That’s what’s up there, behind the horsing around and the dehydrated hamburgers and the televised blood tests. If it’s the moon, that’s why … that’s why …
… there’s no reason Luke shouldn’t come back here.
I must have dropped off for a moment; I return with the swoop of a swing towards the ground from the limit of its half-arc.
The chequebook is in the left-hand upper drawer of my dressing table. Not three feet away. It would be quite feasible for me to use my power of attorney over my grandmother’s account. It is simply a matter of ascertaining (Graham’s word) exactly how I should deposit in her account cheques from abroad; the procedure so far, with foreign exchange, has been that if the currency is from outside the sterling area, I fill in a form giving the source and nature of the funds — dividends from shares in the such-and-such company and so on. And if the money is from the sterling area? Don’t I have to state the source then, too? Well, of course, the payer’s name has to be written on the ordinary deposit slip. That’s routine. But what happens if the money is credited to the account by bank draft? As I remember it, there’s some other sort of form to fill in, or was it that the source of funds had to be declared on the back of the transfer draft? It’s happened once or twice, but I’m not sure what I did.
And what about income tax declaration. How do you get round that one? Well, Luke must have some ideas; he said that all that was needed was a bank account. Quite. Look at Colonel Gaisford.
Graham would be the one who would know exactly how one would stand with the bank and the income tax people; he would know exactly where and how one would be found out. This is one thing you could never ask Graham; this is the end of asking Graham. It was Graham who managed to make a successful application for a passport for me, last year, after I’d been refused one for years. Graham has defined the safe limits of what one can get away with — ‘a woman in your position’.
There is certain to be some clause one’ll fall foul of, some provision one can’t fulfil. But for six months, even if it’s only six months, he said — the bank account of an old woman, who will think of looking into that? My grandmother may only live another few months; it’s as if the account exists for no other reason. She could never be held answerable for anything that might happen. But there’s my signature, of course, the name Van Den Sandt. Yet by the time investigations are made about the source of money coming in, and the link is established with the destination of money being paid out … well, she may be dead, the account may no longer be being used for the same purpose. Everything is impossible, if one calculates on the safe side.
Why on earth should I do such a thing?
It seems to me that the answer is simply the bank account. I can’t explain; but there is the bank account. That’s good enough; as when Bobo used to answer a question about his behaviour with the single word: ‘Because’. Am I going into politics again, then? And if so, what kind? But I can’t be bothered with this sort of thing, it’s irrelevant. The bank account is there. It can probably be used for this purpose. What happened, the old lady asked me: well, that’s what’s happened. Luke knows what he wants, and he knows who it is he must get it from. Of course he’s right. A sympathetic white woman hasn’t got anything to offer him — except the footing she keeps in the good old white Reserve of banks and privileges. And in return he comes with the smell of the smoke of braziers in his clothes. Oh yes, and it’s quite possible he’ll make love to me, next time or some time. That’s part of the bargain. It’s honest, too, like his vanity, his lies, the loans he doesn’t pay back: it’s all he’s got to offer me. It would be better if I accepted gratefully, because then we shan’t owe each other anything, each will have given what he has, and neither is to blame if one has more to give than the other. And in any case, perhaps I want it. I don’t know. Perhaps it would be better than what I’ve had — or got. Suit me better, now. Who’s to say it shouldn’t be called love? You can’t do more than give what you have.
It’s so quiet I could almost believe I can hear the stars in their courses — a vibrant, infinitely high-pitched hum, what used to be referred to as ‘the music of the spheres’. Probably it’s the passage of the Americans, up there, making their own search, going round in the biggest circle of them all.
I’ve been lying awake a long time, now. There is no clock in the room since the red travelling clock that Bobo gave me went out of order, but the slow, even beats of my heart repeat to me, like a clock; afraid, alive, afraid, alive, afraid, alive …
A Note on the Author
NADINE GORDIMER’s many novels include The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Get A Life, Burger’s Daughter, July’s People, My Son’s Story, The Pickup and, most recently, No Time Like the Present. Her collections of short stories include The Soft Voice of the Serpent, Something Out There, Jump, Loot and, most recently, Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black. She has also collected and edited Telling Tales, a story anthology published in fourteen languages whose royalties go to HIV/AIDS organisations. In 2010 her nonfiction writings were collected in Telling Times and a substantial selection of her stories was published in Life Times. Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in South Africa.