Loot

by Nadine Gordimer

  The victim for whose last embrace I was decisive was, of course, a political leader. I don’t make moral judgments, despite the bits and ends of theoretical justice I’ve picked up, so I don’t know if he had it coming to him. And if he did, did he deserve it? There’s not enough sequence in my fragments of experience to judge what I’ll risk as the most important question for you: does killing really solve any of the conflicts between you, and what you claim as your countries, your boundaries? I mean, you can’t turn me away at Immigration, so how can I presume to know what cans you like a commodity, contains your individual experience as imprinted within you from the day you’re born Here or There rather than Somewhere Else.

  My dipping into the experience of politicians has resulted in some discoveries you probably wouldn’t credit, considering the general view of these individuals I overhear. They are stalwart, convinced of their moral right to take power, determined to bring peace, prosperity and justice to all, if you are of those who support their ideas of how a government should run your lives; they are ruthless, power-hungry, wily, will stop at no infamy to impose their kind of regime, if you are in opposition to their ideas of governing you. In the being of one—a politician—once in a while (there are so many buzzing around among you, how could I avoid the temptation or the curiosity) I have known the raw surface of weakness (yes) to any failure, however small, any setback to high self-esteem, however temporary, they conceal from public sight. While they are declaring themselves satisfied with the support they are gaining among the collective electorate—You—the loss of a few votes is to them a slow bleeding from some secret organ they have, the loss of a seat in the palace of government is a lopping-off of a limb of the creature they have to make of themselves—for You, for your sake. You know that? Power is needed, there’s a need to be intact for good, as well as for evil. I have some notion of those two concepts—come to me, in my way; how could I have even the most fleeting contacts with your experience without finding out that they actually do exist.

  Perhaps I would have been one of those, a politician. Because I can’t keep away from them, they attract me with the strong sense with which they wrestle life, the secrecy of the holds they use, under the public surface; their kind of survival tactics among the different ones I see practised among you, from withdrawals to the ashram to the total exposure of the pop star. Why shouldn’t I try them all, since I don’t have the angst of going through the whole way with any! But no. If I imagine a corporeal life for myself—what Denis might be—maybe I would have been a writer; fiction, of course, because that’s the closest a corporeal being can get to my knack of living other lives; multiple existences that are not the poor little opportunities of a single existence.

  When she dies—the one who precociously stole my life, I’d like to know how much value she’s added to it on your stock market—I wonder whether my non-existent existence will stop, too: still-born to stop-dead. I doubt it. I’m curious, nevertheless. So one of the favourite diversions of my eternity is to board a plane in the being of a passenger. Because I find the nearest you who are not religious—can’t rely on an after-life—may get to experience the eternal is up at around thirty thousand feet on the way to the heaven of those who believe they’re going to go all the way. In a layer of the atmosphere outside the earth, between time-zones defined by your earthly existence: you don’t know precisely, up above the earth’s cloud-shroud, its cosy blanket, whether you are X hours behind or X hours ahead of the earthly destination you have headed yourself for. So you are out of both time and place—precariously? No—you inhabit both at the same time, clouds, space, and the interior box of the aircraft, which is like a hospital ward, you are designated to yours (First, Business, Tourist class), your bed (seat number) and you are dependent on the ministrations of the nurse (cabin attendant). Freedom is just beyond the window; as always with you, you can see it but can’t touch it. And it is fearful …

  So I am everybody’s twin?—oh no, no, not at all! Don’t mistake me. Not in anything I’ve said. I’m not an alter ego, doppelgänger , clone—nobody’s alternate. I am not stopping up your ears with a homily on universality, living human beings are part of one another, must love one another etcetera, with my winetastings of your experience here-and-there as the high-minded symbolic lesson. In my condition I have no moral responsibility. Now do you get it? How could I when I don’t have to provide: don’t have to eat, to have a roof over me, don’t have to look over my shoulder at anyone who’s a rival in acquisitions? It’s easy for me …

  I suppose, in the end, you have to be disembodied, like me, to need no morals. All that I have in common with you is all you are not—I am. Pity me. Or envy me.

  ‘It turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have.’

  For so long—well, the ten years we’ve been together—we’ve had everything we wanted. Not some gift from the gods or nice middle-class family inheritance, but in the independent making of our own lives. Karen is overseas investment advisor of the most successful group of brokers in the city. I had a history of having been an activist. That cliché means I was part of actions against the old regime, now put away mummified if not exactly returned to dust, that got me tear-gassed and beaten-up and once detained—another cliché, this one for a spell inside without trial. But I am a lawyer who nevertheless managed to get herself accepted, in a renewed country, as fresh blood and a woman, by one of the most prestigious old legal practices. So that’s the career side of it.

  As women who’ve wanted and had only women lovers since youthful attempts with men, we know we were lucky—extraordinarily blessed—to find one another. Even straight people (as they think of themselves) prove how rare the right relationship is: divorces, remarriages, quarrels over child custody—anyway, that’s the mess we’ve freed ourselves of, in what’s called our sexual preference. Which has been and is open, since the law now accepts its existence as legitimate and we both have the confidence of our recognised career capabilities and loving sexual partnership (the straight couples enviously see how fulfilling it is) to ignore any relics of old prejudice that turn up in long-faced disapproval. We find the society of our own kind naturally compatible, with the usual rivalries, of course, haphazard sexual attractions that complicate and trouble, not too seriously, everyone’s social life, golf club or gay bar. But we also have heterosexual friendships, particularly those coming about through our different professional connections, and we don’t mind obliging as the female dinner-partners of visiting overseas businessmen or other dignitaries who have arrived without spouses. Karen is something of a beauty with the added advantage or disadvantage of being younger than I am, and she sometimes is pursued by one of these men-of-passage after the occasion, and I suppose I must admit that it pleases, rouses me to know that my lover appeals to someone who can’t have her, whom she would reject. With the funny little pursed-up, half-derisive, half-flattered face she makes as we look the man over in retrospect.

  We bought a house two years after we met, and one of ours, an architect friend, renovated it to create exactly what we think our place ought to be. The mixed-media paintings and the one or two sculptures (we like wood and can’t stand the pretension of objets trouvés) are the work of other artist friends. Our collection and our travels together are what we enjoy spending our money on. We’ve seen a good part of the world (four eyes better than two), the Great Wall, the Barrier Reef, New York-Chicago-West Coast, Kyoto, Scottish Highlands, Florence-Rome-Paris—and there’ll be a lot more to come, but it’s always with an emotional dissolve of pleasure, arms going about each other, that we find our two selves back—home. I’ve had the impression that straights don’t believe such a concept should exist, with us. Because we don’t deserve it, eh.

  Some time last year something surprising—yes, happened. Not to us; but came from us. Not surprising, though, that it occurred at the same time in both, as our emotions, concepts, opinions and tastes are non-biological identical twins. For i
nstance, I don’t know whether, talking with others, we’re heard to say ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. The totally unexpected thing—if that’s what surprise is—is that this one was, well, biological. How else could you term it. We wanted to have a child. I’m sure—and I use the singular personal pronoun for once because we never actually expressed this, I’m observing from some imagined outside—we were aware that the desire was like the remnant of a tail, the coccyx, vestigial not of our human origin as primates but of the family organism we have evolved beyond. But freedom means you go out to get what you want, even if it seems its own contradiction. Reject the elements of family and take one of them to create a new form of relationship.

  We have a home to offer, no question about that, vis-à-vis the basic needs of a child. It’s the first consideration an agency would take account of: this easily, informally beautiful place and space we’ve created. But adoption is not what we want: we’re talking of our own child. This means one of us must bear it, because what one is the agency of becomes the possession of both.

  Late at night, accompanied by the crickets out on the terrace, later still, in our bed, her arm under my head or mine under hers, we consider how we’re going to go about this extraordinary decision that seems to have been made for us, not at all like the sort of mutual decision, say, to go to the Galápagos next summer instead of Spain. There’s no question of who will grow the child inside her body. Karen is eight years younger than I am. But at thirty-six she has doubts of whether she can conceive.—How do I know? I’ve never been pregnant.—We laughed so much I had to kiss her to put a stop to it. She hasn’t had a man since at eighteen in her first year at university her virginity was disposed of, luckily without issue, by a fellow student in the back of his car. —I think there are tests you can have to see if you’re fertile. We’ll find a gynecologist. None of her business why you want to know.—

  That was simple. She’s fertile, all right, though the doctor did make some remark about the just possible difficulties—did she say complications, Karen doesn’t remember—for (what did she call her) a primapara at thirty-six, and the infant. There’s always a caesarian—but I don’t want Karen cut up.—I’ll have a natural birth, I’ll do all the exercises and get into the right frame of mind these prenatal places teach.—And so we know, I know now; she’s going to have an experience I won’t have, she’s accepted that; we’ve accepted that, yes.

  But then comes the real question we’ve been avoiding. This is a situation, brought upon by ourselves indeed, where you can’t do without a man. Not yet; science is busy with other ways to fertilise the egg with some genetically-programmed artificial invader, but it’s not quite achieved.

  The conception.

  We think about that final decision, silently and aloud. The decision to make life, that’s it, no evasion of the fact.

  —There’s—well. One of the men we know.—

  What does Karen mean. I looked at her, a stare to read her. I can’t bear the idea of a man entering Karen’s body. Depositing something there in the tender secret passage I enter in my own ways. Surely Karen can’t bear it either. Unfaithful and with a man.

  Karen is blatantly practical. I should be ashamed to doubt her for an instant.—Of course he could produce his own sperm.—

  —Milk himself.—

  —I don’t know—a doctor’s rooms, a lab, and then it would be like an ordinary injection, for me. Almost.—

  —Someone who’d do it for us. We’d have to look for … choose one healthy, good-looking, not neurotic. Do we know anyone among our male friends who’s all three?—

  And again we’re laughing. I have a suggestion, Karen comes up with another, even less suitable candidate. It’s amazing, when you’re free to make a life decision without copulation, what power this is! You can laugh and ponder seriously, at the same time.

  —We’re assuming that if we select whoever-it-is he’s going to agree, just like that.—

  I didn’t know the answer.

  —Why should he?—

  Karen’s insistence brought to mind something going far beyond the obliging male’s compliance (we could both think, finally, that there would be one or two among our male friends or acquaintances who might be intrigued by the idea). What if the child turned out to look like him. More than a resemblance, more than just common maleness if it were to be a boy, more than something recognisably akin to the donator of the sperm, if a girl. And further, further—

  —Oh my god. If the child looks like him—even if it doesn’t—he gets it into his head to claim it. He wants, what’s the legal term you use in divorce cases, you know it—access. He wants to turn up every Sunday to have his share, taking the child to the zoo.—

  We went for long walks, we went to the theatre and to the bar where we girls gather, all the time with an attention deep under our attention to where we were and what we were hearing, saying. Conception. How to make this life for ourselves.

  After a week, days clearing of thinning cloud, it became simple; had been there from the beginning. The sperm bank. This meant we had to go to a doctor in our set and tell what we hadn’t told anybody: we want a child. Karen is going to produce it. We don’t wish to hear any opinions for or against this decision that’s already made, cannot be changed. We just need to know how one approaches a sperm bank and whether you, one of us, will perform the simple process of insemination. That’s all. Amazement and passionate curiosity remodelled the doctor’s face but she controlled the urge to question or comment, beyond saying I’m sure you know what it is you’re doing. She would make the necessary arrangements; there would be some payment to be made, maybe papers to sign, all confidential. Neither donor nor recipient will know that the other exists.

  The whole process of making a life turns out to be even blinder than nature. Just a matter of waiting for the right period in Karen’s cycle when the egg is ready for the drop of liquid. Anonymous drop.

  And waiting, unnecessarily looking at the calendar to make sure—waiting is a dangerous state; something else came to life in us. Karen was the first to speak.

  —From the lab, the only way. But who will know if it’s from a white? Or a black? Can one ask?—

  —Maybe. Yes. I don’t know.—

  But after the moment of a deep breath held between us, I had to speak again, our honesty is precious.—Even if the answer’s yes, how can we be sure. Bottled in a laboratory what goes into which?—

  The sperm of Mr Anonymous White Man. Think what’s in the genes from the past, in this country. What could be. The past’s too near. They’re alive, around—selling, donating?—their seed. The torturers who held people’s heads under water, strung them up by the hands, shot a child as he approached; the stinking cell where I was detained for nine weeks, although what happened to me was nothing compared with all the rest.

  If the anonymous drop contains a black’s DNA, genes? It would bring to life again in Karen’s body, our bodies as one, something of those whose heads were held under water, who were strung up by the hands, a child who was shot. No matter whether this one also brings the contradictions of trouble and joys that are expected of any child.

  But how can one be sure? Of that drop?

  We keep talking; our silences are a continuation. Shall we take the risk. How would we know, find out? Years, or perhaps when he, the white child, is still young; you see certain traits of aggression, of cruel detachment in young children—the biological parents ask, where did he get it from, certainly not from you or me. When he—the child we’re about to make somehow is thought of now as a male—is adolescent, what in the DNA, the genes, could begin to surface from the past?

  We postponed. We went to the Galápagos, perspective of another world. Now that we’re back we don’t talk about making a life, it is not in our silences—home, alone, as it was before.

  So I was never born. Refused, this time. I suspect it was the only time. But then what I have is not what is experienced as memory.

  ‘Just
as everything is always something else … it may also throw some light on the procreative god.’

  The Germans know they are losing. It is after the war of bombs falling on cities. In our family we stayed alive through all that. We Russian bears, we’ve come into the fight on the other side, we’re going to win for the English and French who can’t do it for themselves. While the final battles go on at the front the Germans still occupy our old city, but only just. We have our people who move around in the streets we know so well and knife them at night. So they come to our houses with their guns and frighten the women, smashing the furniture and throwing out whatever’s in cupboards and under beds, while they search for our men they know do these things. They shout all the time so loud, like a stampeding herd of cattle through the house, that I can hardly hear my sisters screaming and I don’t know what my mother, her mouth wide over tight teeth, is trying to tell me to do. Run? How could I get away. They took my father, kicking him to our door, well at least we know that he had managed to get back at them before they got to him, he killed at least three in the times he left us at night and crept back into bed beside my mother before light. Then one of them looks round; and takes me. Kicks me after my father. My mother howls at them, He’s only fourteen, a baby, he knows nothing, nothing! But they don’t understand Russian. Anyway, they know that soon when I’m fifteen I’ll be called up, there are boys from my class who are now in our army because we must win, everyone must fight. They throw my father and me into a kind of military van and keep us on the floor with their feet on us but I see the tops of buildings near our street go past and the towers of the old church my mother goes to and says it was built centuries ago and is the most beautiful in our country, in the world, and it was God who spared it from the bombing. And I even see the one wall, sticking up, of the theatre that was bombed, where we once went to see my eldest sister, she’s an actress, play a part in a play by Maxim Gorky. We’d also read it in my class at school.