Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

The auditorium is kept welcomingly heated by artificial means and by the pleasant warmth of human breath. A minute manifestation of being flies with the music, contributing a high, long-drawn fiddle-note. Nobody hears this Ariel materialise round their heads.

On the other hemisphere — Southern — it is summer, not simulation that makes all the year a summer.

WINGED CHARIOT

They are not here officially, driving on a rutted muddy road between baobab trees, if officially means that your whereabouts are known to close collaterals — wives, husbands, and professional partners. An irresistible mutual impulse — like the original unlikely one that brought them together — to take to themselves something more than two hours once a week under an assumed name in an obscure hotel, had discovered in each the ability to devise unbelievably believable absences, the call of professional commitments. They took a plane, carefully not travelling even in the same class (how clever passion makes even those who have been honest and open all their lives). They chose an unlikely destination — they hoped; in their circles people travel a lot and quite adventurously, so long as the camps are luxury ones with open-air bars and helicopter service.

The baobabs are mythical animals turned to stone.

Whenever before would he have found himself beside a woman who would come out with such delightful fantasies! She’s a writer, and sees everywhere what he has never seen; he’s an economist, privy to so much about the workings of the world she always has felt herself ignorant of, and here he is, listening with admiration to her trivial knack of imagery.

This adventure of theirs can only last a few days — the credibility of the alibis won’t allow longer — and it has come late and totally unexpected, to both of them. Husband, wife, half-grown children, reputation — now a last chance: of what? Something missed, now to be urgently claimed. He loves her to speak poetry to him as he drives. It’s her poetry, appropriated by her to accompany her life, the poets knowing always better than she does what is happening to her; now, to them. What they have done is crazy, the final destination a bad end; the realisation comes silently to each with a bump in the rutted road. Then she’s saying for them both, as the medium possessed by a dead poet, the lines don’t all reach her in the right sequence — at my back I always hear, Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near … let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up … and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life … the grave’s a fine and private place but none I think do there embrace …

He swerves to the side of the deserted road and turns off the ignition. They stare at each other and he breaks the spell with a smile and slow-moving head, side-to-side. There’s no-one, nothing to witness the embrace, the struggle of each not to let go. Then he suddenly frees himself, gets out of the car, opens the passenger door and takes her by the hand. There are old puddles, soupy with stagnation, to step across. The sagging remains of a broken fence: whose land was this, once. No-one, nothing. The sun rests on their backs as a benign hand, they walk a little while over stubble, viscous hollows bleary with past rain, and cannot walk farther, are arrested by need. And there is some tree that really is a tree, in leaf over a low mound of tender grass grown in its moist shelter.

Lying there they find their way to each other through their clothes like any teenagers making love wherever they can hide. It doesn’t matter. Now they lie, breathing each other in, diastole and systole, and nothing draws near, there is only that indefinable supersonic humming of organic and insect life, the sap rising in the tree, grass sprouting, gauze of gnats hovering, and a silent shrike swoops from a branch to catch some kind of flying prey in mid-air.

He is stirred, eventually, by past reality, in concern for her — remembering the hazards of hunting trips he has taken: I hope there’re no ticks. She moves her head, eyes closed: no. Nothing. Safe. Opens her eyes to see him, nothing else. One of the flying specks has landed on the lobe of his ear, lingering there, while she blows at it. He starts with a faint exclamation, she frees a hand and flicks whatever it is, so small, nothing, away.

SHOOTING UP

The rave is in one of those four-walls-and-roof with creaky boards that has housed all kinds of purposes — a church or school hall where there isn’t, in this neighbourhood, a church or school anymore, and the toilets are across a yard that in the daytime is used by some guys to repair exhausts. Dismembered vehicle parts and gas cylinders have to be navigated to reach where he’s gone off to. There he is, sitting on the broken seat, but he has his trousers on, he’s sure not having a shit, and his sweat-shirt sleeve is rolled back on his bare white arm, he’s got an arm pale and hairless as a girl’s. And just look at it.

I thought you’d kicked the habit.

He laughs. You want to use this seat?

But he allows the arm to be grasped.

Just see your arm.

What’s one more prick? How can you tell one from another, high yourself on booze.

So what’s that on your arm?

Mosquito bite.

Very funny. Hahaha.

Summer, winter, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere. There’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing! A speck hovering, landing, you can swat with the palm of a hand. It’s not the Reaper with the scythe.

It’s his emissary, Anopheles.

‘Karma …. 1) The sum and the consequences of a person’s actions during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his destiny. 2) Fate, destiny. Sanskrit karman (nominative karma ), act, deed, work, from karoti , he makes, he does. ’

— THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

‘ … so man is continually peopling his current space with a world of his own’.

Arthur’s wife Norma is the one who is in the group photographs of conferences published in newspapers, she is quoted on the radio and sometimes appears on a TV panel. They have become a couple with a public profile, as the opinion polls would show. He is in insurance, a steady position, wasn’t doing too badly even when they bought the place she set her heart on, a bit beyond their means, then. It looked as if he might become a general manager, eventually, some day — who knows, so they could afford, in another sense, to begin to prepare a place equal to status.

If you don’t have ambitions when you’re young what kind of couple are you? She certainly had had ambition when she finished school top of her class. She’d wanted to go to university, study political science, economics, subjects she’d heard about in the company of her trade unionist parents and their friends, but there was no money. She worked in a factory, in the offices of a restaurant chain, picking up computer efficiency, studied her chosen subjects by correspondence courses, and became one of the working-class whites in the liberation movement. A resilient thread in a net that operated Underground. The movement sent her out of the country on a mission to one of their overseas offices while by some oversight on the part of the political police she still had a passport; when she came back her name appeared on a list of banned persons: her movements and the kind of work she could do to earn a living were restricted.

It was when the leftish-liberal manager of an insurance company did the bravest thing he could steel himself to, and quietly took her on as a filing clerk, that she met Arthur. There are at least two magnetic sources of attraction in the process called falling in love. (Anyone can think of a number of others.) The face, body, of the object-individual: that can be enough. The personality: it may make the above irrelevant. Arthur had no specific sexually-aesthetic taste in what was beauty in a woman, girls were pretty or ugly or just somehow inbetween. Norma, short, with a business-like body (characterised always about some movement and task) and a face in the inbetween category, could not have started the process by means of the first magnetic source. Arthur fell in love, deeply appreciative, with the force of her personality. She was everything he had never been, done everything he had never done. He was one step up out of the working-class from which she came. His father owned a small printing business where his mother acted as receptionist-bookkeeper, they kept clear of politics; the discount price of their middle-class white security, dependent on the local government’s orders for certain forms, might be withdrawn. Arthur was brought up to be honest about money, kind, to respect other people, no matter who or what they were, but without getting mixed with their ideas or problems; make his way as his parents had had to do — for himself. The insurance company was a good start. Whatever happened. In the country. There would always have to be insurance for people’s possessions, against other people who took these from them.