Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  Seeing these things, still there, I can’t believe I’m here so scared I can hardly breathe. My father keeps trying to turn his head to look at me, I know he wants to tell me it’s all right, he’s with me.

  Then there are tops of buildings I don’t know, and then no buildings, only sky. My nose is running. No, I’m crying! Baby! I snort the tears back up through my nose, my father mustn’t know.

  We get wherever it is they’re taking us and the army van opens in a yard, very bright high lights like in a sports field but there’s a building with bars at the windows. They take my father away but not to the building and I call, I yell, but they don’t let him answer, I see his shoulders struggling. The Germans who’re holding me take me into the building. It’s a prison. I’ve only seen the inside of a prison in films. There’s some argument going on, I don’t understand their language but I think it’s because they don’t know what to do with me.

  I know they’re going to shoot my father. This fear that takes away the movement of my legs, the Germans are holding me up, dragging me along passages, is it fear for him or for me. But why don’t they take me away to be shot wherever they’re doing it to him. They open an iron door and throw me into a small place, dark, with a square of light cut by thick black bars. When they have gone I make out that there’s nobody but me and a patch that must be a blanket.

  I’ve been here days now, they bring me water and food sometimes and there’s a bucket that stinks of me. But it’s as if nothing ever happened to me, I am not Kostya who was in school and played second league football and went shopping to carry for my mother and had already invited Natalya to the cinema, paying for her, there is only the ride on the floor of the military van beside my father, and the church tower and the theatre wall sticking up, and his back as he went to be shot. Because if he wasn’t shot he would be in this place with me. We would be very close because this space is very small, there’s hardly room to spread the blanket to lie down. There’s a wall in my face whichever way I turn. If I jump with my hands ready I can just reach and grab the iron bars on the bit of window and hang there. But it’s difficult to haul up my head and shoulders so I can see anything. Only the bars. I feel the bars in my hands, if I lie on the blanket and close my eyes, I see the bars. Sometimes I have the crazy idea that my head is getting smaller, if I can think it into getting small enough I could stick it through the bars. My head would be out of the tight walls, the bars wouldn’t be there on my eyes even when my eyes are closed.

  What can they do with me? They can’t send me back home to tell everyone everything. They’ve lost the war. There they are at the door, they leave it open a moment, stare at me. A loud word in their language. They’ve come.

  Taking me away to be shot. The bars still there on my eyes.

  ‘The Pestle of the moon

  That pounds up all anew

  Brings me to birth again—

  To find what once I had,

  And know what once I have known.’

  The grandmother used to talk about the war and after the war when there were plans in which the government would build up everything that was lost and the man with the great moustache was power in the world just like the American president and she had been on a trip with a women’s group to Moscow to see the other one in his tomb, dead but still as if he was alive among everyone in the country. The granddaughter was born after the one with the great moustache was also dead and she grew up under the public display of portraits of those, one by one, who came after him; successive faces of the father she didn’t have. Apparently he had left her mother for another woman when his child was too small to have kept memory of him. The Government fathers provided good schools and clinics for children, and her mother had a steady job in a catering business, conditions for whose employees were ensured by their trade union. The grandmother had her pension.

  The child was taken with her school class (like her grandmother’s group, earlier, but not to the tomb) to museums and the overawing, dwarfing interiors of splendid buildings which had survived the war and been restored, palaces and theatres from way back in the history of Czars, now belonging, the Government said, to the people. She loved these expeditions; the chipped but glorious gilt, bulbous cupolas, flying crenellated arrows of spires aimed at the clouds, the saints painted in deserted chapels—religion was not taught in schools, and only the very old, like her grandmother, ventured to go and pray in museum-churches without priests to receive them. God was not there. But the grandmother privately could not accept this: that he did not exist. The young girl introduced her mother to the splendour that belonged to the city of their unchanging routine of school, work, food queues, and when the State ballet came on tour, they went together to be dazed with enchantment—tickets were cheap, ordinary workers could afford such pleasures. She had decided she wanted to be a teacher; and then, seeing computers working magically in television shows, changed to the ambition to learn computer skills and maybe work in a regional Government office. Her mother’s trade union would know how the daughter should go about this, when the time came.

  But when the time came, she had completed her school education, it was a different time. Another time. The great fathers lost power, lost hold, the countries that had made a vast union under one name, broke apart. The intellectuals and others the fathers had feared and imprisoned were let out. The world outside told, now all would be free. Bring the computers, bring the casinos, bring whatever the West says that makes happiness that we’ve never tried, couldn’t have. And they did. And the new Government that had never done business the West’s way didn’t do well, now in business with them.

  Factories closed without the market for their products that had existed conveniently in the vast union. Elena’s mother lost her job when the catering firm failed in competition with what were called fast-food chains with American names which replaced many restaurants, Elena could not study to become a teacher or a computer operator. She had to find work, any work. Foreigners come to do business lived in hotels refurbished, by the international chains that had taken them over, to make them feel they were in an hotel in the West. Her mother could not believe it: her daughter, so clever, who was going to make a career in that very world, the new world, came home one day to tell that she had found work: as a chambermaid in one of the hotels. She was instructed to wear a skirt, not jeans, and supplied with a uniform apron. She passed doors hung with the sign ‘Do Not Disturb’ in English, French, German and Japanese, and knocked softly on others. If there was no response, she was to go in, make the beds, vacuum the carpets, clean the bathroom, replace the towels, soap and whatever was missing from the basket of free miniatures of bath-oil, shampoo, provided in the high cost (payable in dollars only) of the room. The sheets were stained with semen. The drain-traps of the bathtubs were blocked with pubic hairs. The lavatory bowls often were not flushed of traces of shit. Socks stiff with sweat and shirts dirty at collar and cuffs had to be picked up off the carpet and placed neatly on a chair. The housekeeper came regularly to see if such things were correctly done.

  Sometimes when the chambermaid knocked there was no reply and she went in, there was someone there, a voice from under the shower, and she would apologise and leave at once. There were times when she entered after no reply and a man was standing, half-dressed, and while she apologised he would smile and say, go ahead, I’ve finished with the bathroom. But she had her instructions: I’ll come back later. There was the morning when she knocked and someone answered in a language she didn’t recognise as English (learnt a little at school), German, French or Japanese. She turned away but the door opened and a man in the white towelling dressinggown the hotel provided in the bathrooms blocked the light of the room.—No Italian?—okay, understand English? Come please.—She followed him to the bathroom and he pointed to the bathtowels that had fallen from their rail into the water. She signalled: I bring some more. When she came back with the towels he thanked her, smiling, shrugging effusively at the good service,—Yo
u Russian? Yes, I’m sure you’re real Russian girl. First one I know!—She smiled back as a maid should, polite to a guest, never mind their dirt. Nodded determinedly.—Russian, yes.—She said it in her language, and he cocked his head a little as if hearing a bird call. They both laughed, and she left. Next day when she knocked at 507 the door opened at once. He was a large man, the Italian, tall and broad but not fat, with a fancy belt that still met above a strong belly, and a fresh full face, black thick-lidded eyes, and a glossy crest of grey hair worn consciously as a cock his comb. The age of many of the foreign guests, somewhere at the end of the fifties. She saw all this, really, for the first time: he was presenting himself.

  Again he signalled her into the room. He had unpacked some purchase; there was a jumble of cardboard box, bubble wrap, plastic chips. Could she do something about this mess? They communicated well by signs and their few English words, her willingness, his appreciation brought laughter. He helped her gather the pieces from the carpet, fill the box, picked it up and made to carry it to the door for her, while she protested, trying to take it from him. It fell and spilled again. He threw his hands above his head in mock culpability. When they came down again they went round her, he was rocking her against him, laughing. She pulled away. He let her go.—Don’t be cross. Come sit down.—She did not know what she was supposed to do. You must not be rude to a hotel guest. He sat on the velvet chaise-longue and patted the place beside him. She came slowly to the summons. Now he put his one arm round her shoulders and turned her to him, kissed her. His lips were warm and pleasant, a change from the dirt she associated with hotel guests, he smelled of pine aftershave. He pressed her closer and put his tongue in her mouth. The caress, the advances came from that other world, outside, the world of computers and travel, even while she resented what he was doing, it took her there, away from the chambermaid.

  He was waiting, every morning. He would be in the dressinggown at his laptop computer or on the telephone, surrounded by a calculator, another—a mobile—phone and spread documents. She could see he was a big businessman of some kind. This was the equipment they all had in their rooms. He would gesture her to him and run a free hand down her buttocks while he argued, agreed, lowered his voice confidentially, raised it confidently in Italian. Business over, he made love to her on the bed she would make up afresh in the course of her work, later.

  She had been clumsily penetrated by a youth who ejaculated halfway but she did not know the act could be like this. The entry of this man was an exquisite opening up of all that must have been secret inside her and when some sort of flame jetted from his strong movements within the sheath he wore she was lit up all through her body down her shuddering thighs and he had to shush her cry—there might someone passing in the hotel corridor.

  She had her rooms to clean; he had his appointments to meet. He found a better arrangement: what was her lunch-hour? He would arrange his meetings accordingly, his business lunches could be scheduled late. Between embraces he would feed her cherries and slices of peach from the bowl the hotel kept replenished on his coffee table, poor little girl, no time for her to lunch.

  His stay at the hotel was longer than usual for foreign businessmen; he must have had complex financial deals that meant waiting for the opportunity to make this connection or that with an intermediary. She was told nothing of this, or anything else about his life where he came from, Italy, but she saw how he was often exasperated when he put down the telephone or grew impatient with the fax facility attached to it. The third week, must have been—one lunchtime he looked at her lying under him, rising on his elbows for a better perspective. His mouth shaped and reshaped as if he were urging himself to make some gesture not physical, toward what it was time to leave behind: pleasures dictating one course, judgment the other. When she was dressing he watched her. That responsive body concealing itself; he had had many responsive bodies coming and going in his life, but time was passing and one more …

  —I can take you to Italy.—

  She didn’t believe him, didn’t answer.

  —No, it’s true. I know someone, I can get you papers. We’ll find work for you there. Not this, here. Better work. You can’t go on in this place.—

  She shook her head, lower and lower. He was smiling, dismissing her powerlessness before his capability in the world of official fixes.

  What could he know of the mother, the grandmother she went back to every night with leftover food one of the chefs smuggled from the hotel restaurant to give her.

  —First days of next month, I go. I take you. Nothing for a girl like you, here.—Every lunchtime he confirmed, assumed the arrangement. And she found her voice:—No, no I cannot. —

  At last he lost interest—all right. There were plenty of girls who would jump at the chance to get out. And there are plenty of girls in Milan even if they haven’t the novelty of being a real Russian one.

  But when she was walking home from the bus stop on her afternoon off duty she saw something so terrible that she was almost run over by a truck as she plunged across the traffic to reach it. Old people begging in the streets; they were everywhere, old men in the remnants of their respectable functionaries’ or clerks’ suits, old women with the bewildered faces of former housewives, shamed under shawls. But this one she was in panic to reach was her own grandmother. She took her home, unable to speak, eyes screwed with tears of anger, disgust, as if the old woman were a criminal caught in the act. At home, her mother first cried and then countered with an anger of her own. —She hasn’t had her pension paid for a year—one month more than a year. I stand with her for days outside the office, no-one is paid. What can they do but sit in the street and hope someone has something to give? Why shouldn’t she do what they do? How can we live on what you bring from that hotel? I’ll have to try and put her in an old people’s home, she’ll die there away from us! What else is there?—Next day the grandmother was back on her stool in the street. Her granddaughter saw her, and passed.

  There was something else.

  After the lunchtime love-making she brought up the subject he had set aside.—If you can do papers, I go to Italy.—

  It was not just the sight of the revered old woman begging in the street; the sometime chambermaid had something of the rational intelligence, calculation, of the businessman. He would find decent work for her in that country outside, Italy, that wonderful city he spoke about, Milan, and she would send good currency back to her mother. If she stayed a chambermaid her grandmother would remain a beggar among all the other beggars.

  She left them behind. Her mother had not known about the Italian businessman but when told of his offer she did not hesitate: Go, Elena. They did not speak about what would become of those left behind. Perhaps the mother could take over the daughter’s work as a chambermaid.

  Her mother gave her in farewell a picture book of the city, its ancient palaces, churches, squares and museums they had visited together; she must have exchanged something for it in the market where people parted with their possessions, and the daughter herself asked for, and was granted, photographs taken in the city in times when her mother had a good position and they still owned a camera.

  She had a room in a small hotel in his city, Milan, his country, Italy. The room was five floors up, a tiny cage of an elevator to take her there, bring him to her when he had time. The first day, he showed her a lacy stone spire just visible fretted out of the sky in the window.—You have a view of the Duomo! You must go to the piazza and see it, the most beautiful thing in the whole world.—

  He paid for the hotel room and took her to a trattoria nearby where he had arranged with the patron for her to have her meals. It was a large and animated place where people working in the quarter came in a hurry to eat and drink plentifully. This was as he had told, a wonderful city; the narrow streets of shops displaying like art exhibitions beautiful clothes and shoes whose elegance you could not ever have imagined. He was looking out for something for her—work; but she had
to have better clothes to wear if he should find that something! He took her to a department store that had good clothes on the racks, not as elegant as the small shops she gazed into, and bought for her trousers and jackets and shoes she had never had. Of course she always had been this tall, angular body with wide-apart breasts, this white skin and jutting cheekbones, shaggy dark hair, narrow black eyes and lips whose defining edges were attractively coarse in contrast with her skin; but now, in the shop mirror, she was seen by herself to be beautiful, in her way; as he, the Italian, must have seen her to be as a chambermaid. So she wandered the city dressed now like any of the smart working men and women from shops and offices, and hurried back to the hotel to see if there was any message from him; any day, every day, he might have found something, a job for her. She was listening avidly to the talk around her, reading the labels and signs on objects she could recognise, picking up a little of the language.