The Late Bourgeois World by Nadine Gordimer

woman – by far the most intelligent female he’s ever had any sort of dealings with – and that a relationship with a woman of my kind implies the acceptance not only of intellectual equality but also coeval commonsense (none of the patronizing affection towards precocious feminine cleverness) – in spite of this, even when I’m holding up my end in discussion a shade better than he is, there’s a sort of backward glance, in me, at my performance before him. And this corresponds to a hidden expectation from him that he will be intrigued by the quality of a female mind – that mind whose quality is accepted rationally as taken for granted. In Europe last year, arguingabout paintings and buildings we saw together, in discussions of various kinds at friends’ dinner tables, in his house or my flat, talking politics as we do most of the time – underneath, he coaxes me, and I show off to him, I coax him and he performs for me.
    While we were talking I was aware, as if standing aside from us both, that this other dialogue of ours was soothingly being taken up. Our speaking voices went on, a bit awkwardly, but, like the changing light in the
Son et Lumière
performances we saw in France, illuminating, independent of the narration, the real scene of events as it moved from walls to portal to courtyard and window, the light and shadow of the real happening between us was going on as usual, in silence.
    Then instead of saying, ‘You have a point there,’ Graham said, ‘How would you say things are with us?’
    For a second I took it as going straight to all that we competently avoided, a question about him and me, the lie he had caught me out with on my hands – and I could feel this given away, in my face.
    I did not know what to say.
    But it was a quiet, impersonal demand, the tone of the judge exercising the prerogative of judicial ignorance, not the partisan one of the advocate cross-examining. There was what I can only describe as a power failure between us; the voices went on but the real performance had stopped in darkness.
    I said, ‘Well, I’d find it difficult to define – I mean, how would you describe – what could one say this is the age
of
? Not in terms of technical achievement, that’s too easy, and it’s not enough about us – about people – is it?’
    â€˜Today, for instance.’ He was serious, tentative, sympathetic.
    Yes, this day. This morning I was driving through the veld and it was exactly the veld, the sun, the winter morning of nine years old, for me; for Max. The morning in which our lives were a distant hum in the future, like the planes a distant hum in the sky (there was a big air-force training camp, near my home, during the war). Grow big, have a job, be married, pray to the blond Christ in the white people’s church, give the nanny your old clothes. This same morning and our lives were here and Max had been in prison and was dead and I was not a widow. What happened? That’s what she asked, the old lady, my grandmother. And while I was driving through the veld to see Bobo (Max heard the ducks quacking a conversation he never understood) a man was walking about in space. I said, ‘Graham, what on earth do you think they’ll call it in history?’ and he said, ‘I’ve just read a book that refers to ours as the Late Bourgeois World. How does that appeal to you?’
    I laughed. It went over my skin like wind over water; that feeling you get from a certaincombination of words, sometimes. ‘It’s got a nice dying fall. But that’s a political definition, they’re no good.’
    â€˜Yes, but the writer – he’s an East German – uses it as a wider one – it covers the arts, religious beliefs, technology, scientific discoveries, love-making, everything –’
    â€˜But excluding the Communist world, then.’
    â€˜Well no, not really’