Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

Since I’ve been awake I’ve been thinking very clearly. It’s as if sediment has settled in my mind during sleep, and, like my hearing, all my faculties are perfectly acute. If I moved at all, the stir might produce cloudiness, as a snowstorm comes up in Bobo’s paperweight; but all my muscles are in perfect tension, too, and I am not aware of what position I’m lying in. I’m clear as a fish in a lighted bowl, as their (silvery?) capsule up there in the empty night that stretches even further than the lilac goes. ‘From the Pacific to the Atlantic in twenty minutes’; when Max drowned today, a man walked about in space.

Why the moon?

There’s no moon tonight, or else the room couldn’t be so dark.

Isn’t it the same old yearning for immortality, akin to all our desires to transcend all kinds of human limits? The feeling that if you bring such a thing off you’re approaching the transcension of our limits of life: our death. We master our environment in order to stay alive, but this is mastery only over the human span, whether that’s measured by three-score-and-ten or its prolongation for a few years — as with the old lady — by medicine. We’ve learnt how to stay alive — until it’s time to die.

You can go down after love or up after the moon.

But if you master something outside our physical environment, isn’t it reasonable to believe you are reaching out beyond the fact of death? If you master that beyond, as those men up there have done, isn’t that the closest we’ve ever got to mastering death? Won’t it seem the prefiguration, the symbol of that mastery?

They are alive, up there.

The very scene of operations is significant. We call the nothing above me ‘the sky’; and that way it’s became the roof of our environment, part of our terrestrial and finite being, witness of our moment of eighty-seven years or thirty-one (he would have been thirty-two next month). But we know that that ‘nothing’, beyond the layer of cloud I’ve seen for myself from a plane, that wrapping of atmosphere that others have soared above — that ‘nothing’ is space. Twin of time, the phrase goes. I hear it in Graham’s voice: together they represent, in the only conception we’re capable of forming of it, infinity. Nightly, lilac infinity.

If that man over my head can get out of ‘the sky’ into space, step from his man-devised, man-controlled casing into an environment beyond man’s, move of his own volition into the vortex our planet was flung from and in which its cooling and bringing forth of life and the emergence of man and all his works together occupy (if you try to think of it in terms of time) a moment — if he can do this, can he really be still mortal? If God is the principle of the eternal, isn’t he near God, tonight? Nearer than Max — who tried love — at the bottom of the sea. After all, religions teach that the kingdom of God, of the spirit, is not of this world. Flesh is of this world; death is of this world, but only by death we shall enter eternal life. Space is not of this world, either, and yet you can walk about alive in it, up there. You don’t need to be dead in order to enter. Is there anything surprising that there should be a deep connection in our subconscious between the eternity of God and the infinity of space? In fact, some scientists set out to prove that these are one and the same, and nearly all believe that there is some identity, at least, between religious myths and the evolutionary drive towards higher forms of life.

What’s going on overhead is perhaps the spiritual expression of our age, and we don’t recognize it. Space exploration isn’t a ‘programme’ — it’s the new religion. Out of the capsule, up there, out of this world in a way you can never be, gone down to the seabed; out of this world into infinity, eternality. Could any act of worship as we’ve known such things for two thousand years express more urgently a yearning for life beyond life — the yearning for God?

That’s what’s up there, behind the horsing around and the dehydrated hamburgers and the televised blood tests. If it’s the moon, that’s why … that’s why …

… there’s no reason Luke shouldn’t come back here.

I must have dropped off for a moment; I return with the swoop of a swing towards the ground from the limit of its half-arc.

The chequebook is in the left-hand upper drawer of my dressing table. Not three feet away. It would be quite feasible for me to use my power of attorney over my grandmother’s account. It is simply a matter of ascertaining (Graham’s word) exactly how I should deposit in her account cheques from abroad; the procedure so far, with foreign exchange, has been that if the currency is from outside the sterling area, I fill in a form giving the source and nature of the funds — dividends from shares in the such-and-such company and so on. And if the money is from the sterling area? Don’t I have to state the source then, too? Well, of course, the payer’s name has to be written on the ordinary deposit slip. That’s routine. But what happens if the money is credited to the account by bank draft? As I remember it, there’s some other sort of form to fill in, or was it that the source of funds had to be declared on the back of the transfer draft? It’s happened once or twice, but I’m not sure what I did.

And what about income tax declaration. How do you get round that one? Well, Luke must have some ideas; he said that all that was needed was a bank account. Quite. Look at Colonel Gaisford.

Graham would be the one who would know exactly how one would stand with the bank and the income tax people; he would know exactly where and how one would be found out. This is one thing you could never ask Graham; this is the end of asking Graham. It was Graham who managed to make a successful application for a passport for me, last year, after I’d been refused one for years. Graham has defined the safe limits of what one can get away with — ‘a woman in your position’.

There is certain to be some clause one’ll fall foul of, some provision one can’t fulfil. But for six months, even if it’s only six months, he said — the bank account of an old woman, who will think of looking into that? My grandmother may only live another few months; it’s as if the account exists for no other reason. She could never be held answerable for anything that might happen. But there’s my signature, of course, the name Van Den Sandt. Yet by the time investigations are made about the source of money coming in, and the link is established with the destination of money being paid out … well, she may be dead, the account may no longer be being used for the same purpose. Everything is impossible, if one calculates on the safe side.

Why on earth should I do such a thing?

It seems to me that the answer is simply the bank account. I can’t explain; but there is the bank account. That’s good enough; as when Bobo used to answer a question about his behaviour with the single word: ‘Because’. Am I going into politics again, then? And if so, what kind? But I can’t be bothered with this sort of thing, it’s irrelevant. The bank account is there. It can probably be used for this purpose. What happened, the old lady asked me: well, that’s what’s happened. Luke knows what he wants, and he knows who it is he must get it from. Of course he’s right. A sympathetic white woman hasn’t got anything to offer him — except the footing she keeps in the good old white Reserve of banks and privileges. And in return he comes with the smell of the smoke of braziers in his clothes. Oh yes, and it’s quite possible he’ll make love to me, next time or some time. That’s part of the bargain. It’s honest, too, like his vanity, his lies, the loans he doesn’t pay back: it’s all he’s got to offer me. It would be better if I accepted gratefully, because then we shan’t owe each other anything, each will have given what he has, and neither is to blame if one has more to give than the other. And in any case, perhaps I want it. I don’t know. Perhaps it would be better than what I’ve had — or got. Suit me better, now. Who’s to say it shouldn’t be called love? You can’t do more than give what you have.