Loot by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online

Twelve bottles on the head. That’s my man. Thick as a log. That’s my man.
    Buffalo Mine.
    The name is a hook, the anecdote comes up with it. (The driver-bodyguard has reduced speed in response to her movement, upright in her seat looking back at the site.)
    First time in Africa? First time yes India Bangladesh Afghanistan not here.
    Not only a dinner-party story of the long dead. What an old rogue, but such style! They don’t make them like that anymore. Tax evasion’s about the only territory of adventurers now. A child half-listening, an adolescent bored with the tradition of family fables recounted to later generations, around other tables, about that extraordinary character, the grandfather.
    Been here before.
    Not in her person. But in her blood-line. The history to which she belongs. There it was—is—Buffalo Mine. One of the houses that were up there on the rise she’s looking at was where the dinner parties heard the famous story, drank the whisky arrived every Friday. Every Friday head thick as a log.
    Â 
    â€”You know the Minister? I’ll introduce you.—Gladwell is in the position to obtain any privilege a curious visitor might wish.
    â€”Enos can tell you all about these old places.—
    She sank back in her seat as if dismissing a passing interest.
    Nearby was her destination, their destination, the Deputy-Director’s farm. She had had in prospect a solid Colonialverandahed farmstead taken over: there, looking on wattle-fenced cattle kraals, mud huts, a troop of sheep and goats, chickens taking a dust-bath under roses gone wild, a scatter of children bowling old tyres, was a house set down out of the sky complete from California. The expanse of glass behind the patio preened in reflected splendour of the sun, a satellite dish held its great ear to the world. Close by was a structure she recognised as a powerful electricity generator. Men and women came out of the back of the house to the double garage whose fine wooden doors rolled away as the driver-bodyguard touched the electronic gadget in his hand. The people were servants or perhaps relatives (she had observed how poorer members of an official’s family often served in both capacities), some hastened to unload the car, a woman in a flounced floral overall that needn’t necessarily mean she was cooking or cleaning, but a mark of status, hugged the master of the house and brought her palms together in greeting to his guest. She was ready to meet the wife in the house and perhaps some of the couple’s grown children—of course the wife would speak English—anyway the social capabilities of her own training were automatically at hand for all such encounters.
    There is an unmistakable atmosphere of absence in rooms where only servants have come and gone in the course of their daily tasks; no-one to fill these rooms has left presence there. Perhaps the arrival is unexpected, his wife is in some other wing of this house. He was following his guest’s usual hostly procedure when he visited her , pouring whisky taken from a cabinet where glasses hung upside down from their stems as in a smart bar; he had not gone to summon anyone.
    â€”I’d like to meet your wife, first.—The protocol smile as she accepted her drink.
    â€”She prefers town.—
    â€”Oh that’s a disappointment.—
    â€”The children come sometimes.—
    â€”Well I’ll have to meet her in town, then.—It was a tentative claim to friendship of the kind she was used to, the bachelor woman taken into a family context.
    They were served a four o’clock meal—the woman in the flowered outfit must have been forewarned, after all, to have ready. The whisky bottle came to the skating-rink shiny table they sat at in a room that led off the livingroom peopled only by framed photographs of weddings, sports teams and official occasions in which he was among the assembly. Lively voices out of sight