A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  Tensions behind closed doors; nothing new to breathe, coming from there. Sometimes Olga and Arthur are quarrelling, sometimes it’s Pauline and Joe analysing, even once Len and Billie, and, maybe, when they were left behind, the sibling cousins—all discussing what is to be done about the one they took in. As for the men; is it the fault of women that they are, or seem, beautiful? That the African cottons over breasts that no longer are hot, tingling, and heavy with milk, but still keep the shape and fullness of it, draw more attention than Liberty silks? That one who has been a beach girl never loses what she found durable in herself while making out? And it was a mentor, not lover, who once remarked that every movement, look, turn of phrase, was flirtatious whether or not innocently so.

  No one else knows—maybe not even the disguised god from the sea himself, who is wise enough (or too preoccupied with matters greater than themselves) not to suspect his wife—that although this invitation of the body is written in eyes and mouth and stance, it keeps no rendezvous in London with any man but him.

  Only—something new has been learned, on the side, in the context of making out. One can offer, without giving. It’s a form of power.

  Casualties

  If Pauline and Joe had known it, the daughter of feckless Ruthie had what they couldn’t find: a sign in her marriage, a sure and certain instruction to which one could attach oneself and feel the tug of history. Pauline, for one, would have doubted Hillela was capable of appreciating this, while the irony of it was that her own children—Sasha and Carole—what direction had been given them, each with the highly-developed social conscience they had? Carole was jeered at by her brother for joining an all-white progressive youth group; Sasha himself, in his maddening changes of mood, had not allowed his father to arrange a further deferment for him to continue his study of law, but had gone into the army after graduating with a useless Bachelor of Arts degree. On weekend leaves he sat beside his mother at the family table in the murderous silence of a prisoner with his jailer. The love between them was a crude weapon each wanted to wrest from the other.

  Early in 1967 the men in the camps in Tanzania were transferred to a camp in Zambia. Whaila was sent to Lusaka. It was the end of waiting about in the anterooms of Europe and Africa, for him. —No more running around. We’ll be in Lusaka a long time.— Hillela took it as her instruction to find something other than temporary hospitality. The headquarters were not up any rotting staircase, this time, but a row of prefabricated huts in what had been a builder’s supply yard, with a high fence of hammered oildrums and access only from a lane. Whaila told her dryly; South Africa was too near for safety. He and his family moved into a cement-grey flat in Britannia Court; streets had been renamed since independence but the buildings where white people had gathered to live apart bore still the claim of their nostalgia. Families of black minor officials in the Zambian government and civil service were Hillela’s neighbours. The ivy of Africa, noisy-coloured bougainvillea, overran what had been a garden kept clipped by a Scottish caretaker’s ‘boy’ for a residents’ association; what associated the residents now was the cheerful tolerance of baby strollers, plastic tricycles and crates blocking the corridors, the day-long banging of the blistered glass front doors that led straight into the kitchens, the tramping up and down stairs of relatives from the country who had to be taken in, and the makeshift accommodation for these rigged up on egg-box balconies. The first nostalgia of her life began for Hillela with the smell of pap and cabbage; she was back in Njabulo and Sophie’s flat in Dar.

  Nostalgia implies the possibility of a home-coming. She had that, too, for the first time; a black husband in her bed, like anybody else behind the thin walls of Britannia Court, her baby exchanging snot and red earth with the other small children in the trampled garden; black, the same as they were. She tricked Whaila and soon was pregnant again, like any other young woman among her neighbours. She would not tell Whaila—there was still that expression round his mouth that set him apart from her, and that she did not want to provoke—until the right moment came, the moment when she had him beguiled. After all, he had said they would be in Lusaka for a long time. Christa had news of her and told Udi. —She’s settled down.— He smiled, as if Hillela were there and he were appraising her to herself. —Settled down. Mutter Courage, at home in war.—

  Christa took it as a compliment for the protégée who had held survival together with nothing but a large safety-pin.

  Afterwards, it seemed perfect, but it was not. It was happiness, it was life. There were people who noticed them criticise each other in those marital half-jests that surface in company. There were closer contacts with home, here, for Whaila—individuals who had emigrated rather than fled from there and were settled as doctors, teachers and clerks, and Zambians who in the colonial period had gone South to Fort Hare in the Cape to study, at a time when there were no universities in British-ruled territories. He spent evenings in male company, in the bars of what were still black working-class quarters of the town. She was disappointed at being left behind. He came home slightly drunk, sometimes—vulnerable, that expression of his gone from his mouth. They made love then in splendid tenderness. She pleased him so greatly that she was childishly proud of herself; and he delighted in this. They quarrelled when she told him she was expecting another child—then her childishness in tricking him annoyed him, she was ‘a spoilt little white girl without proper responsibility to the discipline of the struggle’—at which she looked as if she were going to cry but the tears spurted into a splutter of laughter at the pomposity so alien to his nature. —The struggle in bed?— —No, seriously, seriously, Hillela, this isn’t the time to go ahead with your big ideas of an African family—that’s what I mean.— But it was done, another one was on the way, so they might as well—what?

  —What is it now, Hillela?— She buried her head in his neck, her hair settled like a soft hand hushing his mouth. —Might as well make love, because we don’t have to bother about my getting pregnant.—

  Nevertheless the novelty of the first child gave way to inattentiveness, sometimes. She would leave her (everyone here knew the little girl was dedicated by name to the cause) with one of the other women—that was the easy African fashion, children sharing each other’s mothers. She went about with Whaila in the aura of closeness within which lovers move among rooms full of people, the personal pronoun of her conversation ‘we’ and never ‘I’, their appearance together consciously striking: the spare, obsidian dignity of the man and the miniature voluptuousness of a young girl whose pregnancy by him does not yet show in any other way. There are always women who resent such happiness, which they have never had, or have lost; it was remarked among white women: —Of course, she was there—displaying her black husband, full of herself.—

  Whaila had for her, beyond sensuality, a concentration within himself that kept her steadily magnetized. The presence of a power. It was related to, but not, in effect, the awareness she had had before the fallen statue. It did not bring fear. The concentration was like that a woman must feel when a general comes to her on the nights before a great offensive begins. A long culmination of tension was not only in his face, his lowered lids, but particularly in the lines of his back when she looked up and saw him standing dead still with urgency. So she shared, in the high emotion of some extraordinary purchase being taken on events, what he did not tell her: there was a decision to join military forces with Joshua Nkomo’s guerrillas fighting Smith’s army in Rhodesia. What Bra James had foreseen was about to be attempted. Umkhonto men would pass down Rhodesia guided by the guerrillas through the game park of the Western border, and hope to infiltrate South Africa by way of Botswana without encountering the Rhodesian army. It was the ultimate journey for which there had been years of others; for which the gatherings on Tamarisk, the discussions up rotting stairs and in the Manaka flat, the long wait in strangers’ lands, the missions to the cold hemisphere had been the victualling. Knowledge of it was growing in Whaila while he lay
beside her at night, as the foetus was growing in her. After caresses were over she would clasp his hand tightly in friendship.

  The trees in the streets wore puttees of whitewash, the clay-piped calves of the Governor’s guard, petrified, left behind. Splashes of blood in garden green were the poinsettias the songololo wound past in Salisbury. But Len was dead and his little sweetheart did not know that he was buried, would stay for ever, in this country to the North where she, too, had been assured she was going to be for a long time. The moment of falling into place that had come to her while a street shoemaker mended her only pair of sandals had been an assurance rather than a premonition of how she moved among the people in this town. The skill of the watchmaker, at his fruit-crate table in the push and flow of the pavement, whose concentration on the ordering of a confetti of wheels and screws was fine as the minute tools that handled them, made her marvel as skills that put a man to walk in space did not. She would pause to see him drop each tiny component of his whole exactly where it must go, and he and she had a greeting for each other; he gave the child the present of an old pocket watch as a plaything. Although she never had her shoes shined, she was acquainted with the man whose violent-coloured home-concocted polishes were ranged at the kerb in old medicine bottles. The opportunity taken by taxi drivers to wash their cars with water from a broken main was the kind of making out, stepping across the streams, she understood. When the little girl lagged against her mother’s hand, whining to play in the mud, the men reproached her. —You want to make your nice dress dirty? Why you want to make work for your mother? She so nice to you.— So, in laughter, Hillela became their acquaintance, too. A sign painter whose workshop was the hulk of an old truck parked on the route she walked from Britannia Court past Sandringham Mansions and Avonlea Place to town, was closer to her sense of reality than the dispensation of white wine at an advertising agency. She jostled and pushed along with the gaiety of the women who lined up in a soft-breasted, loud-mouthed army when a supermarket received supplies of cooking oil, and she was at ease in the caper with which they at once set up their own economy of distribution, getting their children to pour the oil from cans into small bottles for resale at the profit of a coin, and leaving the mess—broken bottles, spilt oil—of their defiance of the supermarket’s distribution on its doorstep; A young man made furtive by poverty and the unfamiliarity of a town tried to sell her a ‘stick’—a single cigarette from the packet which was his capital and stock-in-trade. —I don’t smoke.— When the white girl smiled and spoke instead of seeming not to see him, as he quickly had understood white women usually did, he begged for work. —I don’t have people working for me. — —I can be good for kitchen, garden boy. Please madam.— She did not know if he had enough English to understand, but she was moved by some overflow, pride or plenty, to tell him. —I’m not a madam. We are refugees from down South. My husband’s like you …— Not quite true, of course; but if Whaila, the son of a Bettie or a Jethro, had not had a spirit resistant and brain bright as obsidian, it might have been.

  The fullness overflowed into her friendships with women. She fell in love—the young mother’s equivalent of the school-girl pash—with this one or that, spent her days in the bosom company of the favourite and their pooled children, while Whaila was behind the tin security fence in town or out at the camp conferring with Nkomo’s men. Sela is the only one who has ever heard from her again. At one time, Hillela left Whaila’s bed only to walk down to Sela’s house. The children played in the garden, looked after by Sela’s relatives, and the two women settled in the cosy dark cool of the livingroom. Sela had her own car but her lively friend scarcely ever could get her to go out; she sat in calm and stillness, strangely like an object of contemplation rather than in contemplation. Before it, everything could spill over, spill out. There must have been many things about Hillela which she alone could tell; she has never offered them to anybody.

  Selina Montgomery and Hillela Kgomani—personages in some race joke: there was this black woman married to a white man, and this white woman married to a black man … The quartet would have made a neat quadrilateral relationship if not a perfect circle, had Whaila had time for social life that did not in some way further the cause, and if Russell Montgomery had been materially present. Among the crocheted doilies of missionary artisanship and hammered copper plates representing idealized tribal maidens or trumpeting elephants that were African bourgeois taste, there hung in the dimness Edward Lear watercolours of Italy and Stubbs sporting prints swollen with humidity and spotted as blighted leaves. Russell St. John Montgomery was an engineer whose family made a colonial fortune two generations earlier in those raw materials that were exported and sold back, transformed, to those who could afford them. He himself was transformed; he came back to Africa as the member of the family who married a black girl instead of paying her forebears a few British pence a day to labour in field, plantation or mine. She was older than Hillela and had been married twelve years; his engineering projects, begun before independence to help build her new Africa, were more and more delegated to other hands and he spent more and more of his time attending to inherited interests in England and Scotland.

  The children with whom Nomzamo played, decorating mud pies with the torn bloody strips of poinsettias and serving them on the split giant pods of the mahogany tree, were not really Sela’s but those of her relatives—she had no servants but many collateral retainers who lived in the back yard and the empty rooms of the house, and brought in at eleven and four o’clock cucumber sandwiches or soda-tasting scones on the tea-tray. A photograph of two coloured boys in kilts stood on the piano. (They had not come out beautifully black as the namesake.) A schoolgirl in a pork-pie hat smiling obediently to a photographer’s command over the crinkly plait fallen across her shoulder, looked down at her mother from the wall. Sela’s children were in England at the schools Russell and his sisters had attended. —He entered them when they were born.— She had a way of stopping to reflect after a short statement; and then saying something that, perhaps, was not what she might have said. —It’s very hard to get into those schools, apparently.—

  —I wish I’d known you when we were in England! A house in London and one in Scotland! But you weren’t there, Sela, were you—why aren’t you ever there?—

  Sela’s heavy and beautiful head was coiffured in sculptural wedges that seemed carved not combed into place, like those of the wooden figures vendors from Zaïre hawked in Cairo Road. She wore the gold, garnet and diamond Victorian ear-rings of Russell’s family jewels dangling to her neck, and from there down the matronly dresses and, no matter how great the heat, the tight varnish of stockings and the high-heeled shoes of a colonial generation of white women who had been her teachers. —When I was studying for my thesis, I stayed there. When I was young. The children were small. But Russell will invite you to his house. Russell has a lot of visitors, his friends. When you go back, you’ll see him.—

  —Oh no, we’re here for good. Well, quite a long time. However long it takes, Whaila says.—

  Sela had great delicacy. Her manner stopped any indiscretion that might be coming from Hillela about what it was rumoured was being planned behind the tin security fence; whatever indiscreet fantasy of imminent triumph and freedom, down South, the young girl was about to flaunt.

  —But don’t you like London, Sela? I had such a good time. To have a house in London, of your own! I’ve never been to Scotland, but I suppose that must be something, too. Why don’t you spend part of the year there? Isn’t it lonely for Russell? I was so often alone in London when Whaila had to go away—I couldn’t stand it, I moved in with friends.—

  —There’s this house to see to. My family. Always a lot of problems with our families, such big families … now my father is dead and my mother has to deal with the uncles. The children come out for the holidays—in their summer, over there. And there’s the garden.—

  If Hillela did not find her friend in the dark house within its c
ave of towering trees, she was in her garden, the tightly-stockinged legs kneeling on a sack and the other family’s jewels looping forward over her flesh-ringed soft neck. Sela talked of her gardening as she might have been expected to talk of her profession as a physicist—with the achievement and concomitant responsibility of a vocation. She was the first woman in her country to graduate with a Master’s degree in science, one of the first to have a university education at all, let alone at an Ivy League American institution. She was not teaching at the local university ‘at present’, she said, in the tone of an official communiqué, and had not for a length of time she did not mention. On one of the few occasions when she appeared at a gathering, Hillela heard her respond to the reproachful bonhomie of one of the deans of the university. —It wouldn’t be fair for me to take a teaching post, I am away so much, you see, in England.— Her little white friend came up to her and embraced her, and Sela did not know why; well, she was an impulsively affectionate girl and the atmosphere at parties went to her head.

  An odd couple. The women friends, not the Montgomerys or the Kgomanis. But while Hillela chattered and Sela, silent, attentive, overcast the seams of tiny dresses Hillela was sewing for her daughter, they complemented each other in a way nobody saw. Hillela, who had been like a daughter, had no longer a comparative status; was at the centre of a life in her marriage to a black man. Sela, in her marriage to a white man, for all her dowager dignity assumed at thirty-six was only making out; and Hillela had been a prodigy at that.

  *

  Yes, she knew them all. Except Mandela and the others with him. Mandela remained the voice on tape heard when she was a schoolgirl. Mandela was in prison down South, off the very last peninsula of Africa, pushed out to an island in the Atlantic by white men who frightened themselves with rhetoric that his kind would cast them back into the sea by which they came. Her old friendship with Tambo dates from those days when she used to serve him tea at Britannia Court and somehow produce enough food to go round whomever Whaila brought home. There hasn’t been anything she hasn’t profited by, at one period or another; the cuisine at the Manaka flat stood her in good stead, in its day. Oliver Tambo, even then, had the eyes of sleepless nights behind his thick glasses, and the opacity of flesh that, as it did in Whaila, marks the faces behind which decisions must be made: loosed boulders whose thundering echoes a passage out of sight, into consequences that cannot fully be foreseen. Tennyson Makiwane was one of those who came to Britannia Court, too—another namesake; inheritor of Victoriana—who was there in a Xhosa family who admired Tennyson? Tennyson Makiwane gave Nomzamo a stray kitten he had taken in—Makiwane who outcast himself, years later, from the cause for which, like the other frequenters of Britannia Court, he lived then; a man whose shame was obliterated for him by a traitor’s death.