Another Country

The life you think you should want,’ said Eric, ‘is always the life that looks safest.

And she carried him, as the sea will carry a boat: with a slow, rocking and rising and falling motion, barely suggestive of the violence of the deep.

A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. An hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded

Somewhere in his heart the black boy hated the white boy because he was white.

‘Sweetheart, suffering doesn’t have a colour. Does it? Can’t we step out of this nightmare?

I was there. He shouldn’t have ended up the way he did. That’s what’s been so hard for me to accept. He was a very beautiful boy. Most people aren’t beautiful, I knew that right away. I watched them, and I knew. But he didn’t because he was so much nicer than I.’

‘I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that’s why. You want to protect yourself. You want to hate me because I’m white, because it’s easier for you that way.’

‘I don’t hate you.’

‘Then why do you always bring it up? What is it?’

She stirred the rice, which was almost ready, found a collander, and placed it in the sink. Then she turned to face him.

‘This all began because I said that you people – ’

‘Listen to yourself. You people!’

‘– didn’t know anything about Rufus – ’

‘Because we’re white.’

‘No. Because he was black.’

‘Oh. I give up. And, anyway, why must we always end up talking about Rufus?’

‘I had started to tell you something,’ she said, quietly; and watched him.

He swallowed some more of his whisky, and lit a cigarette. ‘True. Please go on.’

‘Because I’m black,’ she said, after a moment, and sat at the table near him, ‘I know more about what happened to my brother than you can ever know. I watched it happen – from the beginning.

Now he stood before the misty doors of the jazz joint, peering in, sensing rather than seeing the frantic black people on the stand and the oblivious, mixed crowd at the bar.

Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen – for the weight of this city was murderous –