A Sport of Nature (33 page)

*

The namesake grew up very black. This has been an advantage for Nomzamo although she does not live in Africa, since the vogue for black models, which had begun esoterically in Paris when Ruthie, Olga and Pauline were playing with golden-haired Shirley Temple dolls in Johannesburg, spread to the United States and Britain during African decolonisation and coincided with the period in which she took up modelling at sixteen. She also grew as beautiful as the woman she was named for. Her mother has never been one to make mistakes when following her instincts. Trust her, as her enemies would remark. The girl, described in an agency's portfolio as exotic, is known as all the most successful models are simply by a single name—hers is Nomo—easily pronounceable by French, Italian, German, American and English couturiers and readers of fashion journals. An international model does not hamper her image with national politics; to the rich people who buy the clothes she displays or the luxuries her face and body promote, she is a symbol of Africa, anyway; one preferable to those children in the advertisements of aid organizations begging money to keep them from starving. She has not made use of the origin of her diminutive except, during a certain period, on occasions when she was hired by a committee giving a fashion show benefit for a cause such as aid for South African political prisoners—then she had a byline in the sponsored programme: ‘Appropriately, top model Nomo is named for the black leader, Mrs Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela'.

The baby became perfectly black. A year old, she would try to climb out of the perfect circle, the bowl her father dug out of sand with fingers strong as the tines of a gardener's tool. Then she would tumble back, again and again, and fall asleep across the limbs of her parents. Hillela put the tiny cushion of a black hand, like something she had come upon, into her own pale palm; with her own pale foot dusted the sand off the little black wadge of a foot not yet shaped by the muscles used in walking. Satisfaction sank
deep as the cool moisture that existed under the parched sand: not to have reproduced herself, not to have produced a third generation of the mother who danced away into the dark of a nightclub, the child before whom certain advantages lay like the shadow of a palm tree, the aunts who offered what they had to offer.

It was the reversal of parental feeling as it is supposed to be. Naturally! Trust Hillela! Incommunicable to the one who had fathered the child because no matter where in the world he was removed physically and no matter how his way of life diverged, he was in his line—the house-servant mother, the butcher's ‘boy' Sunday preacher father, the night-class alumni—teachers and nurses and welfare workers—who were his brothers and sisters, the Second Class taxi drivers, watchmen and farm labourers who were his uncles and cousins; all the people without advantages for whom he had become what he was. From the first words a parent speaks down to the new-born whose sensory responses are still attuned only to the sound of the mother's heartbeat and gut noises, Whaila spoke to the baby in his language—theirs. Hillela picked up a little from them, as the child learned to speak; but the child always, from her first words, spoke to her mother in English. When he was away, the child never spoke their African language, even in the games she played with herself; later she lost it altogether at a nursery-school in Eastern Europe. It would not be much of an advantage, anyway, now when she flies out to spend a week with her mother at State House, because the African language spoken there is a different one.

Where Hillela appears next, of course, is where her husband was sent. For a time they were based in London. It was not more than that; Whaila came and went across borders, barriers of a kind that divided Europe insurmountably in the minds of most Britons and Europeans.

Her aunt—the rich one—had had every intention of taking Hillela to London. She certainly would have given the girl the chance to go abroad at least once. She would have seen the West End shows and the special art exhibitions at the Royal Academy and she would have stayed at the Royal Garden Hotel, where Olga herself always did. Whaila came and went, leaving Hillela in the kind of basement flat buried under a terrace of identical Victorian houses, contiguous as the street run along in a dream, that has been the traditional habitation for political exiles since the 19th century. Heirs to kingdoms and the revolutionaries who plotted their downfall—they have climbed the area steps to put out the dustbin, and have gone to the British Museum to read, out of the cold. She walked with a bundle of wool on two stubby legs that was her child, among other people whose features showed from what countries they were exiled. But—with her knack for such things—she did not stay among them long. Although the British government, like that of the Americans, would not give to the movement the backing in money and arms it needed, so that Whaila was constantly absent seeking this in the Soviet Union and other countries not so easy to guess, there were charming English people who supported the cause personally and socially. Some were even influential in the press, Labour or Liberal Party, useful friends of Whaila. To them, Hillela as a white South African was part of the scatter of white revolutionaries from that country they invited to parties, although, in fact, for these exiles the girl was a nobody. As a white South African actually married to a black South African, she remained for her hosts at these same gatherings an embodiment of their political and ethical credo, non-racial unity against the oppression of one race. Whenever they came across a white South African a black had taken as mate, there was to be seen in the union assurance that they, too, could be given absolution for their country's colonial past. Hillela became the favourite of that alternative
court, the shabby-affluent liberal livingroom, filled with books and generous with wine and food. She was also, of course, very pretty—vivacious, the women called it, sexy, the men agreed, amused at their concurrence. Once again, no party was complete without her. She was not slow to make use of these contacts; someone got her child into a private day-care centre and paid the fees; she and the child were rescued from the basement flat and moved into the guest room of a Holland Park house, with the run of it. It was the least one could do, the television producer told his lawyer wife, and repeated in the bedroom quarrels (it was the only place where their guest or her child would not walk in on them) when the wife wanted to know if they were never to have their home to themselves again, without someone constantly chattering on the telephone and baby food boiling over on the Aga. Whether or not Hillela was aware of the tensions she caused, she gave no sign of understanding what, in their English way, presuming upon the coded communication of their own kind, had been an offer only of temporary hospitality. Some people claim to remember that particular young woman with her black baby (an updated chocolate-box image for people proud of being without colour revulsion) as one who made a play for the men. But in those years there were so many young women, white and black, from Poland and Czechoslovakia and Hungary as well as from Africa, who fluttered into the livingrooms for a while like escaped birds in whose faces there were to be read the descriptive plaques of their distant, caged origins, and found their quickest welcome in the eyes of appreciative men present. It is easy—when it seems one of these girls can be matched with another image, and so comes up out of the obscurity into which all have moved on—to confuse Hillela with someone else.

Thick-skinned. And even the husband, defending her against the accusation, shaming his wife for making it, is mistaken:
—Think of the danger and suffering that poor girl has been through under that bloody government. No wonder she can't be
sensitive
like you, no wonder she doesn't understand that people like us could be selfish enough to begrudge her a corner of our soft lives.—

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
.

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?