Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘ … sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come.’

  Can you believe such a thing. Dump a baby in a toilet. Well it was the church toilet, whoever did it that Sunday knew when we brethren came to morning service we’d hear the crying. No-one could get hold of Welfare on a Sunday and the police—we know our police boys, they’re our own sons or other relatives in our township, what’d they know about looking after a baby couldn’t have been more than two weeks old! So Abraham and I took it home, just for the day, we don’t have kids of our own and other brethren have the house full with them.

  A girl. Pretty little thing. Had no hair yet just a bit of fine fluff, so what’s the easiest thing you can tell whether a baby is one of us, tight, curly, wasn’t there. Except for hair, most of our babies could be whites when they’re born, they’re very light-coloured, the white in us only gets taken over by the black as they get older. The noses usually aren’t flatter than all babies have, and if the eyes are green—our grandfathers, great-grandfathers all the way back were Malay, Indian, Bushmen, real blacks, whites, you name it, and somehow from the mixture many of us have green eyes, like whites. By the time the Welfare made up their minds about which orphanage to get her into we’d … well, no kids of our own, we’d got fond of her, our life was different not just the two of us like before, Abraham had a good steady job with his Jewish boss at the shoe factory, I didn’t really need to go out to work. So we kept her. We named her a lovely name, Denise, and gave her our name. She was christened in our Seventh Day Adventist church by our minister. It was only about the time she began to be steady on her feet and begin to walk that there was no doubt about it; she was a white kid. The reason why her hair was so fine and slow to cover was that she was going to be very blond. The green eyes didn’t help; this kid was white. You do get throwbacks among us that can pass for white, but she was the real thing. Everybody saw it, all the neighbours and Abraham’s and my aunties, uncles, cousins—and looked from the kid to us, saying nothing but thinking, we knew, what were we going to do, later? For school. The children played with her as if she was the same as them; children learn the names for difference, from us, what did apartheid mean to them: just another grown-ups’ word. The local nursery school, run by our church with charity grants, was no problem. All shades of our skins passed, there, some were blacker than it was meant for, slipped in by parents from the nearby black township through family or church connections with our people; if one tot was whiter than she should be, who was going to ask questions.

  But when the time came for real school, Government school, we had to make up our minds, Abraham and I. To be white in apartheid days was to be—everything. Everything! From, you know, sitting on a bench waiting for a bus, to getting a job in a bank, renting a flat, owning a house, qualifying in a trade, getting a good education—all these came to you, just like that, if you were white, all these were closed to you if you were some other colour. We had to decide whether our little girl—because who else’s was she, she called us Mama and Daddy—should grow up to be one of us, our own people, here in the places and jobs, the lives the whites decide for us, or whether we owed it to her to try for white. And that’s not the right way to put it, either, because that means you’re not white but may be able to pass, and our girl was white. Easy to be accepted by our kind because what are we? Such a stew-pot most of us don’t even know, from way back, what’s made us whatever we are, our family names are only clues, Dutch, English, German, Jewish, Malay-Muslim, some of this is even hidden behind family names taken which are just names of months—September, February, that’s two families in this street where Abraham and I took in what is called a foundling who had no name at all.

  We decided to try to put her in a white school. That meant Government school was out. Government schools were separated: blacks at black schools, us coloureds at coloured schools, whites at white schools. Our child, living in our place, would have to go to the local school for our kind. But there were private schools we heard about. A convent school. We were Seventh Day Adventists, no whites or blacks in our local church, but people said the nuns had some arrangement, they took in a few black or coloured children if the parents could pay. But the convent refused her, the vacancies for exceptions were full, and then when we tried a private Anglican school, although the headmistress who interviewed us with our child looked at her curiously and kind of sadly, she wasn’t given a place there, either. The headmistress said that, even with us paying, the school couldn’t afford to take our child because for coloured or black children the Government supplied no subsidy as it did for other private pupils.

  Denise Appolis attended primary and high schools in a coloured township outside the city and suburbs, like the townships and schools designated for blacks and for Indians, and matriculated as head prefect with three distinctions, in English, Afrikaans (the language spoken in her home) and history. Abraham and Elsie Appolis were unsurprised and proud of her. There had grown up in them, as she grew up, the unspoken shared sense that because she was not their biological creation, she had not been made in their bed, she was somehow chosen. Not alone in the sense that they had taken her for a day and kept her; chosen for a different life, other than theirs. A life of fulfilment they thought of as happiness. Had they, then, not been happy? Yes, in their way, the way open to them. Happiness as being white: no boundaries! God’s will.

  Now it was possible for her to be what she was: white. The private business schools in the city were given as her home address that of Abraham’s white Jewish boss (appropriated, with or without consent?) when Abraham and Elsie sent her for application unaccompanied by their presence and obvious place in the official race classification. She carried a letter of parental authority written carefully in English (corrected by the girl who had gained Distinction in that subject), and proof of the parents’ ability to pay fees, in details of their savings bank account. There she was, a white seventeen-year-old among other young white men and women. She evidently made no friends but concentrated on her computer and general secretarial courses and every day came home by way of one of the roving minibuses in the city, back to the township, her friends there. Just as well she was the quiet one who kept to herself at the business college, she didn’t bring any fellow student home; Abraham and Elsie never brought up the subject, neither did she offer any explanation.

  It seemed she understood what their love was doing for her. You couldn’t grow up in that township without becoming aware that it was best to be white, if by some good fortune you had the chance to take. God’s will. When her courses were—successfully—completed she and the parents studied together the situations vacant advertised in the morning and evening papers; for the first time in his life Abraham brought home both (TV was the source of news for what was happening in the world, for him) from his boss’s office, with the permission and kindly interest of his Jewish employer. After all, they were family men of around the same age; there was the joking:—You’re not going down those pages because you’re walking out on me?——No, no … it’s my daughter, just come through business college.—

  Denise wrote her own confident letters of application, now giving the post office box number of her father’s workplace for convenient reply. She read the format out to the parents for approval, and was granted several interviews in favourable response. With her very first job she could choose! Their Denise! Again the three conferred, Denise and the parents; Abraham knew something of the business world, even if he was only a factory foreman. She made the right choice: a trainee in a bank. All personnel white like her. Her starting salary was low, but enough for their girl to clothe herself, pay for daily minibus transport, enjoy a little independence, and it meant Elsie didn’t have to take care of an old white lady anymore—work she’d found to help pay the business school fees. But it appeared that their girl had made one friend during the business school courses, after all. Denise’s appointment at the bank was to begin on the first day
of the coming month, two weeks ahead; she was having a holiday, a reward she deserved after her success in her courses, helping Elsie at home to make new curtains and riding into the city quite often to see the friend. She even spent a night at the friend’s family house, there was a party. In the white suburbs, they were, house and party, of course.

  Abraham found the words after he and Elsie were in the dark in bed.—D’you think she’s told this friend.——Told what.—As if there was nothing that would come out, nothing to explain. —Who she is. Us. Here.——Must have. Otherwise what’d the friend think of never being invited back. Here.—

  There was no resentment or hurt in the fact that their girl did not bring her friend home to them. Other play-whites did so, they knew, with genuinely trusted white pals, in particular that band of whites, Communists, Lefties, Liberals of one kind or another who wanted to prove themselves against the race laws. But their girl was not a play-white. She was fully entitled to be at those parties in the suburbs, sleeping over in a white’s house. They knew and their girl knew what they wanted for her and she should claim for herself in order to fulfil that want.

  Yet when she told them, she and her girlfriend had found a bachelor flat in the city they could afford and would be moving in together—it was the home address she’d given to the bank—they felt something suddenly fallen away from them. Under the very ground they themselves had prepared. That feeling, in their hanging hands, on their faces: it was so—so what? Unreasonable. Shaming. Silly. What on earth was the matter with them, you Abraham (her look), you mama Elsie (his look)? This was the next, the right and vital step in moving out of the cramped life they had and into the life that had everything. For her to leave them was the natural process of their act of love for her. Freed.

  The friend Angela had found a job in an attorney’s office near the bank, the housing arrangement was convenient for both and they got along well together. Abraham and Elsie drew some of their small savings to help Denise buy a refrigerator and her share of the basic furniture needed. They were taken to see the flat and met the girl Angela; it was clear she knew what to expect and was friendly and respectful in the normal way of young adults meeting someone’s parents. So this girl Angela was in the compact as well. They never visited the flat again; but Denise came home—must still be home, a flat that’s passed from occupant to occupant, marks on the walls not your own, can’t be home—she came to them often. Nearly every Sunday, Christmas and birthdays, theirs and hers (calculated as the Sunday she was found in the church toilet), sometimes sleeping the night in her old bed. Such a good girl. Others with her circumstances would have disappeared, disowned them. And that they would have understood as the final act, in their love. God’s will. If he allowed the laws—laws that made it necessary—to be the acts of people who prayed obedient to him in their whites’ churches. This was a proviso that Abraham, growing older, had but would not pass on to Elsie, wounding her with his lapse of faith. Oddly, if there was anyone he might have conveyed it to it could have been his Jewish boss, he’d been working at the factory for more than twenty-five years and it was to himself, the foreman, that the boss one day confided he hadn’t been away ill for a week, his absence was because he had been taking his wife back and forth to doctors for tests that showed she had cancer.

  A foundling. Who was this girl they decided was Denise? A chosen one, having no provenance, she could make for herself two lives, one where she was cradled and loved and learnt to talk, communicate in the intimate taal of a designated township, learnt to walk—walk out into the second, other life: everything.

  Denise and her flatmate had boyfriends. Angela, many. The weekends when Abraham-and-Elsie’s girl was home with them, the current chap could come and make love to Angela in the flat. She never let on—that was the phrase her best friend could be assured of—where that conveniently absent best friend was. Denise, after a few trials that didn’t get as far as bed, had only one boyfriend. When she knew Angela would be out for a late night, they could go to bed in the room she shared with Angela; their turn to make love. They had met at a party, the customary first stage in the white middle-class ritual of mating choices—the birthday of one of the other girls who worked in the bank. He was a technician with a company selling and servicing television sets; a young man from the lower end of that class, his father a retired post-master. Afrikaans was the home language but the mother was of English-speaking origin, so he was fluent in both, and attractively intelligent. A bee scenting something in her pollen: he lent books to his girl; they were there beside her bed when he wasn’t and Angela was sleeping off wine and a wild night. They were novels and travel books. He was saving for a trip overseas, he knew what he wanted to see in his life, London, Paris, Rome. And Venice, she would add; one of the books described the Piazza San Marco, and the gondolas. Who, of either of them, could have said what decided they would marry—the love-making in her bed, the freedom beyond that she had gained for herself, the freedom he was aware of, the world outside the country, the city of a bank and a television sales shop? These were the components of falling in love; marriage was the accepted social means of protecting this and giving it permanence with an official license and vows in a church.

  There the usual, simple progression of the mating ritual was neither usual nor simple. Denise had told Mike—not who she was because she didn’t, couldn’t know—who her Mama and Daddy were, and taken him back over the line she had crossed under their loving guidance, to meet them. He spoke Afrikaans with Abraham and Elsie, a common language brings ease, it didn’t matter that the young white man was in a Coloured township, a Coloured home for the first time (a kind of foreign travel). Being in love is a state of the continuous present, the now; he was living only in the context of his girl’s eyes and breasts and sweet thrilling entry to her body. This unfamiliar, forbidden separate place of colour she had been nurtured in was of no account to him; all that he had been nurtured to believe about the taint of contact with those of a different tint was irrelevant: being in love converted him from milk-imbibed racism, weaned him at a single encounter. And, of course, the fact was that his girl was not theirs, Abraham’s and Elsie’s, she was white—he knew better than anyone how white in all the physical characteristics cited by those claiming these as superior to the characteristics of all others in the official racial categories laid down by law and followed by the church. To record that Abraham and Elsie were overjoyed at a coming marriage of the girl who had been their Denise to a good young white man with a steady job (his own family speaking Afrikaans—a kind of link even though there probably wouldn’t be the usual parents-in-law one) would be to understate the solemnity of that joy. First they had let her go; now the foundling had been found by one of her own kind. Everything: it was about to be achieved with this marriage.

  He had to explain to his girl that her introduction to his parents might not be without certain problems. She looked at him as if he’d had a sudden lapse of memory. She’d been taken to their home several times, first fruit juice and beer on the verandah, where the mother talked to her about what it was like to work in a bank and the father talked to his son about soccer, then to lunch on a public holiday, and once to share the evening meal.—But that was before they knew—about you, I mean. I’d never thought it necessary to tell them about my girlfriends’ families and so on. What interest to them. Nothing to do with their lives. Now when I say we’re getting married, I’m marrying this girl, I’ll have to tell them about you.—

  —Of course.—But she had not thought of this before: love is in the present, it’s her hand slipping beneath his shirt to his chest, it’s reading together descriptions of the places in the world maybe they’ll save up to see. She did not say: they know I’m white. As if he heard the thought:—I know … But that you grew up there, school and home, people who are like—your parents, to you.—He came over in her silence and kissed her; he had no part in the problem his parents might represent.

  He came back with the n
ews, angry, the skin over his cheekbones taut and flushed.—They’re terrible. I don’t even want to tell you about it. I’m degrading never mind myself, them, my sister, her kids. The country. Beautiful South Africa 1975. It doesn’t matter to them that you’re white. You were brought up among Coloureds, the family—which I’ve explained over and over again you haven’t really got although you love them—is Coloured. You’d think colour is something you can catch just by being among people. Infection, it’s a disease.—His car was piled with a thrown-in muddle of clothes, shoes, books, soccer helmet, music cassettes. He left home and moved in with a friend. In servants’ quarters converted to a cottage rented in someone’s garden he had a room to himself where she could comfort him with love-making; she knew something of what it was like to leave behind you those who had been your parents.

  They had each other, in love. They would get married. Sooner, now, an act of confirmation, even of defiance, as well as love. But if he was angry before, he was stricken, transformed by disbelief when he came back from the marriage licence office to tell her that the licence was not, could not be issued. There would have to be a birth certificate to prove she was white; he could give his date and place of birth, the names of his parents. She had no birth certificate and no place except a church toilet, and her adoptive parents had registered her in their name and residence as Coloureds in a duly designated township. Denise Appolis was a Coloured female. The Mixed Marriages Act forbade marriage between them. Even their love-making was clandestine contravention of the law.