A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  —You don’t have to tell me. My name’s the one in the ballot. I’m going to have to go to the army.—

  —Am I responsible for that?—

  —Yes, because you don’t have to go.—

  —Stop talking nonsense, Sasha.—

  —No, Joe, if that’s true, then our life has been useless. Yours and mine.—

  —You, you, your life. Who gives a fuck for you fishing for a pat on the back. I’m not listening, do you hear, I’m not listening—

  Pauline lifted her long, blunt-nailed hand, to raise against her son or to protect herself, silver bangles from which the chasing had long worn off sliding down towards her elbow: the gesture was not concluded. There was an intrusion. The telephone rang. Hillela was speaking from a police station in Durban. She was fine. Mandy von Herz was fine. They had been recognized by the police on the North Beach. The police were being really nice, they allowed her to phone. Joe spoke to the sergeant and arranged for the girls to be put on the train that evening.

  —And him?— Hoarse Pauline presented Joe with the presence of Sasha, swollen-lipped, before them. Her voice was slurred as if she were stunned by drink. —Does the school know you’re here?—

  He did not answer.

  His mother lifted her big head again. —And what are we going to do about that? He could be expelled. —Where do they think you are?—

  —Manzini.—

  —So. Joe—you decide with him how to get out of this mess. A prefect simply runs away when he’s sent to a soccer match. What school can overlook that? What d’you suggest we do now? Simply walks out and hitches a lift home without a word to anyone, like any dropout, any delinquent—

  Joe kept the professional manner he had adopted over the other matter, with the Durban police. —I’ll phone, I’ll explain.—

  Pauline’s great head and red-scratched cheeks faced everyone, the inhabited helmet and mask of authority. —What’ll you explain?—

  —He was under stress. A family matter.—

  Hillela’s nose is peeling and there is a bracelet made of turban shells on her right wrist. When she sees her cousin Sasha, home, reading the Sunday paper, she puts a hand over her opened mouth. —Was it your half-term—

  They all hear Sasha. —No. A couple of us seniors got a chance of a lift, so they gave us a weekend.—

  The house needs to recuperate from the dread Hillela left behind her, and from the emotions Sasha let loose. Pauline has made a lamb curry with accompanying chapatis, yoghurt-and-cucumber salad, bananas with coconut, and peach chutney—the young people’s favourite lunch. Joe asks what the swimming was like. Oh wonderful, though not as good as Plett. —The water was so warm we all went in on Friday night—about two in the morning!—

  —Who’d you meet up with?— Carole slips into innocent schoolgirl gossip.

  —No-one in particular. Mandy knows some chaps from Michael-house, it turned out it was their half-term, and they knew someone I met at Plett.—

  —Who’s that?—

  Sasha swallows a large mouthful and turns on his sister. —Nosey.—

  Hillela is smiling at Sasha, but he doesn’t look at her face. She glances down at her arm as if something, a touch of light, has directed attention there. She rolls the shell bracelet off over her fist. —I brought this for you, Carole. Sasha—I would’ve got you something if I’d known you’d be here—

  The Shadow of a Palm Tree

  There was a time and place for Hillela to give account of herself.

  Olga’s Rover kept by Jethro shiny as the taps in her bathroom stood outside the gate. Olga sat in Pauline’s worn livingroom with Pauline, waiting. Olga got up and hugged her; —Hillela, oh Hillela.— She was sweaty from the day at school and did not know when it would be all right to break the sweet-smelling embrace. —You want to tidy up a bit?— Olga lifted the hair at the back of the girl’s head, gauging it needed an expert cut.

  —There’s a chicken sandwich in the kitchen, darling. Leftovers from the grand lunch I gave Olga.—

  —It was a perfectly good lunch, believe me. I usually have an apple and a bit of cheese.—

  —Yes, one can see that by the shape you keep. But I can’t be bothered. There are too many other things to do. I’m hungry; I eat bread and peanut butter to fuel myself; I spread around the arse …—

  She came back barefoot, her face washed, hair pushed behind her ears.

  —Your sandwich.—

  She turned and fetched it from the kitchen.

  Olga kept smiling at her, frowning and smiling at once, as people do in order not to make fools of themselves in some way. Olga would leave it to Pauline: Pauline accepted with the gesture of inevitability. —It’s all been passed off just as if you’ve been—I don’t know, spending the weekend with a friend, as if it were any other time you or Carole …? But the fact is, my dear little Hillela, you gave us all a terrible twenty-four hours. Not only us, your immediate family here where you belong, but also Olga … Olga was running around hospitals and police stations, just like us.—

  Olga’s smile broke. —We don’t want to reproach you, darling. We only want to know why. Why you could just go off like that.—

  —You know how much freedom I give you and Carole and Sasha. If you had an invitation, if you planned to go to Durban, you could so easily have asked me …—

  Pauline told Joe, Olga told Arthur: the girl answered unnaturally openly: —On Friday after tennis we were hot, and we began talking about the sea. So we thought, why not go?—

  —Without money, without a change of clothes?—

  The girl reassured Olga. They had their gym shorts, pullovers and swimming costumes in their attaché cases; Mandy had money. They had no trouble getting lifts. First a man and his wife going to their farm near Harrismith, and then they waited about half-an-hour at the roadside before a van driver stopped, he was on his way back to Cato Manor because his boss let him keep the van over the weekend, but he specially went right into Durban, for them.

  —Isn’t Cato Manor a black location?—

  Pauline broke in across her sister. —Prejudice is one thing, Hillela, and you know in this house I take full responsibility for bringing you up without any colour-feeling, any colour-consciousness. But you must realize that there are risks one doesn’t take. Just as I often tell you children one shouldn’t leave money lying around where it can be a temptation to poor people … Young girls just do not take lifts from men—men of any colour.—

  Olga had her hand at her own throat. —We’re so afraid for you, Hillela.—

  Mandy von Herz was removed from the school by her parents, since she refused to remain there under a ban on associating with Hillela Capran. Mr von Herz came to see Joe—he did not think such matters should be discussed with women—because he believed Hillela’s family should know that Mandy had been afraid to take a lift with the black man, and the black man himself had been afraid to pick up two white girls, but it was Hillela who had flagged him down and Hillela who had persuaded him. He was an elderly black man, apparently, and had some respect for his position as well as theirs, thank God.

  —Sanctimonious creep!— Pauline was only sorry she hadn’t been allowed to get at von Herz and tell him what she thought of him. Of course, his way of dealing with his daughter was to take the easy way out, and blame someone else’s child.

  Pauline herself never explained why she brought in Olga to deal with Hillela that time. Perhaps there had been the suggestion, since Olga was always saying she, too, was responsible for Ruthie’s child, that she might try her hand again. Olga could take her away, to a new environment; Pauline had heard Arthur was thinking of emigrating to Canada.

  Maybe the girl would be happier there.

  —Why?—Joe disliked unqualified statements. There was nothing to substantiate that the girl was unhappy, anyway.

  —Maybe even Olga would be different, there.—

  But that was no reason. Pauline could offer no reason except the one unexpressed beca
use he knew it well enough: Hillela didn’t resist, it was simply that she seemed not to notice all that Pauline and Joe had to offer that was worthwhile. It had been a misconception to think she had to be rescued from among Olga’s objets d’art, Olga’s Japanese screens placed before the waste ground of torn plastic and human excreta, Olga’s Carpeaux Reclining Nude (even if its provenance was merely ‘attributed to’) in place of surplus blacks, not fit for any labour force, sleeping under bushes. To resist Pauline would at least have meant to have belonged with Olga; why didn’t Hillela understand that was the choice? The only choice. Pauline was moved by her ignorance, innocence one must call it, at that age. She could not be abandoned. Pauline said it as if a note from the school had just informed her of the child’s undetected astigmatism or dyslexia: —She’s a-moral. I mean, in the sense of the morality of this country.—

  Pauline had won the battle with her son; she had no need to think about it. But from the jagged glass of his attack needle-splinters were travelling unfelt through her, maiming the exercise of certain powers in her as a limb is maimed by the lodging of a minute foreign body in the bloodstream, and forcing her to use substitutes, as the body adapts another of its parts to take over the function of the nerve-damaged one. She no longer surged forward to provide what would keep the girl’s mind healthily engaged with the realities of the country, but apparently was trying to circle round what might occupy that mind itself, what needed to be dealt with and got out of the way.

  She would never come empty-handed. She did not bring fancy clothes and chocolates as Olga did, but the shared instinct remained, vestigial, from the neighbourly conventions of her discarded Jewish childhood. She wandered into the girls’ room when her own daughter was not there. —Look what I found. Ruthie’s things. We each had boxes like this one, but mine was yellow. They were supposed to be for sewing, although we never did any …—

  When Ruthie finally went away, her sisters came in and packed up her possessions as if she were dead. Len had wanted them given to charity. Pauline and Olga took some souvenirs of the life Ruthie had abandoned; might she not come back for them some day?

  Their sister was not dead; here was her daughter; maybe she had come for them.

  The box was padded and covered with water-marked taffeta that buzzed under the girl’s drawn fingernail like breath over a paper-covered comb. There were spill-stains and a seal—red nail-varnish dried stony. Pauline sat on the bed beside Hillela, a fellow schoolgirl, while they picked about together in the box. Pauline explained tarnished metal wings and crowns from the war. —Insignia. Our boyfriends sent them, we had pins attached at the back so we could wear them as brooches. We were so ignorant and silly. And so far from the war. No air raids, no blackout. No rationing. No brothers. There’s something about a colonial society that trivialises. Often I think: the fact that civilians here missed out the war has got something to do with whites feeling they can avoid the reality of the other experience, too. Even though that’s all round them. Being black, living as blacks have to—it’s a misfortune that happens to somebody else … oh what’s this? Old bus tickets … we used to live in Mountain View, one time.—

  There was an autograph book with gilded edges: —‘Speech is silver, Silence is golden’—that was contributed by a teacher, for sure, and what about this one, ‘When in this book you look, and on this page you frown, think of the friend who spoilt it, by writing upside-down’. We kids didn’t think anything could be wittier.—

  A small box within the box held a doll’s comb and hair-rollers. —Oh for her Shirley Temple doll, I remember, she wouldn’t let me touch its hair—

  Hillela found a photograph.

  Pauline looked from the photograph to her, from her to the photograph.

  —That’s you, Hillela, that’s you.—

  A little girl whose stomach pushes up her dress stands in a public playground before a seesaw and swings. The shadow of palm fronds lies on the ground. Her long hair is rumpled into a topknot and sand shows in matt swathes clinging to her stumpy, baby legs.

  —Where was I?—

  —Oh at the sea.—

  —Is it Lourenço Marques?— Hillela was looking for landmarks in a tourist’s amateur focus where towers tilt and historic features are cut off.

  Olga explained sexual intercourse when the time came for that; now it was Pauline’s turn to find her appropriate moment.

  —Yes. Yes. It must have been Lourenço Marques.—

  Pauline had evidence other than the shadow of a palm tree. —My sister went on a holiday with you to Lourenço Marques when you were two, and it’s not quite the way they’ve told you … if they’ve told you anything. She’s quite unlike me in most ways, but I understand her. You see, she had been handed over from our father to Len, there were his mother and aunts watching her waist to see if she was going to be pregnant, as she should be, in the first year. They were an orthodox Jewish family—oh it’s only thanks to Ruthie, whose name poor old Len never speaks, that he’s been freed to marry his little Cockney waitress! There were the family dinners on Friday nights, the cake sales for Zionist funds, and especially the same old parties—weddings, barmitzvahs; those tribal Jews don’t know what it is to enjoy themselves spontaneously. Ruthie drank whisky and other nice young Jewish wives didn’t, Ruthie danced as if she were not married, with the prospective husbands of other girls. She went on holiday to Lourenço Marques and she fell in love, yes—but it was with what she suddenly imagined real life to be. She fell in love with that wailing fado, she wanted passion and tragedy, not domesticity. Passion and tragedy were not where she would have looked for them, here—they were around her, but in the lives of blacks, and she was somehow never able to be aware of anything outside her own skin (that’s her charm, in a way), let alone skin of another colour. So she took the kitsch as real. She fell in love with the sleazy dockside nightclubs, the sexuality and humidity, the freedom of prostitutes. That’s what she kept going back for. To wash off the Calvinism and koshering of this place. The way people go to a spa to ease their joints. That’s really what she went for, and then there was the young man in the white suit who could hardly speak English and danced with her all night. It all took place in half-darkness (you can’t imagine how dingy and sordid those places were), she never saw it clearly, she never wanted to come back into the daylight. I know Ruthie. Poor thing, she was all our colonial bourgeois illusions rolled into one; she thought that was Europe. Latin. She thought it was European culture. And she hated South Africa—but she thought what was wrong with this country was that it didn’t have that—

  Hillela heard someone else’s story through with polite attention. Towards the end she picked up the photograph again; she had the self-absorption of someone trying to get into a garment too small for her. —I loved swinging, and a seesaw with a wooden head at either end, I don’t think they were horses’ heads, something like a bull’s, they bumped me up and down.—

  Pauline was almost delicate in the old suggestion: —D’you think you really remember? You were not quite two. Other playgrounds, perhaps.— She shared with Olga and other adults the idea that life begins, for children, at a period set existentially by adults.

  —With Len, on the road. He used to stop in little dorps and take me into school playgrounds wherever there were swings.—

  And then the girl held out the photograph of herself, which she seemed to have succeeded in inhabiting. —Would you like to have it?—

  Pauline had decided what was needed was to fill up the vacuum of the past so that the young life could take root in the grit of the present. She should have said: Now, why don’t you want the photograph? But a sliver of glass paralyzed the nerve. What took over its function was something she despised: a pretence at being pleased, moved etc. —I’d love to. Oh thank you.—

  Hillela was looking at her with something—love?—that was natural, she was not like Sasha, not a child who judged—something not exactly compassion, more open and invading than that. With k
nowing. Pauline tried to remember what. She tried to arrange the knowing logically, to apply to the confidences about Ruthie, her sister, the girl’s mother, shared for the first time on an adult level. But she had the strange feeling it was something it couldn’t be, impossible—what she knew about herself: her refusal to hide a man on the run.

  And then, that day, Hillela kissed her on the cheek.

  What is to be done with these things? They can’t be thrown away. Just as it is necessary to keep the broken and repaired porcelain cat Olga gave her to ask forgiveness for something—Pauline’s offering cannot be refused, either. Autograph book, toy hair-rollers, tokens from boys away in a war—the box goes into a cupboard that can be reached only by standing on a chair, where old tennis rackets and compendia of games are stored. There is a writing-case of grey leather stamped with a picture of the Sphinx Pauline found, as well. Carole likes to write letters. Emptied of junk, it shall be for her. Inside, two porcupine quills, a broken ear-ring; the case is very nicely made, Carole will love it, there are loops for pens and an inner compartment—a few papers still in there.

  Letters. Ruthie’s letters she had not wanted; she left behind her what she did not want to be (so Pauline had explained) and what was not wanted by its owner surely does not belong to anybody? The letters are not in envelopes and not tied together by ribbons the way such things are described in the love stories lent by girls at school. As they are turned over the ends and beginnings of lines, divided by folds, are deciphered automatically as signposts presenting themselves in passing.