€œOh,
Ludi
I laughed. He laughed, too, his wry smile with the corners of his mouth turning down.
    â€œYou drink in the pubs together and you play tennis on Saturdays together and you go to dances organized by the ladies. You live by courtesy of the Mine, for the Mine, in the Mine. And to hell with Jack so long as I’m all right, so long as my promotion’s coming. And I’ll grin at the Underground Manager and I’ll slap the shift boss on the back—”
    â€œBut what are you going to do?” He had admitted me to a planeof adulthood that released the boldness to ask something I had wondered in silence.
    For once he turned to look at me, and it was with the patient smile that expects no comprehension, knows that a familiar barrier has been reached. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to ‘get on.’ I’m happy where I am. All I want is the war to end so that I can get back here.”
    â€œShall you start up the chicken farm again?”
    â€œIt doesn’t much matter. Any sort of job would do so long as it brings in fifteen or twenty pounds a month. Just so’s mother and I can manage. She’s got a small income of her own.”
    I was embarrassed by my own reaction. I knew that in my face and my silence I showed a deep sense of shock and a kind of disbelief that timidly tried to temper it. A struggle was set up in me; dimly I felt that the man acted according