Loot (20 page)

Read Loot Online

Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: Loot
4.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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.'
 
 
 
 
 
T
he 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.
Seeing these things, still there, I can't believe I'm here so scared I can hardly breathe. My father keeps trying to turn his head to look at me, I know he wants to tell me it's all right, he's with me.
Then there are tops of buildings I don't know, and then no buildings, only sky. My nose is running. No, I'm crying! Baby! I snort the tears back up through my nose, my father mustn't know.
We get wherever it is they're taking us and the army van opens in a yard, very bright high lights like in a sports field but there's a building with bars at the windows. They take my father away but not to the building and I call, I yell, but they don't let him answer, I see his shoulders struggling. The Germans who're holding me take me into the building. It's a prison. I've only seen the inside of a prison in films. There's some argument going on, I don't understand their language but I think it's because they don't know what to do with me.
I know they're going to shoot my father. This fear that takes away the movement of my legs, the Germans are holding me up, dragging me along passages, is it fear for him or for me. But why don't they take me away to be shot wherever they're doing it to him. They open an iron door and throw me into a small place, dark, with a square of light cut by thick black bars. When they have gone I make out that there's nobody but me and a patch that must be a blanket.
I've been here days now, they bring me water and food sometimes and there's a bucket that stinks of me. But it's as if nothing ever happened to me, I am not Kostya who was in school and played second league football and went shopping to carry for my mother and had already invited Natalya to the cinema, paying for her, there is only the ride on the floor of the military van beside my father, and the church tower and the theatre wall sticking up, and his back as he went to be shot. Because if he wasn't shot he would be in this place with me. We would be very close because this space is very small, there's hardly room to spread the blanket to lie down. There's a wall in my face whichever way I turn. If I jump with my hands ready I can just reach and grab the iron bars on the bit of window and hang there. But it's difficult to haul up my head and shoulders so I can see anything. Only the bars. I feel the bars in my hands, if I lie on the blanket and close my eyes, I see the bars. Sometimes I have the crazy idea that my head is getting smaller, if I can think it into getting small enough I could stick it through the bars. My head would be out of the tight walls, the bars wouldn't be there on my eyes even when my eyes are closed.
What can they do with me? They can't send me back home
to tell everyone everything. They've lost the war. There they are at the door, they leave it open a moment, stare at me. A loud word in their language. They've come.
Taking me away to be shot. The bars still there on my eyes.
‘The Pestle of the moon
That pounds up all anew
Brings me to birth again—
To find what once I had,
And know what once I have known.'
The grandmother used to talk about the war and after the war when there were plans in which the government would build up everything that was lost and the man with the great moustache was power in the world just like the American president and she had been on a trip with a women's group to Moscow to see the other one in his tomb, dead but still as if he was alive among everyone in the country. The granddaughter was born after the one with the great moustache was also dead and she grew up under the public display of portraits of those, one by one, who came after him; successive faces of the father she didn't have. Apparently he had left her mother for another woman when his child was too small to have kept memory of him. The Government fathers provided good schools and clinics for children, and her mother had a steady job in a catering business, conditions for whose employees were ensured by their trade union. The grandmother had her pension.
The child was taken with her school class (like her grandmother's group, earlier, but not to the tomb) to museums and the overawing, dwarfing interiors of splendid buildings which had survived the war and been restored, palaces and theatres from way back in the history of Czars, now belonging, the Government said, to the people. She loved these expeditions; the chipped but glorious gilt, bulbous cupolas, flying crenellated arrows of spires aimed at the clouds, the saints painted in deserted chapels—religion was not taught in schools, and only the very old, like her grandmother, ventured to go and pray in museum-churches without priests to receive them. God was not there. But the grandmother privately could not accept this: that he did not exist. The young girl introduced her mother to the splendour that belonged to the city of their unchanging routine of school, work, food queues, and when the State ballet came on tour, they went together to be dazed with enchantment—tickets were cheap, ordinary workers could afford such pleasures. She had decided she wanted to be a teacher; and then, seeing computers working magically in television shows, changed to the ambition to learn computer skills and maybe work in a regional Government office. Her mother's trade union would know how the daughter should go about this, when the time came.
But when the time came, she had completed her school education, it was a different time. Another time. The great fathers lost power, lost hold, the countries that had made a vast union under one name, broke apart. The intellectuals and others the fathers had feared and imprisoned were let out. The world outside told, now all would be free. Bring the computers, bring the casinos, bring whatever the West says that makes happiness that
we've never tried, couldn't have. And they did. And the new Government that had never done business the West's way didn't do well, now in business with them.

Other books

Conan The Fearless by Perry, Steve
The Digger's Game by George V. Higgins
Kiss and Kill by Ellery Queen
Once (Gypsy Fairy Tale) by Burnett, Dana Michelle
Temptation Island by Soltry, C.C.
Surrender to Love by Julia Templeton