Get A Life

by Nadine Gordimer

  Where to begin understanding what we've only got a computer-speak label for, ecosystem? Where to decide it begins. Let's say, the known point at which we grasp its formation is where the rivers and streams converge and the patterns of their flow – meeting, opposing – create islands out of the sand they carry, landscapes within the waterscape. Trees grow; where do the seeds come from to germinate them, does the water bring detritus roots which find new foothold? If we identify the tree species, you'll learn from how far and from where water journeys have brought them? What journeys! They have brought sand and it's leached from along its routes, salt. Six hundred and sixty tons a year! That's the figure! In that calm delta disturbed only by the hippos and crocodiles, evaporation in an area bordering on a desert is extreme. The salt content becomes high; contamination problem, ay. Yebo! But no. Managed by matter itself. Trees suck up the water to the islands for growth. Salt comes with it. The sand filters the brackish stuff: clean water flows back, supports fish and the predators offish, the crocs, hippos, fish eagles.

  – Cho! Ayeye! You're forgetting something. Chief. Didn't you read? Eventually the salt kills the trees, there's nothing to hold the island, it disintegrates, back into the water -

  – Yes, but there's some formation of peat, and with the next rainy season the rivers come down again -

  – From Angola from -

  – The sand blocks channels in the reeds and papyrus, there're islands forming again, saplings sprouting again, it's been happening who knows how long? -

  – Tuka! The salt? So what happened to the salt. -

  – Exactly, we don't know how the salt is managed. It is. Probably seeps down through underground watercourses with increasing dilution and is widely dispersed in acceptable levels way through other areas of the region, part of the whole Southern Continental system. We drink that water! This's what we should work on, how with the Okavango the balance between positive and negative is achieved… -

  – You think that'll change their minds about building the dams. Eish! -

  – My brother – the dams are total negations. All this beautifully managed balance will be wrecked. Forever. There should be a category. Destructive Development, closed corporation of disaster. We're chronically short of water and it's not understood that this – what, phenomenon, marvel, much, much more than that – this intelligence of matter, receives, contains, processes, finally distributes the stuff God knows how far, linking up with other systems. If you and I decide now, how it begins, how it works, it still has no end, no dam walls, it's living. And some fucking consortium's going to drain, block and kill what's been given, no contracts. -

  The blurt of laughter is the colleague's welcome at hearing a man at least sounding restored from the stricken substitute for himself found in the garden.

  – Phambili! Top form! We're not going to let them get away with it. Woza! -

  Forever.

  The receiver replaced, the laughter silenced. Adrenalin that (like that other bodily signal) hadn't risen for so long, sinks normally. Still addressing – Thapelo or self – something slowly enters as a third voice, insistent to be heard. Follows, to the garden. And then back to the telephone; is the machine staring mute, or being gazed at, unseeing. But it's not picked up. There are areas of thought not meant to be shared, they question certainties held in common. Neither of you could go on pursuing what you do, being what you are, without them.

  Forever.

  How long is forever. How old is the delta that is part of the cosmos visible from Outer Space? Astronauts report it. Will ten dams be visible, the scale of ponds, like all man-made scratchings and gougings in comparison with the planet's own design.

  Maybe we see the disaster and don't, can't live long enough (that is, through centuries) to see the survival solution Matter with infinite innovation has found, finds, will find, to renew its principle – life: in new forms, what we think is gone forever. In millennia, what does it count that the white rhino becomes extinct, the dinosaur's extinct, the mastodon, the mammoth, but we have the ingenuity of the evolved design of the giraffe, the elephant with its massive hulk standing vestigially web-footed with the memory of the fish. The first fish that dragged itself out of the amniotic element.

  So, what is this kind of stuff, thinking… Heresy, how can it come to one who when asked, And what is your line, answers, What am I, I'm a conservationist, I'm one of the new missionaries here not to save souls but to save the earth.

  This heresy is born of the garden, as Evil was – like those other thoughts, to be forgotten, the garden engendered – it belongs to this state of existence that's about to cease to be. Whatever 'forever' means, irrevocably lost, or surviving eternally, himself in this garden is part of the complexity, the necessity. As a spider's web is the most fragile example of organisation, and the delta is the grandest. Return home; that's his loop in the thread from the spider's web to the Okavango system: Benni/ Berenice, small boy, Daddy! Paul! all the waterways and shifting sand islands of contradiction: a condition of living. Like another heresy, knowledge of what it is he came from into this state of existence, and what – if he survived – he would be returned to – the relationships of that home were not what he might have had; knows that. Doubt had come to him in the garden where he had begun to apprehend life as a boy. Biodiversity; Chief, say to yourself: professional jargon stuff. But it's within that term your place is, Chief, say it: I'm going home at the weekend. Always find the self calling on the terminology of the wilderness, so unjudgmental, to bring to circumstances the balm of calm acceptance. The inevitable grace, zest, in being a microcosm of the macrocosm's marvel.

  Doubt is part of it; the salt content.

  They are there at the gate. Berenice – but he must correct himself, Benni again – and the small boy, Nicholas, his son.

  Lyndsay and Adrian are his entourage as he emerges from the family house, with Primrose helping to carry some of the things – folders of papers accumulated recently – that wouldn't fit into the suitcase Adrian insists on carrying. (The hospital hold-all Lyndsay has quietly disposed of.) They call out to one another across the length of the drive as if it were the length of time of the separation. Even Primrose, with her old-fashioned servitude, pre-liberation sense of propriety that you could be familiar with white kids as you should not with adults, shouted to the child joyfully – So now soon you'll come to play with me, like always, Nickie! – But there can be nothing ordinary about this approach to the gate. It's Benni who's clinging, arms lifted, to the bars this time. Smiling and cajoling – as if he needed any encouragement! He doesn't disappoint her, finds himself gathering the muscles, co-ordination.

  She – Benni – sees coming towards her the long legs flung out sideways at the knees, the arms flailing like oars, the staggering gait, that of a child learning it can run.

  As he gained the gate the electronic control in Adrian 's hand slid it open, Benni's image brought close-up to him with the pressure of her arms around his body: she was laughing, the lens of tears magnifying her eyes. She reached for his head and took his lips, mouth, into hers as a deep draft of something missing so long. But when he knelt to the small boy, his son stared at him a moment and turned away to hide behind his mother. Not forgotten, fingers prized from the bars of this gate, Daddy! Paul!, and the appeal terribly unheeded. Agitated, ashamed, his mother tried to urge him forward, he wriggled and struggled, ran back behind her.

  It was understood: his son had suffered that state of existence, along with himself.

  – No, leave him, it's all right. Give him time. -

  iii / It Happens

  Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be. The pebble-bed reactor project has not been abandoned by the entrepreneurs but it hasn't gone further than being claimed safe enough to walk away from. In the meantime there had been the other experience of the phenomenon of these small natural formations during a return to the normal custom of a couple taking their child to enjoy a week pad
dling and dabbling on a beach. Daddy! Paul! showing him how to collect the colours of land and sea in the shining pebbles sucked over by rills of surf.

  The direst of all threats in the world's collective fear – beyond terrorism, suicide bombings, introduction of deadly viruses, fatal chemical substances in innocent packaging, Mad Cow disease – is still 'nuclear capability'. Another catch-all: the possession as natural resources, in a country, of certain primary elements and the ability to mine and refine these for its own nuclear armament or for sale to that of others; the construction of a nuclear plant/reactor; the testing of a nuclear weapon. Forecast prelude to the apocalypse by what are known as Weapons of Mass Destruction. The proposed reactor based on the harmless pebble a small boy takes home from the beach is a component in the production of Weapons not likely to be overlooked by the inquiry into nuclear facilities that is becoming vigilant all over the world, far if not near, since the power with a foot on everyone's doorstep, the USA, is one that doesn't support the nuclear non-proliferation requirement of efforts towards nuclear disarmament, except when this suits USA ambitions. Thapelo drops in over a weekend on the pretext, just to check up on you (they're back working together at their organisation's offices during the week) but really to analyse Gaddafi's sudden decision to announce and renounce Libya 's possession of nuclear capability.

  Tell all. Come clean, brother. Haai, ma-an!

  Neither sees any mystery in the decision. They laugh at the 'amazement' on newspaper headlines. Gaddafi either doesn't want American guests like the ones who've visited Iraq or he wants the embargo, imposed after his countrymen exploded a passenger plane, lifted so he can sell his oil. Or both.

  But under the laughter the mates now may have some expectation an example has been set – and received with fulsome emotion from the world – that might lead to the pebble-bed reactor project being taken off hold and abandoned, for State reasons of adopting moral high ground, or rather choosing to stay up there since South Africa is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. There's somehow always been little socialising with Paul's colleagues, by contrast with hers, so Berenice/Benni sees the animating Sunday visit of this colleague as part of Paul's new return to his life and takes the opportunity of inviting his apparently special friend to share lunch.

  Lively dialogue continues. Other projects on hold while being developed discreetly are the national toll highway through the Wild Coast, that great botanical treasure of endemism, crop lands of subsistence farmers; the mining concession for the sand dunes and – the dams. The ten dams. The Okavango. As astronauts grasp from Outer Space the beauty of this cosmic scale of waterways, so its existence as an ecological world phenomenon has become clear to international environmental agencies from their perspective down on earth. Paul since his return to work has been delegated by his team to research and prepare a study of the region. He's the one to meet the representatives from Save The Earth and the International Rivers Network who come to see for themselves what can be understood from the perspective with your feet on the ground, as a site of planned destruction important to world ecology.

  He has been back. Back home: a wilderness. Accompanying these people who represent international concern. He was utterly renewed in watching, listening, storing their responses to the glory of the complex not even the mysteries of the imagination, the subconscious, could conjure, so that the assurance he had had in his radiant isolation that he would be restored to himself with a return to the wilderness, was subsumed if not needed to be remembered.

  One of those women, often scientists, who look as if they have never been children and are in an indeterminate age for a lifetime, spoke aside to him rather than her colleagues. – How marginal, demeaned, remote… I don't know… left out of it. – And another in the group, a man, murmured in the slowly extinguishing light of early evening, You feel… -

  Hearing this apparently general reaction too overwhelmment by splendour beyond skylines he doesn't tell, no, you have to endure being in it: a menacing part of it. Its evil genius: enterprise from Australia, private and state hubris in Africa.

  How are things going? A friend at the Agency risks as an afterthought to presenting copy for a cosmetics brand campaign. Does she mean, is the husband quite well again. Or does she unknowingly ask the question, is he himself again. Berenice takes the hesitant, kindly-meant enquiry in the second, unspoken sense.

  Benni is particularly affectionate and carefully considerate with Paul, as one is, would be, with anyone who had been seriously ill. Rather, has come back from a life-threatening experience of some kind, any kind. Hijack, plane crash, earthquake. This of his was no ordinary illness; she comes to know more and more, day by day, night by night, in self-perceptions of unease. Making love is surely the ultimate in the enactment of loving, in the eagerly generous response he must find in entering her body he will find himself again. As he used to be. They make love more often than ever. She is ashamed, even to admit deeply buried within her awareness, she has some fear that what enters her, what is enveloped by her dark clasping passageway, carries some alien light, still. Denial of the fear makes her the one who initiates caresses if he has not, putting her hand on his penis when he is already half into sleep. With time the shaming fear disappears under intense pleasure and its expectation of being experienced again and again. This man who has come back to her, whoever he is, makes love… how to explain it to herself, best leave it alone – as if each is the last in his life. So he must be happy? Her work sensibly defines satisfaction of one kind or another as happiness, persuading people that to buy a new-model car or luxury cruise tickets is to satisfy a need to be happy. He has never been particularly communicative, gregarious as she is, drawing attention and company; the attraction of opposites – well-known – evident in their marriage. Yet she feels that what happened to him maybe means he must instinctively move towards contact with others, now, not confined with his acolyte bushmates in the emptiness of the wilderness; come to life in the variety of friends and stimulating jostle of lively acquaintances she and many other intelligent – yes – people enjoy. To bring this about as what appears naturally, she includes that rather charming bushmate of his, Thapelo – cool! – who wasn't even afraid to go and sit with him in his untouchable quarantine – in drinks parties and occasional dinners with a mix of colleagues and even clients, some of whom are really interesting people in fields of know-how that surely would intrigue anyone. Paul's real closeness, outside the bed, is of course with their small boy, he reads to Nickie during the times when in his absence she used to set the kid up before children's TV programmes, makes things with him out of bits of fruit boxes, joins in the games when Nickie's friends come round to play. The young mothers looking on tell her she's lucky, the man's a great father. Between field trips he goes alone for his blood tests at the laboratory. She chooses the right moment to ask if everything was all right. He tells her the doctors say so.

  And you? And you?

  But then it comes to her unbidden, as the fear did, she has the strange knowing that he, personally, is not responsible to her. Has decided this.

  So that's how things are going.

  There is Christmas without the parents They have gone away on the postponed holiday. That means there is no presence in reminder of the quarantine; it is Christmas with the lit-up tree and greedy excitement of the child, a festival like everyone else's, and there's the New Year, baptised with champagne from a liquor chain whose advertising account Berenice handles, a year that the man of the family has lived to see.

  Adrian and Lyndsay have not gone on the trip to the frozen northlands he had thought of as an example of the new ventures of retirement. They are in Mexico. That is also a venture never before taken. Lyndsay was delighted with his switch of continents and climates. I'm not thick-skinned enough for below zero! Mexico in late autumn to winter, along their itinerary, was like winter at home on the highveld, cold at night and ideally warm at midday. It's not an organised tour rounded up by s
heepdog guides, but as neither speaks nor understands Spanish they found within the first day that to enjoy fully what you're seeing after getting yourself to sites, it would be good to have a local English-speaking person with you instead of keeping your nose stuck in the dingy prose of a guide book. The porter at their Mexico City hotel had a discussion, private since it was in Spanish, with the doorman, called up something on his computer and presented a name and a telephone number. This one is for you. Very excellent. He searched for a personality sufficiently famous to testify to this, and invented if not recalled, Wife of American President was one time going round with her. The recommended guide turned out unexpectedly but happily to be a Scandinavian whose clear English with its definitively enunciated final t and d, over the phone, was matched by an equally clear knowledge of the history – archaeological, architectural, cultural, political – of where they stood on each site and what they were seeing there; what was before them in palaces, museums, colossal fragments and exquisitely delicate jewellery, all of the ancient past.