Nadine Gordimer: Get A Life

– I've been meaning to tell you for some weeks but there have been legal complications, still are… no point in waiting for that to be final. You remember, I brought a welfare worker, witness in one of my cases, along to lunch. Someone who'd taken me to see abandoned babies – children in a home. Well, I went back there on my own a few… a number of times. I felt, I don't know, there was a child, a small girl, she's about three the paediatrician says, one can't be exact with an abandoned child, she responded to my turning up – presence. She was brought in by the police seven months ago, that means she was about two years old, then. She'd been raped and she's HIV-positive. She had to be (Lyndsay, always professionally, unhesitatingly precise – hands up – at a loss how to define this for others)… reconstructed… surgery… weeks in the children's hospital. Apparently it was successful, far as they can tell with a female so young. Then she was handed back to the institution. They're happy – the people in charge at that place – if they think you're trustworthy, you want to give one of the inmates – kids – a treat, an outing. So I took her to the zoo, you must introduce Nickie to the baby seal that's just been born – she was ecstatic. I've decided she couldn't go on living in an institution, good though it is. There are very few adoptions of HIV-positive children. The home has released her already. She's with me. I'm adopting her. -

– What have you done. – He has stumbled into some place in Lyndsay's life closed against him. Can't see her there. -

I'm finding out. Quite an experience. – She raises eyebrows, serene. – You can imagine how delighted Primrose is. She's in charge while I'm in Chambers and court. -

His mother gives time for silence, for Paul and Benni/Berenice to accept what is done. Her son is with her in quarantine in the garden, they are statues, commemorating their habitation there. – How will Adrian. What about Adrian? -

She is alone with Paul, since the quarantine there will always be this facility, apart from the presence of others.

The words flung down before him.

– What about Adrian. -

She went back to that babies' shelter, one Saturday when she had walked past a toy shop in a mall and been beckoned by a display of anthropomorphic bears, monkeys and leopards dressed in jeans. Nickie had pillow-mates like these; there was a jungle gym she'd noticed the unidentified children climbing when she accompanied her outstanding witness to their reality, but were there any toys like these, personal treasures. She bought a few, and went to drop them off in the rundown quarter of the city where the institution was. Those inmates old enough to walk or at least sit were having their supper at tables right for their size. A small girl she recognised from the first visit jumped up, overturning some mess in her plate, and came running, to the toys, not the woman; she took her time, gazed at the bear, the leopard, the monkey, and carefully chose the monkey. Others clamoured round.

Was it foolish to bring a few luxury toys where there were – how many had Charlene said – thirty or more babies and children, the number went up and down as some died and one or two, healthy ones, might be adopted. Would they quarrel over possession – the recognised girl had run off with her monkey. Well-meaning could be mistaken.

She returned a week later, not with gifts that might obviously cause trouble, maybe create a contentious privilege, difficult to imagine a child who doesn't have any, in the democracy necessary in such a place – to ask if she could take the claimant of the monkey to the zoo to see real ones. The girl had been in care for months, she was told, found without a name, not old enough to know if she did have one, the staff called her Klara. Getting to know the features that made the child whoever it was, she was (couldn't be expressed to oneself less clumsily) proposed the wonderful mystery of the personality, how it may be signalled in the set of the nose, the shifting line of lips in speech (this little creature talks a lot, an incoherent coherence of whatever African language she had shaped when she learnt to speak and the English she had learnt to obey from the whites among the Salvation Army people whose institution cared for her). Here was a small being creating herself. The distinguished-looking woman, maybe a politician or something, who came back after Charlene brought her, became well-known to the Army's female Major and was allowed to take lucky Klara away for weekends, then was listed a foster-parent, Klara officially in her care. A bed, a place vacant for another, born not in a manger but a public toilet. Better not ask what next for the small girl if the lady tired of her. Because Lyndsay, also, did not know what next. For herself; for the child; in the meantime she did not make her guest? charge? known to Paul and his family.

Her own motives were suspect to her. Then they were of no concern, she and this stranger with a vividly distinct self, stranger no more, had a life in common. A nursery school accepted her, dropped off there every morning by Lyndsay on the way to Chambers, and Primrose kept her fluent in a mother tongue in the afternoons. Lyndsay did mention to a colleague that she was taking care of someone's black child; it was not the sort of temporary situation without precedent in the individual social conscience of their legal practice – at least had not been during the apartheid years when clients defended on charges of treason sometimes had no choice but to leave a child abandoned. There was a good chance, said the paediatrician Lyndsay took the child to, that her HIV-positive status would correct itself shortly; the blood count was encouragingly mounting. This reprieve could happen only in children. So there was an interim decision; don't look further than that. She wrote one of the spaced letters she and Adrian exchanged, like the form letters to aunts etc. taught to phrase, at school, where she told that Paul was in a helicopter monitoring the terrible floods in the Okavango, and related the progress of Nicholas swimming over-arm instead of dog-paddling, beginning to count up to twenty-five, recognise words in story-books. (Relating to herself; Klara, able already to string red and white beads alternately on a cord, has to be stopped from attempting to climb the jacaranda in the garden, insists on mastering the use of a fork at the age of about two-and-a-half or three.)

Enquiries, to someone who dealt with these things, about the processes of adoption are routine in informing oneself how the child might better be offered to someone where she could grow up in the company of siblings, a father and mother. There was no point she would really remember when instead she had become the adoption applicant, informing herself. The process is not simple, even in the case of a child of unknown parentage, abandoned no-one knows by whom. But it was the time to inform her son and his family.

Should Paul's mother be invited to bring along the child when she came to his house; where Nickie was? Lyndsay, that awesome lawyer rationalist (Berenice's one of the impoverishers of their mother tongue who make the epithet as devoid of religious force as 'fuck' is devoid of force to shock), not only decides at her age and in her situation to adopt a small child but must have one who is infected with the Disease. Does anyone honestly know whether or not it can be transmitted ways other than sexually or by blood? If by blood, what happens when two children play together and there are scratches, blood exchanged. Nickie's a boy, quite rough, if still small. Benni/Berenice – everything must be taken into consideration – decides to put a hold on such visits, tactfully, until Paul is home. She knows Lyndsay well enough, in the shift the plight of Adrian has somehow brought about, to think Lyndsay will understand, not comment upon to Paul.