The Late Bourgeois World by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page B

cartons, in the sun. We were all in the sun. There is a way of being with people that comes only by not knowing names. If you have no particular need of anyone, you find yourself belonging to a company you hadn’t been admitted to before; I didn’t need anybody because I had these people who, like myself, would get up and go away in a little while. Without any reason, I felt very much at home.
    In spite of everything.
    Their talk went on sporadically, in the cadences I know so well, even if I don’t understand the words. It was the hour when all the flat-dwellers were at lunch and only they had time to lie on the grass, time that had no label attached to it. After a while I went in and cut myself the crust of the loaf I’d bought and put some papery shop-ham on it and ate a banana in which there was winter – a hard centre and a felted taste. When I had food in my stomach I was overcome by weariness and lay down on the divan in the living room, where it was warm, under the rug from Bobo’s bed.
    A vision of seaweed swaying up from deep underwater.
    Not asleep but awake in the vision, as I opened my eyes in the room. At once close to the water where the heads surface in bunches of torn rubberribbons sizzling with the oxygen of broken water, bedraggle in the wash from the rocks; and at the same time looking down from the cliff high where the road is, down on the depths tortoiseshell with sun and the rippling distortion of the great stems, brown thrashing tubes that sway down, down, out of the focus of lenses of water thick as bottle-ends, down, down.
    The water rushed into Max’s nostrils and filled his mouth as it opened for air. For the first time it came to me as it must have happened when he made it happen. The burning cold salt water rushing in everywhere and the last bubbles of life belching up from places where they had been caught – the car, under his shirt, in his lungs, filled with the final breath that he had taken before he went down. Down, down, to where the weeds must, at last, have their beginning. He took with him a suitcase of papers that could not be deciphered. So much sodden muck. He took them with him, and no one would ever know what they were – writings, tracts, plans, letters. He had succeeded in dying.
    I was lying still in the room and my eyes were filled with tears. I wept not for Max’s death but for the pain and terror of the physical facts of it. The flowers had stirred and opened while I slept and the warm room was full of scent. I lay quite still and felt myself alive, there in the room as their scent was.
    Max’s death is a postscript. A postscript can be something trivial, scarcely pertinent, or it can be important and finally relevant.
    I believe I know all there was to know about Max. To know all may be to forgive, but it is not to love. You can know too much for love.
    When Max and I got married he left the university and took a job – many jobs. None of them lasted long; there were so many other things to do, at that time there were still things you could do whose immediacy appealed to us – discussion and study groups in the rooms of people like ourselves and in the black townships, open-air meetings, demonstrations. The Communist Party had been declared illegal and officially disbanded, but in the guise of other organizations the whole rainbow from politically conservative do-gooders to the radical left-wing could still show itself fairly openly. Above all, African nationalism was at a stage when it had gained confidence and prestige in the eyes of the world through the passive resistance campaigns, and at home seemed ready to recognize Africans of any colour who wanted to be free of the colour bar. In our little crowd, Solly, Dave, Lily, Fatima, Alec, Charles – Indian, African, Coloured and white – Fatima gave Bobo his bottle, Dave laughed at Max’s bad moods. The future was already there; it was a matter of having the