Mrs 4B asks a very deep question

There are questions and then there are questions

Audio by Jules Keohane

There’s that frantic manoeuvring that happens when people getting on to a plane reach their row of seats. They want to get their hand luggage stowed as quickly as possible while also making sure the little bag by their feet contains whatever they’ll need during the flight.

The woman at my row was tall and imposing. She was nervously hurrying so as not to hold up the queue. The floppy floral bag she was trying to hoist overhead seemed quite heavy. I offered to help her, and she said thank you, and indeed, it was heavy.

We were in the same row. When she was settled in the middle seat – it took a while, she was a faffer, but this is no judgement on her at all, because I am the Queen of the Faff – I took out my novel and my notebook.

As we taxied to the terminal building on the other end of our journey from Cape Town, my neighbour spoke to me.

‘You fascinate me,’ was her opening bid.

‘Oh,’ I said. (Oh covers many species of surprise.)

‘What have you been doing? All this writing and reading,’ she asked.

‘Oh, um. I just…I make notes sometimes when I’m reading.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘What work do you do?’

‘I’m a writer and a writing coach.’

‘How fascinating! Do you like your life?’

That was a curveball.

Double portrait of S. and L. by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, as featured in Expressionism by Dietmar Elder, published by Taschen. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

I am more comfortable asking than answering questions. Not because I’m humble, but because I cannot tell short stories and it’s a tiny bit devastating to see people’s eyes glaze over a quarter into my thoroughness.

How does one succinctly answer a question about whether you like your life?

There have been terribly difficult times when I’ve not liked my life at all and wished I could push a button for the ejector seat. But then, show me a person who’s been spared difficult times.

Now was not one of those times. So I answered her.

‘I do. I really do.’

I didn’t want to get into more. It was time to deflect.

‘What work did you do?’ She clearly was beyond retirement age, hence the past tense.

Mrs 4B told me in her beautiful, old-fashioned, rather grand accent – that one only hears in white English-speaking South Africans of a certain age – that she’d never really worked. But she’d mostly liked her life too because she always found something to do. There were always things to discover.

I said I thought curiosity was the difference between a good life and a mediocre life. She said yes. She said it passionately.

She added, ‘And you know, black people aren’t curious.’

Before I went travelling last year, I prepared myself for conversations in which people would say things that would make my hackles rise. Moving in smaller domestic circles, one can pick your company, but not out there in the big world. I needed a way to navigate these situations without resorting to either passivity or hostility. I settled on probing as a way to get me through tricky interactions.

‘Aren’t they?’ I asked.

She said some stuff that didn’t really hold up to scrutiny and ended with ‘Don’t you think?’

I said I didn’t really have any experience that bore that out, but that I knew that there were people who felt it was rude to ask personal questions.

In Germany last year, I sometimes saw people struggling with their curiosity and holding back on asking me things. Germans are terribly polite and have very solid boundaries.

And Sam, he’s polite. I once told him that he’s never asked me the kind of questions people often ask when they get into relationships. He said, ‘It’s not that I’m not interested, but I don’t feel like everything is my business. If you want me to know, you’ll tell me.’

My neighbour considered the politeness argument. She said she’d never thought of that before.

To make her not feel that I was saying she was rude, I told her that I also asked a lot of questions and I never considered that it was strange to do so until this one incident. I was in a mini bus on my way to some event I was covering and I’d been interrogating the person next to me. She’d turned and said: ‘God, you ask a lot of questions. Is it because you’re a journalist?’

It was not a compliment. She made it clear I was being intrusive.

In recent years, I’ve realised how much power there is in asking personal questions of strangers. A question is a flex. It says, ‘I am very confident of my right to quiz you. I am confident also of receiving an answer.’

I didn’t say this last part, or begin out loud the internal debate I’d been having about where curiosity ends and inquisitiveness begins. Instead, I said I personally valued curiosity highly. Most people would never dare to ask ‘Do you like your life?’ I said I didn’t mind her question. It’s the kind of thing I would ask.

I ended with saying that other people not asking questions of perfect strangers might be more out of politeness than out of a lack of curiosity.

She said she’d never thought of that.

This is not the first time since I made the decision to engage with statements I don’t like that the conversation did not implode. I’m learning – very, very late in life – that being affronted by things people say does not have to end in my withdrawal or my righteous indignation. It doesn’t have to end in me deciding not to like them.

The plane was still making its slow way to where we were to disembark. There was no awkwardness between us and the conversation continued to safer ground.

I discovered that the daughter she was going to visit was a well-known journalist. I discovered that Mrs 4B considered herself a terribly fearful person and wasn’t it funny that her daughter was utterly fearless in her dangerous job?

I discovered that Mrs 4B’s husband had gone blind before he died and that one day they’d been attacked in a holiday home by a gang of men. Tied up. Robbed.

I discovered, though the memory stress of the event was making her story come out wobbly and incoherent, that trying to manage her husband’s distress and helplessness at not being able to see what was going on was one of the worst things about that night.

I discovered that the heavy floppy floral bag above our heads contained a lamb curry for her daughter and grandchildren.

The seatbelt lights went off and the metal clicking of anticipated release from the plane rung all the way back and front in the giant tube we were in.

Mrs 4B offered me her name.

She asked me my name.

I gave it.

Lots of love,

K.