The Late Bourgeois World

The Late Bourgeois World by Nadine Gordimer Page A

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Authors: Nadine Gordimer
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– he loves to give me a concise explanation – ‘it exists in relation to the early Communist world – shall we call it. Defining one, you assume the existence of the other. So both are part of a total historical phenomenon.’
    I poured him another drink because I wanted him to go, and although he wanted to go, he accepted it. ‘Did you work all afternoon? Or did you really sleep?’
    But I knew that he had worked; he gave the admission of a dry, dazed half-smile, something that came from the room where he’d been shut up among documents, as a monk, who during his novitiate still makes some sorties into the life outside, is claimed by the silence of the cell that has never really relinquished him. Even the Friday night love-making had not made Graham sleepy in the afternoon; in that room of his, he wrote and intoned into the dictaphone, alone with his own voice. I’ve heard it sometimes from outside the door; like someone sending up prayer.
    I mentioned I’d noticed that the arrow-and-spear sign was still on the walls of the viaduct near the Home.
    â€˜I’m not surprised. I think there are a few new ones round the town, too. Somebody’s brave. Or foolhardy.’ He told me last week that a young white girl got eighteen months for painting the same symbol; but of course in the Cape black men and women are getting three years for offences like giving ten bobs’ worth of petrol for a car driven by an African National Congress member.
    â€˜D’you think it’s all right, using that spear thing? I mean, when you think who it was who had the original idea.’ It came out in a political trial not long ago that this particular symbol of resistance was the invention of a police
agent provocateur
and spy. I’d have thought they’d want to find another symbol.
    He laughed. ‘I don’t suppose the motives of the inventor’ve much to do with it. After all, look at advertising agencies – do you think the people who coin the selling catchword believe in what they’re doing?’
    â€˜Yes, I suppose so. But it’s queer. A queer situation. I mean one could never think it would be like that.’
    We were silent for a moment; he was, so to speak, considerately bare-headed in these pauses in which the thought of Max was present. There was nothingto say about Max, but now and then, like the silent thin spread of spent water coming up to touch your feet on a dark beach at night, his death or his life came in, and a commonplace remark turned up reference to him. Graham asked, ‘The flowers arrive for your grandmother all right?’ I told him how they were kept outside the door; and how she had cried out when she saw a figure in the doorway.
    â€˜It’s natural to be afraid of death.’ Just as if he were advising a dose of Syrup of Figs for Bobo (one of the fatherly gestures he sometimes boldly makes).
    â€˜Maybe. But she’s never had to put up with what’s natural. Neither grey hairs nor cold weather. It’s true – until two or three years ago, when she became senile, she hadn’t lived through a winter in fifteen years – she flew from winter in England to the summer here, and from winter here to summer in England. But for this, now, nothing helps.’
    â€˜Like the common cold,’ he said, standing up suddenly and looking down at me; almost amusedly, almost bored, accusingly. So he dismisses a conversation, or makes a decision. ‘Can you take me now?’ But he doesn’t understand. Since you have to die you ought to be provided with a perfectly ordinary sense of having had your fill. A mechanism like that which controls other appetites. You ought to know when you’ve had enough – like the feeling at the end of a meal. As simple and ordinary as that.
    I drove him home. His name is on the beautifully polished bronze plate on the gateway and a wrought-iron lantern is turned on by the

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