Whatever the holiday was dubbed, those white South Africans who did not gather to pray for their civilization in churches, or to listen at rallies to political speeches on the subject, traditionally went picnicking. So did many blacks, if they could find some place where they were allowed upon the grass—riversides, lakes and resorts were reserved for whites; it was only this year, as a consequence of the formation of the organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe, announced by Mandela and so troubling to Pauline, that the spear of Dingane’s resistance had been taken up by blacks to mark the day as his and theirs.
If it hadn’t been Dingaan’s Day and if the first bombings in Johannesburg had not been reported to have taken place that very day, the psychiatrist’s wife would not have been able to claim with the certainty of historical confirmation that she actually had met and could even recognize the girl subsumed beneath the woman’s face in newspaper photographs seen many years later. The picnic itself was like many other picnics. The psychiatrist was newly qualified, in junior partnership, and not yet prosperous; the young couple had twin babies, lived in a small flat, and got out into the fresh air every Sunday. Hillela was with them on that picnic because she was now working as his receptionist; her third job—count can be kept at least that far. She had come to the consulting rooms he shared with his senior, peddling The World Atlas and Encyclopaedia of Modern Knowledge on ten per cent commission. The receptionist turned her away and she was taking advantage of the privacy of the corridor outside the rooms to eat a hamburger she had brought into the building, when the psychiatrist came out and punched all the lift buttons in turn. His impatience had no effect, and while he was waiting she looked for somewhere to put down her hamburger, could not, and so approached him with sample Volume 1 of the encyclopaedia and a half-eaten bun in her hands. They both laughed. He refused the bargain offer of the encyclopaedia and sympathetically told the girl nobody really ever wanted to buy that sort of thing; in fact, he explained, going down in the lift with her, the fraudulent offer of encapsulated knowledge was a survival of post First World War aspirations, long before television provided popular culture among the poor in Europe, England particularly, when unemployment rose and people hoped to survive by ‘bettering themselves’. —It’s pretty heavy to lug around, anyway.— That was all the young sales-woman knew. He asked if she wouldn’t prefer some other job? She was swallowing the last of her hamburger but—with a hand over her mouth—eyes that attracted attention with their dark opacity signalled eagerly. Fortunately practical Pauline had made sure all three children had learned to type. And of course, on those visits to Olga Hillela had learned to drive a car; it wasn’t necessary to add to her qualifications by saying she had no licence. The psychiatrist did not need a driver, but he told her to see the receptionist about a vacancy at his rooms. She dumped the sample encyclopaedia on a bench at a city bus stop. Somewhere in forgotten records her name appears, written off to the percentage of bad debts the publishing company expected from those who answered their advertisement: ‘Would you like to earn up to R500 a week in your spare time?’
Because she had first approached him with an encyclopaedia and a hamburger with a big bite taken out of it, the professionally-regulated contact of learned doctor and unskilled employee had an element of shared amusement that held good through working days. He asked her if she was Jewish, too. —I suppose so.— Her reply amused him, once again; he felt the same about his Jewishness—at least he thought he did. But there was the occupational habit of asking gentle, insistent questions. —Why do you ‘suppose’?— —My father was Portuguese.— He did not yet have the experienced insight to recognize a fantasy instantly. —It doesn’t necessarily follow. There are Portuguese Jews. What did he do?— Even if she had been found traipsing around hawking educational ‘lines’, it was evident in her style and the way she spoke that the girl was from the educated middle-class. —He was a dancer.— —Oh, that’s interesting?—Not surprising that this—how had he described her to his wife?—‘striking-looking kid’—should have a strain of artistic heredity.
—A dancing-partner in a nightclub.—
Now he laughed; she laughed; he did not exactly believe her but respected what he interpreted as a surprisingly mature way of reminding that a humble receptionist’s private life was her own business. He suspected some history of running away from home, some chosen displacement, here; she was clearly of his and his young wife’s milieu, so he suggested out of kindness that she join them on a picnic one day. She brought a guitar along, with charming innocent assurance that she could contribute something to the enjoyment of the outing, and his wife, seated under the willows with a baby tugging each breast sideways, was delighted with her. No girlish friendship developed, however; although his wife asked him to many times, he never brought them together again. He sent his junior receptionist out for hamburgers, as the kind of service her position was expected to fulfil, and then shared them with her in his consulting room while everyone else was out for lunch. On the picnic, first names had been adopted, though she understood without having to be told that he must never be addressed as ‘Ben’ before the receptionist or patients. In his room they sat together on the couch he kept as barbers keep a painted pole—he preferred to have his patients upright across the desk from him in a comfortable chair of contemporary design. She amused him greatly with her comments on patients. —They all sit in the waitingroom trying to look as if they’re not there.—
—That’s it. They don’t want to be there. They’re all people on the run from something.—
She smiled, unconvinced, her mouth full again. A healthy appetite. —I knew someone on the run, laughing and joking all the time. He wanted beer and music.—
—On the run from what?— He did not deal with criminal cases.
—Security police. And he got away, safely over the border. We knew he had because he sent such a ridiculous letter—he asked for a pair of brown lace-up shoes, size twelve, and then signed the letter, your loving sister Violet!—
—Asked whom?—
—I can’t tell you. Well, you’re used to secrets.— It was her job. to take each patient’s file from the office cabinets and, preceding the patient silently into the doctor’s room, place it before him.
He left off using a medicated toothpick to warn her, in collusion, smiling. —You’re not supposed to read them, you know.—
—But Ben, I’d never believe anyone would have the thoughts they have!—
—You’re a naughty girl. You know that?—
He insisted that she use toothpicks, too, to take care of her pretty teeth which were marred by only one misalignment. He often drove her, after work, to her room in the second commune she had joined. None of the other occupants would have recognized him, or cared, if they did. All brought men or girls home for a night or as long as an attraction lasted. After a few afternoon rides, he asked if he could see her room. She invited him in without fuss. But she would not make love. Was it because it would be her first time? Ah no—sexual knowingness proclaimed itself in her laugh, from the very day she approached him with the bun and the book, in the unselfconscious ease with which she was at home with her body in a way that none of his patients, poor things, were, squeezing her soft breasts past the hard metal filing cabinets, swivelling her little behind as she bent to pick up the pen that wouldn’t stay efficiently clipped to the pocket of her white coat.
—You’ve got a boy you want to keep yourself for.—
Her answers were always so unmistakably hers. —No, Ben, not at the moment.—
Like a chemical change in the blood, he felt his attempt to put himself in his place with fatherliness turn to jealousy. Yesterday, tomorrow, another man; not today. —Why, Hillela?— He could not delude himself that hers was a moral objection, his wife etc. She spoke kindly, it sounded like a privilege: —I don’t want to with you, Ben.—
He bought her an expensive leather sling bag, a gooseneck reading lamp (had noticed there was only a central naked bulb o
n a cord in her hole of a room) and an anthology of poetry in which one of the names of contributors was his nom de plume. He did not confess authorship until he had asked for and been given her reaction to the poems. She said she liked one of them very much, it reminded her … —Of what? Oh, something she’d once read in a book by that Russian …
So she read Dostoevsky? What a pleasure to talk with her about Dostoevsky, to give her some psychoanalytic insights into the irrationality of his characters.
No, not exactly—she’d looked into the book while someone else was reading it.
—Who?—
—A cousin of mine.—
He wrote poems to her in which she did not recognize herself. In his professional experience of human vanity, her lack of it was amazing. He learnt something he didn’t know; it is difficult to make oneself necessary to one who is free of vanity. He offered something better than hamburgers on the couch where nobody ever lay; they began going to lunch at Chinese restaurants down in Commissioner Street, the Indians’ and coloureds’ end of town, where no colleagues would be likely to be met with. They drank white wine and she teased him. He was treating some patients for alcoholism: —What about your drunks? You, breathing at them across the desk!—
—Doesn’t matter. I can control my impulses within the pleasure principle, they can’t! You’d better worry about Mrs Rawdon—if she gets a whiff of you in the office …—
In the little shops of the restaurant neighbourhood he bought her a slippery satin dressing-gown with a gold dragon embroidered down the back, and incense she liked to burn in the hole of a room where she would take a man yesterday and tomorrow. —You’re going to get more money from next month. Then you can move out of that place.—
—More money?—
—I’m going to raise your magnificent salary. And in six months, I shall do so again. I’m beginning to get the kind of patients who’ll stick with me for years.—
She shook her head as if refusing a chocolate or another glass of wine. —I won’t stay much longer, Ben. They’re so solemn and miserable there in the waitingroom. Those ladies with perfect hairdos, those horribly skinny girls, those sulky kids who look as if they’re handcuffed between mothers and fathers. And there’s nothing wrong with them! Any of them! It’s all made up, imagination? Isn’t it? Those kids go to nice schools, they have toys and bicycles. Those girls can have as much food as they want, they’re not starving, they just don’t eat. Those men who talk to you for hours about sex—they never even take a glance at any woman who happens to be in the waitingroom … just sit there looking at the same old ratty magazines Rawdon arranges every morning.—
For the moment, fascination distracted him from the shock of her casual farewell. —Oh my god, Hillela, you are so healthy it appals me! It’s wonderful. I don’t know where they got you from!—
Indeed, he literally never knew who ‘they’ might be, apart from that one piece of absurd information about her father. She was there, for him, without a past before yesterday and a future beyond tomorrow (she had just announced it), unlike those bowed under the past and in such anticipatory dread that they were, as she rightly observed, unable to look up and eat, learn, fuck in the present at all.
The psychiatrist never again suggested that he might make love to her. They sat at lunch in a Lebanese restaurant also unlikely to be frequented by the medical profession. —I am going to divorce Elaine and we’re going to get married. You and I are perfectly matched. It would be a terrible waste of my life and yours to leave things as they are. It would be unfair to Elaine for me to go on living with her; you are the only woman I can live with. So you don’t have to see my patients ever again. You don’t have to go, away.—
But she went; the darling girl with the hamburger and the book, the only woman, the one who was not a beauty but completely desirable to him, the one who was not an intellectual but whose intelligence was a wonderful mystery to him. She walked out the way she had walked in, the little tramp, clever cock-teaser, taker of free lunches and presents, bitch—she became these successively as he treated himself for the morbid obsession of his passion for her. And when in London, all those years later, his wife recognized her with Indira Gandhi in a newspaper photograph, he could not admit to remembering her because she had once reduced him to the condition of being one of his own patients.
Carole saw her suddenly, at the Easter industrial and agricultural fair. Hillela, in red shorts, black boots and a Stetson, handing out publicity at a stand displaying stereo equipment. Carole was with a boy; Pauline and Joe, the family, did not patronise this fair, which at that time was still segregated, for whites only. Carole squeezed the hand of the cowgirl, but the cowgirl hugged her. The pamphlets took flight and Carole’s beau gathered them up. The beat of the music was so loud that speech appeared as mouthing. Hillela wrote an address on the back of one of the pamphlets. So Carole saw another one of the places in which Hillela lived at that period. (She had visited her at the first commune.) Carole arrived at an old flat with leaded light panes in the front door. She rang the bell for a long time, looking at the dead swordferns and empty milk and beer bottles in the corridor. The bell didn’t work but when she rapped on the glass Hillela came. Carole had in her hands the record player from their shared bedroom; Carole had brought it to give to Hillela because the music at the stereo equipment stand reminded her that Hillela had no player; just as she had seen Alpheus and his wife had nothing beautiful in their garage home, and had given them the Imari cat she treasured, her gift from Hillela.
At the Resettlement Board Headquarters it was decided from where and when black people—African, Indian and of mixed blood—would be moved away from areas declared for whites only. At the Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s offices it was decided for how long and in what capacity black people could live and work in the city. In the city, during the eighteen months Hillela was somewhere about (at least there was the evidence that Olga’s stipend was drawn regularly, and under the circumstances, in all good conscience, there was nothing else her mother’s family could do for her) there were thirty-one other targets. Most were hit by incendiary bombs. It was long before the Underground organizations were to have limpet mines, SAM missiles and AK 47s; these bombs were homemade, with petrol bought in cans from any service station. Letter boxes, electrical installations, beerhalls owned by the white administration boards in the black townships and railway carriages owned by the State monopoly—explosions attacked what represented the white man’s power where blacks could get at it: in the places where blacks themselves lived. A man named Bruno Mtolo, a traitor to the liberation movement who turned State witness at a treason trial, said that ‘recruitment presented no difficulty’ if volunteers were promised they would be allowed to undertake sabotage immediately. And Joe was right; it was not possible to adhere completely to the intention to avoid bloodshed. Timing devices or the indiscipline of recruits caused things to go wrong. In the beerhalls and railway carriages black people were killed or hurt.
White people did not hear the blast, smell the fires; not then, not yet. In another part of the country, black policemen regarded as collaborators with the government were killed, and so were a few white ones, but no white suburbanite or farmer was harmed; not then, not yet. Somewhere about, Hillela worked—probably not in this order—as an apprentice hairdresser, in a car-hire firm (until it was discovered that when she had to deliver a car to a client she was driving without a licence) and in an advertising agency. She was the kind of girl whom people, on very short acquaintance, invite to parties. The advertising personnel drank white wine, their symbol of the good life, instead of tea at the usual breaks in the working day; they had many parties. It was certainly at one of these that she must have met her Australian, Canadian, or whatever he was. Categories were never relevant to her ordering of life. He stared out of beard, eyebrows, brown curls. —So I suppose you’re one of the great ‘creative team’ that persuades people to buy beer and dog-food.— She was not; she was hardly
more than a messenger, she carried copy about and opened bottles of white wine. As soon as he realized she was working to eat, not out of devotion to the art of advertising campaigns, he began to assume a scornful collusion with her.
—Oh you mustn’t be so hard on them. They’re very easy-going people. They’re fun.—
—You’re quite wrong. They take themselves absolutely seriously. They believe they’re writers and artists. The muse of consumerism is the new Apollo. Look at that androgynous creature with his pink shoes and little boy’s braces. He epitomises the whole crowd. I don’t mean because he’s queer. They’re all neither one thing nor the other. Not workers, not artists. All the exhibitionism they imagine is unconventional—meanwhile they are the paid jesters of the establishment, selling the conditioning of the masses on billboards showing girls big as whales.— His yellow eyes rested amiably here and there in the room while he said these things; he even waved a hand at someone in the semaphore of this set that signalled ‘I’m making it over here’. —I’d rather watch a snake swallowing a rat, a cat stalking a bird for a meal. I’m for lives lived by necessity.—
This turn of phrase came back to Hillela as the language of childhood, from the voices in Pauline’s house. Since his manner contradicted the content of what he was saying, she thought, that first night, he might be drunk. Everyone at these parties was always drunk to some degree, with the consequent rapid changes of mood and disoriented awareness that made them so lively—they called it ‘letting your hair down’.
She smiled. —Why do you come, then.—
A Sport of Nature Page 14
