A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  At a bookshop in London Pauline met a friend who passed on news of Hillela she was not aware was already out of date. The friend had been to a seminar in Boston while on a visit to her daughter, married to a professor of International Relations, and actually heard Hillela speak. The name ‘Kgomani’ had meant she expected a black, and then she realized who this white girl must be. Pauline’s niece spoke very well, very knowledgeably, it turned out she was quite a figure in circles concerned with African problems, now. Somebody said her husband had been assassinated by the South African secret service, in Zambia? Yes, Pauline could confirm something like that had happened; the South Africans had denied it, of course, put the blame on rivalry among his own exiled comrades—sickening.

  Pauline herself—Pauline and Joe—had left all that, left South Africa. She was defiantly miserable in London, with its civilised pleasures of parks and ponds, art galleries and theatres, pubs where house painters, advertising men and middle-class women up for a day’s shopping reached over each other’s shoulders for draught beer—democratic pleasures she had so enjoyed on the few visits as a tourist she, unlike her rich sister, had been able to afford. It was Pauline who had persuaded Joe they should leave. His offices had been broken into and some evidence stolen—who but the security police could have done that? The evidence was vital in a case he was defending; being Joe, he went doggedly through the proper channels, seeking an indictment against the police, working himself to death as a detective rather than a lawyer to find the individual culprits. And being successful, of course; exposing the false alibis, the cover-ups by one department of the police hierarchy for another, in cross-examination. For what? The men he was defending were members of the Black Consciousness movement, who rejected white participation in the liberation of the country. She burst out laughing every time she reminded him of this; she did so before friends as well as when they were alone. Her Saturday classes in the church had closed down. The South African Students’ Organization didn’t want black children to take white charity education, and what SASO said dwindled attendance as the students’ authority grew. The children sang freedom songs instead of the songs of gratitude they used to offer to Pauline and her helpers. One of the parents came to her to ask whether madam couldn’t make the children come back to her Saturday mornings? But there was nothing madam or the Soweto woman could do; that was exactly what the students, even quite small children, were saying: they had done nothing, they could do nothing, together. The other non-racial groups to which Pauline belonged had gone white. It was the only advice to be got out of Black Consciousness. Work to change your own people, not us. Joe kept suggesting there was still plenty to be done that was worthwhile at the Black Sash advice bureaux, where some women with views just as politically advanced as Pauline’s helped blacks resist by asserting to the limit such rights as they had. But Pauline could not take the place assigned to her, among whites. The revolutionary temperament that had been unsuccessful in driving her Underground more than ten years before became vanity that would accept black rejection only as some schism within the central movement towards liberation, not as the exclusion of whites like herself who were ready to opt out of their colour and class. —If it’s not simply a revival of the old split between the ANC and PAC, then what is it? If it’s not a revival that favours the others, because the ANC’s at a low ebb in influence within the country, at the moment?—

  Joe had to remind her that when she drove a certain friend of hers and his family to the border one night years ago, the friend was one of those who, at that time, merely put it another way: ‘did not want to dance with whites’. Her theatrical laugh spluttered upon him again. —What are you saying? And we found him dancing with our daughters!—

  So they sold the house and he took Pauline away to London. She was convinced they could stay only as collaborators with the whites, now, whatever they did, however many legalistic triumphs he had. All conversations or arguments with her ended in reiteration of this. Their divorced daughter Carole and her small boy left the country with them, the elder boy had been given into the custody of his father. Joe found a position with a firm of solicitors who employed him mainly on litigation over football-team disputes. He worked as conscientiously as he had done against charges of treason, the documentation of which he had taken with him to Frognal Green, where it occupied one whole wall of bookshelves in the livingroom (the flat was too small to provide him with a study) and was available to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the African National Congress, the Defence and Aid Fund, the International Commission of Jurists, the National Council for Civil Liberties—Pauline went out as soon as someone from any of these arrived, or shut herself in the kitchen and cooked. Carole—at this stage in her life, after having two children and emigrating—had decided she wanted to study law, after all, and was articled to her father’s firm; he helped her with the degree course at London University she studied at night. On the other hand, Sasha, of course, had given up law; he was the only member of Hillela’s adoptive family who had stayed behind. Unless she would have counted (who knew, with her) Olga and the other cousins.

  The one who had contingency plans had not left. Olga had had both breasts amputated and was no longer afraid of blacks. She went courageously to the knife and would do so again if the cancer were to recur elsewhere in her well-cared-for body; she had had fitted artificial breasts that couldn’t be told from her old shapely ones, even in a swimsuit, and she lived on in the house with her antiques—that selection from the past only of what is beautiful, lifted cleanly from the context of its bloody revolutions—her étagére, guéridon, George IV dining table and gilded Blackamoor. She lay beside her pool; only Jethro was gone; one of Jethro’s sons, a cook in a resort hotel in the Vumba Mountains in Rhodesia, was imprisoned for provisioning and hiding freedom fighters, and Jethro went home. Her own sons had all been commissioned during their military service in another kind of army. There was no correspondence between the two sisters after Pauline left and it is unlikely Olga received hearsay about the platform career of the girl she would have brought up to a different life as her own daughter.

  Sasha heard because Pauline passed on the news to him. They could not leave one another be, Sasha and his mother. Pauline phoned once a month and he spoke to her. Before she went into the bedroom and shut the door and dialled the long-distance call, she washed her hands and combed her thick-streaked grey hair at the bathroom mirror: still not too much the old hag. The haughty eyes in the mirror saw Sasha—many Sashas, after even a few months had passed, the last sight of him became a reconstruction out of many, many, like the changing face produced by riffling the pages of one of those booklets of ‘moving pictures’—the expression on the same face drawn on each page different from that of the previous page—that are supposed to have led to the invention of cinematography. There was never much to say to each other. Not ‘What are you doing?’; god knows what he was doing with himself. At least it was something to relate: —I bumped into a woman I know who heard Hillela speak, in Boston recently. Apparently she’s working with some institute concerned with refugees in Africa. It was a seminar at M.I.T. This woman said she was good—knowledgeable. I’d hardly think it was Hillela’s field.— Sasha didn’t respond; what could one find to talk about that would rouse his interest. That old childish fuss over Hillela was forgotten long ago, otherwise Pauline herself couldn’t have brought up her name, to him, so easily. But maybe it was just as well he was crossing her voice with his own, asking whether an acquaintance of his could look up Joe for advice, in London. If she had annoyed him by a judgment in her remark (didn’t she know they annoyed each other always, unavoidably, inevitably, making judgments) and he had pressed her over the implication of what she did think was Hillela’s field, then she would only have made things worse by coming out with it: Hillela’s field was, surely, men.

  Liberated Territory

  What has been, what was, what will be: nobody else can decide.

  That was understood,
lying tenderly apart in the biggest bed in America. His choice, to lie apart; he could have been comforted, why not, he knew he was still loved the way he had been loved. It was never any different. Staying would not have made this house safe for him.

  But that is what is always said by the one who is going.

  No need to leave yet—nobody knew, and nobody could know there was happiness in that house, yes, still there, during those months. Like brother and sister lying there, tempting—but he thought it was wrong. Not for us. Sometimes he panted in his sleep, from his wound. But nothing to be done; tenderness only salts. There would have been many more wounds, because that love would never be any different.

  That’s what is always said.

  He was thinking about the other one all the time—nearly all the time; sometimes both forgot, in the little American family of three, playing in pyjamas in the tropical warmth of the brownstone’s insulation. What’s he like? What’s he like? You were thinking of nothing else but never said it. You sweated it. The child sensed something; tugged uneasily at those frizzy plaits. You tweaked her ear or nose—What’you staring at, Nomikins, what’s the matter.

  Nothing like. With all the intelligence and willingness and understanding shining the golden-brown lantern so steadily from the dark side of your gaze, you would not be able to follow. Because of that, he could never have told you what he told me. And because he could tell me, and I could follow—no, you’ll never follow, it can’t be done in this old house full of heirlooms, the things handed by fathers to sons. A desk, a complete set of The New Republic, and soon a piano; that’s heritage, here. Possible only to stroke your hair, if you’ll allow it, and let them say what they like; you will never explain to anyone why we stayed on a while, your first little family (you’ll play the piano, one of the tall, hunch-shouldered American girls will give you more brothers and sisters for your first Nomikins), and although you’ll never follow what he’s like, what she’s like, the one who is going, you did know, oh you did know—no-one can draw a proxy signature beneath a life.

  The other will not die. Not even a herd of elephant will trample him out. He is not beautiful, he carries his Parabellum, he knows how to deal with sons, in him the handclasp compresses the pan-pipe bones of the hand with which it makes convenant; it is, on recognition, irresistible.

  The General did not many her for some time—or Hillela did not marry him. They moved about Africa, warp and weft of purpose, trading decisions and carrying out, separately and together, the actions these required. He made the decision over the namesake: —Send her to a decent school in England. An eight-year-old child can’t be dragged around the place, she needs a settled life, and that schooling is still the best in the world. I have two kids there. Give her the advantage. I’ll pay.— He meant it, but it was not necessary; Hillela had her connections to revive on behalf of Whaila Kgomani’s daughter. If Nomo doesn’t know her father’s tongue, she hasn’t grown up speaking the colonial-accented English of her mother; she was educated at Bedales.

  It became evident afterwards that Hillela went on several missions for the General, to countries where he could not go, and to which, on her decision, he could not trust anyone else to go. At the beginning she had the unique advantage: no-one in Africa yet connected her with him. If he had been seen to spend the night in an hotel with a young white woman—well, he had never been known to be able to resist a pretty girl, particularly a white one. Such girls have no names. People who came across Hillela in various African states knew her as one of the aid functionaries whose criss-crossing of closed frontiers was tolerated by all sides for reason of what they could hope to get. She looked up old friends without their realizing she was no longer doling out soup powder; and if they did, as perhaps on the night she dined with Tambo, Amojd and Busewe (upgraded) in Algiers, maybe it was the mission itself, on that occasion, to do so. It has never been clear what her position with the African National Congress was, beyond that of Whaila Kgomani’s widow, at that period. And the uncertainty of future political alliances between countries makes it always wiser for references other than ‘she played her role in active support of her husband’s determination to restore peace, prosperity and justice to his country’ to be excluded from data available at the General’s Ministry of Information and Public Relations.

  Anyway, he took her with him to Mozambique in 1975 when he attended the independence ceremonies and saw another of the community of exiles return to his own country as President. The official invitation was in itself a political statement; his old friend Machel showed by it his country’s non-recognition of the regime that had ousted the General from his. If the General brought along a consort who was not his wife—she was the widow of a martyr to the cause of African liberation, and Machel had known her personally as one of Leonie’s American lobby. And if once she drove in some official car past the old Penguin Nightclub where her mother had danced night after night, she did not know that that was the place, that it had ever existed: closed up, along with all the other nightclubs, and the prostitutes whose kind of freedom had excited poor Ruthie were being re-educated for occupations more useful to a country than the sexual relief of white South African tourists. She could not search for any face among the crowds. It belonged to the recollection of the child beneath the palm tree, and that was overlaid by so many shadows.

  In Africa the General wore a black beret bound with leather in place of the gold-braided cap. He grew a beard. It was not only to the great occasions of flag-raisings she accompanied him, sitting there with the growing feeling—binding them together more than if their flesh had been in contact—that next time, or the year after that, he would be the one making the victory speech. Her experience in Africa made it possible to take her even to his bush capital in the expanding area his army was able to declare liberated territory. She was as accustomed to drinking contaminated water and eating off the land as she was to making dinner-table conversation with a Minister. He took her everywhere; a characteristic of the qualities developed by a mistress that she should be, unlike a wife, someone who can be taken everywhere. The language of their intimacy was as much the terse anguish when supply lines of ammunition broke down or a go-between dealer failed to deliver the Stalin organs, Kalashnikovs, Israeli UZI submachine guns, Belgian FAL assault rifles dearly paid for in trade-offs and money, as it was love-talk. Her sexuality, evident to every man watching her pass as he sat in the bush oiling his gun, or stood at attention for review before the General, was part of the General’s Command. For him it seemed to grow, to be revealed with the success of his push towards the real capital. Her small, generous, urging, inventive body was the deserts of success; some bodies are made only for consolation, their sweetness touches with decay. But he had known from the first time he made love with her that that was only an experience of her possibilities—without realizing exactly what these would turn out to be.

  Everyone has some cache of trust, while everything else—family love, love of fellow man—takes on suspect interpretations. In her, it seemed to be sexuality. However devious she might have to be (he realized he did not know why she should have wanted to be chosen by him) and however she had to accept deviousness in others, in himself—she drew upon the surety of her sexuality as the bread of her being.

  You cannot run a country, in exile you cannot equip and train an insurgent army, augment it with villagers, local recruits, establish safe houses both within and without your country, without having an instinct for finding the right people to whom responsibility may boldly be delegated. Right at the start of their relationship he offered this bedfellow a mission for which she was an unlikely candidate—by anyone else’s judgment. But he did not solicit any. It was Hillela, on one of those working trips to Africa while she and the namesake were still living with Brad, who went to the safe house in a country to which the General’s eldest son had been taken when he was successfully kidnapped. It was an Arab country that had agreed to this hospitality. He had to disappear; a strat
egy to confuse the General’s enemies, with whom his son had allied himself, by not transporting him directly to the bush capital. Hillela was sent because she would be so unexpected an envoy that the hit men who had had to be employed for the job would be uncertain what interests beyond the General’s her presence might represent, and therefore would be more likely (the General repeated the phrase without elaboration) to be careful with the young man they had abducted.

  Her arrival also threw the defiance, anger and fear of the young man into confusion. All he had prepared for the confrontation with his father was become a set of cumbersome armour of which this feminine apparition was not worthy; for which his posture was useless. Whatever explanations she gave, he was sure he did not really know who she was and why she was there. She could not be from the CIA, because the CIA had helped oust his father. Was she from the KGB? Or from Castro?

  She said his father had sent her to see if he was ‘all right’. They were figured-over, the two of them and his guards, like patterned cloth, by lozenges of orange and purple light that came through closed velvet curtains in a suburban villa. He would not speak to her. She told him that what he had been hearing in the capital for the past six months was the regime’s propaganda: the General was not routed and in retreat, the whole of the Northern region was liberated territory, he was now receiving massive material and other support from outside, village after village was welcoming his men. Within the year he would be in the capital. —Whatever happens to the government people, he can’t leave you to be among them. He wants you to know that is why you are here. I know you don’t believe it, yet, but he doesn’t want you to come to any harm.—