A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  He felt a fresh surge of what she called anger. —Because you forgive them.—

  The castaway raft that was carrying the day dropped out of rapids into quiet water. She played the guitar to herself, bent over cradling it to save him from disturbance. Out of his week’s pay at the liquor store he had bought himself some books, and had begun one this weekend. The Brothers Karamazov was in the house in the old red hardback uniform edition of Dostoevsky along with all the other books under whose influence he had been reared without knowing it or having read them, but he had bought the paperback as if the other had not been there all his life, on one of the shelves that narrowed every passage as well as stretched up the walls in every room, and made the odours he associated with home compound with the smell of paper and the livingroom fruit bowl. He wanted to read the book because he had heard one of the masters at school mention, in a debate on capital punishment (the school tried hard to introduce issues that schoolboys could not be expected to think about), that the writer Dostoevsky had stood before a firing squad and found himself suddenly reprieved instead of dead. The extremity of this experience attracted Sasha, who sometimes was secretly drawn to the possibility of committing suicide. One of the reasons for the anger which Hillela had gently mocked was that he felt his mother had wormed this secret out of him—not in words, but in the concentration of signs only she and he could read: the way he left a room, the shift in his attention when someone was speaking—he could not stop her adding these things up. But he was safe from that secret now. Hillela was there. It was not possible to think of nonexistence while she was close by, her bare foot with the one funny toe stretched towards the afternoon fire they had made for themselves.

  He was disappointed with the visit to the holy Zossima (rationalism was one of the influences he was unaware of; religious mysticism bored him) until Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov embarrassed his sons by making a ridiculous scene, but after that the new reader entered the novel as millions had done before him, although to him it seemed its knowledge of all he needed to know, that nobody would ever tell him—even though everything was discussed, talk never stopped—was part of the possession of the house boarded this silent weekend when it was lit-up and empty. As he read his absorption deepened like the stages of sleep; and he was aware of his companion only the way the cat, actually asleep, showed awareness of the comfort of human presence and the fire’s warmth by now and then flexing thorns through the white fur of a paw. Then he fell into a passage that seemed to surround and isolate him. ‘I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not a cultivated man, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries there are!’

  He did not know Hillela had stopped playing her guitar; he had not been listening. She wandered out of the room, and that she was not there any longer he felt immediately. He thought he heard her calling. Some other sound, the susurrus of the shower; perhaps he imagined the voice, like the voices heard under a waterfall. He went to the bathroom door and rapped a mock drum-roll. She did call something. He rapped again. Hillela opened the door, pink paths showing all over her drenched head, streams of water licking her breasts, the springy stamens of her pubic hair brilliant with shaking drops. A hollow of pale mauve shadow went from each lean hip-bone down to the groin. —I boiled myself by the fire.— He looked at her. Not at her face; and she was watching him, both encouraging and anxious, a kind of happiness. He kissed the breasts, letting them wet his face. He knelt down and pressed closed eyes and mouth against that wet moss that poor boys at school had tried to represent in ugly drawings in the lavatories. She reached for a sponge and squeezed it over his head. The water ran down his hair and plastered it. She teased: —Just like an old mango pip.— They played, through the open door the house was filled with shouts and laughter. The shower was still plashing. They fought and slithered in the steam. She pulled him under the fall of water and he struggled out of his wet clothes and imprisoned her, cool and ungraspable. The water found the meeting of their bellies and poured down their thighs. She la-la-la-ed, he pushed her head under the full force of the jet.

  They dried their hair by the fire. He towelled hers vigorously, but her resistance was weak and laughing, the game was running down; the smell of Hillela’s hair was identifiable as the source of the intimations of her he had found, over several years now, in her jacket that hung in the jumble behind a door, or on a cushion on the old sofa, in a jersey left inside-out, as it had been pulled off, sleeves holding the shape of her impatient push up to elbows.

  Hunger was also a happiness. He cooked up a rich red-and-yellow mess of tinned tomatoes and mushrooms, tuna fish and cheese, an expert in clandestine boarding-school cuisine. They carried it to the fire and camped on the floor. The cat filched bits of fish with the club of a curved paw and spat out each morsel several times to get rid of the tomato coating. Sasha put her through the window, Hillela let her in again. Sasha suggested he would take another bottle of wine but neither wanted it. The telephone rang; Hillela was sopping up sauce with a piece of bread, he put down his plate, she waved the crust, and he did not know whether it was a signal that he should answer. She cleaned her plate with conscientious gusto, making figures of eight while he counted the rings, nine, ten, eleven, and the last cut off in the middle. Within such content so many things seem possible, even easy. —All you need is enough for a cheap one-way ticket. If you can get that together, then you can work your way round Europe. There must be people we know we could stay with … connections.—

  —Billie—she’s got family in London. You know—my step-mother.—

  —I want to keep away from youth hostels. I’ve had enough of living in dormitories. They say in France, if you go to the South where so many rich people are, you can get taken on as crew for a yacht. Girls too. There’s someone at school, his brother went all the way to the Bahamas—fantastic. The trouble is, we’ll finish school in the December of next year—

  —November.—

  —Same thing; it’s winter in Europe. But we could work in ski resorts for a bit.—

  Hillela mimed a shiver.

  —No, you’ll love it. The way you can dance, I’ll bet you’ll ski well. Good co-ordination.—

  —Cold places.— A fearful intake of breath.

  —That’s because it’s something you can’t even imagine. The sun is hot, the snow is cold—it’s like eating sorbet and drinking hot black coffee.—

  She smiled praisingly. —How do you know.—

  He caught her hand, patted himself on the head with it. —I know, I just know.—

  —And Carole could join up with us somewhere.—

  —Carole?—

  He stared at her. She looked back with the face of someone practical, considering ways and means.

  —But she’ll still be at school.—

  —In the holidays. It’ll be fun. The three of us. Like here.—

  Orange and blue liquid pulsed in the coals; measured perhaps a minute. He picked up his book again, and, as the cat would look about fastidiously for a place to lie, slowly settled his head in her lap, where the plate had been. She grabbed a cushion, lifted his head, and put the cushion beneath it. He had been reading, on and off, all day. She looked to see how far along he was by now: more than two hundred pages.

  —What about the bathroom.—

  Only the pilot light of his conscious attention burned. —There’s all day tomorrow.—

  She began to read over his head; when he got to the end of a page before her, her hand went down to hold him back. As she caught up with the sense of the narrative their pace drew even, so that they were reading at t
he same instant the same passage; ‘I want you to know me. And then to say goodbye. I believe it’s always best to get to know people just before leaving them.’

  Sasha closed the book and put it aside without marking his place with the torn bus ticket he used, but the spine of the paperback, bent as far as he had read, lifted the pages apart from the rest at that point. After a while her hand stirred as if about to touch his hair, but did not. She bent over, smiling, but his eyes were closed.

  —Sasha?—

  —Sasha?—

  He waited, once again, to hear her call softly, again.

  —Sasha?—

  He opened his eyes and suddenly began to yawn, yawned till his eyes watered, full of tears.

  They got up. She stood a moment, waiting for him.

  —I would never go to Rhodesia.—

  She was moving her head very slowly. Feeling him looking at her, a smile turned the edges of her mouth; she might have been being photographed. He approached her very shyly, and kissed her. They wandered through the house, arms about each other’s waist, following the trail of their inhabitation: among the papers on the study desk, a packet of chocolate broken into, from which she took a square, records among the open tins in the kitchen, his telescope that he had been tinkering with (last year’s birthday present for a boy interested in phenomena beyond his orbit) on the dining-table.

  He took the telescope into his room and for a long time, until they got too cold, they drew the moon and stars near through the open window, just as their talk drew near ski resorts, the Bahamas, the anonymous freedom of foreign cities.

  They were in the deep sleep of midnight when Pauline came quietly into her son’s room and saw that there were two in his bed. She turned on the light. The room was cold and stuffy; warm in the core of it was the smell of a body she had known since she gave birth to him, unmistakable to her as the scent that leads a bitch to her puppy, and it was mingled with the scents of sexuality caressed from the female nectary. The cat was a rolled fur glove in an angle made by Sasha’s bent knees. The two in the bed opened their eyes; they focussed out of sleep and saw Pauline. She was looking at them, at their naked shoulders above the covers, and she called, as if she had come upon intruders in the house—Joe. She turned and walked out.

  They did not move. Something grasped Sasha’s innards and was shaking him; he trembled against Hillela. Her body was calm as sun-warmed stone. He spoke. —It’s not Sunday.— Hillela said nothing. Her soft, clean, curly hair lay against his neck, the last sensation he had been conscious of as he fell asleep. Hillela was there. Now that terrified him.

  Pauline came back with Joe, she was clutching his upper arm, taking protection. She stopped him in the doorway, against some danger. Sensing attention, the cat began to purr. Pauline’s splendid head rose like an archaic representation of the sun, aureoled with wild filaments, blinding them and holding them in her gaze. —Joe. Joe.— Sasha’s mother was imploring his father to tell the intruders not to be there. The cat stretched, jutted rump and tail and jumped off the bed.

  The greatest shock was the confusion. It was days before Sasha (and Hillela, for all he knew) understood why his parents had come home on Saturday night. And Pauline and Joe had to grasp a total displacement of apprehension. They returned because of a crisis they knew how to deal with, in an anxiety not unexpected in the context of their lives. Someone had brought that curse upon peace, a radio, to the camping ground in the Drakensberg. He took the thing, the size of a cigarette pack, along with him when the party of friends went on a climb, and under another kind of waterfall (of static) its cackle told of the arrest of Joe’s partner in the early hours of Saturday morning. Joe and Pauline left Carole with the party and tramped back in the silence of shared preoccupation along the hikers’ trail where, a few hours before, they had noticed the minute beauties of every fern and flower, and the grand surveillance of eagles. What both feared most, on the long drive back, was that their house had been raided while the other two members of the family were left alone there. —Well … they’re not children … they’ll know how to behave sensibly.— Pauline accepted the reassurance, but a mile or two farther on, while she was taking her turn to drive, allowed herself: —How d’you behave with those bastards raking through a house? It’s all very well … but it hasn’t happened to us. I’m not sure what my reactions would be. If I could shut up. And Sasha …—

  —Sasha knows the drill.— They were travelling in the car in which Pauline had taken the Masuku family to escape over the border. Police investigations into such things often took a long time when they were preparing a case pertaining to state security and involving many people. Both were thinking about this, but said nothing. When Pauline was not driving there was no other claim to distract her attention, and foreboding built within her a whole construct of consequences from a single act, made by her, it now seemed on impulse, that would trap the considered, continuing usefulness of Joe and his kind. She experienced a new guilt; through her, hands that should never touch, eyes that should never see the papers in Joe’s modest study might have been going through them.

  That was the first room in the house she went to, and there was some evidence of disorder—Joe’s rug was not under the desk, files were on the floor, the chess set was not in its usual place. She could not wait to verify if anything had been taken but ran at once to be reassured that the children were all right, that Sasha was in his room.

  Joe was already on the telephone, waking up his partner’s wife.

  Coming back from that room, Pauline waited a full minute, standing there looking at Joe, not hearing what he was saying, unable to understand anything, neither what she had just seen nor the purport of his expression as he asked questions and received answers.

  And in the days that followed, which was one to think about, how could one grapple with the one, the always-to-be-expected crisis, while the other … how was one to think of anything but the other? Joe had no choice. He was preparing applications, making representations, following procedures and looking (always looking) for the loopholes in Acts through which he could reach the detained man, while at the office doing the work of both of them. He phoned Pauline at odd moments of day, as a busy man will find time to do usually only to keep contact with a mistress. A few murmured, elliptical words, to which the response was equally laconic. Everything all right? Anything happened?

  Yes. Nothing.

  After Pauline had pushed past Joe that night, gone over to the bed and hit Sasha across the face, hit him for the first time in her life, hit him twice, jolting his head first this way then that, what could be all right. But outside that room where he lay naked, smelling of sex, with his sister—outside that house, all over the country, there were parents whose sons were in prison, whose sons had had to flee, like Donsi Masuku, and whom they would never see again.

  For the first time, what there was could not be talked over ‘frankly and openly’ between the parents and children. There was no formula of confidence that would do. Pauline and Joe searched for one, as he searched for loopholes in the law. The attraction that had overcome taboo was something no-one could be asked to explain. Could one ask the fifteen-year-old Carole if she had noticed anything about—what? Could a father collude with his daughter in the old adult euphemism for sexual relations, ‘something between’ her siblings? The incident—how would one phrase it to Sasha, to the girl—was it an incident, a piece of sexual bravado (there was the empty wine bottle as a clue) in the defining family’s absence, or was it something—

  —Oh worse, worse.— Pauline stopped Joe. —Love, then, incest, going on who knows how long.—

  Joe told her again and again, she shouldn’t call Hillela Sasha’s ‘sister’.

  —Not in actual terms of kinship, no, but in fact, how they’ve been brought up, how we live, they are brother and sister, they are, they know they are. And she is his first cousin. My sister shares my blood, doesn’t she! Their mothers are one!—

  —In some
countries even marriages between cousins were not illegal. Until very recently. Where your grandfather was born, lots of Jews married cousins. Not only secular, but religious law allowed it.— Joe offered the information not to comfort his wife and himself, but to defuse emotion that they might apply reason to the unspeakable.

  In the end, Joe closed the door in his study as was customary when he and Sasha wanted to be left in peace to play chess, and said to him as Len once said to Hillela: —I don’t understand, either.— He was concurring, perhaps, with the state of mind of Pauline, who never before had excluded herself from any discussion concerning her son. —We’re prepared to accept that you yourself do not understand. So let us put it behind us. Forget it.—

  Such abject desolation burned over the boy that Joe sensed this like a fever emanating from him.

  —Come. Set up the men. I’ve had a hellish day in court. Let’s play.—

  Sasha would go back to school, but Hillela would remain there, in the house.

  Carole, younger and impressionable, shared a room with her. Already the parents could sense a protective hostility in Carole: ganging up for, rather than with, the old triumvirate, because Sasha was withdrawn, he spoke to the two girls only when others were present, in the conventional exchanges at table, and Hillela—no-one had confronted Hillela with anything. One of the things Hillela had done—Sasha and Hillela had done—was to take away from Pauline the single area where Pauline was certain always to know what to do, the area where she had been sure nothing could shock her, nothing elude understanding or alienate love. Joe had to shut himself up, alone, with Sasha; she could not bring herself to take on Hillela. When Hillela came over quietly—astonishingly—to kiss her goodnight as usual (this was a house where affection was displayed, normal emotions had never been suppressed) every evening of the very week that followed what had happened, Pauline touched that young cheek with lips like charred paper. Hillela went to her holiday job, Carole to hers, and in the evenings, if Hillela did not go out with those friends of hers (and god knows who they were, what ideas she had picked up from them and brought home) she was shut up with Carole in their shared room in schoolgirl intimacy—creaming faces, squeezing blackheads, pushing back cuticles; whatever they were doing or saying concealed by the music they played. Some of the nights of that week Pauline wept in the dark beside Joe, after they had talked in bed about the things that really mattered in the world, the clandestine investigations Joe was making, through contacts in the police, to find out whether his partner was going to be charged with subversion, and the progress of the trial of others, already in session. He patted her back, stroked her hip; uncertain whether it would be a good thing to go on to make love to her. Once, when his caress of comfort began to change, she spoke. —I have the feeling Carole knew all along …—