A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  —But why Portuguese?—

  —She had a Portuguese lover.—

  —But you were already born, two years old, you ass.—

  —She could’ve been there before.—

  —Did they ever say anything?—

  —They only tell us what they think we ought to know.—

  —And your father?—

  —They wouldn’t tell Len, would they?—

  Sasha still had her head between his hands. —So you’re not my cousin after all.—

  —Of course we are. You dope. She’s still Pauline’s sister.—

  He let go her head and rolled back on the floor. Slowly he began to play with her toes again. He spoke as if they had not been alone together all evening, and now were. —Maybe I’ll also be on the run. As soon as I leave school next year, I could be called up in the ballot for the army.—

  —You’ll have to go.—

  He rested his cheek on her feet. She put out a hand and stroked his hair, practising caresses newly learned. He moved in refusal, rubbing soft unshaven stubble against her insteps: —No.—

  —Yes, you’ll have to go.—

  —I don’t understand them. They send me to school with black kids, and then they tell me it can’t be helped: the law says I’ve got to go into the army and learn to kill blacks. That’s what the army’s really going to be for, soon. They talk all the time about unjust laws. He’s up there in court defending blacks. And I’ll have to fight them one day. You’re bloody lucky you’re a girl, Hillela.—

  She drew away her feet and swivelling slowly round, lay down, her chin to his forehead, his forehead to her chin, close. Sasha, Carole and Hillela sometimes tussled all three together in half-aggressive, giggling play that broke up the familiar perspective from which human beings usually confront one another. She righted herself, eye to eye, mouth to mouth. The knowledge that they were cousins came up into their eyes, between them; she, his cousin, kissed him first, and slowly the knowledge disappeared in rills of feeling. It washed away as the light empty shells at the Bay were turned over and over by films of water and drawn away under the surf. He touched her breasts a little; he had noticed, living with her as a sister, that her breasts were deep and large under the token family modesty of flimsy pyjama top or bath towel tucked round under the arms. She slid the delicious shock of her strange sisterly hand down under his belt; her fingertips nibbled softly at him and, busy at her real mouth, he longed to be swallowed by her—it—the pure sensation she had become to him: for them to be not cousin, brother, sister, but the mysterious state incarnate in her. After a while they were Sasha and Hillela again; or almost. Light under the bedroom door showed Hillela was still up, preparing her books for the new term, when the parents came home; locked in the bathroom, Sasha had buried, with pants thrust to the bottom of the linen basket, his sweet wet relief from the manhood of guns and warring. Tenderness was forgotten: like any other misdeed undetected by adults.

  Forgotten and repeated, as anything that manages to escape judgment may be repeated when the unsought opportunity makes space for it again.

  Go-Go Dancer

  Olga gave her a cheque (—Now that you’re grown up I don’t know what you’d really like—) and a package wrapped in Japanese rice paper with a real peony, under the ribbon, duplicating its peony motifs. The black students at the Saturday school (Pauline would have made the suggestion) gave her a pink-and-gold pop-up birthday card taped to a cigarette box covered with tinfoil. She was seventeen. Inside the Japanese paper package was the pair of Imari cats. Inside the cigarette box was an Ndebele bead necklace. Pauline picked up first one porcelain cat, then the other, and smiled, running her finger where she had found the cracks. The repairs were detectable as a fine line of gold.

  —Real gold?—

  —Oh yes, Hillela. But they’ve lost their value for a collection. Just a souvenir.—

  Carole yearned for these porcelain cats. Hillela generously presented her with the undamaged one. Pauline was amused to see the pair parted, one with a space carefully cleared for it on Carole’s bedside table, the other among shells and mascots and packets of chewing gum on the window-sill above Hillela’s bed. —Now you’ve reduced their value still further. Don’t tell Olga, for god’s sake. You’ll never make an art collector.—

  When the two girls were alone Carole made an offer. —I don’t mind swapping for the mended one.—

  —No. I’d give them both to you, if I could.—

  The Ndebele necklace fastened with a loop over a button, and the thread broke the second or third time Hillela wore it; the beads frayed off and in time rolled away into cracks in a drawer. The wink of their glint under dust and fluff caught her eye: she had missed many Saturdays at the classes in the old church; without making any decision, it was understood that Carole alone would be accompanying her mother each week. Hillela and her new friend Mandy von Herz lied about where they were going or had been, even if the destination were innocent as a walk to the corner shop. They disappeared, even in company, into a privacy of glances, whispers, gazes past adults to whom they were either talking or appeared to be listening; an impatience sparked silently from them. Perhaps Mandy knew about Sasha; such secrets are binding as vows, affirm a buried solidarity even among crowds. Without mixing much with other girls, the pair were immensely popular at school, admired by those who could not keep up with their nerve. Hillela, an old lag, introduced to selected boarders the technique learned in Rhodesia for getting in and out of school at night. When discovered, they were too grateful for the freedom they had had, to mention her name.

  GO-GO DANCERS LIVEN SATURDAY STREETS: a Sunday paper publishes a photograph of two young girls, flying legs and hair, dancing in a shop window. So this is what Hillela is doing with her Saturday mornings, now.

  But Pauline must have decided, with the wise counsel of Joe, to take it tolerantly, carefully, considering the girl’s background. —What on earth is go-go dancing, darling? And whose idea was the shop window?—

  —It’s a boutique run by some friends of Mandy. They’re paying us ten rands each.—

  There would be no second time for the proud young wage-earners of the new currency just introduced; as Pauline said, how lucky they were to get off even once without trouble at the school; and this issue wasn’t really one on which she could have tackled the headmistress as she had over the waiter. (The headmistress must have been grateful that the girls’ names were not published; there was no summons to her study.) Carole was the only member of the family who allowed herself to be openly upset by the incident. —You should see Hillela and Mandy dancing! You don’t know! They’re wonderful! You should just see them!— But one thing Pauline and Joe never feared was that Carole would be influenced by her cousin; like her brother Sasha, Carole was too well-adjusted for that.

  Pauline was frank with Hillela, always frank: one of the problems with Hillela was that she never seemed able to explain what made her do what she did? Having got away with dancing in a shop window in a bikini with a bit of fringe bobbing on her backside, one Friday she did not come home from school and had not appeared by eleven o’clock at night. Carole confided later that she herself had ‘got hell’ from her parents for not reporting earlier she had no idea where Hillela was. Pauline thought Hillela, as the elder of the two, must be allowed the self-respect of more freedom than Carole. The girls had heard it many times: I don’t want to behave towards you the way Olga and Ruthie and I were treated when we were young, I’d rather take risks with you than do what our parents did to Ruthie.

  But now a kind of dread came into the house; Carole could not explain what it was: —As if we’d done something awful—to you, or more that you were telling something awful to us … I don’t know … — Pauline telephoned the von Herz girl’s home. Her parents had been to the police and hospitals, already assuming disaster. They were not surprised to hear that Mandy’s new best friend was also missing. —I have never liked this friendship.— The mother was frank, t
oo.

  —Anti-semitic cow. I could hear it.— A moment’s distraction flared in Pauline. But the convention of action set by the other family provided an acceptable channel for the dread. The feeling it was something about which nothing could be done was contained. Carole went along with Pauline and Joe to a police station. All the time Hillela’s particulars were being given to a young Afrikaner policeman Carole was watching a white girl, a girl Hillela’s age, with Hillela’s little face, and big breasts shaking as she cried, a girl with blood dried dark like sap from a cut next to a swollen eye, being pawed helplessly, to comfort her, by restless and wary friends in the motorbike set. The light in that place where neither Carole nor her cousin had ever been was so strong that the shadows at midnight were the shadows of day. Boot-falls and clangings echoed from somewhere; shouts in languages Carole and Hillela heard spoken by the black waiters and cleaners at school, Bettie, Alpheus, Alpheus’s mother, and did not understand. —The policeman asked all sorts of mad things. Did you take drugs. Did you go to discos in Hillbrow. Did you have any ‘previous convictions’—and all in the most terrible japie English, just repeating what he’s been taught to say, like a little kid who can’t even read yet.—

  Two other policemen were swinging their legs where they sat on a table and a third flirted in Afrikaans, over the phone. How tall was Hillela Capran? What did she weigh? Any distinguishing marks? Pauline, her hair bristling with the static of anxiety, would not give Joe a chance to answer any questions, but had to turn to Carole for these bodily statistics that obsess adolescent girls, always weighing and measuring themselves. Pauline had brought an identifying photograph, yes; one of the three of them—her children and their cousin—with Carole and Sasha cut away.

  Did Hillela ever realize that no door was locked in the house that night? The front and back doors, the sliding glass ones that led to the verandah where Pauline had refused what was asked of her by the woman with red hair—all were open, the way a window is left wide in the hope of enticing back a strayed cat.

  In the morning the whole house was swept full of night air, the leaf-smell of dawn. Carole explained how she had tried to stay awake that night but must have slept: she opened her eyes and saw the second bed still neat and empty. Bettie was crying, the flanges of her black nose lined with rosy wet. While drinking coffee standing up in the kitchen, Pauline and Joe, with Carole listening, discussed whether or not to telephone Olga. —Oh my god—Olga … What suggestions could she have. She didn’t have enough understanding to take her after that Rhodesian business, so how could she have any idea at all of how to deal with this?— Yet Pauline came back from the duty call somehow relieved, though scornful. —I told you. D’you know what she said? First she didn’t know what to say … then she came up with the bright idea Hillela might have gone to Mozambique.— Joe seemed actually to be considering the supposition, so Pauline exposed it in all its uselessness. —She hasn’t had a word from her mother since she was old enough to read, we haven’t even an address any more, so the notion she would run away to Ruthie … really. Olga reads too many romantic novels from her ladies’ book club.—

  —Olga’d like to go and look for Ruthie, herself, maybe … so it’s a perfectly reasonable idea for her to have.—

  —Well, I happen to love Ruthie, too, but I’m capable of being a bit more intelligently objective than my sister Olga—

  —She reproached you?—

  —Not that … unless you read her silences. She didn’t dare. But what does it matter now. Doesn’t help us.—

  —Carole. D’you think there’s any chance Hillela might have had a notion to go to Lourenço Marques?— Joe gestured lightness; it would not be such a serious matter if her cousin had. —D’you ever get the impression she longs for her mother, or at least for some idea of her? Or might go for the adventure of it? Take the von Herz girl along?—

  Well, Hillela would know how Carole had to answer her father’s weighing-up of circumstantial evidence. It was only surprising when Hillela did ask her young cousin: —How?—

  —I said you wouldn’t go to Len or to your mother. It wouldn’t be anything we would think of. So then they went on and on, whether you were unhappy, whether you didn’t love us—all that stuff, I nearly passed out with embarrassment.—

  But Joe was accustomed to persisting logically towards the uncovering of motivation. —If she were to be unhappy, to whom would she go?—

  Carole didn’t tell Hillela what she had said then: —Sasha. I think. If he were around.—

  —Sasha? Really? Not you!—

  —Why Sasha!—

  They still suspected Carole of covering up for her cousin.

  —She would. I don’t know … because he’s older … but he’s not here. So she couldn’t have.—

  They did something Carole would never have thought they would do. Pauline telephoned Swaziland—to the school. Sasha was out on a cross-country run but he was allowed to telephone home when he returned half-an-hour later. Hillela? He had not heard from her. They did not write to each other—Pauline knew very well Hillela never wrote, even when she was away at Plett with Olga, she didn’t write.

  Had she ever spoken to him of any friends she didn’t want the family to know about?—it was natural for young people, part of growing up, beginning to be independent of their parents, to have little secrets. But it would be necessary for him to betray a confidence in an emergency like this, to prevent possible harm coming to his cousin.

  Pauline came from the telephone with the dread settled upon her again. —No idea where she could be. He got quite cross when I said, if she should phone him or turn up there … There’s an inter-school match today, he’ll be away playing soccer at Manzini.—

  Pauline went to take her Saturday-morning coaching classes as usual. She did not know what else to do? She would not help Hillela by letting down black children who travelled all the way from Soweto in their eagerness for education. Carole stayed with Joe, at home, to be there for Hillela if she came.

  In the afternoon there was the slam of a car door and footsteps running up the drive; all three in the livingroom stood up ceremoniously to receive Hillela restored to them—but Sasha, Sasha was in the doorway. Sasha walked into the familiar house empty of the presence of Hillela. An amazing rage broke over them. He smashed their sensible calm like a bottle flung against a wall, and his words were the jagged pieces held before the faces of his mother, his father, Carole. —What’ve you done?—

  He stood in the doorway apart from them, turned to Pauline. He was unshaven, a grown man, and his nose was running, a little boy’s. —You bitch. What’ve you done? You think everything you do is the only thing. Only you know what to think, how to live. Everybody’s got to be like you. Something’s right because it fits in with you. If it doesn’t it’s stupid, it’s shit. Not everybody’s going to be exactly like you and dad. You understand what everybody needs, you never ask them. You know what blacks ought to have and you know what Hillela needs, you’re so sure it’s not Olga, it’s not her father, it’s you … You send me to school with blacks because that’s normal, that’s the way it ought to be here but isn’t, it isn’t, and you don’t have to go into the army afterwards and kill them, only I, I have to do that, I have to do what’s wrong, not you. You take Hillela in, that’s the right thing, and now, if she’s dead … (Carole wept with shock to see her brother weep.) … If you’ve killed her then she’s done what’s wrong, you’ve got nothing to do with it, she doesn’t fit in … And if I get blown up or shot defending this bloody country where do I fit in? You despise Olga for wanting to run away to Canada, but you don’t have to go into the army, I do, I do. You don’t know what happened to Hillela, no, because you’re careful not to let anything happen to you—

  Pauline stood still, breathing deeper and deeper, her intimacy with her son making certain the sense under the ridiculous tirade would find the vital places, known only to him and her, to wound her.

  And because of Hillela, then
, Joe did something inconceivable for him: he called his son a bastard. The hollow house filled with anger and pain that would never have been let loose, things were said that should never, would never be said by people like them.

  Pauline tugged out one by one the crude homemade shafts that pierced her, shameless, as if exposing before her husband and almost-grown children the privacy of the body where he had begotten them and from which she had ejected them into the world. Her hair was a great wick by which she might catch alight. —Yes cheap, stupid, shit, this place, and you’ve been sent away so’s you don’t have to dirty yourself with it while you’re growing up. You haven’t had to listen to it from your friends at school, the way the girls have to. You haven’t got to teach Alpheus to spell while he dreams about being a lawyer, the way your father has to—you know only blacks who’re your equals, getting the same education you’re getting. You’re too high and mighty to make any compromises because you don’t have to, you’re a spoilt brat. There’re all kinds of ways of making a spoilt brat, I see that, and—you’re right—this is my way. I’ve had my way and I’ve done it. You’re my way. We can’t all live at Waterford Kamhlaba School, you know. There’s the world out there—There’s this place. And Joe and I have to decide every day of our lives how to live here, whites only, no choice about that, no phalanstery without passes and black locations, white this and black that, beach houses for Olga and the kids I teach living fourteen people in two rooms in Soweto!—

  —And Alpheus in the garage.—

  —Where shall I put him? Your room? Would you like that? Do I run an orphanage here? —What do you know about the decisions your father has to make, taking cases pro deo when he could be making money as a divorce lawyer for whites with wives who must have enough alimony to have their faces lifted. We do know what’s cheap, what’s stupid, what’s shit. Yes. We’ve spent our lives finding out how to live in the midst of it, part of it, and … and behave as decently as one can … until it’s changed. I do think I know what’s right, even if I don’t always manage to do it. And, my Christ, the last thing I want is for you to have to be exactly like me, like us. That’s what I’ve been preparing you for since you were two bricks and a tickey … for change. But you have to think for it, work for it; and every day of the week do what you’re not sure of, or despise yourself for … it’s not a clean process … getting out of the shit … it’s not going to be for you, either, don’t think it can be, you’re old enough to realize.—