A Sport of Nature (20 page)

That year when Hillela was living in the city with some man was the same year when torture began to be used by the police. Political suspects—mostly black—who, defended by lawyers like Joe, made such allegations when and if they could get to the courts, were dismissed from any concern of most white people, put out of mind as isolated agitators, left-overs of communist influence who had to be dealt with somehow; liars by ideology, who either invented injury or—looking at the issue paradoxically but righteously—deserved it anyway. And even those who were humanely and morally opposed, on principle, to beatings, applications of electric shocks, disorientation by extended denial of sleep, generally took their stand from under the centre of the white eye's hypnotic gaze. A doctor who had given vital testimony of torture that won the case Joe's team brought on behalf of a black man in a provincial town, described over a drink in the Pauline house his appalling findings on the man's body, and concluded: —By the way, Joe … while you were appearing in Durban, were you ever invited to the Club? I was given a surprisingly good lunch there … a charming place, lovely old colonial style … I really enjoyed it.—

Pauline stared into her glass. —How did you reconcile the two?—

He smiled and quizzed, not following.

She read the dregs of wine as if they were tea-leaves. —Your morning in court. Your evidence. What you'd seen. And the Club.—

He smiled again, broadening the understanding to encompass Joe, anyone. —But they had nothing to do with each other!—

Easy then, with hindsight, to sneer at what was only a young girl excited by the exhibitionism she was too naive to distinguish from concomitant courage; the ex go-go dancer nested amid testimony of horror, happy in the midst of torture. By day she chilled the white wine, at night she was in the alternating current of the man's frustration and resolve, the thrilling tension into which, in his command of her body, he converted the dreadful happenings around her. He raged through a thinned line of mouth at the poor press coverage of revolutionary actions. He disappeared from the yard cottage for days. She was to tell no-one he had gone away; if anyone phoned or called in, he was simply out for a while. This was an important task she had. His reports of what he had seen of the scale of resistance coming from blacks pushed back to starve in the Bantustans, of the violence used by the police against rural people, of the sour and lethal misery this caused between government-paid headmen and desperate villagers—she watched him tear up these reports (rejected by his editors) in a tantrum and throw them into the big bin that served the main house as well as the cottage. She had once cast certain papers in other people's dirt, like that. But, these bits of paper she helped pick out again from under eggshells and vegetable peelings. They taped facts together; he sat down and wrote an article using the same material, but in the context of an accusation—press collusion with white domination. This, like the articles he wrote on concealed evidence of torture, she took in her elegant souvenir sling bag to the advertising agency; although the piece would be published under an alias abroad, its author might be traced
by the identification of his typewriter with the typescript—it had happened to other journalists, before: envelopes addressed to newspapers, or even to cover addresses, were opened at the post office before despatch and photocopied for the secret police. It was another important task for her: the sipping and banter of copywriters and models going on around her, she made her fair copy of subversive documents on one of the agency typewriters. —Time off for a love-letter? I don't blame you, love, they work us to extinction in this loony bin, can't call a thought your own.— It was with this (genuinely female) art director whose yellow-veined blue eyes stood out like an octopus's from a mound of forehead that the girl fell to the childish, vain temptation one day to hint that she was ‘sometimes scared' on behalf of Rey, with whom, it was generally known in temporary pairings-off hardly kept count of, the little junior assistant had ‘got together' at an agency lush. The woman whose loose, black-dyed hair was designed to make her look more like an elder sister than a mother not only picked up at once the scent of political danger holed up in its love-nest, was stirred by it and passed it on as a rill of risk to touch the agency with daring-by-association; she was also the one who kept absolute discretion when the girl's confidence was taken further. What Sasha had feared did come to pass, but not when he was looking for his cousin in the cinemas where they had spent autumn afternoons. While electric currents were passing through the reproductive organs of others, Hillela had an abortion. It was arranged for her in good hands, by the kindness and understanding of the woman art director. Hillela was nineteen. It happened inside her; her body, her life: and the torture was one of the things he—Rey—had ways of knowing about, outside.

On his birthday they took wine along to the house where, lately, they often met the same group of black men. Rey didn't take any notice of birthdays, but it was somebody-or-other's birthday every few days at the agency, and Hillela had acquired
a style of adult celebration from there. She wrapped both serious and jokey presents elaborately, bought wine and a cake. The sexy card he glanced at without comment. The witty present (a beard-comb stuck into the orange whiskers of a toy orangoutang) he unwrapped and ignored, and the real elephant-hide attaché case with gilt fittings he looked at, lying there, as one does at something one is confused to see anyone could think one would want.

The wine was drunk, anyway. That was all right. The black men were not those African National Congress Youth Leaguers she had met with him when first she had moved into the yard cottage. He was perhaps collecting other material; they talked closely with him, watching him, some with moving, responsive eyes, others with the in-turned glaze between lids that sometimes dropped, with which blacks keep themselves intact from the invasion of white presences. He was telling them about his ‘quiet trips': whom he saw, where he had got himself into, in the Transkei, in Tembuland and Pondoland. He brought messages they tested in silence. She felt indignation welling in her as it did permanently, from another source, in him:
Trust him!
Trust him! But she was not expected to speak. Halfway through the evening a white man came in, apparently from having been only in some other part of the house. His murmured upper-class courtesies and round face that in its texture and tender colouring appeared to be stripped down of several outer skins, seemed to belong to an English climate, yet his recognition of the younger white man signalled acceptance to the blacks: —Of course—you interviewed me in Cape Town, at my house. Some Swedish or German paper … ?—

The free-lancer changes journalistic alliances too often to be expected to remember or to answer. This one grasped the finger-hold of credentials to press his own questions both stoutly and humbly, in the manner of whites demonstrating loyal support for
a black cause and aware of the superiority of the blacks' inner circle of involvement, drawn by experience, language and blood. About ‘Qamata'—it had been described to him, in these rural inner circles in which his familiarity suggested he had been received, as a sort of church?

They took their time. There was a spokesman from out of the lazy, acquired deadpan: —It's their god, there. He comes from the sea.—

—One of our gods, Xhosa gods… our religion we had, before.—

—I was told he was the ‘ruler of the spirits', a kind of Pantokrator … top man among the gods … ?

—Yes, ruler of our other spirits… them all. Those country people, they still believe those things.—

The journalist, with a movement of legs and behind, shifted his chair nearer the spokesman. —Or believe in them again? Weren't they all dosed with Christianity at school?—

Shrugs, and everyone waited for someone else to speak.

—Many people were Christians, but they kept the old customs.—

—Oh I know—I've been among the young
abakwetha
hidden away in the circumcision camps. That's not quite the same thing. I mean, Qamata, as I understand, isn't a hero who once lived, a warrior from precolonial or early colonial times. The old days. He's a different thing, different kind of inspiration, isn't he? A spirit that makes people fearless? Tells them what to do? White people are saying Poqo is like Mau Mau—of course you know that, it's inevitable. But is the idea that Qamata … an African god, a Xhosa god is something that can chase away the god of submission, the Christian god who says ‘thou shalt not kill', and make killing a sacrifice for freedom?—

—What's new with that? The Christian god's killed plenty, plenty! Here and in the world! He gives his blessing to the wars of white people.—

—You're right! So how will he give it to blacks! That's where Qamata comes in.—

The spokesman's broad, relaxed chest, naked under a football jersey, heaved to life. He kept everyone waiting while he dropped his head to one side, rolled it against the sofa back. —The Qamata thing … it's really among the rural people, man, you must understand that. It's not policy. But regionally … the people work out a lot of things for themselves, we don't interfere unless …—

—But it's useful, it brings people together where political concepts like constitutions and programmes don't reach?— The lover put his fist on his breast.

—If you want to know about the Xhosa religion, man, you should talk to a guy like Prof here, I don't go along too much with that kind of stuff.—

—I just want to understand what I've seen, what I've been told. I don't want to misinform anybody—and that's for your sake… You don't want people believing, that Mau Mau story. Then tell me—

A small man who had been listening with distended nostrils, an alertness displaced from his ears, blew words like cigarette smoke across her face.—Let them believe. Kenyatta won. He's getting the country. Without Kimathi, the Queen of England would still have it. Let them believe.—

Rey was laughing, rubbing his taut palms along his thighs. —Qamata!— He drew himself into a knot of the white man, the man they called Prof, the spokesman and a very young man whose upper body danced up and down as he tried to interject and sometimes laughed harshly with frustration. The white girl was accustomed to being left to occupy or entertain herself until, as she saw it, ‘his book' had garnered what was wanted for it. The black men around her began talking in their own language. It grew long, the night of the uncelebrated birthday. She dozed off,
sitting on the sofa with the cadences and exclamations of an African language flying round her, accumulating in layers between the layers of smoke, wavering away and towards her ears; the lullaby without words, for her, surrounding all her childhood. The
platteland
towns where the commercial traveller took his little sweetheart, the Rhodesian boarding-school, the rich aunt's villa at the sea, the old church path where children sang picking their way past excreta, the shop window where schoolgirls danced, the kitchen where a former trumpet player with the Extra Strongs took refuge.

When they got back at two in the morning the cottage was in darkness as they had left it, but the door stood open as if they were expected. He felt round the jamb for the light switch. Again, there was the shock of light on a disorder; a blinding exposure. This time, it was she herself who called out:
Rey!
And he was beside her, but could not make what was there fly back to the way it was before—clothes, paper-spewing suitcases, books, the stuffing from eviscerated cushions—as a film run in reverse. There was no-one waiting. This was confirmed at once; the cottage was small. Whoever had ransacked it had found or not found what they wanted and gone. But this time, this exposure, was different. What had been turned up in the middle of the night had no context of other lives to resorb it. They went back to the house they had left and threw pebbles at the windows until the gentle-complexioned white man came down in a handsome towelling gown and took them in. Next day they went to stay with other friends-of-friends. Every day, her lover believed, must be lived at a further remove from the cottage. Nothing was ever to be restored of the life she lived there. Only the object that he himself had thrown aside, the toy orang-outang with the beard-comb, had become something in place, lying on the floor where it was dropped among its torn gold wrappings as if it had drawn down everything about it.

He was convinced that he was going to be arrested. Whether this was so or not nobody can say. Many premises are raided; there are not always consequences of the kind he foresaw, building up for her and for those who sheltered them a case against himself. Fear and self-esteem—his conviction of his own threat to others confirmed as it could be only by the assumption of himself being in danger—burned his old resentments as the fuel of elation. He made love more often than ever, and each race to the finish might be the last. His face presented itself as the face that must be looked at as a last look, at any ordinary moment of the day. She opened white-wine bottles and no-one knew the other tipsiness that animated her, now. She confided in no-one; no longer, not she. Sitting a moment on someone's desk, swinging her legs and chattering; no-one knew that next day she might not be there, one day soon would simply not be there. She and he: gone.

He did not even risk going back for what might be left of ‘his book'. A friend-of-a-friend would go to the cottage and send later whatever papers were there. He—and the little girl, of course—would bum a few clothes (friends who weren't in danger surely owed them that much) and disappear as they were. The only problem was money. —I can manage, I don't care. But with you … Maybe you should follow.—

For the first time, there was fear to be seen in her shining, opaque black eyes. —I'll get money. For both.—