Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

It was far away. They rose and descended round a mountain pass, and caused people in two country towns to stare back at the majestic car’s glossy blackness as the populace in distant times and far countries must have watched a royal carriage go by. In the third town he stopped (the other journey, he’d paused at a roadside store), this time before the town’s landmark, a supermarket, and went in attended by the driver-bodyguard, perhaps only to carry provisions. She had her own secreted in her largest straw bag. The shaming resort to charity: a dose of sugar in place of an answer to the state of beggary. The children were there, the same children. She handed out a pack of sweets. The bodyguard and his charge returned loaded with food — must have been a long list from the wife. Then his man was in attendance on a visit to a liquor store behind the battered iron-pillared-and-roofed pavement that was the style of old frontier towns — along with the shopkeeper’s Jewish name was pioneer immigrant provenance: I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. Bottles clanked in the trunk as the car moved off and the driver-bodyguard was instructed in their language to halt and rearrange his packing of provisions. Once more, refreshment had been brought for her; this time it was imported mineral water.

They talked between comfortable intervals — unlike his imposed silences — watching the country go by. The candelabra aloes were in bloom, flaming votive offerings to the ultimate cathedral that is the late winter sky when the heat has come, as it does, before the rains, a scouring to the bone that needs a term other than the one named Spring in Europe. The Cultural Attaché of the British had remarked to her at dinner last week, August’s the cruellest month, not T. S. Eliot’s April.

They came to the kind of terrain where activity by man has made savannah of what once was forest. Sparse scrub was nature’s attempt to return among weathered rubble, half-buried rust-encrusted unidentifiable iron parts, even a jagged section of a wall where foundations traced by weeds outlined what might have been a building. Beyond some sort of slag heaps a rise where the picked-over remains of what must have been elaborate structures — houses? — of a considerable size, in scale with the giant hulks of fallen trees too heavy to have been carted away for firewood, still made their statement as an horizon. In other parts of the country she had seen farmsteads abandoned by whites pillaged for whatever might be useful; nothing of this extent. — What was here?—

— Used to be a mine. Long time ago. Before.—

— Copper?—

— Yes.—

— But what happened? Why isn’t it still worked?—

— I don’t know. Maybe the ore was finished — but in the war they say it was attacked and flooded, underground, the pumps were smashed. You can ask the Minister of Mines; the Buffalo Mine.—

There was a great deal of entertaining up at the Manager’s house, weekends. On Monday morning a member of the kitchen and ground staff whose job it was set off to walk fifty miles to town with the master’s note for the liquor store. A case of Scotch whisky. The man walked back with twelve bottles in the case on his head, arriving Friday. Every Friday. The feat was a famous dinner-party story, each weekend: that’s my man — what heads they have, eh, thick as a log.

A stop at the last town to buy supplies the driver-bodyguard loaded. I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. A case of Scotch whisky. Twelve bottles on the head. That’s my man. Thick as a log. That’s my man.

Buffalo Mine.

The name is a hook, the anecdote comes up with it. (The driver-bodyguard has reduced speed in response to her movement, upright in her seat looking back at the site.)

First time in Africa? First time yes India Bangladesh Afghanistan not here.

Not only a dinner-party story of the long dead. What an old rogue, but such style! They don’t make them like that anymore. Tax evasion’s about the only territory of adventurers now. A child half-listening, an adolescent bored with the tradition of family fables recounted to later generations, around other tables, about that extraordinary character, the grandfather.

Been here before.

Not in her person. But in her blood-line. The history to which she belongs. There it was — is — Buffalo Mine. One of the houses that were up there on the rise she’s looking at was where the dinner parties heard the famous story, drank the whisky arrived every Friday. Every Friday head thick as a log.

— You know the Minister? I’ll introduce you. — Gladwell is in the position to obtain any privilege a curious visitor might wish.

— Enos can tell you all about these old places.—

She sank back in her seat as if dismissing a passing interest.

Nearby was her destination, their destination, the Deputy-Director’s farm. She had had in prospect a solid Colonialverandahed farmstead taken over: there, looking on wattle-fenced cattle kraals, mud huts, a troop of sheep and goats, chickens taking a dust-bath under roses gone wild, a scatter of children bowling old tyres, was a house set down out of the sky complete from California. The expanse of glass behind the patio preened in reflected splendour of the sun, a satellite dish held its great ear to the world. Close by was a structure she recognised as a powerful electricity generator. Men and women came out of the back of the house to the double garage whose fine wooden doors rolled away as the driver-bodyguard touched the electronic gadget in his hand. The people were servants or perhaps relatives (she had observed how poorer members of an official’s family often served in both capacities), some hastened to unload the car, a woman in a flounced floral overall that needn’t necessarily mean she was cooking or cleaning, but a mark of status, hugged the master of the house and brought her palms together in greeting to his guest. She was ready to meet the wife in the house and perhaps some of the couple’s grown children — of course the wife would speak English — anyway the social capabilities of her own training were automatically at hand for all such encounters.

There is an unmistakable atmosphere of absence in rooms where only servants have come and gone in the course of their daily tasks; no-one to fill these rooms has left presence there. Perhaps the arrival is unexpected, his wife is in some other wing of this house. He was following his guest’s usual hostly procedure when he visited her , pouring whisky taken from a cabinet where glasses hung upside down from their stems as in a smart bar; he had not gone to summon anyone.

— I’d like to meet your wife, first. — The protocol smile as she accepted her drink.

— She prefers town.—

— Oh that’s a disappointment.—

— The children come sometimes.—

— Well I’ll have to meet her in town, then. — It was a tentative claim to friendship of the kind she was used to, the bachelor woman taken into a family context.

They were served a four o’clock meal — the woman in the flowered outfit must have been forewarned, after all, to have ready. The whisky bottle came to the skating-rink shiny table they sat at in a room that led off the livingroom peopled only by framed photographs of weddings, sports teams and official occasions in which he was among the assembly. Lively voices out of sight indicated that the driver-bodyguard must be sociably at home in the kitchen just as he was in Tomasi’s.

She tucked in to stew and wild spinach, helped herself, under the permissive wave of the host’s hand, to the mound of stiff maize meal smoking vapour like a dormant volcano. There were wheels of sliced tomato arranged as a still life on a glass plate. He was controlledly annoyed to find there was to be no coffee (apparently forgotten when the purchases were made at the supermarket); she noticed then what must have been there all along in him, the attractive tilt of his eyebrows drawn upward at the inner corners enquiringly even when he was not — as now — irritated. A hieroglyph of vulnerability to be deciphered, if one were to be interested enough, in the closed self-possession of this functionary.