The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
The train left at midnight, not at six. Jansen’s flare of temper at the clerk’s mistake died before he turned from the counter: he did not really mind. For a week he had been with rich friends, in a vacuum of wealth, politely seeing the town through their eyes. Now, for six hours, he was free to let the dry and nervous air of Johannesburg strike him direct. He went into the station buffet. It was a bare place, with shiny brown walls and tables arranged regularly. He sat before a cup of strong orange-coloured tea, and because he was in the arrested, dreamy frame of mind of the uncommitted traveller, he was the spectator at a play which could not hold his attention. He was about to leave, in order to move by himself through the streets, among the people, trying to feel what they were in this city, what they had which did not exist, perhaps, in other big cities – for he believed that in every place there dwelt a daemon which expressed itself through the eyes and voices of those who lived there – when he heard someone ask: Is this place free? He turned quickly, for there was a quality in the voice which could not be mistaken. Two girls stood beside him, and the one who had spoken sat down without waiting for his response: there were many empty tables in the room. She wore a tight short black dress, several brass chains, and high shiny black shoes. She was a tall broad girl with colourless hair ridged tightly round her head, but given a bright surface so that it glinted like metal. She immediately lit a cigarette and said to her companion: ‘Sit down for God’s sake.’ The other girl shyly slid into the chair next to Jansen, averting her face as he gazed at her, which he could not help doing: she was so different from what he expected.
Plump, childish, with dull hair bobbing in fat rolls on her neck, she wore a flowered and flounced dress and flat white sandals on bare and sunburned feet. Her face had the jolly friendliness of a little dog. Both girls showed Dutch ancestry in the broad blunt planes of cheek and forehead; both had small blue eyes, though one pair was surrounded by sandy lashes, and the other by black varnished fringes.
The waitress came for an order. Jansen was too curious about the young girl to move away. ‘What will you have?’ he asked. ‘Brandy,’ said the older one at once. ‘Two brandies,’ she added, with another impatient look at her sister – there could be no doubt that they were sisters.
‘I haven’t never drunk brandy,’ said the younger with a giggle of surprise. ‘Except when Mom gave me some sherry at Christmas.’ She blushed as the older said despairingly, half under her breath: ‘Oh God preserve me from it!’
‘I came to Johannesburg this morning,’ said the little one to Jansen confidingly. ‘But Lilla has been here earning a living for a year.’
‘My God!’ said Lilla again. ‘What did I tell you? Didn’t you hear what I told you?’ Then, making the best of it, she smiled professionally at Jansen and said: ‘Green! You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I was green when I came, but compared with Marie …’ She laughed angrily.
‘Have you been to Joburg before this day?’ asked Marie in her confiding way.
‘You are passing through,’ stated Lilla, with a glance at Marie. ‘You can tell easy if you know how to look.’
‘You’re quite right,’ said Jansen.
‘Leaving tomorrow perhaps?’ asked Lilla.
‘Tonight,’ said Jansen.
Instantly Lilla’s eyes left Jansen, and began to rove about her, resting on one man’s face and then the next. ‘Midnight,’ said Jansen, in order to see her expression change.
‘There’s plenty time,’ she said, smiling.
‘Lilla promised I could go to the bioscope,’ said Marie, her eyes becoming large. She looked around the station buffet, and because of her way of looking, Jansen tried to see it differently. He could not. It remained for him a bare, brownish, dirty sort of place, full of badly-dressed and dull people. He felt as one does with a child whose eyes widen with terror or delight at the sight of an old woman muttering down the street, or a flowering tree. What hunched black crone from a fairy tale, what celestial tree does the child see? Marie was smiling with charmed amazement.
‘Very well,’ said Jansen, ‘let’s go to the flicks.’
For a moment Lilla calculated, her hard blue glance moving from Jansen to Marie. ‘You take Marie,’ she suggested, direct to Jansen, ignoring her sister. ‘She’s green, but she’s learning.’ Marie half-rose, with a terrified look. ‘You can’t leave me,’ she said.
‘Oh my God!’ said Lilla resignedly. ‘Oh all right. Sit down baby. But I’ve a friend to see. I told you.’
‘But I only just came.’
‘All right, all right. Sit down I said. He won’t bite you.’
‘Where do you come from?’ asked Jansen.
Marie said a name he had never heard.
‘It’s not far from Bloemfontein,’ explained Lilla.
‘I went to Bloemfontein once,’ said Marie, offering Jansen this experience. ‘The bioscope there is big. Not like near home.’
‘What is home like?’
‘But it’s small,’ said Marie.
‘What does your father do?’
‘He works on the railway,’ Lilla said quickly.
‘He’s a ganger,’ said Marie, and Lilla rolled her eyes up and sighed.
Jansen had seen the gangers’ cottages, the frail little shacks along the railway lines, miles from any place, where the washing flapped whitely on the lines over patches of garden, and the children ran out to wave to the train that passed shrieking from one wonderful fabled town to the next.
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