A Sport of Nature (50 page)

Ruthie must have just washed her hair. She wore a towel turban that pulled firm the skin of her temples and cheeks; the lost beauty her sisters talked of almost emerged—useless beauty thrown away so cheap on the first man to take it up in a nightclub. It was her turn to lead the way, chattering and apologizing for her dressing-gown. They went into what must have been the communal room: paper flowers before a plaster Virgin Mary, piles of gritty records, a photograph of a frock-coated man and a woman in a high collar under oval convex glass. They sat on a sofa protected by crocheted headrests and arm-mats. The curtains were closed against the sun and again what was said was said
in patterned dimness, twenty-nine years submerging their faces under the dissolving play of depths.

Ruthie's chatter stopped instantly. —Europe. But what would I do there. I mean, I don't know anybody.—

—We've got friends who would look after you.—

—Oh no. Thank you, it's very generous, tell your husband, I don't know what to say … No, I'd better stay. I'm used to it, now. I speak the language pretty well, you know. After such a long time. Some of the whites who went away when it was all finished for them, they've come back, they can't settle down there, after here—even though everything's changed so much. And would I get my job back … Europe. I'd better stay where I'm used to.—

Five weeks after a certain telephone call from his mother Sasha followed the impulse, and wrote to the Department of Political Science at M.I.T. asking whether the Department would be good enough to supply him with the address of Mrs Hillela Kgomani, who had taken part in a seminar on Africa (he apologized for not being able to be more precise) the previous spring. It was necessary for him to contact Mrs Kgomani for reasons of research. He requested that if it appeared that his letter was directed to the wrong department, it might be passed on to the appropriate one. He received a courteous reply, and the address of the brownstone. But although Hillela wrote several times to Brad over the next year, she never gave any address other than that which would place her in a city at the moment of writing: ‘Algiers', ‘Luanda'. If there is nowhere to reply to, of course, the one to whom a letter is addressed cannot fall to the temptation to write back, and cannot deliver any slight through not doing so. Trust her to protect herself … She would not know the joy and pain her handwriting caused.

Brad wrote across the envelope from South Africa: return to sender.

Unwanted, unopened, dead letters come back slowly, by sea mail. Sasha opened his and could not stop himself from beginning to read: …
my “field” (as my mother says, as if we were sheep she'd like to keep corralled chewing on this bit of grass or that) turns out to be not so different from yours, after all. I suppose that's why I'm writing. I chucked up law (again, the first time was for the army) and I'm working with a black trade union in Durban, the place you once ran away to with your friend, I've forgotten her name, and left the whole house in a state of shock … I'm relieved to be away from JHB, I'm no longer with that girl, either. And the house is gone, they sold it before they left. But I hate the climate. I've never liked lying about on beaches, which is what everyone finds the compensation for breathing warm soup instead of air, night and day, in summer. I haven't had a winter here, yet. What I do: I'm helping to organize workers. It's as simple as that but of course it's not simple at
all here. You would have gone off to take a shower or gossip on the phone if I'd talked about such things, but now I suppose you'll know something of them. Maybe more than I do. Pauline said you lecture. African problems
—
she didn't know the details, she thought it was refugees, but anyway, refugees are ex-employees, potential labour, an unemployment problem among other things, so you're certain to have picked up a lot from them. As you must know, blacks' unions here at home still aren't allowed to participate in the official industrial conciliation process, but this won't be able to go on for much longer, whatever the government would like. As blacks have become the main work force, not only traditionally in mining, but in the engineering, construction and other secondary industries, being able to negotiate directly only with whites has left the bosses a fraction of the labour force to parley with. The recognized trade unions are a farce, and these pragmatic capitalists have to deal with reality. So it's certain that in a year or two black unions will have to be recognized. And there's the question of mixed ones
—
but I won't go into all that. The only thing that was alive for me in law was labour legislation, and now at least I'm doing something practical with all that stuff I mugged up. Black workers have little or no experience of the kind of organizing skills they're going to need, or the kind of structures, right from the shop floor, they have to set up. Not that there's always a shop floor
—
I'm mostly concerned with dockworkers, at present. All I ever knew about them when I started was that they invented (should I say ‘choreographed') the gumboot dance, you know, the calf-slapping-and-stamping performance, tin whistles shrieking between their teeth
—
teams of them used to be brought to put on for Pauline's indigenous art shows. It's not much of a career; I only mind for Joe
—
but believe it or not, Carole has taken up where I dropped out, she's articled to the firm he joined in London! So that's good, for him. He didn't want to leave but my mother decided he was useless here. And that was that
.

I don't know what you want to know. If anything. But I imagine that you are back in a family now; you have your own family, a professor husband, a child (I know that's not his, that's from another marriage)
.
I've never been to Uncle Sam's great U.S. but I can choose and furnish your house from the movies … how else? And you in it. No movie to supply that one
.

I suppose that house and you in it is a good idea. So that with it you may want to know the sort of things people want to know when they have family houses. The other cousins: maybe you'd like to hear about them. They all three have careers. Mark's a urologist, a neighbor of yours, more or less, in Philadelphia. Brian's in banking: Clive
—
I'm not sure what he's doing, can't remember for the moment, but whatever it is he's very successful—I met him once, on a plane going to Cape Town. He gave me a card which I lost. Maybe you have a card now: Professor and Ms Hillela
—
what? Pauline didn't say; you keep your other name when you lecture
.

It's wonderful to be with blacks. Working with blacks. Already there are some who are senior to me, one or two who have been, for training, to England and West Germany. I take my orders from them. So I suppose I'm like Pauline, really. Where I get my thrills. It's wonderful and sometimes it's a terrible let-down. Alpheus's garage was luxury compared with the flat near the Point I'm living in, but I'm still cut off from the vigorous ugliness of the life they live, different from my ugliness; what they find to talk about in their endless dialectic
—
no, synthesis
—
of laughter, anger and mimicry, their Sunday booze-ups, the childhood loyalties they never seem to give up
—
it's not in a manner of speaking that they call each other brother
.

But what am I saying. You were married to a black. It must have been different, for you. Perhaps I should marry a black girl
—
if that were possible. (By the way, the law against that is going to go, too, one of these days. They're looking for ways they can trim off the straggly edges without harming white power.) But I have to tell you I'm not attracted to black girls. Not so far. As if they could care
.

The kind of job I do
—
it's neither legal nor illegal. It's not really new, either. I'm making no great break-through for progress. It was done before we were born or when we were little kids by people whose names I've
learned, Afrikaners like the Cornelius sisters and Bettie du Toit, and Jews like me, Solly Sachs and Eli Weinberg. Before the laws put a stop to it. Some of them landed in jail and exile, and others gave in and settled for working in white unions. So now it has to be begun over again, but this time there'll be no stopping it. The gumboot dance won't be hustled off the arena when the whites have had enough for their amusement. Our offices have been raided a few times; the police seem bewildered by what they find, might as well be reading upside-down. I've been questioned, along with another white involved. But they don't seem to know what to do about us, yet
.

It was not prying, to read the letter meant for Hillela. As he read he saw that when he was writing to her, he was writing to himself. He tore up his letter and dropped it into the office waste basket among memoranda, spoilt photocopies, and the Coke cans his colleagues aimed there.

The signals from the General's free radio stations became stronger and stronger. His pilots, training in Bulgaria to fly MIGs, qualified and came back to the bush to operate from the captured provincial towns with their airports or airstrips. The government troops were fighting from besieged towns. The General rocket-attacked and bombed military bases but gave strict instructions that the oil refinery and the country's two ports were not to be touched, nor were there to be any but unavoidable civilian targets. —I'm not going to walk into a ruined city and take on a wrecked economy.— But in the end there was fighting in the streets in which his former comrades, his neighbours when he was a young officer, his friends and perhaps even some members of his own family would be killed. Only the best of them was safe by his side, and no-one dared to recall that the Colonel had once belonged with the enemies his father had overcome. The General did not have to explain to Hillela his feelings about this; she had
seen the homeless wanderers between army and army, war and war, sitting in the bush, she had brought the soup powder that comes after shrapnel.

Some time before the army headquarters, police headquarters, broadcasting station and telecommunications centre in the real capital were taken by the General's troops, and he entered the capital in a procession of armoured cars and tanks whose engine power was quickly superseded by the lava of crowds that carried them forward in battered, ecstatic eruption, the marriage took place in some Hilton or Intercontinental hotel where he flew to join Hillela for twenty-four hours. It was then that the General gave her her African name. She had forgotten the promise, taken as one of the kind offered her meaninglessly so often in the playfulness of sexual advances. —You'll be there on the register: Chiemeka Hillela.— Now she remembered. —What does it mean?— He took a smiling breath that expanded the muscles of his neck as well as his big chest. —It's not a name in my language, it comes from another country, but it means the same as my real name does. ‘God has done very well'.—

His bell of laughter broke and reverberated, back and forth. She embraced him, the accolade of victorious commanders, her arms hardly able to reach around his shoulders.

She had drawn back. The shine of her one cheekbone was impressed with the ridges of the insignia he bore, her eyes were inescapable; he found the challenge very attractive. —Why in another language? Because I'm a stranger?—

—Now, now. Wait a minute. It's an Igbo name, from Nigeria. I had a good friend there, I stayed with him and his mother, she treated me like her son. It's in her honour I call you. She fed me, she clothed me the first time I was in exile, as a youngster. And her name was the same as mine, a female version; a name that was fated …—

The name that was ready for her has been hers for official purposes ever since, but between the couple she remained Hillela, as he remained for her Reuel, his colonial baptismal name at the Catholic font. So that ‘Hillela' has become the name of intimacy, withdrawn from the currency of general use and thereby confusing her identity and whereabouts, for others, further than these already had been. It was only by her face that Olga recognized the President's wife in the newspaper photograph, that time, sitting there right next to Yasir Arafat.

Aleopard stands in the entrance of State House. When Nomo has a week to spare between seasonal haute couture presentations in Paris, Rome, New York and London, and flies out to Africa, the moment of arrival for her is when she passes an elongated hand over the creature's head in recognition of the way the namesake climbed on its back the first time she was brought to visit, as an eleven-year-old child. She has a leopard-skin coat at home in her Trastevere apartment or London mews flat (depending where she passes the winter). It was designed for her by one of the Japanese couturiers who have superseded the French since Chanel and Dior died.

This other, a taxidermist's, version of the leopard gives it flanks hard and hollow to the touch as cardboard under the bright-patterned tight silky fur, and a tongue like congealed sealing-wax in its snarling mouth. There are a small rock and clumps of dried grasses glued to the plinth with which it was supplied; the whole tableau a gift of homage to the State given by the oil concessionaires when the country became independent and the General was President for the first time, before the civil war. The entrance is an atrium, with wings of the house led to by open, white-pillared passages on either side. State House was originally Government House, and built to the standard design of one of the sovereignties of hot climates in the imperial era which, of course, flourished and declined before that of airconditioning. The President has wanted to brick up walls and extend to the whole place the airconditioning system he long ago installed in the public and private rooms, but Hillela's early exposure to the stylistic graces
and charms of the past, spending school holidays with a collector aunt, left latent in her an appreciation that has emerged in the mistress of the Presidential residence. She has insisted that State House appropriate Government House, not destroy its architectural character. She has been in charge of all extensions and structural alterations. A style of living commensurate with the dignity of the State, she persuaded the President, is not expressed in the idiom of the Hilton and Intercontinental (with which both have a strong emotional tie as the places where his return into his own was bargained for and planned). As for luxury—a measure of which every Head of State, even one as determined to live as close to his people as Nyerere was, must have in order to symbolize some estate now attainable to the people, since every head of a black state was once one of its oppressed people—real luxury is expressed in gardens and the indulgence of individual notions of comfort, idiosyncratic possessions. Behind the leopard of black independence, the atrium opens across the reception area from which official visitors waiting to be received by the President can watch, in the park, peacocks from the last governor's tenancy trailing worn tails. Hillela would not touch, either, the collection of votary objects that surrounds the coat-of-arms that has replaced an imperial one: plaques beaten out of the country's copper, the carvings by local artists of heroic agrarian couples, faithfully but subconsciously reproducing as an aesthetic mode the oversize head and spindly legs of undernourishment, and the toadying gifts of white visiting artists or the multinational firms who commission them—heroic animals, more leopards, elephants, lions—paintings as subconsciously reproducing the white man's yearning for Africa to be a picture-book bestiary instead of the continent of black humans ruling themselves. She knows the strings of cheap pearls and pressed-tin miniature human limbs that encrust walls round the ikon in Eastern Europe called the Black Virgin—whether 14th-century anticipation of Black Theology or time and
the grime of worshippers' breath had made her so, the admirer who took Hillela on a weekend expedition to the shrine could not say.