Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

Luke isn’t one of the old crowd, but his half-section, Reba, knew Max, and that is how they both happened to come to me. They live in Basutoland, though of course they really belong here but were somehow able to prove their right to Basuto citizenship and papers from the British administration there. Reba has some building and cartage contracting business and he sends his old truck quite freely up and down between Maseru and Johannesburg with loads of second-hand building material. Apparently it provides an unscheduled bus service for politicals on the run, and even transports people in the other direction, taking them up to the Bechuanaland border. One night about fifteen months ago Reba arrived at my flat in the middle of the night; the truck had broken down with two chaps on board who had arranged to be escorted over the border that night, and he didn’t have enough money to pay for the repairs. I’d only met him once before, with Max, and I wasn’t quite sure if I really knew who he was, but I lent him what I had — eight pounds. I was afraid to — he could easily have been a police trap — but I was even more afraid not to; how could someone like me risk losing two Africans their chance to get away?

He had with him that night a plump young man with a really black, smooth face — almost West African — and enormous almond eyes that were set in their wide-spaced openings in the black skin like the painted eyes of smiling Etruscan figures. That was Luke. Reba is a little, Vaseline-coloured man whose head is jammed back between his shoulders like a hunchback’s and who holds his big jaw full of teeth open in an attentive, silent laugh, while you’re speaking, as a hippopotamus keeps his ajar for the birds to pick his teeth. They were an immensely charming pair who gave the impression of being deeply untrustworthy. I didn’t expect to see the money again, but a registered envelope arrived with the notes and a letter of thanks idiotically signed ‘yours in the Struggle, Reba Shipise’. Since then, Luke turns up from time to time; he says, alternately, apparently not remembering from one visit to the next what explanation he gave last time — that Reba is too busy with his business or that Johannesburg has become ‘too hot’ for him. What does it matter? It’s none of my business, anyway. They’re both PAC men, too; and Max and I, like most white leftists and liberals, always supported ANC people because they are not ‘racialist’ and don’t count us out, but the government doesn’t make any fine distinction between those who are said to want to push the white man into the sea and those who merely want their majority vote — both kinds can rot in prison together. What does the fact that they are PAC rather than ANC matter, either? All the old niggling scruples of the days before black political parties were banned seem quite to have missed the point, now.

It’s not often that I cook a proper meal, unless Bobo’s home on holiday; Graham can afford to buy our dinner in a restaurant, or we can eat at his house, where there’s a cook — it’s not worth the trouble for me to have to start work in the kitchen when I come home from the laboratory. So that the mere fact of cooking something that requires more skill and organization of tasks than frying an egg makes quite an occasion for me — it doesn’t matter whom it’s for. Anyway, Luke Fokase is always hungry. That first night he came with Reba he sat down and ate cold frigadelles I happened to have in the refrigerator. Pork fillets cooked buried in lots of thinly sliced onions are a bother to do, but I rather enjoyed getting everything prepared right up to the stage when all I should have to do was set it cooking, just before we wanted to eat. I opened a bottle of Spanish red wine that Graham had left in case we should happen to eat something worthy of it here, sometime — wine is very important to Graham, I notice that a good dinner and good wine and then love-making go together, with him, he doesn’t really enjoy the last without the first. I took a glass into the bathroom, and drank it in the bath. It looked lovely, the dark pansy-red against the tiles. I had the newspaper with me and I read the whole report from which Graham had read out bits about the space flight. There was nothing in the paper about Max; it had already been dropped from this, the late final edition.

Even then I was dressed and ready long before Luke came, and did not know what to do with myself. There are so many things that ought to be done when I have the time, but an awkward little wedge of time like this is not much use. Whatever I began, I should not finish. I can never go back to a half-written letter; the tone, when you take it up again, doesn’t match.

And yet to put on a record and pour myself another glass of wine and sit — something that sounds delightful — made me feel as if I were on stage before an empty auditorium. I fetched the book I was reading in bed in the morning. Since I stopped halfway down the page at which a dry cleaner’s slip marked my place, there was Max’s death; it seemed to me a different book, I can’t explain — it sounded quite differently there in that inner chamber where one hears a writer’s voice behind the common currency of words. The voice went on and on but ran into itself as an echo throws one wave of sound back and forth on top of another. I read the words and sentences, but my mind twitched to the single electrical impulse — the death of Max. As soon as I gave up the attempt to read, it was all right again. I wasn’t even thinking about him. Through the walls there was the muffled clatter of dinner time in the flats on either side of mine, and the bark of someone’s radio at full volume. Car doors slammed and the clear winter air juggled voices. Our lights blazed at Fredagold Heights and theirs blazed back. I saw the tube of glue lying in the ashtray (I’d had it out to stick down the sole of my shoe a few days ago) and remembered that I had never got round to mending the head of the baboon mascot I brought back for Bobo from Livingstone, on the way home from Europe last year. It came broken out of my overnight bag; and after showing it to him I’d put it away among my cosmetics, telling him I’d stick the snout on. I went to the bedroom and found it, at the back of the drawer; one of the red lucky-bean eyes had come out, too, but I found that as well, in the fluff and spilt powder. The thing is made of some unidentifiable fur (meerkat? rat?), well observed, with an obscenely arched tail, and a close-set, human expression about the bean eyes in a face carved out of a bit of soft wood. I glued both broken surfaces very carefully and then pressed them together accurately. I scraped off with my fingernail the hairline of glue squeezed out along the break and then held snout and head tightly while the fusion set; you wouldn’t be able to tell that it was mended. I began to think about how one day I would buy albums and begin to stick in the photographs of Bobo as a baby that are lying in an old hatbox on the top of the bathroom cupboard. Most of the others — him as a little boy — went along with our personal papers and cuttings in security raids on the old cottage, and I’ve never been able to get them back. Sticking Bobo’s pictures into an album and recording the dates on which and places where they were taken suddenly seemed enthusiastically possible, just as if the kind of life in which one does this sort of thing would fly into place around us with the act. My stomach was rumbling hunger, and with fingers tacky with glue, I had just poured myself another glass of wine when there was a soft, two-four beat rapping at the door; Luke doesn’t ring bells.

He doesn’t worry about being seen, either. I know that he comes straight up through the front entrance of the building, so that the watchman, who sits on his box on the lookout for people sneaking up to the servants’ rooms on the roof by way of the back stairs, won’t bother him, and if he met the caretaker — somehow he doesn’t — he’d spin her a plausible, breezy yarn to account for his presence, and get away with it, too. There are some Africans who can do these things; others can’t move a step without getting entangled in the taboos all round their feet. I learnt that while Max was working with them. When he — Luke — stood in the doorway I realized that he is not present to me in any way when I don’t see or hear him. He exists only when his voice is on the other end of the telephone or when he stands there like this, a large, grinning young man, filling his clothes. And yet I felt happy to see him. He is immediately there — one of those people whose clothes move audibly, cloth on cloth, with the movement of muscle, whose breathing is something one is as comfortably aware of as a cat’s purr in the room, and whose body-warmth leaves fingerprints on his glass. He came in heavily and I put down the catch on the Yale. ‘Good — great — good to see you …’ He put his hands at once on the top of my arms and let them slide down towards the elbows, squeezing me gently. We stood there a moment, grinning, flirting. ‘And you, I’d forgotten what you look like …’ ‘Hey, what’s this, what’s here — have I been away so long?’ It was a light hair he had found and pulled out, on top of my head. ‘Nonsense, it’s the newest thing. They do it at the hairdresser, it’s called streaking …’ It was a game; he gave me a little appraising lift, with the heel of the hand, on the outer sides of my breasts, as one says, ‘There!’, and we went into the living room.