A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  The exile caste came to the beach for air. And then the original impulse—to breathe!—became part of a social ritual, a formation of a new regularity, a necessary ordering of a place where other needs that cannot be done without might be met. Many had experienced this kind of formation even in jail. On Tamarisk Beach they strolled through the colonnades of palms, avoiding or meeting each other, eyeing across a stretch of sand faces separated by the distance of alliances dividing Moscow and Peking, East Germany and the United States, or the desert distance of solitary confinement and the stony alienation that succeeds screams in those who have known torture since last meeting. They paused to pick tar and oil-slick from the soles of their feet, and scratched the hair on their chests, smoked, shook water from their ears—just for those hours in the late afternoon could have been holiday-makers anywhere. There were some women among them, political lags, like the men, and defiantly feminine, keeping up with curled, home-tinted hair, ingenious cut of local cotton robes as sun-dresses, and cheap silver-wire jewellery from the market craftsmen, the high self-image needed to defeat the humiliations of prison. There was sensuality on Tamarisk Beach. It came back with the relief of a breeze; it came back with the freeing of bodies from the few clothes thrust into a suitcase for exile and worn in the waitingrooms and makeshift living quarters of exile. It became a pattern of human scale made by strollers in the monumental arcade of palms and swimmers dabbling in the great Indian Ocean at the edge of a continent.

  There were hangers-on, at Tamarisk. Not only the thieving urchins, but friends and acquaintances picked up by the exiles, and the appendages of love affairs and casual dependencies of all kinds. There were also those who passed as these and were suspected, found out or never discovered to be part-time informers for the governments whose enemies the exiles were. Most of the ‘beach rats’, as they were known, were themselves expatriates—black and white—who had been expelled from or broken with a series of schismatic groups in the exile community; others had become misfits, easy to recruit for pocket-money spying, in a survival of the old European tradition of black sheep. In imperialist times, these whites were ‘sent out’ to the colonies; in the break-up of colonial empires, their counterparts took advantage of transitional opportunities to get by, far away from the censure of home, in some warm place whose different mores didn’t concern them. It would have been difficult to distinguish impostors from the genuine, those afternoons on the beach. The tall Jew whose incipient tyre around the waistline was being prodded at by a wobbly-breasted blonde girl—what was there to show, in his mock affront, that the black beard he still wore he had grown in order to escape across a border disguised as one of the White Father missionaries, dangling cross, breviary and all? Who could tell the difference between the credentials of a little beauty with a Huguenot delicacy of face-structure, speaking Afrikaans, and the black man, her fellow countryman, talking trade union shop with her in the same language? Hadn’t both served their apprenticeship as jailbirds, back there? Suspect everybody or nobody. Leaning on an elbow in the sand, talking to an intimate, wandering to borrow a cigarette and join this group or that, resting one’s back, in sudden depression, against a palm-pillar in this place of littered sand and urine-tepid shallows—gossip and guarded tongues erratically mingled with the long-held breaths expelled by the ocean on a coral reef. Among the regulars, every afternoon, there was a girl who looked as if she had slept in her clothes and hadn’t combed her hair. Probably true; many, through obscure quarrels of doctrine and discipline, found themselves not provided for by any liberation movement housed up rotting stairs. This one (a man who was doing his best, without funds, to drink himself to death on local gin) had left his country before receiving permission from his cadre to do so. That one (staring at the sea as if to blind himself with its light) belonged to another organization and had defied its policy: recognized the validity of the white courts by accepting pro deo legal defence.

  The Afrikaner woman noticed the girl about: she was clean, the hair naturally like that, tangled because in need of a cut—just living through hard times, as everyone was, more or less. She seemed a loner, but not lonely; at least, the men appeared to know that she was approachable. She came by herself to the beach, but as soon as her presence was noted there was always some man, arms crossed over his chest, digging a toe in the sand, chatting to her. The tamarisks cast no more than a fishnet of shade. She sat there beside other people’s possessions the way the stray dogs came to settle themselves just beyond cuffs and blows.

  When the Afrikaner woman saw the big safety-pin that held together the waistband of the girl’s jeans above a broken zipper, she had one of the contractions in her chest just where, whatever rational explanation there was, she knew there to be some organ capable of keener feeling than the brain. It was this organ, taking over from all the revolutionary theory she had studied since recruitment at seventeen in a jam factory, that had been responsible for her arrest along with black women protesting against the pass laws, and her bouts of imprisonment as an organizer of illegal strikes and defier of laws decreeing what race might live where. She asked about the girl. The story was doing the rounds, by then: that was the girl who had come with that Andrew Rey fellow, the journalist. The man who had disappeared, dumped her, now. The one who was found to be politically unreliable (the informant was a member of the Command in exile and had the authority to decide such things). As for his girl … what was anyone to do with her. She clearly didn’t belong to any movement at all; his camp-follower, pretty little floozy. But he had misrepresented himself, and she must have moved about with him in all his unacceptable contacts, so she wasn’t their responsibility, really.

  Yet the Afrikaner woman brought her a pair of her own jeans, concealed in one of the straw bags from the market so the girl wouldn’t be embarrassed by receiving charity in front of everyone at the beach. As she became accepted—because Rey had betrayed her, too—as one at least by implication belonging to the cause Rey was suspected of double-crossing, the member of the Command was among the men on the beach, far from their wives and likely to be for many years, with whom she slept.

  Certainly she had no place to sleep in alone. Not until the Afrikaner woman decided something must be done about her. Christa Zeederburg, urged to reminisce at the end of her life, never forgot the safety-pin. —Just an ordinary safety-pin, the kind you buy on a card, for babies’ nappies. That’s all she had, then!—

  If you have lived your young life with Jethro and Bettie to feed you and at worst always an aunt’s stipend deposited monthly, it must be difficult to believe there is nothing for you in the houses you pass and the banks in their pan-colonial classical grey stone with brass fittings. For many weeks she was waiting for Rey to come back; that was her status. She was living in their room in an old hotel from British times which now functioned only as a bar; his radio was on the wicker table and his pyjamas were still under the pillows. He had gone on a quick trip to Sweden about a communications development project they wanted him to start in East Africa, or (depending to whom he was talking) to Germany to tie up a television documentary based on a book he was writing. She knew she could not go along. Already there had been problems; when the vehicle that took them from Northern Rhodesia arrived at their country of refuge, it turned out that although she had no passport he—quite properly, a professional in these matters—had an Irish one. He went with his companions to the local hotel in the small frontier town; she spent the night in the local jail—well, on an old sofa in the, chief warder’s office, they couldn’t put a white girl in the sort of cells they had. It was quite fun, really, she could sleep anywhere and wake up fresh. Her experience was something they joked about together, next day, all very exciting, like the leopard they saw crossing a red road at dawn. It disappeared into the bush as they themselves were doing, hour after hour, mile after mile, beyond pursuit.

  He had taken only half the money. He wouldn’t hear of taking more than that; he was going to come back with grants
that would keep them for two or three years, they were going to look for a flat—or an old house, why not occupy one of the nice old houses with gardens the colonists had fled when independence came to this country? She was in one, once, while he was away. Some people from the beach took her along to a party given by the representative of a European press agency. The agency operated comfortably; there was a telex chattering in what had been a children’s playroom, and the agency chief could refresh himself in the leaking swimming pool. She would have written immediately to tell what a good idea it would be to have a house like that from which the development project could be run, and the television documentary planned, but she had no address. She thought of looking round for such a house, in preparation. But the suburb along the sea was a long walk from town, and soon the taxis, reassuringly humble with their missing doorhandles and rust-gnawed mudguards, had become expensive in relation to the money she had left.

  Unlike observers, she expected him back any day. She passed the days wandering purposefully about, looking, listening, smelling, tasting. The ancient town was a Mardi Gras for her, everybody in fancy dress that could not possibly be daily familiar: the glossy black men in braided cotton robes and punch-embroidered skull caps, the Arab women with all their being in their eyes, blotted out over body, mouth and head by dark veils, the skinny, over-dressed Indian children, bright and finicky as fishing-flies, the stumps of things that were beggars, and the smooth-suited, smooth-jowled Lebanese merchants touched with mauve around the mouth who sat as deities in the dark of stifling shops. Her watch was stolen in the hotel and she kept track of time by a grand public clock-face and the regular call of the muezzins from the mosques. There were no laws—nothing to prevent her going down into the black quarters of the town, here, except the rotting vegetables and sewer mud that had to be stepped through, and the little claws of beggar children that fastened on her whenever she smiled a greeting, not knowing that every day she had less and less to give away. She bought pawpaws and big, mealy plantains, more filling than ordinary bananas, down there; cheaper than in the markets. She picked them from the small pyramid of some woman whose stock and livelihood they were, arranged among the garbage, spittle, and babies scaled with glittering flies. She ate the fruit in place of lunch and dinner on a broken bench on the esplanade and did not get sick.

  Olga, Pauline, even Len—they had never given her the advantage of knowing what to say to someone to whom one owes money and can’t pay. The wife of the hotel proprietor stopped her as she came along the verandah where her room was, and broke her silence.

  —Going on for six weeks, and rates are strictly weekly, dear. You know that, don’t you? We aren’t running a charity. We have to pay even the yard boys the fancy new minimum wage this government’s set down, I don’t know how much longer we’re gonna be prepared to carry on, anyway.— A drop of water run down to one of the spiral ends of the girl’s hair had fallen on the dry sun-cancer of the woman’s forearm. —We have to pay for the water you’re using for those lovely cold showers you take whenever you fancy.— From the day that fellow went off with his briefcase, never mind the pyjamas left under the pillows, the proprietor had not been happy about the situation. There’d been bad experiences before with that CCC lot who’d taken over Tamarisk for themselves. That’s what the regular white residents from the old days called them: commies, coons and coolies. She looked at this cocky miss who played the guitar in her room as if the world owed her a living; looked in a way that made the girl feel she would be physically prevented, by the barrier of a scaly arm, from getting past her.

  —I haven’t any money.—

  She didn’t think of assuring that she was only waiting for ‘her friend’ to come back; of promising all would be set right and paid then—soon. It was only when she knew, quite simply, what to say that with that truthful statement another became true: she was not waiting. She was now one of the regular coterie of Tamarisk Beach, making out. She packed her bag and hung the room key on the board behind the unattended reception desk. The pyjamas she left under the pillows.

  How are things? Oh, I’m making out. At best, the phrase used on the beach meant one had found somewhere ‘to stay’ (‘to live’ belonged to a kind of claim left behind in the home country) or that a relevant liberation organization had created a title, Education Officer, Publicity Secretary, Liaison Assistant, that provided a chair, if not a desk, in an office, and a stipend even more modest than that of a rich aunt. She had neither job, nor stipend, nor anywhere to stay unless the beach was somewhere, until Christa Zeederburg (her name should be recorded along with that of the woman art director with the octopus eyes) provided a sleeping bag on the floor of some other people’s flat. It is possible the girl actually did sleep out at Tamarisk a couple of nights, taking the warmth of the sand and the thick air for harmlessness, recklessly unaware of danger, as in one of those anecdotes about small children who are found happily unharmed, playing with a snake. More likely that whomever she drifted away from the beach with in the evening found themselves saddled with her for the night. And it was quite customary for people who had a place to stay to allow others to dump their suitcases and duffle bags there. One might live out of such a base, calling in when one needed a change of clothes. Why did she have only one pair of jeans, with a broken zipper? What had happened to the clothes, most of them quite good, she had appropriated by right of a hunted status before she fled with her lover? Clothing of ‘European’ cut and style was short in a poor country trying to save foreign exchange; probably, to buy herself pawpaws and plantains, she sold the clothes in the wrong places (Christa Zeederburg reminisces) at poor prices, foolish girl, compared with what could have been obtained on the other kind of black market. Oh if Pauline, if Olga had known how little one could make out on, in money, comfort, calculation, principles and respectability, and stay healthy and lively, with good digestion and regular menstruation!

  But they were never to know, and no doubt she who had been their charge was to make sure she herself would forget.

  Poor countries provide for poverty. There was not only cheap over-ripe fruit that had improved her figure—Christa, of course, had found a swimsuit and sewn in the sag, so that those who had not slept with the girl watched with the envious desire to know more the sucking movement of the flat belly under wet yellow knit, and the deep rift of breasts into which sea water trickled down out of sight. There were all kinds of vendors of goods and services without the surcharge of overheads. She was outside one of those stone-and-polished-brass banks she had no more business to enter than the old crippled black man who sat on the pavement with his portable workshop spread neatly handy. For days she had been flapping along with a broken thong on her only pair of sandals; for a coin the shoemaker repaired the sandal while she leaned against the bank walls with a bare foot tucked up beneath her. The sun on Tamarisk had provided her with the free cosmetics of a dark, fruit-skin tan and a natural bleach of her hair. The heat made her languid and patient; she was enjoying the sureness with which hands like black roots snipped a little patch of leather to size, folded and sewed it, attached it to the broken thong and hammered flat to the sole the nail that was to hold it in place. It was just then that she experienced a surge of something, a falling into place of people passing that came from the unfamiliar moments of standing still while all flowed, as if one belonged there like the shoemaker, instead of being in passage. And the Africans, the Arabs, the Lebanese, and the Europeans from embassies, economic missions and multinational companies wearing tropical-weight trousers wrinkled at buttocks and knees by sweat, no longer were a spectacle but motes in a kind of suspension, a fluid in which she was sustained.

  A man among passersby noticed her in that moment; she did not distinguish him. But he had come into her orbit as others had done and were to do. A few days later Christa took her along to a friend’s flat. A free meal was never to be by-passed; on the way, she scarcely bothered to listen to Christa: —German fellow, I think he used to be in
import and export, now he’s going to represent a trade union foundation that’s helping to organize in industry here. He got friendly with Mapetla and that crowd from home. That’s how I know him, and now he’s after me all the time, you know how persistent Germans are, wants me to teach him how to organize among blacks! He’s a very generous fellow. He keeps giving me books, newspaper cuttings, I don’t know what else. You’ll see what a lunch we’ll have … he’s got a cook and everything.—

  He wasn’t one of the beach people. Hillela had never before seen their host, with his deep T-shaped transverse and vertical clefts where the razor could not reach properly in the stubby chin, the red underlip with dark patches like tea-leaves he had forgotten to wipe away, and imprisoned behind thick glasses in that botched face, magnified grey eyes with ferny lashes. They changed at once when he saw her. For him there was no need of introduction. —You can stand like a flamingo on one leg. With your bright pink skirt.—

  —Udi, what on earth are you talking about—this is Hillela, you don’t mind me bringing her along—

  —I am de-lighted … also, you are very welcome to bring along anyone of your friends … any time. I am glad her shoes are mended. But I wish she would be wearing her lovely pink skirt.— He held in his diaphragm with an almost military courtesy as he showed them into his livingroom.

  —I couldn’t. It’s Christa’s. Don’t you notice, she’s got it on?—

  —So? Oh you’re right… she has … So … But two legs, that’s not the same thing, that’s a bird of a different feather … how could I be expected …—

  There was fish cooked in green coconut milk, then the cook brought in a dessert called Zitronencréme he had been taught to make. Alsatian wine revived trade union anecdotes in Christa and set flowing one of those instant friendships of tipsy laughter. —Isn’t she wonderful, our Christa, with her funny oohs and aahs and her thick Boer accent?— —Hillela, do you hear that! From zat Cherman!— Even the mock insults were pleasing and approving. —Well, I’ve just heard him speaking Swahili to the cook, and I don’t hear you saying anything but jambo, jambo after how long? You’ve been here a year?—