A Sport of Nature (38 page)

A moment later he filled her glass and put a hand on her wrist. —But don't go asking your kind of question among people here.—

—Oh I should keep my mouth shut! But—again—you see, being in this kind of country's not like talking about it. Reading about it. I read quite a lot, in Ghana—the university library … because Whaila—he hadn't been brought up in a house with books, the way I was, but he'd managed somehow to know so much; so much you need to know. For me, everything happens for the first time, for him everything grew out of what had already happened. I just think about how to manage; the way people do it, wherever you find yourself.—

—It's all right with me. With me you don't have to worry.—

—No, but I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have started asking. I don't even know you.—

—There are some people who have never been strangers.—

No need to explain why some subjects were invaded out of sequence by others; talk between them wove back and forth closely a pattern of its own; their pattern. While he was examining the bill, spectacles balanced on his nose but not hooked behind the ears, she set out firmly before herself like a hand at
cards to be read:—You have an empty place where they were shot, we … Some are buried in the veld, nobody knows where, maybe hyenas have dug them up. He died on the kitchen floor. Another family eats there, now, there's a housing shortage.—

He was querying an item, kindly, with the wraith-faced waiter, and counted out notes in their language, but he knew what she was saying to him. —Yes, we are lucky. Yours is the hardest kind of struggle, in its worst phase—a battle going on in exile, with no place that belongs even to the dead. That is the greatest dispossession there is. Even to be in prison in your own country is to have a place there. I know.— As a cat sees the movement of a mouse while apparently not looking its way, he noticed the bottom of her glass was still coloured, and drank off the mouthful of wine left. A drop shone on the brush of moustache. She thought she felt it, although that was ridiculous, it must have been the frost of the streets, the wind across the river, when he kissed her goodnight under the statue without a nose above her apartment building's entrance. It was a kiss on either cheek, but not the butterfly flit of the Ambassador's household. It was of the order of the handclasp; to which she belonged, held by the hand of the dead.

A warning was not necessary for a good worker like Hillela. She had—she made—all the right connections. Citagele has always admitted he never anywhere had anyone more energetic (even if she was a woman, even if she was white). And watchful; as if life depended on never forgetting for a moment what they were there for. She entered various circles, or drew from these a certain circle around her—it is not possible that one did not attract people, whether she had the heart to or not. From among them she cultivated the most useful—nothing new in that, for her, but the focus was different, and calculated, as it had not been. So she disappears. She disappears into what is known about the mission, in that country at that time. No history of her really can be personal
history, then; its ends were all apparently outside herself. There was someone named Pavel—he was not a native of that country but an envoy or expert sent from outside; Karel had told her there used to be many of them, ‘experts' watching even members of the government, but now they were fewer—only their army units remained stationed in certain parts of the country.

Pavel was young and did not limp. Surely more to her taste, but how can anyone know? He had the wild face associated with ballet dancers who defect to the West, and that face was the centre of a group of State officials and press functionaries who met often in the same café or at the apartment of a painter. —From Africa. You are strange to us like a giraffe.— She had the answer for this first remark addressed to her. The namesake was with her: — Today I went to the hairdresser, and the girl who was cutting my hair spoke a few words of English. She gave Nomzamo chocolate and pointed at her—‘Where did you get that?'—

—Maybe she thinks at hard currency shop, like any other luxury she knows foreigners can buy.—

The café was for repartee, the painter's apartment for discussion where attitudes outside the insulation of book-and-canvas stacked walls, between other, official walls, could be gauged, and the movements up and down the ladder of influence and favour traced, even advanced or retarded. They made conclaves there, in their own language, but broke into English in the company of English-speakers. She heard Karel referred to as ‘the hero of the revolution'. Why was he called that? —Because that's what he is, we have One Hundred Heroes of The Revolution, old boys who fought the Germans and were honoured by our first communist government after the war. The trouble is, some of them think that's a free pass to grab everything that's going, for the rest of their lives.— —Well, the Minister knows all about the Hero, so there's no danger he'll get the Embassy appointment in London.— —Oh but he's got a friend higher up than that.— —Maybe. But
there are jobs younger men need to do, it's not nineteen-fifty, you know. Attitudes have changed. Our representatives in the West shouldn't be people who are remembering instead of thinking—that's all forgotten now, it's nuclear warheads not the Nazis we're talking about with Western Europe and America. There is a new style of diplomacy entirely—

—Time to get rid of these old men. You have even more of them, Pavel.—

The other foreigner swallowed, the Adam's apple bobbing almost humorously above his sweater. —His translations of Neruda are excellent. We'll invite him to a conference with Latin American scholars at our institute. Nice old man. Let him stay happy with his Neruda and his chasing girls. That is heroic too for him.—

There was laughter.

—Well, he must be kept out of the West. He has the wrong friends in the West, he is here and there with the enemies of this country. You'll invite him to a conference? What for? He'll expect to see reactionaries like Borges there! Our hero … that house of his, how is he allowed to have such a house for two old people?—

Mrs Kgomani said nothing to defend her friend or correct misinformation. She continued to take the bus to the old suburb where most houses, withdrawn up green drives like the houses in the white suburbs where she had lived as a daughter, had been converted into institutions. Her friend lived in the house that had been vacated in a hurry by a general of occupying forces, and he had no wife alive but two very old aunts and several sons and daughters with their wives and husbands living with him. There were neat beds behind rigged-up curtains in passages, and a warped grand piano in an entrance hall where four carved dining chairs that had somehow survived being chopped up for firewood during bad times were oddly-assorted round a plush-clothed table in anticipation of a vanished occasion. The aunts sat there and did not speak, even in their own language. Karel had a room at the
top of the house with french windows and a balcony. —But don't step out, it's unsafe.—

Grass up there, growing from blown seeds between cracks in the cement. Inside, so much was safe. The room was perhaps meant for a reception room or studio, in the days when people like him had separate rooms for each function of living, and his grandfather's peasants were crowded into huts like the ones where Whaila's people lived now. Karel worked, slept and ate there, in the middle of an entire, assembled life. It was abundance of a kind she had not known existed, a fullness beyond money, although here and there was a fragment of something costly but damaged, like the Imari cat. She wandered about this life of his. A photograph when young; handsome as she had never seen a man to be, with the wing of black hair pointing back from the brow, and a cigarette holder between beautiful lips. Plaster maquettes of vanished structures; a piece of thick embroidery detached from its ceremonial occasion, hanging on a cord, dictionaries in five languages, solid as furniture, step-pyramids of journals shedding press cuttings, a plate of smooth stones, the painting of a man in braid and medals, dated 1848, who looked like Karel in fancy dress, framed letters in foreign languages signed ‘Lukács Gyorgy' and ‘Thomas Mann', scrap-paper drawings and sheets of music manuscript with dedications, old lamps that had scorched their shades, long fixing with an amber eye among books one left open at a poem or an engraving, a child's clumsy posy of dried flowers, a draped flag worn thin as an old dress, theatre programmes, abstract paintings of the modest size presented by artists themselves, even a tin canister—What's this?—

He looked at her hand for a moment as if it held one of the grenades whose features and performances she was studying. He came over to her. —Don't you see? The label is still there. Like a can of beans. It's Zyklon B, the gas the Nazis used in their death chambers. It was issued with—what d'you call it—rations
to the camp commandants.— He translated from the German: —‘For the control of vermin'—and there are instructions to be careful not to contaminate yourself when using it. —

He took the canister slowly from her and replaced it on a scroll-ended bibelot shelf stained with circles made by wine glasses at long-past parties. He adjusted the position so that the label would not be obscured. —I was with the Russians who went in when Berlin fell. Most of Hitler's men had fled but we opened doors and found some. One had this can on his desk.— His head seemed too heavy for him and under raised eyebrows his face sagged before her. —A sample. Something to (he ran his fingers round some invisible gadget) play with, while talking on the phone. I put the can in my pocket. That was the looting I did. And I keep it here where I can see it every day among the books, and the photographs of the women and children and friends because that's where it belongs, that's how it was used, as some ordinary … commodity—

An urge came upon her crudely as an urge to vomit or void her bowels. She began to tremble and to flush. Her eyes were huge with burning liquid she could not hold back. She wept in his arms, blotted against the solid body thick with life in which the constricted breathing of age was like a great cat's purr. He knew she was not weeping for the man he had shot dead at his desk, or even for the innocents for whom death was opened like a can of beans. The kitchen floor; it was the kitchen floor.

She came from so far away, down there in a remote country, belonging to a privileged class at home, and far, far from the bombardments, the childhood existence on frozen potatoes, the firing squads for partisans set to dig their own graves, and the gas chambers for families. The necessity to deal in death, no way out of it, meeting death with death, not flowers and memorials, was just coming to the people among whom she had grown up.

*

Where the city of the intermediate thousand years had been bombed to rubble in the war, excavations for a new subway line had unearthed Roman baths belonging to a garrison from the first foreign occupation of the country. With enough time, foreign occupations become part of a treasured history which is threatened by the latest foreign power: asserting national heritage in stone restored everywhere, the local authorities raised the marble columns in a park laid out above the subway. Behind, at the distance of a crowd from a spectacle, was the solid horizon of workers' housing blocks. The nursery-school teacher who lived there took Nomzamo's mother home for coffee to what she called ‘The Great Wall'. In a kilometre of ten-storey buildings with windows set like close type she pointed at one she alone could distinguish from all others. —That's where we are.—

The mythical wooden beasts of a children's playground were furred with snow, here. The women and their small children moved at once into the hot, echoing concrete walks beyond double doors. —Everybody in this block has not less than three children. That's the way housing is allotted. In the school holidays you can't think, you can't hear yourself speak … your own children are among them, and they make a hell.— The teacher was studying to improve her qualifications and become an official translator for a State publishing house. —I'm lucky, my two eldest can look after themselves and my mother takes the little one, so I can go and work at night in a library.— Here, too, were neat beds disguised as livingroom furniture; the preoccupations of different members of the household staked out in corners and shelves of territory: musical instruments and reference books (the husband taught in a college of music), children's sports banners and bicycles, models on box-lids, an ironing board before a television set. —D'you want to go away?—

She was a soft-voiced blonde with all her tension and emotion in her neck. —Only to a better apartment. That's all. To have another
room! I know very well why we can't have it, it'll take another generation to make up what was destroyed and provide for all the people who have come to the towns. But I want it. If I had money, I know I'd try and buy the way … although I think it's wrong.—

—Can people do that?—

—Always, everywhere, people do that. It can't be stopped, altogether.—

—We've got something … a charter. Something like this ‘… the people shall have the right to live where they choose, to be decently housed'.—

The coffee cups were special ones, the teacher's laugh rang from the cupboard where she sought them. —Oh yes, that's what the leaders say, but when they are in power, they have to do it … that's the trouble. But it's a rich country down there? You didn't have wars. Maybe you can.—

There was no African family here in which the namesake was common responsibility. Mrs Kgomani could not go out at night unless she could find a baby-sitter. Pavel took up the instruction begun long ago by a naughty boy and girl in Joe's study among documentary evidence of the kind of activity she was engaged in now. Pavel came to the apartment and taught her chess. Snow did not keep him away; looking out the window at the expected hour she saw him in his fur boots and elegant coat, moving through the white like one of those antlered creatures in his own latitude who graze in cold wastes, digging for nourishment only they know is there.