The following passage is adapted from the short story “Exile” by Rose Moss. Here, the South African narrator struggles to adjust to life in the United States.
- The road twisted and heaved.
- They had come off the smooth
- turnpike, homogeneous from
- Virginia to Maine, that made
- Stephen feel that this whole lecture
- tour was a hallucination in which
- distance had no more dimension
- than in a dream. Every road was
- the same road. The arrangement
- played with slightly differing signs
- and overpasses, discreet banks of
- grass, and trees that only gradually
- and reluctantly admitted the grey
- agglomeration of cities whose
- suburbs had long been
- suppressed by the same green
- uniform as the countryside. At last
- off the highway, an idiosyncratic
- thrust from the land moulded the
- road into a pliant index of fields
- and streams, pulled straight over
- flats, packed more densely in
- steep valleys and rises. From the
- dancing swell of the road he could
- imagine himself back on the
- stretch between Mooi River and
- Pietermaritzburg where frequent
- mists nourished the land, and
- cattle condensed the airy whiteness
- into substances richly edible—for
- those who could afford to buy
- them.
- But every now and then a leafy
- intrusion over the road caught
- his eyes, the uneven bars of a
- wooden fence, or irregular stone
- globules of a wall, and Stephen
- was reminded by these foreign
- shapes and colours that he was not
- on that Natal road, he was
- somewhere in New England, going
- to spend the night in a strange
- house among strangers. These
- sights, like foreign substances
- grafted among the tissues of what
- he had seen, lived, and
- compounded into organic
- constituents of his own self set up
- a resistance. Each reminder that
- he was not home accelerated an
- irritation, a process of rejection.
- His body, his perception, the
- accumulated chemicals of his own
- being barred these alien elements
- and tried to seal their pernicious
- proximity off from himself,
- to expel all toxic strangeness.
- He shut his eyes. He did not want
- to think that if he did not learn
- how to assimilate America there
- would be nothing left for him to
- see, no place where he could retain
- that dwindling self he felt to be
- his own. He thought of his brother
- and the dusty soccer field where
- they used to play when their
- mother went off with the baby
- and a bundle of washing wrapped
- in a sheet, to the white city where
- she worked until night came.
- How did that theme shape him?
- His host was also a composer.
- Stephen had heard a quartet by
- him. It had been played at one of
- the colleges where Stephen had
- contributed to a symposium on
- modern music. There had been
- lectures and workshops during the
- day. In the evening there was a
- concert and Ken Bradley’s String
- Quartet, cited as an example of
- some of the finest composition in
- the United States, was played to
- instruct an audience that might
- find such compositions hard to
- come by. To Stephen, the quartet
- seemed unintelligible, thin, and
- boring, but he blamed his response
- on his own ignorance. Ken’s
- quartet was one of the many signs,
- like billboards on the road, that
- said to Stephen, “We don’t speak
- to you. We are not written in your
- language. You have nothing to
- say to us.”
- The car slowed, turned up a
- driveway, and they had come.
- “We’re here,” Janet announced
- smiling. This was her home.
- Stephen smiled to her. They were
- so kind. Ken opened the door and
- light flared out of the amber hall
- over damp steps. Inside there was
- more light.
- “Why don’t we wash and have a
- drink while Janet’s preparing
- supper” Ken suggested. “I’ll show
- you to your room,” and he took
- Stephen’s suitcase, which he had
- already fetched from the car. He
- led the way up carpeted stairs,
- pointed out the bathroom, and
- gestured inside the doorway of a
- room at the end of the passage.
- “This is yours. See you downstairs.”
- Stephen noted the artefacts of
- someone else’s life. A childhood
- unimaginably like his own
- surrounded him. Behind the bed
- hung a drawing of the beach.
- The sea was a properly undulating
- blue on whose conventional waves
- there sailed the black outline of a
- yacht, innocent of the relatively
- immense fish whose profile stood
- mute, motionless, and symbolic
- between it and the yellow and
- purple sand, where a green scribble
- suggested grass. In a low bookcase
- under the window, children’s books
- about shells and birds, Webster’s
- illustrate dictionary, a microscope
- under a plastic cover, indicated
- another layer of the American
- boy’s life. The most recent stratum
- was evidenced near the dressing
- table where a poster of Humphrey
- Bogart ignored college pennants
- and the image of the alien in the
- mirror.