A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  Alpheus and his girl were walking out of the yard gate as Pauline and the girls arrived home. He opened the gate for the car, and Pauline paused as it passed him. —The stay-at-home seems to be fairly successful. We’ve just been into town.—

  Alpheus and his girl were dressed to stroll out on a public holiday. He had a way of standing quietly as if waiting to be dismissed. He smiled. —Thank you.—

  In the yard, Pauline sat a moment with her hands on the steering-wheel. —What does he thank for? The information? He’s always like that. If every black were like him, nothing would ever change. If Joe hadn’t told him to, he wouldn’t even have supported the strike. Maybe it’s a mistake to have removed him from the condition of his own people. I don’t know, anymore.—

  Carole and Hillela also stayed at home when the school held its prayers and celebrations for the Republic. On the day, Pauline and Joe kept open house for friends as depressed and confused as themselves; when Hillela left to go and lunch at Olga’s (a compensation offered for the postponed shopping trip) they were arguing over Mandela’s reasons for calling off the stay-at-home on its second day—as for the national convention, no-one had ever expected for a moment the government would consider that.

  —This is the lovely young daughter I didn’t have.—

  It was too chilly to swim, but in Olga’s pavilion beside the pool Jethro carried round a whole poached salmon—the stately pink corpse laid out with the cook’s radish roses and swags of golden mayonnaise—and Hillela was allowed a glass of the French champagne served in honour of some guests, in the way of Arthur’s business, from another country. The lady was settled in her chair like a beautifully-marked butterfly—amber hair and the deep blue oval of a sapphire on each earlobe, pale fingers banded with gold and diamonds and tipped with red nails. She made soft noises of approval over Hillela. Jethro paused in his procession to beam on the girl, while everyone except Arthur smiled at them both. —Miss Hilly, you been there to my country again? You staying all the time here in Jo’burg now, you don’t like go there sometime see you daddy?—

  Olga charmed, speaking to him in the third person. —Next time Jethro goes home, he’s going to take Miss Hilly with him, isn’t that right?— And Jethro bowed his way round, laughing.

  —He thinks of the children in this house as his own.—

  —How wonderful. You can’t get anybody loyal like that, not in Europe, not at any price.—

  Olga took care not to neglect her young niece in the presence of distinguished company. She turned aside from talk of the villa in Italy, belonging to these guests, which she and Arthur were being pressed to visit, and had a confidential moment with Hillela. —How is Pauline … I worry about Pauline. What is the point of all the things she gets herself involved in. That bus boycott—they had to pay in the end, surely. The Republic—it’s been declared … And she neglects herself. She used to be so striking-looking. If you live here you must abide by the law of the country.—

  Olga and Arthur believed you must abide by the law of the country but were once again making contingency plans not to go on living there.

  —There’s a delightful place on the market, not far from ours. I think the position’s even better than ours. Why don’t you buy a little pied-à-terre in Italy? It’d be lovely to have you as neighbours now and then—

  —The way things are going, it might have to be more than that!— Olga laughed when she said it, and the butterfly lady did not pause to take in the inference: —Though I can understand, if I lived in this beautiful country, with those wonderful vineyard estates at the Cape, and those marvellous beaches, so clean—not like Europe—uncrowded, I wouldn’t see much reason to go anywhere else—

  Arthur broke in when he saw an advantage in doing so. —We’ve got a place at the Cape. Nice place right on the best beach in the country. You can come out and spend as long as you like there, any time.—

  —I still think we should take up Michael’s offer to look round for us in Italy.—

  Arthur had a way of blinking, refusing to acknowledge the regard of others, conversely, as Pauline always felt that regard, sought it. His head hung forward from his thick shoulders while he chewed—like an ox, yes.

  Hillela had her first driving lesson on the day a republic was declared; the day on which one drives for the first time is like that on which one first found one’s balance on a bicycle—something never forgotten. Her cousin Clive had just passed his driving test. Stopping, starting, giggling at herself, with Clive sitting beside her she went up and down Olga’s long drive the whole afternoon, pausing only when admiring Jethro came over the lawn with the cream scones and tea, and finally ending her first journey only when Olga called out that drinks were being served, and the car must be ‘put to bed’. Very carefully Hillela drove it successfully into its bay beside Arthur’s two other cars.

  Clive presented his pupil, an arm across her shoulders the way he would walk off a sports field with a fellow player. —You should just see how quickly Hillela caught on. She can even declutch properly, already.— By some quirk of heredity, he had Pauline’s black, demanding eyes, and the red, live mouth of the handsome male. No-one took a photograph. But Olga kept the image of the pair, the children belonging to her sister Ruthie and herself, so full of their little achievements, so happy, so innocent in their burgeoning, although she could never place the day, the year when it was imprinted.

  Olga drove her niece back to Pauline’s house. She embraced her and held her hands before letting her leave the car. She seemed saddened by something she could never say—all children who are sent to boarding-school know this mood in adults, who have exiled them.

  —I’ll see you next Monday, then, Olga. And thanks for a lovely day.—

  Olga took comfort and forgiveness. —Oh yes, darling. And I know exactly what we’re going to buy. Monday—if everything’s all right. But I’m sure this whole business is over now.—

  Nelson Mandela went Underground after the All-In African Conference Pauline had attended in Maritzburg. When he surfaced he was tried and imprisoned; and when he was taken from prison and tried once again, this time for treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment, no-one was allowed to record the speech he made from the dock; so the schoolgirl Hillela, present when her aunt played a tape-recording of his speech made at Maritzburg, was one of the few people to hear the sound of Mandela’s voice for many years, and perhaps to remember it. She had the opportunity to do so, anyway.

  Through the high hum of the blood in adolescence, that distances the voices of adults, the tense discussions between Pauline and Joe continued as if taking place somewhere else and from time to time breaking in with a name or phrase overheard. It was cold; the snug of a sweater round the neck; a fire at night; it must have been June. Mandela was the name. From that Underground where he had gone he sent portents and messages like those the Latin writers Hillela was having to construe for the winter exams said came from the flight of birds or from sibyls speaking through the mouths of caves. Pauline supported Mandela’s call for an international economic boycott of South Africa. ‘Supported’, when obtruding from adult conversation at Olga’s, applied to whether or not a divorced wife received alimony from an ex-husband, or whether a relative was adequately provided for by her family. (For example Len—his daughter understood from oblique references—did not ‘support’ her.) ‘Supported’, in Pauline and Joe’s dialogue which plunged into tunnels of silence or absent attention to other things but never ceased, perhaps not even in dreams, meant that one or both of them thought they had found some sort of sign. Not the sure and certain instruction they had been waiting for, but something to which one could attach oneself, and feel the tug of history. Pauline supported economic boycott as a way out: for the thousands of blacks imprisoned and banned as, it seemed, the dismal only result of the politics of protest; for the whites, her friends, braver than herself, who were also banned or imprisoned as part of the same tactical failure Mandela admitted. And for herself, c
ompanion of the blacks’ route, with nowhere to go now that marches were banned, fearful of and not free to enter (a family, a husband’s surer contribution within legal opposition to consider) the unimaginable darkness of the Underground—for her, rescue from being stranded, from ending up white as her sister Olga was white.

  There was the unaccountable doubt of Joe to set Pauline’s hands raking up through the electric crackle of her hair.

  —But what are you talking about? Who will suffer? People who work in towns and have shoes on their feet and drink bottled beer and spray their armpits with deodorants? Or the ones on the farms and in the ‘homelands’ who live on dry mealie-meal? How much more can they suffer than they do already? What will boycotts deprive them of they don’t already lack? What’ve we got we couldn’t do without if it means bringing down this government—if we really mean we’re ready to sacrifice these wonderful privileges everyone’s afraid we’ll miss so much—

  —And what do those rural people use to buy that bit of mealie-meal? Money sent home by the labourers in the mines and the factories, the construction workers. And if—if—what an hypothesis that is, when has economic boycott ever been fully imposed—and if American and European investment were to dry up, what would happen to those mines, factories, building projects? What happens to the men they employed, the men who sent back the money for mealie-meal?—

  —You sound like a member of the Chamber of Commerce. I can’t believe it. As if you were trying to explain economics to a five-year-old. For Christ’ sake! I know the consequences as well as you do. They’ve made the calculation because there’s nothing else left to do—except kill. Don’t you see? They’ve made the decision—one generation more to suffer, but if it’s going to be worse than it’s ever been, it’ll be for something.—

  —Pauline … you can’t even pass a starving cat in the street.—

  —I’ll leam. I’ll learn.—

  —No, my girl. Against your own good sense and reason, you actually imagine it quite differently. You dream the American bankers will all band together in the name of FREE-DOM for South African blacks and the boys in Pretoria will take down the flag and tear up the statute book.—

  Pauline’s hair fell across her cheeks, flew back. —Hah, you’re the one who doesn’t face facts. Everything’s going to come right through the loopholes you manage to find in disgusting laws. The government stops up one mouse-hole, you find another. You work yourself to death, but what’s changed? What will you be at our Nuremberg?— In her face was the cruel pleasure, already distressing her while indulged, of turning her fears for Joe into hurt inflicted on him. —The one who tried to serve justice through the rule of law, or the one who betrayed justice by trying to serve it through the rule of unjust laws?—

  Yet soon the controller of the four winds in that house was back in self-conflict again, a state felt by others in the house as a change in atmospheric pressure, in diet, rather than understood. The Swazi fruit bowl was often empty; Bettie borrowed the girls’ pocket-money to buy soap flakes on Rebecca’s ‘day’ because she had told Pauline ‘two time’, without result, that the supply had run out. Another sign had come from the Underground. It was a spear; the shape of the object itself, its clear and familiar associations (the dates of Kaffir Wars to be memorised, the mascot shields and assegais sold along Len’s roads in Rhodesia) pierced the half-attention with which the new phase of the Pauline-Joe dialogue was registered by the children. Umkhonto we Sizwe: translated for whites as ‘The Spear of the Nation’; the voice from nowhere and everywhere—Mandela’s—announced it.

  —Why should whites be told they can join Umkhonto when we couldn’t be members of the ANC? I mean, if there’s been a change of policy, why doesn’t it apply to ANC as well?—

  Joe had a special, almost sorrowful tone for use in court when it was necessary to suggest to an evasive witness that he was in fact well aware of circumstances of which he claimed ignorance. —But, Pauline, isn’t it just exactly in order that no-one will be able to say there’s been a change of policy. Controlled, symbolic violence—that’s the business of Umkhonto. ANC doesn’t change; it retains its principles—

  —Yes, yes, non-violence, that’s all the difference is. He was talking about its stand against violence—

  —Wait a minute. If it were to retain its non-violent principles but yield another, it would be impossible to deny officially that it had not changed at all, impossible to refute the charge that Umkhonto or the Spear of the Nation or whatever you like to call it is proof that the ANC has abandoned non-violent tactics. ANC hasn’t changed, can’t, won’t change; not at this stage. ANC is what it always was, the classic non-violent, non-racial liberation movement. Its claim for support from the West depends on its clean record—victim of but not prepetrator of violence. Credibility with black Africa and black Americans depends on its clean record—a revolutionary movement by blacks for blacks. These two principles are the moral basis. If you accept the need for violence, you lose credibility with the West from which, though god knows why, help is still expected to come. If you let in whites, you lose credibility with the blacks outside—and some inside, as we know.—

  The exchange is suspended by the disruption of the end of a meal, the need for sleep (the fire crumbling down; Carole and Hillela sauntering off to bed) or the time come for a return to Joe’s office. But the preoccupation continues, present as the creak of floorboards in the night, and sounds now from here, now from there, in the house and from the garden where, on Saturdays, Alpheus earns his lodging by the token of weeding the grass or burning leaves.

  If Olga had seen Pauline during that winter she would have noticed with concern the skin, darkened like bruised rose petals, and the minute cysts, grains of waste her body was not eliminating, under Pauline’s eyes; the impatient flick of the lids with which she monitored thoughts she did not want to have.

  —So we are invited to join in the dirty work.—

  —No. On the contrary. It’s a recognition that you don’t have to be black to have the revolutionary temperament.—

  —That’s fine. But blacks who don’t have the revolutionary temperament may still say ‘I support the ANC but I won’t join a violent movement’—and keep their self-respect.—

  When friends were present, voices rose and clashed. Lying on her bed in the room filled with all the sentimental sexual totems of young girls who go to good schools, Hillela heard the drum-roll and piercing notes of adult ritual, produced by a preoccupation and passion remote from the yearnings, wild anticipations and dreads that do not come from outside but grow like the bones and flesh, the tree of self.

  —What about ’60, that leaflet the communists put out? The police were picking them up from gutters everywhere … The Party called upon communists, then, to work with the Congress Alliance. They’d found a way to get round the national versus socialist revolution wrangle. For whites, South Africa is an advanced capitalist state in the last stage of imperialism; but for blacks, it is still a colony. So a traditional national movement like the ANC has a ‘progressive function’ that a workers’ party can support. Well, now they’ve got where they wanted to be; the government’s done it for them. Protest politics has come to a dead end. The time’s come when blacks must think about revolutionary tactics. Whites are invited to join Umkhonto, and who’s going to join?—the CP whites, those in the Congress of Democrats, and those Underground. ANC’s become a front organization, a national monument, and the white communists are entrenched in its avatar, Umkhonto. So they’ll make sure the national black revolution is a red one.—

  —Oh my god, here’s another who sees a red under every bed.—

  —We all made a mistake, not joining the Congress of Democrats.—

  —But why?—

  —We should have got in there and kept it what it was supposed to be, kept the communists out of control.—

  —And what would you have made of it? Another dead end?—

  —Oh Joe, I know you think we
’re all dodos—

  —No, no, I know I am. My wings are atrophied; I don’t expect anything, of myself—

  Their laughter prodded him; they were drinking wine as part of their ceremonial palaver.

  —But we do! I do!— Pauline’s fierce cry. —I wish I’d joined COD when I nearly did, after Maritzburg. Then I’d be in it up to the neck now.—

  —You’d be prepared to see things blown up?—

  —Things, yes. Buildings. Their white House blown up, there in van Riebeeck’s garden; that would shift their backsides if nothing else will.—

  —And people?—

  —Controlled violence against symbolic targets doesn’t take life.—

  —Oh no? Some old nightwatchman who gets in the way? Passersby? There’s no such thing as completely controlled violence.—

  —Oh I don’t know … Of course you’re right. I just don’t know.—

  —It’s necessary to demystify, always demystify. Controlled violence is a sanitized term for killing. Killing anyone who gets in the way of your symbolic target. Including your own people, if a bomb blows up in their own hands. Yourself. Killing is killing. Violence is pain and death.—

  —The police have been handing those out to blacks, year after year.—

  —Yes. Let the blood be on the government’s hands.—

  Killing is killing. Violence is pain and death. Torn streamers from the fabric of adult life, drifting across the imaginary scenes and dialogues in the busy consciousness of a seventeen-year-old girl match nothing there. To kill or not to kill: her urgent choices are not these, could not even conceive of these. Indecision is between which group of friends she should choose to ‘go with’ more steadily than the other; whether to enjoy being swayed by some dominating personality in the one, or to enjoy being herself the boldest, the brightest, the most magnetic, in the other. She would be smouldering over some piece of injustice meted out to her at school and seeing herself—where?—anywhere she has never been, some apartment in a city never seen, Los Angeles or Paris, as comfortable as Olga’s house but of course not at all like Olga’s, or Pauline’s or anybody’s, with good-time friends (but not like the friends she makes do with now) or just one person, a man older than herself who adores her and makes love to her and takes her all over the world. Or perhaps with a boy her age whom she has not yet met, but who would have a certain family likeness without being in any way connected with, not even speaking the same language as any family she knew—a boy with whom she would play the guitar and grow vegetables, make love and have babies the way ordinary people (even Alpheus and his girl) did.