Yes. Well, perhaps I don’t understand and know I never shall what force sends me back to existence, but my experience doesn’t bear out a process of either perfection or retribution. It has been written: ‘Many people worry about the issues of “unfinished business” whether it be psychologically or karmically.’ The being I become to continue unfinished business in the life of another is not always, seldom is subject to any retribution owed by or to another life; and perfection’s something I’ve never attained in a Return … This force I once heard, read about, they called karma—isn’t it a questioning going back again and again? Here we are: ‘Within such a search no single, narrow angle of perception is sufficient … From Hinduism and Buddhism; the doctrine that the sum of a person’s actions in previous states of existence controls his or her fate in future existences.’ That’s mostly been my existences. Even the one where I was—how to put it—waiting, was called back from existence I might have had.
After life.
The earthly term for what is hoped for after death. But here’s a version of immortality for one who can’t believe in an after-life somehow of a similar, if exalted, nature of the one they’re living: when you die your body decays in earth or the process has been anticipated by cremation. Right? You are humus or ash; heat and rain, in the course of seasons cause the matter to rise in the form of evaporation and microscopic particles, to the atmosphere. It reconstitutes as clouds. When you’re aloft in a plane and you gaze at the hillocks of cloud through which you are passing, underneath and above you, drifting: that’s where the dead are, beyond their number and time (heaven is surely too crowded to believe in), constantly forming and reforming matter. Returning.
Dead. Death sentence.
But there’s also such a thing as life sentence; going back again and again, no escape; this is infinity: reward, forgiveness, another chance or final punishment for all the misdeeds of all the karmas so far … only so far.
I understand.
It means you are condemned to live forever.
REINHOLD
12th March 1908–18th October 2001
1st March 1953–18th October 2001
Also by Nadine Gordimer
NOVELS
The Lying Days
A World of Strangers
Occasion for Loving
The Late Bourgeois World
A Guest of Honor
The Conservationist
Burger’s Daughter
July’s People
A Sport of Nature
My Son’s Story
The House Gun
The Pickup
STORIES
The Soft Voice of the Serpent
Six Feet of the Country
Friday’s Footprint
Not for Publication
Livingstone’s Companions
A Soldier’s Embrace
Selected Stories
Something Out There
Jump and Other Stories
ESSAYS
The Black Interpreters
The Essential Gesture—Writing, Politics and Places
(edited by Stephen Clingman)
Writing and Being
Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century
On the Mines (with David Goldblatt)
Lifetimes Under Apartheid (with David Goldblatt)
Notes
… so man is continually peopling his current space with a world of his own. A. P. Sinnett, The Occult World (Kessinger Publishing, 1981).
Aorist: Denotes past action without indicating completion, continuation.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.
Many times man lives and dies,
Between his two eternities
That of race and that of soul.
W. B. Yeats, ‘Under Ben Bulben’.
… sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come. National Geographic (3/1/32), quoted by Ruth White, Karma & Reincarnation (Weiser Books, 2001).
I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and returning life after life like an insect in the grass. W. B. Yeats.
It turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have. Amos Oz, The Same Sea, trans. Nicholas de Lange and the author (Harcourt, 1999).
Just as everything is always something else … it may also throw some light on the procreative god. Harry Mulisch, ‘The Procedure,’ trans. Paul Vincent (Viking, 2001).
The Pestle of the moon
That pounds up all anew
Brings me to birth again—
To find what once I had,
And know what once I have known.
W. B. Yeats, ‘On Woman.’
The individual’s choice of a future earthly body is limited, however … . T. C. Lethbridge, Witches (Lyle Stuart, 1969), quoted by Ruth White, Karma & Reincarnation (Weiser Books, 2001).
The doctrine of karma or transmigration …’ ibid.
Copyright © 2003 by Felix Licensing, B. V.
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Abby Kagan
eISBN 9780374707460
First eBook Edition : June 2011
First edition, 2003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gordimer, Nadine.
Loot and other stories / Nadine Gordimer.—1st ed. p. cm.
Contents: Loot—Mission statement—Visiting George—The generation gap—L, U, C, I, E.—Look-alikes—The diamond mine—Homage—An emissary—Karma.
ISBN 0-374-19090-9 (alk. paper)
1. South Africa—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9369.3.G6 L66 2003
823’.914—dc21
2002042601