Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Come to think of it, there were a couple of attempts on my life before the present catastrophe. But they didn’t succeed. No! I detected at once, infallibly, some substance aggressive towards me concealed in the nourishment coming down. Didn’t touch that delivery. Let it slowly urge its way wherever it was going – in its usual pulsions, just as when I have had my fill; untouched! No thank you. I could wait until the next delivery came down: clean, I could tell. Whatever my host had in mind, then, I was my whole length aware, ahead of him. Yes! Oh and there was one occurrence that might or might not have had to do with whatever this aggression against my peaceful existence might mean. My home, my length, were suddenly irradiated with some weird seconds-long form of what I’d learnt second-hand from my host must have been light, as if some – Thing – was briefly enabled to look inside my host. All the wonderful secret storage that was my domain. But did those rays find me? See me? I didn’t think so. All was undisturbed, for me, for a long time. I continued to grow myself, perfectly measured segment by segment. Didn’t brood upon the brief invasion of my privacy; I have a calm nature, like all my kind. Perhaps I should have thought more about the incident’s implication: that thereafter my host knew I was there; the act of ingestion conveys nothing about what’s gone down with the scrap of lettuce or the meat: he wouldn’t have been aware of my residency until then. But suspected something? How, I’d like to know; I was so discreet.

  The gouts of that agreeable strong liquid began to reach me more frequently. No objection on my part! The stuff just made me more active for a while, I had grown to take up a lot of space in my domain, and I have to confess that I would find myself inclined to ripple and knock about a bit. Harmlessly, of course. We don’t have voices so I couldn’t sing. Then there would follow a really torpid interval of which I’d never remember much when it was over . . .

  A contented, shared life; I knew that my host had always taken what he needed from the nourishment that came on down to me. A just and fair coexistence, I still maintain. And why should I have troubled myself with where the residue was bound for, when both of us had been satisfied?

  O how I have come to know now! How I have come to know!

  For what has just happened to me – I can only relive again, again, in all horror, as if it keeps recurring all along me. First there was that period, quite short, when no nourishment or liquid came down at all. My host must have been abstaining.

  Then—

  The assault of a terrible flood, bitter burning, whipping and pursuing all down and around into a pitch-black narrow passage filled with stinking filth. I’ve become part of what is pushing its path there – that was where the nourishment was bound for all the years, after the host and I had done with it, a suffocating putrefaction and unbearable effusions.

  Jonah was spewed by the whale.

  But I – the term for it, I believe – was shat out.

  From that cess I’ve been ejected into what was only a more spacious one, round, hard-surfaced, my segments have never touched against anything like it, in my moist-padded soft home space, and I am tossed along with more and many, many kinds of rottenness, objects, sections of which I sense from my own completeness must be dismembered from organic wholes that one such as myself, who has never before known the outside, only the insides of existence, cannot name. Battered through this conduit by these forms, all ghastly, lifeless, I think I must somehow die among them – I have the knowledge how to grow but not how to die if, as it seems, that is necessary. And now! Now! The whole putrid torrent had somewhere it was bound for – it discharges (there is a moment’s blinding that must be light) and disperses into a volume of liquid inconceivable in terms of the trickles and even gouts that had fed me. Unfathomable: I am swept up in something heady, frothy, exhilarating; down with something that flows me. And I am clean, clean the whole length of me! Ah to be cleansed of that filth I had never suspected was what the nourishment I shared with my host became when we’d taken our fill of it. Blessed ignorance, all those years I was safe inside . . .

  My host. So he knew. This’s how he planned to get rid of me. Why? What for? This’s how he respected our coexistence, after even sharing with me those gouts of agreeable liquid whose happy effects we must have enjoyed together. It ends up, him driving me out mercilessly, hatefully, with every kind of ordure. Deadly.

  But I’m adapting to this vastness! Can, at least, for a while, I believe. It’s not what I was used to and there’s no nourishment of my habitude but I find that my segments, the entire length of me still obeys; I can progress by my normal undulation. Undulating, I’m setting out in an element that also does, I’m setting out for what this powerful liquid vastness is bound for – nature’s built into my knowledge that everything has to move somewhere – and maybe there, where this force lands, one of my eggs (we all have a store within us, although we are loners and our fertilisation is a secret) will find a housefly carrier and settle on a scrap of lettuce or a fine piece of meat in a Beefsteak Tartare. Ingestion. The whole process shall begin over again. Come to life.

  Dreaming of the Dead

  Did you come back last night?

  I try to dream you into materialisation but you don’t appear. I keep expecting you. Because dream has no place, time. The Empyrean – always liked that as my free-floating definition of Somenowhere – balloon without tether to earth. There is no past no present no future. All is occupied at once. Everyone there is without boundaries of probability.

  I don’t know why it was a Chinese restaurant – ah, no, the choice is going to come clear later when a particular one of the guests arrives! Guests? Whose invitation is it. Who hosts. Such causation doesn’t apply; left behind. Look up and there’s Edward, the coin-clear profile of Edward Said that is aware how masculinely beautiful it still exists in photographs, he’s turning this way and that to find where the table is that expects him. It’s his decision it’s this one. He’s always known what was meant for him, the placing of himself, by himself, through the path of any obstacles, Christian-Muslim, Palestinian-Cairene, American. He’s his own usher, shining a torch of distinctive intellectual light and sensibility to guide him. It’s not the place to remember this, here, but if you’re the one still living in the flesh wired up by synapses and neurons you recall his wife Mariam told that on his last journey to the hospital he disputed the route taken by the driver.

  Edward. He stands a moment, before the embrace of greeting. His familiar way of marking the event of a meeting brought about by the coordination of friends’ commitments and lucky happenstance. It’s reassuring he’s wearing one of the coloured shirts and the flourished design of his tie is confirmed by the ear of a silk handkerchief showing above the breast pocket of the usual elegant jacket. Edward never needed to prove his mental superiority by professorial dowdiness and dandruff. We don’t bother with how-are-yous, there’s no point in that sort of banality, here. He says why don’t we have a drink while we’re waiting – he seems to know for whom although I don’t (except, for you) any more than I knew he would come to this place hung with fringed paper lanterns. He beckons a waiter who doesn’t pretend in customary assertion of dignity against servility that he hasn’t noticed. Edward never had to command, I’d often noted that, there is something in those eyes fathomless black with ancient Middle Eastern ancestry, that has no need of demanding words. With the glance back to me, he orders what we’ve always drunk to being well-met. He apologises with humour ‘I don’t know how I managed to be late, it’s quite an art’ though he isn’t late because he never was expected, and there can be no explanation I could understand of what could have kept him.

  We plunge right away into our customary eager exchange of interpretations of political events, international power-mongering, national religious and secular conflicts, the obsessional scaffolding of human existence on earth, then ready to turn to personal preoccupations, for which, instinctively selected in each friendship, there is a different level of confidences. Before we get to ours, someone
else arrives at our table; even I, who have known that face in its changes over many years and in relation to many scenes and circumstances, from treason trials in the country where I am still one of the living, to all-night parties in London, don’t recognise his entry. Once standing at this table, the face creased in his British laugh of greeting: it’s Anthony Sampson. Who? Because instead of the baggy pants unworthy of tweed jacket, he’s wearing an African robe. Not just a dashiki shirt he might have picked up on his times in Africa, and donned for comfortable summer informality of whatever this gathering is, but a robe to the ankles – by the way, it can’t be hot in the Chinese restaurant; there’s no climate in dream. When he was editor of a black-staffed newspaper in South Africa and belonged, was an intimate of shebeen ghettos, never mind his pink British skin, this preceded the era when African garb became fashionable as a mark of the wearer’s non-racism. Sampson had no interest in being fashionable within any convention. He showed no consciousness, now, of his flowing robe. So neither did I; nor did Edward though I suppose they had met in the Elsewhere. Edward rose while Anthony and I hugged, kissed on either cheek, he greeted Edward with recollected – it seemed – admiration and chose a chair, having to arrange the robe out of the way of his shoes, like a skirt.

  We took up, three of us now, the interrupted talk of political conflict and scandals, policies and ideologies, corrupt governments, tyrant fundamentalists, homegrown in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and those created by the hubris of the West. A waiter subserviently intruded with distributed menus but we all ignored him as if it were understood we were waiting for someone. I was waiting for you. Even in that Chinese restaurant though it was never your favourite cuisine.

  Whom were we waiting for?

  I wonder now, awakened in bed by a heavy cat settling on my feet, but I didn’t then, no one asked me so I didn’t have to give my answer: you. Edward opened a menu big and leather-bound as a book of world maps. Perhaps this meant he and Anthony knew no one was coming. No one else was available among the dead in their circle. Maybe the too newly dead cannot enter dreams. But no; Anthony was recent, and here he was, if strangely got up in the category of the childhood belief that when you die you grow wings, become angels in the Empyrean.

  Suddenly she was there, sitting at the head of the table as if she had been with us all along or because there was no time we hadn’t remarked when it was she’d joined us. Susan. Susan Sontag. How to have missed the doorway entrance of that presence always larger-than-life (stupid metaphor to have chosen in the circumstances, but this is a morning-after account) not only in sense of her height and size: a mythical goddess, Athena-Medea statue with that magnificent head of black hair asserting this doubling authority, at once inspiring, menacing, unveiling a sculptor’s bold marble features, gouged by commanding eyes.

  It seemed there had been greetings. Exclamations of pleasure, embraces and less intimate but just as sincere pressures of hands left animation, everyone talking at once across one another. Susan’s deep beautiful voice interrupted itself in an aside to call a waiter by name – well of course, so this is the Chinese restaurant in New York’s SoHo she used to take me to! The waiters know her, she’s the habituée who judges what’s particularly good to order, in fact she countermands with an affectionate gesture of a fine hand the hesitant choices of the others and questions, insists, laughs reprovingly at some of the waiter’s suggestions; he surely is aware of what the cooks can’t get away with, with her. She does let us decide on what to drink. Susan was never a drinker and this one among her favourite eating places probably doesn’t have a cellar of the standard that holds the special French and Italian cultivars for which she makes an exception.

  As if, non-smoker, she carries a box of matches, there strikes from her a flame flaring the Israeli-Palestinian situation. The light’s turned on Edward, naturally, although this is not a group in which each sees personal identity and its supposed unquestioning loyalty cast by birth, faith, country, race, as the decisive and immutable sum of self. Edward is a Palestinian, he’s also in his ethics of human being, a Jew, we know that from his writings, his exposure of the orientalism within us, the invention of the Other that’s survived the end of the old-style colonialism into globalisation. If Susan’s a Jew, she too has identity beyond that label, hers has been one with Vietnamese, Sarajevans, many others, to make up the sum of self.

  They carry all this to the Somenowhere. In the Chinese restaurant, there between us.

  Sampson doesn’t interject much in that understated rapidity of half-audible upper-class English delivery, yet gives a new twist to what’s emerging from the other two eloquently contesting one another from different points of view even on what they agree upon. A journalist who’s achieved distinction of complete integrity in venturous success must have begun by being a good listener. And I – my opinions and judgements are way down in the confusion of living, I don’t have the perspective the dead must have attained. But the distance with which Edward seems to regard Susan’s insistent return to passionate views of opposing legitimacies between Palestinians and Israelis is puzzling. After all his clarity and commitment on that conflict-trampled ground of the earth he’s left behind, searching the unambiguous words and taking the actions for a just resolution (on the premise there is one), putting his brilliant mind to it against every hostility, including the last – death: how this lack of response? Lassitude? Is that the peace of the dead that passeth all understanding the public relations spin doctors of religions advertise? The hype by one to counter that other, a gratis supply of virgins? Lassitude. But Edward Said: never an inactive cell in that unique brain.

  ‘What did you leave unfinished?’

  The favoured waiter had wheeled to the table a double-deck buffet almost the table’s length, displaying a composition of glistening mounds, gardens of bristling greens. Susan with her never-sated search for truth rather than being fobbed off with information, dared to introduce as she turned to the food’s array, a subject it perhaps isn’t done to raise among the other guests.

  She was helping herself with critical concentration, this, no, then that – and some more of that – filling to her satisfaction, aesthetic and anticipatory, the large plates the restaurant earned its reputation by providing.

  Edward waited for her to reach this result. ‘Everything is unfinished. Finality: that’s the mistake. It’s the claim of dictatorship. Hegemony. In our turn, always we’ll be having to pick up the baggage taking from experience what’s good, discarding what’s conned us into prizing, if it’s destructive.’

  Dream has no sequence as we know it, this following that. This over, that beginning. You can be making love with someone unrecognised, picking up coins spilled in the street, giving a speech at a board meeting, pursued naked in a shopping mall, without the necessary displacements of sequence. Whether the guests were serving themselves – the others, Anthony and Edward – and whether they were talking between mouthfuls and those swallows of wine or water which precede what one’s going to say at table, I was mistaken in my logic of one still living, that they were continuing their exchange of the responsibilities for 9/11, the Tsunami, famine in Darfur, elections in Iraq, the Ukraine, student riots against youth employment restrictions in Paris, a rape charge in court indicting a member of government in my country: preoccupations of my own living present or recent months, years; naturally all one to them. What was I doing there in Susan’s Chinese restaurant, anyway?

  It is news they’re exchanging of what they’re engaged in. Now. Edward’s being urged to tell something that at least explains to me his certain distance from Susan’s perceptions of the developments (at whatever stage these might have been when she left access to newspapers, television, inside informants) in the Middle East. He’s just completed a piano concerto. I can’t resist putting in with delight ‘For two pianos’. The Said apartment on the Upper West Side in New York had what you’d never expect to walk in on, two grand pianos taking up one of the living rooms.
Edward once remarked to me, if affectionately, ‘You have the writing but I have the writing and the music.’ An amateur pianist of concert performance level, he’d played with an orchestra under the baton of his friend Daniel Barenboim.

  Here was his acknowledging smile of having once led me into that exotically furnished living room; maybe a brush of his hand. Touch isn’t always felt, in dream. There was a scholar, a politico-philosophical intellect, an enquirer of international morality in the order of the world, a life whose driving motivation was not chosen but placed upon him: Palestinian. An existential destiny, among his worldly others. It’s cast in the foundations, the academic chairs, honours endowed in the name. All that. But death’s the discarder he didn’t mention. Edward Said is a composer. There’s also the baggage you do take. Two grand pianos. Among the living, it’s Carlos Fuentes who asks if music is not the ‘true fig leaf of our shames, the final sublimation – beyond death – of our mortal visibility: body of words’. Is only music ‘free of visible ties, the purification and illusions of our bodily misery’?

  Edward. A composer. What he always was, should have been; but there was too much demand upon him from the threatening outer world? It’s a symphony Edward Said’s working on now.

  ‘What’s the theme, what are you giving us?’ Susan is never afraid to be insistent, her passion for all creation so strong this justifies intrusion.

  ‘I don’t have to tell you that the movements of a symphony are in sum just that, a resolution, symphonically.’ Edward is paying an aside tribute to her non-performer’s love and knowledge of music. ‘It’s still – what should I say—’

  ‘You hear it, you play it? It’s in your fingers?’ Susan is relentless in pursuit of the process, from one who’s been an eloquent man of words people haven’t always wanted to hear.