One who stayed

In a parlor dominated by dark antique furniture, a beamed ceiling and the overpowering aroma of fresh-cut tropical blooms, South African novelist Nadine Gordimer sets down a heavy tea tray. The gray light of a rainy day filters in from the long windows onto her leafy garden as she pours the steaming black tea.

Like her friend Nelson Mandela, who read Gordimer’s novels during his 27 years in prison, Gordimer is an institution in South Africa. For years she was a voice of conscience against apartheid with books that were famous abroad if sometimes banned at home, and she continues to continue her nation’s evolution.

At age 79, she recently has unveiled her latest volume of short stories, “Loot,” a collection that provides a timeline for her society’s transformation from a race-divided backwater to a black majority state that now fights poverty and underdevelopment.

And “unlike many other South African writers and activists,” notes Paul Theroux, in his African travel chronicle “Dark Star Safari,” Gordimer has “resisted fleeing into exile. By staying put in Johannesburg,” he wrote, Gordimer has become “one of the most reliable witnesses to the seismic South African transformation.”

Not everyone stayed. South Africa’s most famous playwright, Athol Fugard, has divided the last six years largely between New York and California, according to his agent. Another prominent South African writer, J.M. Coetzee -- whose scorching recent novel, “Disgrace,” was viewed by some critics as a pessimistic vision of the new brutalities of contemporary South Africa -- is living in Australia, according to his literary agency’s Web site. A steady exodus of affluent, skilled people from South Africa has triggered the publication of books with titles like “Reasons to Stay.”

Gordimer has her own reasons. “This is my home,” she says crisply, her dark eyes sharp and direct, her gray bob framing her fine-boned face. “Why should I leave it? I have no feeling of being European. And you see, exile is a terrible thing, even in comfort.”

Instead, Gordimer has set to chronicling the muddy ambiguities of the society that is emerging from the long struggle against apartheid. During apartheid, her fiction anchored her country’s historical drama in the intimacies of daily life, bringing home the schisms of a system as bizarre as it was brutal: When she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, the internationally known Mandela still lacked the right to vote.

That approach has not changed with “Loot.” There is the story of the young woman, classified as “Colored” by the apartheid state, who tries in vain to get officials to allow her to marry her white fiance. There is the British foreign aid worker who, during an affair with a married official of the post-apartheid black majority government, is startled when her lover proposes to make her his second wife. There is the newly minted government functionary, who, riding the wave of democratic euphoria, is tainted by the temptations of corruption -- exposing a human weakness that has landed more than one real-life anti-apartheid hero on the front pages of South African newspapers.

“What happens to their ideals, which were maintained under the most terrible circumstances, when they’re risking their life all the time?” Gordimer puzzles, her decisive features momentarily disconcerted. “When they have a comfortable life and good things, and can live normally, they succumb to this stupid, empty materialism. Where have their values gone? Did they only apply in crisis conditions?”

It was in crisis conditions that writers like Gordimer cast their longest shadows. Like the Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, playwright Ariel Dorfman, an opponent of the military government in Chile, and his colleague, the playwright and onetime Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, the work of such literary heretics cuts a heroic profile against the crudely brutal regimes that banned their works.

It is difficult to maintain that relevance against the less exciting backdrop of flawed nascent democracies. And in South Africa, concerns have shifted to the urgency of economic development and the threat posed by crime. Carjackings have become so common in South Africa that traffic signs warn “Hijacking Hot Spot.” President Thabo Mbeki is widely criticized for his perceived failure to deal with his country’s enormous AIDS crisis and for doubting the connection between HIV and AIDS.

“For heaven’s sake, it’s been proven a million times,” Gordimer snaps, her eyebrows raised with impatience, when the world-famous gaffe is mentioned.

“It shows you’re a big man to say, ‘I was wrong, and now I’ve changed my mind,’ ” she says. “But [Mbeki] doesn’t do it. He will not give us what we need and put himself in the leading role in fighting AIDS.

“In a way,” she says, former President Mandela is “still at the helm of this ship we’re steering through difficult seas.”

Gordimer does not suffer fools gladly. A 1990 London Independent profile quoted an acquaintance as saying that “she talks like an electric carving knife.”

So her impatience with Europeans and Americans who are shocked by South Africa’s continuing social inequities is unsurprising.

“There are tremendous problems which, under the apartheid regime, we didn’t even have time to think about,” Gordimer said. “Then, the problem was getting rid of apartheid. We didn’t even think about the tremendous burden from the past, which we are now carrying. There hasn’t been time to solve this tremendous poverty. I say, ‘Wait a minute, we’re not even 10 years into freedom. The democracy hasn’t had time to deal with this.’ They’re used to going to the bathroom, turning on the shower, and turning on the light, but they don’t know how many people were without this. It’s opening up a whole new area of life for people.”

South Africans who, like Gordimer, have remained in their country find themselves in tremendous demand. Tony Award-winning actor John Kani ticks off his duties: director of the Market Theatre, chairman of the National Arts Council, chairman of the board of the Apartheid Museum. His life, too, is not as cushy as it might be abroad. Carjackers shot to death the boyfriend of his teenage daughter on a quiet Sunday in February in front of the Kanis’ suburban Johannesburg home.

When asked about South Africa’s notorious crime rate, Gordimer shrugs. “Where are you going to find a safe place to live? Graham Greene had it right. He said wherever you live, get accustomed to the particular kind of violence that goes with that place.”

A rich, unique partnership

Gordimer’s latest short-story collection came to fruition near the death of her husband, the art dealer Reinhold Cassirer, in 2001, at 93.

Their 49-year marriage was a unique partnership. Cassirer, hardly overshadowed by his Nobel laureate wife, fostered the talents of many of South Africa’s renowned artists, from William Kentridge to Sam Hlengethwa.

Cassirer was born in 1908 into a distinguished German Jewish family whose business was confiscated when Hitler came to power. Cassirer managed to rescue their art collection by loading it on a train to Holland and telling border officials that a friend accompanying him was being honored with an extensive exhibition in Amsterdam. Gordimer was born in 1923 to a Lithuanian Jewish father and an English mother in the small town of Springs in the Transvaal, 30 miles from Johannesburg. Cassirer became her second husband in 1954.

Together they shared an Arts and Crafts-style house in a leafy suburb under towering jacaranda trees draped in vine-like monstera plants.

If she and Cassirer shared a rich and interesting life, they also shared some of the most daunting days of apartheid, including a time, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when they considered leaving the country, Gordimer said.

“It seemed like there was so little one could do, and all the tightrope-walking things we had done were not possible anymore, so you’d find yourself in a position where you were feeling useless,” she said. “So if you were not going to put yourself in a position where you were going to put yourself in jail, perhaps you should go.”

She and her husband discarded the idea of moving to Europe or America but considered moving to another part of Africa, she says.

“I realized that was a fantasy, because, if we had gone, perhaps to Zambia, in Zambia I would have been like all the other whites who were there temporarily,” she said. “I would have been an expatriate. So we decided to stay.”

It was during that desolate period she published some of her most acclaimed novels, such as “Burger’s Daughter” in 1979 and “July’s People” in 1981. Then, in 1990, Mandela was released from prison, and four years later he became South Africa’s first democratically elected president. Gordimer and Cassirer voted together in those first free elections.

“It’s been wonderful to live long enough to see the change come,” Gordimer mused. “Some of my friends didn’t. They perished along the way.”

But Gordimer also lived long enough to witness new abuses of power that are harder to swallow when they involve former heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle. Just a few days before she was interviewed, a famous freedom fighter, Tony Yengeni, was convicted of fraud. Yengeni allegedly received a deeply discounted, new luxury Mercedes-Benz from a company tied to a multibillion-dollar 1999 package of planes, ships and submarines after he served on a parliamentary defense committee that oversaw the deal.

“Before, you knew what you were against,” Gordimer says, pausing a moment to reflect.

Outside, it begins to rain. The house darkens, casting deep shadows on a collection of rust-colored African pottery. The scent of long-stemmed shell ginger intensifies in the humid room.

“Now there are all sorts of nuances and new shades,” Gordimer says. “Freedom has so many choices. “Take the question of corruption. Here you have Tony Yengeni. He was a great soldier in the spirit of the nation, in the liberation army. He’s a liberation hero, no question. But he survives the whole struggle, he comes into the parliament and becomes the chief whip, and what does he do? He gets involved in this arms deal.

“It is rather terrible to see people who were very brave and who deserved to have good positions, who seemed to be our natural leaders, to see them becoming corrupt for material things,” she says, adding a novelist’s caveat: “It’s understanding the human psyche.”