Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  Lying there they find their way to each other through their clothes like any teenagers making love wherever they can hide. It doesn’t matter. Now they lie, breathing each other in, diastole and systole, and nothing draws near, there is only that indefinable supersonic humming of organic and insect life, the sap rising in the tree, grass sprouting, gauze of gnats hovering, and a silent shrike swoops from a branch to catch some kind of flying prey in mid-air.

  He is stirred, eventually, by past reality, in concern for her—remembering the hazards of hunting trips he has taken: I hope there’re no ticks. She moves her head, eyes closed: no. Nothing. Safe. Opens her eyes to see him, nothing else. One of the flying specks has landed on the lobe of his ear, lingering there, while she blows at it. He starts with a faint exclamation, she frees a hand and flicks whatever it is, so small, nothing, away.

  SHOOTING UP

  The rave is in one of those four-walls-and-roof with creaky boards that has housed all kinds of purposes—a church or school hall where there isn’t, in this neighbourhood, a church or school anymore, and the toilets are across a yard that in the daytime is used by some guys to repair exhausts. Dismembered vehicle parts and gas cylinders have to be navigated to reach where he’s gone off to. There he is, sitting on the broken seat, but he has his trousers on, he’s sure not having a shit, and his sweat-shirt sleeve is rolled back on his bare white arm, he’s got an arm pale and hairless as a girl’s. And just look at it.

  I thought you’d kicked the habit.

  He laughs. You want to use this seat?

  But he allows the arm to be grasped.

  Just see your arm.

  What’s one more prick? How can you tell one from another, high yourself on booze.

  So what’s that on your arm?

  Mosquito bite.

  Very funny. Hahaha.

  Summer, winter, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere. There’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing! A speck hovering, landing, you can swat with the palm of a hand. It’s not the Reaper with the scythe.

  It’s his emissary, Anopheles.

  KARMA

  ‘Karma … . 1) The sum and the consequences of a person’s actions during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his destiny. 2) Fate, destiny. Sanskrit karman (nominative karma), act, deed, work, from karoti, he makes, he does. ’

  —THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

  ‘ … so man is continually peopling his current space with a world of his own’.

  Arthur’s wife Norma is the one who is in the group photographs of conferences published in newspapers, she is quoted on the radio and sometimes appears on a TV panel. They have become a couple with a public profile, as the opinion polls would show. He is in insurance, a steady position, wasn’t doing too badly even when they bought the place she set her heart on, a bit beyond their means, then. It looked as if he might become a general manager, eventually, some day—who knows, so they could afford, in another sense, to begin to prepare a place equal to status.

  If you don’t have ambitions when you’re young what kind of couple are you? She certainly had had ambition when she finished school top of her class. She’d wanted to go to university, study political science, economics, subjects she’d heard about in the company of her trade unionist parents and their friends, but there was no money. She worked in a factory, in the offices of a restaurant chain, picking up computer efficiency, studied her chosen subjects by correspondence courses, and became one of the working-class whites in the liberation movement. A resilient thread in a net that operated Underground. The movement sent her out of the country on a mission to one of their overseas offices while by some oversight on the part of the political police she still had a passport; when she came back her name appeared on a list of banned persons: her movements and the kind of work she could do to earn a living were restricted.

  It was when the leftish-liberal manager of an insurance company did the bravest thing he could steel himself to, and quietly took her on as a filing clerk, that she met Arthur. There are at least two magnetic sources of attraction in the process called falling in love. (Anyone can think of a number of others.) The face, body, of the object-individual: that can be enough. The personality: it may make the above irrelevant. Arthur had no specific sexually-aesthetic taste in what was beauty in a woman, girls were pretty or ugly or just somehow inbetween. Norma, short, with a business-like body (characterised always about some movement and task) and a face in the inbetween category, could not have started the process by means of the first magnetic source. Arthur fell in love, deeply appreciative, with the force of her personality. She was everything he had never been, done everything he had never done. He was one step up out of the working-class from which she came. His father owned a small printing business where his mother acted as receptionist-bookkeeper, they kept clear of politics; the discount price of their middle-class white security, dependent on the local government’s orders for certain forms, might be withdrawn. Arthur was brought up to be honest about money, kind, to respect other people, no matter who or what they were, but without getting mixed with their ideas or problems; make his way as his parents had had to do—for himself. The insurance company was a good start. Whatever happened. In the country. There would always have to be insurance for people’s possessions, against other people who took these from them.

  That was life as proposed to him. Yet he read the newspapers, he came face to face with demonstrations prancing anger in the streets, their assault by police with dogs and guns, he saw, in his work at the insurance company, who owned everything in the country. So he refrained from using his privilege, as a white, to vote in the elections while others did not even have the right to demonstrate in the streets. That was his only political stance. He did not tell his parents they were wrong, he himself was wrong to accept skin privilege, do nothing about this but refuse a vote, making his way with the secret justification to himself that when the great change that was coming did come, he would welcome it and claim self-respect not to be found alone in making your way.

  In love with Norma. She was evidence against himself and taking her for his own absolved him from however, whatever he had failed.

  Arthur was good-looking, no inbetween so far as male beauty is concerned, and that may well have been the magnetism by which Norma was drawn, in love with him. Beauty has an innocence, it can’t be aimed or plotted or struggled for as justice; it’s a kind of assurance for someone who has lived with the deviousness, the machinations of survival, spied upon, hunted under bans.

  Arthur was there for her, when it was all over—the bans, the head-hunters of the old regime disarmed of power. With his knowledge of the practical ways, the signals of a normal life of private ambitions and satisfactions she had not known, now legitimately open to those who had sacrificed for it, they could create a new normal life in the conditions of freedom. She had dossed down with comrades in places sleazy or disguised behind a facade of respectability; he had lived past twenty with his parents and then, by the time he met her, in a bachelor flat whose window was an inescapable observation post for the blare and turmoil of a street of bars, minicabs hooting for custom, laughter and anger of pimps and prostitutes of three sexes. A job had been found for her—the comrades kept one another in touch about opportunities—with some non-governmental organisation taking care of the children and youths whose fathers had died in action in the liberation forces or whose parents had disappeared in exile. He, of course, was secure in insurance, a necessity of the old normal life that, as his parents’ wisdom had predicted, remained a necessity in the new. Weekends and after work almost every day they went looking at houses. A house of your own; that always was and always will be the beginning of the normal life they were set upon: she deserved. Estate agents lied to them; they quickly became wise to the basic questions with which to counter: was the highly-praised house on offer not too near a freeway, was the nearby green space one where homeless people put up
shacks, was there a creche in the suburb (Norma was expecting their first child), what was the crime rate in the area?

  Finally, they found the house for themselves. They were driving around a neighbourhood they had heard about from black friends of Norma who were moving, now, out of the black townships become ancestral homes to flee. Norma saw the Cape Dutch gable. A house with character! He was privately surprised at her enthusiasm for an architectural embellishment that was the style, brought from Holland, by the forefathers of the people who had spied upon, pursued and banned her from her rights, imprisoned and tortured her kind. But it is true that a gable is graceful; it makes a house unique among others in what was the kind of street they visualise starting out on. Jacaranda trees all along both sides. And there was a For Sale notice on the gate. They raised a bond on the evidence of his position advancing at the insurance company, and bought the Cape Dutch gable and all that was behind it, wonderful, more rooms than they’d need, but they were going to have a family, he’d earned his promotion from dreary bachelordom and she hers from anonymous hideouts.

  Arthur lies in bed on weekend mornings at leisure and his mind wanders visually through the house and garden. He is not thinking, there are no words. There is the livingroom ceiling, generations of thick hard paint removed to reveal gold-brown lengths of wood panelling, hooded angle lights shining down from it softly. (Real style; the architect who was a colleague on the urban planning commission with Norma discovered for them the original fine pine under the paint.) The mounting pink profusion of Bauhinia he’d planted, rambled over by purple-blue Morning Glory at the boundary where the old trees were too dark a conclusion to the north end of the garden. The semicircle of blond cane with clean glasses on its table-top, striped in terrace sunlight—his hospitality bar. Green of the lawn well-kept by the black weekly gardener and green of the mini billiard table in what’s come to be called the TV room since the two kids like to watch programmes adults can’t sit through. That passing vision, with Norma and a glass of wine, after the day, watching the news on the other set in the livingroom. And transparencies of what isn’t there yet. Still to come. One of those garden statues, cement but look like real stone, to glance at you from the centre of the lawn when you stand at the glass sliding doors he had installed in the livingroom soon as they could afford it, not long after they had moved in. One of the first to go through the doors: the baby just born, there in his pram. A swimming pool—where in the garden, imagined?—most people in the street have one but Norma won’t agree because the child of friends drowned in theirs.

  Norma bought him the mini billiard table as a surprise. Some connection through a firm that had tendered to the Commission for Sanitation in informal settlements (Norma had moved to Public Works, then) also owned a factory that made what they called entertainment equipment. It arrived on his birthday—But it must have cost a packet, Norma!—

  —So what? Why shouldn’t you have some fun, I’ve seen how you enjoyed yourself on the table at Edward’s place. Anyway, I got a big discount.—

  He taught their first-born, then seven years old, to play and as their arms grew longer it was used more and more by Danny and his schoolfriends. Danny was proud of it: if the school soccer game was washed out—Come to my house, we’ve got a real billiard table in our TV room.—

  When they had lived almost nine years behind the Cape Dutch gable (you can’t miss our place just look out for that when you come to the street) it was occupied in the patterns of their presence, their personal routes, invisible internal maps of existence from room to room, Norma and Arthur, Danny and his brother Brett. Almost completely occupied, but not quite. Still some to come: things to be achieved. The statue, a woman moulded with draping over one shoulder, was in place, and an electronic call system linked to the house was installed at the gates—Norma left Public Works to go into what was officially termed the Private Sector: individuals whose economic status put them at particular risk of thieving intruders and other invaders of privacy in their homes.

  The Private Sector she joined was in fact the construction company one of whose directors she had come to know when the company tendered for a sanitation project in informal settlements. She became at once assistant to the director. Her salary and benefits were beyond anything she and Arthur could have imagined reaching, at first; but it is much easier to become accustomed to having money than it is to do without it. Norma had a natural aptitude that was perhaps already evident when first she saw the Cape Dutch gable and claimed its flourish for herself. There was a holiday in Europe, she saw some suppliers in an English industrial city and then she and Arthur took a Mediterranean cruise. Norma was orderly; kept every taxi receipt and credit card restaurant bill, don’t bother about anything, it’s routine entertainment allowance. The director’s secretary at the company arranged air tickets for other, frequent travels where, if Arthur could absent himself from his insurance office, he was consort of the director’s assistant. Through Norma’s connections their elder son found a place at the most selective and expensive private school. The black maid who cleaned the house and did the family washing was placed under the supervision of a cook-housekeeper, also black; one of the directors had died and Norma, appointed to take his place, was too occupied with the demands of her position to have time or mind for shopping or cooking.

  The couple’s social life was extensive, expansive; not much use for Arthur’s little home-built terrace bar. The company’s public relations dinners and working breakfasts were eaten and libated in restaurants. Norma and her husband were guests at the national day celebrations of foreign embassies and the homes of Government officials, even a Minister in whose projects of urban renewal the company was involved, or expected to be. She bought Arthur silk shirts and a brocade cummerbund for important formal occasions; the couple came back through the electronic Open Sesame of their gates and made love in the house of their achievement. There was no question of jealousy; this need, hers of him, made Norma’s success his as well, just as, when they met, she was everything he had never been, done everything he had never done. What he had done, was doing, was still in the process of creating, there’s no end to it, is that containment of everything they are—Norma, himself, their children—which is home, the organism that expresses, and grows in, status.

  Norma, of course, has changed outwardly with status. Reduced rather than grown … slimmed away the stockiness with diet, massage and the gym she insists they go to together; changed the colour of her hair and smoothed the bluntness of her face with beauty treatments, professional make-up before official occasions. She wears the female tycoon outfits of crossdressing masculine suits with the jacket open over flouncy blouses which reveal the beginning of the valley between breasts. She has shed everything of the old days Underground, the dossing-down anywhere, the risky missions that mustn’t be questioned, the hunter’s eye of the Plain Clothes political police at the corner—everything but the bonding then, way back, with the comrades, many of whom are now in Government and parastatal organisations. That’s still there: a new kind of Underground. To be counted on. The people who lost power have their sneering accusatory term for it: nepotism. As if they didn’t do it, jobs for pals, in their day. But their pals had not suffered, had done nothing to deserve reward. Unless for their evil. And where in the world is there a political party in power, a government, that does not take the right to appoint its proven colleagues from the guerrilla times of opposition, parliamentary let alone revolutionary, to important cabinet portfolios and other high positions?

  Norma was more than competent. There didn’t need to be any snide justification cited for her appointment: she simply fulfilled every principle of the new order of fitness for public life and responsibility, even the professional scepticism of the newspaper editorials granted her highly intelligent use of experience gained in various sectors, and if she was not black, at least she qualified for that other, the gender principle industry as well as Government was expected to follow: she was a woman
appointee. Often she was the Company board’s choice to be negotiator on joint projects with the Government. That would be one of the occasions when her photograph would appear in the newspapers. When representatives of the World Bank or the Group of 8 visited the country official invitations came to her and her partner (secretaries had been instructed to avoid gender forms of address which stereotype the concept of a couple, there are dignitaries linked together as two men or two women). So sometimes Arthur was in the photograph, too, if half-hidden between other heads. At such gatherings there was always, naturally, the Minister or Minister’s Deputy from Norma’s old days who had put her on the list the important visitors should meet, be aware of. A consciousness that might be recalled some time, useful to the comrade become colleague, in her advancement.

  The house with the Cape Dutch gable continued to keep up; the furniture that already had been changed since the basic stuff that was all they could afford when they moved in was replaced by something more comfortable and of better quality. Arthur caught his Norma looking about her, shifting in a chair, and it was as if he read it, said it for her. And for himself.—Shouldn’t we look for one of those leather seating units you can move around, compose the way you like, you know, more places for people to group in.—Journalists came to interview Norma, TV crews were often there to film the encounter for overseas series seeking the opinions of prominent people outside Government but active in the progress of the country. There had also grown up the tradition, following that of other people living in their kind of suburb, of giving a quasi-official party on some private occasion—birthday or wedding anniversary. Norma would call in an Indian caterer, old comrade who had made his particular way to thrive in new circumstances.