Loot (23 page)

Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: Loot

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They think I'm disappearing, but always they're disappearing from me. Left behind. For this time.

I don't know in which Return I first heard about it. Read about it, it seems. I wish I never had. I believe if you don't know of some possibility, you'll never have to live it. Outside your orbit. Absurd, really, because I then must already have been a Return, the only
sure, actual
beginning is the fishâand even it had had a form of being in another element.

It must have been one of the Returns in which I had become middle-aged, even oldâcertainly adult, with a developed intellectual curiosity. Most times I was young, or a child. Short-lived:
at once available again. Must have been when I was a being dissatisfied with the explanations of human life on offer: given in churches, synagogues and mosques; or simply had the kind of restless mind that seeks out explanations in etymology and philosophical tracts and treatises.
âKarma. The sum and consequences of a person's actions during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his destiny. Fate, destiny. Sanskrit
karman
(nominative
karma
), act, deed, work, from
karoti
, he makes, he does.'
The garble of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. And there are other interpreters.
âThe doctrine of
karma
or
transmigration
â¦ is intimately associated with the philosophy of the Upanishads.'
I don't believe I ever read the Upanishads. Then there's:
âOfficials, too, are subject to the laws of karmaâthat sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come.'
And another:
â â¦ karma
can
be seen as the law of “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” â¦ but such an interpretation is not only a simplification, but also a severe limitation. '

Yes. Well, perhaps I don't understand and know I never shall what force sends me back to existence, but my experience doesn't bear out a process of either perfection or retribution. It has been written:
âMany people worry about the issues of “unfinished business” whether it be psychologically or karmically.'
The being I become to continue unfinished business in the life of another is not always, seldom is subject to any retribution owed by or to another life; and perfection's something I've never attained in a Return â¦ This force I once heard, read about, they called karmaâisn't it a
questioning
going back again and again? Here we are:
âWithin such a search no single, narrow angle of perception is sufficient â¦ From Hinduism and Buddhism; the doctrine that
the sum of a person's actions in previous states of existence controls his or her fate in future existences.'
That's mostly been my existences. Even the one where I wasâhow to put itâwaiting, was called back from existence I might have had.

After life.

The earthly term for what is hoped for after death. But here's a version of immortality for one who can't believe in an after-life somehow of a similar, if exalted, nature of the one they're living: when you die your body decays in earth or the process has been anticipated by cremation. Right? You are humus or ash; heat and rain, in the course of seasons cause the matter to rise in the form of evaporation and microscopic particles, to the atmosphere. It reconstitutes as clouds. When you're aloft in a plane and you gaze at the hillocks of cloud through which you are passing, underneath and above you, drifting: that's where the dead are, beyond their number and time (heaven is surely too crowded to believe in), constantly forming and reforming matter. Returning.

Dead. Death sentence.

But there's also such a thing as life sentence; going back again and again, no escape; this is infinity: reward, forgiveness, another chance or final punishment for all the misdeeds of all the karmas so far â¦ only so far.

I understand.

It means you are condemned to live forever.

REINHOLD

12th March 1908â18th October 2001

1st March 1953â18th October 2001

Also by Nadine Gordimer

NOVELS
The Lying Days
A World of Strangers
Occasion for Loving
The Late Bourgeois World
A Guest of Honor
The Conservationist
Burger's Daughter
July's People
A Sport of Nature
My Son's Story
None to Accompany Me
The House Gun
The Pickup

STORIES
The Soft Voice of the Serpent
Six Feet of the Country
Friday's Footprint
Not for Publication
Livingstone's Companions
A Soldier's Embrace
Selected Stories
Something Out There
Jump and Other Stories

ESSAYS
The Black Interpreters
The Essential GestureâWriting, Politics and Places
(edited by Stephen Clingman)
Writing and Being
Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century
On the Mines
(with David Goldblatt)
Lifetimes Under Apartheid
(with David Goldblatt)

Notes

â¦ how few Westerners grasp malaria's devastation â¦ .
âCatch As Catch Can',
Los Angeles Times Book Review
(12/5/02), review by Dr Claire Panosian Dunavan of
The Fever Trail
by Mark Honigsbaum (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

â¦ so man is continually peopling his current space with a world of his own.
A. P. Sinnett,
The Occult World
(Kessinger Publishing, 1981).

Aorist: Denotes past action without indicating completion, continuation.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Many times man lives and dies,
Between his two eternities
That of race and that of soul.

W. B. Yeats, âUnder Ben Bulben'.

â¦ sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come. National Geographic
(3/1/32), quoted by Ruth White,
Karma & Reincarnation
(Weiser Books, 2001).

I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and returning life after life like an insect in the grass.
W. B. Yeats.

It turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have.
Amos Oz,
The Same Sea
, trans. Nicholas de Lange and the author (Harcourt, 1999).

Just as everything is always something else â¦ it may also throw some light on the procreative god.
Harry Mulisch, âThe Procedure,' trans. Paul Vincent (Viking, 2001).

The Pestle of the moon
That pounds up all anew
Brings me to birth againâ
To find what once I had,
And know what once I have known.

W. B. Yeats, âOn Woman.'

The individual's choice of
a future earthly body is limited, however â¦ .
T. C. Lethbridge,
Witches
(Lyle Stuart, 1969), quoted by Ruth White,
Karma & Reincarnation
(Weiser Books, 2001).

The doctrine of
karma
or
transmigration â¦' ibid.

Lines from “On Woman” and “Under Ben Bulben” by W. B. Yeats reprinted with the permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from
The Collected Work of W.B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, Revised,
edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997). Copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats; copyright renewed Â© 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9780374707460

First eBook Edition : June 2011

First edition, 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gordimer, Nadine.

Loot and other stories / Nadine Gordimer.â1st ed.
p. cm.

Contents: LootâMission statementâVisiting GeorgeâThe generation gapâ
L, U, C, I, E.âLook-alikesâThe diamond mineâHomageâAn emissaryâKarma.

ISBN 0-374-19090-9 (alk. paper)

1. South AfricaâSocial life and customsâFiction. I. Title.

PR9369.3.G6 L66 2003