A Sport of Nature (36 page)

The children belonging to Sela's relatives made a doll out of the namesake and never wanted to part with her. This was one of the many evenings when they wandered back with Hillela to Britannia Court. Hillela taught them songs the
songololo
had sung, as they walked home with her past Sandringham Mansions and Avonlea Place; a sunset first stamped out every coarse leaf of the flamboyant trees against translucent lakes of sky and then clotted the black metallic cut-outs into a cage of earthly dark. The little straggle of woman and children made their cheerful chorus far beneath, and stumped up the stairs to the flat. When Whaila came home, the streetlight that could be seen from the kitchen window was on, bats circling it like the rings round a planet. He held his little daughter up to look, but she wriggled away to the other children. There was the static of frying behind loud play; Hillela, barefoot in her broad stance of pregnancy, was cooking chips for their supper. The eldest girl had made herself at home with the radio playing monotonous African music; on
one of those sudden impulses children have, all scrambled out of the room to some game in the bathroom but the music wound on. The level of noise was raised by a tumble of running water. Neither Hillela nor Whaila was sure, for a moment, whether or not the doorbell was ringing. He said something she didn't catch, where she bent at the open refrigerator to fetch a carton of milk, but she was aware that he had passed behind her to go to the door and she took off the shelves a couple of cans of beer as well—it was the time in the evening when one or another of the men from the office or camp would call in. The door was swollen by summer damp and she seemed to hear all at once the prelude of its scrape along the linoleum, a pause in which she had no time to grasp that there were no greetings exchanged, and then a crack that splintered the thick homely hubbub against the thin walls of the flat. Something fell. As she turned there was another crack and a bolt of force hit the refrigerator door she stood behind. Someone—one, more than one—ran clattering down the corridor of Britannia Court; the doorway was open and empty: and Whaila? Whaila? As she came out from behind the shield of the refrigerator, he was there, on the floor. Whaila was flung before her, red flowing from the side of his head, his neck, under the shirt pocket where his pen still was hooked. His open eyes faced the wall and his lips stretched finely in that expression drawn by his life.

His life running away in red like the muddy filth in the gutters of the market.

There was a wrenching upheaval inside her as the foetus convulsed and turned. The bullet that was lodged in the refrigerator door penetrated her consciousness in the bullets' disorientation of sequence; she felt she was shot. She backed away from death, from death ebbing away Whaila. Backed away, backed away. Her shoulder hit the jamb of the doorway leading to the internal passage of the flat. She opened her mouth to wail but terror
blocked her throat and instead of her cry there was the voice of a radio commercial enthusing over a brand of beer. She burst into the bathroom in the path of a plastic duck one child had thrown at another; the children saw in her terrible face grown-up anger at their game. She grasped the thirteen-year-old girl in charge. She dragged her to the kitchen, but when they reached the doorway, she herself turned to the wall and pressed her bent arms tight against her head, screaming.

It was the child who went in, and began to heave small, hard breasts in deep breaths that became sobs, and slowly went up to the dead man who had been Whaila, and touched him.

There have been others since then. They received parcels of death in mail from their home country. It seems that in the case of Whaila Kgomani, one of the first, the agents employed by the South African government might have bungled their mission. It was said in Lusaka that they were meant to kill Oliver Tambo, but came to the wrong address. Seeing a man through the blistered glass door, they did not wait to verify any identity; there is no margin for hesitation in such tasks. Others said the government's instructions were carried out: Whaila was a key man in the planning of armed infiltration. In South Africa itself, of course, the death was reported as the result of rivalry and a power struggle within the movement; as any statements from the organization itself were banned and could not be published, that version became the accepted one for most white people, if they were aware of the assassination at all.

It was not surprising that news of Hillela's whereabouts at that time should have come to the families of her aunts by way of violence. Trouble. She was always trouble. Olga hoped nobody would tell Arthur, recovering from a coronary on a low-fat diet with instructions that he should not be subjected to stress or annoyance. Anyway, there was no unpleasant publicity, fortunately,
because no-one made the connection between Hillela and Ruthie's sisters—it was merely mentioned that the ANC man had a white wife. Carole was about to be married, herself, to a young journalist. A simple wedding in the garden, no big Jewish show for Pauline's daughter. He could have written a Sunday paper scoop that would have given him a byline, and Pauline certainly didn't give a damn whether or not Arthur was upset by the family's political connections, but Carole asked her boy not to. He would soon be her husband; she tried to imagine how it would be to have him killed, taken away from her. She could not have borne to have had her life with him taken away, as well, exposed in a newspaper. Perhaps a sign, already, nobody read: she was not the wife for a newspaperman.

Pauline knew Hillela was not little Carole. —Whatever else Hillela has lacked, it's never been guts. She won't shut herself away somewhere.—

—What'll she do? She's got a small child. So the paper said—he had a wife and daughter. But maybe that's from a previous marriage—his child?—

Carole's father reassured her. —People will look after Hillela and her child, the organization will take care of that. There are resources.— And of course Joe, through his legal cases, was in touch with the circumstances of political exiles—some of his clients became them.

—I want to write to Hillela, Daddy.—

Sasha, silent among them, was suddenly present. —What about? Your bridesmaids' dresses?—

Carole was still emotional on the subject of Hillela. —Don't you care about anybody anymore? What's the matter with you? Maybe she'll come home, now, maybe she can come home.—

The future husband had never seen Carole, of all people, shrill and angry. There were still so many currents in this family he couldn't follow.

Her bastard of a brother looked as if she had slapped him across both sides of his face. —Don't you understand anything about anything? What are you the product of, for Christ' sake?—

And now the mother lifted her head and narrowed one eye, as if in pain.

There have been others. There were to be others. To begin with
—
O, what was grief, could anyone have guessed, explained, prepared for this
—
anyone, a quiet, wise lawyer-uncle, the father of the little sweetheart, for only a man can comfort for the loss of a man, only a man's arms, the smell of a man's shaven skin can make it possible to believe that a man actually came to an end, that it happens in a kitchen, on an evening like any other ordinary evening, and that there will never be another ordinary evening like that one again. If there had been a mother, if she had turned up the lights in the nightclub and seen the cockroaches and the dirty neck of the ageing
fado
singer, would she have been able to provide the advantage: to prepare the daughter against the lights going up on her romance of defiance and danger? Who knew about this? Who could bear to know about this? So that if it happened to someone, that one feared to tell what it was, and everyone feared to ask
.

And what about the other survivor who had done the killing himself, driving his wife home on the road to Bagambyo? His body rejected life, afterwards, could not accept what had happened. The baby rejected life, wrenching itself from the body it was anchored in. It loosed with it the waters of grief: the longing of the body the man would never enter again, the untouched breasts, empty vagina, empty clothes in the cupboard, rooms without a voice: desertion. What am I without him? And if, without him, I am nothing, what was I? The loving gone, the African family of rainbow-coloured children gone, the innocent boast of the striking couple gone
—

What was left behind was the handclasp. Because the handclasp belongs to tragedy, not grief. Udi explained it, once, not knowing the explanation would ever come to be understood
.—
No, the fact that I killed my wife is not a tragedy. I must not call it that. A tragedy, Hillela, is when a human
being is destroyed engaging himself with events greater than personal relationships. Tragedy is an idea from the ancient Greeks; from the gods. A tragic death results from the struggle between good and evil. And it has results that outlast grief. Grief is a rot, it belongs with the dead, but tragedy is a sign that that struggle must go on. If I had experienced tragedy, I'd be all right… but it has nothing to do with someone like me
.—

Whaila is dead. There have been others. There will be others
.

When the police had gone away Sela brought an old relative to scrub Whaila's blood from the linoleum. The man rolled up his trousers and carefully took off his laceless shoes so that they might not be spoiled, but he worked reverently, intoning some kind of lament to himself, or perhaps it was a hymn he was breathing. Hillela and her child were taken into the empty rooms of Sela's house, dark as if they had been waiting for the occasion of such occupancy.

The obsidian god from the waves, the comrade was buried in the gold, green and black flag he died for. Tambo spoke of him, at an oblong hole in red earth that had been dug.
Woza, woza
, rose the responses to the verses of the national anthem that came from home and belongs to all Africa. Hillela's bare feet in shabby sandals carried away red earth on the toes. Sela was correctly dressed in a black tailored skirt and jacket and she led from among the women in her band of relatives the traditional ululation. The high, unearthly, ancient sound is produced to release sorrow or hail triumph; it is both grief and tragedy.

Hillela stood, huge, at the graveside, like Joshua Nkomo, who had been the subject of a private joke. Her pregnancy appeared to have risen to her flushed and swollen face. But nobody seems to know what happened to that child. She was close to her term, then. It might have been born dead, or it died shortly after birth. The namesake who looks out from magazine covers, unsmiling with charming haughtiness, nostrils dilated, is her only child, her daughter.

Saved by a refrigerator door. In the undeclared wars that maim and kill without battlefields or boundaries, in the streets, cafés and houses of foreign towns, on tourist planes and cruise ships, it was a campaign ribbon from a front that is anywhere and everywhere. In her confusion, she had felt herself hit; and, indeed, the story went round that the baby had been killed by a bullet inside its mother's belly at the same time as its father was shot. She kept to herself the true story, telling only Sela: —It died because I cheated Whaila into making it. So it went with him.— Sela calmed these fantasies of shock; she knew her friend was young and healthy and would regain an equilibrium.

And it was also true that the persistent rumour that she had seen not only her husband but his child, as well, sacrificed to the cause, provided her with credentials of the highest order. There are lacunae again, mainly because she was deployed in Eastern Europe and Western hysteria over such contacts made it necessary for her to ignore, in one period, the existence of another. But it is certain that the organization accepted full responsibility for Whaila's wife and daughter. She went first back to London, where she worked in its office. Personality clashes with other white women employed there, some of them the veterans of political imprisonment and exile who remembered her from Tamarisk Beach, cut short that posting.

They did not understand that even if she had not been hit, the little beach girl was buried.

The fiery surf of veld fires was the last Mrs Hillela Kgomani saw of Africa, leaving it, and the first she saw of it, coming home
to Africa. Whaila Kgomani's widow flew back to be present at a memorial-day ceremony held for him and others a year after his death. Twenty-five years old, very thin except for her breasts, the cheekbones prominent beneath black eyes, she wore African dress and headcloth and made a speech on behalf of wives and mothers who had given husbands and sons to the cause of liberation. It was clear from her delivery that this was not the first time she had spoken in public, and the emotion she conveyed was not only private but also skilfully drawn from that generated by the crowd. A day or two after the ceremony, she changed into the duffle coat and boots of a European winter and flew away again to the other hemisphere, to an ancient Eastern European city whose gothic and baroque and art nouveau buildings, so beautiful and strange to her, were poxed with the acne of gunfire from generations of wars and revolutions. Muffled in clothing that gave a new dimension to her body (—It's like driving a bus when you've been used to a racing bicycle.— Her observations of things they took for granted amused local citizens) she came out of the steamy fug of an apartment into a seizure of cold every morning. She took her child to a nursery-school, and then walked to her place of work. It was along gangrene corridors whose colour had nothing to do with forgotten summers of trees and grass, and—when the dented lift did not work—up flights of cold stairs. The room itself was like the others above rotting stairs in hot climates thousands of kilometres away: the old typewriters, the posters and banners, framed declarations and newspaper collages, with the addition of photographs of the host country's heroes displayed like a shopkeeper's licence to trade. She typed letters and was brought into negotiations as a translator when there were people who could speak French, which was not their language any more than it was hers, but which served as a means of communication if they had no English. She apologized briskly for her poor ability: —I was nursemaid to French-speaking kids, once, in Ghana, that's all.—