A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  —And you?— The man’s attention raced flatteringly between the woman and the girl. —How long are you going to go on saying only jambo?—

  —Oh well, Hillela’s right about me … but she doesn’t need any Swahili, she’s on her way to Canada.—

  The atmosphere was not one in which kindly lies were necessary.—No, I’m not. Christa, you know I’m not.— The man smiled sadly at the charming head shaking curls in a disclaimer. —Good. You stay here. This’s a nice place. Hot, dull, poor, nice. Isn’t it, Christa. Let’s keep her here.—

  —Then will you give her somewhere to stay? You’ve got this big flat… how many rooms …— Christa tucked her head back to her shoulder, a child looking up round a palace. —All this to yourself. She’s sleeping under a kitchen table. I’m telling you! And there are cockroaches—oooe, I hate those filthy things—

  The other two laughed at her expression of horror, she laughed at herself; she who had survived interrogations and prison cells.

  —That is your Room 101, Christa. Now we know.— But neither of the women caught the reference to Orwell.

  Finishing the wine extended lunch. Hillela was not seen on Tamarisk that afternoon; they went off for a drive in his car, Christa still entertaining them, he solicitous and even momentarily authoritarian: —Fasten that strap across you, please. Now, this is how it opens—you try it once or twice, please—Hillela had not worn a seat-belt before. They were not compulsory back where she came from. —I feel like a kid in a pram.—

  —All right. I’ll adopt you.— It was said dryly, inattentively; he was turning out of his parking space into the street. Bicycles shot zigzag past and he called after them in Swahili, black-robed women congealed together out of the way. His lips pursed thickly on that chin, the chin pressed on the shirt-collar; he had about him the stubborn weariness of one who lives as a spectator.

  Udi Stück demanded nothing. Christa came home—she had a job as a part-time receptionist to an Indian doctor as well as her title as some kind of welfare officer at Congress headquarters—not sure whether or not to be pleased with herself. —I was only fooling, that day … But I bumped into Udi this morning, and you’ll never guess, he’s taken me seriously—he says he’ll give you a place to stay in the meantime. I was only fooling … I feel a bit bad … as if I pushed him to it, taking advantage because he’s so generous.—

  Hillela used the schoolgirl phrase. —Is he keen on you?—

  Christa’s burst of laughter that shook her like a cough: —Me? Oooe, I hope not! No-oo-o. That’s why I like him, poor old Udi, he’s not like the others who think once you’re on your own here, got nobody, no family … you can’t get away from them. That Dr Khan—I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep on that job. He’s always coming in and making some excuse to lean over to see what I’m doing. He presses his soft tummy against me. Oh it’s no fun being a woman. Sometimes.— She wriggled her shoulders in one of her exaggerated exhibitions of revulsion. —I can’t get over Udi taking me seriously … Oh I think he feels guilty, us with nothing, living all over the place, and he didn’t even have to leave Germany because of Hitler, he’s not a Jew. He’s got that lovely flat—didn’t you like the way the sittingroom has open brick-work at the top of the wall so’s the air comes in? And at night, there’s always a breeze from the bay, he’s so high up, it must be cool to sleep there. I only feel bad because of his wife—apparently his wife died last year and he sort of doesn’t want to have people around, he wants his privacy. But you must jump at it! You’ll have a room to yourself. Fish in coconut milk. That whatsis-zitron pudding—oh my god, I could eat that every day—She hugged the girl while they laughed.

  —But don’t you want to take the room, then?—

  —No, no-ooe, I’m okay here with the Manakas, I couldn’t leave Sophie and Njabulo. They’d be terribly hurt.— Christa, the real refugee, one who knew prison just as did the black refugee couple with whom she and her protégée were staying.

  It would surely be a relief to the Manakas not to have their tiny kitchen doubling as a bedroom any longer, but Sophie kissed the girl she had given shelter and was gracious as any Olga with a private bathroom and a rose to offer. —A-ny time. Bring your blankets and come back to us a-ny time. We always find a place for you. We must help each other in these strange countries. It is terrible, terrible to be far from home. But we must stick together, fight together, and we are going back!—

  So it was not for long that Hillela as a young girl slept on the beach or a kitchen floor and lived on over-ripe fruit and Sophie Manaka’s mealie-meal with cabbage. Trust her. That was the observation that went around on Tamarisk Beach. She was still seen there most afternoons, in the yellow swimsuit. She was part of the company that lay like a fisherman’s catch spread out on the sand, holding post-mortems on political strategies used back home, exchanging political rumours and sometimes roused, as a displacement of the self each had accustomed to living like this, by the arrival of a new member for their ranks, standing there urgently vertical to their horizontals, dazed, the tension of escape seeming to throb in the throat like the life pulsating in some sea creature taken from its element and peddled round the beach before them in the sun. Arnold of the Command or one of his designates usually accompanied such people; a bodyguard not against any physical dangers but to ensure that the relief of being ‘out’ and bringing firsthand news from home would not result in loose talk. A Beach Rat was sure to be grooming its whiskers in every group. It must be assumed that everything that was said on Tamarisk became what is known in the vocabulary of police files and interrogation rooms as intelligence, and would result back home in more arrests; more valuable people forced out to approach slowly, over the sand, to join the company.

  Arnold would walk up the beach with newcomers; they sat apart, and the flash of his rimless glasses was enough to keep away anyone who might think of joining them. Their absorption was intense as can be only in those in whom singleness of purpose has taken hold of every faculty of intellect and feeling, so that even if that purpose is to be frustrated for a lifetime in prison, or to be exercised far removed from the people and places where its realization begins to take place, all other purposes in life are set aside, perhaps for ever, because each in some way contradicts the single one. Arnold was a lawyer—like Joe—who would never practise law again; the law in his country enforced the very social order his purpose was to end. He had a wife—like Pauline?—with whom he would never set up home again in the house where only white people could live. His children would grow up here and there—like Hillela herself—without his knowing them; there could be no family life for whites, with blacks, at best, illegally given a place in their converted garages. Christa’s brother with his farm on land from which blacks had been removed could not be her brother while Sophie and Njabulo were her family. Mothering girls without a decent pair of jeans to their names, she could not have married the Afrikaner doctor in Brits who was in love with her, and mothered children he would take to the segregated Dutch Reformed Church every Sunday.

  Arnold, rising from a conclave, paused on the beach as a bee holds, in mid-air. At the signal of the flower-yellow swimsuit, he waded into the water. There was no surf. A transparent grass-green was a huge lens placed from shore to reef over sand like ground crystal. He kept his own glasses on when he swam; the image of the girl’s body under water swayed and shone, broke and reformed. His hairy toes struck him as ugly as crabs. He and she began to swim around each other. He had a soft way of speaking, conspiratorial rather than sexually modulated. —So you’ve got yourself nicely fixed up.—

  —Oh … ? Yes. Somewhere to stay.—

  —Clever girl. Lucky Udi.—

  —I was fine with Sophie and Njabulo but it was hard on them.—

  —Left the beach—high and dry.—

  She pinched her nose between thumb and forefinger and submerged herself, like a child at a swimming pool. When she came up, smiling, he was still talking.‘
/>   —You’d better watch out, with him.—

  —He’s a good friend of Christa’s, really nice. I’ve got a room as big as Sophie’s whole flat! You can see the town and the bay.—

  —Are you sure it’s to yourself?—

  She turned like a porpoise, floated on her back, water beaded her flesh with light in the sun, in his sight.

  —Well of course. I want Christa to come and share, but she won’t leave the Manakas.—

  —He won’t need an invitation in his own house.—

  She turned her head; not understanding, or thinking she ought to pretend not to? He took off his glasses, which she had splashed. The little beach girl was a lovely blur. He put them back again. —You’d better keep the door locked. Or maybe it hasn’t got one?—

  —Arnold … he’s an old man … old as my uncle …— It was in character with the footlooseness of this pretty girl, the ruptured kinships and displaced, marginal emotions of exile that, to his ears, made a slip of the tongue where the usual comparison would have been with a father.

  —You don’t know old men. The older we get, the younger we like ’em.—

  —Well how would you know, you’re not old.—

  —Thank you for those kind words, obvious as they are. Isn’t there anything you know without experiencing it for yourself?—

  Both floated on their backs now, and it was not only the water-jewelled breasts, down to where the yellow swimsuit just covered stiff nipples, that surfaced, but also the thick index finger and fist of his penis and testicles under their pouch of wet blue nylon. They saw what there was to be seen of each other, while feeling identical delicious coolness and heat—the water on submerged and the sun on exposed flesh.

  —Didn’t you hear what I asked?—

  —I thought you were telling me something.— A figure of such authority on Tamarisk; she had seen how the appearance of a line above the bridge of his nose made a voice stop short in mid-sentence, and how, when he was asked the kind of question that was not to be asked in such circles, his evasion of an answer came from complete intelligence of all that happened, was thought, discussed, investigated and decided there. What could he be interested in that she could tell him? The odd hours they had spent together (he worked very hard, even on Tamarisk he had time to take pleasure only when he left the last sandy foothold of the continent and entered the neutrality of the non-human element, the water) those times—caresses, the universal intelligence of pleasurable sensations, a rill from it present in wet coolness and heat, now—were the exchange with him in which she could take part. —I don’t know. Let me think.— Her eyes were closed against the sun; her smiling lips moved, he saw her so seriously young that she spelled out thoughts to herself the way children learning to read silently mouth words. The giant of desire woke in him to kiss her while she saw nothing but the red awning of her eyelids, and he slew him with the sling of priorities. Sexual pleasure was everyone’s right; dalliance when he had simply taken a breather from the discussion on shore was not something he himself or those who could watch from Tamarisk should tolerate.

  —No. Not really. No.— She kept her eyes closed, screwed up; the sun was making her see fire. —How can anyone know what hasn’t happened to them? People like you, who’ve been in prison … and once or twice others, I’d heard talking, back there. You can describe what it was like, but I … I never, I don’t really believe it’s all it’s like. The same with leaving the country. I was always hearing about it. I even once saw someone on his last night. But it’s only now that I’ve done it … it’s different from what you’re told, what you imagine. You are all different, all of you … from the speeches. Where I lived—at home, when I was still in what was my home—everything was read out from newspapers, everything was discussed, I went to a court once and there was another kind of talk, another way of words dealing with things that had happened … somewhere else, to somebody else … I couldn’t know. I can know what happens to me.—

  —You’ll burn your eyelids. Turn over. —But what you read, what you learn, what people tell you, what you observe—good god, that’s what happens to you, as well! Not everything can be understood only through yourself—what do you mean?—and anyway, isn’t your comprehension, your mind, yourself? What are you saying? You don’t trust anything but your own body? It’s a nice one, my god, certainly—but I don’t believe you know what you’re saying.—

  —Thinking about what happens to myself—yes, of course, that I can know.—

  —Someone needs to take you in hand, my girl. You are not a fully conscious being. I wish I had the time. And it would be quite pleasant … I can imagine the sort of home you come from. Girls the ornaments who spoil their decorative qualities and betray their class as soon as they begin to think. How in god’s name did you get here? I mean I know—but how’d you ever take up with that fellow? You know he was a liar and a double-dealer? He was for us and at the same time he was really working for PAC*? And maybe if we’d not run him out of here he would be working for the government back there, as well.—

  —He was collecting material for a book. That’s why he went all over the show, he had to talk to all kinds of people.—

  —And you believed that? What did you believe? That he was really one of us?—

  A pair of talking heads, buoys bobbing on the water, tethered to lazy fin-movements of hidden arms and legs. —Yes.—

  Impatiently, he gave her a chance to explain herself. She would not or could not. What a thicket of roses surrounded the power-drugged intelligence of the white sleepers; even dragged out through the thorns by some would-be prince turned betrayer, she could not recognize the lesson of wounds.

  —Why?—

  —I’d have to tell you too many things … Well, the family where I used to live—I just naturally thought, because of them, if white people were mixed up in that sort of thing at all, it was on your side. When I met his black friends, I didn’t take much notice … whether there was any difference. Between them, I mean. Whether they were yours or some, others’. It was part of his work to know them all.—

  —Yes, his work!—

  —And he was in danger—

  —Danger!— He scoffed.

  —The police came and raided, you know that, they turned out all our things, took all the stuff for his book … He was writing for the papers under different names—

  —And pushed different politics—

  —Really, I think you’ve got it wrong. He told me, he had to have cover, that’s why. Even his name. He even had to show up at parties given by people where I worked—and nobody talked about politics. Just there for a good time. Nobody gave a damn.—

  —Not you, either.— It was said in the tone of one wanting her to be otherwise.

  A man was swimming out towards them, his flailing arms black and defined in the heat-hazy radiance as the wings of a cormorant that skimmed the water.

  Their voices changed key with the approach of a third presence. —So you see … well, if you’re right, what I think is true: I believed him because I believed what he was telling me; and none of it was happening to me.—

  The swimmer was almost upon them; he didn’t wave; he might not be making for them at all, just setting for himself the limit of his own horizon.

  —Until the police came and gave you a big fright, ay?—

  Wet hair slapped her throat as she shook her head. —Until I came here.—

  By saying ‘I’ and not ‘we’ he saw she had begun to promise better human material. The girl was no longer jetsam on Tamarisk Beach. His desire for human dignity was gratified, his desire for the beach girl twinged with apprehension of loss. There was just time, before the black man, his sideways regard turned regularly upon them and away as his face was alternately hidden in water and lifted for breath in the movements of strong over-arm strokes, was upon them: —Don’t suppose I’ll be seeing you again.—

  Low enough, but she heard. —Why?—

  —Your elderly benefac
tor might object.—

  —I’ve told you.—

  —You’ll come?—

  As she slowly smiled the gestures and nod became a polite greeting for the head of the black man, now among them. To eyes accustomed to the radiance above water his blackness was a blow, pure hardness against dissolving light, his head a meteorite fallen between them into the sea, or a water-smoothed head of antiquity brought up from the depths, intact; basalt blackness the concentration of time, not pigment. Even the hair—black man’s kind of hair—had resisted water and remained classically in place as a seabird’s feathers or the lie of a fish’s scales.

  The man’s urgency did not acknowledge the girl. —Nwabueze’s been killed. A bomb in the car.—

  Neither man noticed her go, the siren turning yellow tail and diving away from the navigators of the world’s courses for whom, at that moment, in that ocean, she was no more than a distraction totally out of place.

  A series of mini-biographies of outstanding women cites the news of the assassination of an important West African leader as the turning-point in her political development. Why should it ever have been contradicted?

  But in that hour she was gliding and turning through water as perfectly tempered to the body as amniotic fluid, she heard no commotion but the sound of water getting into her ears and air breaking free in them through bubbles; the dead leader was a name. The real significance of the moment when the news was announced within a coral reef of the Indian Ocean was there, in another man, corporeal.

  They love you. They tell you they love you. Len when making the necessary despatch from Rhodesia because of that boy being coloured, Olga when handing over to Pauline, Joe—dear Joe—when he gave the money with which to escape them. When he called his son a bastard because nothing was said in that bed, not about love of fellow man, not about family love, not about sisterly, brotherly love, but it was done. Loved, let love. Used what you have to love with, you know? It is there, you feel it, it happens all over and inside you and there is no difference between you and the one you’re doing it with, you don’t have to try to reach him, help him, teach him—you can’t lie, or spy or kill, so what could ever be wrong about it? Left behind by my mother, they say, because of it; because they told her it was wrong. The man they call a double-dealer, who lied about Sweden and Germany: the place he told the truth was in bed, with his lovely body, the feelings he gave me were not his fantasies or his boasts. Those others, on the beach; they have no home—not out of clumsiness, a tendency to break what is precious—but because they are brave and believe in the other kinds of love, justice, fellow man—and inside each other, making love, that’s the only place we can make, here, that’s not just a place to stay.