Indians? Coloureds? She saw the assistant from the Indian store and smiled. They came in, with nervous glances at the group of white girls who were making their way around the exhibition.
‘OK?’ said the assistant.
‘OK,’ said Martha. The group of Indian youths started at the other end of the exhibition from the girls, with an air of wary self-respect, as if to say: We’d prefer not to come here at all if it means trouble.
‘Oh hell,’ said Martha, suddenly utterly depressed, and instantly felt that to let go into private moods was irresponsible with Tommy.
He said, blushing scarlet: ‘I don’t think that I can be a communist. I mean to say, I feel bad things all the time. I know it’s the way I’m brought up. But when I see Coloured people or Indians in a place like this, then I think of them as different from us, and that’s wrong, isn’t it?’
‘We can’t help the way we were brought up.’
‘And it’s not only that. I mean, sitting here selling tickets, I mean selling tickets to anyone, it makes me feel funny. I feel self-conscious. That’s snobbish, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I felt like that to start with.’
‘I mean, ever since I joined the group I feel funny. I don’t know what I feel, half the things I feel seem to be wrong but I feel them. I know they are wrong but I can’t help it.’ He ended, very defiant, his honest urchin’s face hot with confusion.
‘But, Tommy, it’s because we’re both brought up in this country. We’ve got bad attitudes to people with a different colour. We’ve just got to change our attitudes.’
‘But it’s so hard to change. Today on the job I did something very bad. I was fitting a pipe with my mate. And one of the Kaffirs brought the wrong pipe and I shouted at him. But if I did different, then the blokes on the job’d think I was mad. I’m just an apprentice, and it’s hard to be different from the grown-ups. And there’s Piet. I saw him today on the job with some Kaffirs unloading stuff and he was talking to them just the way he always does – and listen to me, I use the word Kaffir and I shouldn’t, it just slips out.’ He ended in despair, almost in tears.
The group of white girls, having finished their tour, went out. Slowly the group of Indians scattered out of their defensiveness and began wandering around the exhibition at their ease.
‘The point is,’ said Tommy, ‘it’s easy for you, because you’re better educated.’
She laughed in astonishment. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’
‘Well, it is, I’m telling you.’
His finger, insistent on a point in the page, drew Martha’s attention. The book was War and Peace.
‘Did Jasmine tell you to read this?’
‘She said it was the greatest novel ever written. Is that right?’
“Yes, I suppose so.’
‘But man, it takes such a long time to read. I thought this was the whole book but there are two others when I’ve finished this.’
On the open page half a dozen phrases had been underlined in pencil, with definitions scribbled opposite.
‘Your eloquence would have taken the king of Prussia’s consent by storm,’ she read. And in pencil: ‘eloquence: the power of speaking with grace.’
‘I don’t even understand half the words,’ he said.
‘But Tommy, you shouldn’t read books unless you really want to.’
‘I’ve never read books before, except just adventure stories. Jasmine said this book explained why there was a Russian Revolution; she said if I read this I would understand about Russia before the Revolution. But perhaps there’s a shorter book somewhere?’
‘Don’t you enjoy it?’
His eyes lit into enthusiasm. ‘Oh yes, I do. But you don’t see what I’m saying, Matty. I watched Jasmine the other day, reading. I thought about the way she reads books. It was just another book to her, Because she’s read so many books, don’t you see? I asked her about the book she was reading and she said: It’s a useful description of reactionary circles in Paris. Then she said: But it’s a bad book. Don’t you see, I wouldn’t know if it was bad or not. It’s just a book. When I read this stuff here, I mean about all these generals and maids-in-waiting and the courtiers, it makes me feel …’ He hesitated, looking angry and stubborn. ‘What I mean is, I couldn’t say: This is a useful description.’ He was suddenly scarlet with anger. ‘Don’t you see, it’s just snobbish when you and Jasmine say things like that. Well, anyway, that’s what I think. All the time I’m reading this, I feel – mixed up in it. I mean to say, if I were there, I’d be thinking just what all these generals and old ladies think. I’d be the same as them. And that makes me confused. Because they were all a bunch of reactionaries, weren’t they? And this girl, Natasha, I like her.’
‘But why shouldn’t you like her?’
‘She was the daughter of an aristocrat, wasn’t she? So why should I like her?’
‘But, Tommy, suppose someone wrote a novel about you. The Africans might say: Why should I like that reactionary white man, Tommy Brown? But it would help them to understand the way things are, do you see?’
No, I don’t see. That’s it,’ he said, ‘I just don’t see. And sometimes when I tell you and Jasmine and Piet what I’m feeling, you have a smile on your faces, and I know you’re thinking: Tommy’s just a stupid boy.’
‘But I haven’t got a smile on my face,’ said Martha. ‘I don’t know why you think everything’s easy for us either. The thing is, now we’re communists we’ve all got to go on learning for the rest of our lives.’
‘I can’t say what I mean,’ he said. He put up his burned fist and began banging at the top of his head where the tufts of hair stood up. ‘You say: “We’ve got to go on learning,” but I don’t even know half the words I see.’
‘But we’ll all help you, we’ll all help each other.’
‘Do you know what I think, Matty? Well, I know what you are going to say when I tell you. But it’s this. I don’t think any people brought up here, white people, can ever be good communists. It’s different for people like the RAF, because they weren’t living here all their lives, and so everything comes easy to them, but I don’t think we can change ourselves.’
‘But we are changing all the time.’
‘Well, all right. I’ll try.’ He pushed the book towards her. ‘If you tell me what the words mean then I won’t have to look them up in a dictionary.’
They bent together over the book, but almost at once a large sheet of cardboard slid over the print. It was bordered with black an inch thick, and it was headed ‘Homage to Heroes’. Solly Cohen, grinning heavily, stood beyond the piles of pamphlets on the table, hands in his pockets.
A short while before, at a Progressive Club lecture on the necessity for switching support from Michailovitch to Tito, for this was before Michailovitch’s collaboration with the Germans had been officially confirmed, Solly had come with a group of local Yugoslavs and stood at the back of the hall chanting steadily, every time Tito was mentioned: ‘Communist propaganda, communist propaganda.’ At the end of the meeting, when the chairman wound up, Solly had leaped up to shout over and over again: ‘Down with Stalin the Assassin.’
In the interval Allied policy had switched: Tito was now officially principal guerrilla leader in Yugoslavia, and Michailovitch a dubious collaborationist. Martha therefore faced Solly triumphantly.
But he seemed unconscious that she had any right to. He indicated the large black-bordered cardboard and said: ‘I’ve brought this for the exhibition.’
Martha