Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  We had four days. On our last afternoon, he said ‘Let’s walk up to the old cemetery.’ My mother was cremated—so there was no question of returning painfully to the kind of scene where we had parted with her; still, I should have thought in his mood death was too close to him for him to have found it easy to approach any of its territory. But it seemed this was just one of the directions we hadn’t yet taken on the walks where he had shown me what he believed belonged to me, given in naming me.

  We wandered up to this landmark as we had to others. He took a wrong turning into a lane where there were plaster gnomes and a miniature windmill on a terrace, and canaries sang for their caged lives, piercingly as cicadas. But he retraced our steps and found the right cartographical signals of memory. There was a palatial iron gateway surmounted by a cross, and beyond walls powdery with saltpetre and patched with moss, the black forefingers of cypress trees pointed. Inside: a vacuum, no breath, flowers in green water, withered.

  I had never seen a cemetery like that; tombs, yes, and elaborate tableaux of angels over grave-stones—but here, in addition to a maze of these there were shelves and shelves of stone-faced compartments along the inner side of the walls, each with its plaque.

  Were the dead stored, filed away?

  ‘When there’s no room left for graves, it’s usual in this country. Or maybe it’s just cheaper.’ But he was looking for something.

  ‘They’re all here’ he said. We stepped carefully on gravelled alleys between tombstones and there they were, uncles and aunts and sons and daughters, cousins who had not survived infancy and other collaterals who had lived almost a century, lived through the collapse of the silkworm industry, the departures of their grown children to find an unknown called a better life in other countries, lived on through foreign occupation during a war and through the coming of the footwear and automobile parts factories—all looking out from photographs framed under convex glass and fixed to their tombstones. No face was old, or sick, or worn. Whenever it was they had died, here they consorted in the aspect they had had when young or vigorously mature.

  There were many Albertos and Giovannis and Marias and Clementinas, but the names most honoured by being passed on were Carlo and Lucia, apparently those of the first progenitors to be recorded. Five or six Lucias, from a child in ringlets to fat matrons inclining their heads towards their husbands, many of whom were buried beside them; and then we came to—he came to—her grave. Her sisters were on either side of her. I couldn’t read the rest of the inscription, but LUCIE was incised into the ice-smooth black marble. I leant to look. Go on, he said, giving me the example of bracing his foot on the block that covered her. Under her oval bubble of glass the woman was composed and smooth-haired, with the pupil-less gaze of black eyes, the slightly distended nostrils and straight mouth with indented corners of strong will, and the long neck, emphasized by tear-drop earrings, of Italian beauties. Her eyebrows were too thick; if she had belonged to another generation she would have plucked them and spoiled her looks. He put his arm on my shoulder. ‘There’s a resemblance.’ I shrugged it off with his hand. If your name is on your tombstone, it’s definitive, it’s not some casual misspelling. Why wasn’t she Lucia, like the others?

  ‘I don’t really know—only what I was told by my father, and he didn’t say much … parents in those days … the sisters kept their mouths shut, I suppose, and in any case he was away working at the docks in Nice from the age of eighteen … Apparently she had also gone to work in France when she was very young—the family was poor, no opportunity here. She was a maid in an hotel, and there’s something about her having had a love affair with a Frenchman who used the French version of her name … and so she kept it, even when she married my grandfather.’

  While he was talking a dust-breeze had come up, sweeping its broom among the graves, stirring something that made me tighten my nostrils. The smell of slimy water in the vases of shrivelled flowers and the curious stagnant atmosphere of a walled and crowded space where no living person breathed—what I had taken in when we entered the place was strengthened by some sort of sweetness. With his left foot intimately weighted against her grave, the way a child leans against the knee of a loved adult, he was still talking: ‘There’s the other version—it comes from her mother, that it was her mother who was a maid in Nice and my grandmother was her illegitimate child.’ I was looking at the foot in the pump-soled running shoe, one of the pair he had kitted himself out with at the market in Cuneo on our way to the village. ‘She brought the baby home, and all that remained of the affair was the spelling of the name.’ Dust blew into my eyes, the cloying sweetness caught in my throat and coated my tongue. I wanted to spit. ‘ … what the maiden sisters thought of that, how she held out against them? God knows … I don’t remember any man in the house, I would have remembered …’

  The sweetness was sickly, growing like some thick liquor loading the air. We both inhaled it, it showed in the controlled grimace that wrinkled round his eyes and mouth and I felt the same reaction pulling at my own face muscles. But he went on talking, between pauses; in them we neither of us said anything about the smell, the smell, the smell like that of a chicken gone bad at the back of a refrigerator, a rat poisoned behind a wainscot, a run-over dog swollen at a roadside, the stench, stench of rotting flesh, and all the perfumes of the living body, the clean salty tears and saliva, the thrilling fluids of love-making, the scent of warm hair, turned putrid. Unbearable fermentation of the sweetness of life. It couldn’t have been her. It could not have been coming to him from her, she had been dead so long, but he stayed there with his foot on her stone as if he had to show me that there was no stink in our noses, as if he had to convince me that it wasn’t her legacy.

  We left saunteringly ignoring the gusts of foulness that pressed against us, each secretly taking only shallow breaths in revulsion from the past. At the gate we met a woman in the backless slippers and flowered overall local women wore everywhere except to go to church. She saw on our faces what was expressed in hers, but hers was mixed with some sort of apologetic shame and distress. She spoke to him and he said something reassuring, using his hands and shaking his head. She repeated what she had told him and began to enlarge on it; I stood by, holding my breath as long as I could. We had some difficulty in getting away from her, out beyond the walls where we could stride and breathe.

  ‘A young man was killed on his motorbike last week.’

  What was there to say?

  ‘I didn’t see a new grave.’

  ‘No—he’s in one of the shelves—that’s why … She says it takes some time, in there.’

  So it wasn’t the secrets of the rotting past, Lucie’s secrets, it was the secret of the present, always present; the present was just as much there, in that walled place of the dead, as it was where the young bloods, like that one, tossed down their bright helmets in the bar, raced towards death, like that one, scattering admiring children in the church square.

  Now when I write my name, that is what I understand by it.

  LOOK-ALIKES

  It was scarcely worth noticing at first; an out-of-work lying under one of the rare indigenous shrubs cultivated by the Botany Department on campus. Some of us remembered, afterwards, having passed him. And he—or another like him—was seen rummaging in the refuse bins behind the Student Union; one of us (a girl, of course) thrust out awkwardly to him a pitta she’d just bought for herself at the canteen, and she flushed with humiliation as he turned away mumbling. When there were more of them, the woman in charge of catering came out with a kitchen-hand in a blood-streaked apron to chase them off like a band of marauding monkeys.

  We were accustomed to seeing them pan-handling in the streets of the city near the university and gathered in this vacant lot or that, clandestine with only one secret mission, to beg enough to buy another bottle; moving on as the druids’ circle of their boxes and bits of board spread on the ground round the ashes of their trash fires was cleared for the erection of
post-modern office blocks. We all knew the one who waved cars into empty parking bays. We’d all been confronted, as we crossed the road or waited at the traffic lights, idling in our minds as the engine of the jalopy idles, by the one who held up a piece of cardboard with a message running out of space at the edges: NO JOB IM HUNGRY EVEYONE HELP PLeas.

  At first; yes, there were already a few of them about. They must have drifted in by the old, unfrequented entrance down near the tennis courts, where the security fence was not yet completed. And if they were not come upon, there were the signs: trampled spaces in the bushes, empty bottles, a single split shoe with a sole like a lolling tongue. No doubt they had been chased out by a patrolling security guard. No student, at that stage, would have bothered to report the harmless presence; those of us who had cars might have been more careful than usual to leave no sweaters or radios visible through the locked windows. We followed our familiar rabbit-runs from the lecture rooms and laboratories back, forth and around campus, between residences, libraries, Student Union and swimming pool, through avenues of posters making announcements of debates and sports events, discos and rap sessions, the meetings of Muslim, Christian or Jewish brotherhoods, gay or feminist sisterhoods, with the same lack of attention to all but the ones we’d put up ourselves.

  It was summer when it all started. We spend a lot of time on the lawns around the pool, in summer. We swot down there, we get a good preview of each other more or less nude, boys and girls, there’s plenty of what you might call foreplay—happy necking. And the water to cool off in. The serious competitive swimmers come early in the morning when nobody else is up, and it was they who discovered these people washing clothes in the pool. When the swimmers warned them off they laughed and jeered. One left a dirt-stiff pair of pants that a swimmer balled and threw after him. There was argument among the swimmers; one felt the incident ought to be reported to Security, two were uncomfortable with the idea in view of the university’s commitment to being available to the city community. They must have persuaded him that he would be exposed for elitism, because although the pool was referred to as The Wishee-Washee, among us, after that, there seemed to be no action taken.

  Now you began to see them all over. Some greeted you smarmily (my baas, sir, according to their colour and culture), retreating humbly into the undergrowth, others, bold on wine or stoned on meths, sentimental on pot, or transformed in the wild hubris of all three, called out a claim (Hey man, Ja boetie) and even beckoned to you to join them where they had formed one of their circles, or huddled, just two, with the instinct for seclusion that only couples looking for a place to make love have, among us. The security fence down at the tennis courts was completed, reinforced with spikes and manned guard-house, but somehow they got in. The guards with their Alsatian dogs patrolled the campus at night but every day there were more shambling figures disappearing into the trees, more of those thick and battered faces looking up from the wells between buildings, more supine bodies contoured like sacks of grass-cuttings against the earth beneath the struts of the sports grandstands.

  And they were no longer a silent presence. Their laughter and their quarrels broadcast over our student discussions, our tête-à-tête conversations and love-making, even our raucous fooling about. They had made a kind of encampment for themselves, there behind the sports fields where there was a stretch of ground whose use the university had not yet determined: it was for future expansion of some kind, and in the meantime equipment for maintenance of the campus was kept there—objects that might or might not be useful, an old tractor, barrels for indoor plants when the Vice-Chancellor requested a bower to decorate some hall for the reception of distinguished guests, and—of course—the compost heaps. The compost heaps were now being used as a repository for more than garden waste. If they had not been there with their odours of rot sharpened by the chemical agents for decay with which they were treated, the conclave living down there might have been sniffed out sooner. Perhaps they had calculated this in the secrets of living rough: perhaps they decided that the Alsatians’ noses would be bamboozled.

  So we knew about them—everybody knew about them, students, faculty, administrative staff, Vice-Chancellor—and yet nobody knew about them. Not officially. Security was supposed to deal with trespassers as a routine duty; but although Security was able to find and escort beyond the gates one or two individuals too befuddled or not wily enough to keep out of the way, they came back or were replaced by others. There was some kind of accommodation they had worked out within the order of the campus, some plan of interstices they had that the university didn’t have; like the hours at which security patrols could be expected, there must have been other certainties we students and our learned teachers had relied on so long we did not realize that they had become useless as those red bomb-shaped fire extinguishers which, when a fire leaps out in a room, are found to have evaporated their content while hanging on the wall.

  We came to recognise some of the bolder characters; or rather it was that they got to recognise us—with their street-wise judgment they knew who could be approached. For a cigarette. Not money—you obviously don’t ask students for what they themselves are always short of. They would point to a wrist and ask the time, as an opener. And they must have recognised something else, too; those among us who come to a university because it’s the cover where you think you can be safe from surveillance and the expectations others have of you—back to play-school days, only the sand-pit and the finger-painting are substituted by other games. The dropouts, just cruising along until the end of the academic year, sometimes joined the group down behind the grandstands, taking a turn with the zol and maybe helping out with the donation of a bottle of wine now and then. Of course only we, their siblings, identified them; with their jeans bought ready-torn at the knees, and hair shaved up to a topknot, they would not have been distinguished from the younger men in the group by a passing professor dismayed at the sight of the intrusion of the campus by hobos and loafers. (An interesting point, for the English Department, that in popular terminology the whites are known as hobos and the blacks as loafers.) If student solidarity with the underdog was expressed in the wearing of ragged clothes, then the invaders’ claim to be within society was made through adoption of acceptable fashionable unconventions. (I thought of putting that in my next essay for Sociology 11.) There were topknots and single earrings among the younger invaders, dreadlocks, and one had long tangled blond hair snaking about his dark-stubbled face. He could even have passed for a certain junior lecturer in the Department of Political Science.

  So nobody said a word about these recruits from among the students, down there. Not even the Society of Christian Students, who campaigned for moral regeneration on the campus. In the meantime, ‘the general situation had been brought to the notice’ of Administration. The implication was that the intruders were to be requested to leave, with semantic evasion of the terms ‘squatter’ or ‘eviction’. SUJUS (Students For Justice) held a meeting in protest against forced removal under any euphemism. ASOCS (Association of Conservative Students) sent a delegation to the Vice-Chancellor to demand that the campus be cleared of degenerates.

  Then it was discovered that there were several women living among the men down there. The white woman was the familiar one who worked along the cars parked in the streets, trudging in thonged rubber sandals on swollen feet. The faces of the two black women were darkened by drink as white faces are reddened by it. The three women were seen swaying together, keeping upright on the principle of a tripod. The Feminist Forum took them food, tampons, and condoms for their protection against pregnancy and AIDS, although it was difficult to judge which was still young enough to be a sex object in need of protection; they might be merely prematurely aged by the engorged tissues puffing up their faces and the exposure of their skin to all weathers, just as, in a reverse process, pampered females look younger than they are through the effect of potions and plastic surgery.

  From ASOCS came the ru
mour that one of the group had made obscene advances to a girl student—although she denied this in tears, she had offered him her pitta, which he had refused, mumbling ‘I don’t eat rubbish’. The Vice-Chancellor was importuned by parents who objected to their sons’ and daughters’ exposure to undesirables, and by Hope For The Homeless who wanted to put up tents on this territory of the over-privileged. The City Health authorities were driven off the campus by SUJUS and The Feminist Forum while the Jewish Student Congress discussed getting the Medical School to open a clinic down at the grandstands, the Islamic Student Association took a collection for the group while declaring that the area of their occupation was out of bounds to female students wearing the chador, and the Students Buddhist Society distributed tracts on meditation among men and women quietly sleeping in the sun with their half-jacks, discreet in brown paper packets up to the screw-top, snug beside them as hot-water bottles.

  These people could have been removed by the police, of course, on a charge of vagrancy or some such, but the Vice-Chancellor, the University Council, and the Faculty Association had had too much experience of violence resulting from the presence of the police on campus to invite this again. The matter was referred back and forth. When we students returned after the Easter vacation the blond man known by his head of hair, the toothless ones, the black woman who always called out Hullo lovey how’you and the neat queen who would buttonhole anyone to tell of his student days in Dublin, You kids don’t know what a real university is, were still there. Like the stray cats students (girls again) stooped to scratch behind the ears.

  And then something really happened. One afternoon I thought I saw Professor Jepson in a little huddle of four or five comfortably under a tree on their fruit-box seats. Someone who looked the image of him; one of the older men, having been around the campus some months, now, was taking on some form of mimesis better suited to him than the kid-stuff garb the younger ones and the students aped from each other. Then I saw him again, and there was Dr Heimrath from Philosophy just in the act of taking a draw, next to him—if any social reject wanted a model for look-alike it would be from that Department. And I was not alone, either; the friend I was with that day saw what I did. We were the only ones who believed a student who said he had almost stepped on Bell, Senior Lecturer from Math, in the bushes with one of the three women; Bell’s bald head shone a warning signal just in time. Others said they’d seen Kort wrangling with one of the men, there were always fights when the gatherings ran out of wine and went onto meths. Of course Kort had every kind of pure alcohol available to him in his domain, the science laboratories; everybody saw him, again and again, down there, it was Kort, all right, no chance of simple resemblance, and the euphoria followed by aggression that a meths concoction produces markedly increased in the open-air coterie during the following weeks. The papers Math students handed in were not returned when they were due; Bell’s secretary did not connect calls to his office, day after day, telling callers he had stepped out for a moment. Jepson, Professor Jepson who not only had an international reputation as a nuclear physicist but also was revered by the student body as the one member of faculty who was always to be trusted to defend students’ rights against authoritarianism, our old prof, everybody’s enlightened grandfather—he walked down a corridor unbuttoned, stained, with dilated pupils that were unaware of the students who shrank back, silent, to make way.