Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) was a South African writer whose main works include the novels "The People of July" and "Nobody Stays with Me".
Gordimer was born in 1923 in a small mining town called Springs near Johannesburg. At the age of 13, Gordimer began his career as a writer when he published a fable in the children's edition of the Sunday Express in Johannesburg, "The Quest for Visible Gold". Her first collection of short stories, Face to Face, was published in 1948, and short story collections such as Whispers of the Serpent and Six Feet of Land published in the 50s of the 20th century, and Footprints of Friday and Unsuitable for Publication published in the 60s of the 20th century were highly praised by critics. The novels of this period include "The Ethereal Years", "The World of Strangers", "The Season of Love", and "The Lost Bourgeois World". Her 1970 novel, The Guest, was seen by critics as the dividing line between her early and late work.
Since the 70s of the 20th century, Gordimer has published novels such as "The Natural Resource Conservationist", "Berg's Daughter", "Julie's People", "Natural Variation", "My Son's Story", "No One Follows Me", and short story collections such as "Livingston's Companion", "The Soldier's Embrace", "Shadow and Shadow", and "Jump".
In 1991, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2014, Gordimer died at home.
Found
Nadine Gordimer
To hell with them.
A man who is always unlucky when dealing with women decides to live celibate for a while. This duke has been married twice for love. The faithful second lady left home with all the valuable things they had collected—paintings, precious glasswork, and even vintage wine from the cellar. He swept away everything she hadn't been able to take with him. He threw away the books, and on the title page of the books, the first wife had lovingly written her name after marriage. Then, without any woman, he went on vacation alone. For the first time in his memory, the bitter young woman and the prostitute, whom he thought would be sincere, proved to be no different from the most faithful wives who had sworn to love forever—always treacherous.
He arrives alone at a seaside casino. Clusters of rocks stand on the surface of the sea like cracked fans, and the tide rattles and is sucked in by puddles. There is no yellow sand here. The rocks, dotted and dotted, were filled with people, like boiled preserves—all women—lying on mats discoloured by salty water, pampering themselves with balsam. That year, most of their hair was tied up with artificial floral ornaments with elastic bands, and some came out of the sea with sparkling drops of water on their smooth limbs, and their shiny gilded headdresses that swayed back and forth to earrings dripping from earrings. Their breasts are bare. In the secrecy of their lower bodies, they wore two glittering triangular cloths that were fastened back and forth, held together by a string that passed through the middle of the buttocks and joined by two strings that crossed the abdomen and ischium. In his sight, they looked as if they were naked as they walked out into the sea, and when they came out of the sea, full of joy, and into his sight, their breasts were throbbing, and their breasts drooped again as they bent down and smiled to get towels, combs, and sunscreen to be carryed. Some women are covered with patterns, as if dyed in strips of fabric: some red or white stripes or patches, the product of the warm baptism of clothing that keeps the skin away from the sun. Other women's nipples were like unripe strawberries, and they could not tolerate the use of ointment to rub them. There was a man there, but he didn't see it. When he closed his eyes and listened to the noise of the sea, he could smell the scent of a woman—the smell of sunscreen.
He went swimming frequently. He swam far into the calm bay and troubled the colourful sails among the windsurfers, and closer to the shore the breaking waves rolled in and buried his head beneath the vast expanse of white water. A group of young mothers with their children are scattered in the shallows. The child's soft, naked body clings to its mother. These little bodies were recently separated from their mother's flesh, and they looked like they were still part of the female carcasses that men like him had planted into those carcasses in the first place. He lay on the rocks and dried himself. He loved those hard protrusions on the rocks. He moved until he felt that the bones in his body were in tune with the rock, and he squirmed until the bones in his body moved to a low lying place, and his form settled down and no longer felt the top of the rock. He fell asleep. When he woke up, he saw smooth thighs walking past his head - a woman. Drops of water from their drenched hair fell on his hot shoulders. Sometimes, he found himself swimming past them, his rough-skinned body gently brushing against them like a shark.
As most men often do when they are alone on the seashore, he slashed stones diagonally towards the sea, and he remembered—and remastered—the art of carving out a series of drifters on the water. He lay out of reach of the tide, sifting through a handful of stones that had been polished by the sea. He drew closer, and began to look at them with a gaze that no adult would ever have: the gaze of a child when he looked with fervent hope at a flower, a leaf, a stone. He carefully observed the swept stripes, the tiny and mysterious patches of color, the hidden dots of mica, and stroked the smooth oval and diamond shapes of its giant hands caressed by the sea.
Not all of the stones are real stones, there are some flat amber pebbles, which were polished into the shape of broken beer bottles by the gem carver of the sea. There are some cabochons made of blue glass and green glass (others fall into the sea in bottles) that, if sloppy, are thought of as sapphire emeralds. The children pick them up in hats or kegs. One afternoon, the jewellery was mixed with some Styrofoam and other plastic discarded items from cargo ships. These things floated in the sea, were thrown back to the shore, and were everywhere on the beach. He was holding a handful full of stones, like a monk holding a string of prayer beads. In this stone, he found a true treasure. Among these stained glass pebbles is a sapphire diamond ring. It wasn't lying on the surface of the rocky beach, so it was clearly not dropped by the woman who was there that day. It could be that some baby, some big sweetheart (or lady secret), in the nearby sea, jumped into the sea from a yacht, and just as she was fashionably throwing off her other clothes, she was still wearing her jewelry, and she must have noticed that a ring had slipped from her finger due to the action of the water. Or, they didn't feel it at the time, and only found out about it when they got back to the deck. While she was anxious to find a way to get the insurance compensation, the sea sank the ring deeper and deeper, and after many days and years, the sea got tired of it, and slowly pushed it, rushed it, and threw it to land. It's a beautiful ring. A large oval sapphire surrounded by a halo of round diamonds, flanked on either side of this magnificent hillock, is set with a diamond cut into a narrow rectangle, making it an unforgettable circle.
Although the ring had been dug by chance with his fingers from the six-inch-deep sand, he looked around as if the owner of the ring must be standing next to him.
But the women were applying sunscreen to themselves, wiping their children with towels, plucking their excess eyebrows in front of the tiny mirror, or sitting on their legs, their breasts lazily hanging on the small table where the hotel waiter brought them salads and white wine. He walked towards the hotel with the ring, perhaps someone had already lost it. Let's have a lost and found. But it's likely that she's been buying stolen goods from the black market. This ring is worth a lot of money. Hand it over to the police.
But suspicion alerted him, and perhaps, in this foreign land, there was reason to be suspicious, even to the police. If no one comes to claim the ring, some locals carry it into their pockets. So, what difference does it make if he puts it in his pocket, or even further, puts it in a backpack with money, credit cards, car keys, and sunglasses. So he walked to the beach and lay down on the rocks again, among the women. Think about it.
In a local newspaper, he posted a posting. "On the first day, Tuesday, at Blue Horizon Beach, I found a ring. And his phone and room number at the hostel. Lost & Found was good: phone calls were coming. Some of them were called by men claiming that their wives, mothers, and girlfriends had indeed lost a ring on the beach. When he asked them to describe what the ring looked like, they tried their luck: it was a diamond ring. But when he asked them to give further details, they could only prevaricate and be vague. If it's a woman calling, and her voice is soothing and flattering (and some women, even crying), and you can hear it as some middle-aged female liar, she simply hangs up the phone just as she is about to describe what the missing ring looks like. But if the voice was moving, and at times apparently young, gentle, and even hesitant in the audacity of lying, he asked the owner to come to the hotel and confirm the ring.
Please describe it.
He sat them comfortably on the open-air balcony, where the sun came from the sea. He examined their faces. Only one woman convinced him that he had really lost the ring, and she described the details of the ring and left, sorry to disturb him. The other women—some of them quite charming, even extremely beautiful, and dressed with great seduction—if they could not take with them the ring they had made up, were determined to get something else for the visit. It seems that they calculated that a ring is a ring, and if it is valuable, it must have diamonds on it. One or two, even naïve enough to say, "Yes, there are other gems on it, but because the ring is a family heirloom (grandmother's, aunt's), they really don't know what the names of those gems are."
What about the color? What about the shape?
They left as if they had been insulted in public, or they were giggling as thieves, saying that they had only come to make a bold joke. It's hard for them to get rid of politeness.
Then, the voice of a caller is different from all the other callers, and it is the very restrained voice of a singer or actress, perhaps timidly expressed. I didn't have much hope. For finding that...... My ring. She saw the notice and thought, no, no, it's useless. But perhaps, there is a 1 percent chance...... He invited her to the hotel.
She must have been forty years old, a natural beauty, with a pair of large, calm gray-green eyes, but that did not prevent her from having peacock-black hair. The hair rose from the top of her round forehead like a bird's beak, and the hair was coiled in a circle above her head, smooth as a smooth feather. There was not a single crease at the junction of her two nipples, and her breasts stood out firmly in the middle and upper part of the garment, which was as black as her hair. Her hands were born to wear rings, and she stretched out her slender fingers, revealing their palms: as they fell, I saw a glimmer of light in the water—
Please describe what it looks like.
She stared straight at him, then turned her head away, and began to speak. She said painstakingly. It is platinum and gold...... You know, it's hard to say exactly what you've been wearing for a long time and no longer paying attention to. A very large diamond...... It's a few pieces. Also, some rubies and emeralds...... It's rubies, but I think they've fallen before that......
He walked over to the drawer, where the desk attached to the dresser, and pulled out an envelope from under the folder containing information about the hotel, cable TV and customer service items. It's your ring, he said.
Her gaze didn't change. He took out the ring and handed it to her.
Her fingers, as if underwater, slowly floated towards him. She took the ring from his hand and began to put it on the middle finger of her right hand. The ring didn't fit, but she corrected it with a juggling quick movement, and the ring fell into place on the third finger.
He took her out to dinner, but he didn't say anything about it during the feast. She became his third wife. They lived together, and there were no more secrets between them than any other couple.
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