Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  They walked out together. The corridor, like the whisky glasses, had emptied; they said goodnight and then as if remembering the most elementary protocol, he offered his hand to her.

  Roberta Blayne told her Administrator that the Deputy-Director in the Ministry of Land Affairs had approached her with some further questions about the subsistence crop-cash crop debate; Henderson said they might make it their business to cultivate the man, he hadn’t been prominent in the debate that afternoon, nor was heard from much at other sessions where you’d expect him to speak up, mh?—but one didn’t know who was or was not influential behind the scenes in the cabinet. What was his name again?

  A Saturday ten days later she was drying her hair when the phone rang and a secretarial voice informed her that the Deputy-Director in the Department of Land Affairs was on his way to visit her; was this convenient. But it was a statement, not a question. She had only just combed out her hair and wriggled bare feet into sandals when she heard a horn and from her window saw the man who woke her with tea and polished the floors, heels flung up as he raced to open the gates. A black car of the luxury models provided for officials just below ministerial level came crunching over the gravel, delivered the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs at the front door, and was directed by the houseman round to the yard.

  She had the door open: there he was, Deputy-Director Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma, still formally dressed in a suit as he would be on official occasions, although it was Saturday. They shook hands once more. She led him to the livingroom.—You may have been in this house some other time—when Chuck Harris was the Agency’s man here, with his team? You probably know the place, anyway.—

  —Thank you. No, I did not have the occasion to come to this particular house, of course I knew Mr Harris and his people. I was in the Ministry of Agriculture during that period.—

  —Well that must have been an ideal preparation, for Land. I’ll get us some tea—you’d prefer coffee?—

  —Whatever. It is a good background to have, that I agree, but the problems are different, yes, agriculture’s—they come after the question of ownership of the land—

  She was at the passage leading to the kitchen. But when this man of few words at working breakfasts and meetings did begin to talk he expected no interruption. She had to hover there.

  —The Ministry where I was … was deployed … before—Agriculture, we came up against it all the time, excellent opportunities from the point of view of developing better farming practices, introduction of new crops and so on—the best expertise from other countries, the agencies and all that. But to introduce this on little plots everywhere, all over, too small for anything but subsistence farming—where is the land.—

  —Oh we understand only too well in what my boss calls our outfit—we know that until the land’s reclaimed that was taken from you in colonial times, the larger agricultural projects we advise can’t go further than enthusiasm … Even yours, if we convince you they’re good … That’s why we have to look at projects we’re able to get going now. The community ones people from those little plots can work on together—oh you’ve heard it all before—

  She got away to order the tea, words trailing after her.

  In the kitchen she found a uniformed driver and two men with the heavy shoulders, armed belts, and discreet communication contraptions in their ears—the display of bodyguards as the spread tail is the display of a peacock—seated round the kitchen table already drinking tea from the houseman’s big mugs. The houseman was animatedly hostly over them but set about at once putting some relic of a starched lace mat on a tray for the other serving he would bring to her and the occasion of her distinguished guest, a man from the Government.

  The guest appeared to be still with the statement left behind in the passage, ignoring her ritual of serving him tea, before he spoke. It could have been unease, or the self-confidence of status. He had the gift of the closed face that blackness, in her experience, enviably makes obscure. The so-called inscrutability of the Chinese was no match. He was very black, no taint of colonial dilution in the blood, there.

  —You are satisfied with the progress?—

  Did he mean of the country or the Agency’s efforts within it? Safer to take it as reference to the Agency.—How could we be? Always want to achieve more, feel we could have done more. Progress is slow … our approach is to learn what’s needed, right where we are—

  —How does it compare?—

  So he had meant his country. Had he been sent by someone—another hidden agenda—to get something out of an unsuspecting female, not in a high position but in the know, close to the Administrator of funds.

  Not so easy with this one, he was going to find; and let him wonder if she was too innocently stupid to suspect what he was after, or too alertly experienced in such devious politicking to let him get at it. She produced the Agency’s stock responses, reassuring appreciation of the Government’s sharing of objectives, unchallengeable knowledge of its own people, vital element of their history in influencing, guiding the possibilities of the present etc. All this compared, she would say, rather favourably (her tongue’s quick caution had held back ‘very’) with other territories where the Agency had operated.

  —And you were always with him, so for you also, you know his impressions.—

  —Always, no. But in the last few years. I’ve been fortunate enough to learn a lot from him. Experience with him.—

  And for the half-hour or less the subject—whatever it really was—went no further. He followed the necessary preliminary of hitching the cuff of his striped shirt that protruded at the correct length from his jacket sleeve, looking at his watch.—I have a meeting.—

  He named another province, a two-hour journey away.

  She called to the kitchen, for him, and in the moments of silence as they walked together to the front door they could hear the loud and laughing farewells between his driver and bodyguards and her houseman.

  As he was about to step into the car brought round with a flourish from the yard, he turned.—I hope I did not disturb your weekend.—

  The protocol came instinctively to her, she left the verandah, protesting, her hand out for his.

  The livingroom held the low emptiness left by a transient occupation in which there was no meeting: the only one was the political appointment for which the man had stopped by on the way. But the houseman Tomasi was so elated by the official visitors he had entertained that he kept up a bass hum as he went about his work, doing something tympanically noisy in the kitchen.

  It was only when she was driving to lunch with the Hendersons on Sunday, she suddenly remembered: that afternoon after the strictly single glass of whisky she had told the man that her Administrator would be pleased to have a talk with him; but Alan Henderson had not asked her to arrange an appointment at the Deputy-Director’s convenience, and she had not reminded him of this. That was the unspoken message of the visit on Saturday!

  She and her Administrator were playfully but firmly forbidden, by his wife, to chew over, as she put it, Agency stuff on Sundays, but while the Administrator’s Assistant and her boss were sitting out during a mixed doubles at tennis she took the chance to tell him of the Saturday visit—of course the man wanted to know why the Administrator of the Agency hadn’t approached him, was offended. Her dereliction of duty, really! —That’s what I’m for, to see that you take the hints passed on to me!—

  They were being called to the court.—No aid in the doubles! —A cry from his wife Flora. They leapt to their feet in mock alacrity.

  Roberta Blayne hastened with the genuine thing to call the Deputy-Director’s secretary and arrange the date and time when the Administrator would come to his office. Or would the Deputy-Director care to lunch with him?; whichever.

  Alan Henderson was back in New York for a special briefing at headquarters and she had had a week of overwhelming work, dealing with what it was long tacitly agreed she could do as well as he, and stalling responses
to requests that must await his return. She was on the telephone to him across the seven-hour time difference when she might have hoped to get some sleep. The computer screen, voice mail, e-mail, the cell phone’s summons: when she finally did get back to the house she could not tolerate another four walls and found herself walking round, up and down, the garden—so enclosingly over-grown that she felt like some animal let out only into an exercise pen. There was a party she was invited to at the witty lawyer’s with Flora Henderson, that Saturday night; she felt too tired to expect to enjoy herself but didn’t want to disappoint Flora. In the morning she was half-heartedly looking through her clothes for something to wear that evening when the telephone rang. Early in the Southern Hemisphere, middle of the night, across the world; wouldn’t be Alan, thank God.

  There was the voice that seemed always to be addressing someone else: who, me? Roberta Blayne, yes, speaking. As if it could be other, unless that of the houseman Tomasi; or does the man think I don’t live alone.

  Would she like to come out in the country, see something of the rural Eastern area,—I don’t think you have been.—

  —Oh. Oh … When.—

  —Today. I can fetch you from your house at nine-thirty. Or ten. What you like. It’s quite a long way, not good to leave too late.—

  He had had his meeting with the Administrator before Alan left for America, so surely that was enough contact. But suddenly the idea of getting out of the glowering matted garden into space, grass and sky, the scent and feel of air not over-breathed by people and blasted by airconditioning—the appropriate responses came, never mind for whom.—Lovely, love to get away, thank you, can we make it ten? I didn’t have much sleep last night, got up late …—

  Instead of the elegant silk trousers for the party she pulled out a pair of jeans less worn than those of her usual weekend wear; leather lace-ups instead of sandals—‘the country’ might include some rough walking, at least she hoped so.

  He came driving himself in his own car. Also a luxury model but an older one and he was alone. The dark three-piece suit had been shed; Flora knew the wife of the local Indian, Expert Tailor & Gentleman’s Outfitter who made a lot of money in custom-cutting this only slightly varied uniform for parliamentarians. The Deputy-Director wore khaki pants and a blue shirt, open-necked, but with his unchanged air of formality. He held the passenger door wide for her as she settled herself chattering, and Tomasi, clearly delighted at the reappearance of the important visitor, stood to watch the car leave through the gates of what was his domain whatever transients from the Agency might occupy it.

  —In your place, your home, there in England, you live in the country, you like the country life so much, Miss Blayne?—

  She laughed.—You can’t spend the day giving me a breather, calling me ‘miss’—please, I’m Roberta.—

  He did not try it out until they had been driving for a while and it was clear—his tone made it clear—that this usage was not to be taken as unwonted familiarity. His supposition that field trips with the Administrator would not have been in the direction taken now, was correct; that was a suitable opening for him to give her information about the countryside they were travelling, the people who lived there—migration from the West because of floods a few years ago, migration from the South because of more recent drought, cattle country here, maize on the plain, baboons, yes (she thought she saw something move on the rocks) and even a leopard sometimes, in the hills. But mostly shot out.

  —Fur coats for ladies in Europe?—

  —I wouldn’t say that. We have poaching pretty much under control in this area. The big game was really finished, anyway, long ago, the old days when the British were here. Many years of their governors’ hunting parties.—

  Denunciation of the colonial period, whether bitter or merely derisive, was a stock subject in social exchanges among Government and other dignitaries’ circles, to which the Agency often contributed. Alan Henderson could always raise a laugh along with a glass:—Thank my lucky stars I’m not a Brit!—It didn’t count that his Assistant apparently was; she didn’t matter. She had been in Deputy-Director Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma’s presence on such occasions; this present passing remark about the colonial governors was near as he had ever come to bitter historical judgments. Due to his being habitually the man of few words? Or it could be a sign of strength of character: no indulgence of dwelling on the past for every lack in the present; perhaps even the largesse of forgiveness—the same ‘Brits’ were being offered the grace of retribution by their providing more ‘soft’ loans. The way forward. She didn’t know the man; not even to the extent she felt she knew some of his colleagues by professional attention to the views most of them volubly expressed.

  There were villages of the very kind where the Agency entered into local projects with the inhabitants; she could tell him, if he happened not to know of it, of the successful brick-making that employed women whose husbands had lost their jobs due to the closure of an old coal mine—the women provided bricks for the men to build a school and a clinic, and had begun to sell surplus production to make a living for themselves. The way forward. Well … inch by inch. This time he was the one to assure of suitable appreciation; land acquisition was on a grand scale, a difficult operation (for the first time he allowed himself a glance away from the road, at her, and she understood an unspoken reference to the forced occupation of white farmers’ land by the people in a neighbouring country).—Small is beautiful. Also. Isn’t that it.—And he smiled, she saw in profile, his attention on the road. Not far on there was a village with a store crouching under a broad sign BAMJEE’S DRINK COCA COLA PETER STUYVESANT.—What would you like?—He pulled up the car.

  She was fine, didn’t want anything, thank you.

  The children who were the frieze of her actions, her life, on Agency assignments everywhere, gathered slowly round the car while he was in the store. They are always the same children. Their black skin as if sandpapered grey, their leaking noses and shy giggles. One or two come up to her window silently; it is their way of begging. What could she have asked him for? What need could she possibly have, before these. It is the policy of the Agency not to give handouts; charity is not an answer, although caritas is part of an answer when you open your mouth and out comes ‘empowerment’ ‘development’. She was off duty; the man was not wearing his Deputy-Director’s garb: she fumbled in her locally-woven straw bag and brought up some useless small change to give before he appeared from the store.

  Bottle-heads winked and the serrated topknot of a pineapple poked out of plastic bags he was carrying. In the rear-view mirror she saw him stacking the trunk. When he got into the driver’s seat he handed her a bottle of soda.—No mineral water … I’m sorry no cup, glass—

  And now she thought it ridiculous, even rude, not to be using his name, if without permission.—Who needs a glass, thanks so much Gladwell—I realise I’m thirsty after all.—She tipped back her head and drank as he drove; paused, wiped the mouth on her shirt and offered the bottle to his hand on the wheel, but he merely lifted splayed fingers, kept the hand in place.—I had something in the shop.—

  She wanted to say, I don’t have any communicable disease, but he was not a person with whom one could joke. (As if one could joke about anything ‘communicable’ these days when a new pestilence threatened intimacy.) Instead she asked him where they were making for—or was this going to be a circular drive, nowhere in particular. No, they were going to a place, there was a place where an uncle of his lived, he had some papers for him, something to arrange.—An old man doesn’t understand these matters. It’s on the edge of the forest, mopani trees, you know those? Illala palms.—

  —A village?—

  —Not really. Outside the village.—

  —What does he grow? Does he farm cattle?—

  —It’s not a cattle farming area. They can’t cultivate. His sons work in town and send some money to the old ones.—

  There was a one-room-sized brick
house with a tin roof and three or four satellite huts whose thatch hung like grey falling hair. In such a place, the car seemed grown twice its size, the sun clashing off its brilliant black surface. The Agency’s scarred station wagons she was used to arriving in were less blatant. An old man in a sagging dark jacket and trousers (could it be a cast-off parliamentary suit handed down) and a woman so round and heavy in her skirts she might have been the African version of a Russian doll with many clones of descending size inside her, came out of the house and warm greetings and exclamations were exchanged. His passenger didn’t know the language but gathered these were praise of the member of the family who was in Government.

  She stood by smiling, as on a field trip with her Administrator. The couple had shown no reaction at the arrival of a white accompanying the Deputy-Director; no doubt a Government man, one of their own, could command a white secretary. Their member of the Government introduced her first in their language, and when the old man responded in English, Pleased to meet you, madam:—This lady—she’s from the aid people in America who are helping the Government in our country.—So now the distinction of the visit was doubled, for the old couple. But with dignity of his own the old man gestured to his house—the Deputy-Director responded with some interjection that led to his taking his uncle reverently by the arm, and the two of them fetched three chairs and a stool from the house.