A Sport of Nature (24 page)

—No. Not really. No.— She kept her eyes closed, screwed up; the sun was making her see fire. —How can anyone know what hasn't happened to them? People like you, who've been in prison … and once or twice others, I'd heard talking, back there. You can describe what it was like, but I … I never, I don't really believe it's
all
it's like. The same with leaving the country. I was always hearing about it. I even once saw someone on his last night. But it's only now that I've done it … it's different from what you're told, what you imagine.
You
are all different, all of you … from the speeches. Where I lived—at home, when I was still in what was my home—everything was read out from newspapers, everything was discussed, I went to a court once and there was another kind of talk, another way of words dealing with things that had happened … somewhere else, to somebody else … I couldn't know. I can know what happens to me.—

—You'll burn your eyelids. Turn over. —But what you read, what you learn, what people tell you, what you observe—good god, that's what happens to you, as well! Not everything can be understood only through yourself—what do you mean?—and anyway, isn't your comprehension, your mind, yourself? What are you saying? You don't trust anything but your own body? It's a nice one, my god, certainly—but I don't believe you know what you're saying.—

—Thinking about what happens to myself—yes, of course, that I can
know
.—

—Someone needs to take you in hand, my girl. You are not a fully conscious being. I wish I had the time. And it would be quite pleasant … I can imagine the sort of home you come from. Girls the ornaments who spoil their decorative qualities and betray their class as soon as they begin to think. How in god's name did you get here? I mean I know—but how'd you ever take up with that fellow? You know he was a liar and a double-dealer? He was for us and at the same time he was really working for
PAC
*
? And maybe if we'd not run him out of here he would be working for the government back there, as well.—

—He was collecting material for a book. That's why he went all over the show, he had to talk to all kinds of people.—

—And you believed that? What did you believe? That he was really one of us?—

A pair of talking heads, buoys bobbing on the water, tethered to lazy fin-movements of hidden arms and legs. —Yes.—

Impatiently, he gave her a chance to explain herself. She would not or could not. What a thicket of roses surrounded the power-drugged intelligence of the white sleepers; even dragged out through the thorns by some would-be prince turned betrayer, she could not recognize the lesson of wounds.

—Why?—

—I'd have to tell you too many things … Well, the family where I used to live—I just naturally thought, because of them, if white people were mixed up in that sort of thing at all, it was on your side. When I met his black friends, I didn't take much notice … whether there was any difference. Between them, I mean. Whether they were yours or some, others'. It was part of his work to know them all.—

—Yes, his work!—

—And he was in danger—

—Danger!— He scoffed.

—The police came and raided, you know that, they turned out all our things, took all the stuff for his book … He was writing for the papers under different names—

—And pushed different politics—

—Really, I think you've got it wrong. He told me, he had to have cover, that's why. Even his name. He even had to show up at parties given by people where I worked—and nobody talked about politics. Just there for a good time. Nobody gave a damn.—

—Not you, either.— It was said in the tone of one wanting her to be otherwise.

A man was swimming out towards them, his flailing arms black and defined in the heat-hazy radiance as the wings of a cormorant that skimmed the water.

Their voices changed key with the approach of a third presence. —So you see … well, if you're right, what I think is true: I believed him because I believed what he was telling me; and none of it was happening to me.—

The swimmer was almost upon them; he didn't wave; he might not be making for them at all, just setting for himself the limit of his own horizon.

—Until the police came and gave you a big fright, ay?—

Wet hair slapped her throat as she shook her head. —Until I came here.—

By saying ‘I' and not ‘we' he saw she had begun to promise better human material. The girl was no longer jetsam on Tamarisk Beach. His desire for human dignity was gratified, his desire for the beach girl twinged with apprehension of loss. There was just time, before the black man, his sideways regard turned regularly upon them and away as his face was alternately hidden in water and lifted for breath in the movements of strong over-arm strokes, was upon them: —Don't suppose I'll be seeing you again.—

Low enough, but she heard. —Why?—

—Your elderly benefactor might object.—

—I've told you.—

—You'll come?—

As she slowly smiled the gestures and nod became a polite greeting for the head of the black man, now among them. To eyes accustomed to the radiance above water his blackness was a blow, pure hardness against dissolving light, his head a meteorite fallen between them into the sea, or a water-smoothed head of antiquity brought up from the depths, intact; basalt blackness the
concentration of time, not pigment. Even the hair—black man's kind of hair—had resisted water and remained classically in place as a seabird's feathers or the lie of a fish's scales.

The man's urgency did not acknowledge the girl. —Nwabueze's been killed. A bomb in the car.—

Neither man noticed her go, the siren turning yellow tail and diving away from the navigators of the world's courses for whom, at that moment, in that ocean, she was no more than a distraction totally out of place.

A series of mini-biographies of outstanding women cites the news of the assassination of an important West African leader as the turning-point in her political development. Why should it ever have been contradicted?

But in that hour she was gliding and turning through water as perfectly tempered to the body as amniotic fluid, she heard no commotion but the sound of water getting into her ears and air breaking free in them through bubbles; the dead leader was a name. The real significance of the moment when the news was announced within a coral reef of the Indian Ocean was there, in another man, corporeal.

They love you. They tell you they love you. Len when making the necessary despatch from Rhodesia because of that boy being coloured, Olga when handing over to Pauline, Joe
—
dear Joe
—
when he gave the money with which to escape them. When he called his son a bastard because nothing was said in that bed, not about love of fellow man, not about family love, not about sisterly, brotherly love, but it was done. Loved, let love. Used what you have to love with, you know? It is there, you feel it, it happens all over and inside you and there is no difference between you and the one you're doing it with, you don't have to try to reach him, help him, teach him
—
you can't lie, or spy or kill, so what could ever be wrong about it? Left behind by my mother, they say, because of it; because they told her it was wrong. The man they call a double-dealer, who lied about Sweden and Germany: the place he told the truth was in bed, with his lovely body, the feelings he gave me were not his fantasies or his boasts. Those others, on the beach; they have no home
—
not out of clumsiness, a tendency to break what is precious
—
but because they are brave and believe in the other kinds of love, justice, fellow man
—
and inside each other, making love, that's the only place we can make, here, that's not just a place to stay
.

*
Pan Africanist Congress

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.—