She did not have many duties—duty being what does not come naturally—in that posting, where the Ambassador was temporarily relieving a colleague recalled. In a French-speaking city, Marie-Claude had found more friends, liked to do her own shopping in boutiques run by French people who had stayed on under a black government civilisedly tempered, it was felt, by the fact that the President had a white French wife. Some people said the young girl in the Ambassador’s household was a housekeeper, others assumed she was a relative of Marie-Claude—and Marie-Claude did not deny, only corrected this: —No, no, no relation at all! But it’s true, she’s like a young sister, a member of the family. The children adore her.— Certainly she played tennis, took part in sightseeing and dining-out parties, as any visiting favourite from Europe experiences Africa in pursuits imported long before her.
But there were times when the surrogate was alone in the house with only the half-awareness of the presence somewhere of servants that is like the sound of her own heart to any white brought up in Africa. Alone as if she were an ambassador’s wife in a succession of interleading rooms, passing furnishings and objects with which she has no connection, interchangeable from Residence to Residence. If the Ambassador happened to come in he seized her sufferingly. Under his elegantly-hung suit his body swelled and prodded her; but that presence outside the beating of blood reminded that nothing further was permissible, not here, not now. —Look what you do to me.— He was handsome, proud. She would shake that curly head, not culpable. —You know just what you do, my little girl, don’t you.—
Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman had never been here but the town floated as flower and palm fragments, islands and isthmus, on lagoons covered with a mail of waterlilies; a breeze touched, as if it were the black rags of bats themselves, flapping the air round the streetlamps as lights threaded on across bridges. She was seen in the town, where the cry of Edith Piaf came from the bistros, but mostly she kept to the quarter of embassies, villas and hotels. Regularly a young First Secretary from the British Embassy ran to meet her at an open-air bar for their six o’clock rendezvous. —You had better be seen with one or two young men—believe me, my treasure, no-one will believe you haven’t got a man somewhere, if they don’t see him.— A First Secretary was eminently suitable. —But you won’t sleep with him, will you?— She was such a sensible girl, she understood a man has to sleep with his wife; that was different. —You won’t, will you, eh?— When there was a sortie to a nightclub, where the presence of wealthy local blacks and the strident sexual beauty of black prostitutes was the amusement, Marie-Claude appointed the young First Secretary to partner her protégée. Emile danced with her dutifully once or twice, flirting publicly in exactly the harmless degree expected of the married males in homage to the irresistibility of the female sex that had, of course, delivered them to their wives.
Boutique, bistro, bar, nightclub—these were the marked routes of the diplomatic and expatriate community. There was a path of her own drawn through the grass; the grass closed it away behind her. It led across one of those stretches of ground that are called vacant lots in the cities of other continents; here it was a vacant patch in history, a place where once manioc had been grown and goats had wandered, now appearing on some urban development plan as a sports or cultural centre that would never be built. A tiny scratching of planted maize was hidden in the grass, like a memory. Her path crossed those made by the feet of fishermen, and servants moving from and to where she was going, the enormous hotel that multiplied itself, up and up, storey by storey, shelf by shelf of identically-jutting balconies and windows that eventually had nothing to reflect but sky. There was no other structure to give it scale, nothing to dissimulate its giant intrusion on the low horizons of islands and water, that drew the eye laterally. Even the great silk cotton tree and the palms left as a sign of its acculturation when the site was cleared were reduced to the level of undergrowth beside its concrete trunk.
Inside, the scale of unrelation, of disjuncture continued; through ceremonial purplish corridors she walked, past buried bars outlined like burning eyelids with neon, reception rooms named for African political heroes holding a silent assembly of stacked gilt chairs, crates of empty bottles and abandoned mattresses, sudden encounters with restaurant stage-props—plastic palm trees and stuffed monkeys from some Tropicana Room, rolled-up carpets from the Persian Garden. At the white grand piano outside a locked entrance where photographs of girls whom gilt text dated the previous year announced as direct from the Crazy Horse in Paris, she turned to a bank of elevator doors like the reredos of some cathedral. Her path was always the same; through the grass, through the carpeted tunnels of corridors, the soughing ascent to the same floor. She had her key to the room; the bed was big as the one in Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman’s fake palace. The Ambassador came by some path of his own through this dark ziggurat, pyramid, Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building raised to the gods of development; he could arrange everything as he arranged immigration papers. He shed the Ambassador. What a pleasure to be able to give so much pleasure! Enough to turn any young person’s head. One day when he made love to her he smelled his children on her. It was a great sweetness to him; it brought the two halves of his life together as they had never been before. An annealment, wholeness; a new eroticism.
—You have simplified everything.—
—Why me?— He had not concealed, despite the risk at the beginning that a young girl might have been shocked or even jealous, and withdrawn herself, that he had had many love affairs.
—I don’t know, I don’t want to know. Simplicity is the one thing that can’t be explained. Not that you are simple, Hillela. You won’t get away with that, my little girl! But that you are clever enough to make things simple.—
—Emile, why do you like other women so much?— She knew that was her category.
—Oh you are young, Hillela, you are still at the stage when you ask all the questions, you don’t propose any answers.—
—Marie-Claude is so beautiful.—
—To have one beautiful woman. Once she is always there—it makes no difference. It doesn’t help, you understand? Didn’t she say it herself, about women: ‘Is it our fault’—well it’s not their fault they are beautiful, so many of them, and how can I not … try? As soon as I have one, or sometimes two at once—although they don’t know it—I see another and I have to prove to myself I can possess her. And so it goes on … gets worse as I get older. I’m forty-seven …— The birthday was recognized between them in a different context from that of the children’s performance, arranged by Hillela, that marked it the week before. If he had ever met Udi Stück, he could have curiously confirmed the possibility of telling this girl anything, confiding amour propre to her stranger’s hands.
He was smoking; this one smoked after love-making, the member of the Command in exile had drunk water, and far back, there was the one who had shed sibling tears. The smoke seemed to be drawn down all through his body as it was through his nose; his toes flexed, and his hand bent hers. —I need it like I need smoking.—
He turned and looked at her. He was silenced by what he saw, by what she understood beneath the crude and paltry words. Her black eyes gave him back his meaning in yet another question, unspoken: is life terrible as that?
After the room was left empty he went away to his secretary, attachés, telex messages and distinguished callers, with the smooth look round the eyes of a man in harmony with his body and free to be alert; any experienced staff recognizes the signs of a successful love affair and is thankful for the calm it generates. Hillela did not make her path to the Residence. She wandered; her body moved with the suppleness limbered by love-making, the pretty loll of breasts and the rhythm of her thighs were a confidence that made another kind of path through people in the streets. Men turned, as if at a reminder, to look at her; it was not her fault. Where the European city grid of right angles was overgrown and broken up by the purposeful tangle of African pursuits—the shortest
point-to-point meander taken on foot between barbers and fruit-sellers, scribes and bicycle repairers—to be white was to feel invisible; only a sensuous self-assurance, while it lasted, could counter that. Hillela came to the docks. Her nostrils widened to snuff in the spice of cargoes swinging out on cranes overhead—coffee and cocoa beans—and the scrubbed smell of tar, the grassy scents of wet rope and putrid whiff of fish guts. The sun sank and flung colours up the sky. The black labourers who did not see her in their inward gaze of weariness, their self-image of religion and race, suddenly unrolled mats towards the East and bowed their heads to the ground. Their seamed heels were raised, naked, as they kneeled, their feet tense. The draped fishnets enlaced the sunset like the leads of stained-glass windows. A flock of prayers rose murmuring, vibrating, buzzing all round her, a groan of appeal and answer, supplication and release.
There are many kinds of consolation. Not all can be orthodox, in the ritualistic or other, social, sense. Before the invisible bird lifted off as capriciously as it had settled, the Ambassador sometimes came to her room late at night and slid into her bed. He was breathing fast, with fear as much as passion; yet the moment he felt her small warm solidity he was sure no-one would discover them. She was proof against his recklessness; at the same time he was sure, in contradiction: she would go without fuss, if Marie-Claude found him out. It was a scandal, of course, among the white community, who followed the appearance of such phenomena through the spy-glass of their mores: a tranquil household, a whole family content, in its way, as few families ever are.
Credentials
The men who had shared pap and cabbage with her at Ma Sophie’s went to Algeria and the Soviet Union instead of China, now. Alliances changed; she moved on.
It may have been because she was back in a country where she could speak her own language and therefore range more widely, but she is difficult to keep track of once the Ambassador’s extended family moved yet again and settled in his next West African posting. So there is another lacuna; she is somewhere, of course, in momentary glances stored in those who must have passed her in the streets of Accra on a Saturday, colliding as she jostled between the mammy wagons and the street vendors’ jingling dinner-bells, the shouts and the splurt of tyres through overflowing drains, but there is little to attach in a contiguous, concrete identity. Her good friends in Dar es Salaam had no word. The passport her Aunt Olga carried was not recognized in the African countries Olga overflew on her way to Israel or Europe; anyone in that blank bush down there between the clouds was lost. Pauline would have written if she had known where to find her niece, as she would have sought out Ruthie. Carole once made the suggestion that enquiries might be made through the African National Congress—that idea surely could not have been little Carole’s own; could Sasha have been behind it? But Sasha never spoke of his cousin, he was bored by family connections, and now that his schooldays were over, lived at home in Pauline’s presence like an estranged lover, turning away from her assertion of their bonds as affines and spending all his time with friends made at the university. As he had predicted, his name had come up in the ballot; but Joe arranged a deferment of military service. Joe had Afrikaner nationalist colleagues whom, although they knew he and his big-mouthed wife disagreed with them politically, professional buddyhood obliged to put in a word for his son. Carole’s suggestion was out of the question (typically Sasha). The ANC was a banned organization with which any connection that could be traced was treasonable; its leaders from the Lilliesleaf house-party had been sentenced to life imprisonment, and the only man who might have been trusted with such an enquiry, the advocate Bram Fischer—whom Joe, like everyone who abhorred racism, loved and admired but would not go so far as to emulate—had been arrested, gone Underground, been recaptured and sentenced to life imprisonment, declaring that his conscience didn’t permit him to recognize laws enacted by a body in which three-quarters of the people of the country had no voice. In any case, Pauline was dourly, depressedly amused by the romantic notion that Hillela was a revolutionary. More likely she had fallen on her feet in some way: Pauline never saw her as Olga did, as lost—Hillela was not the helpless Ruthie. After all, hadn’t she had the advantage of being brought up to independence and self-respect along with Pauline’s own children? There was nothing vulnerable in that persistent image of the girl lying beside, the trembling schoolboy, composed in a—distorted, wrong—manifestation of the self-respect she had been taught.
Hillela herself, as they knew her, disappears in the version of a marriage that has a line in the curriculum vitae devoted to Whaila Kgomani in a Who’s Who of black 20th-century political figures. In 1965 he married in Ghana, and had a daughter. From this accident of geography reports assume he married a Ghanaian; a suitable alliance with a citizen of the first country in modern Africa to gain independence, a citizen of Nkrumah’s capital. With the fall, the following year, of the father of Pan-Africanism, the concept upon which black political exiles everywhere were dependent for their shelter, and the disarray of Umkhonto We Sizwe through police infiltration, back at home, exiles themselves had no heart to bother about which of them found consolation with (or even married) which girl. That this one was white and South African was slow to filter to those far away for whom such details had a gossip-column interest not extended to the great and terrible events happening in their midst and on the shared continent they overflew.
The girl is mother to the woman, of course; she has been acknowledged. In fact, the woman has generally chosen to begin her existence there, when asked about her early life: —I was very young, working at an embassy in Accra when I met Whaila at a reception given by the late Kwame Nkrumah.—
Well, it’s not impossible.
Though in conversation with Madame Sadat after the assassination of President Sadat, speaking as one who has known widowhood among so many other experiences, it was recalled differently: —You always remember the beginning, not the end. Fortunately. It was in Accra, a man passed me in the street and then turned around—Whaila: we recognized each other.—
Hillela was at least once taken to a reception at Christiansborg Castle, although by then Nkrumah’s party was in decline, even the adoring market women—his brides, he called them—had turned against him, and he seldom appeared in public. But after the break-up of the united front of four South African liberation movements, the Nkrumah regime favoured the Pan Africanist Congress, not the African National Congress; it seems unlikely that Kgomani would have been a fellow guest. The Ambassador and his wife took her everywhere—no party was complete without her, it is said. And she did go about with zest in the gregarious uproar of Accra streets. On Saturdays she was regularly at one of the hotels where, about eleven in the morning, a high-life band began to play for the weekend; everyone drank beer and danced among pretty prostitutes in wigs, children stuffing groundnuts, black businessmen in the company of the real financial establishment of the city, the huge female tycoons with their brilliant robes of plenty, sweat-gilded faces, weaponry of gold jewellery and imposingly planted feet. She may have sung and played the guitar in a nightclub; she would soon have picked up the West African beat. She does appear to have left the ambassadorial employ at some point before or not long after she began to be seen with the black South African revolutionary envoy; and she must have had to earn a living somehow.
The same kind of worn stairs. She went up that day while about town on an errand for Marie-Claude. As she approached the building she had passed many times without interest since being told some members of the organization—which did not yet have official representation—had an office there, that day she walked in as she might have turned aside into a shop that attracted her. Whether it was a sudden echo of the accents of Sophie’s and Njabulo’s flat, a flipping back of the pages of self, or whether it was a stir of something that couldn’t be sickness for a ‘home’ that was exile, she went up to be there, among the same posters and drawing-pin-stabbed cuttings, the framed Freedom Charter and photographs of
the old Chief (of whom, a secret between them, she had the private picture of a stout black man in an army overcoat, met at dawn) and the younger leader whose voice Pauline had brought into the house on tape and who was now an even further-disembodied presence, looking down on second-hand filing cabinets from a distant prison island.
She did not know either of the two young men sitting in the room. She introduced herself through her familiarity with Njabulo, Sophie, Christa and the names of others who used to come to the flat; she had lived with them, it clearly was not a false claim. Yet the two were cautious, and not only because she was white: because she was from back home. What had she come for? Who was it she’d come to see? No-one. —Just to say hello.—
It was dangerous to believe anything open, while holed up in refugee status where everything is ulterior. They stared past, willing her to go. Then someone walked in whom she did know. She began from that moment to have credibility of her own: he came back, the man who had appeared so black, so defined, so substantial from out of water running mercurial with light. He had come between them, a girl and man in the sea, paling them in the assertion of his blackness, bearing news whose weight of reality was the obsidian of his form. A slight acquaintance seems more than it was when two people meet again in an unexpected place. Although he had not acknowledged her when he rose from the sea, and she had only put in a word here and there in the conversations he had led at Ma Sophie’s, he took her by the shoulders in greeting, shook her a little, comradely, and she was close enough to see the lines made by dealing with the white man, down from either side of his mouth, and the faint nicked scars near the ears made by blacks in some anterior life. —How did you find out I’d just arrived?— The shaking of her head, over the sweet warm drinks from a cupboard, became a sign to them both; she must have known without knowing. He was a man who did not laugh loosely but had a slow-developing strong smile when confirming something he was sure of.
A Sport of Nature Page 22
