The Late Bourgeois World

by Nadine Gordimer

‘No, there’s no chance of that – we’ve got it taped, now.’ He gave the fatally easy assurance you always get from people like him. ‘And we won’t use one account for more than six months or so, from now on.’

  He went on looking at me, half-smiling, satisfied I couldn’t get away.

  ‘You’re not thinking of me!’

  It was absurd, but he saw the absurdity as another attempt at evasion, and made me feel as if I were concealing something by it. But what? It’s true that I have no money coming to me from abroad, in fact nothing in the bank more than the small margin – which often dwindles into the red – between the salary I deposit at the beginning of a month and the bills I pay by the end. He laughed with me, at last, but beneath it, I saw his purpose remain; the laughter was an aside.

  ‘Ah, come on, Liz.’

  I told him he must be mad. I didn’t know of anyone, anyone at all whom I could even approach. I said I was out of that sort of circle long ago – a meaningless thing to say since we both knew he wouldn’t have come to me, couldn’t have come to me, otherwise. But everything I was saying was meaningless. What I was really telling him and what he understood was that I should be afraid to do what he asked, should be afraid even if I knew ‘someone’, even if I had some feasible explanation for money suddenly coming in to my bank account. We kept up the talk on a purely practical level, and it was a game that both of us understood – like the holding and flirting. The flirting is even part of this other game; there was a sexual undertone to his wheedling, cajoling, challenging confrontation of me, and that’s all right, that’s honest enough.

  I said I’d think about it; I’d try and come up with a suggestion. If I could think of someone, I’d perhaps even sound out whoever it was, to see. He told me a few more details – ‘Just let me brief you’ (he likes that sort of phrase) – as if the person would ever exist.

  And while we talked, the thought was growing inside me, almost like sexual tumescence, and like it – I was nervous – perhaps communicating its tension: there’s my grandmother’s account. She always has had dividends coming in from all over the place. For more than a year, now, in order to make payments (for the Home, and other odd expenses) independent of her unreliable mental state, I have had her power of attorney. I was afraid Luke would somehow divine – not the actual fact, but that there was a possibility; that there really was something for me to conceal. His hand, his young, clumsy presence (there at my pleasure, I could ask him to leave whenever I wanted) hung over it. And at the same time I had the feeling that he had somehow known all along, all evening, that there was a possibility, some hidden factor, that he would get me to admit to myself. Probably just the black’s sense that whites, who have held the power so long, always retain somewhere, even if they have been disinherited, some forgotten resource – a family trinket coming down from generations of piled-up possessions.

  ‘Even for say six months, good God, you don’t know how important it would be for us – even just a few months.’ We went on talking as though the non-existent ‘someone’ I should never approach were already found.

  I kept saying, ‘Well, I can’t promise anything – maybe as I think about it … there might be a name I can’t think of straight off. But I doubt it …’ and he hovered on the margin of my uncertainties and excuses, snapping them up like a bird swooping on mosquitoes: ‘It’d be marvellous, man. Our hands are tied, tied! The money’s there in London, waiting for us, but for eight months now – eight months! – we haven’t been able to move, our hands are tied!’

  ‘Well, I’ll look around and let you know.’

  ‘You’ll let me know?’

  I said, yes, we’d be in touch; we always say that when he comes; it means that perhaps in six weeks, three months, he will turn up again, and I’ll tell him that I’m awfully sorry, I couldn’t find anyone.

  He said, ‘Tomorrow night?’

  But I could say with a laugh at his impatience, ‘It’s tomorrow already – give me a chance. I’ll have to think.’

  So he said, affectionately, watchfully, ‘All right, Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe. You see I’ve got to get back, I can’t hang around here too long.’ He kept looking at me with a jaunty, admiring male pride, as if I were displaying some special audacity that charmed him. ‘I’d better let you get some sleep,’ he said, coming over and putting out a hand to pull me up from the sofa. I was chilly and wrapped my arms round myself. ‘What’ll you do now’ – his eyes took in the room again – ‘phone the boyfriend?’ I looked at him and smiled. ‘He’s fast asleep long ago.’ We spoke softly at the door, and when I opened it, signalled goodnight, because of the light still showing behind the glass door of the flat opposite. The soles of his shoes creaked, and I wanted to laugh. He grinned and, with just the right, light regret, put the palm of his hand a moment on my backside, with the gesture with which one says, wait there.

  Chapter 7

  And so he’s gone, my Orpheus in his too-fashionable jacket, back to the crowded company that awaits him somewhere in the town-outside-the-town. In a way it must be a relief to leave behind pale Eurydice and her musty secrets, her life-insured Shades (Graham has made me take out an all-risk policy). At this time of night, all the objects in the room lie around me like papers the wind has blown flat in an empty lot. I stand about; but where can I go, to whom? This is the place I have hollowed out for myself. Only the flowers, that are opening their buds in water and will be dead by Monday, breathe in the room. I put my face in among them, ether-cool snowdrops; but it is a half-theatrical gesture.

  I even thought I might go out for a while, go down to one of the Hillbrow clubs where people I know are likely to be on a Saturday night. I do that, sometimes, when Graham has gone home. I put on a coat and some lipstick and go to one of those noisy dark places he’s never seen the inside of. He talks about ‘the white laager’ but this is really it, in a way: all the German and Italian immigrant men, looking for the street-life of Europe, and the young white South Africans and their girls, playing at low life, while outside in the lanes the black prostitutes and male transvestites hang about for those who are serious. In some of these places there are lean young men with guitars, and you hear everyone join in the singing of ‘We Shall Overcome’, just as if it were ‘My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean’. I ought to take Graham there sometime. But that would be an encroachment on my private life.

  I have left everything in the room as it was – the onion rings congealed on our plates, Luke’s table napkin thrown on the floor when he turned away from the table, the cheese for the mice to climb up and get at, the monkey lying on the sofa. Tomorrow, for an extra half-crown, Samson will clean it all up and take away the leftovers in an old jam tin. I cream my face as I do every night, as a man carefully cleans and oils his gun after use. I lie in bed, in the dark, and my body follows the routine ritual preparation for sleep: left side with right leg drawn up; belly-down, head to left; left leg drawn up, head to right, weight slowly given to the right side.

  Perhaps he’s talking now in the language I don’t understand, full of exclamations and pauses for emphasis, telling them he’s found a white woman who’ll do it. But that’s nonsense, there’s no possible way he can know about my grandmother’s account. It’s not written on my forehead. He’s gone. In three or four months’ time he’ll turn up again, and it’ll be as if the whole thing has been resolved. Africans are instinctively tactful in these matters. He knows that all my talk about trying to think of someone, asking for time, etc., is just a face-saving way – for him and me – of saying no. He knows it. He must know it well. And next time he’ll want something else from me, a fiver again perhaps, or even just a meal, and it won’t be expedient to bring up what he asked for the last time.

  The headlights of a car making the steep turn into the street send a great pale moth of light travelling slowly round the room; I turn on my back to follow it. Then there’s darkness again, but some other light, a streetlamp perhaps, casts a wavering panel, spattered and blobbed (
the shadow of the branch of a tree?) like the reflection of light in water. But water is heavy and dark, under its own weight, there’s no light down there. I know they must have brought him up when they recovered the suitcase full of papers; but he’ll always be down there, where he chose to go, where he had his last conscious thought. Max was dropped from the late final edition, crowded out by the astronauts. They are still up somewhere above my head. The moon, next time.

  I should have kept the front page, with pictures, to send to Bobo. I must remember in the morning. I don’t know what time it is. Often you can tell from the quality of the darkness and silence whether you have woken deep in the night, or towards morning. It can’t be much before morning, I went to bed late and I seem to have come up from a long sleep. Yet it is quite dark and still, layer on layer of sleep suspended in the building between the earth and the open dark … and now, very far off, I heard quite distinctly the shuffle and clash of couplings falling into place between the coaches of a train; the railway yards are about two miles from here and one never knows they’re there.

  Since I’ve been awake I’ve been thinking very clearly. It’s as if sediment has settled in my mind during sleep, and, like my hearing, all my faculties are perfectly acute. If I moved at all, the stir might produce cloudiness, as a snowstorm comes up in Bobo’s paperweight; but all my muscles are in perfect tension, too, and I am not aware of what position I’m lying in. I’m clear as a fish in a lighted bowl, as their (silvery?) capsule up there in the empty night that stretches even further than the lilac goes. ‘From the Pacific to the Atlantic in twenty minutes’; when Max drowned today, a man walked about in space.

  Why the moon?

  There’s no moon tonight, or else the room couldn’t be so dark.

  Isn’t it the same old yearning for immortality, akin to all our desires to transcend all kinds of human limits? The feeling that if you bring such a thing off you’re approaching the transcension of our limits of life: our death. We master our environment in order to stay alive, but this is mastery only over the human span, whether that’s measured by three-score-and-ten or its prolongation for a few years – as with the old lady – by medicine. We’ve learnt how to stay alive – until it’s time to die.

  You can go down after love or up after the moon.

  But if you master something outside our physical environment, isn’t it reasonable to believe you are reaching out beyond the fact of death? If you master that beyond, as those men up there have done, isn’t that the closest we’ve ever got to mastering death? Won’t it seem the prefiguration, the symbol of that mastery?

  They are alive, up there.

  The very scene of operations is significant. We call the nothing above me ‘the sky’; and that way it’s became the roof of our environment, part of our terrestrial and finite being, witness of our moment of eighty-seven years or thirty-one (he would have been thirty-two next month). But we know that that ‘nothing’, beyond the layer of cloud I’ve seen for myself from a plane, that wrapping of atmosphere that others have soared above – that ‘nothing’ is space. Twin of time, the phrase goes. I hear it in Graham’s voice: together they represent, in the only conception we’re capable of forming of it, infinity. Nightly, lilac infinity.

  If that man over my head can get out of ‘the sky’ into space, step from his man-devised, man-controlled casing into an environment beyond man’s, move of his own volition into the vortex our planet was flung from and in which its cooling and bringing forth of life and the emergence of man and all his works together occupy (if you try to think of it in terms of time) a moment – if he can do this, can he really be still mortal? If God is the principle of the eternal, isn’t he near God, tonight? Nearer than Max – who tried love – at the bottom of the sea. After all, religions teach that the kingdom of God, of the spirit, is not of this world. Flesh is of this world; death is of this world, but only by death we shall enter eternal life. Space is not of this world, either, and yet you can walk about alive in it, up there. You don’t need to be dead in order to enter. Is there anything surprising that there should be a deep connection in our subconscious between the eternity of God and the infinity of space? In fact, some scientists set out to prove that these are one and the same, and nearly all believe that there is some identity, at least, between religious myths and the evolutionary drive towards higher forms of life.

  What’s going on overhead is perhaps the spiritual expression of our age, and we don’t recognize it. Space exploration isn’t a ‘programme’ – it’s the new religion. Out of the capsule, up there, out of this world in a way you can never be, gone down to the seabed; out of this world into infinity, eternality. Could any act of worship as we’ve known such things for two thousand years express more urgently a yearning for life beyond life – the yearning for God?

  That’s what’s up there, behind the horsing around and the dehydrated hamburgers and the televised blood tests. If it’s the moon, that’s why … that’s why …

  … there’s no reason Luke shouldn’t come back here.

  I must have dropped off for a moment; I return with the swoop of a swing towards the ground from the limit of its half-arc.

  The chequebook is in the left-hand upper drawer of my dressing table. Not three feet away. It would be quite feasible for me to use my power of attorney over my grandmother’s account. It is simply a matter of ascertaining (Graham’s word) exactly how I should deposit in her account cheques from abroad; the procedure so far, with foreign exchange, has been that if the currency is from outside the sterling area, I fill in a form giving the source and nature of the funds – dividends from shares in the such-and-such company and so on. And if the money is from the sterling area? Don’t I have to state the source then, too? Well, of course, the payer’s name has to be written on the ordinary deposit slip. That’s routine. But what happens if the money is credited to the account by bank draft? As I remember it, there’s some other sort of form to fill in, or was it that the source of funds had to be declared on the back of the transfer draft? It’s happened once or twice, but I’m not sure what I did.

  And what about income tax declaration. How do you get round that one? Well, Luke must have some ideas; he said that all that was needed was a bank account. Quite. Look at Colonel Gaisford.

  Graham would be the one who would know exactly how one would stand with the bank and the income tax people; he would know exactly where and how one would be found out. This is one thing you could never ask Graham; this is the end of asking Graham. It was Graham who managed to make a successful application for a passport for me, last year, after I’d been refused one for years. Graham has defined the safe limits of what one can get away with – ‘a woman in your position’.

  There is certain to be some clause one’ll fall foul of, some provision one can’t fulfil. But for six months, even if it’s only six months, he said – the bank account of an old woman, who will think of looking into that? My grandmother may only live another few months; it’s as if the account exists for no other reason. She could never be held answerable for anything that might happen. But there’s my signature, of course, the name Van Den Sandt. Yet by the time investigations are made about the source of money coming in, and the link is established with the destination of money being paid out … well, she may be dead, the account may no longer be being used for the same purpose. Everything is impossible, if one calculates on the safe side.

  Why on earth should I do such a thing?

  It seems to me that the answer is simply the bank account. I can’t explain; but there is the bank account. That’s good enough; as when Bobo used to answer a question about his behaviour with the single word: ‘Because’. Am I going into politics again, then? And if so, what kind? But I can’t be bothered with this sort of thing, it’s irrelevant. The bank account is there. It can probably be used for this purpose. What happened, the old lady asked me: well, that’s what’s happened. Luke knows what he wants, and he knows who it is he must get it from. Of
course he’s right. A sympathetic white woman hasn’t got anything to offer him – except the footing she keeps in the good old white Reserve of banks and privileges. And in return he comes with the smell of the smoke of braziers in his clothes. Oh yes, and it’s quite possible he’ll make love to me, next time or some time. That’s part of the bargain. It’s honest, too, like his vanity, his lies, the loans he doesn’t pay back: it’s all he’s got to offer me. It would be better if I accepted gratefully, because then we shan’t owe each other anything, each will have given what he has, and neither is to blame if one has more to give than the other. And in any case, perhaps I want it. I don’t know. Perhaps it would be better than what I’ve had – or got. Suit me better, now. Who’s to say it shouldn’t be called love? You can’t do more than give what you have.

  It’s so quiet I could almost believe I can hear the stars in their courses – a vibrant, infinitely high-pitched hum, what used to be referred to as ‘the music of the spheres’. Probably it’s the passage of the Americans, up there, making their own search, going round in the biggest circle of them all.

  I’ve been lying awake a long time, now. There is no clock in the room since the red travelling clock that Bobo gave me went out of order, but the slow, even beats of my heart repeat to me, like a clock; afraid, alive, afraid, alive, afraid, alive …

  A Note on the Author

  NADINE GORDIMER’s many novels include The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Get A Life, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, The Pickup and, most recently, No Time Like the Present. Her collections of short stories include The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot and, most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She has also collected and edited Telling Tales, a story anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations. In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in Telling Times and a substantial selection of her stories was published in Life Times. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.