He took her gloveless hand and tucked it under his arm between the thicknesses of his enormous coat, laughing. How old could he be? Old enough to be her father, her grandfather, in terms of the wars, invasions, military occupations, uprisings, imprisonments he had lived. The restaurant was warm, warm. A conservatory. It had palms under its glass dome and the waiters were crook-backed and wispy-haired. So was the violinist who played from table to table. Her host ordered little packets made of stuffed vegetable leaves, fish soup, a duck dish and a veal dish, and ‘a wine that isn’t exactly champagne, but it will make you happy tomorrow’. He touched his big head; no headache. He tasted from her plate and encouraged her to taste from his. The wan violinist, bent in one curve with his instrument, came over and played passionately to her, and her new friend was delighted to see that she was not embarrassed, as so many women would think it necessary to be, but listened as if receiving what was her due as a rather beautiful young woman—whether it was the cold they had tramped through, or some private mood, she gave the impression of a coursing of new blood through the vessels of her being, a brilliance of colouring and brightness of gaze, a flow of words. —I’ve been rescued, too. A few times. A bullet went into a door instead of me. But nothing like you … More like a beetle that’s flicked out of a swimming pool. I used to lie on my stomach and do that, as a kid. There’d be rose beetles that had fallen into my aunt’s pool, and I’d flip out one, and let the others drown. Why that one?—
—Someone may just be passing by—that’s the only chance. Two boys teased the girls together in the school yard; then he happened to be President, and I was in jail. So I got flicked out. What are you looking round for? Is there a man you don’t want to see you with another man? But look at my grey hair.—
—No … Is it all right to talk about anything, here?—
He laughed. —Oh I know what’s worrying you, there have been times when we couldn’t talk, either … but it’s all right—everybody talks, everybody says what they think, it doesn’t change anything, now …—
—What do you believe?—
—Ah, that’s the kind of talk my friend the President says we used to have at sixteen! But you’re not much more than that yourself—no, no, I’m insulting you when I think I’m paying you a compliment. You are a woman. Nothing less.— He had asked about a husband, children, and she had told him, walking across the bridge.
—You were against the old regime, you were a socialist when you were young.—
He signalled with a full mouth; he enjoyed his food. —Like everyone. Like you, yes?—
—No. No. I didn’t know what it meant. Everybody told me, explained—but I was white, you see.—
—What has that to do with it? There are white, black and yellow socialists, millions of them …—
—White made it impossible to understand. For me, anyway. Everybody talked and argued, and I thought about other things. And whenever I heard them again, they were still talking and arguing, living the same way in the same place. Liberalism, socialism, communism.—
—What other things? I don’t know what life must be like, down there.—
She sat back against her chair, smiling for herself; the movement drew him to lean towards her across the table in the familiar invitation and approach between a woman and a man.
—Someone to love. A man. Somewhere to go.—
—Where there would be—what?—
—What the others didn’t know about.—
—And did you know what that was?—
—No. But I knew it wasn’t to be found in their talk, they would never find it. Oh it sounds such rubbish—but I’ve never tried to tell anyone before. Oh and now I’m getting like them, all the people I behaved so badly to, I’m talking, talking.—
—You weren’t asking me about God, were you? For god’s sake, my dear! Here religion has been allowed again to offer its soporific until you wake up in the next world, as even we can’t seem to get this one right. But I stick to my cigarettes and wine.—
—Not that. Can I ask you something—you were in that uprising, and this is a communist regime; does that mean you’re no longer a communist? If that’s so, how could you be running that meeting this afternoon? For the Ministry of Culture?—
He put up a large, long-fingered hand with a thin seal-ring on the third finger. He made to comb down the moustache but stopped himself fastidiously as if a gesture might trivialise seriousness or honesty. —It’s right that you should ask me. Don’t be afraid. If we are going to be friends, in your position you must know about me, my dear.—
—My position?—
—Your somewhere to go is right at the centre of this century. In my country you’ve come to ask for backing from the regime, and you’ve got to get that backing. That must be your one and only objective. You must be careful not to give any impression that you have fraternising connections with dissatisfied, critical elements in our population.—
—So you’re no longer a communist.—
—I have been a Marxist since I was sixteen and I’ll die one. That’s what I’ve spent years of my life in prison for, whether it was the fascists or capitalists who put me there, or whether it was the comrades who called me a revisionist. I don’t want this to come back.— He made a conductor’s gesture, taking in the palms, the chipped gilding, the weary servility of the old waiters. —I don’t want my grandfather’s estate with its illiterate peasants dying of tuberculosis. People like me are run down, I can’t afford to buy foreign books anymore, I have to burn them—excuse me, I learnt that from the British, during the war—through boring myself stiff in cultural organizations, I can travel to Rome to see my beloved Piranesi wall only by getting myself invited to conferences—(short of breath or caught by laughter)—bourgeois hardships! But life is better for people who were wretchedly poor before. I wanted that. I still want it. That’s freedom, too. You see, it’s turned out that freedom is divisible. My schoolfriend is right. And I still prefer the way it’s divided here to the way it’s divided in the great riches of the West.—
A moment later he filled her glass and put a hand on her wrist. —But don’t go asking your kind of question among people here.—
—Oh I should keep my mouth shut! But—again—you see, being in this kind of country’s not like talking about it. Reading about it. I read quite a lot, in Ghana—the university library … because Whaila—he hadn’t been brought up in a house with books, the way I was, but he’d managed somehow to know so much; so much you need to know. For me, everything happens for the first time, for him everything grew out of what had already happened. I just think about how to manage; the way people do it, wherever you find yourself.—
—It’s all right with me. With me you don’t have to worry.—
—No, but I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have started asking. I don’t even know you.—
—There are some people who have never been strangers.—
No need to explain why some subjects were invaded out of sequence by others; talk between them wove back and forth closely a pattern of its own; their pattern. While he was examining the bill, spectacles balanced on his nose but not hooked behind the ears, she set out firmly before herself like a hand at cards to be read:—You have an empty place where they were shot, we … Some are buried in the veld, nobody knows where, maybe hyenas have dug them up. He died on the kitchen floor. Another family eats there, now, there’s a housing shortage.—
He was querying an item, kindly, with the wraith-faced waiter, and counted out notes in their language, but he knew what she was saying to him. —Yes, we are lucky. Yours is the hardest kind of struggle, in its worst phase—a battle going on in exile, with no place that belongs even to the dead. That is the greatest dispossession there is. Even to be in prison in your own country is to have a place there. I know.— As a cat sees the movement of a mouse while apparently not looking its way, he noticed the bottom of her glass was still coloured, and drank off the mouthful of wine left. A drop
shone on the brush of moustache. She thought she felt it, although that was ridiculous, it must have been the frost of the streets, the wind across the river, when he kissed her goodnight under the statue without a nose above her apartment building’s entrance. It was a kiss on either cheek, but not the butterfly flit of the Ambassador’s household. It was of the order of the handclasp; to which she belonged, held by the hand of the dead.
A warning was not necessary for a good worker like Hillela. She had—she made—all the right connections. Citagele has always admitted he never anywhere had anyone more energetic (even if she was a woman, even if she was white). And watchful; as if life depended on never forgetting for a moment what they were there for. She entered various circles, or drew from these a certain circle around her—it is not possible that one did not attract people, whether she had the heart to or not. From among them she cultivated the most useful—nothing new in that, for her, but the focus was different, and calculated, as it had not been. So she disappears. She disappears into what is known about the mission, in that country at that time. No history of her really can be personal history, then; its ends were all apparently outside herself. There was someone named Pavel—he was not a native of that country but an envoy or expert sent from outside; Karel had told her there used to be many of them, ‘experts’ watching even members of the government, but now they were fewer—only their army units remained stationed in certain parts of the country.
Pavel was young and did not limp. Surely more to her taste, but how can anyone know? He had the wild face associated with ballet dancers who defect to the West, and that face was the centre of a group of State officials and press functionaries who met often in the same café or at the apartment of a painter. —From Africa. You are strange to us like a giraffe.— She had the answer for this first remark addressed to her. The namesake was with her: — Today I went to the hairdresser, and the girl who was cutting my hair spoke a few words of English. She gave Nomzamo chocolate and pointed at her—‘Where did you get that?’—
—Maybe she thinks at hard currency shop, like any other luxury she knows foreigners can buy.—
The café was for repartee, the painter’s apartment for discussion where attitudes outside the insulation of book-and-canvas stacked walls, between other, official walls, could be gauged, and the movements up and down the ladder of influence and favour traced, even advanced or retarded. They made conclaves there, in their own language, but broke into English in the company of English-speakers. She heard Karel referred to as ‘the hero of the revolution’. Why was he called that? —Because that’s what he is, we have One Hundred Heroes of The Revolution, old boys who fought the Germans and were honoured by our first communist government after the war. The trouble is, some of them think that’s a free pass to grab everything that’s going, for the rest of their lives.— —Well, the Minister knows all about the Hero, so there’s no danger he’ll get the Embassy appointment in London.— —Oh but he’s got a friend higher up than that.— —Maybe. But there are jobs younger men need to do, it’s not nineteen-fifty, you know. Attitudes have changed. Our representatives in the West shouldn’t be people who are remembering instead of thinking—that’s all forgotten now, it’s nuclear warheads not the Nazis we’re talking about with Western Europe and America. There is a new style of diplomacy entirely—
—Time to get rid of these old men. You have even more of them, Pavel.—
The other foreigner swallowed, the Adam’s apple bobbing almost humorously above his sweater. —His translations of Neruda are excellent. We’ll invite him to a conference with Latin American scholars at our institute. Nice old man. Let him stay happy with his Neruda and his chasing girls. That is heroic too for him.—
There was laughter.
—Well, he must be kept out of the West. He has the wrong friends in the West, he is here and there with the enemies of this country. You’ll invite him to a conference? What for? He’ll expect to see reactionaries like Borges there! Our hero … that house of his, how is he allowed to have such a house for two old people?—
Mrs Kgomani said nothing to defend her friend or correct misinformation. She continued to take the bus to the old suburb where most houses, withdrawn up green drives like the houses in the white suburbs where she had lived as a daughter, had been converted into institutions. Her friend lived in the house that had been vacated in a hurry by a general of occupying forces, and he had no wife alive but two very old aunts and several sons and daughters with their wives and husbands living with him. There were neat beds behind rigged-up curtains in passages, and a warped grand piano in an entrance hall where four carved dining chairs that had somehow survived being chopped up for firewood during bad times were oddly-assorted round a plush-clothed table in anticipation of a vanished occasion. The aunts sat there and did not speak, even in their own language. Karel had a room at the top of the house with french windows and a balcony. —But don’t step out, it’s unsafe.—
Grass up there, growing from blown seeds between cracks in the cement. Inside, so much was safe. The room was perhaps meant for a reception room or studio, in the days when people like him had separate rooms for each function of living, and his grandfather’s peasants were crowded into huts like the ones where Whaila’s people lived now. Karel worked, slept and ate there, in the middle of an entire, assembled life. It was abundance of a kind she had not known existed, a fullness beyond money, although here and there was a fragment of something costly but damaged, like the Imari cat. She wandered about this life of his. A photograph when young; handsome as she had never seen a man to be, with the wing of black hair pointing back from the brow, and a cigarette holder between beautiful lips. Plaster maquettes of vanished structures; a piece of thick embroidery detached from its ceremonial occasion, hanging on a cord, dictionaries in five languages, solid as furniture, step-pyramids of journals shedding press cuttings, a plate of smooth stones, the painting of a man in braid and medals, dated 1848, who looked like Karel in fancy dress, framed letters in foreign languages signed ‘Lukács Gyorgy’ and ‘Thomas Mann’, scrap-paper drawings and sheets of music manuscript with dedications, old lamps that had scorched their shades, long fixing with an amber eye among books one left open at a poem or an engraving, a child’s clumsy posy of dried flowers, a draped flag worn thin as an old dress, theatre programmes, abstract paintings of the modest size presented by artists themselves, even a tin canister—What’s this?—
He looked at her hand for a moment as if it held one of the grenades whose features and performances she was studying. He came over to her. —Don’t you see? The label is still there. Like a can of beans. It’s Zyklon B, the gas the Nazis used in their death chambers. It was issued with—what d’you call it—rations to the camp commandants.— He translated from the German: —‘For the control of vermin’—and there are instructions to be careful not to contaminate yourself when using it. —
He took the canister slowly from her and replaced it on a scroll-ended bibelot shelf stained with circles made by wine glasses at long-past parties. He adjusted the position so that the label would not be obscured. —I was with the Russians who went in when Berlin fell. Most of Hitler’s men had fled but we opened doors and found some. One had this can on his desk.— His head seemed too heavy for him and under raised eyebrows his face sagged before her. —A sample. Something to (he ran his fingers round some invisible gadget) play with, while talking on the phone. I put the can in my pocket. That was the looting I did. And I keep it here where I can see it every day among the books, and the photographs of the women and children and friends because that’s where it belongs, that’s how it was used, as some ordinary … commodity—
An urge came upon her crudely as an urge to vomit or void her bowels. She began to tremble and to flush. Her eyes were huge with burning liquid she could not hold back. She wept in his arms, blotted against the solid body thick with life in which the constricted breathing of age was like a great cat’s purr. He knew she was not weeping
for the man he had shot dead at his desk, or even for the innocents for whom death was opened like a can of beans. The kitchen floor; it was the kitchen floor.
She came from so far away, down there in a remote country, belonging to a privileged class at home, and far, far from the bombardments, the childhood existence on frozen potatoes, the firing squads for partisans set to dig their own graves, and the gas chambers for families. The necessity to deal in death, no way out of it, meeting death with death, not flowers and memorials, was just coming to the people among whom she had grown up.
*
Where the city of the intermediate thousand years had been bombed to rubble in the war, excavations for a new subway line had unearthed Roman baths belonging to a garrison from the first foreign occupation of the country. With enough time, foreign occupations become part of a treasured history which is threatened by the latest foreign power: asserting national heritage in stone restored everywhere, the local authorities raised the marble columns in a park laid out above the subway. Behind, at the distance of a crowd from a spectacle, was the solid horizon of workers’ housing blocks. The nursery-school teacher who lived there took Nomzamo’s mother home for coffee to what she called ‘The Great Wall’. In a kilometre of ten-storey buildings with windows set like close type she pointed at one she alone could distinguish from all others. —That’s where we are.—
A Sport of Nature Page 29