Free Loot by Nadine Gordimer Page B

you—we should drop in, it’s been such a long time, we’ll be a real surprise, back here again. There were so many people from so many ages; so many periods, approaching us on that London street; in these ancient European cities they are all there in the gait, the shapes of noses and eyes and jowls, the elegant boots and plodding sandals, Shakespeare’s audiences, Waterloo’s veterans, comportment of the bowler-hatted past, slippered advance of the Oriental counter-immigration from the colonial era, heads of punk-purple-and-green striped hair in recall of 60s Flower Children, androgynous young shuffling in drug daze, icons of the present; black faces that could be the indelible after-image left behind, on the return to Africa by our political exiles. All these, recognisable but not known; coming at us, coming at us. And then he was singled out, for me, they shouldered around him on the pavement but he was directed straight towards us. His paper carrier with the name of a speciality shop, his white curls like suds over thick earlobes—just the way he always was, returning from his pilgrimage to buy mangoes or a bottle of wine from the right slope of a small French vineyard. I saw him.
    Wasn’t it lovely? Because it was not that everything changes. His image was him: the same.
    We did go back to that Kensington flat with him? Didn’t we? Its watercolours of Tuscan landscapes, engravings of early Cape Town, bold impasto oils by South African black painters he used to discover, music cassettes spilled about, the journals and books to be cleared off the sofa so you could sit. Christ! he said, this old unbeliever, where the hell have you been? People don’t write letters any more. We might all have been dead for all we’ve heard of each other. He railed against whatever conservative government it was (maybe still Thatcher). He, who had left the Party after a visit to the old Soviet Union in the Fifties when he was taken round collective pig farms. But I was thinking—perhaps only thinking now—we all have our point of no return in political loyalty, and the stink of pigs is as good as, say, the disillusion of corruption. He was once detained, back home in the old South Africa, he had paid his dues, earned his entitlement to defect, I suppose, however we might have viewed the pretext.
    You don’t remember what we talked about? Neither do I. Not really. There he still is, walking out of the weave of people; for us. The apartment: well, as we knew it. But she didn’t appear. No. After so long, can one ask … ? Maybe asleep, she often said she was an owl, not a lark, liked to lie late. If she’s gone—died—or divorced? They’ve had their contingent loves, that’s known. And not only the young have sexual freedom, people find new sexual partners at any age at all. We must wait for him to say something.
    But no, he didn’t. There are no flowers in the room; she always had majestic vases of blooms and leaves.
    So we didn’t need any other evidence.

    Not there.
    But perhaps she was just too busy to buy any flowers that day and he had forgotten her request and gone his usual route to pursue the fresh halibut or the mangoes or the restricted cultivar of a wine?
    Will we ever know the significance of apparent trivial forgetfulness, what’s ignored, in anyone’s life—keys to stages a relationship is passing through. You’ll have to invent them. I can’t help you. Because I couldn’t ask him. Her name didn’t come up at all, did it? That close couple, politically involved, risking themselves, never a policy disagreement between them, a stance in total solidarity, together, over the years. Admirable, d’you remember! One commitment, one mind—he always said: we are convinced, we declare ourselves—it was—enviable. Yes.
    She didn’t have to confirm. No? Ever. Did she?
    He forgot the flowers, followed the