Loot (19 page)

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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: Loot
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Don't think it's all grave. (No pun intended. ) Only now—what you would call a little while ago, or a day ago, in your measuring-out of your time—I was on a bicycle with curved handles like the horns of some swift beast. The bicycle and I were cutting a swathe through the air up a tree-lined street. Gateways, houses, telephone poles sliced away from us on either side, leaves and branches rushed out to meet—and just missed—us. On my head was a yellow casque slashed with red arrows. I had eyes that could see as keenly as fish in the depths of an ocean. I had a heart: I was that pump, a creature whose corporeality was all one pulse of energy. Glory. Mouth open to gulf wild laughter. Whoever you were, half-grown boy: I understood from you what it means to be alive!
Glory.
Some I've come upon can't find it simply, as the boy did, in this life that you complain about continually yet cling to fiercely—even abjectly, as I've come to know, in circumstances you yourselves bring about. Like ticks on the body of the world, you suck there inert until you bloat and fall off. Ugh.
Glory: there are others—completely other. They believe it can't be experienced in corporeality, it belongs to something they visualize: an after-life. Which must be the opposite term of still-born (you can tell I hang around intellectuals and amateur
philosophers). Perhaps that's where I belong, if anywhere: their after-life, because I've missed out what's inbetween. How do they get to their after-life? Strapped to the chest of that other being I took on—hardly older than the bicycle rider, he must have been—was a device with a stopper like a heavy pin. The thing was hard against the breast-bone under a flowing garment; on the crown of the head I was also aware of an embroidered skullcap. The pin came out with an easy tug. There was an embrace more passionate than any I've been privy to, and without boasting, I don't mind telling you there've been quite a few, between men-and-men and women-and-women, as well as the kind of woman-man one that half-created me. This one was between man and man and the climax was an orgasm unlike any other, unsurpassable, an explosion that ended everything, for both. There was nothing to remember of it, for him, my chosen partner, just as for myself, who can only borrow memory. I don't know if the Believer I was, for a while, for the flashed duration of the embrace, received the reward of the after-life, and if it was better than the one that flew apart in darkness beyond any dark. I left him at that moment of nothingness.
You
will perhaps know because
you
will have lived, whereas I have never existed in my own right, and if you don't experience life you don't experience its end. I suppose I could go on the way I do for ever, while you, my friend, you will come to that nothingness one way or another, in bed slowly or fast on a highway, even if it is extremely unlikely that anyone would find reason to bring you into a final clinch with a grenade.
The victim for whose last embrace I was decisive was, of course, a political leader. I don't make moral judgments, despite the bits and ends of theoretical justice I've picked up, so I don't
know if he had it coming to him. And if he did, did he deserve it? There's not enough sequence in my fragments of experience to judge what I'll risk as the most important question for you: does killing really solve any of the conflicts between you, and what you claim as your countries, your boundaries? I mean, you can't turn me away at Immigration, so how can I presume to know what cans you like a commodity, contains your individual experience as imprinted within you from the day you're born Here or There rather than Somewhere Else.
My dipping into the experience of politicians has resulted in some discoveries you probably wouldn't credit, considering the general view of these individuals I overhear. They are stalwart, convinced of their moral right to take power, determined to bring peace, prosperity and justice to all, if you are of those who support their ideas of how a government should run your lives; they are ruthless, power-hungry, wily, will stop at no infamy to impose their kind of regime, if you are in opposition to their ideas of governing you. In the being of one—a politician—once in a while (there are so many buzzing around among you, how could I avoid the temptation or the curiosity) I have known the raw surface of weakness (yes) to any failure, however small, any setback to high self-esteem, however temporary, they conceal from public sight. While they are declaring themselves satisfied with the support they are gaining among the collective electorate—You—the loss of a few votes is to them a slow bleeding from some secret organ they have, the loss of a seat in the palace of government is a lopping-off of a limb of the creature they have to make of themselves—for You, for your sake. You know that? Power is needed, there's a need to be
intact
for good, as well as for evil. I have some notion of those two concepts—come to
me, in my way; how could I have even the most fleeting contacts with your experience without finding out that they actually do exist.
Perhaps I would have been one of those, a politician. Because I can't keep away from them, they attract me with the strong sense with which they wrestle life, the secrecy of the holds they use, under the public surface; their kind of survival tactics among the different ones I see practised among you, from withdrawals to the ashram to the total exposure of the pop star. Why shouldn't I try them all, since I don't have the angst of going through the whole way with any! But no. If I imagine a corporeal life for myself—what Denis might be—maybe I would have been a writer; fiction, of course, because that's the closest a corporeal being can get to my knack of living other lives; multiple existences that are not the poor little opportunities of a single existence.
When
she
dies—the one who precociously stole my life, I'd like to know how much value she's added to it on your stock market—I wonder whether my non-existent existence will stop, too: still-born to stop-dead. I doubt it. I'm curious, nevertheless. So one of the favourite diversions of my eternity is to board a plane in the being of a passenger. Because I find the nearest you who are not religious—can't rely on an after-life—may get to experience the eternal is up at around thirty thousand feet on the way to the heaven of those who believe they're going to go all the way. In a layer of the atmosphere outside the earth, between time-zones defined by your earthly existence: you don't know precisely, up above the earth's cloud-shroud, its cosy blanket, whether you are X hours behind or X hours ahead of the earthly destination you have headed yourself for. So you are out of both
time and place—precariously? No—you inhabit both at the same time, clouds, space, and the interior box of the aircraft, which is like a hospital ward, you are designated to yours (First, Business, Tourist class), your bed (seat number) and you are dependent on the ministrations of the nurse (cabin attendant). Freedom is just beyond the window; as always with you, you can see it but can't touch it. And it is fearful …
So I am everybody's twin?—oh no, no, not at all! Don't mistake me. Not in anything I've said. I'm not an
alter ego, doppelgänger
, clone—nobody's alternate. I am not stopping up your ears with a homily on universality, living human beings are part of one another, must love one another etcetera, with my winetastings of your experience here-and-there as the high-minded symbolic lesson. In my condition I have no moral responsibility. Now do you get it? How could I when I don't have to
provide
: don't have to eat, to have a roof over me, don't have to look over my shoulder at anyone who's a rival in acquisitions? It's easy for me …
I suppose, in the end, you have to be disembodied, like me, to need no morals. All that I have in common with you is
all you are not
—I am. Pity me. Or envy me.
 
‘It turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have.'
 
 
 
 
 
F
or so long—well, the ten years we've been together—we've had everything we wanted. Not some gift from the gods or nice middle-class family inheritance, but in the independent making of our own lives. Karen is overseas investment advisor of the most successful group of brokers in the city. I had a history of having been an activist. That cliché means I was part of actions against the old regime, now put away mummified if not exactly returned to dust, that got me tear-gassed and beaten-up and once detained—another cliché, this one for a spell inside without trial. But I am a lawyer who nevertheless managed to get herself accepted, in a renewed country, as fresh blood and a woman, by one of the most prestigious old legal practices. So that's the career side of it.
As women who've wanted and had only women lovers since youthful attempts with men, we know we were lucky—extraordinarily blessed—to find one another. Even straight people (as they think of themselves) prove how rare the right relationship is: divorces, remarriages, quarrels over child custody—anyway, that's the mess we've freed ourselves of, in what's called our sexual preference. Which has been and is open, since the law now accepts its existence as legitimate and we both have the confidence of our recognised career capabilities and loving sexual
partnership (the straight couples enviously see how fulfilling it is) to ignore any relics of old prejudice that turn up in long-faced disapproval. We find the society of our own kind naturally compatible, with the usual rivalries, of course, haphazard sexual attractions that complicate and trouble, not too seriously, everyone's social life, golf club or gay bar. But we also have heterosexual friendships, particularly those coming about through our different professional connections, and we don't mind obliging as the female dinner-partners of visiting overseas businessmen or other dignitaries who have arrived without spouses. Karen is something of a beauty with the added advantage or disadvantage of being younger than I am, and she sometimes is pursued by one of these men-of-passage after the occasion, and I suppose I must admit that it pleases, rouses me to know that my lover appeals to someone who can't have her, whom she would reject. With the funny little pursed-up, half-derisive, half-flattered face she makes as we look the man over in retrospect.
We bought a house two years after we met, and one of ours, an architect friend, renovated it to create exactly what we think our place ought to be. The mixed-media paintings and the one or two sculptures (we like wood and can't stand the pretension of
objets trouvés
) are the work of other artist friends. Our collection and our travels together are what we enjoy spending our money on. We've seen a good part of the world (four eyes better than two), the Great Wall, the Barrier Reef, New York-Chicago-West Coast, Kyoto, Scottish Highlands, Florence-Rome-Paris—and there'll be a lot more to come, but it's always with an emotional dissolve of pleasure, arms going about each other, that we find our two selves back—home. I've had the impression that straights
don't believe such a concept should exist, with us. Because we don't deserve it, eh.
Some time last year something surprising—yes, happened. Not to us; but came from us. Not surprising, though, that it occurred at the same time in both, as our emotions, concepts, opinions and tastes are non-biological identical twins. For instance, I don't know whether, talking with others, we're heard to say ‘I' instead of ‘we'. The totally unexpected thing—if that's what surprise is—is that this one was, well, biological. How else could you term it. We wanted to have a child. I'm sure—and I use the singular personal pronoun for once because we never actually expressed this, I'm observing from some imagined outside—we were aware that the desire was like the remnant of a tail, the coccyx, vestigial not of our human origin as primates but of the family organism we have evolved beyond. But freedom means you go out to get what you want, even if it seems its own contradiction. Reject the elements of family and take one of them to create a new form of relationship.
We have a home to offer, no question about that, vis-à-vis the basic needs of a child. It's the first consideration an agency would take account of: this easily, informally beautiful place and space we've created. But adoption is not what we want: we're talking of our own child. This means one of us must bear it, because what one is the agency of becomes the possession of both.
Late at night, accompanied by the crickets out on the terrace, later still, in our bed, her arm under my head or mine under hers, we consider how we're going to go about this extraordinary decision that seems to have been made for us, not at all like the sort of mutual decision, say, to go to the Galápagos next summer
instead of Spain. There's no question of who will grow the child inside her body. Karen is eight years younger than I am. But at thirty-six she has doubts of whether she can conceive.—How do I know? I've never been pregnant.—We laughed so much I had to kiss her to put a stop to it. She hasn't had a man since at eighteen in her first year at university her virginity was disposed of, luckily without issue, by a fellow student in the back of his car. —I think there are tests you can have to see if you're fertile. We'll find a gynecologist. None of her business why you want to know.—
That was simple. She's fertile, all right, though the doctor did make some remark about the just possible difficulties—did she say complications, Karen doesn't remember—for (what did she call her) a
primapara
at thirty-six, and the infant. There's always a caesarian—but I don't want Karen cut up.—I'll have a natural birth, I'll do all the exercises and get into the right frame of mind these prenatal places teach.—And so we know, I know now; she's going to have an experience I won't have, she's accepted that; we've accepted that, yes.

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