Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Someone — might have been I — said, ‘Muslim women — still behind the black veil — men suffer from them.’ It’s taken as rhetorical.

I’m no match for Susan.

‘See them trailing the wives and mothers grandmothers matriarchs aunts sisters along with endless children: that’s the power behind the burka. Their men — don’t forget the possessive — carry the whole female burden through entire male lives, bearing women who know that to come out and fend for yourself means competing economically, politically, psychologically in the reality of the world. The black rag’s an iron curtain.’

‘And gay men?’ Anthony’s a known lover of women but his sense of justice is alert and quizzical as anyone’s.

Susan looks him over: maybe she’s mistaken his obvious heterosexuality, his confidence that he’s needed no defence in his relations with females. She’s addressing us all.

‘When the gay bar closes, it’s the lesbians who get the jobs — open to their gender as women . Gay men aren’t even acceptable for that last resort of traditional male amour propre , the army, in many countries. Unfit even to be slaughtered.’

Meanwhile Edward’s found his appetite, he’s considering this dish, then that, in choice of which promises the subtlety that appeals to him as (oh unworthy comparison I’m making) he might consider between the performance of one musician and another at the piano. As the left hand pronounces a chord and the right hand answers higher. But the discrimination of taste buds’ pleasures does not temper his demand, ‘What’s happened to penis envy?’

Nevertheless, Susan gives him the advice he clearly needs, not duck, the prawns are better, no, no, that chicken concoction is for dull palates.

The waiter is already swaying servilely this way and that with a discreet offer of the dessert menu; some of us have done with the main spread. Maybe we’re ready for what I remember comes next in this place which is just as it was, the trolleys of bounty will never empty. Fortune cookies. Sorbet with lychees; mangoes? Perhaps it’s the names of tropical fruits that remind us of Anthony’s form of dress.

‘What are you up to?’ It’s Edward. ‘Whose international corporate anatomy are you dissecting?’ As if the African robe must be some kind of journalist surgeon’s operating garb. Oracular Edward recalls, ‘Who would have foreseen even the most powerful in the world come to fear of running dry — except you, of course, when you wrote your Seven Sisters . . that was. .’ The readers of his book about the oil industry, the writer himself, ignore reference to the memory museum, its temporal documentation. ‘Who foresaw it was those oilfields witches’ brew that fuels the world which was going to be more pricey than gold, platinum, uranium, yes! Yes! — in terms of military strategy for power, the violent grab for spheres of supply, never mind political influence. Who saw it was going to be guns for oil, blood for oil. You did! ’

I don’t know at what stage the continuing oil crisis exists in the awareness of the Chinese restaurant Empyrean.

Anthony is shrugging and laughing embarrassedly under an accolade. Now — for ever — he’s proved prophet but there’s only the British tribe’s understatement, coming from him. ‘Anybody could have known it.’

Susan takes up with her flourish, Edward’s imagery. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble, the cauldron that received what gushed from earth and seabed? They didn’t.’

Edward and Susan enjoy Sampson’s modesty, urging him on.

‘Well, if the book should — could — might have been somehow. .’ Dismissing bent tilt of head.

Of course, who knows if hindsight’s seeing it reprinted, bestselling. There’s no use for royalties anyway. No tariff for the Chinese lunch.

Now it’s Susan who presses. ‘So what’re you up to?’

Maybe he’s counting that Mandela will arrive soon, so he can add an afterword to his famous biography of the great man.

‘Oh it’d be good to see you sometime at the tavern.’

Tavern?

Probably I’m the only one other than Sampson himself who knows that’s the South African politically correct term for what used to be black ghetto shebeens (old term second-hand from the Irish).

Susan turns down her beautiful mouth generously shaped for disbelief and looks to Edward. The wells of his gaze send back from depths, reflection of shared intrigue.

Anthony Sampson has some sort of bar.

Did he add ‘my place’ — that attractive British secretive mumble always half-audible. So that would explain the African dress. And yet make it more of a mystery to us (if, the dreamer, I’m not one of those summoned up, can be included in the dream).

‘How long has this place been going?’ Susan again.

Where?

Where isn’t relevant. There’s no site, just as with the Chinese restaurant conjured up by Susan’s expectation of her arrival. (Couldn’t have been a place of my expectation of you.)

How long?

The African garment isn’t merely a comfortable choice for what might have been anticipated as an overheated New York-style restaurant. It is a ritual accoutrement, a professional robe. Anthony Sampson has spent some special kind of attention, since there is no measure by time, in induction as a sangoma.

Sangoma . What. What is that.

I know it’s what’s commonly understood as a ‘witch doctor’, but that’s an imperio-colonialist term neither of Anthony’s companions would want to use, particularly not Edward, whose classic work Orientalism is certainly still running into many editions as evidence of the avatars of the old power phenomenon in guise under new names.

Sampson’s ‘place’ is a shebeen which was part of his place in Africa that was never vacated by him when he went back to England, as the Chinese restaurant is part of her place, never vacated in Susan’s New York. But the shebeen seems put to a different purpose; or rather carries in its transformation what really had existed there already. Sampson’s not one in a crowd and huddle that always made itself heard above the music in ‘The House of Truth’ — ah, that was the name in the Sophiatown ‘slum’ of the white city, poetic in such claims for its venues. He’s not just one of the swallowers of a Big Mama’s concoction of beer-brandy-brake fluid, Godknowswhat, listening to, entering the joys, sorrows, moods defiant and despairing, brazenly alive, of men and women who made him a brother there.

He has returned to this, to something of the world, from isolation in the bush of Somenowhere with knowledge to offer instead of, as bar proprietor, free drinks. The knowledge of the traditional healer. He serves the sangoma’s diagnoses of and alleviations of the sorrows, defiances and despairs that can’t be drowned or danced, sung away together.

‘Oh, a shrink!’

Who would have thought Susan, savant of many variations of cultures, could be so amazed. The impact throws back her splendid head in laughter.

At ‘Tony’s Place’, his extraordinary gifts as a journalist elevated to another sphere of inquiry, he guides with the third eye his bar patrons — wait a minute; his patients — to go after what’s behind their presented motives of other people, and what’s harmful behind the patient’s own. He dismisses: doesn’t make love potions. Hate potions to sprinkle, deadly, round a rival’s house? That’s witch doctor magic, not healing. The patrons, beer in hand, talk to him, talk out the inner self. As he reluctantly continues to recount, he says that he observes their body language, he gathers what lies unconfessed between the words. No. He doesn’t tell them what to do, dictate a solution to confound, destroy the enemy, he directs them to deal with themselves.