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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: Loot
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She was fine, didn't want anything, thank you.
The children who were the frieze of her actions, her life, on Agency assignments everywhere, gathered slowly round the car while he was in the store. They are always the same children. Their black skin as if sandpapered grey, their leaking noses and shy giggles. One or two come up to her window silently; it is their way of begging. What could she have asked him for? What need could she possibly have, before these. It is the policy of the Agency not to give handouts; charity is not an answer, although caritas is part of an answer when you open your mouth and out comes ‘empowerment' ‘development'. She was off duty; the man was not wearing his Deputy-Director's garb: she fumbled in her locally-woven straw bag and brought up some useless small change to give before he appeared from the store.
Bottle-heads winked and the serrated topknot of a pineapple poked out of plastic bags he was carrying. In the rear-view
mirror she saw him stacking the trunk. When he got into the driver's seat he handed her a bottle of soda.—No mineral water … I'm sorry no cup, glass—
And now she thought it ridiculous, even rude, not to be using his name, if without permission.—Who needs a glass, thanks so much Gladwell—I realise I'm thirsty after all.—She tipped back her head and drank as he drove; paused, wiped the mouth on her shirt and offered the bottle to his hand on the wheel, but he merely lifted splayed fingers, kept the hand in place.—I had something in the shop.—
She wanted to say, I don't have any communicable disease, but he was not a person with whom one could joke. (As if one could joke about anything ‘communicable' these days when a new pestilence threatened intimacy.) Instead she asked him where they were making for—or was this going to be a circular drive, nowhere in particular. No, they were going to a place, there was a place where an uncle of his lived, he had some papers for him, something to arrange.—An old man doesn't understand these matters. It's on the edge of the forest, mopani trees, you know those? Illala palms.—
—A village?—
—Not really. Outside the village.—
—What does he grow? Does he farm cattle?—
—It's not a cattle farming area. They can't cultivate. His sons work in town and send some money to the old ones.—
There was a one-room-sized brick house with a tin roof and three or four satellite huts whose thatch hung like grey falling hair. In such a place, the car seemed grown twice its size, the sun clashing off its brilliant black surface. The Agency's scarred station wagons she was used to arriving in were less blatant. An old
man in a sagging dark jacket and trousers (could it be a cast-off parliamentary suit handed down) and a woman so round and heavy in her skirts she might have been the African version of a Russian doll with many clones of descending size inside her, came out of the house and warm greetings and exclamations were exchanged. His passenger didn't know the language but gathered these were praise of the member of the family who was in Government.
She stood by smiling, as on a field trip with her Administrator. The couple had shown no reaction at the arrival of a white accompanying the Deputy-Director; no doubt a Government man, one of their own, could command a white secretary. Their member of the Government introduced her first in their language, and when the old man responded in English, Pleased to meet you, madam:—This lady—she's from the aid people in America who are helping the Government in our country.—So now the distinction of the visit was doubled, for the old couple. But with dignity of his own the old man gestured to his house—the Deputy-Director responded with some interjection that led to his taking his uncle reverently by the arm, and the two of them fetched three chairs and a stool from the house.
—The English lady enjoys the sun.—The old man bowed to her. His wife brought tea—the fellow-woman gesture of rising to help was met with an authorative side-to-side of the head on the ample neck. The guest took no part in the conversation, either, because the old woman spoke no English and the men seemed to have much to discuss in their own language; but Roberta Blayne was accustomed to this, too, in her role as the Administrator's side-kick, alertly at ease, speaking up only when it was indicated by the sign language between them (a certain
way he shrugged a shoulder almost imperceptibly in her direction) she ought to. Papers were signed, with the Deputy-Director leaning over the old man's shoulder as the pen moved in a hand mummified by toil—that was the biblical word that came to her as the one for subsistence farming; while the men talked she learnt with her gaze around what the old couple's life was: a hand-pump stood crookedly, there was a small patch of maize, white-plumed close to the house, the nagging complaint of a tethered goat, some potato plants, withered cabbages like severed heads and a few plump orange pumpkins. The sun was fierce; they moved into shade. Green handgrenades hung from the branches of the avocado tree.
This was, after all, her outing; she rose, smiling.—Gladwell, I think I'm going to go for a walk. Up to that hill over there, see the view.—
He broke off what he was saying to his uncle, head vehement. —No, no. You can't walk around out there, there can be land mines still not cleared. No.—
It was as if the queer image that had come to her—fruit in the guise of weapons had been a warning. In countries where not long ago there had been one of those civil wars supplied with such weapons for both sides by foreign countries with ‘agendas' of their own, the violence lies shallowly buried. The Agency had had enough experience of that. So the stout rubber-soled hiking boots were not to be put to use.
As the honoured guests were about to leave, he brought the plastic bags from his car and carried them into the house. Only then. She found this unexpectedly delicate, certainly in this man; he hadn't wanted the old couple to start insisting that the guests share what was meant for themselves. The old man and
woman followed him, protesting happily. The woman came back with a knife in her hand and cut down two avocados, presented them to the woman from the aid agency.
She weighed them, heavy, one in either hand, thank you, thank you.
Now they were fruit.
In the car she placed them on the rear seat. He seemed to contemplate a moment on the suitability of the gift.—They will get ripe.—
 
She forgot to take them with her when he dropped her at her house. It was dark, she'd had to shout for the houseman Tomasi, who ignored the horn, to come and unlock the gates.
On Sunday she went with Flora to fetch Alan Henderson from the airport, back from New York. He was elated.—We've a whole new allocation of funds!—
—Tell, tell!—
—One-and-a-half million more.—
His Assistant and his wife celebrated him: you're a wizard, a Midas, how'd you do it, what'd you tell them.—We-e-ll—this country is stable, right—by standards of the newly emergent economies, it's ditto democratic, on the way there, anyway, and if we want to help keep it on its feet, we must do more to promote good governance, while projects must be totally co-operative, real money must be put into them, theirs and ours—
His colleague knows that ‘specific project choices' are what they'll have to adapt, finagle, beyond fine intentions.
—And how'd they receive our
‘well-documented'
doubts about funds for IT?—
—That was the tough one. They came up with their solution:
funds to supply generators for community centres and so on where we know there's no local power plant. How feasible that is … we'll work on it. They still see this continent left behind to be the Dark Continent again, Mister Kurz he dead, unless IT comes
first
—even before houses, schools and clinics. Maybe they're right … On line into the world and what's missing will follow. And there's enthusiasm over our AIDS education strategy. They're waking up over there in AmeroEurope to see if the new Plague isn't stopped nothing much else we do will matter … that's what's going to bring about a Dark Continent in our age of globalisation.—
Over lunch he asked what she'd been up to.
As if he hadn't been kept only too well informed:—Minding the store for you. Plenty of problems I didn't trouble you with, though.—
Flora was carving a leg of lamb.—Not now, not now, in your office on Monday.—
—But I did have a break. Out in the country yesterday. The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs turned up and took me for a drive, he had some chore and I suppose looked for useful company. Did you know there're still land mines not cleared in the Eastern province?—
—Good grief, I'd been told it was all clear except for the frontier in the West! We'd better look into that with Safety and Security—Defence, maybe. Was he fishing again, an Agency sardine or two to dish up for his boss's reports to the Minister? As he was doing with me, as well, when we lunched. We'll never get these guys in Government to understand we have to keep out of political issues—or seem to. As if sinking a borehole in this village before that doesn't become political. What does he think
about IT—or does he only utter on land? If you see him again, bring it up; he must sit at all manner of closed meetings with his Director, he must have a general idea of what the Government's prepared to do, we have to gather what we can to work on for cooperation from it. They can't expect to leave it all to the big network donors … as you noticed,
their
stocks have gone wa-ay down, anyway.—
 
The Hendersons put Deputy-Director Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma and his wife along with the name of the Director of Land Affairs himself on the list for a cocktail party marking the Agency's decade of service in Africa. The Director brought his wife, his Deputy came alone. As if there was no wife; but there's always a wife, somewhere. When Roberta, co-host with the Hendersons, greeted him she was about to add as a pleasantry, I forgot the avocados, but did not. Turned with other pleasantries to a man from Home Affairs, arrived with the Minister of Welfare (rumours of another kind of affair, there) who always tried to manoeuvre her sisterly into a corner with some urgent situation of women that must be brought to the attention of the Agency.
These first weeks of Alan Henderson's return were taken up in collaboration with the local World Health Organisation representative in meetings arranged for a senior man from WHO headquarters who was touring the continent in a campaign against HIV AIDS. There were visits to rural counselling centres set up in army surplus tents and to an old hospital still known by the name of a deceased English queen, now a hospice—euphemism for the last of the Stations of the disease. The Agency Administrator's Assistant had had to face, and walk
away from, to life—starvation in Bangladesh, in India, not just the living human head resculptured by it, but its final power manifest, wreaked upon the feet, the skeleton of feet no longer for standing, the feet, the hands, the hands the very last web-hold on existence. People deployed on the ground (as opposed to those tours of duty looking down from cloud-high windows of metropolitan headquarters) are like doctors, they must do what they have to do without the fatality of identification with sufferers. But in this red-brick relic of imperial compassion for its subjects the long-established discipline become natural to her failed; suddenly was not there. She groped for it within herself; the anguish of the bodies on beds and mats entered in its place. She could not look, she
had to look
, at the new-born-to-die and the rags of flesh and bone that were all that was left of the children they were to become if they did survive weeks, months, maybe a year. Food and clean water (the succour ready to be provided on other tours of duty): useless here.
Silenced by what they had seen, the official group was taken to a Holiday Inn where the Agency had arranged a private room and coffee was served. She was hearing as echoes sounding off the walls the practical responses to—what? Incurable. Something incurable in the nature of human life itself, taking many forms of which this was the latest, arising, returning in endless eras and guises—disease, wars, racism. That's how people come to believe—have to believe—in the existence of the Devil along with God, Capital Initials for both. How else? How else answer why. But what there was in that place was not ontologically incurable! Just that a cure was not yet discovered.
Preventable.
That was the succour, in the meantime! Research facilities, preventive
education—that was what, under the mantra of diffused tapes repeating pop songs, the people who were
doing something about these
were arguing, as the coffee revived blood run cold. And that was the code she belonged to: whatever there is, the ethic is do something about it. But she couldn't respond when her Administrator, with his usual consideration of the worth of her views, looked to see if she was going to speak.
 
The official car drew up at the gates just as she arrived back at the house. Dismay difficult to overcome: not this afternoon, end of this day! Draw the curtains pour yourself a whisky, no-one but the face, familiar in this delegated house, this tour of duty, of the attendant Tomasi.
Nothing for it but to blast the horn for Tomasi to come and open the gates—and dismay gave way to embarrassment, the blast sounded exasperated, she had the duty of a polite show of welcome, at least. As the gates were opened she waved a hand to signal the car to precede hers. The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs was deposited at the front door and his car proceeded once again round to the yard. She left hers and produced a smile to greet her guest.

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