Get A Life

by Nadine Gordimer

  Not an epiphany, life moves more slowly and inexorably than any belief in that. Except there's the question of why she chose that moment and place to announce herself. Well. Did she think, was she given courage (what a bastard to have said, Get yourself another man), the telling of the abortion of Abel from the nest made time and place propitiate, for the right perception.

  Lyndsay was told. A sibling for Nicholas. Although he was not so much an only child now that Klara was – an unexpected form of relationship, unnamed, as she had been. Lyndsay herself doesn't define it, the child has not been taught to call her mama, or should it be grandma – that's the question but not a problem: she's Lyndsay to the child, and this doesn't undermine authority; or what looks like love, apparently.

  Benni is overwhelmingly energetic, working in her advancing position at the Agency to take advantage of the improvement in the economy, as beautiful as ever, the face above the thickening body. When gestation is over (difficult not to think in terms of the vocabulary familiar for the other mammals that should be saved from extinction) will be the time to judge. If what is born is not affected, mutated in some way by sperm spurted from a body that had emanated radiance. Only then. In the meantime have to trust. What? Benni's instinct. Her contribution to starting over in a new state of existence. She has had a scan which reveals the curled-up foetus has male genitals already formed. A son. Be able to think of this being as a son when other things have been verified. You can be guilty of what you were not responsible for. Derek and Thapelo are congratulatory when they notice, on Sunday lunch invitations, the mound his wife carries under her flowing robe (Berenice's flair has taken to African dress as most attractive, in her present shape). Their jubilation – did they think a man wouldn't be able to make it after the state of quarantine – is infectious, it calls for a few beers Thapelo contributes to be enjoyed with rations in the wilderness. Nickie's hand is taken by his mother and placed on her belly; your little brother's waiting in there. He won't be as big as me. Everyone laughs at the premature one-upmanship. But there is a gleaming joy of curiosity and anticipation that may be what will banish for good the fingers forced from the iron gate, Daddy! Paul! Klara hears she too will have a little brother. Why not? A family has to be constituted for one who has none. She has been introduced to Jacqueline, the one of Paul's sisters who lives in the city, not Brazil or on an ostrich farm. Jacqueline's adolescent daughters make a great fuss of the little girl, putting bangles on her arms and bows on her dreadlocks. Likely Lyndsay may have told the prospective grandfather of the new addition expected by his son, in one of the occasional letters to Stavanger. No response to Paul and Benni, from there. If the father writes to her, the mother doesn't bring letters to the family, any more; the absence is not noted, perhaps not noticed, Klara and Nickie are playing a wild game, friends are expected. Lyndsay has sat for the first time in her judge's robes, at her elevation in court. If she's mentioned that, tie must be allowed to be proud of her. Still.

  Lyndsay came with a letter again one day, without the accompanying happening of the child, and after calling to ask if he was alone. Yes, his wife Benni couldn't forego a promotional cocktail party which Berenice should host despite the hard swell under the beaded African robe that announced, in medical jargon, her term was approaching.

  His mother ignored Nickie watching the children's television programme he demanded with Benni's inherited charm. Taking it out of a courier's plastic packet she, once more, gave over the letter. The son found the envelope unopened – uncomprehending, ready to be irritated, what's this for, Ma, looked away from her. The address: the writing unfamiliar.

  He slit the top of the envelope carefully and drew out the folded sheet at the same time handing it towards her, but she came to stand close beside him, head bent to read it together.

  Stavanger.

  Lyndsay recognised the handwriting from the statement of expenses the guide had presented at the end of each week of services in Mexico. She sensed her lips moving as she and her son read, as if following a foreign language. Dear Mrs Bannerman, I didn't want to shock over the phone, so I write to tell you he died last night, Adrian. In his sleep, the doctor came at once, I called. It was heart failure. He did not suffer. It was after the theatre. We had a nice walk by the sea in the afternoon. That was yesterday, 14th. So that was the date when it happened.

  Both stopped reading. What happened: he stayed behind in Mexico, he went to Norway. Gone away. It is difficult to realise another departure. If this had been a letter from Adrian telling at last that he was not coming back, the state of retirement he was in, Stavanger, was final, would that have been different? But what an insane escapist thought. Even if they were having it together. Adrian is dead. He hasn't announced finality. He's silent about it. Lyndsay and he read poetry together when they were young, tags remain, 'Death is silence, things which are not'. The guide he retired to speaks, writes for him.

  Her son – their son – stirs the sheet of paper; they must read on. As if there is anything to say. Already told: died in his sleep, in bed beside the guide of course, no suffering, she knows because she was there, she simply sensed there was no rise and fall of breath or his body was cold against hers. They had walked together in the afternoon on the beautiful North Sea beach, Sola, a theatre where the streak of wet in the light from the stage that touched his cheek announced another kind of grief.

  Read on. A gap, a pause at the word processor before a new start to this letter. Mrs Bannerman (again, though surely thought of as Lyndsay, embarrassment, guilt at the appropriation of retirement or late assurance that this title of marriage would never have been usurped) Mrs Bannerman, I have made all the enquiries, I will do it immediately you give me details where he must be received. My telephone number and email is at the top of the page. I can arrange it. I will send his body.

  Smiling.

  How else. In the grief she also must feel.

  They walk into early evening light in the garden of Paul 's house, to which he returned from that other garden. Up and down, slowly, legs move even if mind doesn't. To the shrubs and the acacia where the children's swings hang twinned, one's been strung up for Klara too; and back. Lyndsay trips over an abandoned toy in the rapid rise of darkness in Africa and he steadies her; also himself, to speak. Silence is only for the dead. Adrian.

  Let's go in.

  It's no-one else's decision, only theirs, as the conditions of another state of existence were finally between them alone in quarantine. He doesn't dutifully indicate, it's yours to decide, you, his lover, that indefinable relation dubbed by law and church, wife. Do you want him back; if dead. Did he ever express that primeval urge, to be buried in his natal soil. The idea that his death in the logical sequence of events after retirement would happen elsewhere never occurred. He could have had a heart attack and died in the Arctic under the aurora borealis, that retirement venture with Lyndsay that didn't come off. Preserved in ice ready to be flown home.

  Home. From Stavanger. Begin over again, from the grave. Or the ashes of the crematorium. There are new beginnings, in place. This's not home you left to follow so late, in archaeological digs, your avocation.

  Smiling.

  Found it.

  They didn't tell other members of the family, not Jacqueline, not Susan, not Emma in Brazil, of the offer. An email was sent thanking the guide and declining. His mother asked Paul to place his name alongside hers. He had his sense of loss carried with him in the wilderness that still needed him and his team, Derek, Thapelo, always new threats to which there must be human solutions (if your father dies do you now exist in his place, nature's solution). If there's a possibility for the dune mining project or the pebble-bed nuclear reactor to be outlawed that's proof that what is a vocation and an avocation may be worth pursuing in the limited span of one individual's minuscule existence, not seen from Space.

  What she – Lyndsay – does with sorrow – it must be? – cannot be asked and must not be pried at or spied upon. The life of p
arents is a mystery even when you are paired off with someone in a version of the state, yourself. She has her successes, as the defeat of destruction of the Pondoland dunes, if achieved, would be a success at least partly attributable to Derek, Thapelo and himself. She's been appointed to serve on the Constitutional Court, and this is no Gender Affirmative post, that's certain.

  Adrian is not a taboo subject. Paul does not know that she has on her desk in her office at the Constitutional Court a photograph of Adrian she took when they were together at an archaeological site in Mexico. They speak of Adrian when a context comes up to remember something he might have remarked, laughed at with them, and when listening to music together, talking of his depth of understanding from which she profited and, yes, Paul's evidently growing enjoyment must have come, even of those composers she's never learnt to listen to without a sense of psychic disruption, Stockhausen, Penderecki etcetera. Perhaps the only way to break the silence is to have passed on something. Impalpable.

  A well-secured box addressed in the same unfamiliar hand eventually was delivered, containing a few small archaeological artifacts, a reproduction feather headdress of the kind seen being made with delicate ancestral skill by vendors outside the Museum of Anthropology, and what was evidently a draft of thoughts on the experience of seeing 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. She gave the artifacts, headdress, and the manuscript to the Department of Archaeology at a university where one of the academics was a friend. She asked, maybe the university press would publish the draft in some form.

  EDEN OF AFRICA FACING THREAT OF BEING SUBMERGED BY FLOODS

  This is the kind of lyrical drama a newspaper headline makes of the waters Noah must have seen. But not from Outer Space. Not from a helicopter. The team has come back from a second survey of Okavango to map-covered walls, spread aerial photographs and half-drunk cups of instant coffee. Which is the reality? Here or there. It's not normal to live in two environments, every traveller knows the disorientation, disbelief, that is the brief consequence of leaving home and walking out into a foreign country ten hours later. But this consequence of being back among domestic objects and four walls, from wilderness, earth or water is a condition of living, not jet lag.

  As they go over in their minds and talk what was seen down below, the observations shouted, half-heard, to one another against the racket of the helicopter, there is another question of which is the reality: the 'Eden' treasure feared threatened or the people of the central delta there, told they must abandon their homes before the rising waters. What's going to happen to them anyway, if ten dams that will alter the cosmic picture of the world as seen from Space are built?

  Shouldn't be thinking about this, like this. The practice of conservation, boots in the mud, Thapelo's occasional addition of beers to basic supplies, concentrates on one issue at a time, some sort of sequence in activity while the commissions keep sitting, for or against. What is in the others' minds – about these people.

  Derek's glance moves down a newspaper cutting that had reported interviews with the Delta people about the dams. – No-one will evict us from our ancestral lands. It is a gift from God, and our forefathers' soil. -

  How does this emotional stuff, no doubt genuine as many (hopeless) defences are (isn't that the principle of rousing the Amadiba over the effects of the toll highway), strike Thapelo? He's one of those all over Africa who were long ago evicted from the forefathers' soil. And even what was left to them was 'a gift from God', the white man's God, not the ancestral ones? 'God': the first colonial civilising dispensation, a token something of a whole country dispossessed.

  Thapelo needs none of his white mates' tact; seventeen months in solitary detention in the bad old days and none of the Gods did anything about it. He smiles and lifts his fingers softly up, down, from where his hands rest on the table, saluting respect to the ancestors but in acceptance of realities. His people have had to abandon their homes so many times and not for reasons of their safety before a flood.

  – Safari guides report animals have drowned; we didn't see any bodies floating. -

  – Didn't fly low enough and they might be caught in the submerged reeds and stuff. -

  – An elephant? Submerged? -

  – Doesn't mention the big guys. -

  There's a season of flood, at expected levels, part of the ecological balance dealing with the salts, every year. But such extensive and unusual waters; a great inundation. Copies of background documents are handed round. An expert geoscientist, McCarthy, has found – predicts? – that after about 150 years toxic salts will destroy all plants (Derek starts to read aloud and the other two shush him as they read for themselves)… and at this point the floodwaters should erode the islands and release salts into the swamp. But with perfect timing papyrus and hippo grass upstream will have encroached into channels, causing sand levels to rise and blocking their flow. (Silenced Derek glances up: Man, we know all that. The others won't be distracted: Chief, you never know it all.) The water is diverted elsewhere and the old islands dry out. Then in that mysterious way it does, the peat in these dry areas catches fire (somebody's god strikes a match?) creating a mosaic of burning forests up to fifteen centimetres deep… these wild fires can burn for decades, destroying all life growing above them. After the fires have died, summer rains flush saline poisons deep below ground. Nutrients from the fires combine to form fertile soils… in this way the flow of water and creation of islands is constantly changing… the entire organism named Okavango renews itself.

  Splendid, triumphant. Wola! Cho! Jabula! Phambili! Only the exclamations picked up from Thapelo's languages are adequate. The Okavango 's revenge. Originating hundreds of kilometres away, every year with the spring rains the rivers Cuebe, Longa, Custi, Cichi, Cubango – Africa-named before the white men dubbed them with that other reality, discovery for Europe – send a pulse of water, no, now a magnificent flood, the perennial wetland becomes a high waterland (what does it look like from Space!). Drowns projects, obliterates the idea of ten dams. And carries its own knowledge of dispersal, subsidence, knowledge of its own means of renewal in time.

  Read on. However there is a problem against which the living swamp has not had time to develop a defence: humans.

  The intention to build ten dams is not submerged.

  So what is the reality. The human reality, Chief, Bra, however you're seen or you see yourself, the immediate, market reality – that's what counts in what you learn from the mother of your children, one in the womb, is the real world. Okavango left to itself will renew eternally. That is: woah! – eternity also has to be defined: as long as the earth is not ended by explosions of irreversible radiance. People don't live eternity; they live a finite Now. The mining of the dunes. Now the Australians have made a deal with a fifty-one percent black-owned company. The blacks are to have a fifteen percent share in the dunes mining project. While we were busy working with the International Rivers Network, the World Conservation Union, the Wild Life and Environmental Society, all our good acronym partners, the Aussies were spending nine months, same gestation period as the human ovum fertilised by a radiance survivor's sperm, negotiating this agreement which – confidently – now will allow to be granted from the Government a prospecting permit for the eighty-nine million rands, around eight million pounds, international enterprises may be quoted in many currencies, to proceed. That's the official-speak to express it, 'Allow to be granted'. A worthy incentive isn't a bribe, my Bra. No-one can disagree with the necessity for blacks to enter the development economy at a major level, fifteen percent is a good start? Thapelo gives a grand fanfaring laugh, for celebration or derision: is it yona ke yona or shaya-shaya, this bit of black empowerment? There's also the concomitant reality that a toll highway carrying the derived minerals and ilmenite (used in the fabric and the beauty business, cosmetic industries) to a smelter and processor in the city centu
ries ago named by homesick Europeans 'East London', might bring a weekly wage to replace the sacrifice, God's gift of a few crop fields, unique endemism, and twenty-two kilometres of sand dunes which used to be fished from instead of mined. Bring hi-fi systems and cars. Yes! Easy to sneer at materialism and its Agency seductions while existence within it has the luxury of dissatisfaction, the wilderness to oppose it.

  Who's to decide.

  This kind of research has no place in this room with two mates – we just happen to be earth-brothers if not blood-brothers – Thapelo and Derek with whom is shared what the self pursues as reality. She. Benni, it must be allowed, is the other reality. Berenice. Hers, chosen, or advised by its effectiveness in the finite. Get a life! The Agency admonishment.

  This kind of subject is left in the garden.

  In quarantine.

  Thapelo tips his chair, boots lifted, rights it with the flourish of impact to the floor loud before them.

  A summons. He senses danger; distraction.

  Benni's soft hand on his cheek against the prickle of morning's beard wakes him, her Berenice voice coaxingly calls his name. Half-returned, half in the other world of sleep, can't help receiving the calm purpose with which the female, like any in the wild, approaches what must be a cataleptic ordeal; the reverse of the invasion of the body by demonic light, the contrary, a desertion by what has been tenderly part of it, feeding from a common life-blood. She slides the African robe over her belly, ready to go to a birth-place here in the city, a clinic not a hide under bushes, but the purpose of shelter for the event is the same. It's something that cannot be shared. At least she understands he is not one to be a spectator, present. He's not the man who massaged her feet at the event of the first child.

  In the meantime.