Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  —I love the feel of leather.—She seemed already to be arranging the units, this way or that, in their livingroom. They decided it was not worth the trouble to advertise furniture for sale and have people coming to view. The Cape Dutch gable was hardly the place for yard sales. They donated the old stuff to a shelter for the homeless aged Welfare told her about; a van came to take it away, there was a grateful letter from the trustees of the place, it was somehow nice to think that the acquisition of an indoor setting adequate to the distinction of the gabled facade of their life at this stage also benefitted others who had the misfortune to have descended to the nadir.

  It was shortly after the new furniture had been put in place (how he and she enjoyed themselves trying out the combinations, a mating dance, with her pleasure at the smooth cling of the leather to her bare legs when he and she collapsed on the seats!) that the accident happened. She was driving from a late meeting. At the sharp turn off the main road that led to the quickest, familiar way to the Cape Dutch gable, a car came from somewhere—a blind blunder into her. Her car was flung away with the whole passenger side punched to a crumple. The impact was as if an invisible blow in the face but she was unhurt. And so was the driver of the other car. There followed the usual procedures, that Arthur took care of. Police report, wreck towed away, insurance claimed; his line. It was clear Norma was not at fault; but maybe neither was the other driver. The traffic lights were not functioning at the crossroads he came from; if anyone was culpable it was the city traffic department. One of the deficiencies of ordinary capacity in administration, now; the fascistracists everywhere, anywhere, were always more efficient than the free.

  She had a company car but it was being serviced that particular day and the car she was driving was their own, the family one—Arthur too, in his slow but satisfactory advance to Assistant General Manager had his company car. It’s a man’s affair, buying a car. A woman chooses the colour and has a preference for the profile, as the vehicles stand patient for acquisition in ballroom-showrooms, but the man looks under the hood and has a criterion of safety features and local availability of spares, to be met. Arthur visited dealers and brought home brochures. They studied them together, flipping with an admiring detachment past the ultimate luxury models but agreeing that they didn’t want another station wagon, they had moved out of the utility class, the boys were old enough now not to climb on the seats and household supplies were delivered, not loaded and lugged from a supermarket. The decision was made for the latest good model in an upper price range (as the salesman placed it in his hierarchy) but not excessively high. So long as it had automatic transmission and the other requirements Arthur tried out on his test drive, the car was the right one to glide through the Open Sesame gates as one of the appropriate complements to what had been made, what was being made, of the home behind the gable. Norma wanted the colour to be blue; only black or red was on the dealer’s floor, but a blue model would be available in a few days.

  —Have you ordered it?—The question was her greeting as she flung down her briefcase and brushed his cheek as if he were a handkerchief passing her lips.—Because if you have, get on to the man and cancel. You haven’t signed anything, no? We can get a wonderful deal.—She named one of the great foreign luxury cars whose photographs they had flipped through in brochures. A co-director knew the right dealer well and she would meet him next day. Yes, she was aware of the fortune a car like that cost, but she had been promised—absolutely—there’d be a sizeable discount. And almost nothing in cash on the spot. The colleague could assure anybody of her position in one of the two largest construction firms in the country, payments no problem. The dealers know it’s good for their business to have prominent people choosing their make of luxury vehicle.

  —Can you imagine yourself driving one of those!—As if he were a little boy with a dream to be fulfilled. Norma hugged him.

  Later, after a happy, noisy meal with the boys—often their mother wasn’t there, she had business engagements—and the children had gone to bed, she smiled her jaunty grimace-way from the old days.—Why shouldn’t we take advantage of connections, like everybody else.—

  The car was delivered. It was not blue but silvery and had the pedigreed scent of real leather seats, a console like that of the array of controls before the pilot of a plane. It was so long that it only just cleared the lowering of the roll-down doors in the garage. She was right, Arthur enjoyed driving the family on trips; when it was not in use, the pedigreed in its stable, it was another, an exalted attribute to the life being created in the house with the Cape Dutch gable Norma had chosen unerringly, that one look.

  A year or more passed and Brett, the younger son, satisfactorily found a place along with his brother at the best of private schools. On the newspaper posters that couldn’t be read as the Assistant Manager of an insurance company was urged along by rush hour traffic, but whose headlines filled the wait at red lights, news from the world was often ousted by terse assertions of local corruption. Corruption in central government departments, regional, provincial structures, privatisation projects, land redistribution, mining or fishing rights, airline mergers—land, sea and air—the very air that was being circulated by the vehicle’s airconditioning. When he got home he read in the newspaper details of whatever the accusations and evidence were; and heard the assertions and denials on the radio, saw, with Norma over wine, the faces of those involved who consented to appear on TV to exonerate themselves in defence. Often the faces were those of official spokespersons rather than the individual him- or herself. It was so repetitive that it became if not boring—some of the names were fascinatingly unexpected—accepted, if within critical unease: a climate, a season. Living in it; not of it.

  There was an evening unlike their evenings together with wine and television news. Norma switched off image and sound in mid-sentence. She sat with both hands round her glass looking into it.

  Norma was not one for bad moods?

  —Nothing. Problems at work.—

  He mentioned a colleague of hers she had once spoken of as careless. She clicked her tongue in dismissal.

  He waited, Norma always knew what she wanted to say and when. Timing was part of her efficiency, he admired how it had worked for her in her advancement.

  —There’s an investigation started into the finances of the Company. The Government tenders we won last year.—

  —But it all went well. You were satisfied? The projects were completed according to specification and so on—I mean, the Company’s not some little outfit taking on what it can’t deliver. —

  —It’s the awarding of tenders. Who won the tender against others.—

  Then it was flashed by on the newspaper posters in rush hour traffic, the latest scandal. CONSTRUCTION BECOMES CORRUPTION. He still believed it would be the members of the Board who would be investigated, and indicted if it were proved that bribery was involved in the awarding of contracts to the Company, though he was troubled about what this would mean for Norma’s career. Muddy water splashes, anyone in insurance cases that come to Court knows that.

  A weekly paper that relied on sensational exposé for its circulation published names and details of company corruption and Norma—Norma’s name was among them. The pedigreed car she had bought at a ‘discount’, it is alleged (a newspaper has to be careful even if it has somehow found proof of a fact) was in recognition of the favour of putting in a good word to the ear of one of the members of the old comrades’ bond in the Government department calling for tenders. The holidays Arthur had understood were complement to business trips or were paid for as her yearly bonus as a Director—these were her share of bribes between the Company and various tender boards’ members with whom—wasn’t that time honourably dead and buried—she had dossed down Underground.

  The billiard table, the birthday present of the mini billiard table! That’s where it started! If only he had realised then. And all the other achievements in his part of her advancement, the cre
ation of the home for it behind the Cape Dutch gable—all carried out with the money in their joint bank account swelled by her. Directors in every kind of company award themselves bonuses when a company thrives, what was there to doubt in that? Don’t bother about anything it’s routine business expenses.

  Arthur, for his part, through the insurance company knew good lawyers and engaged one to defend Norma in Court. The man insisted that he had obtained the best that could be expected: a heavy fine and suspended sentence, while two of the senior directors even lost their case on appeal to a higher Court and went to prison. Her background as a white who had suffered to bring about a just society, and the fact that she was female, the lawyer lectured, were the only mitigating factors in her favour. —Your wife is a gullible woman. Or so the judge has chosen to believe.—And even if this had saved Norma, Arthur felt angry at the insult to her intelligence, all she had been and was. And there was bewilderment in him, at his anger: would he rather accept that his Norma was deviously dishonest?

  It all happens just at the time when the architect has presented plans for extensions to the house that will not impinge upon or spoil the profile of the Cape Dutch gable against the sky. The boys have had lessons and are fine swimmers by now, there is a plan for a free-form pool and patio with change-room and bar with refrigerator.

  They sold the house with the Cape Dutch gable, these things not accomplished, the home being made of it not fully achieved. The estate agent told them the property market was in decline; the Cape Dutch gable went at too low a price. It changed ownership several times in a decade.

  ‘Aorist: Denotes past action without indicating completion, continuation.’ Arthur: some years not long after, must have died; as the moment of that part of the process is termed.

  ‘Many times man lives and dies,

  Between his two eternities

  That of race and that of soul.’

  We were very excited when they told us about the new house. We knew there was something going on, the parents don’t like to tell until something’s sure because kids ask so many questions. But since my father’s had his new big job, an office and everything in what’s called Regional Administration—whatever that is—he talks with his friends, when they drink beer at our old place, about rebuilding and clearing away street people and so on—our mother’s been greeting him with other long talk we catch a few words of as we run in and out from playing in the street.

  Then they told us, my sisters and me, we are leaving Naledi township, our grandmother’s house where we were born, and our grandmother’s coming with us to live in a suburb. That’s a place where whites live. Now anyone can live there. It’s not the same suburb where the Catholic school is our father drove us to on his way to his office in the city every morning; the school also used to be for whites, but now any child can go there, my mother says, long as the parents can pay high fees. The township school is a dirty place and the teachers are lazy, she says. You can’t learn English properly there, and there’s no hope of a good position like our father’s, when you grow up, if you can’t speak proper English, it’s the language of the world, she says.

  So our uncle who has a transport business came with his removals van and my friend Meshak, Rebecca, Thandike and I helped the grownups load all our stuff. We also left some things behind, that kind of rubbish isn’t going to be what we need anymore, my mother said. Gogo still wanted her paraffin heater and her funny old sewing machine. The sewing machine, all right. My father lifted it in.

  This house has rooms for everybody. Rebecca and Thandike share because they want to, they say it’s lonely to be by yourself. But I like the room, my room, with all my things around, just mine. I used to share with the girls in the township because Gogo had to have a place. Our big TV that was squashed up against the fridge in the room that was half-kitchen half-everything, the table and chairs and couch where we sat and ate our food and watched, looks the way it should be, here, in the room that has glass doors you can slide open. We kids sit on the carpet my father bought, thick and so wide and long it covers the whole floor, and that’s how you can follow sport with my father in his new chair with its special rest for his feet up.

  Our houses in the township were all the same except that some had a pretty door because people wanted them to look nicer. But in this street in the suburb all the houses are different. Mama says some are very old, they’re built of stone, with an upstairs. Ours doesn’t look as old as that and there’s no upstairs, but in front you can’t see the roof because of a kind of white wall—curly shapes, something like the head of our mother’s and father’s new bed—that sticks up into the sky from where you know the roof really begins. Rebecca says she’s seen on TV houses like that when they show Cape Town and when she’s said that, it reminds me—so that’s where I must have seen what makes the house ours, that same wall. The feeling I get, where we’ve come to live now. There’s no swimming pool yet, my father says maybe next year. There’s a garden, all the houses in this street have these gardens, there’s a kind of lady made of stone or something standing where you can see right down the grass to the flower bushes and high trees from the glass doors that slide away. Plenty of room to play. But we don’t play there much. Mama tells us to but we don’t. We always used to play in the street in Naledi. There wasn’t a garden. In the garden you don’t see anybody. When we come home from school we sit around under the street trees on the pavement with our feet in the road, same as always although in Naledi it was just the dust, no trees, no smooth tar and gutters for the rain. Not many cars pass, just the Watchem Security one that patrols looking for loafers and thieves—Mama says everyone living on this street pays for this, to be safe, our father too. The people in the other houses come from work in super cars like my father’s only even better, and the gates of their places open by themselves, magic—we have gates like that, as well, my father has in his car the whachamacallit he presses to work them. There are other kids in the houses, white kids. They play in the gardens of course. We don’t know those kids, they don’t come out and tell us where they go to school, what they’re doing in those gardens. There’s just one boy, lives down the street, who comes out, riding his skateboard. He’s not black like us, he’s an Indian boy you can see, black the sort of way they are, so although his family have moved from the Indians’ townships to the suburb, like us, he also doesn’t know the white kids. He’s begun to come and sit where we fool around and watch him fly past, him showing off a bit. He never offers to lend me his skateboard. Thandike would be scared but Rebecca’s cheeky, she’s asked him and he said no, his parents don’t allow anyone to ride it but him. Because it’s dangerous, he says. And he’s only allowed to ride it on our street because it’s a quiet one and the downhill is just enough, not too much. So he doesn’t try it out anywhere else—I’ve told him there are much faster runs in the other streets, up and down hills in this suburb. I know. Because the very first day we came here, with Uncle Ndlovu’s van with our stuff, I was the first one to unload something, I climbed in and dragged out my bicycle that I’d got from my father for winning a merit prize at school at the same time he won his new great job. I rode off straight away, Mama and Gogo yelling after me, where’re you going, you’ll get lost, you don’t know this place. But I did know all these streets, which went where, and which one became that one, where to turn to reach this way back to recognise our new house with the fancy white front, or instead take another way. Like my bike had a map. Maps on the school walls. But they’re foreign countries.

  So I dare Fazeel—we’ve told our names, Rebecca and Thandike too—to skate along with me all over, sometimes the downhill I know makes him fly so fast he even overtakes me on my bike, it’s a superbike, I can do all sorts of tricks on it, now. He jumps and lands smack on his board that’s running away from him, I pedal full-power, hands off, we zigzag round each other, the girls shout and laugh at us. It’s real fun. And all the time it’s in English, Fazeel wouldn’t understand us in Sesotho, we’
re talking English every day at school and anyway where we live it’s the language of everyone, the one for the suburb, we hear the voices of the white people we don’t know, in their gardens. My dad (that’s what we’ve got used to calling him in English instead of Tata, although our grandmother’s still Gogo for us) also bought me a Superman helmet to wear when I’m on my bike, it’s yellow with red arrows. Rebecca loves it and I let her wear it sometimes while she and Thandike run and dodge around Fazeel and me when we’re having a competition in the fastest streets. I ride such a lot I’m getting to be a star, I could go on TV with the stunts I do. On the street where you can whizz down to the sharp corner that comes off from the main road, although you can’t see it the five o’clock traffic’s like the volume turned up full blast on a TV.

  Look!

  Fazeel’s just done something!

  Man! Man! But fabulous! He’s jumped, turned himself right round, and landed back on the board! It’s wobbling but he doesn’t fall. The girls are shouting, Rebecca’s dancing her bottom around, my helmet’s too big for her, it’s falling over her eyes, stupid, she must give it back but I must show Fazeel, I must show them all, everybody in our suburb where we’re living, the streets I know—Look! Look! Look what I’m going to do now! They’re yelling, So what! What you think you are! Laughing gasping because I’m no hands, I’m full speed, and I’m bending back, I’m looking up at them, show-off Fazeel, show-off silly girls, upsidedown. Now the bike’s thrown me it’s on top of my legs I’m on my elbow. I’m shouting I’m okay, okay, don’t touch me. I’m going to get up right away. I’m going to get up but now there’s a terrible noise the volume is up, on me, the underneath of a truck—

  Sometimes the Return is such a short one.

  Hardly worth it? No-one can know. No-one is ever to have such knowing. And if a Return is supposed to atone for errors, wrongs committed, acts uncompleted in a previous existence, how could I atone, sent back briefly as a life of a child to the streets, to the house with the fake Cape Dutch gable where something was not realised: awry, abandoned halfway.