A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  *Pan Africanist Congress

  Trust Her!

  The young guest did a little typing—a task invented by her host to make her feel useful—and some evenings played the guitar for him and sang those old coffee-bar songs, ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun’, while swallows flew in and out of mud nests they had made in the brick lattice of his livingroom. He would not come to Tamarisk to swim; would not accept her casual invitation to join her, any time, when she went to the Manakas’. Njabulo Manaka had permission from the Command in exile to live outside the camp provided for refugees, but his friends were those who still lived in the camp. Some on their way to refuge had been captured in Northern Rhodesia and repatriated by the British colonial authorities; they had had to escape from the police at home, once again. Some were from the areas, at home, of hut-burnings and rural police posts whose methods of interrogation, the sjambok, suffocating plastic bag over the head, heavy boot on the spine, were less sophisticated than city facilities of electric shock. The office space up rotting stairs, the administrative titles, the few chairs were not sufficient to accommodate everyone who got away, even at that early stage, and neither did everyone have the education to be of use there. Along with other rank and file, from the cities, these men waited in the camp to be sent to the countries where the Command was negotiating for them to receive military training for their future as freedom fighters. A world refugee organization fed them meagrely, and although the host government made it a condition of refuge that they should not take jobs from local inhabitants, a few, like Njabulo himself, while waiting clandestinely made use of skills they had that most local inhabitants didn’t have: he worked as a garage mechanic.

  The smell of mealie-meal and cabbage that never cleared from the Manaka flat wafted out a signal: food and privacy among friends, with a woman in charge. The cushions of the old sofa that had one wooden arm missing never recovered shape from the impress of one trio of behinds before another flattened them. The snorting gulp of the lavatory emptying was as constant a punctuation of talk as laughter, argument, and the greetings of new arrivals. In the company of Christa and Sophie there was no question of women being ignored; and hadn’t the girl slept there, on the kitchen floor, like any one of them? Many did not frequent Tamarisk Beach, feeling out of place in that high-ranking, half-naked, intellectual colloquy, and did not know the difference between the status of this white girl and that of Christa the revolutionary, one of themselves.

  Newspaper cuttings and smuggled reports on the Lilliesleaf trial were coming to the office. —It’s a white man who betrayed everything, all of us! Terrible, terr-ible. That’s what I always said, we whites in the movement must be ve-ery careful, if anything happens through one of us, what is our position with blacks? Who’s going to accept us? We going to isolate ourselves, we not going to be trusted ever again … I thought when I met that Gotz fellow … I don’t know … He was too eager to tell you all about himself, make a clean breast of it, you know—ek is ’n ware Afrikaner, plaas seuntjie, maar—like some religious conversion he wanted you to be convinced of. Ag, man, I felt like telling him, I’m an Afrikaner, too, plaas meisie, it’s not such a big deal that you’ve come over to the movement. But some of them, they did think he was a catch for us—

  —Meantime, they were on the hook—Christa’s soprano distress was counterpointed by the low, black bass.

  —Oh my god, they were. And the way he went for the women! Well, you see what one of them let herself in for … Oh he tried something with me, but I never liked him, I never trusted him, he was clever all right, he smelled out that I didn’t and then he kept clear. Terr-ible. Terrible fellow. And look what he’s done. A white’s blown the whole High Command.—

  The volubility of high spirits that was Christa had changed to hysteria. In the silence of the black men on the old sofa she struggled against some kind of responsibility that suddenly had come between them and her.

  —And in Umkhonto? There’s infiltration there already. And Lilliesleaf, you’ll see, as the State brings them into the witness box, there’re blacks who were mixed up with informing there, too. Just the same, Christa. A thing we don’t know how to deal with. A pro-blem.— In this company the euphemism took on weight with a long, round African O.

  —But not right among the High Command. Close to them, eating with them, talking to them about important things with a tape-recorder going under his clothes or wherever it was, even under a pillow in bed, ugh, it disgusts me. Look, Njabulo, ever since I read that this morning my hands have been shaking—look, Elias—

  —No, man, traitors are traitors. He’s right. But the brothers at home will know what to do with them, don’t worry.—

  —With the High Command in jail? With life, if they don’t get hanged? Not worry?—

  —Anyway, those bastards who put them there, they won’t live to get old.—

  —Who’s going to get Gotz in a location alley, the way they’ll get the black ones? I’ll bet he’ll live a long life of promotion in the police or become a successful private detective, spying for divorce cases. I know the Boere. He can use his tape-recorder under some more pillows.—

  —Is there anything new from Umtata and Engcobo?—

  —I don’t know, I didn’t see …—

  —Oh I asked Johnny. He showed something from the Star, just said the usual, ‘peasant unrest’ still going on among the Tembus. ‘Agitators’ are still at work.—

  —Man! Tax was almost doubled for us there from nineteen-fifty-five up to nineteen-fifty-nine. You know? Ever since, how we have been suffering! You remember Dalindyebo’s meeting in sixty-one against the rehabilitation scheme? That thing that took our land and pushed us tight together like cattle? A thousand chiefs came to that meeting. By the time I was grown up, Influx Control wouldn’t let us out to find jobs. My uncle was chief in our place, he didn’t want us forced back into the reserves, so the government made another man chief in his place. They do those things! My uncle was the one who said, They just want us chiefs to sign a piece of paper that says, destroy me, baas. He said, Let them destroy us without our signatures.—

  —You know, we should have been better organized in the Western Cape, man. Too many Tembus who were working on contract around Cape Town joined Poqo instead of us.—

  —Well! What do you know about the unions? ANC-affiliated unions were pretty active, I was working in one.— Christa shed her self-assumed burden at the turn towards a subject where the integrity of her contribution could not be questioned, even by herself.

  Among such talk her protégée must have felt at ease, even if she were an impostor in its implied status. She had listened for years to people talking about these people; now they were real, the daily strategies of survival preoccupied them also, as these did her. There was much grumbling talk to which, at least, she could contribute, of where to get ordinary comforts they had taken for granted under oppression at home—soap and razor blades, batteries and insecticide sprays, in short supply here. People from the Command office might not meet these men on Tamarisk, but they kept close to them beneath barriers of sophistication and education through that other place in themselves nothing could alienate, where no bane of conquest, law or exile had ever touched them—the relationships codified in their language, the common embrace of their own tongue. People from the office ran classes in political and general subjects in the camp, and often one or the other would come on to Njabulo and Ma Sophie’s to continue a point of discussion that would ravel into small-talk in English and their own language. Johnny Kgomani was there a few times, when the girl was; the one who had swum out with bad news. —We are spoiled, man, that’s what it is. We all had it too soft. Wilkinson’s Sword, passes in our pockets, first-class prisons …— He watched faces waver from solemn acceptance or resentment to laughter. He had a way of drawing his lips to a line and giving a twitch to his nostrils, the skull mocking himself within the tight modelling of his face. Sophie translated for Christa and Hill
ela what the laughter was about.

  There were not enough tin spoons or forks to go round at the Manakas’. Everyone got a plate piled by Ma and ate neatly African-style with their fingers, balling stiff pap the way a dung-beetle efficiently rolls together its cargo with the tips of prehensile legs. It was easier to learn to do that than to handle chopsticks at a Commissioner Street Chinese restaurant; and further than a few streets away from the embroidered place-mats, Bavarian crystal glasses and Zitronencréme where Hillela had herself nicely fixed up, now. There was not much chatter to join, round Udi’s table. He sometimes went out to dinner but the impression left with her was that while she was staying with him they had always been alone at meals; the servant, with that air servants have (even Bettie, Jethro) of suppressing judgments that await their time, passed behind the two chairs, presenting each dish silently to the master of the establishment before dispensing the interloper’s share. After she had been occupying her large, cool room for a few days, Udi asked her not to continue making her own bed in the mornings. —Mohammed thinks you don’t sleep in it. It upsets him.—

  Her laughter, her guitar, the slap of her sandals, the clear-struck notes of her voice—each time these sounded they seemed to make a splash into the stillness of those rooms.—Does he think I liked sleeping on the floor so much I can’t give it up?—

  —I don’t think he knows you slept on the floor. Though I could be quite wrong … in the kitchens, they know everything about all of us, it’s all picked up in the markets.—

  —So where does he think I sleep?—

  The ferny, magnified lashes moved dismissingly. Udi did not quite smile. —That’s the trouble.—

  Arnold had warned her. But if this was the to-be-expected approach, broached in a European way she was supposed to interpret, she could always appear not to understand. And it would not be Udi’s way to be obliged to be explicit; although there were many things she did not know or understand that he did explain. Why wouldn’t he get up out of his eternal chair and turn off his eternal Bach and Penderecki (the latter had to be explained, his music had not been among the records in Joe’s collection) and come along to the Manakas’? He had said Christa’s friends were his friends, any time. Christa had invited him again and again. The flat was only just down the road, in the old part of town.

  —I am not lonely. A dear girl to worry … I am alone, that’s different. Like the difference between the pink flamingo balanced on one leg and someone else wearing a pink skirt.—

  She told him he was a stick-in-the-mud, coaxingly. Alone must be lonely. —To have another meaning for ‘alone’ there have to be two of you.—

  —One can love one’s neighbours at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible. D’you know who said that true thing? Said it for me. A man named Ivan to his brother Alyosha, in a book called The Brothers Karamazov.—

  Among all the possessions he had in that deep room with the frieze of live swallows, the African drums each with its ashtray and pipe beside each chair, the collection of Malian and Nigerian masks on the walls, the Fon hangings, the rugs from Khartoum with their counter-pattern of his pipe-burnings, the wall covered with shelves of damp books that gave the place its own bodysmell—there must have been that same novel. Again that novel. He didn’t have to explain about that! —I’ve read it, long ago.— She wouldn’t be expected to remember the whole of such a long book, even if she had.

  —That’s why, although I believe all this (the room was kept dim against heat, the spines on the shelves shone titles of studies of revolutions, of colonialism, communism, social democratic theory)—all that Christa goes to prison for, I sit here in this chair … I can’t take part. That’s why I’m worried about this trade-union foundation thing … nearly as bad as politics. If only what Teacher—you know that’s what the people call him, our President?—says could be true: ‘People, not money’ make development. The trouble is, I’m stupid enough to believe in what is being attempted in this place since the British got out … and anyway… I can’t go away. And I can’t just sit here and approve out of books. So there you are … at this time in my life … It’s funny, some people open the bible to see what message a page has for them. I find my message any-old-where. Listen to this I’ve just read, here. ‘He avoided all the confusion and absurdity present in the efforts of those who say they are living for others’—now it goes on—‘but in fact are living on others—on their gratitude, their opinions, their recognition’. The first part of that sentence—that used to be me. The second half—that’s what I am now. The president invites me. The minister thanks me.—

  —We all thank you.— She pulled a prim, pert face, her aubergine-coloured, shining eyes contradicting it. He saw that he amused her; she would not say ‘I thank you for taking me off the beach, off the kitchen floor, using your influence with the immigration men to let me stay on in this town that has no place for me, where, if I have a reason to be, it is not the kind provided for on application forms!’ Impossible for this girl not to be flirtatiously elusive, even with someone as clearly out of the running as himself; it came naturally from her as the sweat that, with the rising humidity of midday, painted on her lip a little moustache of wet that must taste salty to her lovers.

  Udi showed Hillela something of the country. Around about that time—just before she started working in the curio shop,—he drove her along the coast for the weekend. —I am going to take you to Bagamoyo, where Livingstone started out to cross Africa from east to west.— But when they got as far as the new hotel where he had intended they should return to spend the night on the near side of the historical destination he had in mind, she hung back irresistibly. She ran to marvel at it from all perspectives, from sand so hot she danced across it as a fakir over the white ash of a bed of coals, to the cool of palms, remnants of the oil plantation the site once had been, now reified by a Scandinavian landscape gardener into his idea of a tropical garden. Her benefactor took his first photograph of Hillela there; the shadow of a palm tree falling before her. It could be measured for progress, like notches on a doorpost, against that other souvenir image under a palm.

  He didn’t insist on continuing the drive according to schedule; was content to study, as one standing back in a museum from a canvas whose conception he could not share but was fascinated by, her greedy pleasure in the post-colonial kitsch of the place—a Holiday Inn pervasion of piped music over poolside bars and buffets composed of a German-Swiss chef’s attempt at reproducing his kind of food out of unidentifiable flesh and fowl decked with hibiscus flowers—all housed within a facsimile, as Udi informed her, of the 13th-century palace of Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman. She ate the food with appetite. She had seen there were boats for hire and did not want to waste time accompanying the Arabian Nights-garbed black boy who would show them to their rooms. Under the sun of two in the afternoon, that was not in the sky but was the sky, had consumed both sky and sea in a stare of pure and terrible light, the black boat with the thin black oarsman slid away into dazzling evanescence. They sat side by side in the stern. The only detail to cling to in this total blankness of light was the legs of the oarsman, dark and sparsely hairy as the dried skin of a mummy. But when they reached the limit of the reef, heard the ocean open the roar of its surf at them, and the boat turned back, he, Udi, saw in the distance the entrancing pleasure palace she had been able to see all along, a mirage of the coast’s past, shimmering there.

  He took his hetaira to see something he could show her, even if she wasn’t interested in Bagamoyo. They drove along narrow parallel tracks with grass stroking the underside of the car and thick shrubs running screeching thumbnails along the windows. Wind-maimed trees closed over, and they left the car. He led the way. At first she saw only the butterflies, so many they softly pulsated the still, dense air. Small white flowers scented it. She buried her face where the butterflies did. The competitive selection of nature—shiny, thick-tongued trees that had starved scrub from beneath them to make a c
learing for plants and grasses; creepers and lianas closing off arbors where other trees had made the mistake of flourishing too close together—had created what seemed a garden; or there was the pattern of a human rearrangement of nature, far back, still faintly discernible under the natural aesthetic of growth, as the outline of a lost city may be traced from the height of an aircraft. Then she saw the pieces of china among the green; who had lived here, once, and owned beautiful things that got broken and were thrown away? But these were not broken vessels—they were tiles? Their azure, their unfaded brilliant designs were not designs but fragments of Arabic script? She had seen it, in her adoptive city. Wait, wait; he took her hand. With his other, he pushed aside creepers, lianas and webs: gravestones were sunken there, leaning; they were faced with the tiles, ornately embellished by their scrolling colours, like the pages of an illuminated manuscript. What was written? But he did not know the language, he couldn’t tell her. —Nothing out of the ordinary, I’m sure. Christians have a line from the bible on their tombstones, these will be the same sort of quotation, consolation from the Koran. The only interesting thing to make out would be the dates, if there are dates. I’ve always meant to come with someone who could read Arabic … This cemetery is probably six hundred years old. Under the Imams of Muscat in the Persian Gulf, this whole coast from Mogadishu to Mozambique was ruled by the Sultan of Zanzibar.—