Nadine Gordimer
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In her twinned short stories "Town Lovers" and "Country Lovers", South African writer Nadine Gordimer asks her readers to consider the nature of love and the nature of crime - the two of which can in fact be the same under the apartheid regime of South Africa. In each part of the story, a crime is committed by two people who have a relationship with each other that - solely because it crosses racial lines - is a crime. But there are also real crimes committed - by the state against its people and by a man against a child. By focusing on two relationships that are at worst consenting and at best loving and contrasting these to real crimes, Gordimer underscores the ways in which totalitarian regimes can make even the most innocent of gestures and actions into crimes.In the first story, Gordimer tells the story of a geologist named Von Leinsdorf and a nameless clerk at a store who begins a casual relationship with him that deepens into something like friendship. When the fact that the girl has been visiting his apartment on a regular basis becomes known, the two are arrested on suspicion of having a sexual relationship, but charges against them are dropped when there is no evidence that such a relationship has taken place. In the second half of the story, Paulus Eysendyck, the son of a white farmer, falls in love with Thebedi, a black women that he has known since childhood. She marries a black man, but seven months after the marriage gives birth to a light-skinned child that
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gated here by the fact that the clerk has taken such an active role in instigating the relationship. With this pair of characters, Gordimer is both pointing out the absurdity of a state that considers their relationship to be a criminal offense and asking us why sex between races should be a crime when the casual, daily exploitation of one race by another should not be.
The second pairing in these stories presents us with what any of us would (surely!) recognize to be a crime, the poisoning of a baby. Although Gordimer has the poisoning take place offstage so that we do not see it (and so there is at least some doubt as to Eysendyck's guilt) we expect him to be punished for what he has done. Most of us would like to believe that anyone who commits an action so heinous will face punishment for it, but he is exonerated when a mother refuses to speak the truth about her murdered child.
Gordimer does not spell out exactly why Thebedi should perjure herself at the trial. It may be that she believes that the child was poisoned from birth, that the mixing of gene pools was a sort of psychic poisoning and that Eysendyck was only completing a process that the two of them began with the conception of the child. We see a suggestion of this
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1232
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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