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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

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BOOK: Loot
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Tomasi the sprinter was already opening the front door. Once she and Gladwell Shadrack Chabruma were in the livingroom she excused herself:—May I dump my papers and tidy myself up, we've been about out of the office all day. Please—be comfortable.—
He will have heard her flushing the loo, water coming from the old squeaking taps as she washed, she did not look at herself in the bathroom mirror. Hadn't made himself comfortable.
There in his parliamentary dress he was standing as if he had just entered.—Come.—She turned to the sofa; while he seated himself, she indeed drew the curtains and opened the cupboard where the hospitality bottles were.
—It's too late for tea, don't you agree. Gladwell. What'll it be?—
—Whatever you are having.—
—Whisky? Soda, water?—
—I prefer soda.—
She drew up a little table for their drinks and joined him on the sofa.—We have a visitor from WHO in New York, we've been taking him around with people from the Ministry of Health, some from Welfare.—
—It is good when these principals come, see for themselves. Sometimes.—
—And other times?—
—They don't understand what they see, what it means; what we are doing.—One of his pauses.—They're seeing something else they bring along with them. What is it, the word … when I was a student at University of Virginia—a paradigm. Yes.—
Sometimes.
The curt proviso caught at her abstracted attention. The few occasions they had met, even in the opportunities of the weekend drive, he had not allowed himself any uncertainties. Now from this small indication that this official was also a man with doubts came the release coffee at the Holiday Inn had not brought her.
—I shouldn't be doing this job.—
Spoken suddenly for herself. But as if overheard by both—
the man was here so it must have been for him, too.—We were at that new water purification plant … two clinics they fund. And the old Queen Mary Hospital. You know.—
—Their AIDS programme.—
—WHO's and ours, the Agency.—
—You have had a very busy day. Roberta.—
And she was the one who had not seen what there was to see: here was a reassuring presence seated in physical solidity, affirming her worth, the correctness of the three-piece suit a sign of order—like the gown of a judge in the discipline of the law, a surgeon in his white coat—in a shaking world. A man in command of himself. Strong perfectly articulated hands enlaced at rest on his knees.
—It was unbearable. You should go—no, don't, don't go, it's what no-one's meant to see, how can I say, the processes, what happens after death and it's supposed to be buried away, but it's all there—living. The babies just born and that means beginning to die, there in front of you.—
In profile she saw his mouth drawn stiffly, eyebrows contracted. That he did not look at her made it possible for her to control the stupid, useless indulgence of tears.
He picked up his glass and drank, then stirred slightly, towards her.—I told you not to walk out because of land mines still there, my uncle's place. His youngest was home for school holidays and went with his dog to shoot a bird for his mother's pot and he was blown up. Both legs gone. Sixteen years. He died. They can't plant their fields.—
When the man had left she didn't know whether he had meant to reproach her weakness, or comfort her with the
proof—seen it for herself—that the old couple continues to live surrounded by the Death that had killed their son, lying in wait for them to step upon it.
 
The tour of the WHO representative ended. Roberta Blayne and her Administrator took up their usual activities until the next partner in development came. She was doing her job. In the social life promoted by Flora Henderson beyond official entertaining and being entertained (enough, enough aidshoptalk) the bachelor woman was always in the company of couples. She danced with other women's husbands; no woman seemed to fear her. She couldn't consider herself lonely, and the work was among the most fulfilling she had ever been assigned to, since Alan Henderson used her particularly in meetings where, in accordance with the Agency's Mission Statement, local communities' ideas of what they most needed—dams, access roads to markets, chicks and fingerlings to begin poultry- or fish-farming, roofing and desks for a new school—were to be joint projects with them. Many of those chosen by people to speak for them were women; somehow she created confidence: surely a woman would listen to them?—but the men respected her, too, an official position counters many traditional prejudices. Her Administrator would remark to Government officials, Roberta's learning the language, you know, often she doesn't need an interpreter! She would protest—she certainly did! But the fact that his Assistant was taking the trouble, in a tour of duty that lasts only a couple of years, to learn the main language of the country reflected well upon the Agency. Often the community would give her some small gift (no vicuna coat bribe—the Agency allowed acceptance as a token of trust)—a carved wooden spoon,
woven straw bags, a clay pot; the house she'd been assigned to began to take on the signs of homely possession that come with objects which have their modest personal history.
The black car of the luxury model provided for the second echelons of Government office-bearers was in the yard—perhaps once a week, could be any day. The driver and bodyguards installed in the kitchen.
The Deputy-Director of Land Affairs was the one acquaintance among many in her job (she knew their names, faces round conference tables, gossip about them, by now) who had become a special kind of acquaintance; his presence at least claimed that. They progressed from exchanges and courteous argument about current events in the country and the continent, inevitably, as people do when such talk runs out, to link observations from the past: when I was young, when I was a kid, I remember I thought it would be, it was … and to offer experiences of childhood background. Without any confidentiality, of course. These ordinary anecdotes are common currency.
But you are what you were.
There, then, the experiences don't meet; he began minding his father's cattle, classic for a government career in Africa, she was at a girls' school in an English cathedral town, the bells pealed while the basketball was aimed, the cattle lowed as they were driven under the herdboy's whip. He had been to a mission school, then a college in some neighbouring African country from where there came his scholarship to America. He had once mentioned a university. University of Virginia, wasn't it? Here, experience could be shared; well, she had studied for a year in the USA, exchange programme with an English university. He had wanted to go on to the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard; it was part of the limits of contact he apparently always set himself that he did not offer the sequel to the intention. She had learnt not to fill his silences, but sometimes there was the vacuum's pressure to continue. Out of politeness he would have to make some sort of explanation.
—I was married, at home. Away a long time, I had to come back. Children.—
—They must be grown up now? Satisfaction to you … It's a trade-off, I suppose. I was married, but no children, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately as there was a divorce. But I wonder if you really missed much, Harvard, I mean. You've gone through another kind of school of government, haven't you, right here.—
—We are all learners in the world. But academic things in a c.v., they impress people.—
—In government careers? At high level? I wouldn't have thought so. The President hasn't got a Harvard degree, not even a less grand university one from overseas, far as I know.—
—There are other qualifications to make up.—
He smiled at her in pride, lest she lure him to a lapse into criticism of the Head of State.—He was one of our first leaders in our war of liberation … he is a man who has not abandoned our culture the same time as he can take on the world. You know.—
—What are the children doing? Anyone interested in going into politics, like Dad?—
—Studying.—Subject closed.
One evening they had a second whisky and time had passed so unnoticed that she suggested some supper. The driver and bodyguards were already being fed maize meal and stew when she went to the kitchen to see what she and Tomasi could offer.
Over canned soup and cold chicken he told her of a farm in the Southern Province.—Your own farm?—Yes, he had a farm. (Doesn't everyone in government acquire a farm or farms, don't ask about how, nothing to do with the questions of land redistribution; but this was none of her business, certainly not at her own table with a guest.)
The next time the black car brought distinction to Tomasi's yard the Deputy-Director of Land Affairs invited her to visit his farm the coming weekend. When she told him there were two gatherings she was obliged to attend he merely substituted: —The weekend after, then.—
—Oh I don't want to spoil your plans, Gladwell, please—
—It's the same for me. I go all the time.—
So that is home, the family home, not the official residence (to which she has never been invited) that must be in the suburb of guard-houses manned before swimming-pool and tennis-court endowed gardens, where Government office-bearers and foreign diplomats lived. She looked forward with mild curiosity to meeting the wife and family. He must belong somewhere else outside the parliamentary suit—as he did with the old uncle and aunt, that glimpse she'd had of him in personal mufti. The black car was at the gates early, not unexpected of this stickler for all disciplines. She recognised one of the bodyguards doubling as driver; perhaps, unlike the destination of the other outing on which she'd accompanied the Deputy-Director, the area they were bound for in this vast country presented some possible threat which made the discreet, disguised-by-function presence of at least half his usual Security a precaution? So she and Gladwell were together on the back seat, very comfortable, he had no
need to give any attention to the road, his man at the wheel had the air of a horse making surely for the stable.
It was far away. They rose and descended round a mountain pass, and caused people in two country towns to stare back at the majestic car's glossy blackness as the populace in distant times and far countries must have watched a royal carriage go by. In the third town he stopped (the other journey, he'd paused at a roadside store), this time before the town's landmark, a supermarket, and went in attended by the driver-bodyguard, perhaps only to carry provisions. She had her own secreted in her largest straw bag. The shaming resort to charity: a dose of sugar in place of an answer to the state of beggary. The children were there, the same children. She handed out a pack of sweets. The bodyguard and his charge returned loaded with food—must have been a long list from the wife. Then his man was in attendance on a visit to a liquor store behind the battered iron-pillared-and-roofed pavement that was the style of old frontier towns—along with the shopkeeper's Jewish name was pioneer immigrant provenance: I. SARETSKY EST. 1921. Bottles clanked in the trunk as the car moved off and the driver-bodyguard was instructed in their language to halt and rearrange his packing of provisions. Once more, refreshment had been brought for her; this time it was imported mineral water.
They talked between comfortable intervals—unlike his imposed silences—watching the country go by. The candelabra aloes were in bloom, flaming votive offerings to the ultimate cathedral that is the late winter sky when the heat has come, as it does, before the rains, a scouring to the bone that needs a term other than the one named Spring in Europe. The Cultural Attaché
of the British had remarked to her at dinner last week, August's the cruellest month, not T. S. Eliot's April.
They came to the kind of terrain where activity by man has made savannah of what once was forest. Sparse scrub was nature's attempt to return among weathered rubble, half-buried rust-encrusted unidentifiable iron parts, even a jagged section of a wall where foundations traced by weeds outlined what might have been a building. Beyond some sort of slag heaps a rise where the picked-over remains of what must have been elaborate structures—houses?—of a considerable size, in scale with the giant hulks of fallen trees too heavy to have been carted away for firewood, still made their statement as an horizon. In other parts of the country she had seen farmsteads abandoned by whites pillaged for whatever might be useful; nothing of this extent. —What was here?—
—Used to be a mine. Long time ago. Before.—
—Copper?—
—Yes.—
—But what happened? Why isn't it still worked?—
—I don't know. Maybe the ore was finished—but in the war they say it was attacked and flooded, underground, the pumps were smashed. You can ask the Minister of Mines; the Buffalo Mine.—
 
There was a great deal of entertaining up at the Manager's house, weekends. On Monday morning a member of the kitchen and ground staff whose job it was set off to walk fifty miles to town with the master's note for the liquor store. A case of Scotch whisky. The man walked back with twelve bottles in the case on his head, arriving
Friday. Every Friday. The feat was a famous dinner-party story, each weekend: that's my man—what heads they have, eh, thick as a log.
BOOK: Loot
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