Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

She made the mistake of dropping on her knees to him before she looked up to see who had done it. All she could tell the police, the papers and the inquiry was that she saw the back of a man in dark clothing, a leather jacket, leaping up the flight of steps that leads from the side-street. This particular city is one of steep rises and dark alleys. She never saw my face. Years later now, (I read in the papers) she keeps telling people how she never saw the face, she never saw the face of the one who did it, if only she had looked up seconds sooner — they would have been able to find me, the nobody who did it would have become me. She thinks all the time about the back of my head in the dark cap (it was not dark, really, it was a light green-and-brown check, an expensive cap I’d bought with the money, afterwards I threw it in the canal with a stone in it). She thinks of my neck, the bit of my neck she could have seen between the cap and the collar of the leather jacket (I couldn’t throw that in the canal, I had it dyed). She thinks of the shine of the leather jacket across my shoulders under the puddle of light from a street-lamp that stands at the top of the flight, and my legs moving so fast I disappear while she screams.

The police arrested a drug-pusher they picked up in the alley at the top of the steps. She couldn’t say whether or not it was him because she had no face to remember. The same with others the police raked in from the streets and from those with criminal records and political grievances; no face. So I had nothing to fear. All the time I was being pushed out of one country into another I was afraid, afraid of having no papers, afraid of being questioned, afraid of being hungry, but now I had nothing to be afraid of. I still have nothing to fear. I don’t speak.

I search the papers for whatever is written about what was done; the inquiry doesn’t close, the police, the people, this whole country, keep on searching. I read all the theories; sometimes, like now, in the subway train, I make out on the back of someone’s newspaper a new one. An Iranian plot, because of this country’s hostility towards some government there. A South African attempt to revenge this country’s sanctions against some racist government there, at the time. I could tell who did it, but not why. When they paid me the first half of the money — just like that, right away! — they didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Why should I ask; what government, on any side, anywhere, would take me in. They were the only people to offer me anything.

And then I got only half what they promised. And there isn’t much left after five years, five years next month. I’ve done some sort of work, now and then, so no-one would be wondering where I got the money to pay the rent for my room and so on. Worked at the race course, and once or twice in night clubs. Places where they don’t register you with any labour office. What was I thinking I was going to do with the money if I had got it all, as they promised? Get away, somewhere else? When I think of going to some other country, like they did, taking out at the frontier the papers and the name of nobody they gave me, showing my face—

I don’t talk.

I don’t take up with anybody. Not even a woman. Those places I worked, I would get offers to do things, move stolen goods, handle drugs: people seemed to smell out somehow I’d made myself available. But I am not! I am not here, in this city. This city has never seen my face, only the back of a man leaping up the steps that led to the alley near the subway station. It’s said, I know, that you return to the scene of what you did. I never go near, I never walk past that subway station. I’ve never been back to those steps. When she screamed after me as I disappeared, I disappeared for ever.

I couldn’t believe it when I read that they were not going to bury him in a cemetery. They put him in the bit of public garden in front of the church that’s near the subway station. It’s an ordinary-looking place with a few old trees dripping in the rain on gravel paths, right on a main street. There’s an engraved stone and a low railing, that’s all. And people come in their lunch-hour, people come while they’re out shopping, people come up out of that subway, out of that cinema, and they tramp over the gravel to go and stand there, where he is. They put flowers down.

I’ve been there. I’ve seen. I don’t keep away. It’s a place like any other place, to me. Every time I go there, following the others over the crunch of feet on the path, I see even young people weeping, they put down their flowers and sometimes sheets of paper with what looks like lines of poems written there (I can’t read this language well), and I see that the inquiry goes on, it will not end until they find the face, until the back of nobody turns about. And that will never happen. Now I do what the others do. It’s the way to be safe, perfectly safe. Today I bought a cheap bunch of red roses held by an elastic band wound tight between their crushed leaves and wet thorns, and laid it there, before the engraved stone, behind the low railing, where my name is buried with him.

‘ … how few Westerners grasp malaria’s devastation. That said, its global toll remains staggering. In the last 20 years, it has killed nearly twice as many people as AIDS …. Malarial mosquitoes can even stow away on international flights — just ask recent unsuspecting victims near airports in Germany, Paris and São Paulo’.

All impurity hazing away, middleage evanescing, you can’t really make out their jowls and eye-pouches in the steam, and your own face if you could see it would be smudged, all that you’ve done to it, the wriggles of red veins down the nose, wafted from view. Underneath is you as you were.

This place calls itself Fredo’s Sauna and Health Club. But when you’re lying here you’re a senator among senators and nobles in a Roman bath. It’s winter now — no need to worry, no dangerous ultraviolet striking you, nothing noxious survives. Winter now but there’s no shivering here! Never any winter. In the humidity summer lives on; and there’s some tiny thing floating out off the misty heat — can’t be — no, must be a shred of someone’s towel — but it lands on a plump wet pectoral, just above the hair-forest there, it’s alive — and now dead, smack! A deformed punctuation mark of black, a scrap of wing, sliding on sweat.

REBIRTH

Winter outside but there’s water and privacy for breeding, eggs to lie low where no-one could imagine it, a place in which to emerge as you were, sloping back, transparent wings and special proboscis feature, in Fredo’s Sauna and Health Club.

The musical conversation of the orchestra, tuning up rather like athletes running-on-the-spot and shadow-punching, before performance; it even includes the pitch of anticipation in the low interchange of human voices. A diminuendo from this audience, as the musicians come from the wings, and a rallentando when the guest conductor, a famous young Czech or whatever, appears to bow, turn his back, mount the podium and settle his shoulders in readiness to enter the symphony with raised baton.

HEAVENLY CHORUS OF THE SPHERES

It’s winter, but nobody coughs. The sonority of wind, strings and keyboard calms all, the following tempest of brass sweeps away all reactions but the aural. The cello and viola file into the temple of each ear with the intoning of monks, there’s the query of the flute, the double-stopping grunt of the bass, the berating of drums and an answering ping of a triangle. All these creatures produce the beauty of the invisible life of sound. They dive, they soar, they ripple and glide almost beyond the reach of reception, and swell to return; some overwhelm others and then in turn are subsumed, but all are there somewhere in the layers of empyrean they ravishingly invade and transmute. They weave in and out of it, steal through it, flow into eight hundred sets of ears — it’s a full house when this conductor comes out on tour from one of those dangerous benighted Balkan countries that are always seceding and fighting and changing their names.