Get A Life

by Nadine Gordimer

  – Did he ever say – anything – about her? -

  – You know how he would naturally remark on the beauty of a woman, someone among our friends or yours we'd met. But I don't think he saw her as a beautiful woman. He would have said something… when we talked of what luck it was we'd found a Scandinavian, typically competent and friendly but keeping a distance. -

  And now Lyndsay did not smile but gave a burst of breath, cutting herself off.

  He still held the letter and began to skim it again, while half-handing it back to her.

  Neither of them wanted it; it lay on the low table where the child's game was set out.

  – So that's all changed. Just in the time they went off together? The car and the adobe hut. Two weeks? -

  – A few days more. I was going to meet him at the airport this coming Saturday, his postponed date to come home. -

  – Ma (he reverted to the childhood address, once grown up he and his sisters, most often, called their parents as the parents preferred, by their names)… Ma, what are you thinking of doing. -

  She said nothing and neither did he. The lively frolic of an exchange between Nickie and Primrose's cousin sounded from the kitchen.

  – I've come to you. -

  – But I can't know how you feel. He's my father, that's not the husband, the man, your man. -

  – Are you angry with him. – As his mother's son.

  – I suppose I am. Of course you are. -

  – No, no, not angry. No right to be angry. -

  If she had said something that might lead to doubts about his mother's own record, she quickly covered with a succeeding generalisation. – We don't own one another. Men and women don't. – If there's no barnyard hen there's no barnyard rooster.

  No embarrassment to say (as if the father were dead) – He's always loved you so much. Any of us could see it. And so I suppose you… Sometimes we could be quite jealous. -

  She would not know whether it was when 'we' were children (not loved enough) or whether he was contrasting his own life with a woman.

  Look, this isn't the unbelievable of someone radiant with emanating danger, it's an ordinary human situation, if painful. Clear from the letter the one who loves once too often is in pain, too, although he can bury it in the body of his Norwegian. Lyndsay is a lawyer and lawyers' vocation is to deal with everything that has a legal status between birth and death. Rights. Lyndsay can divorce Adrian if she wishes, she has the conventional grounds, she knows exactly how you go about it although she's long left that level of legal practice behind for the higher ones of civil rights and constitutional law. Or she can leave him to pursue this given phase (love, sexual imperative is always a given), unplanned for retirement; wait. He doesn't seem to want, to be considering, a divorce, finality, in that letter. It's some sort of appeal – for what?

  The mother and son understand this without discussion.

  It is too soon, too raw, to receive the different answers there must be. And that's really the mother's necessity, the choices can't be of the same preoccupation, inevitability, to the son. He has left home, twice. He has his own life to live: that convenient cop-out of other intimate responsibilities. The generations can't help each other, in the existential affront. They are no closer than his awkwardness in a chair, might have been about to embrace her but clatter means the pair from the kitchen are bursting in upon them.

  Lyndsay. Lyn. He's always loved you so much. The son could bring himself to witness that, not the kind of thing one says to a mother. Out of a soap opera, but not when it comes from him. He doesn't watch soap operas he reads trees and watercourses.

  She does not reply to the letter at once. Reply? What does that imply. This happens and you do that. She did not call the hotel in Mexico City; perhaps he was expecting her to. Voice to voice if not face to face. She gave herself time, which was, supposedly, giving him time. To come home and say, as she knows one could, The affair's over. Weeping, as she had been. Whether for its end or for the betrayal it was of being loved so much. The more days she let go by before writing the letter that formulated and reformulated – crossed out, abandoned, and coming again into her mind (only in court, allowed no distraction, ever, did what he had made happen to her have no place), the more he would feel that he had her acquiescence, some sort of acceptance, her understanding he could not make a decision just as she could not, beyond his writing in his letter that for the time being he was simply staying on, visiting sites with his lover.

  The longer the letter in return was unwritten, rewritten when she came home from Chambers to the old house that had never echoed empty on occasions when he was away and would be back on this day or that; when she lay in the dark and his side of the bed was flat, no body-horizon to be made out, the interpretation of what had come about was different. Life-work. All his life he had worked not grudgingly or unhappily, it appeared, with the satisfaction of doing what he had to do, conscientiously, in activity he wouldn't have chosen. The only culmination: retirement. The experience close to if not exactly fulfilment of his avocation (there's that mention he'd 'sifted the dust' that yields the past on an archaeological site), wasn't that enhanced by the realisation that there is another avocation, to love again. They go together. The woman and the archaeology. The lovemaking and the digs.

  Perhaps this should be the contents of the letter, final draft before it got written. She did not think she could put it to the son, not even him. Even he would take it thankfully as a rationalisation. Rationalisation being essential in any solution for his mother. At least he would be too preoccupied, as he should be, with the remaking of his own life, to see how the rationalisation sifted through the familiar, familial dust to show everything of what the life of those two, parents, had been. Ordinary. A version of it. Just as his taking up again his wife/child/containing house – the elements of home – seemed to be reassembled.

  The written letter was not any one of the unwritten drafts with their flourishes of emotion, contradictions of cruelty (who would have thought you'd make a fool of yourself pushing seventy) and sad understanding (it's still good together, yes, even in bed).

  Honest. To be the way he was.

  I can't tell you I am anything but almost disbelieving, amazed. Because I've noticed, oh over all our years, even since you've been getting old, women having an eye for you, but Hilde didn't give any sign whatever of responding to you any more than she did to me. The same smile. And you – do I stupidly think people, the man and the woman, know each other so well after all those years that there couldn't be a change going on in one without the other sensing it. Apparently I did, do, think so. While we were together with the guide she was just that, smiling. You were just attentive, as I was, to the vivacious precision of her guidance to places and objects we wanted to see, and her knowledge of their history and meaning. No gallantry towards her – you know what I mean. In fact I thought you were relieved, in a way, when she excused herself from eating with us, we've never been at a loss for something we want to exchange over a meal alone. Perhaps I misread you, the strain of hiding the responses you were beginning to feel to her meant it was a relief for her not to be around for a while.

  I suppose I should feel some reproach of her. But I won't. And there's no point, for her or for me, in her feeling 'bad'. As you write, it's happened, you both made it happen. From the letter it seems you don't know what you want (blocked out 'except not me') at present. So let it be an extended holiday, for now. I have shown your letter to Paul but for the girls the extended holiday will be the only explanation why you haven't come back, you're following more archaeological digs. The awkwardness that may result, if Emma gets to know you're lingering in Central America she'll want to persuade you to hop over to Brazil and see our grandchildren. ('Grandchildren'. Was that cruel; but she left the ambiguous reference, did not cross it out.)

  The letter was typed on her word processor. When she took up the copy, she had ready to write in her own hand, I love you. She wrote only the
version of her name by which he knew her, Lyn.

  It was unnecessary to warn Paul not to tell his sisters about the nature of the extended archaeological holiday. There was not much contact with them, anyway; family occasions of Christmas and New Year were long over and the social life arranged by Benni was peopled by her advertising colleagues now drawn together with some of his bushboys. Since he was no longer in quarantine, his affectionate sister Emma hadn't emailed from Brazil; presuming he didn't need her wild, amusing messages any more. Often it was Benni who would suggest his mother should come to dinner, and Lyndsay would arrive with a bottle of good wine. Benni would dutifully also ask, what news of Adrian, and appeared to listen as innocently as she did when Lyndsay told of some wonderful region he'd just driven through, adding – You two really must go to Mexico one day, it's dramatic. Worth the trip for the Museum of Anthropology alone. – If this was an interregnum his mother was managing it just as she had managed the isolation of quarantine.

  She and her son have again something in common, as there was unknown to each in his reversion to childhood and her matching reversion, then, of reliving the shame of four lollipop years. They have each the dedication beyond the personally intimate, of belonging to the condition of the world. Justice. The survival of nature. Whatever the condition of their intimate lives, she was fully committed with her colleagues to the complexities, the apparent dead ends to be followed and disproved, the nuance of statements to be deciphered, the lies to be disentangled from facts, in the corruption cases for which they were briefed, and which certainly would go on, with adjournments and referrals, for months. Another extended period. And he, with Thapelo and Derek, was back and forth to the coastal dunes, now, of the Eastern Cape, where the government's decision to allow mining for titanium and other metals was pending – same area as the toll highway project. The subject of begetting another child, companion for Nickie, had not come up again. What he had said, that time, put an end to it. They made love when he was home from the dunes, smelling, she told him, of the sea; which roused her, evidently. He assumed she had protected herself against insemination. Protected herself from Him.

  His mother became somehow part of the life returned to, taken up, in his house; as if with the end of its occupation as a place of quarantine and in the absence of the father, the old house was no longer home. She was quite often found with Nicholas and Benni, when he came back to the city, to his life there. Seems she had some sort of relationship, if not close at least comfortable, to the combination personality Berenice/Benni with whom she had little in common. Well – himself and the boy. As the archaeological holiday, the fulfilment of an avocation long denied – that was how it came to be unspokenly accepted – indeed extended it took on something of the established ordinariness that had been achieved by Lyndsay in the period of a quarantine. Apparently she filled her time in the company of other women rather than the married couples who were her friends and Adrian's. Her son supposed this was usual with women not looking for a new man, or disadvantaged by age or a sense of distaste for such a pursuit; not something he would have given a thought to if it hadn't been out of concern about his mother. Apart from the parents' circle of mutual friends, she had tended to have hers among the legal fraternity – fraternity, yes, because most judges and prominent lawyers were male. She brought to lunch one Sunday what it is clear was a particular new friend, not a lawyer but a social worker, and not a nice middle-class do-gooder like the ones who might be among the married couples, but a woman employee of the local government Social Welfare department. She was coloured, one in whose broad face, a composite image of the Khoi Khoi, San, Malay, Dutch, English, German and only the past knows what else, was pleasingly mixed. She was presented as Charlene-Somebody but cut in with a laugh, Just call me Charlene, that's me.

  Lyndsay defined, in dismissal of modesty – She's been introducing me to the realities my colleagues and I only see as the end result. She took me yesterday to a hospice, no, I suppose you'd call it a halfway home for babies. Abandoned babies, some of them HIV-infected or already with AIDS. -

  – Ghastly thought. That must have been hard to take. – Benni, like Adrian, is also honest, coming out with the crude reaction others would suppress in order not to appear to lack human feeling.

  This Charlene sensed some explanation was appropriate for how the introduction to a reality came about, and also perhaps unable to suppress an impulse to show her quality in becoming mentor to someone in a high position of the authoritarian world. – Ag, you see, I've just been a witness in that big case, you know, my brother-in-law who was kicked out of his firm, his job, he was assistant manager in a supermarket, because he's got AIDS – how he got it, that's another story, not for me – the trade union made a case to defend him and Mrs Bannerman was the chief lawyer -

  – Unlawful dismissal. We won. It's something of a test case with implication for others. Charlene Damons was an outstandingly good witness – the attorney who was supposed to prepare her said it was the other way about -

  The two women laughed; this testimony must have been what led Lyndsay to take an interest in the woman. Obviously initiated some opportunity to talk to her; time has long passed when coffee shops were segregated and there was nowhere to go. Over the Sunday lunch Lyndsay encouraged voluble Charlene, who didn't need much urging while she composedly enjoyed her food and the usual wine the host's mother contributed, to tell about her work among people suffering HIV and AIDS, in particular workers employed in industry and chain stores.

  – What happens to the babies? Many die? And if they survive, with treatment. They do get treatment? – Benni is wiping the traces of icecream from round Nickie's mouth.

  – Many die. What can you do. They've been left in public toilets. Some in the street, the police find them and bring them in. -

  – The mothers? -

  – Nobody knows the mothers, who're the fathers. -

  Lyndsay has been turned away, listening. – But when you see them, their faces. They look like someone. Not nobody. -

  There's proof. Nickie, icecream-besmeared face, looking like – Paul, Benni, Lyndsay. Adrian. And progenitors farther back. As the elements that converge in the Okavango; as the natural forces of alchemy create the sand dunes secreting minerals from still earlier formations.

  The new kind of family lunch passed uneventfully enough with the guest; Paul and Benni didn't encounter her again. Lyndsay was engaged in a new case, her next offering was not an individual but a letter, first of several, read out to the family as sometimes she brought along an email from Emma; a letter from Adrian telling something of whatever it was that he was living. A state awkward to categorise. Travels to the mountains, natal region of Zapata, more Rivera paintings seen, the weather. Archaeological excavations, of course. In one letter, he said he was thinking of writing something. The experience of seeing these unearthed accomplishments of the ancient past when you belong to an era where there are wars going on over who possesses weapons that could destroy all trace of it. (The letters were addressed like publicity leaflets headed 'The Occupier', 'Dear family' on the first page.) When Lyndsay came to these few sentences her distanced tone sounded to the others a sign that they were meant for her alone.

  She probably wrote back – would she? – the same kind of letters with matters skimmed from the surface of what the family was living; whether there were words, residue of the exchanges of the personal, not the ancient, past, coming privately from her to him was her own affair, her son couldn't speculate any more than he could foresee any resolution the parents might come to for themselves.

  The government's announced project for a Pondoland 'marine protected area' wasn't going to be any resolution for the sand dunes on that coast. It protected the waters alone. The Australian-based Mineral Commodities could still go ahead with their plan to mine twenty kilometres of the dunes. With Thapelo and Derek surrounded by a paper-territory of surveyors' maps and their own field notes, the team sat with representatives from E
arthlife Africa and the Wildlife and Environmental Society following the trail of contradictory statements, a palimpsest over what was before them.

  – The Minister's passing the buck. Just listen again. Environmental Affairs: 'The Minister remains opposed to the mining and instead supports ecotourism in the area. But ultimately the decision to mine on the Wild Coast rests with the Minister of Minerals and Energy.' Ja-nee. – Derek's jerks of the head mimic 'yes-no'.

  – The Mineral Commodities outfit must have submitted for the Aussies the application to Minerals and Energy by now. Department's sitting on it. While that's going on and Mineral Commodities' spin doctors are lobbying, you can depend on that, we've got to keep pushing, man, pushing. They're going over the Pondoland Marine Park projects, they say, to 'assess' how it will affect their mining plans, but that's nonsense, shaya-shaya, their chief exec's already said the frontal dune and riverine systems had always been excluded from the mining areas – they're not – Thapelo hoists the flag of one of the surveyors' maps.

  A heat of frustration rises with it. Paul waves a hand up across the table as if clearing this emanation. – Lobbying – that's only part of the strategy. Bribery is going to serve them even better. The option they've given to a black empowerment company that represents the very community, the traditional leaders we counted on, the people we've been lobbying to protest misuse of their land, threat to their subsistence. A fifteen percent stake in the mining deal, ten million dollars. Ten million! How does that divide up among – how many people? It doesn't; going to be shares on the stock exchange. Doesn't matter. It's a sum that fills the sky. – His rolling glance tilts inadvertently at Thapelo, who shouldn't be singled out; wanting the empowerment of money is a characteristic of whites as well, at least human temptation isn't discriminatory. The difference is whites have held that power exclusively, so long. – How does that look for protest against the toll road that's going to break up their habitat, the mining that's set to destroy the dunes there? So? We don't want rural blacks to have a share in the growth of economic power? It's not for them? They're out of the mix in our mixed economy? What're we going to say to that. -