The Red and the Black

 by Emanuel Derman

June 22, 2025

This article is extracted from “Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian” by Emanuel Derman.

Review of the book by Nobel Laureate J,M.Coetzee: "Brief Hours and Weeks awakes many memories of Cape Town, the city of Emanuel Derman's youth and mine, as it was half a century ago. The chapter on the lonely Mrs Gold is a triumph."

As the door opens I register flesh and solidity and a fullness that seems to burst all boundaries.

 Odalisque couchée aux magnolias. Henri Matisse. (1923)

In my last year of high school I take painting-and-drawing lessons one afternoon a week at the Frank Joubert Art School in Claremont. Our teacher is a late-thirties refined-looking Dutch woman with brown rounded arms, a rounded full body, and long elegant legs. She is a new immigrant to South Africa, having fled the Dutch Indonesian ex-colonies after the troubles there, and she has café-au-lait skin and a chalk-white smile. She is corporeal and good-natured, down-to-earth and solid. In fact, she could easily be mistaken for a Cape Coloured, whose skin shades cover a wide colour spectrum. Despite this, she is strongly pro the Nationalist apartheid government.

During class she likes to slip her small bare brown feet out of her brown moccasins and wiggle her toes on the floor beneath the table at the head of the studio. Once, looking down at her feet, she gives us a mock-serious lecture on the dangers of not drying them thoroughly after a bath, and proceeds to demonstrate, with words and in great detail, how to use an imaginary towel to carefully dry between her toes. The glimpsed nooks and crannies of her body seem more intriguing and mysterious than the bodies of the bland younger-than-me girls I’ve liked. Her easy way is something I’ve never seen.

Her husband occasionally comes to art-school functions too. He is a portly gruff sensual-looking man, dresses in dark suits like the men in Rembrandt’s sombre group portraits of Amsterdam patriarchs. A year later we hear that he has left her and their late-teen- age daughter for another woman.

The Syndics of the Clothmakers Guild. Rembrandt. (1662)

My uncle in Tel Aviv, a newsagent, regularly sends me copies of Mad Magazine, hard to find in South Africa. One of the issues has a spoof on vending machines, and one of the cartoons shows a large machine with women of various styles behind the glass doors, each door carrying a labelled button to push after you insert your quarter. One of the labels reads “Pleasantly Plump” and the woman in the cartoon behind the glass reminds me of the art teacher. The label evokes a world of frequently savoured familiar yet exciting passions.

In my third year at university I’m a Habonim counsellor in charge of a bunch of boys between eight and twelve years old who all live in Oranjezicht. We meet every week on Sunday morning in the Orphanage. Everyone is in standard khaki Habonim uniform. I administer corny Boy-Scout-style opening ceremonies in Hebrew, organise scavenger hunts, teach bits of Jewish history, play rounds of soccer or cricket, give quizzes, teach campcraft and other scout- ing-y things.

One Sunday a new eleven-year-old joins the group and soon be- comes a regular. He has a charming open way about him. I feel pa- ternal, and he has asked me for a book on physics so that he might learn something. I tell him I have one aimed at a layman audience and I will bring it to him, and so, one weekday afternoon, I drive over to his house, about five minutes from ours. I park in front, and take the book with me.

I push open the low front gate in the centre of the hip-high brick wall facing the street and walk down the stairs. The front door is a frame of translucent glass made-up of multiple small lenses, through each of which I can see a kaleidoscopic interior. I ring.

Something happens.

I hear footsteps and after each one the soft rhythmic flap of a loose shoe against a foot. I see the blurred shape of a pink house- coat approaching through the glass. As the door opens I register flesh and solidity and a fullness that seems to burst all boundaries. She is in her late thirties. Her hair is dark black, thick and stiffly coiffed above a broad white forehead; she has heavy black carefully plucked eyebrows above dark brown eyes, a thick sensual nose, and somehow impatient red lips. I think momentarily of Myrtle, Tom Buchanan’s energetic and common mistress in The Great Gatsby.

“I’ve brought a book for Daniel,” I say.

“I’m Mrs Gold,” she says. Her voice is deep and sonorous and slow, no-nonsense, but she smiles and looks me over. “Daniel told me about you. He’s not here now, he’ll be back soon, but come in- side.” She holds out her hand. Her nails are bright red, her arms ample and full below the short sleeves of the housecoat. Her palm feels big and warm.

She leads me into a plain comfortable living room. Her cork- soled mules (I don’t know that that’s what they are called until much later) tap up and down against her heels as she walks. The toes and backs are open, with just a strap across the arch. She seats herself in the armchair opposite me and leans back, crossing one leg over the other at the knee, dangling one shoe off the front of her raised right foot. Red toenails peek through the front; a white heel emerges smooth and round at the back. She is too ample to be graceful, but she isn’t ungraceful either. I suddenly wonder about her carnal life.

The maid soon brings a small tray with a tea pot, two cups and saucers, milk and sugar and some home-made biscuits. Mrs Gold pours me a cup, and then pours one for herself. She takes a pack of cigarettes off the side table and taps one out and lights it and takes a quick draw.

“Oh my goodness, sorry, I should have asked,” she says as an afterthought. “Do you smoke?”

“Sometimes, yes,” I nod. “I wouldn’t mind one.”

“Of course,” she smiles. She rises and walks towards me with the pack, taps it upside down on the coffee table to shake the cigarettes loose, and proffers the pack. I take one. She offers me her lighter, a small solid slim silver Ronson that looks too angular for her soft fingers. She reminds me of the art teacher, though there is no specific resemblance.

“What are you studying at university?” she asks. I explain about physics and particles and fields. We drink tea and smoke and talk about her son for ten minutes, like two adults. Then Daniel arrives and she fusses over him.

“It was nice talking,” she says when I say I must go. “Drop in again if you’re near.”

After that I make my path often cross that of Mrs. Gold’s. Some- times, driving home from university or to neighbouring suburbs to visit friends, I see her white four-door tail-finned Chev parked in various places. It’s a talisman. Sometimes it’s in front of my friend’s flat in Vredehoek where she takes her daughter for music lessons. Sometimes it’s opposite another friend’s house in Oranjezicht where she visits her sister-in-law. She seems to spend her days driving her two young children.

There is no visible husband. I learn that he owns a farm in the Karoo, hardly ever comes to Cape Town. The kids visit him there during vacations. Daniel tells me his father has to be at the farm. The strangeness of this arrangement never occurs to me.

When I drive to university I begin to take circuitous routes that run via her house. On rainy weekend days I take long walks in her neighbourhood, hoping for glimpses. If I see her car parked outside her house, then sometimes – not so often as to be too noticeable – I allow myself a visit, usually on the pretence of saying hello to her son.

Now when I knock on the door, I wait for approaching foot- steps and the vague pink shape of the housecoat through the glass. Sometimes the maid answers the door, and, now familiar with me, gives a smile and then calls up the stairs, Madam, your young man is here.

For twenty or thirty minutes we sit in her living room. After the

maid brings tea she offers one of her cigarettes and I inhale too as I watch her take long drags on the cork filter she places between her lips. She likes to talk, and, self-assured though she is, seems puzzled by young people’s lives in the 1960s. She quizzes me on what I read, on politics, on what it’s like to be young and at university. She wants to know what her son and daughter should learn about.

I think about her. I wonder what to do.

Over time Mrs Gold tells me about herself. She grew up in a small dorp north of Cape Town. Her husband had been brought to South Africa from Lithuania as a 14-year-old long before World War II. She  was eighteen, fourteen years younger than him and just out  of school at the end of the war when they married. They moved to  a farm he bought in the Karoo. A few years after that, when her first child was born, she moved to Cape Town. Her husband kept running the farm.

Now her life is filled with looking after children, seeing relatives, being involved in charity events, raffles, and used-clothing drives.

“I married early, you know,” Mrs Gold says to me one day be- tween cigarettes. “Straight out of school. In the bundu you married and became a housewife. Nowadays girls need time to find them- selves – they shouldn’t compete to find a husband so soon.”

“According to Schopenhauer,” I reply stupidly, “all women are natural competitors. They’re like plumbers or shoemakers, all in the same trade.” I explain who Schopenhauer is.

She nods seriously and frowns a little, takes another drag on her cigarette.

“Maybe,” she says slowly, “ … that could be. At least when they’re young. I wonder if I was like that. It’s a little sad, you know, how we set out in life with no idea of what will happen. Or the wrong idea. That hasn’t happened to you yet, you’re lucky … I live differently now from what I expected.”

I like her and I can see she likes me. I take what I can: the flattery of being taken seriously, the surreptitious glances at her incipiently vulnerable body, the beginning-to-get-heavy contours of her face, the full figure and legs, the slow curvaceous walk when she’s relaxed, the index finger impatiently tapping on the cigarette to knock off ash, the sticky red imprint of her lips on the end of the cork filter, a glimpse of a slip between two buttons of the pink housecoat, the way she leans over to touch my arm, intimate and casual when she wants me to refocus my attention on some new question.

Her whole life seems bare of men, and yet … she chooses her clothes and paints her nails to look attractive. Why would anyone do that if they weren’t thinking about men?

One Sunday afternoon I go driving on a country road near the local quarry and see Mrs Gold and Daniel walking together on the sidewalk, accompanied by another mother and son. I slow down and wave to them as I drive by, but keep going. When I turn my head left and back to look at them and wave, the steering wheel turns left with me. The car rides up briefly on the empty country sidewalk and then comes down again. I hope they don’t notice.

On a rainy weekday afternoon during university winter holidays I take a solitary walk through suburban streets to pass her house. The windows upstairs and down are all dark except for the kitchen. I open the gate and walk down to the front door and ring the bell.

She opens the door dressed in her housecoat. “Oh, no one’s here, Daniel and Sandra have gone out of town to the farm for the week, and I gave the maid the afternoon off.” She looks worn, not right. “Do you want to come in for a while?”

Tea and cigarettes. She looks distracted as we talk about poli- tics, South Africa, Israel. Suddenly, between puffs, she covers her face and sobs for a moment. I am about to ask what is wrong when she waves her hand up and down in a negative ignore-it sign.

“Don’t ask me anything, please,” she says. She takes a tissue from the table and wipes her eyes.

I look at her. She’s pale. No red lipstick. Her fullness and fresh- ness are gone. I feel deep and sad for her, paternal, and filial too. Shakespeare jumps into my head.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

I have been wanting to touch her for weeks. I walk over to her armchair and stand over her, lean down and stroke her black hair, kiss her forehead. She looks up confusedly.

“What are you doing?” she says sharply, and stands up quickly.

“It came over me,” I say, and back off. “What could I do?    I’m

sorry you’re sad.”

A softer kinder look comes over her.

“My dear! It’s alright! Don’t be upset! I didn’t expect that,” she says.

She has cheered up and half chuckles. “Oh, so romantic,” she says, with a touch of mockery. “You’re from a different generation, I never really had those feelings. I didn’t have time for relationships,” she says in a continuing stream of statements. “I went straight from parents to husband to children.”

She sits down again and smiles and says, “Sit, let’s have some more tea and a cigarette.”

She changes the subject. Later, when I feel I should leave, she walks me to the door.

“Please please don’t be insulted,” she says looking straight at me. “It’s alright. I like talking to you. I’m sorry I’m upset today, I reacted too much.”

She leans forward and kisses me lightly, right on the lips.

I return in my car the next day in the late afternoon. She looks a bit agitated when she opens the door.

“Is everything OK?” I ask.

“Thank you for being with me yesterday,” she says. “I have troubles. I cannot talk about them ... I read my horoscope today and it said everything will be ok!”

“I’m sure it will,” I say. “Things will work   out.”

“Do you really think so?” she asks me, leaning back, entwining her solid legs about each other shyly as though she were a child, looking up at me almost coquettishly.

“Yes I do.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Bad things will pass. I know how it feels sometimes.”

“I’m being silly, I’m sorry. How can you know?” She smiles. “But you’re making me feel better anyway.”

She makes tea.

“I’ve been having such a difficult time for months,” she says quietly while we sip. “Thank you for helping me.”

We talk.

When the time comes I prepare to go to my car. It’s no longer light. She accompanies me outside, which she’s never done before, and waits while I open the car door. She looks sad.

“I can keep you company for a while if you like. Shall I?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, slowly and softly, assenting with a grave nod,

moving her face up and down through such a long vertical arc that, at its nadir, I can see the crown of her head.

I decide to tell the truth.

“I don’t feel like leaving you anyhow,” I say.

She moves forward in the dusk, tilts her head up, and puts her lips against mine. I’m much taller than her.

“Then don’t,” she says, and kisses my mouth and then my cheek. 

My heart fills with all the kinds of love I know about. I see her yearning for something I cannot properly understand and I see that she sees my yearning. I kiss her cheek, and she kisses me back.

“Come back inside,” she says with a sigh.