—What’s new with that? The Christian god’s killed plenty, plenty! Here and in the world! He gives his blessing to the wars of white people.—
—You’re right! So how will he give it to blacks! That’s where Qamata comes in.—
The spokesman’s broad, relaxed chest, naked under a football jersey, heaved to life. He kept everyone waiting while he dropped his head to one side, rolled it against the sofa back. —The Qamata thing … it’s really among the rural people, man, you must understand that. It’s not policy. But regionally … the people work out a lot of things for themselves, we don’t interfere unless …—
—But it’s useful, it brings people together where political concepts like constitutions and programmes don’t reach?— The lover put his fist on his breast.
—If you want to know about the Xhosa religion, man, you should talk to a guy like Prof here, I don’t go along too much with that kind of stuff.—
—I just want to understand what I’ve seen, what I’ve been told. I don’t want to misinform anybody—and that’s for your sake… You don’t want people believing, that Mau Mau story. Then tell me—
A small man who had been listening with distended nostrils, an alertness displaced from his ears, blew words like cigarette smoke across her face.—Let them believe. Kenyatta won. He’s getting the country. Without Kimathi, the Queen of England would still have it. Let them believe.—
Rey was laughing, rubbing his taut palms along his thighs. —Qamata!— He drew himself into a knot of the white man, the man they called Prof, the spokesman and a very young man whose upper body danced up and down as he tried to interject and sometimes laughed harshly with frustration. The white girl was accustomed to being left to occupy or entertain herself until, as she saw it, ‘his book’ had garnered what was wanted for it. The black men around her began talking in their own language. It grew long, the night of the uncelebrated birthday. She dozed off, sitting on the sofa with the cadences and exclamations of an African language flying round her, accumulating in layers between the layers of smoke, wavering away and towards her ears; the lullaby without words, for her, surrounding all her childhood. The platteland towns where the commercial traveller took his little sweetheart, the Rhodesian boarding-school, the rich aunt’s villa at the sea, the old church path where children sang picking their way past excreta, the shop window where schoolgirls danced, the kitchen where a former trumpet player with the Extra Strongs took refuge.
When they got back at two in the morning the cottage was in darkness as they had left it, but the door stood open as if they were expected. He felt round the jamb for the light switch. Again, there was the shock of light on a disorder; a blinding exposure. This time, it was she herself who called out: Rey! And he was beside her, but could not make what was there fly back to the way it was before—clothes, paper-spewing suitcases, books, the stuffing from eviscerated cushions—as a film run in reverse. There was no-one waiting. This was confirmed at once; the cottage was small. Whoever had ransacked it had found or not found what they wanted and gone. But this time, this exposure, was different. What had been turned up in the middle of the night had no context of other lives to resorb it. They went back to the house they had left and threw pebbles at the windows until the gentle-complexioned white man came down in a handsome towelling gown and took them in. Next day they went to stay with other friends-of-friends. Every day, her lover believed, must be lived at a further remove from the cottage. Nothing was ever to be restored of the life she lived there. Only the object that he himself had thrown aside, the toy orang-outang with the beard-comb, had become something in place, lying on the floor where it was dropped among its torn gold wrappings as if it had drawn down everything about it.
He was convinced that he was going to be arrested. Whether this was so or not nobody can say. Many premises are raided; there are not always consequences of the kind he foresaw, building up for her and for those who sheltered them a case against himself. Fear and self-esteem—his conviction of his own threat to others confirmed as it could be only by the assumption of himself being in danger—burned his old resentments as the fuel of elation. He made love more often than ever, and each race to the finish might be the last. His face presented itself as the face that must be looked at as a last look, at any ordinary moment of the day. She opened white-wine bottles and no-one knew the other tipsiness that animated her, now. She confided in no-one; no longer, not she. Sitting a moment on someone’s desk, swinging her legs and chattering; no-one knew that next day she might not be there, one day soon would simply not be there. She and he: gone.
He did not even risk going back for what might be left of ‘his book’. A friend-of-a-friend would go to the cottage and send later whatever papers were there. He—and the little girl, of course—would bum a few clothes (friends who weren’t in danger surely owed them that much) and disappear as they were. The only problem was money. —I can manage, I don’t care. But with you … Maybe you should follow.—
For the first time, there was fear to be seen in her shining, opaque black eyes. —I’ll get money. For both.—
It must have been in June 1963, exact date unknown, she left South Africa. Whether by air under assumed names, or by some Underground route overland, they were gone, she and whoever the man was. His name does not appear in any accounts of resistance during the period, his book seems never to have been published. No-one even gives him the credit for having been the one who, however reluctantly, moved her on.
*
It was to Joe Hillela went so that she wouldn’t be left behind. To his rooms, asking to see him and sitting in the waitingroom among clients. These were blacks as well as whites, sharing the same chairs and journals, The Motorist and Time passed on, perhaps, from the household of one of Joe’s new partners, the English Guardian and local liberal reviews she recognized as from the stacks in Pauline’s livingroom. She didn’t have to pass time with any of these. Joe appeared as soon as her name was taken in to him. Being Joe, there was no demonstration of surprise, pleasure or displeasure. He simply put up a hand and flagged a quiet, coaxing movement. He stood back to let her pass before him through his doorway: Joe, the smell of the shaving cream standing like a tongue’d icecream cone on the bathroom shelf, the buzzing cello voice sustained behind the high babble at family meals. He kissed her gently and held a moment the fingers of the hand she awkwardly took back.
—How have you been?— Even when she and his own daughter were children he had always treated them like grown-up ladies; she was under an old guidance, taking a chair he displaced from where clients customarily faced him across his desk. He drew up another, leaving his professional place empty. Her face was ready to fawn in parrying smiles, culpability, girlish charm at the formula of insincere reproaches that did not come; months and months, not a word, thought you’d forgotten us!
—Oh fine. I’m working in an advertising agency. Oh yes, and they haven’t kicked me out yet, marvel of marvels. I’ve actually been there—what—about six months or so.—
She knew his pace. He didn’t pretend not to be studying her. The last season of good clothes Olga used to supply was lost, along with the cottage, but friends who had offered her ‘something to wear’ had not failed to notice she took the best garments, not the most ordinary, hanging in their modest cupboards. For this visit she had picked a full black skirt that sank round from her small waist as she made herself comfortable, and an Indian shirt of thin red silk slit from a high collar down her brown neck to her wide-set breasts. Thin chains slid in and out of the opening as she gestured.
—There were quite a few jobs before then? Turnover pretty high?— They laughed together, after so long, she and Joe.
—Don’t tell me! You were right about qualifications … you have to be prepared to take anything.—
—Anything?—
—Well, just about.—
After a moment, he spoke. —You didn’t take ‘anything’.—
There was the ‘on my hon
our’ tone of childhood. —I didn’t—
He confirmed with his slow turn of the head, aside.
—We don’t have the right to ask, anyway.— But he saw she was still so young that she was afraid of references to the family’s rejection of her; the taboo she had broken made responsibility towards her a taboo subject, as well. Her mouth opened a moment, in unease. It seemed to him to contradict the new maturity, clenched hardness, of the way her cheekbones stood out. (She had lost weight after the abortion.) The eyes, without the differentiation between iris and pupil that makes it possible to read eyes’ expression, were drawn miserably half-closed and then opened again, full on him. Her concern and confusion jumped at him like the attention of an affectionate puppy. —Of course, of course you’ve got the right, of course you have! You’ll always have, I promise you!—
He was able to turn the emotion to a gentle, shared joke that gracefully accepted bonds between him and her, belonging to but surviving the past. —Now that’s the correct way with the verb! Future tense! You and Carole used to drive us crazy by using it in the context of something already achieved: ‘I did my homework last night, I promise you’—
—So you see I have learnt something … a little.—
—A lot, Hillela, a lot. You have earned your own living and lived your own life, without help from any of us.— Olga’s handout was not worth his mention.
Joe’s silences were comfortable. At the end of them, there was always some sort of understanding, as if, coming from him as the thread the spider issues from its body and uses to draw a connection from leaf to leaf across space, some private form of communication had been spun.
—So … here I am.—
—And so you should be.—
—I’m going to ask you something. Something big. It’s a lot to ask for. I won’t blame you at all if you won’t—can’t.—
His old gesture: he rested an elbow on the arm of the chair and pressed a finger into the sag of his cheek. —Go on.—
She smiled with calculation, innocent in knowing, showing it to be so. —Not the others, just you.—
—What is said in these professional rooms is naturally confidential.— Dear Joe, teasing her a little while giving another, serious assurance—whatever she was going to ask, he would grant by the default of those whom she could not ask. —Go on, Hillela.—
The small taut fold of skin that formed beneath each eye sank away, drawn back over her cheekbones. It was a feature of her particular image she had had since childhood. She looked at him out of childhood, her darkness, where the natural moisture of her eyes made a shining line along the membrane of each lower lid.
—It’s money.—
Slowly as he watched, her face changed; the molecules of this girl’s being rearranged themselves into the exact aspect they had had when she lay under the sudden bright light, his gaze and Pauline’s, calm in bed beside his son.
Joe judged himself, in the end, no more trustworthy than anyone else. He did tell Pauline. Pauline heard of the escapade—flight, defection, or whatever it was supposed to be—from Olga, of all people. Olga, who herself had long had contingency plans, was the first to hear that her niece had been out of the country for some weeks. The news came to her through the husband of a friend, a client of the advertising agency where, apparently, the girl had had the latest in a series of all kinds of jobs. The husband was told in confidence; the agency’s directors did not want to shake clients’ confidence by allowing any suggestion that their advertising portfolios would be handled by politically suspect people. The girl in question had no position of access to the creative process—she was described (euphemistically) as hardly more than a tea-maker. But the husband remembered his wife talking of her friend Olga’s adoptive daughter of that unusual name; so he was able to supply a piece of gossip for dinner parties. His wife came out with it tactlessly in the presence of Arthur. Olga, from across the table, had to make a quick correction: —We’d never actually adopted—no—she has her father … She already hadn’t lived with us for some years—we’ve been completely out of touch—
Pauline burst the news to Joe: —That’s a laugh! Hillela, ‘having to flee the country’! That’s how my sister puts it, I could feel her trembling in her boots, at the other end of the phone … What could Hillela have done, she didn’t even have any interest in helping black schoolchildren on Saturday mornings! Smoking pot in a coffee bar, that was more in that little girl’s line.— Joe’s customary considered reactions meant that Pauline did not notice he already knew what she had just learned. But he told her, then, of the girl’s visit to his rooms because he saw that jealousy was mixed, in distress, with guilt, for Pauline. He made the mistake of phrasing it: —She came to me.—
—Came to you!—
How expressive these faces of his women were, how frightening in their importunity: the dyes of hurt, resentment, indignation were always so quickly there to flood the cheeks and brow of Pauline.
—It was what she was told to do, you know.—
—But this kind of trouble! Hillela! She has no political sense, no convictions, not the faintest idea, that child! Hillela a political refugee—from what, I’d like to know! Now no-one can keep an eye on her. None of us can do anything, she’s made sure of that. We’ve let it happen. Hillela a political refugee. What idiocy. What a final mess. God knows what will become of her.—
—She has the money. In good foreign currency.—
—And how did you get that for her?—
But what was arranged within the walls of professional confidence was not to be divulged further; his wife knew that he must have done what the ethics of that profession did not allow, and that he had never done before—contravened currency restrictions in some shady way. Hillela, of course, would not stop to think of consequences for others, then as at any other time. Yet suddenly anger became tears in Pauline’s eyes.
—How long will it last.—
At least Joe’s breach of confidence enabled her to telephone Olga and let her know that no-one in Pauline’s family was trembling in their boots; on the contrary, Joe had done the practical thing, Joe had seen to it that the girl had funds of some sort for whatever predicament, real or imaginary, she had got herself into.
In July a country estate, in the area near the city where the rich lived to escape suburbia, was raided by the police. The people living at the evocatively-named Lilliesleaf Farm were not enjoying their gardens and stables but were the High Command of liberation movements planning to put an end to the subjection of blacks by whites by whatever means whites might finally make necessary. Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada and a whole bold houseparty of others, white and black, were arrested, and Nelson Mandela was brought from prison to be tried with them on new charges. Olga—by now afraid to talk over the telephone; the girl was a blood relation, after all, it couldn’t be denied if the police should make enquiries—came to see her sister. Was there anything to the story that it was known at the agency Hillela had gone with a man? Only a month earlier? Maybe he was mixed up in the Farm affair, perhaps it had been just in time … ? Pauline gave a light laugh at this—flattery; at Olga. But the idea provided the base for some sort of explanation that slowly came to serve, in the end. Attached herself to some man—that’s what it was all about. He was the one who had to go.
Pauline and Olga were only two of three sisters, after all; still.
Attached herself to some man.
My poor Ruthie.
I, me.
Time, now. They had always, they went on fitting that self into their conjugations, leaving out the first person singular. Except one of the cousins, poor boy; he didn’t.
It’s not possible to move about in the house of their lives. A china cat survived two centuries and was broken. Awful.
Intelligence
Tamarisk Beach in the late afternoons was the place of resurrection. Those who had disappeared from their countries while on bail, while on the run, while under house arrest; th
at non-criminal caste of people from all classes and of all colours strangely forced to the subterfuge of real criminals evading justice—they reappeared on foreign sand in swimming shorts and two-piece swimsuits. While they swam, their towels, shoes, cigarettes were dumped for safety in numbers under the three etiolated tamarisks for which the British colonial families had named the beach once reserved for their use. Now hungry, raucous local youths hung about there all day, acrobatically light-fingered. If those of the new caste—big men, some of them, cultivated on distant soccer fields—looked warningly at the boys, they jacked themselves swiftly up palm boles and laughed, jeering from the top in their own language, that not even the strangers who were black as they were understood. Sometimes a coconut came down from there like a dud bomb, unexploded, from the countries left behind; the local boys fought over it just the way the scorpions they would set against one another in a sand arena fought, and the victor hawked it round for sale.
There was no respite from heat in weeks passing, months passing. Like exile itself, a sameness of time without the trim and shape of home and work, the heat was unattached to any restraints of changing seasons. Only in the late afternoons did something stir sameness: a breath blew in under it, every afternoon, one of those trade winds that had set history on course towards prehistory, bringing first the Chinese and then the Arabs to that coast. It brought to Tamarisk Beach the men from alley offices with unpaid telephone bills and liberation posters, from the anterooms of European legations where they waited to ask for arms and money, and from the comings and goings between taken-over colonial residences and ex-governors’ offices where rival political groups struggled to keep their credentials acceptable to their host country, lobbying, placing themselves in view of the powerful, watching who in the first independent black government there was on his way up to further favour, and worth cultivating, and who was dangerous to be associated with because he might be on his way down.
A Sport of Nature Page 16
