Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

Over lunch he asked what she’d been up to.

As if he hadn’t been kept only too well informed — Minding the store for you. Plenty of problems I didn’t trouble you with, though.—

Flora was carving a leg of lamb. — Not now, not now, in your office on Monday.—

— But I did have a break. Out in the country yesterday. The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs turned up and took me for a drive, he had some chore and I suppose looked for useful company. Did you know there’re still land mines not cleared in the Eastern province?—

— Good grief, I’d been told it was all clear except for the frontier in the West! We’d better look into that with Safety and Security — Defence, maybe. Was he fishing again, an Agency sardine or two to dish up for his boss’s reports to the Minister? As he was doing with me, as well, when we lunched. We’ll never get these guys in Government to understand we have to keep out of political issues — or seem to. As if sinking a borehole in this village before that doesn’t become political. What does he think about IT — or does he only utter on land? If you see him again, bring it up; he must sit at all manner of closed meetings with his Director, he must have a general idea of what the Government’s prepared to do, we have to gather what we can to work on for cooperation from it. They can’t expect to leave it all to the big network donors … as you noticed, their stocks have gone wa-ay down, anyway.—

The Hendersons put Deputy-Director Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma and his wife along with the name of the Director of Land Affairs himself on the list for a cocktail party marking the Agency’s decade of service in Africa. The Director brought his wife, his Deputy came alone. As if there was no wife; but there’s always a wife, somewhere. When Roberta, co-host with the Hendersons, greeted him she was about to add as a pleasantry, I forgot the avocados, but did not. Turned with other pleasantries to a man from Home Affairs, arrived with the Minister of Welfare (rumours of another kind of affair, there) who always tried to manoeuvre her sisterly into a corner with some urgent situation of women that must be brought to the attention of the Agency.

These first weeks of Alan Henderson’s return were taken up in collaboration with the local World Health Organisation representative in meetings arranged for a senior man from WHO headquarters who was touring the continent in a campaign against HIV AIDS. There were visits to rural counselling centres set up in army surplus tents and to an old hospital still known by the name of a deceased English queen, now a hospice — euphemism for the last of the Stations of the disease. The Agency Administrator’s Assistant had had to face, and walk away from, to life — starvation in Bangladesh, in India, not just the living human head resculptured by it, but its final power manifest, wreaked upon the feet, the skeleton of feet no longer for standing, the feet, the hands, the hands the very last web-hold on existence. People deployed on the ground (as opposed to those tours of duty looking down from cloud-high windows of metropolitan headquarters) are like doctors, they must do what they have to do without the fatality of identification with sufferers. But in this red-brick relic of imperial compassion for its subjects the long-established discipline become natural to her failed; suddenly was not there. She groped for it within herself; the anguish of the bodies on beds and mats entered in its place. She could not look, she had to look , at the new-born-to-die and the rags of flesh and bone that were all that was left of the children they were to become if they did survive weeks, months, maybe a year. Food and clean water (the succour ready to be provided on other tours of duty): useless here.

Silenced by what they had seen, the official group was taken to a Holiday Inn where the Agency had arranged a private room and coffee was served. She was hearing as echoes sounding off the walls the practical responses to — what? Incurable. Something incurable in the nature of human life itself, taking many forms of which this was the latest, arising, returning in endless eras and guises — disease, wars, racism. That’s how people come to believe — have to believe — in the existence of the Devil along with God, Capital Initials for both. How else? How else answer why. But what there was in that place was not ontologically incurable! Just that a cure was not yet discovered. Preventable. That was the succour, in the meantime! Research facilities, preventive education — that was what, under the mantra of diffused tapes repeating pop songs, the people who were doing something about these were arguing, as the coffee revived blood run cold. And that was the code she belonged to: whatever there is, the ethic is do something about it. But she couldn’t respond when her Administrator, with his usual consideration of the worth of her views, looked to see if she was going to speak.

The official car drew up at the gates just as she arrived back at the house. Dismay difficult to overcome: not this afternoon, end of this day! Draw the curtains pour yourself a whisky, no-one but the face, familiar in this delegated house, this tour of duty, of the attendant Tomasi.

Nothing for it but to blast the horn for Tomasi to come and open the gates — and dismay gave way to embarrassment, the blast sounded exasperated, she had the duty of a polite show of welcome, at least. As the gates were opened she waved a hand to signal the car to precede hers. The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs was deposited at the front door and his car proceeded once again round to the yard. She left hers and produced a smile to greet her guest.

Tomasi the sprinter was already opening the front door. Once she and Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma were in the livingroom she excused herself — May I dump my papers and tidy myself up, we’ve been about out of the office all day. Please — be comfortable.—

He will have heard her flushing the loo, water coming from the old squeaking taps as she washed, she did not look at herself in the bathroom mirror. Hadn’t made himself comfortable. There in his parliamentary dress he was standing as if he had just entered. — Come. — She turned to the sofa; while he seated himself, she indeed drew the curtains and opened the cupboard where the hospitality bottles were.

— It’s too late for tea, don’t you agree. Gladwell. What’ll it be?—

— Whatever you are having.—

— Whisky? Soda, water?—

— I prefer soda.—

She drew up a little table for their drinks and joined him on the sofa. — We have a visitor from WHO in New York, we’ve been taking him around with people from the Ministry of Health, some from Welfare.—

— It is good when these principals come, see for themselves. Sometimes.—

— And other times?—

— They don’t understand what they see, what it means; what we are doing. — One of his pauses. — They’re seeing something else they bring along with them. What is it, the word … when I was a student at University of Virginia — a paradigm. Yes.—

Sometimes.

The curt proviso caught at her abstracted attention. The few occasions they had met, even in the opportunities of the weekend drive, he had not allowed himself any uncertainties. Now from this small indication that this official was also a man with doubts came the release coffee at the Holiday Inn had not brought her.

— I shouldn’t be doing this job.—

Spoken suddenly for herself. But as if overheard by both — the man was here so it must have been for him, too. — We were at that new water purification plant … two clinics they fund. And the old Queen Mary Hospital. You know.—

— Their AIDS programme.—