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 Paulus is obviously the father of. Paulus, panicked over what will happen to him, poisons the child - but is set free after a trial at which Thebedi denies her knowledge that he has killed the baby.
The stories are on the surface about the absurdity of the state's making it a crime for two consenting adults to be in love with each other and to have sex with each other. Such things should not be crimes, Gordimer suggests, but should be a choice that is left ent...