‘Karma …. 1) The sum and the consequences of a person’s actions during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his destiny. 2) Fate, destiny. Sanskrit karman (nominative karma), act, deed, work, from karoti, he makes, he does. ’
— THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
‘ … so man is continually peopling his current space with a world of his own’.
Arthur’s wife Norma is the one who is in the group photographs of conferences published in newspapers, she is quoted on the radio and sometimes appears on a TV panel. They have become a couple with a public profile, as the opinion polls would show. He is in insurance, a steady position, wasn’t doing too badly even when they bought the place she set her heart on, a bit beyond their means, then. It looked as if he might become a general manager, eventually, some day — who knows, so they could afford, in another sense, to begin to prepare a place equal to status.
If you don’t have ambitions when you’re young what kind of couple are you? She certainly had had ambition when she finished school top of her class. She’d wanted to go to university, study political science, economics, subjects she’d heard about in the company of her trade unionist parents and their friends, but there was no money. She worked in a factory, in the offices of a restaurant chain, picking up computer efficiency, studied her chosen subjects by correspondence courses, and became one of the working-class whites in the liberation movement. A resilient thread in a net that operated Underground. The movement sent her out of the country on a mission to one of their overseas offices while by some oversight on the part of the political police she still had a passport; when she came back her name appeared on a list of banned persons: her movements and the kind of work she could do to earn a living were restricted.
It was when the leftish-liberal manager of an insurance company did the bravest thing he could steel himself to, and quietly took her on as a filing clerk, that she met Arthur. There are at least two magnetic sources of attraction in the process called falling in love. (Anyone can think of a number of others.) The face, body, of the object-individual: that can be enough. The personality: it may make the above irrelevant. Arthur had no specific sexually-aesthetic taste in what was beauty in a woman, girls were pretty or ugly or just somehow inbetween. Norma, short, with a business-like body (characterised always about some movement and task) and a face in the inbetween category, could not have started the process by means of the first magnetic source. Arthur fell in love, deeply appreciative, with the force of her personality. She was everything he had never been, done everything he had never done. He was one step up out of the working-class from which she came. His father owned a small printing business where his mother acted as receptionist-bookkeeper, they kept clear of politics; the discount price of their middle-class white security, dependent on the local government’s orders for certain forms, might be withdrawn. Arthur was brought up to be honest about money, kind, to respect other people, no matter who or what they were, but without getting mixed with their ideas or problems; make his way as his parents had had to do — for himself. The insurance company was a good start. Whatever happened. In the country. There would always have to be insurance for people’s possessions, against other people who took these from them.
That was life as proposed to him. Yet he read the newspapers, he came face to face with demonstrations prancing anger in the streets, their assault by police with dogs and guns, he saw, in his work at the insurance company, who owned everything in the country. So he refrained from using his privilege, as a white, to vote in the elections while others did not even have the right to demonstrate in the streets. That was his only political stance. He did not tell his parents they were wrong, he himself was wrong to accept skin privilege, do nothing about this but refuse a vote, making his way with the secret justification to himself that when the great change that was coming did come, he would welcome it and claim self-respect not to be found alone in making your way.
In love with Norma. She was evidence against himself and taking her for his own absolved him from however, whatever he had failed.
Arthur was good-looking, no inbetween so far as male beauty is concerned, and that may well have been the magnetism by which Norma was drawn, in love with him. Beauty has an innocence, it can’t be aimed or plotted or struggled for as justice; it’s a kind of assurance for someone who has lived with the deviousness, the machinations of survival, spied upon, hunted under bans.
Arthur was there for her, when it was all over — the bans, the head-hunters of the old regime disarmed of power. With his knowledge of the practical ways, the signals of a normal life of private ambitions and satisfactions she had not known, now legitimately open to those who had sacrificed for it, they could create a new normal life in the conditions of freedom. She had dossed down with comrades in places sleazy or disguised behind a facade of respectability; he had lived past twenty with his parents and then, by the time he met her, in a bachelor flat whose window was an inescapable observation post for the blare and turmoil of a street of bars, minicabs hooting for custom, laughter and anger of pimps and prostitutes of three sexes. A job had been found for her — the comrades kept one another in touch about opportunities — with some non-governmental organisation taking care of the children and youths whose fathers had died in action in the liberation forces or whose parents had disappeared in exile. He, of course, was secure in insurance, a necessity of the old normal life that, as his parents’ wisdom had predicted, remained a necessity in the new. Weekends and after work almost every day they went looking at houses. A house of your own; that always was and always will be the beginning of the normal life they were set upon: she deserved. Estate agents lied to them; they quickly became wise to the basic questions with which to counter: was the highly-praised house on offer not too near a freeway, was the nearby green space one where homeless people put up shacks, was there a creche in the suburb (Norma was expecting their first child), what was the crime rate in the area?
Finally, they found the house for themselves. They were driving around a neighbourhood they had heard about from black friends of Norma who were moving, now, out of the black townships become ancestral homes to flee. Norma saw the Cape Dutch gable. A house with character! He was privately surprised at her enthusiasm for an architectural embellishment that was the style, brought from Holland, by the forefathers of the people who had spied upon, pursued and banned her from her rights, imprisoned and tortured her kind. But it is true that a gable is graceful; it makes a house unique among others in what was the kind of street they visualise starting out on. Jacaranda trees all along both sides. And there was a For Sale notice on the gate. They raised a bond on the evidence of his position advancing at the insurance company, and bought the Cape Dutch gable and all that was behind it, wonderful, more rooms than they’d need, but they were going to have a family, he’d earned his promotion from dreary bachelordom and she hers from anonymous hideouts.
Arthur lies in bed on weekend mornings at leisure and his mind wanders visually through the house and garden. He is not thinking, there are no words. There is the livingroom ceiling, generations of thick hard paint removed to reveal gold-brown lengths of wood panelling, hooded angle lights shining down from it softly. (Real style; the architect who was a colleague on the urban planning commission with Norma discovered for them the original fine pine under the paint.) The mounting pink profusion of Bauhinia he’d planted, rambled over by purple-blue Morning Glory at the boundary where the old trees were too dark a conclusion to the north end of the garden. The semicircle of blond cane with clean glasses on its table-top, striped in terrace sunlight — his hospitality bar. Green of the lawn well-kept by the black weekly gardener and green of the mini billiard table in what’s come to be called the TV room since the two kids like to watch programmes adults can’t sit through. That passing vision, with Norma and a glass of wine, after the day, watching the news on the other set in the livingroom. And transparencies of what isn’t there yet. Still to come. One of those garden statues, cement but look like real stone, to glance at you from the centre of the lawn when you stand at the glass sliding doors he had installed in the livingroom soon as they could afford it, not long after they had moved in. One of the first to go through the doors: the baby just born, there in his pram. A swimming pool — where in the garden, imagined? — most people in the street have one but Norma won’t agree because the child of friends drowned in theirs.
Norma bought him the mini billiard table as a surprise. Some connection through a firm that had tendered to the Commission for Sanitation in informal settlements (Norma had moved to Public Works, then) also owned a factory that made what they called entertainment equipment. It arrived on his birthday — But it must have cost a packet, Norma!—
— So what? Why shouldn’t you have some fun, I’ve seen how you enjoyed yourself on the table at Edward’s place. Anyway, I got a big discount.—
He taught their first-born, then seven years old, to play and as their arms grew longer it was used more and more by Danny and his schoolfriends. Danny was proud of it: if the school soccer game was washed out — Come to my house, we’ve got a real billiard table in our TV room.—
When they had lived almost nine years behind the Cape Dutch gable (you can’t miss our place just look out for that when you come to the street) it was occupied in the patterns of their presence, their personal routes, invisible internal maps of existence from room to room, Norma and Arthur, Danny and his brother Brett. Almost completely occupied, but not quite. Still some to come: things to be achieved. The statue, a woman moulded with draping over one shoulder, was in place, and an electronic call system linked to the house was installed at the gates — Norma left Public Works to go into what was officially termed the Private Sector: individuals whose economic status put them at particular risk of thieving intruders and other invaders of privacy in their homes.
The Private Sector she joined was in fact the construction company one of whose directors she had come to know when the company tendered for a sanitation project in informal settlements. She became at once assistant to the director. Her salary and benefits were beyond anything she and Arthur could have imagined reaching, at first; but it is much easier to become accustomed to having money than it is to do without it. Norma had a natural aptitude that was perhaps already evident when first she saw the Cape Dutch gable and claimed its flourish for herself. There was a holiday in Europe, she saw some suppliers in an English industrial city and then she and Arthur took a Mediterranean cruise. Norma was orderly; kept every taxi receipt and credit card restaurant bill, don’t bother about anything, it’s routine entertainment allowance. The director’s secretary at the company arranged air tickets for other, frequent travels where, if Arthur could absent himself from his insurance office, he was consort of the director’s assistant. Through Norma’s connections their elder son found a place at the most selective and expensive private school. The black maid who cleaned the house and did the family washing was placed under the supervision of a cook-housekeeper, also black; one of the directors had died and Norma, appointed to take his place, was too occupied with the demands of her position to have time or mind for shopping or cooking.
The couple’s social life was extensive, expansive; not much use for Arthur’s little home-built terrace bar. The company’s public relations dinners and working breakfasts were eaten and libated in restaurants. Norma and her husband were guests at the national day celebrations of foreign embassies and the homes of Government officials, even a Minister in whose projects of urban renewal the company was involved, or expected to be. She bought Arthur silk shirts and a brocade cummerbund for important formal occasions; the couple came back through the electronic Open Sesame of their gates and made love in the house of their achievement. There was no question of jealousy; this need, hers of him, made Norma’s success his as well, just as, when they met, she was everything he had never been, done everything he had never done. What he had done, was doing, was still in the process of creating, there’s no end to it, is that containment of everything they are — Norma, himself, their children — which is home, the organism that expresses, and grows in, status.
Norma, of course, has changed outwardly with status. Reduced rather than grown … slimmed away the stockiness with diet, massage and the gym she insists they go to together; changed the colour of her hair and smoothed the bluntness of her face with beauty treatments, professional make-up before official occasions. She wears the female tycoon outfits of crossdressing masculine suits with the jacket open over flouncy blouses which reveal the beginning of the valley between breasts. She has shed everything of the old days Underground, the dossing-down anywhere, the risky missions that mustn’t be questioned, the hunter’s eye of the Plain Clothes political police at the corner — everything but the bonding then, way back, with the comrades, many of whom are now in Government and parastatal organisations. That’s still there: a new kind of Underground. To be counted on. The people who lost power have their sneering accusatory term for it: nepotism. As if they didn’t do it, jobs for pals, in their day. But their pals had not suffered, had done nothing to deserve reward. Unless for their evil. And where in the world is there a political party in power, a government, that does not take the right to appoint its proven colleagues from the guerrilla times of opposition, parliamentary let alone revolutionary, to important cabinet portfolios and other high positions?
Norma was more than competent. There didn’t need to be any snide justification cited for her appointment: she simply fulfilled every principle of the new order of fitness for public life and responsibility, even the professional scepticism of the newspaper editorials granted her highly intelligent use of experience gained in various sectors, and if she was not black, at least she qualified for that other, the gender principle industry as well as Government was expected to follow: she was a woman appointee. Often she was the Company board’s choice to be negotiator on joint projects with the Government. That would be one of the occasions when her photograph would appear in the newspapers. When representatives of the World Bank or the Group of 8 visited the country official invitations came to her and her partner (secretaries had been instructed to avoid gender forms of address which stereotype the concept of a couple, there are dignitaries linked together as two men or two women). So sometimes Arthur was in the photograph, too, if half-hidden between other heads. At such gatherings there was always, naturally, the Minister or Minister’s Deputy from Norma’s old days who had put her on the list the important visitors should meet, be aware of. A consciousness that might be recalled some time, useful to the comrade become colleague, in her advancement.
The house with the Cape Dutch gable continued to keep up; the furniture that already had been changed since the basic stuff that was all they could afford when they moved in was replaced by something more comfortable and of better quality. Arthur caught his Norma looking about her, shifting in a chair, and it was as if he read it, said it for her. And for himself. — Shouldn’t we look for one of those leather seating units you can move around, compose the way you like, you know, more places for people to group in. — Journalists came to interview Norma, TV crews were often there to film the encounter for overseas series seeking the opinions of prominent people outside Government but active in the progress of the country. There had also grown up the tradition, following that of other people living in their kind of suburb, of giving a quasi-official party on some private occasion — birthday or wedding anniversary. Norma would call in an Indian caterer, old comrade who had made his particular way to thrive in new circumstances.
— I love the feel of leather. — She seemed already to be arranging the units, this way or that, in their livingroom. They decided it was not worth the trouble to advertise furniture for sale and have people coming to view. The Cape Dutch gable was hardly the place for yard sales. They donated the old stuff to a shelter for the homeless aged Welfare told her about; a van came to take it away, there was a grateful letter from the trustees of the place, it was somehow nice to think that the acquisition of an indoor setting adequate to the distinction of the gabled facade of their life at this stage also benefitted others who had the misfortune to have descended to the nadir.
It was shortly after the new furniture had been put in place (how he and she enjoyed themselves trying out the combinations, a mating dance, with her pleasure at the smooth cling of the leather to her bare legs when he and she collapsed on the seats!) that the accident happened. She was driving from a late meeting. At the sharp turn off the main road that led to the quickest, familiar way to the Cape Dutch gable, a car came from somewhere — a blind blunder into her. Her car was flung away with the whole passenger side punched to a crumple. The impact was as if an invisible blow in the face but she was unhurt. And so was the driver of the other car. There followed the usual procedures, that Arthur took care of. Police report, wreck towed away, insurance claimed; his line. It was clear Norma was not at fault; but maybe neither was the other driver. The traffic lights were not functioning at the crossroads he came from; if anyone was culpable it was the city traffic department. One of the deficiencies of ordinary capacity in administration, now; the fascistracists everywhere, anywhere, were always more efficient than the free.
She had a company car but it was being serviced that particular day and the car she was driving was their own, the family one — Arthur too, in his slow but satisfactory advance to Assistant General Manager had his company car. It’s a man’s affair, buying a car. A woman chooses the colour and has a preference for the profile, as the vehicles stand patient for acquisition in ballroom-showrooms, but the man looks under the hood and has a criterion of safety features and local availability of spares, to be met. Arthur visited dealers and brought home brochures. They studied them together, flipping with an admiring detachment past the ultimate luxury models but agreeing that they didn’t want another station wagon, they had moved out of the utility class, the boys were old enough now not to climb on the seats and household supplies were delivered, not loaded and lugged from a supermarket. The decision was made for the latest good model in an upper price range (as the salesman placed it in his hierarchy) but not excessively high. So long as it had automatic transmission and the other requirements Arthur tried out on his test drive, the car was the right one to glide through the Open Sesame gates as one of the appropriate complements to what had been made, what was being made, of the home behind the gable. Norma wanted the colour to be blue; only black or red was on the dealer’s floor, but a blue model would be available in a few days.
— Have you ordered it? — The question was her greeting as she flung down her briefcase and brushed his cheek as if he were a handkerchief passing her lips. — Because if you have, get on to the man and cancel. You haven’t signed anything, no? We can get a wonderful deal. — She named one of the great foreign luxury cars whose photographs they had flipped through in brochures. A co-director knew the right dealer well and she would meet him next day. Yes, she was aware of the fortune a car like that cost, but she had been promised — absolutely — there’d be a sizeable discount. And almost nothing in cash on the spot. The colleague could assure anybody of her position in one of the two largest construction firms in the country, payments no problem. The dealers know it’s good for their business to have prominent people choosing their make of luxury vehicle.
— Can you imagine yourself driving one of those! — As if he were a little boy with a dream to be fulfilled. Norma hugged him.
Later, after a happy, noisy meal with the boys — often their mother wasn’t there, she had business engagements — and the children had gone to bed, she smiled her jaunty grimace-way from the old days. — Why shouldn’t we take advantage of connections, like everybody else.—
The car was delivered. It was not blue but silvery and had the pedigreed scent of real leather seats, a console like that of the array of controls before the pilot of a plane. It was so long that it only just cleared the lowering of the roll-down doors in the garage. She was right, Arthur enjoyed driving the family on trips; when it was not in use, the pedigreed in its stable, it was another, an exalted attribute to the life being created in the house with the Cape Dutch gable Norma had chosen unerringly, that one look.
A year or more passed and Brett, the younger son, satisfactorily found a place along with his brother at the best of private schools. On the newspaper posters that couldn’t be read as the Assistant Manager of an insurance company was urged along by rush hour traffic, but whose headlines filled the wait at red lights, news from the world was often ousted by terse assertions of local corruption. Corruption in central government departments, regional, provincial structures, privatisation projects, land redistribution, mining or fishing rights, airline mergers — land, sea and air — the very air that was being circulated by the vehicle’s airconditioning. When he got home he read in the newspaper details of whatever the accusations and evidence were; and heard the assertions and denials on the radio, saw, with Norma over wine, the faces of those involved who consented to appear on TV to exonerate themselves in defence. Often the faces were those of official spokespersons rather than the individual him- or herself. It was so repetitive that it became if not boring — some of the names were fascinatingly unexpected — accepted, if within critical unease: a climate, a season. Living in it; not of it.
There was an evening unlike their evenings together with wine and television news. Norma switched off image and sound in mid-sentence. She sat with both hands round her glass looking into it.
Norma was not one for bad moods?
— Nothing. Problems at work.—
He mentioned a colleague of hers she had once spoken of as careless. She clicked her tongue in dismissal.
He waited, Norma always knew what she wanted to say and when. Timing was part of her efficiency, he admired how it had worked for her in her advancement.
— There’s an investigation started into the finances of the Company. The Government tenders we won last year.—
— But it all went well. You were satisfied? The projects were completed according to specification and so on — I mean, the Company’s not some little outfit taking on what it can’t deliver. —
— It’s the awarding of tenders. Who won the tender against others.—
Then it was flashed by on the newspaper posters in rush hour traffic, the latest scandal. CONSTRUCTION BECOMES CORRUPTION. He still believed it would be the members of the Board who would be investigated, and indicted if it were proved that bribery was involved in the awarding of contracts to the Company, though he was troubled about what this would mean for Norma’s career. Muddy water splashes, anyone in insurance cases that come to Court knows that.
A weekly paper that relied on sensational exposé for its circulation published names and details of company corruption and Norma — Norma’s name was among them. The pedigreed car she had bought at a ‘discount’, it is alleged (a newspaper has to be careful even if it has somehow found proof of a fact) was in recognition of the favour of putting in a good word to the ear of one of the members of the old comrades’ bond in the Government department calling for tenders. The holidays Arthur had understood were complement to business trips or were paid for as her yearly bonus as a Director — these were her share of bribes between the Company and various tender boards’ members with whom — wasn’t that time honourably dead and buried — she had dossed down Underground.
The billiard table, the birthday present of the mini billiard table! That’s where it started! If only he had realised then. And all the other achievements in his part of her advancement, the creation of the home for it behind the Cape Dutch gable — all carried out with the money in their joint bank account swelled by her. Directors in every kind of company award themselves bonuses when a company thrives, what was there to doubt in that? Don’t bother about anything it’s routine business expenses.
Arthur, for his part, through the insurance company knew good lawyers and engaged one to defend Norma in Court. The man insisted that he had obtained the best that could be expected: a heavy fine and suspended sentence, while two of the senior directors even lost their case on appeal to a higher Court and went to prison. Her background as a white who had suffered to bring about a just society, and the fact that she was female, the lawyer lectured, were the only mitigating factors in her favour. — Your wife is a gullible woman. Or so the judge has chosen to believe. — And even if this had saved Norma, Arthur felt angry at the insult to her intelligence, all she had been and was. And there was bewilderment in him, at his anger: would he rather accept that his Norma was deviously dishonest?
It all happens just at the time when the architect has presented plans for extensions to the house that will not impinge upon or spoil the profile of the Cape Dutch gable against the sky. The boys have had lessons and are fine swimmers by now, there is a plan for a free-form pool and patio with change-room and bar with refrigerator.
They sold the house with the Cape Dutch gable, these things not accomplished, the home being made of it not fully achieved. The estate agent told them the property market was in decline; the Cape Dutch gable went at too low a price. It changed ownership several times in a decade.
‘Aorist: Denotes past action without indicating completion, continuation.’ Arthur: some years not long after, must have died; as the moment of that part of the process is termed.
‘Many times man lives and dies,
Between his two eternities
That of race and that of soul.’
We were very excited when they told us about the new house. We knew there was something going on, the parents don’t like to tell until something’s sure because kids ask so many questions. But since my father’s had his new big job, an office and everything in what’s called Regional Administration — whatever that is — he talks with his friends, when they drink beer at our old place, about rebuilding and clearing away street people and so on — our mother’s been greeting him with other long talk we catch a few words of as we run in and out from playing in the street.
Then they told us, my sisters and me, we are leaving Naledi township, our grandmother’s house where we were born, and our grandmother’s coming with us to live in a suburb. That’s a place where whites live. Now anyone can live there. It’s not the same suburb where the Catholic school is our father drove us to on his way to his office in the city every morning; the school also used to be for whites, but now any child can go there, my mother says, long as the parents can pay high fees. The township school is a dirty place and the teachers are lazy, she says. You can’t learn English properly there, and there’s no hope of a good position like our father’s, when you grow up, if you can’t speak proper English, it’s the language of the world, she says.
So our uncle who has a transport business came with his removals van and my friend Meshak, Rebecca, Thandike and I helped the grownups load all our stuff. We also left some things behind, that kind of rubbish isn’t going to be what we need anymore, my mother said. Gogo still wanted her paraffin heater and her funny old sewing machine. The sewing machine, all right. My father lifted it in.
This house has rooms for everybody. Rebecca and Thandike share because they want to, they say it’s lonely to be by yourself. But I like the room, my room, with all my things around, just mine. I used to share with the girls in the township because Gogo had to have a place. Our big TV that was squashed up against the fridge in the room that was half-kitchen half-everything, the table and chairs and couch where we sat and ate our food and watched, looks the way it should be, here, in the room that has glass doors you can slide open. We kids sit on the carpet my father bought, thick and so wide and long it covers the whole floor, and that’s how you can follow sport with my father in his new chair with its special rest for his feet up.
Our houses in the township were all the same except that some had a pretty door because people wanted them to look nicer. But in this street in the suburb all the houses are different. Mama says some are very old, they’re built of stone, with an upstairs. Ours doesn’t look as old as that and there’s no upstairs, but in front you can’t see the roof because of a kind of white wall — curly shapes, something like the head of our mother’s and father’s new bed — that sticks up into the sky from where you know the roof really begins. Rebecca says she’s seen on TV houses like that when they show Cape Town and when she’s said that, it reminds me — so that’s where I must have seen what makes the house ours, that same wall. The feeling I get, where we’ve come to live now. There’s no swimming pool yet, my father says maybe next year. There’s a garden, all the houses in this street have these gardens, there’s a kind of lady made of stone or something standing where you can see right down the grass to the flower bushes and high trees from the glass doors that slide away. Plenty of room to play. But we don’t play there much. Mama tells us to but we don’t. We always used to play in the street in Naledi. There wasn’t a garden. In the garden you don’t see anybody. When we come home from school we sit around under the street trees on the pavement with our feet in the road, same as always although in Naledi it was just the dust, no trees, no smooth tar and gutters for the rain. Not many cars pass, just the Watchem Security one that patrols looking for loafers and thieves — Mama says everyone living on this street pays for this, to be safe, our father too. The people in the other houses come from work in super cars like my father’s only even better, and the gates of their places open by themselves, magic — we have gates like that, as well, my father has in his car the whachamacallit he presses to work them. There are other kids in the houses, white kids. They play in the gardens of course. We don’t know those kids, they don’t come out and tell us where they go to school, what they’re doing in those gardens. There’s just one boy, lives down the street, who comes out, riding his skateboard. He’s not black like us, he’s an Indian boy you can see, black the sort of way they are, so although his family have moved from the Indians’ townships to the suburb, like us, he also doesn’t know the white kids. He’s begun to come and sit where we fool around and watch him fly past, him showing off a bit. He never offers to lend me his skateboard. Thandike would be scared but Rebecca’s cheeky, she’s asked him and he said no, his parents don’t allow anyone to ride it but him. Because it’s dangerous, he says. And he’s only allowed to ride it on our street because it’s a quiet one and the downhill is just enough, not too much. So he doesn’t try it out anywhere else — I’ve told him there are much faster runs in the other streets, up and down hills in this suburb. I know. Because the very first day we came here, with Uncle Ndlovu’s van with our stuff, I was the first one to unload something, I climbed in and dragged out my bicycle that I’d got from my father for winning a merit prize at school at the same time he won his new great job. I rode off straight away, Mama and Gogo yelling after me, where’re you going, you’ll get lost, you don’t know this place. But I did know all these streets, which went where, and which one became that one, where to turn to reach this way back to recognise our new house with the fancy white front, or instead take another way. Like my bike had a map. Maps on the school walls. But they’re foreign countries.
So I dare Fazeel — we’ve told our names, Rebecca and Thandike too — to skate along with me all over, sometimes the downhill I know makes him fly so fast he even overtakes me on my bike, it’s a superbike, I can do all sorts of tricks on it, now. He jumps and lands smack on his board that’s running away from him, I pedal full-power, hands off, we zigzag round each other, the girls shout and laugh at us. It’s real fun. And all the time it’s in English, Fazeel wouldn’t understand us in Sesotho, we’re talking English every day at school and anyway where we live it’s the language of everyone, the one for the suburb, we hear the voices of the white people we don’t know, in their gardens. My dad (that’s what we’ve got used to calling him in English instead of Tata, although our grandmother’s still Gogo for us) also bought me a Superman helmet to wear when I’m on my bike, it’s yellow with red arrows. Rebecca loves it and I let her wear it sometimes while she and Thandike run and dodge around Fazeel and me when we’re having a competition in the fastest streets. I ride such a lot I’m getting to be a star, I could go on TV with the stunts I do. On the street where you can whizz down to the sharp corner that comes off from the main road, although you can’t see it the five o’clock traffic’s like the volume turned up full blast on a TV.
Look!
Fazeel’s just done something!
Man! Man! But fabulous! He’s jumped, turned himself right round, and landed back on the board! It’s wobbling but he doesn’t fall. The girls are shouting, Rebecca’s dancing her bottom around, my helmet’s too big for her, it’s falling over her eyes, stupid, she must give it back but I must show Fazeel, I must show them all, everybody in our suburb where we’re living, the streets I know — Look! Look! Look what I’m going to do now! They’re yelling, So what! What you think you are! Laughing gasping because I’m no hands, I’m full speed, and I’m bending back, I’m looking up at them, show-off Fazeel, show-off silly girls, upsidedown. Now the bike’s thrown me it’s on top of my legs I’m on my elbow. I’m shouting I’m okay, okay, don’t touch me. I’m going to get up right away. I’m going to get up but now there’s a terrible noise the volume is up, on me, the underneath of a truck—
Sometimes the Return is such a short one.
Hardly worth it? No-one can know. No-one is ever to have such knowing. And if a Return is supposed to atone for errors, wrongs committed, acts uncompleted in a previous existence, how could I atone, sent back briefly as a life of a child to the streets, to the house with the fake Cape Dutch gable where something was not realised: awry, abandoned halfway.
‘ … sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come.’
Can you believe such a thing. Dump a baby in a toilet. Well it was the church toilet, whoever did it that Sunday knew when we brethren came to morning service we’d hear the crying. No-one could get hold of Welfare on a Sunday and the police — we know our police boys, they’re our own sons or other relatives in our township, what’d they know about looking after a baby couldn’t have been more than two weeks old! So Abraham and I took it home, just for the day, we don’t have kids of our own and other brethren have the house full with them.
A girl. Pretty little thing. Had no hair yet just a bit of fine fluff, so what’s the easiest thing you can tell whether a baby is one of us, tight, curly, wasn’t there. Except for hair, most of our babies could be whites when they’re born, they’re very light-coloured, the white in us only gets taken over by the black as they get older. The noses usually aren’t flatter than all babies have, and if the eyes are green — our grandfathers, great-grandfathers all the way back were Malay, Indian, Bushmen, real blacks, whites, you name it, and somehow from the mixture many of us have green eyes, like whites. By the time the Welfare made up their minds about which orphanage to get her into we’d … well, no kids of our own, we’d got fond of her, our life was different not just the two of us like before, Abraham had a good steady job with his Jewish boss at the shoe factory, I didn’t really need to go out to work. So we kept her. We named her a lovely name, Denise, and gave her our name. She was christened in our Seventh Day Adventist church by our minister. It was only about the time she began to be steady on her feet and begin to walk that there was no doubt about it; she was a white kid. The reason why her hair was so fine and slow to cover was that she was going to be very blond. The green eyes didn’t help; this kid was white. You do get throwbacks among us that can pass for white, but she was the real thing. Everybody saw it, all the neighbours and Abraham’s and my aunties, uncles, cousins — and looked from the kid to us, saying nothing but thinking, we knew, what were we going to do, later? For school. The children played with her as if she was the same as them; children learn the names for difference, from us, what did apartheid mean to them: just another grown-ups’ word. The local nursery school, run by our church with charity grants, was no problem. All shades of our skins passed, there, some were blacker than it was meant for, slipped in by parents from the nearby black township through family or church connections with our people; if one tot was whiter than she should be, who was going to ask questions.
But when the time came for real school, Government school, we had to make up our minds, Abraham and I. To be white in apartheid days was to be — everything. Everything! From, you know, sitting on a bench waiting for a bus, to getting a job in a bank, renting a flat, owning a house, qualifying in a trade, getting a good education — all these came to you, just like that, if you were white, all these were closed to you if you were some other colour. We had to decide whether our little girl — because who else’s was she, she called us Mama and Daddy — should grow up to be one of us, our own people, here in the places and jobs, the lives the whites decide for us, or whether we owed it to her to try for white. And that’s not the right way to put it, either, because that means you’re not white but may be able to pass, and our girl was white. Easy to be accepted by our kind because what are we? Such a stew-pot most of us don’t even know, from way back, what’s made us whatever we are, our family names are only clues, Dutch, English, German, Jewish, Malay-Muslim, some of this is even hidden behind family names taken which are just names of months — September, February, that’s two families in this street where Abraham and I took in what is called a foundling who had no name at all.
We decided to try to put her in a white school. That meant Government school was out. Government schools were separated: blacks at black schools, us coloureds at coloured schools, whites at white schools. Our child, living in our place, would have to go to the local school for our kind. But there were private schools we heard about. A convent school. We were Seventh Day Adventists, no whites or blacks in our local church, but people said the nuns had some arrangement, they took in a few black or coloured children if the parents could pay. But the convent refused her, the vacancies for exceptions were full, and then when we tried a private Anglican school, although the headmistress who interviewed us with our child looked at her curiously and kind of sadly, she wasn’t given a place there, either. The headmistress said that, even with us paying, the school couldn’t afford to take our child because for coloured or black children the Government supplied no subsidy as it did for other private pupils.
Denise Appolis attended primary and high schools in a coloured township outside the city and suburbs, like the townships and schools designated for blacks and for Indians, and matriculated as head prefect with three distinctions, in English, Afrikaans (the language spoken in her home) and history. Abraham and Elsie Appolis were unsurprised and proud of her. There had grown up in them, as she grew up, the unspoken shared sense that because she was not their biological creation, she had not been made in their bed, she was somehow chosen. Not alone in the sense that they had taken her for a day and kept her; chosen for a different life, other than theirs. A life of fulfilment they thought of as happiness. Had they, then, not been happy? Yes, in their way, the way open to them. Happiness as being white: no boundaries! God’s will.
Now it was possible for her to be what she was: white. The private business schools in the city were given as her home address that of Abraham’s white Jewish boss (appropriated, with or without consent?) when Abraham and Elsie sent her for application unaccompanied by their presence and obvious place in the official race classification. She carried a letter of parental authority written carefully in English (corrected by the girl who had gained Distinction in that subject), and proof of the parents’ ability to pay fees, in details of their savings bank account. There she was, a white seventeen-year-old among other young white men and women. She evidently made no friends but concentrated on her computer and general secretarial courses and every day came home by way of one of the roving minibuses in the city, back to the township, her friends there. Just as well she was the quiet one who kept to herself at the business college, she didn’t bring any fellow student home; Abraham and Elsie never brought up the subject, neither did she offer any explanation.
It seemed she understood what their love was doing for her. You couldn’t grow up in that township without becoming aware that it was best to be white, if by some good fortune you had the chance to take. God’s will. When her courses were — successfully — completed she and the parents studied together the situations vacant advertised in the morning and evening papers; for the first time in his life Abraham brought home both (TV was the source of news for what was happening in the world, for him) from his boss’s office, with the permission and kindly interest of his Jewish employer. After all, they were family men of around the same age; there was the joking — You’re not going down those pages because you’re walking out on me? — No, no … it’s my daughter, just come through business college.—
Denise wrote her own confident letters of application, now giving the post office box number of her father’s workplace for convenient reply. She read the format out to the parents for approval, and was granted several interviews in favourable response. With her very first job she could choose! Their Denise! Again the three conferred, Denise and the parents; Abraham knew something of the business world, even if he was only a factory foreman. She made the right choice: a trainee in a bank. All personnel white like her. Her starting salary was low, but enough for their girl to clothe herself, pay for daily minibus transport, enjoy a little independence, and it meant Elsie didn’t have to take care of an old white lady anymore — work she’d found to help pay the business school fees. But it appeared that their girl had made one friend during the business school courses, after all. Denise’s appointment at the bank was to begin on the first day of the coming month, two weeks ahead; she was having a holiday, a reward she deserved after her success in her courses, helping Elsie at home to make new curtains and riding into the city quite often to see the friend. She even spent a night at the friend’s family house, there was a party. In the white suburbs, they were, house and party, of course.
Abraham found the words after he and Elsie were in the dark in bed. — D’you think she’s told this friend. — Told what. — As if there was nothing that would come out, nothing to explain. — Who she is. Us. Here. — Must have. Otherwise what’d the friend think of never being invited back. Here.—
There was no resentment or hurt in the fact that their girl did not bring her friend home to them. Other play-whites did so, they knew, with genuinely trusted white pals, in particular that band of whites, Communists, Lefties, Liberals of one kind or another who wanted to prove themselves against the race laws. But their girl was not a play-white. She was fully entitled to be at those parties in the suburbs, sleeping over in a white’s house. They knew and their girl knew what they wanted for her and she should claim for herself in order to fulfil that want.
Yet when she told them, she and her girlfriend had found a bachelor flat in the city they could afford and would be moving in together — it was the home address she’d given to the bank — they felt something suddenly fallen away from them. Under the very ground they themselves had prepared. That feeling, in their hanging hands, on their faces: it was so — so what? Unreasonable. Shaming. Silly. What on earth was the matter with them, you Abraham (her look), you mama Elsie (his look)? This was the next, the right and vital step in moving out of the cramped life they had and into the life that had everything. For her to leave them was the natural process of their act of love for her. Freed.
The friend Angela had found a job in an attorney’s office near the bank, the housing arrangement was convenient for both and they got along well together. Abraham and Elsie drew some of their small savings to help Denise buy a refrigerator and her share of the basic furniture needed. They were taken to see the flat and met the girl Angela; it was clear she knew what to expect and was friendly and respectful in the normal way of young adults meeting someone’s parents. So this girl Angela was in the compact as well. They never visited the flat again; but Denise came home — must still be home, a flat that’s passed from occupant to occupant, marks on the walls not your own, can’t be home — she came to them often. Nearly every Sunday, Christmas and birthdays, theirs and hers (calculated as the Sunday she was found in the church toilet), sometimes sleeping the night in her old bed. Such a good girl. Others with her circumstances would have disappeared, disowned them. And that they would have understood as the final act, in their love. God’s will. If he allowed the laws — laws that made it necessary — to be the acts of people who prayed obedient to him in their whites’ churches. This was a proviso that Abraham, growing older, had but would not pass on to Elsie, wounding her with his lapse of faith. Oddly, if there was anyone he might have conveyed it to it could have been his Jewish boss, he’d been working at the factory for more than twenty-five years and it was to himself, the foreman, that the boss one day confided he hadn’t been away ill for a week, his absence was because he had been taking his wife back and forth to doctors for tests that showed she had cancer.
A foundling. Who was this girl they decided was Denise? A chosen one, having no provenance, she could make for herself two lives, one where she was cradled and loved and learnt to talk, communicate in the intimate taal of a designated township, learnt to walk — walk out into the second, other life: everything.
Denise and her flatmate had boyfriends. Angela, many. The weekends when Abraham-and-Elsie’s girl was home with them, the current chap could come and make love to Angela in the flat. She never let on — that was the phrase her best friend could be assured of — where that conveniently absent best friend was. Denise, after a few trials that didn’t get as far as bed, had only one boyfriend. When she knew Angela would be out for a late night, they could go to bed in the room she shared with Angela; their turn to make love. They had met at a party, the customary first stage in the white middle-class ritual of mating choices — the birthday of one of the other girls who worked in the bank. He was a technician with a company selling and servicing television sets; a young man from the lower end of that class, his father a retired post-master. Afrikaans was the home language but the mother was of English-speaking origin, so he was fluent in both, and attractively intelligent. A bee scenting something in her pollen: he lent books to his girl; they were there beside her bed when he wasn’t and Angela was sleeping off wine and a wild night. They were novels and travel books. He was saving for a trip overseas, he knew what he wanted to see in his life, London, Paris, Rome. And Venice, she would add; one of the books described the Piazza San Marco, and the gondolas. Who, of either of them, could have said what decided they would marry — the love-making in her bed, the freedom beyond that she had gained for herself, the freedom he was aware of, the world outside the country, the city of a bank and a television sales shop? These were the components of falling in love; marriage was the accepted social means of protecting this and giving it permanence with an official license and vows in a church.
There the usual, simple progression of the mating ritual was neither usual nor simple. Denise had told Mike — not who she was because she didn’t, couldn’t know — who her Mama and Daddy were, and taken him back over the line she had crossed under their loving guidance, to meet them. He spoke Afrikaans with Abraham and Elsie, a common language brings ease, it didn’t matter that the young white man was in a Coloured township, a Coloured home for the first time (a kind of foreign travel). Being in love is a state of the continuous present, the now; he was living only in the context of his girl’s eyes and breasts and sweet thrilling entry to her body. This unfamiliar, forbidden separate place of colour she had been nurtured in was of no account to him; all that he had been nurtured to believe about the taint of contact with those of a different tint was irrelevant: being in love converted him from milk-imbibed racism, weaned him at a single encounter. And, of course, the fact was that his girl was not theirs, Abraham’s and Elsie’s, she was white — he knew better than anyone how white in all the physical characteristics cited by those claiming these as superior to the characteristics of all others in the official racial categories laid down by law and followed by the church. To record that Abraham and Elsie were overjoyed at a coming marriage of the girl who had been their Denise to a good young white man with a steady job (his own family speaking Afrikaans — a kind of link even though there probably wouldn’t be the usual parents-in-law one) would be to understate the solemnity of that joy. First they had let her go; now the foundling had been found by one of her own kind. Everything: it was about to be achieved with this marriage.
He had to explain to his girl that her introduction to his parents might not be without certain problems. She looked at him as if he’d had a sudden lapse of memory. She’d been taken to their home several times, first fruit juice and beer on the verandah, where the mother talked to her about what it was like to work in a bank and the father talked to his son about soccer, then to lunch on a public holiday, and once to share the evening meal. — But that was before they knew — about you, I mean. I’d never thought it necessary to tell them about my girlfriends’ families and so on. What interest to them. Nothing to do with their lives. Now when I say we’re getting married, I’m marrying this girl, I’ll have to tell them about you.—
— Of course. — But she had not thought of this before: love is in the present, it’s her hand slipping beneath his shirt to his chest, it’s reading together descriptions of the places in the world maybe they’ll save up to see. She did not say: they know I’m white. As if he heard the thought — I know … But that you grew up there, school and home, people who are like — your parents, to you. — He came over in her silence and kissed her; he had no part in the problem his parents might represent.
He came back with the news, angry, the skin over his cheekbones taut and flushed. — They’re terrible. I don’t even want to tell you about it. I’m degrading never mind myself, them, my sister, her kids. The country. Beautiful South Africa 1975. It doesn’t matter to them that you’re white. You were brought up among Coloureds, the family — which I’ve explained over and over again you haven’t really got although you love them — is Coloured. You’d think colour is something you can catch just by being among people. Infection, it’s a disease. — His car was piled with a thrown-in muddle of clothes, shoes, books, soccer helmet, music cassettes. He left home and moved in with a friend. In servants’ quarters converted to a cottage rented in someone’s garden he had a room to himself where she could comfort him with love-making; she knew something of what it was like to leave behind you those who had been your parents.
They had each other, in love. They would get married. Sooner, now, an act of confirmation, even of defiance, as well as love. But if he was angry before, he was stricken, transformed by disbelief when he came back from the marriage licence office to tell her that the licence was not, could not be issued. There would have to be a birth certificate to prove she was white; he could give his date and place of birth, the names of his parents. She had no birth certificate and no place except a church toilet, and her adoptive parents had registered her in their name and residence as Coloureds in a duly designated township. Denise Appolis was a Coloured female. The Mixed Marriages Act forbade marriage between them. Even their love-making was clandestine contravention of the law.
The television technician had never needed a lawyer, he was an ordinary law-abiding young man who wanted to marry in the usual progression of life, and, white and sure of his own, he had never taken any part in organisations concerned with human rights but remembered reading in newspapers of a legal aid resource that offered help in such matters. There he was received by a rumpled, well-rounded woman lawyer who ran her hands up through her hair as if they were going over a story she’d heard in various versions many times. — I know, I know it’s an awful prospect, but your ‘intended’ will have to go before the Population Registrar. We’ll make an application for her to be reclassified. White. Don’t think I’m doubting you in any way, but I must meet her, first.—
— You’ll see for yourself. Whoever they are can’t have any doubts.—
— The parentage questions — habitation, childhood — complicates things, even if the physical appearance seems to fit by their invented genetic standards …—
When there is trouble you take your shock home to those to whom you went with the hurt of grazed knees.
She took him with her to Mama and Daddy, Abraham and Elsie, there she was able to give way to tears and they wept with her, hugged the young white man who hadn’t given her up but become confined, as they had been all their lives, in one of those cages of the law that made people species of exotic animals: he must understand — yes — he’s in the whites’ cage. And she, their girl? If the lawyer knows the procedure, everyone in the township knows how you must present yourself before it. Everywhere, close, there are families to whom nature — God’s will — has produced one of a brood who could play for white, Abraham and Elsie could call in all manner of advice from friends, relatives, expert in their ways; lore unknown to any lawyer. Without papers, registered Coloured, the girl must present herself, to that bastard looking her over, as if the girl really is a play-white who must disguise herself. He’ll only be convinced, by his model of a real white girl, if she gets herself up in the right way that they know, from experience, will succeed. She looks too — what’s it — lady-like. He’ll find it fishy. He’s not used to that. He’s used to letting pass — all right, got to make a few who do, just to show the law is good — the special kind of looks, it’s like they’re on a rubber stamp ready to his hand, he recognises as properly faked. How she must dress and make up — that’s important. Really white, you must look; she and her boyfriend go swimming a lot, she’s rosily-dark sunburned.
Who knew better than the aunties, cousins, neighbours how to deal with the law’s servants, those white ‘civil servants’ that decided your life for you. On the day she and her future husband met the lawyer at the office of the Population Registrar she was heavily plastered with chalky makeup, as if she truly had mixed blood to conceal, her hair, which lately she had followed the craze of the girls at the bank to have cooked into a rippling Afro, was tortured even straighter, her blondness bleached even blonder, than these were naturally.
The lawyer from Legal Aid was appalled. She left the future husband standing in a corridor and rushed the girl to the women’s toilet where, totally concentrated, exasperatedly wordless, she scrubbed the face with paper tissues from her briefcase and drew palms-full of liquid soap from a dispenser to finish the job. The clean shining face of a tanned white girl, pink around the nostrils, emerged and it was in this naked aspect that the foundling applicant entered the official’s office accompanied by the woman lawyer. The future husband left behind the door: he could make out the voice but not the words of the lawyer explicating her client’s claim. His lips moved on the words he would have used. And he would also have said what surely couldn’t be denied by any Registrar, I love her, isn’t there a right to love.
His girl and the lawyer were on the other side of the door a long time. He did not allow himself to look at his watch as if the hour might be an omen; good or bad. He could scarcely catch his girl’s low voice and an indifferent-sounding growl of the official’s questions was infrequent, impossible to follow.
They came out and the door closed on a moment when he saw the official with his chin pressed into a swag of flesh as he bent over papers on a desk. She was looking straight in front of her, not at him. The woman lawyer was slowly wagging her head, lips tight. Absence of documentation, the applicant’s answers to where her parents lived, who they were, what school she was admitted to, recognised as a Coloured among Coloureds all her childhood — these criteria have decided that her classification cannot be changed to white. Application refused. Sorry. That was what the half-audible growl had been decreeing.
They wandered out into the forest of city in which they were abandoned strangers. The lawyer was guiding them, at their backs. — Let’s go to my office and have some coffee. — What could she have to say to them there? Application for reclassification refused.
They don’t know, but she receives in never-silenced memory her echo of what they are feeling; as a child, a life ago, in a German town called Dortmund she was turned away from school with a yellow star stuck to her dress. — Look, I have experience with these people. — A note taken of the afterthought: ‘Sorry’. —I’m going to see him tomorrow.—
Mr van Rensburg was amiable: you again. Rose from his chair, both sat down. Across the desk from one another, a level of understanding confidentially, professionally assumed. You know, I know. The girl is white. Years ago some other white girl dumped an unwanted infant on church premises. — A church for Coloureds, ja. — Yes. But in those days, you’ll remember, there was a poor whites’ area only a few yards away across the veld. If it’d been a whites’ church, the mother might have been discovered.—
And now he released himself to the assumed level of understanding. — Look. Ag, she’s white, can’t I see it for myself. Of course. Anyone can see it. A nice young man wants to marry her. Jesus, I see what she is. But it’s the law it’s my job. She can perhaps apply again. If you can dig up something from the orphanage or church or whatever she was found. Sorry.—
They’re saving up now. Not to see the Tower of London, the Champs Élysées, Piazza San Marco in Venice, but to go away, for good. That’s how they describe leaving a home they can’t have.
Perhaps they’ve come back since all the laws that decided who she was, who he was, have gone, as the politicians and newspapers like to put it, into the dustbin, the rotten eggshells and beer cans, of history. Years ago now, by the time that is measured when you’re in bodily manifestation. The names of those heroes who made the laws have even been taken off street signs and airports.
I must have been released from her — she must have died, somehow, young: you don’t always keep, know, the moment when you were recalled; how it ended. But of all my Returns that one was unique, there never was anything like it! Because, each time, you are one manifestation, sent back to live out one life. But that Return was in itself two, I had come back twice over in the same enclosure within space that is a planet.
Denise — my pretty name they gave me because I didn’t have one. I’m thinking in the taal; I was so happy among the other kids in the township, our own place, my Mama and Daddy giving me my Barbie doll and all her outfits, even a pearl necklace that broke and Mama threaded again, the prizes I got, top girl in class, the Sundays when the aunties and uncles and cousins came, we kids ran races, turned cartwheels, and stuffed ourselves with sweets and cold drinks. The time when I had grown breasts, still not full like Mama’s but quite nice, and Terry held them and sucked the nipple and put his finger in my hole at the donga we kids roofed over with branches as our headquarters in the veld. His name was Tertius, teacher told us it means number three, but he was first-born, we used to tease him, his parents were stupid. I was in junior choir at our church, with Mama in the ladies’ choir. Daddy — oh he had me with him so many times, we went to watch dirt-track racing, very exciting, and when there was a fun fair set up in our township and a circus he bought tickets for us for the rides and the seats. He held my hand when I was scared that the lion was going to bite the tamer. When I was little I used to climb into their big bed between them and cuddle on Sunday mornings, and when I grew bigger and didn’t anymore they didn’t know about Terry and the headquarters we kids had.
Then — without a death yet, without the proper end — that Return ended. There was Miss Denise Appolis, trainee at the bank. Now it comes to me in English. I live in a flat in the city with another girl. We’re white — well of course, what else could we be? What a question. Like other people who work in the bank or the attorney’s office where my friend is also some sort of trainee. We try out different hairstyles together, have boyfriends we mock and laugh about when we’re alone, we go to parties. But sometimes this Denise Appolis who I am goes, crosses from one self to another, to a place and people, feelings towards these people, that should belong to another Return entirely. So I don’t know what happened to the force that sends me back, again and again, but never as the same being, even if, rarely, I do have a recognition that must come from another life. How can there be two in one Return?
There are no answers.
There is no answer. Only that you have to go back, in whatever form, again and again.
Perhaps there are things people on the planet decree upon one another that would explain this freak Return that once happened.
‘I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and returning life after life like an insect in the grass.’
I would have been Denis — if she hadn’t pushed her way into the world first. They were expecting me. Hoped for, planned for — a son. So far as you could then; it was before the discovery of tests that would reveal the sex of what was in the womb. They knew only that we were two of us — Gemini — in the biological package.
Still-born. Which means you don’t get a name. Still-born: means ‘still’ in the sense of unable to breathe, to move, to live. So it’s true that my corporeal life outside the shelter, the womb, was only the passage from the birth canal to the hospital incinerator. You have seen a foetus? Head and genitals — that’s it. Both outsize. What is inbetween is dismissable. Because a foetus doesn’t have to eat, digest, evacuate. Head and genitals — intelligence and sex. That’s about what I was; she had hogged the vital juices meant for both of us and she emerged ready to meet the requirements, fully formed. I was the runt, underdeveloped, the feeble heart arrested, not even incubator material, still-born. Never got further than that. Only head and genitals, intelligence and sex as my share of experiencing the world in the flesh the way you do; but never to have your experience of humiliating functions that, from the tangled nuisance of gut and stuff, plague and disrupt these two great powers! You begin to understand? I wonder …
Memory belongs to the corporeal — you have to have lived, to travel your time through the body, to remember. I have no memory of my own beyond that passage from the birth canal to the incinerator. Instead I find I flit about, I experience snatches of corporeal life of any and all of you, as I please. That’s the explanation for my non-existent existence. Of which I have proof to offer in response to your disbelief.
How is it that I think? Know words? Something of history, literature, politics, contemporary life, what it’s all like — as you’ll see. Is it the collective unconscious some of you believe in, others deride? Or do I have, as the ancient religious mystics believed and some of your fashionable novelists resort to for their characters, in invigoration of flagging invention — the ability to inhabit someone’s body, invade his or her experience as incubus, succubus, dybbuk — I don’t know. But I do no harm; the subject isn’t even aware of what I have appropriated and is not deprived in any way; there’s enough for both of us. You’d be surprised if you knew how much goes to waste in your experience; how much you don’t grasp, just don’t get it, don’t (what’s your word) intuit, and how much you don’t want to accept, although it’s been provided.
And even that faculty of memory, which as I’ve told you, I don’t have because I’ve lived nothing to remember except that trip from the birth canal to the incinerator you’re tired of hearing about — you, with your corporeal ability to create memories, don’t always retain the ability to hold on to them, and that can be either your kind of deprivation or your protection against the suffering I see you’re subject to in the stages of mortality. There’s an old man I know in my way, whose occupation of your kind of life is the same chair each day and whose corporeal activity is moving between it and the bathroom on a contraption like one I’ve seen infants supporting themselves on as they are learning to walk. He was a scaler of mountains and once was part of an Everest expedition that if it did not reach the summit gallantly survived an attempt in dangerous weather conditions; friends and even an occasional journalist come to talk to him about this, and while he smiles with pleasure to be reminded that it must have been an experience somewhere in the past that has abandoned him, he cannot relive any moment of it. The friends and the journalists find this sad; it depresses them and I’m the one who knows why, because while I’m living their experience I accept the meaning within them they suppress: living is growing old on the way to death, losing those faculties they treasure so much, and although they think their lives are choices, there are the two stages over which they don’t have any choice — to be born, and to die.
But when I’m experiencing the old man I reach into something else laid away in his past to which he no longer has access. He dearly loves his wife (feeling this, with my own precocious, arrested awareness of sexuality, those genitals I was at least equipped with, I have an inkling of what I’ve missed, the joy she, my greedy twin, robbed me of as she shouldered me aside). The wife is much younger than the old man, she lies beside him and the life that is in her keeps him going, she buries her warm face in the grave between his jaw and skeletal shoulder-blade. She is the joy I experience in him and he’s going to die happy because he does not remember the long love affair she had with another man, in the middle years of their marriage, which caused him such violent misery and demeaning jealousy, and almost — imagine that, since he possesses her totally now — led him to divorce her.
And she? Isn’t that female lucky? Not merely forgiven, if you please! It never happened. The cheat never lied. The bitch never came home and sat at dinner with another man’s semen inside her. But don’t be too sure about her. I know in her that other something I’ll never have: remorse. In her chest there’s a tightening as if a drawstring has pulled together all that she did, that time, there’s an emotional congestion she can’t relieve by asking, as she longs to, his forgiveness. For what? he would say, lovingly. For what, my darling? And to remind him would be the final cruelty of all she did to him.
But there’s even more to it. The complexity of these lives of yours between birth and death! I wake up as her in the night and she raises herself to listen for his breathing. Her love for him is devastating. She has never contemplated death but now knows sorrow will be silence.
And how does she live, that sister who twinned my life with hers in the closest meaning of the word, worse than any freakish Siamese twinning, for she grabbed the chance, the oxygen, at any cost. Does she live it up, doubly, for both of us who fought it out in the womb? The odd thing is, I can’t take on, as I do here and there, as the fancy moves me, her consciousness and subconscious. I have difficulty even in identifying her. I can’t find her. Sometimes I think I’m on the wave-length … but it’s just a choking exclamation that strangles. It’s the umbilical cord that was round my neck. Never mind her; how would I have lived — quite unlike her, for sure, however her way might have turned out to be. I can’t pretend to be without prejudice; I can’t imagine, in the here-and-there of the lives I light upon, anything particularly interesting or fulfilling for her. I don’t think she merits it. But I should like to experience her, to confirm this. Although I would have been a man (evidence that outsize bunch between the legs of the wretched little corpse) if I had not been still-born, my disembodied state, as you’ve no doubt noticed, means that I can enter both male and female experience — in my own way.
Don’t think it’s all grave. (No pun intended.) Only now — what you would call a little while ago, or a day ago, in your measuring-out of your time — I was on a bicycle with curved handles like the horns of some swift beast. The bicycle and I were cutting a swathe through the air up a tree-lined street. Gateways, houses, telephone poles sliced away from us on either side, leaves and branches rushed out to meet — and just missed — us. On my head was a yellow casque slashed with red arrows. I had eyes that could see as keenly as fish in the depths of an ocean. I had a heart: I was that pump, a creature whose corporeality was all one pulse of energy. Glory. Mouth open to gulf wild laughter. Whoever you were, half-grown boy: I understood from you what it means to be alive!
Glory.
Some I’ve come upon can’t find it simply, as the boy did, in this life that you complain about continually yet cling to fiercely — even abjectly, as I’ve come to know, in circumstances you yourselves bring about. Like ticks on the body of the world, you suck there inert until you bloat and fall off. Ugh.
Glory: there are others — completely other. They believe it can’t be experienced in corporeality, it belongs to something they visualize: an after-life. Which must be the opposite term of still-born (you can tell I hang around intellectuals and amateur philosophers). Perhaps that’s where I belong, if anywhere: their after-life, because I’ve missed out what’s inbetween. How do they get to their after-life? Strapped to the chest of that other being I took on — hardly older than the bicycle rider, he must have been — was a device with a stopper like a heavy pin. The thing was hard against the breast-bone under a flowing garment; on the crown of the head I was also aware of an embroidered skullcap. The pin came out with an easy tug. There was an embrace more passionate than any I’ve been privy to, and without boasting, I don’t mind telling you there’ve been quite a few, between men-and-men and women-and-women, as well as the kind of woman-man one that half-created me. This one was between man and man and the climax was an orgasm unlike any other, unsurpassable, an explosion that ended everything, for both. There was nothing to remember of it, for him, my chosen partner, just as for myself, who can only borrow memory. I don’t know if the Believer I was, for a while, for the flashed duration of the embrace, received the reward of the after-life, and if it was better than the one that flew apart in darkness beyond any dark. I left him at that moment of nothingness. You will perhaps know because you will have lived, whereas I have never existed in my own right, and if you don’t experience life you don’t experience its end. I suppose I could go on the way I do for ever, while you, my friend, you will come to that nothingness one way or another, in bed slowly or fast on a highway, even if it is extremely unlikely that anyone would find reason to bring you into a final clinch with a grenade.
The victim for whose last embrace I was decisive was, of course, a political leader. I don’t make moral judgments, despite the bits and ends of theoretical justice I’ve picked up, so I don’t know if he had it coming to him. And if he did, did he deserve it? There’s not enough sequence in my fragments of experience to judge what I’ll risk as the most important question for you: does killing really solve any of the conflicts between you, and what you claim as your countries, your boundaries? I mean, you can’t turn me away at Immigration, so how can I presume to know what cans you like a commodity, contains your individual experience as imprinted within you from the day you’re born Here or There rather than Somewhere Else.
My dipping into the experience of politicians has resulted in some discoveries you probably wouldn’t credit, considering the general view of these individuals I overhear. They are stalwart, convinced of their moral right to take power, determined to bring peace, prosperity and justice to all, if you are of those who support their ideas of how a government should run your lives; they are ruthless, power-hungry, wily, will stop at no infamy to impose their kind of regime, if you are in opposition to their ideas of governing you. In the being of one — a politician — once in a while (there are so many buzzing around among you, how could I avoid the temptation or the curiosity) I have known the raw surface of weakness (yes) to any failure, however small, any setback to high self-esteem, however temporary, they conceal from public sight. While they are declaring themselves satisfied with the support they are gaining among the collective electorate — You — the loss of a few votes is to them a slow bleeding from some secret organ they have, the loss of a seat in the palace of government is a lopping-off of a limb of the creature they have to make of themselves — for You, for your sake. You know that? Power is needed, there’s a need to be intact for good, as well as for evil. I have some notion of those two concepts — come to me, in my way; how could I have even the most fleeting contacts with your experience without finding out that they actually do exist.
Perhaps I would have been one of those, a politician. Because I can’t keep away from them, they attract me with the strong sense with which they wrestle life, the secrecy of the holds they use, under the public surface; their kind of survival tactics among the different ones I see practised among you, from withdrawals to the ashram to the total exposure of the pop star. Why shouldn’t I try them all, since I don’t have the angst of going through the whole way with any! But no. If I imagine a corporeal life for myself — what Denis might be — maybe I would have been a writer; fiction, of course, because that’s the closest a corporeal being can get to my knack of living other lives; multiple existences that are not the poor little opportunities of a single existence.
When she dies — the one who precociously stole my life, I’d like to know how much value she’s added to it on your stock market — I wonder whether my non-existent existence will stop, too: still-born to stop-dead. I doubt it. I’m curious, nevertheless. So one of the favourite diversions of my eternity is to board a plane in the being of a passenger. Because I find the nearest you who are not religious — can’t rely on an after-life — may get to experience the eternal is up at around thirty thousand feet on the way to the heaven of those who believe they’re going to go all the way. In a layer of the atmosphere outside the earth, between time-zones defined by your earthly existence: you don’t know precisely, up above the earth’s cloud-shroud, its cosy blanket, whether you are X hours behind or X hours ahead of the earthly destination you have headed yourself for. So you are out of both time and place — precariously? No — you inhabit both at the same time, clouds, space, and the interior box of the aircraft, which is like a hospital ward, you are designated to yours (First, Business, Tourist class), your bed (seat number) and you are dependent on the ministrations of the nurse (cabin attendant). Freedom is just beyond the window; as always with you, you can see it but can’t touch it. And it is fearful …
So I am everybody’s twin? — oh no, no, not at all! Don’t mistake me. Not in anything I’ve said. I’m not an alter ego, doppelgänger, clone — nobody’s alternate. I am not stopping up your ears with a homily on universality, living human beings are part of one another, must love one another etcetera, with my winetastings of your experience here-and-there as the high-minded symbolic lesson. In my condition I have no moral responsibility. Now do you get it? How could I when I don’t have to provide: don’t have to eat, to have a roof over me, don’t have to look over my shoulder at anyone who’s a rival in acquisitions? It’s easy for me …
I suppose, in the end, you have to be disembodied, like me, to need no morals. All that I have in common with you is all you are not—I am. Pity me. Or envy me.
‘It turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have.’
For so long — well, the ten years we’ve been together — we’ve had everything we wanted. Not some gift from the gods or nice middle-class family inheritance, but in the independent making of our own lives. Karen is overseas investment advisor of the most successful group of brokers in the city. I had a history of having been an activist. That cliché means I was part of actions against the old regime, now put away mummified if not exactly returned to dust, that got me tear-gassed and beaten-up and once detained — another cliché, this one for a spell inside without trial. But I am a lawyer who nevertheless managed to get herself accepted, in a renewed country, as fresh blood and a woman, by one of the most prestigious old legal practices. So that’s the career side of it.
As women who’ve wanted and had only women lovers since youthful attempts with men, we know we were lucky — extraordinarily blessed — to find one another. Even straight people (as they think of themselves) prove how rare the right relationship is: divorces, remarriages, quarrels over child custody — anyway, that’s the mess we’ve freed ourselves of, in what’s called our sexual preference. Which has been and is open, since the law now accepts its existence as legitimate and we both have the confidence of our recognised career capabilities and loving sexual partnership (the straight couples enviously see how fulfilling it is) to ignore any relics of old prejudice that turn up in long-faced disapproval. We find the society of our own kind naturally compatible, with the usual rivalries, of course, haphazard sexual attractions that complicate and trouble, not too seriously, everyone’s social life, golf club or gay bar. But we also have heterosexual friendships, particularly those coming about through our different professional connections, and we don’t mind obliging as the female dinner-partners of visiting overseas businessmen or other dignitaries who have arrived without spouses. Karen is something of a beauty with the added advantage or disadvantage of being younger than I am, and she sometimes is pursued by one of these men-of-passage after the occasion, and I suppose I must admit that it pleases, rouses me to know that my lover appeals to someone who can’t have her, whom she would reject. With the funny little pursed-up, half-derisive, half-flattered face she makes as we look the man over in retrospect.
We bought a house two years after we met, and one of ours, an architect friend, renovated it to create exactly what we think our place ought to be. The mixed-media paintings and the one or two sculptures (we like wood and can’t stand the pretension of objets trouvés) are the work of other artist friends. Our collection and our travels together are what we enjoy spending our money on. We’ve seen a good part of the world (four eyes better than two), the Great Wall, the Barrier Reef, New York-Chicago-West Coast, Kyoto, Scottish Highlands, Florence-Rome-Paris — and there’ll be a lot more to come, but it’s always with an emotional dissolve of pleasure, arms going about each other, that we find our two selves back — home. I’ve had the impression that straights don’t believe such a concept should exist, with us. Because we don’t deserve it, eh.
Some time last year something surprising — yes, happened. Not to us; but came from us. Not surprising, though, that it occurred at the same time in both, as our emotions, concepts, opinions and tastes are non-biological identical twins. For instance, I don’t know whether, talking with others, we’re heard to say ‘I’ instead of ‘we’. The totally unexpected thing — if that’s what surprise is — is that this one was, well, biological. How else could you term it. We wanted to have a child. I’m sure — and I use the singular personal pronoun for once because we never actually expressed this, I’m observing from some imagined outside — we were aware that the desire was like the remnant of a tail, the coccyx, vestigial not of our human origin as primates but of the family organism we have evolved beyond. But freedom means you go out to get what you want, even if it seems its own contradiction. Reject the elements of family and take one of them to create a new form of relationship.
We have a home to offer, no question about that, vis-à-vis the basic needs of a child. It’s the first consideration an agency would take account of: this easily, informally beautiful place and space we’ve created. But adoption is not what we want: we’re talking of our own child. This means one of us must bear it, because what one is the agency of becomes the possession of both.
Late at night, accompanied by the crickets out on the terrace, later still, in our bed, her arm under my head or mine under hers, we consider how we’re going to go about this extraordinary decision that seems to have been made for us, not at all like the sort of mutual decision, say, to go to the Galápagos next summer instead of Spain. There’s no question of who will grow the child inside her body. Karen is eight years younger than I am. But at thirty-six she has doubts of whether she can conceive. — How do I know? I’ve never been pregnant. — We laughed so much I had to kiss her to put a stop to it. She hasn’t had a man since at eighteen in her first year at university her virginity was disposed of, luckily without issue, by a fellow student in the back of his car. — I think there are tests you can have to see if you’re fertile. We’ll find a gynecologist. None of her business why you want to know.—
That was simple. She’s fertile, all right, though the doctor did make some remark about the just possible difficulties — did she say complications, Karen doesn’t remember — for (what did she call her) a primapara at thirty-six, and the infant. There’s always a caesarian — but I don’t want Karen cut up. — I’ll have a natural birth, I’ll do all the exercises and get into the right frame of mind these prenatal places teach. — And so we know, I know now; she’s going to have an experience I won’t have, she’s accepted that; we’ve accepted that, yes.
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.’
The 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.
Factories closed without the market for their products that had existed conveniently in the vast union. Elena’s mother lost her job when the catering firm failed in competition with what were called fast-food chains with American names which replaced many restaurants, Elena could not study to become a teacher or a computer operator. She had to find work, any work. Foreigners come to do business lived in hotels refurbished, by the international chains that had taken them over, to make them feel they were in an hotel in the West. Her mother could not believe it: her daughter, so clever, who was going to make a career in that very world, the new world, came home one day to tell that she had found work: as a chambermaid in one of the hotels. She was instructed to wear a skirt, not jeans, and supplied with a uniform apron. She passed doors hung with the sign ‘Do Not Disturb’ in English, French, German and Japanese, and knocked softly on others. If there was no response, she was to go in, make the beds, vacuum the carpets, clean the bathroom, replace the towels, soap and whatever was missing from the basket of free miniatures of bath-oil, shampoo, provided in the high cost (payable in dollars only) of the room. The sheets were stained with semen. The drain-traps of the bathtubs were blocked with pubic hairs. The lavatory bowls often were not flushed of traces of shit. Socks stiff with sweat and shirts dirty at collar and cuffs had to be picked up off the carpet and placed neatly on a chair. The housekeeper came regularly to see if such things were correctly done.
Sometimes when the chambermaid knocked there was no reply and she went in, there was someone there, a voice from under the shower, and she would apologise and leave at once. There were times when she entered after no reply and a man was standing, half-dressed, and while she apologised he would smile and say, go ahead, I’ve finished with the bathroom. But she had her instructions: I’ll come back later. There was the morning when she knocked and someone answered in a language she didn’t recognise as English (learnt a little at school), German, French or Japanese. She turned away but the door opened and a man in the white towelling dressinggown the hotel provided in the bathrooms blocked the light of the room. — No Italian? — okay, understand English? Come please. — She followed him to the bathroom and he pointed to the bathtowels that had fallen from their rail into the water. She signalled: I bring some more. When she came back with the towels he thanked her, smiling, shrugging effusively at the good service, — You Russian? Yes, I’m sure you’re real Russian girl. First one I know! — She smiled back as a maid should, polite to a guest, never mind their dirt. Nodded determinedly. — Russian, yes. — She said it in her language, and he cocked his head a little as if hearing a bird call. They both laughed, and she left. Next day when she knocked at 507 the door opened at once. He was a large man, the Italian, tall and broad but not fat, with a fancy belt that still met above a strong belly, and a fresh full face, black thick-lidded eyes, and a glossy crest of grey hair worn consciously as a cock his comb. The age of many of the foreign guests, somewhere at the end of the fifties. She saw all this, really, for the first time: he was presenting himself.
Again he signalled her into the room. He had unpacked some purchase; there was a jumble of cardboard box, bubble wrap, plastic chips. Could she do something about this mess? They communicated well by signs and their few English words, her willingness, his appreciation brought laughter. He helped her gather the pieces from the carpet, fill the box, picked it up and made to carry it to the door for her, while she protested, trying to take it from him. It fell and spilled again. He threw his hands above his head in mock culpability. When they came down again they went round her, he was rocking her against him, laughing. She pulled away. He let her go. — Don’t be cross. Come sit down. — She did not know what she was supposed to do. You must not be rude to a hotel guest. He sat on the velvet chaise-longue and patted the place beside him. She came slowly to the summons. Now he put his one arm round her shoulders and turned her to him, kissed her. His lips were warm and pleasant, a change from the dirt she associated with hotel guests, he smelled of pine aftershave. He pressed her closer and put his tongue in her mouth. The caress, the advances came from that other world, outside, the world of computers and travel, even while she resented what he was doing, it took her there, away from the chambermaid.
He was waiting, every morning. He would be in the dressinggown at his laptop computer or on the telephone, surrounded by a calculator, another — a mobile — phone and spread documents. She could see he was a big businessman of some kind. This was the equipment they all had in their rooms. He would gesture her to him and run a free hand down her buttocks while he argued, agreed, lowered his voice confidentially, raised it confidently in Italian. Business over, he made love to her on the bed she would make up afresh in the course of her work, later.
She had been clumsily penetrated by a youth who ejaculated halfway but she did not know the act could be like this. The entry of this man was an exquisite opening up of all that must have been secret inside her and when some sort of flame jetted from his strong movements within the sheath he wore she was lit up all through her body down her shuddering thighs and he had to shush her cry — there might someone passing in the hotel corridor.
She had her rooms to clean; he had his appointments to meet. He found a better arrangement: what was her lunch-hour? He would arrange his meetings accordingly, his business lunches could be scheduled late. Between embraces he would feed her cherries and slices of peach from the bowl the hotel kept replenished on his coffee table, poor little girl, no time for her to lunch.
His stay at the hotel was longer than usual for foreign businessmen; he must have had complex financial deals that meant waiting for the opportunity to make this connection or that with an intermediary. She was told nothing of this, or anything else about his life where he came from, Italy, but she saw how he was often exasperated when he put down the telephone or grew impatient with the fax facility attached to it. The third week, must have been — one lunchtime he looked at her lying under him, rising on his elbows for a better perspective. His mouth shaped and reshaped as if he were urging himself to make some gesture not physical, toward what it was time to leave behind: pleasures dictating one course, judgment the other. When she was dressing he watched her. That responsive body concealing itself; he had had many responsive bodies coming and going in his life, but time was passing and one more …
— I can take you to Italy.—
She didn’t believe him, didn’t answer.
— No, it’s true. I know someone, I can get you papers. We’ll find work for you there. Not this, here. Better work. You can’t go on in this place.—
She shook her head, lower and lower. He was smiling, dismissing her powerlessness before his capability in the world of official fixes.
What could he know of the mother, the grandmother she went back to every night with leftover food one of the chefs smuggled from the hotel restaurant to give her.
— First days of next month, I go. I take you. Nothing for a girl like you, here. — Every lunchtime he confirmed, assumed the arrangement. And she found her voice — No, no I cannot. —
At last he lost interest — all right. There were plenty of girls who would jump at the chance to get out. And there are plenty of girls in Milan even if they haven’t the novelty of being a real Russian one.
But when she was walking home from the bus stop on her afternoon off duty she saw something so terrible that she was almost run over by a truck as she plunged across the traffic to reach it. Old people begging in the streets; they were everywhere, old men in the remnants of their respectable functionaries’ or clerks’ suits, old women with the bewildered faces of former housewives, shamed under shawls. But this one she was in panic to reach was her own grandmother. She took her home, unable to speak, eyes screwed with tears of anger, disgust, as if the old woman were a criminal caught in the act. At home, her mother first cried and then countered with an anger of her own. — She hasn’t had her pension paid for a year — one month more than a year. I stand with her for days outside the office, no-one is paid. What can they do but sit in the street and hope someone has something to give? Why shouldn’t she do what they do? How can we live on what you bring from that hotel? I’ll have to try and put her in an old people’s home, she’ll die there away from us! What else is there? — Next day the grandmother was back on her stool in the street. Her granddaughter saw her, and passed.
There was something else.
After the lunchtime love-making she brought up the subject he had set aside. — If you can do papers, I go to Italy.—
It was not just the sight of the revered old woman begging in the street; the sometime chambermaid had something of the rational intelligence, calculation, of the businessman. He would find decent work for her in that country outside, Italy, that wonderful city he spoke about, Milan, and she would send good currency back to her mother. If she stayed a chambermaid her grandmother would remain a beggar among all the other beggars.
She left them behind. Her mother had not known about the Italian businessman but when told of his offer she did not hesitate: Go, Elena. They did not speak about what would become of those left behind. Perhaps the mother could take over the daughter’s work as a chambermaid.
Her mother gave her in farewell a picture book of the city, its ancient palaces, churches, squares and museums they had visited together; she must have exchanged something for it in the market where people parted with their possessions, and the daughter herself asked for, and was granted, photographs taken in the city in times when her mother had a good position and they still owned a camera.
She had a room in a small hotel in his city, Milan, his country, Italy. The room was five floors up, a tiny cage of an elevator to take her there, bring him to her when he had time. The first day, he showed her a lacy stone spire just visible fretted out of the sky in the window. — You have a view of the Duomo! You must go to the piazza and see it, the most beautiful thing in the whole world.—
He paid for the hotel room and took her to a trattoria nearby where he had arranged with the patron for her to have her meals. It was a large and animated place where people working in the quarter came in a hurry to eat and drink plentifully. This was as he had told, a wonderful city; the narrow streets of shops displaying like art exhibitions beautiful clothes and shoes whose elegance you could not ever have imagined. He was looking out for something for her — work; but she had to have better clothes to wear if he should find that something! He took her to a department store that had good clothes on the racks, not as elegant as the small shops she gazed into, and bought for her trousers and jackets and shoes she had never had. Of course she always had been this tall, angular body with wide-apart breasts, this white skin and jutting cheekbones, shaggy dark hair, narrow black eyes and lips whose defining edges were attractively coarse in contrast with her skin; but now, in the shop mirror, she was seen by herself to be beautiful, in her way; as he, the Italian, must have seen her to be as a chambermaid. So she wandered the city dressed now like any of the smart working men and women from shops and offices, and hurried back to the hotel to see if there was any message from him; any day, every day, he might have found something, a job for her. She was listening avidly to the talk around her, reading the labels and signs on objects she could recognise, picking up a little of the language.
He did not come to claim love-making as often as he had back in that other hotel, her country. He had a great deal of work, a staff to direct, and she knew there was the apartment in some other part of the city where he lived with his wife; he had not talked about his family before he brought her to Italy, they couldn’t talk much then or now because of their lack of a fluent common language, their tongues in love-making were the only real form of communication they had in common. But now he would mention that he wouldn’t be coming to her from his offices next afternoon because his son had to be met at the airport or his wife was giving a cocktail party for her visiting relatives and he had to be home early. Although the city was a marvel surging around her she was more and more anxiously impatient to have work and belong to the city instead of being its spectator. Work and foreign currency to send back where she came from. And she also had the illusion — she knew it to be one — that she would pay him back, for the hotel, the trattoria, the clothes, in time; she would have liked the love-making not to be paid for in any way but the pleasure exchanged. But that, she knew, belonged to being in love. Men loved their wives. He loved his wife, she was sure of it, felt it; she had never had the chance to be in love.
He found something for her. And for himself as well.
It was not work, in Milan where he would be supposed to keep coming to her — perhaps there was some new woman for that diversion, or his wife was getting suspicious and difficult. But he treated his women kindly and it so happened that a solution came up to benefit everybody, satisfy what he felt was his wide family responsibility, uncles, aunts, cousins, as well. He told her, one weekend (she did not usually expect him in those periods it was taken for granted he would spend with his wife and children), he wanted to introduce her to someone in his family. Perhaps there was an opportunity because the wife was away, or the relative was one with whom he exchanged confidences over affairs with women, someone to be counted upon to be discreet. But she was surprised and shyly touched at this sign of letting her into his life. After an hour’s drive when the Alps were always present, approaching, withdrawing, as she followed this landscape that was Italy, the world, they came to a town, a large family apartment filled with imposing old dark furniture, generous food and wine laid out among the cries of people welcoming someone he told them he had saved from the chaos in Russia. They knew what a good man he was, generous. There was an aunt, another ample woman who might be her sister, a half-grown boy playing a computer game, the uncle, and a man who was the couple’s son. The Russian stranger had observed, in Milan, how difficult it was to gauge the age of certain foreigners; they might look slim and briskly young seen from the back and turn age-seamed faces in which the bones of the nose were almost emerging from the thin skin, or they might appear to be well-fleshed, stout-muscled young men, thighs and buttocks stretching tight pants, the fleshy jaws and earlobes not necessarily giving away middle age. The son was one of these, and his mature vigour was the epicentre of the gathering. He had his own apartment; the Russian girl and the cousin from Milan who had brought her were taken by the man — Lorenzo, the name was, among all the names presented to her — to see his apartment almost as if there were a reason for this, such as an estate agent showing a prospective dwelling to a client.
There was a reason. The middle-aged son was not married; his parents did not know exactly why — there were a number of nice, goodlooking girls whose parents would have been only too pleased, lucky, to have a successful man with three butcher shops, two in town and another in a nearby village, as a son-in-law. There was some story of a love affair that had gone on for years with a married woman who wouldn’t divorce; apparently it was over, she’d moved down south with her husband to Naples. Confidentially, the aunt and uncle in family council had told their worldly Milanese nephew to look out for a suitable wife from among the many women he must know, it was time for a man of Lorenzo’s age and status to settle down. At the time, the Milanese nephew had raised high his eyebrows and pulled down his mouth; what city woman would want to come and live in a dull provincial town, among a few small factories and half-abandoned farms, nothing happening? But now there was a Russian girl he had brought from her wretched existence to his beautiful country out of kindness — yes, he fancied her for a while — and who would become a legal citizen by marriage to the son of one of the oldest families in a provincial town, what better solution to looking out for something for her! A well-off husband, every comfort, a man who could even afford to be generous and let her send money to her mother etc. — something she’d never have earned enough both to support herself and provide, by whatever humble work he might have found for her, a woman unable to speak the language, no qualifications but those of a chambermaid. He certainly wasn’t going to pay her keep forever, and anyway the particular arrangements through which he’d made her entry possible had a time limit about to lapse.
Lorenzo came to Milan several times, something to do with a deal in hides, he tried to explain; he took her out to dinner in restaurants where the champagne bottles lolled in ice. He too, had a little English and praised her attempts at Italian, covering her hand with his in congratulation. He did not kiss her or make overtures to go to bed with her as she resignedly expected.
No, he was getting to know her. It had been proposed that she would be a suitable wife. She was an émigrée in doubtful legal standing, she was not in a position to decide whether she’d prefer to live in the city with the Duomo or in a small town, she had no prospects of a job other than to improve her Italian enough to sit at a comfortable desk and answer the telephone, greet customers as the wife of the owner in his high-class butcher shop — it would add to his local prestige to be shown to have settled down. And maybe even if the wife was a foreigner that would only evidence his superior flair in matters other than the way he prepared each customer’s individual cut of meat with the skill and finesse of a surgeon.
Her Milanese came to her little hotel room with a view of the Duomo not to make love to her but to tell her that there was a great chance for her. The papers he had arranged for her in a certain way were no longer valid; she would be deported, nothing he could do about that. Lorenzo was ready to marry her. She would become an Italian wife, belong to this beautiful country. Lorenzo was a good man, not old, a man any woman would — he stopped, spread open his hands. Love; he didn’t need to say it.
He came from Milan for the wedding. The aunt had been with her to a friend of the family who owned a shop in the town that was a modest version of the shops whose perfectly-composed windows made clothes works of art in the narrow streets of Milan; she had a wedding outfit and hat but not the girlish convention of white and long veil. The vigorous maturity of the bridegroom would have made this unsuitable; who knew what her background was, anyway, in that savage unknown vastness, Russia. They had not made love before the marriage, as if that was part of the arrangement. His love-making was concentrated, nightly regular as his butchering during the days. They couldn’t talk much because of the language difficulty, again. There was no tenderness — but then she had not known any since that of her mother and grandmother towards her — but there was generosity: he insisted she buy herself whatever fine clothes she liked and presented her with jewellery, looking on at it with calculated pride, round her neck and on her wrists and fingers. Love-making between husband and wife was part of the rest of the days and nights, she went with him to his principal butcher shop in the morning, his customers who were all friends or long acquaintances of his family were introduced to her, smiled and congratulated her, lucky woman, and at night the couple came back to his apartment, cleaned and left in perfect order by a woman he could afford to employ daily. They lived on the primest of prime beef, cheeses and fruits exotic to her. She had never eaten so well in her life. In the first month of the marriage she was pregnant. He announced this to the whole family, his pride was theirs.
She brought out her picture book of her city, where she was conceived and born, where she was the child, and displayed the photographs taken when she and her mother visited the ancient churches (maybe they were the most beautiful in the world). How else can the stranger show she too has her worth — she hasn’t come without a heritage. The husband’s mother was enchanted; look, look, she thrust the book at his father, tried to distract her sister’s adolescent grandson from his computer games. Lorenzo was again proud: so! His choice was not just some poor little foreigner from a frozen barbaric country ruined by communists, she had a provenance of ancient monuments, opera houses, churches, almost as Italy had her — unequalled, of course — treasures, which the family had never visited beyond those of Milan but knew of, owned by national right.
He wanted to show this woman, carrying his child, where he was born. Not in the town with his two butcher shops, where his parents had retired? No. No, the farm that had belonged to his great-grandfathers, grandfather and father. Now was his. Over a weekend extended by a religious holiday on a Monday — some saint’s day or other — he was going to give her a treat there hadn’t been the opportunity for in what was supposed to be their courtship. He would take her into the country to see his cattle farm developed from the old farm, source of his wealth, of the good life he provided for her. Another uncle and cousin run the operation for him, with their wives, in the old homestead he’s renovated for them. Microwave, satellite TV — you’ll see. The latest model installations, raising cattle for the supply of high quality beef he sold not only in his shops but supplied to supermarkets and restaurants in Milan, Turin and beyond.
She takes with her, shyly, knowing she won’t be able to have much conversation with these relatives, either, the picture book and the photographs of the city she has had to leave behind. She puts on her gold bracelets and the necklace with an amber pendant (she’d chosen that because amber comes from her part of the world) which falls at the divide of her wide-apart breasts he appreciates so much.
It is a long drive — beautiful. Now and then she puts the flat of her palm on her stomach, she thought there was already a faint swell of the curve there; but really is amused at herself, all the prime meat they eat has made her less gaunt anyway. Whoever is in there — boy, girl — hasn’t grown enough yet to make the presence evident. She is very well, no morning sickness his aunt had warned her of; a healthy Russian woman become an Italian wife. She feels a sudden — yes, happiness, it must be? At thirty, a new sense of life. As he drives, she looks from the landscape to this man dutifully received so weighty on top of her every night, with a recognition that he, too, must need this sense.
The old farmhouse shows its transformation to be his, as his gifts of fine clothes and jewellery transform her. When she uses the bathroom, it is all mirrors and flowered tiles. The new relatives embrace her, there is coffee and wine and cakes. Again the picture book and photographs go round; she summons her breathlessly hesitant words of their language to tell them the names of squares and churches, palaces. These glories that have survived are once more his wife’s distinctions — she, his acquisition. He is gratified by the enthusiasm for Russia’s old glory of these relatives who depend on him for their living — You must go there one day. — In America it is said that people are booking trips to the moon …
Then it was time for the uncle and cousin to take her, led by her husband who owns it all, round the cattle-breeding installation. To her, cows graze in fields in summer, they are part of the green peace of a landscape as clouds are of a sky. There are brilliant fields stretching way behind the house. But no cows. There are sheds huge as aircraft hangars, and a great machine beside a solid wall of crushed maize that smells like beer.
Five hundred beasts. The owner knows his possessions exactly. In the hangars are five hundred beasts. The party is walked along the cement passage between each row, where the heavy heads face their exact counterparts on the opposite row. In front of each bowed head is a trough filled with the stuff that smells like beer. The huge eyes are convex blacked-out mirrors, expressing no life within. The broad, wet, black soft noses breathe softly upon the food. Some are eating; those that are not are in the same head-bowed position. They are chained by the leg. The bulk of each animal is contained — just — by the iron bars of a heavy stall; it cannot turn round. It can only eat, at this end of its body. Eat, eat. The butcher owner tells her: at six months, ready for slaughter. Prime.
Then she is led down the backs of the rows. Vast rumps, backsides touch the iron bars, hide streaked and plastered with the dung that falls into a trough like the one for food. The legs are stumps that function to hold up bulk.
She spoke only once — no need, the butcher owner keeps a running commentary of admiration of his beasts’ condition, market prices. She puts together in English, out of the muddle of languages that inhibit her tongue — When they go out in the fields?—
Never. They spend the six months in the installation. That is the way meat production is done today. They are gelded — know what that is — he demonstrates. That’s why they grow so fast and well!
She puts out a hand to touch the head above the shining eye-globes and the creature tries to draw away in fear but cannot move more than a few centimetres to either side, or front and back of the iron bars.
She turned from the men, absorbed in their talk and gestures, and walked out of the hangar looking only at the concrete under her feet. If the eyes followed her as she passed, she could do nothing for them. Nothing.
She stands outside, the sweetish beer smell from the wall of crushed maize in her nostrils as in theirs. She is swollen with such horror, her body feels the iron bars enclosing her, the bars are before her eyes, she cannot turn about, escape to the house. She does not know where it comes from, this knowledge — happening to her — of how it is for them, beasts born dumb as a human being can be made dumbly unable to free itself. It is as if that brief moment of awareness — happiness — had opened her to something in her she didn’t, shouldn’t know, a real memory she couldn’t have had. There are many bad things endured in her abandoned, escaped life back — home — where the basilica from past centuries was world-renowned and her grandmother begged in the famous streets, her pension unpaid for years. But there is nothing, in her own record her life keeps, like this. And there is now, here, a child inside her seeded by the owner of these beasts in iron bars.
When the men come out, he takes her arm. — Tired? — And to the other men, in their language — She’s expecting, you know. — The news is repeated, over grappa, at the house. This aunt embraces her. There is a toast to the new addition soon to be welcomed in the family. A child with an inheritance — going to be born lucky.
She collected her picture book and photographs. At that moment she decided she would go there — home.
Back.
But to what?
Instead she found someone who, with the exchange of her few words, money, agreed to give her an abortion. And she told the butcher she had miscarried.
‘The individual’s choice of a future earthly body is limited, however … ’
No. Whoever the interpreter was who wrote that was in ignorance. Choice? That’s a temporal concept. There’s no choice because choice implies a fixed personality to make it. I am an old being Returned in the being of a child; I find I’m back as a man, or Returned again to continue his experience in another time, place, as a woman. The gender is only one of the forms of Return. But if there can be any remnant of what I once really was—‘really’: how meaninglessly relative that is in so many, many Returns — it is the sense that I’m somehow more fully inhabited, as a male, than when the Return is female. And to carry over being from the earthly death of a young male to a woman, with the vestiges of what he endured inevitably continued somewhere in her — I inhabit her, I am her — that something in me of course becomes part of her, her personality her character as a being, although she doesn’t know the reason.
And within her, a maleness I harbour resents this being—hers—as the victim she is in this phase of possible existences.
The first fish propelling itself by its fins over the slime to sand. That’s when it all started.
They tell so.
And death: that’s the end. Dead. They think I’m gone, but it’s a process, lingering, between this past and that, lived. Can’t call it memory? Something not even collective memory, because nobody comes back from the dead do they, to tell? I’m only some kind of answer — invented, dreamed into being? — to their awful fear of death everyone has from the beginning of earthly consciousness.
They think I’m disappearing, but always they’re disappearing from me. Left behind. For this time.
I don’t know in which Return I first heard about it. Read about it, it seems. I wish I never had. I believe if you don’t know of some possibility, you’ll never have to live it. Outside your orbit. Absurd, really, because I then must already have been a Return, the only sure, actual beginning is the fish — and even it had had a form of being in another element.
It must have been one of the Returns in which I had become middle-aged, even old — certainly adult, with a developed intellectual curiosity. Most times I was young, or a child. Short-lived: at once available again. Must have been when I was a being dissatisfied with the explanations of human life on offer: given in churches, synagogues and mosques; or simply had the kind of restless mind that seeks out explanations in etymology and philosophical tracts and treatises. ‘Karma. The sum and consequences of a person’s actions during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his destiny. Fate, destiny. Sanskrit karman (nominative karma), act, deed, work, from karoti, he makes, he does.’ The garble of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. And there are other interpreters. ‘The doctrine of karma or transmigration … is intimately associated with the philosophy of the Upanishads.’ I don’t believe I ever read the Upanishads. Then there’s: ‘Officials, too, are subject to the laws of karma — that sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come.’ And another: ‘ … karma can be seen as the law of “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” … but such an interpretation is not only a simplification, but also a severe limitation. ’
Yes. Well, perhaps I don’t understand and know I never shall what force sends me back to existence, but my experience doesn’t bear out a process of either perfection or retribution. It has been written: ‘Many people worry about the issues of “unfinished business” whether it be psychologically or karmically.’ The being I become to continue unfinished business in the life of another is not always, seldom is subject to any retribution owed by or to another life; and perfection’s something I’ve never attained in a Return … This force I once heard, read about, they called karma — isn’t it a questioning going back again and again? Here we are: ‘Within such a search no single, narrow angle of perception is sufficient … From Hinduism and Buddhism; the doctrine that the sum of a person’s actions in previous states of existence controls his or her fate in future existences.’ That’s mostly been my existences. Even the one where I was — how to put it — waiting, was called back from existence I might have had.
After life.
The earthly term for what is hoped for after death. But here’s a version of immortality for one who can’t believe in an after-life somehow of a similar, if exalted, nature of the one they’re living: when you die your body decays in earth or the process has been anticipated by cremation. Right? You are humus or ash; heat and rain, in the course of seasons cause the matter to rise in the form of evaporation and microscopic particles, to the atmosphere. It reconstitutes as clouds. When you’re aloft in a plane and you gaze at the hillocks of cloud through which you are passing, underneath and above you, drifting: that’s where the dead are, beyond their number and time (heaven is surely too crowded to believe in), constantly forming and reforming matter. Returning.
Dead. Death sentence.
But there’s also such a thing as life sentence; going back again and again, no escape; this is infinity: reward, forgiveness, another chance or final punishment for all the misdeeds of all the karmas so far … only so far.
I understand.
It means you are condemned to live forever.