Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

We have a home to offer, no question about that, vis-à-vis the basic needs of a child. It’s the first consideration an agency would take account of: this easily, informally beautiful place and space we’ve created. But adoption is not what we want: we’re talking of our own child. This means one of us must bear it, because what one is the agency of becomes the possession of both.

Late at night, accompanied by the crickets out on the terrace, later still, in our bed, her arm under my head or mine under hers, we consider how we’re going to go about this extraordinary decision that seems to have been made for us, not at all like the sort of mutual decision, say, to go to the Galápagos next summer instead of Spain. There’s no question of who will grow the child inside her body. Karen is eight years younger than I am. But at thirty-six she has doubts of whether she can conceive. — How do I know? I’ve never been pregnant. — We laughed so much I had to kiss her to put a stop to it. She hasn’t had a man since at eighteen in her first year at university her virginity was disposed of, luckily without issue, by a fellow student in the back of his car. — I think there are tests you can have to see if you’re fertile. We’ll find a gynecologist. None of her business why you want to know.—

That was simple. She’s fertile, all right, though the doctor did make some remark about the just possible difficulties — did she say complications, Karen doesn’t remember — for (what did she call her) a primapara at thirty-six, and the infant. There’s always a caesarian — but I don’t want Karen cut up. — I’ll have a natural birth, I’ll do all the exercises and get into the right frame of mind these prenatal places teach. — And so we know, I know now; she’s going to have an experience I won’t have, she’s accepted that; we’ve accepted that, yes.

But then comes the real question we’ve been avoiding. This is a situation, brought upon by ourselves indeed, where you can’t do without a man. Not yet; science is busy with other ways to fertilise the egg with some genetically-programmed artificial invader, but it’s not quite achieved.

The conception.

We think about that final decision, silently and aloud. The decision to make life, that’s it, no evasion of the fact.

— There’s — well. One of the men we know.—

What does Karen mean. I looked at her, a stare to read her. I can’t bear the idea of a man entering Karen’s body. Depositing something there in the tender secret passage I enter in my own ways. Surely Karen can’t bear it either. Unfaithful and with a man.

Karen is blatantly practical. I should be ashamed to doubt her for an instant. — Of course he could produce his own sperm.—

— Milk himself.—

— I don’t know — a doctor’s rooms, a lab, and then it would be like an ordinary injection, for me. Almost.—

— Someone who’d do it for us. We’d have to look for … choose one healthy, good-looking, not neurotic. Do we know anyone among our male friends who’s all three?—

And again we’re laughing. I have a suggestion, Karen comes up with another, even less suitable candidate. It’s amazing, when you’re free to make a life decision without copulation, what power this is! You can laugh and ponder seriously, at the same time.

— We’re assuming that if we select whoever-it-is he’s going to agree, just like that.—

I didn’t know the answer.

— Why should he?—

Karen’s insistence brought to mind something going far beyond the obliging male’s compliance (we could both think, finally, that there would be one or two among our male friends or acquaintances who might be intrigued by the idea). What if the child turned out to look like him. More than a resemblance, more than just common maleness if it were to be a boy, more than something recognisably akin to the donator of the sperm, if a girl. And further, further—

— Oh my god. If the child looks like him — even if it doesn’t — he gets it into his head to claim it. He wants, what’s the legal term you use in divorce cases, you know it — access. He wants to turn up every Sunday to have his share, taking the child to the zoo.—

We went for long walks, we went to the theatre and to the bar where we girls gather, all the time with an attention deep under our attention to where we were and what we were hearing, saying. Conception. How to make this life for ourselves.

After a week, days clearing of thinning cloud, it became simple; had been there from the beginning. The sperm bank. This meant we had to go to a doctor in our set and tell what we hadn’t told anybody: we want a child. Karen is going to produce it. We don’t wish to hear any opinions for or against this decision that’s already made, cannot be changed. We just need to know how one approaches a sperm bank and whether you, one of us , will perform the simple process of insemination. That’s all. Amazement and passionate curiosity remodelled the doctor’s face but she controlled the urge to question or comment, beyond saying I’m sure you know what it is you’re doing. She would make the necessary arrangements; there would be some payment to be made, maybe papers to sign, all confidential. Neither donor nor recipient will know that the other exists.

The whole process of making a life turns out to be even blinder than nature. Just a matter of waiting for the right period in Karen’s cycle when the egg is ready for the drop of liquid. Anonymous drop.

And waiting, unnecessarily looking at the calendar to make sure — waiting is a dangerous state; something else came to life in us. Karen was the first to speak.

— From the lab, the only way. But who will know if it’s from a white? Or a black? Can one ask?—

— Maybe. Yes. I don’t know.—

But after the moment of a deep breath held between us, I had to speak again, our honesty is precious. — Even if the answer’s yes, how can we be sure. Bottled in a laboratory what goes into which?—

The sperm of Mr Anonymous White Man. Think what’s in the genes from the past, in this country. What could be. The past’s too near. They’re alive, around — selling, donating? — their seed. The torturers who held people’s heads under water, strung them up by the hands, shot a child as he approached; the stinking cell where I was detained for nine weeks, although what happened to me was nothing compared with all the rest.

If the anonymous drop contains a black’s DNA, genes? It would bring to life again in Karen’s body, our bodies as one, something of those whose heads were held under water, who were strung up by the hands, a child who was shot. No matter whether this one also brings the contradictions of trouble and joys that are expected of any child.

But how can one be sure? Of that drop?

We keep talking; our silences are a continuation. Shall we take the risk. How would we know, find out? Years, or perhaps when he, the white child, is still young; you see certain traits of aggression, of cruel detachment in young children — the biological parents ask, where did he get it from, certainly not from you or me. When he — the child we’re about to make somehow is thought of now as a male — is adolescent, what in the DNA, the genes, could begin to surface from the past?

We postponed. We went to the Galápagos, perspective of another world. Now that we’re back we don’t talk about making a life, it is not in our silences — home, alone, as it was before.

So I was never born. Refused, this time. I suspect it was the only time. But then what I have is not what is experienced as memory.

‘Just as everything is always something else … it may also throw some light on the procreative god.’

The Germans know they are losing. It is after the war of bombs falling on cities. In our family we stayed alive through all that. We Russian bears, we’ve come into the fight on the other side, we’re going to win for the English and French who can’t do it for themselves. While the final battles go on at the front the Germans still occupy our old city, but only just. We have our people who move around in the streets we know so well and knife them at night. So they come to our houses with their guns and frighten the women, smashing the furniture and throwing out whatever’s in cupboards and under beds, while they search for our men they know do these things. They shout all the time so loud, like a stampeding herd of cattle through the house, that I can hardly hear my sisters screaming and I don’t know what my mother, her mouth wide over tight teeth, is trying to tell me to do. Run? How could I get away. They took my father, kicking him to our door, well at least we know that he had managed to get back at them before they got to him, he killed at least three in the times he left us at night and crept back into bed beside my mother before light. Then one of them looks round; and takes me. Kicks me after my father. My mother howls at them, He’s only fourteen, a baby, he knows nothing, nothing! But they don’t understand Russian. Anyway, they know that soon when I’m fifteen I’ll be called up, there are boys from my class who are now in our army because we must win, everyone must fight. They throw my father and me into a kind of military van and keep us on the floor with their feet on us but I see the tops of buildings near our street go past and the towers of the old church my mother goes to and says it was built centuries ago and is the most beautiful in our country, in the world, and it was God who spared it from the bombing. And I even see the one wall, sticking up, of the theatre that was bombed, where we once went to see my eldest sister, she’s an actress, play a part in a play by Maxim Gorky. We’d also read it in my class at school.