Get A Life

by Nadine Gordimer

  But when he got himself roused, back into quarantine to pick up the few sheets of paper conscientiously word-processed by an institute secretary, he put the thing aside, not on the foot of the bed again but slid on a pile of video cassettes.

  Only out there, the garden, could the wilderness be gained, the unfinished homework be escaped. Leg over the sill; lying on the grass the many hours not tallied with a stick tracing in the sand. The days.

  Nights. The nuclear family, father mother son, is asleep in reconstitution, reduced by quarantine.

  One night, the dog barked frantically in the small hours and Lyndsay got up to follow as it plunged released through the front door into the driveway. In the arrested silence between night and day the interruption of the dog echoed from a hard black sky. The security light triggered by any movement within its orbit caught a man spot-lit like a celebrity, approaching. She shouted, What do you want! Response customary for mendicants, panhandlers, idiotic for an invader with what was the shape of a weapon of some sort in the hand clutched at his side. The dog danced and leapt, barking deafeningly but the man must have heard her anyway and she heard, as if they were yelling in mad conversation, his curses at her in an African language and the foulest scatological English, as he stood his ground a moment before twisting violently to race ahead of the dog and half-scramble, half-vault over the garden's iron-bar gate.

  The son down the passage, doubly isolated by the soporific prescribed for him, and the husband asleep on the side of his good ear with only the other, increasingly less reliable, above the bedclothes, were not roused; the son on a remote level of consciousness and the husband, hearing at reduced volume the kind of annoying fuss of the dog that generally had no cause other than its bad dreams.

  In the morning when she told the two of the man in the driveway, they were amazed, reproachful in concern. But why didn't you call one of us! Two men in the house, why does a woman go to face an intruder in the middle of the night! Adrian knows this woman, his, is courageous in everything she does, but…

  My dear mama, foolhardy, I won't say stupid! Her son.

  She pulled a smiling, deprecating mouth at the concern and the reproach.

  Adrian. His father didn't seem to feel it as any diminution of manhood, that incident. You don't have to be macho – the quick word of judgment by which Benni measures male reactions so evident, she relates, in her working milieu – simply to accept that there are some situations which by reason of physique if nothing else, a male is the one fit to deal with. Adrian seemed concerned only to assure himself that Lyndsay was unharmed in any way at all, by the existence of a threat, by an experience of fear, as if he wanted to go over reverently that face that body that spirit of hers to be certain the five-minute confrontation in the night hadn't been traumatic: changed everything in her. You don't ever think, none of your business, in the ordinary course of living your own adult life, that there still may be this kind of sexually-charged emotion in your father for a woman, the woman that is your mother.

  His father, having hired a permanent night watchman equipped with intercommunication to a security patrol company, has filed the incident, dealt with appropriately, among present living conditions.

  It depends whose. An incident without harmful consequences may have another consequence within another living condition. A young man wouldn't have slept through the obvious summons of commotion if he were not less than a man, less than himself, stoned out of his mind into impotence as an inability to take any action, by drugs swallowed and radiance through the circulation of arteries blinding the brain. This's the monologue when lying in the quarantine's four walls while they, the others, Benni/Berenice, Adrian, Lyndsay, the friends who use the safe-distance telephone and email to enquire how you're doing, are all what is known as about their daily business. Busy-ness.

  The garden is where the company of jacaranda fronds finger the same breeze that brushed the boy's soft cheek, where caught in peripheral vision a cent's-worth of never-exterminated snail moves by peristalsis over a stone, there is the wise presence that changes solitude of monologue into some kind of dialogue. A dialogue with questions; or answers never sought, heard, in the elsewhere. Not even the wilderness, where they must have, sometime, disturbed the readings of surveying instruments; the body of a fish floating belly-up? The doctors say there is significant improvement in those other readings. The radiance will soon fade and cease completely and the twenty-first-century leper may go back to touch and be touched.

  Accepted and accepting.

  What is it to go back to. You'll soon be home, had enough of us! Lyndsay's delight, for him. Berenice, across the space of No-Man's-Land – Why shouldn't we go off on a little trip, then? Indulge ourselves, one of the exclusive resorts the Agency represents, these really great game reserves… no… you've had enough of being away, just us and Nickie in our own place.

  What is it: to go back.

  The individual, the woman, the desire – the persona Benni/Berenice. Create her as the father did the mother, going over her being after she'd endangered it shouting, What do you want.

  The man standing alone in the night of the garden ran away, back. The only time out in the garden ever at that time of night was when allowed to stay up to celebrate a New Year in a radiance of fireworks.

  Back, to gain forgiveness, make up to the small boy (he's the spitting image of you over again) for desertion by Daddy! Paul! while the fingers had to be prized off the bars of the gate. Oh the boy's so young, that will be forgotten, filed away in childhood.

  Only to come back, maybe, before a psychiatrist trying to unknot an adolescent's painful aggression. So many half-grown about whom no parents can fathom why these menacing creatures they've produced are as they are.

  What do you want. What did you want. What did you settle for.

  Five years passed – a state of existence in which the question – if it is one, because a choice was made – doesn't sound from within. There was – is – no place for it there. But this unimaginable concept of Life Time, the inconceivable: a state of existence which could-should never have happened, brings a knowing of that which was not admitted. The emanation irradiates the hidden or undiscovered.

  To go back, to the contradiction that surely cut through the intimacy a man and a woman make together. That unit of being that is sexual fulfilment within the other conditions of being, being in the world, commitment of religious or political faith, commitment of values (can't weigh them in year-end bonus), what you live by in what matters, idea of what is meaningful for each in the aims of work, beyond the common needs it meets – can it be divided. You go your way I go mine while we belong easily together. A good fit. The evidence of that achievement the two-in-one tender flesh of the child. Who wants to face the fact that this 'achievement' also can result from the greatest possible alienation between a man and a woman 'together': rape.

  Benni means well when Berenice offers a weekend transition from the state where the Untouchable has been a hermit within his own body – my god, of course she's tried to understand what this is, in her way – and coming: home. To take up where everything was left off. Meant well. So why allow an answer to a question, so long never put to the self, to open up such significance. It was nothing, her thought to please, quickly passed over. A nothing he has all the time in this existence to follow how and why it would come to mind in the one who proposed it. For Benni there is a Berenice solution to his return from an absence unlike any, a few days' break in the bush offered by one of the clients whose public relations the Agency handles. Luxury suites, pool and sauna, the Big Five sure to be seen on game drives, a portable bar on board the open-viewing vehicle. He loves the bush doesn't he, its animals, birds, insects, before he goes home again to their threesome life together let him return to make the connection with the working life he's so wrapped up in. For Benni, Berenice's recommendation is a microcosm of that wilderness. She's right, in a way. These places simulate life in the wild for indigenous animals w
ho otherwise would not survive industrial and urban expansion; the territory bought by what is known as the leisure industry is land where the equally indigenous people were driven out by conquest of old colonial wars and exchanges of papers of possession for paper money, ever since, between generations of conquerors become lawmakers. Many of the corporate clients of whom the Agency is proud (high-profile is the coveted category in the business) are consortia that bid for rights to build resorts where the environment won't survive this kind of development, nevertheless. There was – is, he must not think of as no longer there, the terrain where he is not – a consortium lobbying the government with assurance of exceptional tourist potential, economic uplift of the surrounding region (the full litany), for such a scheme to build an hotel, casino, yacht marina as part of the vast drainage plan the government envisages. Development Disaster.

  Whom does Berenice believe. Him, her man, or the client. What is her conviction when he comes from the wilderness and tells of the irreplaceable forest felled to make way for the casino, the fish floating belly-up in all that's left of a watercourse diverted to feed an Olympic-size swimming pool and replica of one of the fountains of Rome. What's her conviction within herself. His, or the client's? Or it's not as crude as that. Macho as that, she would interpret. It's something – Stop. Stop hearing the answer. But you cannot go back without knowing it.

  She is that persona who has no need of convictions.

  What is it? A terrible lack. A kind of awful purity? A virginity; or underdevelopment. That term fits.

  Don't judge. For five years, if you count only the outward symbol of marriage as the unit of intimacy, not the love affair that preceded the formality, there was present always that while occupying the same bed you don't occupy the same fundament: to know your conviction of being in the world. Conviction, which? You cannot have two to live tolerantly by, outside the sense of self. One for the client and one at home. How could he, himself, whose work, reason-to-be is preserving life, live so long with an intimate, herself, who was successfully complicit in destroying it.

  Living in isolation, all along. Even when inside the woman.

  Later, in the garden, away from the closeted emanation in that room, what is this all about but an obvious matter of the incompatibility between the advertising industry and environmental protection. Two clichés. So what? Can't even call it by its true term. Irreconcilability. Because the world, in distinction from the individual, has no absolutes, there's a mix that goes along prescriptively with the mixed economy. And what about the woman, Benni/Berenice. What a prick the woman's chosen man has been. Yes, revealed as nothing but the prick in his relation to her.

  The innocence of the tree that was climbed, the perspective of being alive, from up there, the mind's sketch of the treehouse-gynaeceum of the sisters – everything accepted, the sin behind the pampas grass, capture of the freedom of butterflies, fall of the slingshot bird.

  But it was in the Garden that expulsion came once there was Knowledge.

  Divorce? Divorce after she's endured, on her side of the quarantine, did her job, earned the means of common needs, took care of the child calling Daddy Paul, smiled and joked anecdotally for normality across the divide between outdoor chairs. While this brings no counsel from the uncertain waverings of the jacaranda fronds, tongues in trees, there comes a prolonged ringing from the house. Goes ignored, until whoever it was hangs up. But the caller determinedly keeps trying. Such obstinacy must somehow be responded to. Still – as now – unsteady, upright from supine, the way to the house seems slowly gained. The ringing gives up; and starts once more, an encouragement.

  – So you laz-zy, how's it? Chief, haai! We never hear from you! So much happening. I'm back onto the pebble-bed scene, now, it's dynamite, my man, I can tell you. But what are the doctors doing, keeping you locked away like this, do you feel okay? When're you coming back? Aren't you due for remittance of sentence by now… So… good, that's great. Sharp – sharp! Say, you hear the latest – the Institution of Nuclear Engineers says the new reactor at Koeberg gonna be 'walk away safe'. 'Walk away safe.' I thought you'd like to take that walk, Bra. But if the Minister gives Government go-ahead, we'll have him in court against this 'favourable environmental impact assessment evaluation' his boys have come up with. Man, I've got plenty to tell you, what's going on, we're getting more support groups joining protest every day. Big names. Amazing. I promise you. The man's gonna find the nuclear a hot seat… so when can I come to your place, I don't know where you are -

  – Not a good idea for you, I want to see you, Bra, but we can't sit in the same room, we'd be in the garden like a couple of kids sent out of the way. And even then, who knows. Why should you risk anything at all, I'm my own experimental pebble-bed nuclear reactor. -

  Laughter bursting into the receiver. – Sharp! Sharp! But nonsense, non-sense. What about the weekend. I'll be back in town. What's the address? I'll turn up in the afternoon and bring you some stuff to work over. We need you. -

  When he arrives he has to be backed away from as he throws out his arms for the African shoulder-hug that's come out of the expression of freedom fought for together among black men and has done away with the inhibition of whites that God-fearing heterosexual males don't embrace. (Thapelo at seventeen was in a Mkhonto we Sizwe cadre, another kind of combat in the bush.)

  How can you manage what you are, to others. Primrose, her statement to stay on in the risk of quarantine when the right thing was for the parents – and the leper himself – to insist that the faithful retainer be treated like anyone else outside the responsibility of progenitors, and be sent beyond harm. What is the threshold of risk to be decreed for different people – what about the paper plates touched by radiant saliva on spoons and forks, got rid of. Thrown away in the trash to lie on waste dumps picked over by kids from black squatter camps. What is 'rid of' in terms of any pollution, it's a life's work to inform us that it's not only what is cast into the sea that comes back to foul another shore, no matter whose it is.

  This man is not that barely-literate woman; he's scientifically literate, awareness of the insidious power of radiation is in his daily field. Primrose does not believe in what she cannot see; he knows what is not to be seen as it exudes from one who is his Chernobyl, his own Koeberg experimental nuclear reactor. How was it these two had no fear; too easy to attribute this sentimentally, as a white man descended from a history posited on the tenet that blacks were worse, to evidence that both were blacks, and better. Willing to take risks, in contact with fellow humans. More likely, for this ex-Freedom Fighter colleague in scientific research as for the uneducated woman, he's been exposed and accustomed to many threats in childhood in the quarantine of segregation, before those of war.

  Thapelo brought cold beer and a field briefcase tight with documents. Beer in the garden was the first drink after decreed abstinence. Worth taking the risk of reaction, in the company of a workmate. The sun drowned under the horizon of shrubs and the garden darkened, until a light appeared on the terrace and the mother's voice called affectionately, a familiar coaxing echo, Paul don't you think it's time you came in.

  ii / States of Existence

  She pulled a smiling, deprecating mouth at the concern and the reproach.

  If someone had to get shot by an intruder it mustn't be one of her beloved men; only now come to know, through another kind of threat, the urgency of that love. Couldn't tell them. That was her reason to be out before the intruder, alone. A threat you could counter. But that much was clear in all that was confused in what had happened to them; Paul, Adrian, Lyndsay. To try and make sense of it there were devices of different approach; she must place herself among these less subjectively, as a woman called 'Lyndsay'. Set it out. The meteor of the inconceivable fell upon the son; he was the one who became invisibly alight. Paul. What happened to him was not to be presumptuously compared with what happened within his radius to the father, Adrian, and the mother, Lyndsay. In yourself as progenitor you have so
mewhere a stowed disaster kit, resourced both practically and psychologically to deal with a known list of existential crises in your children's lives: career failure, suicidal loss of confidence, doomed love affair, broken marriage, change of sexual orientation, drug addiction, debt. They've had the broken marriage syndrome with the daughter born too soon after the son, but it has proved to be a kick start for her rather than a trauma, she has a new country, a new language and a new man to fulfil her apparent needs. As a lawyer, in her early career the Lyndsay persona was familiar with the entire conventional list, but for years her career has been as a civil rights and constitutional lawyer. Adrian proved to be the one best in understanding of the way Emma could emerge from the tangle of the early marriage; lawyer Lyndsay could simply provide the practical means to end the contract. He suggested to their daughter that you can perhaps destroy out of pride and anger, too hastily, what may be essential for you. She had been so crazily in love with the man, whatever had happened to them since. Give yourself time to be sure whether the heady power of rejection – making a decision while you are drunk with it, it's potent – hasn't taken from you the one you really want, worth an acceptance of all the disillusion come about. So the girl who had married too young didn't take the quick and tidy divorce; unaccountably, in her mother's view (wasn't the childish marriage a casualty before the register was signed), she took half a year to test herself and did not regret it, confiding to her father that it had been a good thing: she would leave the marriage now in calm certainty it was not vital, within her or the man. The father didn't protest or pass judgment, apparently this was all right, for him, too? The process had been fulfilled, justifying whatever the outcome.