Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,251

torch of distinctive intellectual light and sensibility to guide him. It’s not the place to remember this, here, but if you’re the one still living in the flesh wired up by synapses and neurons you recall his wife Mariam told that on his last journey to the hospital he disputed the route taken by the driver.

Edward. He stands a moment, before the embrace of greeting. His familiar way of marking the event of a meeting brought about by the coordination of friends’ commitments and lucky happenstance. It’s reassuring he’s wearing one of the coloured shirts and the flourished design of his tie is confirmed by the ear of a silk handkerchief showing above the breast pocket of the usual elegant jacket. Edward never needed to prove his mental superiority by professorial dowdiness and dandruff. We don’t bother with how-are-yous, there’s no point in that sort of banality, here. He says why don’t we have a drink while we’re waiting – he seems to know for whom although I don’t (except, for you) any more than I knew he would come to this place hung with fringed paper lanterns. He beckons a waiter who doesn’t pretend in customary assertion of dignity against servility that he hasn’t noticed. Edward never had to command, I’d often noted that, there is something in those eyes fathomless black with ancient Middle Eastern ancestry, that has no need of demanding words. With the glance back to me, he orders what we’ve always drunk to being well-met. He apologises with humour ‘I don’t know how I managed to be late, it’s quite an art’ though he isn’t late because he never was expected, and there can be no explanation I could understand of what could have kept him.

We plunge right away into our customary eager exchange of interpretations of political events, international power-mongering, national religious and secular conflicts, the obsessional scaffolding of human existence on earth, then ready to turn to personal preoccupations, for which, instinctively selected in each friendship, there is a different level of confidences. Before we get to ours, someone else arrives at our table; even I, who have known that face in its changes over many years and in relation to many scenes and circumstances, from treason trials in the country where I am still one of the living, to all-night parties in London, don’t recognise his entry. Once standing at this table, the face creased in his British laugh of greeting: it’s Anthony Sampson. Who? Because instead of the baggy pants unworthy of tweed jacket, he’s wearing an African robe. Not just a dashiki shirt he might have picked up on his times in Africa, and donned for comfortable summer informality of whatever this gathering is, but a robe to the ankles – by the way, it can’t be hot in the Chinese restaurant; there’s no climate in dream. When he was editor of a black-staffed newspaper in South Africa and belonged, was an intimate of shebeen ghettos, never mind his pink British skin, this preceded the era when African garb became fashionable as a mark of the wearer’s non-racism. Sampson had no interest in being fashionable within any convention. He showed no consciousness, now, of his flowing robe. So neither did I; nor did Edward though I suppose they had met in the Elsewhere. Edward rose while Anthony and I hugged, kissed on either cheek, he greeted Edward with recollected – it seemed – admiration and chose a chair, having to arrange the robe out of the way of his shoes, like a skirt.

We took up, three of us now, the interrupted talk of political conflict and scandals, policies and ideologies, corrupt governments, tyrant fundamentalists, homegrown in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and those created by the hubris of the West. A waiter subserviently intruded with distributed menus but we all ignored him as if it were understood we were waiting for someone. I was waiting for you. Even in that Chinese restaurant though it was never your favourite cuisine.

Whom were we waiting for?

I wonder now, awakened in bed by a heavy cat settling on my feet, but I didn’t then, no one asked me so I didn’t have to give my answer: you. Edward opened a menu big and leather-bound as a book of world maps. Perhaps this meant he and Anthony knew no one was coming. No one else was available among the dead in their circle. Maybe the too newly dead cannot enter dreams. But no; Anthony