Get A Life

by Nadine Gordimer

  The man got rid of his old family friend and came back to embrace her in a hotel room that contained no echoes, neither of what it had just overheard nor of any other impassioned, angry, loving accusatory, conciliatory, triumphant, fruitless calls in its promiscuous service to couplings of occupants with fictitious names. He was not the kind to notice traces of emotions not roused by him.

  The neurons and synapses are merciless in their uncontrollable selectivity. A secretary has to remind of names of clients whose cases were the subject of consultation only a year ago, perhaps. But nothing, nothing is inaccessible, avoidable, escapable in this case closed fifteen years ago. I have something to tell you.

  It is all being told, all, no detail to be turned away from, presented by that self to the present self. Once upon a time. You found you were pregnant. To be factual the timing was such, a brief absence at a seminar and return home, that the error of conception could have been with husband or lover. No female panic, neither man told of (once again) the blind opportunism of progeniture. Although abortion was illegal in those Calvinist regime days in her country, sister women always knew of out-of-the-way but competent if expensive doctors who would perform the simple procedure, and it was timely done. There was a complete family, daughters, a unique son; there was none of the sense of emptiness, regret for lost chance to bear a life that is supposed to depress a woman when she has that blob removed, to be done without as Paul has to do without a part of himself, one of the monitors of life. But now comes the fact that there is another fact of that time. Was it the chummy black nurse or the by now faceless doctor who told the blobs were two. Two foetuses waiting to grow into their human likenesses and be born. Well, twins come from the female line, her mother was a twin. Within a few days the man had entered her and Adrian had entered her. If not biologically possible – don't, don't give it scientific verity, don't join the lesser phenomena ranks of the late Dolly the Sheep – it is still a psychic reality in the emotion coexistent between contingent love and the love it is contingent to. In that unimaginable state of existence, the double conception is a reality.

  This is a fantasy spewed of disgust. Self-disgust, a rising bile which apparently didn't affect that woman who was no barnyard hen. Flying free around the world. A man responded to at a duty dinner party just as her own young daughter, at the appropriate age, to the Brazilian as one of the mother's professional social obligations brought home. That woman, whoever she was, disembodied from the historical continuity of her life. Why did she not feel disgust, shame, then? Why now, when there have been fifteen years to – that is the fashionable plaster for confession jof political crimes – cleanse and heal.

  I have something to tell you.

  Oh not all, though that is supposed to be the condition of absolution.

  I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.

  Truth and reconciliation. The one who offends, against the power, as only the victim has, to open return to the historical continuity of a life.

  Fifteen years have achieved this. There should be no need to recognise the artifact of that four-year state of existence. But it was an amputation, excision; admit it, four years cut out of the time when he, Adrian, beloved, was in mid-life. The loss is calculable now, only now, when he's about to enter that half-life without the purpose of work. Even if its achievement was not his vocation. Four years taken from his maleness, the total capacity of love with all his being, the way lovemaking was with him, not just fucking with penis and tongue; love, with the cross-currents of children made by that commitment, the being of a compound existence within and against hazards of the world. Four years thrown in the trash where contaminated paper plates go. And now this man with his prostate humiliations and dimming deafness, soon to withdraw with the books illustrating the vocation he gave up (who knows if he would have fulfilled it) to the quarantine room transformed to that other confinement, 'retirement' – he cannot be given back those four years.

  He talks of plans for a new phase of life to be entered together.

  To make up; make up to him for a state of self you cannot understand could have existed – that's a childish notion. You cannot absolve yourself of the inconceivable. Nothing but to take up the acceptance into the historical continuity of life granted fif-teen years ago. Cannot make up – to yourself – those four years you've deprived yourself of. What happened in that retrogression from all that was indispensable to you? The worst of ageing – fifty-nine if looking forty-nine – is you cannot know, find out. Why? How? Could you ever have interrupted your selfhood – yes – for an unthinking primitive gratification of some sort, a child gobbling a lollipop.

  Who goes there…

  The buzz from the intercom at the gate doesn't need any response asking identification of one seeking entry… it's Thapelo, he keeps a finger on the monitor as his fanfare greeting. They pull up their chairs in the garden, so many activities visualised in small boys' fantasy are succeeded by the visualised consequences of present reality. A bamboo-legged table has been commandeered to hold the spread of papers. Thapelo is spending some weeks on verification of actions being planned or taken behind closed doors by the Department of Minerals and Energy and the Department of Environmental Affairs, all their interconnections with industry, bidding consortia. Undercover stuff. Background to reports on the field research he and Derek were engaged in with Paul before – whatever this is, happened to him. And while Paul's inside (the word for jail seems the right one) there have been other environmental issues come up. – Yona ke yona! No limit to the way the construction companies khan'da! – These words in the slang of his mother tongues (he speaks at least four or five) aren't italicised in Thapelo's talk, they belong in English just as his natural use of the scientific terms and jargon of his profession does. Or maybe they're part of the identification with his boyhood street life of blacks he asserts as essential to who and what he is. It's not what he's emancipated from: it's what he hasn't, won't leave behind.

  So the scientist talks like a tsotsi when he pleases. That's how Paul teases him; in appreciation. Paul sums up in colloquialism common to black and white alike: no bullshit in Thapelo.

  He comes both to keep his colleague informed and to consult with him; doesn't matter whether he's actually been delegated to do this by their employer organisation or it's something delegated by himself. The question of his continued exposure to Paul's Chernobyl – the nature of relations with officialdom in the work they do makes him dismissive of the controlling edicts of authority as hidden agenda. Paul's condition doesn't come up between them in their talk, interruptions of one another, laughter, lowered voices, shouts of emphasis, this garden resounds, echoes with the animation of its past. It's the quarters, now, where two men are absorbed in the work that informs their understanding of the world and their place as agents within it, from the perspective that everyone, like it or not, admit it or not, acts upon the world in some way. Spray a weedkiller on this lawn and the Hoopoe delicately thrusting the tailor's needle of its beak, after insects in the grass, imbibes poison. That's the philosophy of conservation from which Paul is approaching the great issues in a draft petition of an environmentalist coalition to the State President he's writing between discussions in the garden.

  The pebble-bed nuclear experiment may be the apocalyptic one, nuclear experiment you can walk away from; there are also planned or proceeding slower means of development taking the form of destruction.

  – So now it's the Australians in on the act. Haai! Pondoland, it's recognised all over the world, the centre of endemism, the great botanical treasure, n'swebu, man! The government wants to put a national toll highway through it, tear it up, and now they're going to let an Aussie company in to mine the dunes, destroy the coastline too. This Transworld Company says it's identified reserves there, sixteen million tons of heavy minerals and eight million tons of ilmenite. One of the biggest mineral sand deposits in the world. Yesus! This what we mean by attracting foreign investment? Mining on the
beaches, same time the Minister of Tourism says the Germans, the Japanese and what-what flying in are big in our economic future -

  Primrose has appeared with a tray of paper cups and the fruit juice prescribed for the one she cares for at some sort of distance decreed for her by her employers. She doesn't know where to put the burden and Thapelo interrupts himself, sweeps up the papers from the table, laughing and chaffing with her in what he's recognised, in an earlier encounter with her here in the garden, is her language among his four or five.

  – The aspect for us to hammer -

  Thapelo waves his cup across his colleague's half-sentence. – The road and the mining are linked – like that, nê? – He bangs the flimsy cup, overflowing, down upon the table, clasps one fist in the other.

  Invigorated by the piece of theatre, his colleague tries again. – The aspect for us to go for is the broadest effect of danger the toll highway carries, pleas for beauty destroyed in these issues are regarded as going soft, just sentimental objection to progress -

  – Chief, lalela, hear me, I think you're wrong there. You know that after mining tourism's our best income source. Who's coming to look at a mine, and a highway like they've got all over where they come from. -

  – I'm talking about the Amadiba, my brother, they're living on the Wild Coast, five communities, not so? Go for them. From the plan you've shown me, the route of the highway plunges right through people's houses and fields, straight over their mealies. Staple food. What about the Amadiba Tribal Trust? Need to make them shout. Loudly. All stops out. Rally the traditional leaders; the government has to hear them; you know it's policy, government's having to recognise right now all kinds of questions on land distribution rights. -

  – Derek's due down there next week. -

  – And the National Road Agency? Any new statement from them? The figures they give for employment their grand highway will create – short-term, do they admit that. -

  – The government must vuka! Open their eyes. See what's getting by in the name of development. All over the country. What about the cost of demissioning the pebble-bed plant? If it does light up that huge grid claimed, it can only last about forty years… -

  The Hadedas landing from the house roof squawked derision. Their familiar companion took up quietly: – And the disposal of the nuclear waste. Where? -

  Thapelo had brought photographs and surveyors' charts he had forgotten last time he came by. They bent over them, now and then, Thapelo constantly trespassing the distance at which his mate held him off, his forefinger returning to the toll highway, stabbing at a feature, the array spread among makeshift refreshment, coffee half-downed, the way they took it in the forest, in the bush, the desert. Thapelo had in a pocket – where was it, now – a pencil-length of root, shrunken and withered dead digit of a mangrove tree from the wetland they'd not long ago researched together, and the half-shell, patterned blue on cream like a fragment of Chinese porcelain, of a bird that would soon be extinct. Thapelo had the habit of absently gathering such small signs as he walked. When he was there, the garden was an enclave, paused at together, a wilderness.

  Thapelo had left.

  The eggshell and root, there on the table.

  How many more days go by in the garden.

  There are markers other than time on the way back from this state of existence. Not all are reassuring. Not without confusion. Yes, the doctors had given the cancer all clear. Only: after some months – How many months? – A shrug; somewhere between three and six, we'll do a scan. That's all. A precautionary follow-up. Most unlikely, but it can be that another radioactive treatment is indicated in some cases.

  But now, so far as radioactivity is concerned? He is no longer radiant. All clear.

  He hears otherwise, from his body.

  His decision is to remain a week or so in a kind of halfway – between the leper refuge and the return, harmless to the human fold. How could Benni question this protection of her and the child; how could Adrian and Lyndsay be seen to think his presence become a burden? And he was still weak. Wobbly due to lack of muscle tone, the inactivity of weariness, the spell cast in the pursuit of rabid cells on the loose in his body. He had to get to know that body again; the doctors were aware of this consequence, of course, and it was arranged that a masseur would come to revive his depleted flesh before he quit the old family home once again in his life-cycle. A man arrived, about his own age, the thirties, neither young nor near the barrier of the forties. The man chattered amiably as he worked, first with the body laid out on its back, his strong hands cool at contact, warm as he went over the chest, triceps, biceps, diaphragm area, moved down to the thighs and calves. Body belly-down. Massage of the feet, that was the beginning; the significance of biblical washings of the feet, a sacred tending to the most distant part of physical awareness, least emotive. Unless the shoes pinch or a thorn pricks, barefoot, who notices what's carrying you. Sometimes in bed the foot of one nuzzles for a moment the foot of the other but that happenstance has little to do with caresses of the body. 'He kisses their feet' – a derogatory reference to sycophancy. The deft and firm manipulation of the feet brings to notice, like the existence of someone who had gone ignored, the expressive mobilities in the curve of arch and keyboard of toes; so this is what took over, came into play – what one danced. What was prehensile when a boy climbed the jacaranda. Up calves and thighs, the hands brought back the good tensions of effort, sensation of running through thick underbrush, taut balancing over stones. Then the hard-smooth palms and fingers came up the outer sides of the buttocks, down and up over to the spine, and along either side of that stem and back again, down. The man was leaning over, when his hands reached the muscular contour of the upper back and shoulders – that male attribute, secondary only to the frontal display between the legs – his breath just touched on the bare nape of the neck. Massage is hard work, deep breaths are audible, their touch is a soft breeze.

  How long since he had come alive like this with Berenice/Benni. The growing, brimming against the resistance of the hard surface on which he lay face down. What had deserted him with the emanations of that unseen light, the ordinary birthright phenomenon he had wondered if he would ever again wake with in the morning. His erect penis, that other self of a man, restored to him.

  Under the hands of a man.

  Never had a sexual relation with a doppelgänger, a replica of myself: that's how he sees the act. No homophobia, either, each to his or her own sexual instincts; he's attracted to women and although there's enough evidence they're attracted to him – advances to be read even from among his wife's friends – men evidently were not. No gay proposals although his working life is intimately and virtually exclusively among his own sex.

  So unquestioning about himself.

  This question coming now.

  Take what he is feeling as the last alienation of that state of existence.

  It was decided he would leave home this second time to go home as an adult, at a weekend, when everyone would be free to welcome and settle him in, there.

  Decided by his mother and his wife, each representative of those habitats. He was not yet reaccustomed to taking practical decisions for himself. If his radiance had gone dark he was not ready, after so long under orders of others, for sunlight, except that of the garden. During his last days he kept what since the visits of Thapelo had been something like a routine, worked in that place of outdoor activity most of the day on the material Thapelo brought him.

  Going home: home that is work to be done. The pebble-bed nuclear reactor project is neither abandoned nor finally approved, in the holding silence like that which falls over international inquiry into the possession of nuclear capabilities in certain countries. The thought is troubling: research must be continued to be used for protest as vigorously as possible to keep the issue alive.

  There was the possibility he might be ready to go with his team on another field research at present in its planning stage. When the wilderness recei
ved him he would believe the oncologists' guarded edict that he was all clear, belonged among humankind, animals, birds, reptiles, insects, trees and plants without taint or threat. The project was one for which Thapelo piled more and more documentation, including tape recordings of contesting opinions on feasibility from chemical engineers, social scientists, anyone and everyone concerned with environmental management, the professionals along with the Greens, Save The Earth, Earthlife, International Rivers Network – campaigners of all titles and acronyms.

  A dam. Ten dams.

  A conventional developmental concept this time. Old as when the earliest agriculturists rolled stones into a stream to block its flow for themselves. Not the pebble-bed experiment descended from deadly alchemy of atoms that can achieve space-fiction in reality. But as the nuclear plant is promised to light vast areas of powerless darkness, the great dams are promised to gather water to slake the thirst of human populations and the industries which employ and feed them.

  The Okavango is an inland delta in Botswana, the country of desert and swamp landlocked in the middle of the breadth of South West, South and South East Africa. That's it on the maps; nature doesn't acknowledge frontiers. Neither can ecology. The consequences of what happens to the inland delta affect the region. How far?

  The surveyors' sheets, both actual and speculative, represent the phenomena; as they are now.

  Maze of waterways remembered as the glide of a narrow boat through passages between skyscraper reeds made by hippopotami, their local streets and lanes. Berenice was in the boat; not what she dubs with some due acknowledgement in her throwaway laughter, a macho bushboys' assignment. He thought he was fairly familiar with the ecosystem, at the time, had read up a bit to refresh this colloquially so she could share something of the wilderness he was fortunate to experience completely; while she had only her terrain of a city. But no – no reminiscent holiday snapshot album – a compilation of dossiers overlapping, having to be held down against the riffling of garden breeze by a stone on the bamboo-legged table: he realised he knew too abstractly, himself limited by professionalism itself, too little of the grandeur and delicacy, cosmic and infinitesimal complexity of an ecosystem complete as this. The Okavango could never have been planned on a drawing-board by the human brain. Its transformations, spontaneous, self-generated, could not have been conceived. And this is no evidence to be claimed by religious or other creational mysticism, either. The innovation of matter is greater than that of any collective of minds, faiths. As Thapelo would say, Yona ke yona – this is it! The capacity to visualise this complex, let alone create it, as a project of a multinational team of genius hydrologist engineers is as limited in scale as taking the hippo's part in maintaining the system as something that can be understood without the to-and-fro, in-and-out, problem-solving of the infinite whole. The Okavango delta in co-existence with a desert is a system of elements contained, maintained – by the phenomenon itself, unbelievably, inconceivably. The Okavango is a primal feature of creation, so vast it can be seen by astronauts from Outer Space. This is an excitement that must be confirmed – he has to leave the garden of isolation to go into the house and dial Thapelo.