A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  Whaila knew at least an edited version of his young wife’s life; she had told him how she had got to Tamarisk Beach via Rey; and when she had expressed wonder that anyone (Rey) who seemed so committed to the cause had abandoned it (she had this wider interpretation, now), Whaila gave one of his held-back sighs that became a grunt. —We’ll have them, too. Casualties. And not only operational ones… There’ll always be some who won’t go the whole way.—

  On the 8th of August 1967, he told her. The little girl had climbed into bed with them, early in the morning. She sat astride her father’s chest and he spoke it straight at her, who couldn’t understand and couldn’t betray. —Umkhonto is crossing the Zambezi today.—

  Hillela turned her head to him, he saw her eyes, that were never bleary in the morning but opened from sleep directly into acceptance of the world as it is. —It’s begun?—

  —It’s begun. Two parties. Nothing big in numbers.—

  —How many?—

  But even in the telling there was some instinct to hold back. —Enough.— The little girl rode him as her mother had loved to ride the playground’s mythical bull. —There’d be no hope of getting through with a whole company. I only hope the ZAPU crowd really know what they’re doing. Ours have to depend on them to find their way hundreds of miles through the bush. It’s all the way sticking to Wankie.—

  —What about animals? Can you just walk about among lions and elephants?—

  —That’s not the problem. Lions don’t come looking for men and if you sight a herd of elephants you can turn and head the other way for a bit. The danger is running into the Rhodesian army patrols; Wankie’s the only route you’ve got a chance against that.—

  The child bounced her laughter into gurgles, thumping him. He lifted her gently under the arms, to regain his breath, gently put her down again.

  Hillela sat up with one of her surges of energy, her sunburned breasts juggled between tightened arms. She took his hand, hard. Then she was out of bed and moving about the room as on the morning of some festival. She rushed back to kiss him, holding his head, her possession, between open palms. She rolled on the floor in play with the child and trod by mistake on the kitten. Amid laughter and miaowing he watched from the bed the excitement she felt, for him.

  While he shaved she lay in the bath trickling water from a sponge onto her navel. Her belly was coming up; the creature in there was beginning to show its presence. She did not ask him, this time, what colour he thought it would be; they would be a rainbow, their children, their many children.

  —What will happen when they get to South Africa?—

  The sound of the razor scraping. —They’ll split, into smaller groups and operate in different areas. They’ll join up with people inside. There are specified targets to go for.—

  —In the towns or in the country? Where they cross the border it’ll be farmland, won’t it? Are they going to attack white farms? Or is it going to be pylons and things like that, in the cities?—

  —Military installations, power stations—hard targets.—

  —There won’t be bombs in cafés and office buildings, or in the street? I can’t imagine what that would be like—

  He dried his hands, ridding them of something more than shaving foam. He was aware of her waiting for him to tell her what she should be feeling about the unimaginable. —If the government goes on doing what it does, torturing and killing in the townships, in time … well, we’ll have to turn to soft targets as well.—

  —Soft targets. You mean ordinary people. People in the streets.— Pressing her fingers into her belly, testing for a response from the life in there. She thought she felt a faint return of pressure and he mistook, with a flicker of displeasure, the beginnings of a smile relaxing her lips as lack of understanding of what she really had said.

  —Ordinary people? What ordinary people? Our ordinary people have always been the soft targets. Our bodies, hey? Our minds. The police use violence on us every day and white people think they keep out of it, although the beatings-up and the killings are done on their behalf, they’ve let it happen for so many years. One day the blacks will have to carry the struggle into white areas. It’s inevitable. The violence came from there. Violence will hit back there. It must be, we know it. But not yet. Not now.—

  —Innocent people?—

  The answer echoed from another bed, another time. —Are there really any innocent people in our country?—

  She was communicating in nudges with the third person present, inside her. —And me?—

  Down on him came all the sorrow of pain and destruction that his people had endured, were suffering, and would endure no longer, and all the suffering they might have to inflict in consequence, in the knowing horror of victim turned perpetrator. Of course she brought it upon him; he had brought it upon himself by making such a marriage. Sometimes her lack of any identification with her own people dismayed him, he who lived for everything that touched upon the lives of his; there was something missing in her at such times, like a limb or an organ.—This secretly felt, paradoxically, in spite of the fact that he saw their own closeness as a sign; the human cause, the human identity that should be possible, once the race and class struggle were won. With her, it was already one world; what could be. And yet he looked at her lying pearly under water, the body prettily shaded and marbled as white flesh in its uncertain pigment and peculiarly naked nakedness is, and had to say what there was to say. —Yes, you too. If you happened to be there. You were born in sin, my love, the sins of your white people.—

  But saved. She knows how to look after herself. She climbed out of the bath and he wrapped her in a towel tenderly, as if she had just been baptised.

  Through the still heat before the rains men moved as the wild animals moved in the bush where tourists used to follow game rangers’ advice about the best areas to find and photograph them. There was silence. Whaila was silent about the silence. The occasional news that came back to the offices behind the tin security fence was confused in a way that did not allow an interpretation that was anything but bad. The maps had turned out to be inaccurate in a territory where the only true maps are the migratory paths of wild creatures drawn by the imperatives of the propagation of life, not the campaigns of war. The two parties lost their way, and the journey took much longer than provided for; they ran out of food. Moving like wild creatures in the bush, they were spotted like wild creatures by game rangers. On August 14th fighting with the Rhodesian army began. It was easier to hear the Rhodesian version of the combat over the radio than to keep up with how Umkhonto actually was faring. The Rhodesians, who lied so consistently in their own favour about every campaign in their civil war, claimed ‘overwhelming victories’ against the ZAPU and Umkhonto guerrillas. When news did come through from the freedom fighters, they claimed victories, too; and after two weeks they were still fighting.

  Hillela searched Whaila’s face for news each time he entered the flat: still fighting! If certain people had thought her ‘full of herself’ before, what could they have said of her now! She went about with the beginnings of her big African family—the one by the hand, the other swelling her like a bellying sail—in animated confidence that she was escorting the first generation that would go home in freedom. She would deliver what she had heard discussed there at suburban tables, what had been aborted by hesitations and doubts, the shilly-shallying of what was more effective between this commitment or that, this second-hand protest or that. Her blood was up, the colour of her skin warmed her eyes, darker with what she saw in the inner eye. —Pregnancy suits you, you’re lucky.— Her friend Sela envied her energy, mistaking its source. Mutter Courage, as her older friend Udi knew, survived on war as well as survived it.

  No-one reached home down South. By mid-September there was defeat; most of the guerrillas were either killed or captured by the Rhodesian army, and the few who had managed to get as far as Botswana were imprisoned for illegal entry. But one of the parties had been successfu
l in mobilizing black Rhodesian villages as support bases for future attempts; planning must already have begun for a new incursion. The huge weight of Joshua Nkomo was lowered once or twice onto the cheap furniture at Britannia Court, the little namesake welcomed to sit on whatever space there was between his enormous stomach and knees—he, too, could have been regarded as an old friend, later; but Hillela has never lost her instinct for avoiding losers. Christmas had a significance other than the traditional when the time came; Sela invited the Kgomani family to the traditional kind of dinner Russell Montgomery would have expected had he been there, with a tinselled tree, presents and plum pudding, but over the wine Hillela grasped Whaila’s hand in covenant with another occasion—at the end of December brothers from the camp were going into Rhodesia once again.

  Whaila was with Tambo and his other colleagues eighteen hours a day; she saw him, usually, only when she opened her eyes as he came into the bedroom late at night. She did not ask questions but behaved with her friend Sela as if she knew everything and was saying nothing. This empty boast became real when Whaila, in some inexplicable urge to honour the clasp of the hand in the way that his possession of her body could never do, in some certainty of trust that would transform both him and her and their relationship, told her the plans in detail. This time Umkhonto men were a much larger force, and under their own command. —We’ve learned our lesson. We’ve gone over the logistics again and again, this time. Nothing left to chance. One of the main objectives is going to be to help ZAPU prepare rural people for an uprising. It’s all one struggle. Their war’s ours.—

  The handclasp held. She had more concealed inside her than a baby; weeks went by and the men in the bush moved about undetected, hidden by the local people down there. The nature of time changed. With each day, each week, it was something gained, not passed. Each morning, when she and the man beside her woke together, their first thought was the same. The intimacy was an entry into one of the locked rooms of existence. No-one could ever surprise them there; no-one could ever appear in that doorway and look upon them, judge them. He was lover and brother to her in the great family of a cause.

  And all around, the marvel of daily life went on weaving continuity as the birds in the rampant bougainvillea threaded shreds of bright cloth, human hair combings, twigs and leaves into their nests. On the twenty-sixth morning in January Hillela smelt the scent of the frangipani as the breath of her own body, the thick pollen in the hibiscus trumpets as her own secretion, as she stretched, the baby inside lifting with her, to hang washing in the old garden of Britannia Court. Whaila came down from the building on his way to the office—that banal summing-up of an ordinary man’s day that had so little to do with the row of prefabricated huts behind the tin security fence. He strolled over to say goodbye and they laughed because her belly (her Nkomo, they called it) got in the way of an embrace, and instead he turned her about and crossed his arms over her breasts from the back, bending round her neck to kiss her cheek. His bare arms in a short-sleeved shirt were, for an instant, the black shining arms that had flailed the sea, coming towards her from the shore. She recognized now, in the heady oxygen of a morning after rain, that she had even then noticed that watch he still wore, flashing on the swimmer’s left arm.

  Ten past eight when he left for ‘the office’. She went to the market in the afternoon. Sela was persuaded to come with her; —But leave Nomzamo at the house, Hillela. You know you’ll say you’ll only be half-an-hour there, and then you expect that little kid to trail around for two or three.— Sela was right; the smells and colours and sounds of the market were the adornments Hillela wore as brightness and bells of an extended self, and she could not pass any stall or squatting vendor without stopping to finger, admire, question and talk. What she was supposed to have come to buy she forgot, once in among the cloth-hung alleys, the yards with their pyramids of rape, cabbages, oranges, okra, bananas, groundnuts; she could not be kept to any purpose or time limit. They went through the sheds where dried split fish and grasshoppers were laid out neat and stiff as if lacquered. Sela had to ask, for her, the names of roots big as torn-off heads or fanged like drawn teeth. Hillela had dozens of lengths of Kanga cloth hooked down from the stallholders’ rails and draped them, one after another, over Sela’s crêpe two-piece. Wonderful, wonderful: a Nubian queen! As if Sela could be persuaded to wear such things; but she was stirred by some old familiarity that afternoon. The questions she was urged to ask on behalf of her friend, in the language she shared with the market people, developed into conversations, laughter, and even an insider’s scepticism about prices. —No, no. That’s far too much; don’t give it to him.— Sela was bargaining, with all the pauses of feigned loss of interest, the African organ-note hums required. Sela’s white shoes were splashed with the mud and scales from around the fish-vendors’ tables and the spurt underfoot of rotting vegetables studded with flies; a young madman naked except for a sack he held over himself did not beg but rootled in the mess: yet Hillela that day saw only wholeness. —Everything’s here. Everything in the world that you really need. Come and see.— There was furniture that delighted her with its parody, in cane and grass, of suburban coffee tables, and its brave approximation of white middle-class ugliness in sofas and chairs covered with acrylic-coloured plastic and hammered together, out of the memory of something seen in a white man’s house, in the cubist angles of the Thirties. She liked best the tinsmiths’ section set out under trees with exposed club-foot roots. —Come and see!— She followed every process of the ancient craft adapted to the waste materials a modern industrial society throws away. Here a man was cleaning the paint off tin containers and drums; there another was hammering them out into sheets. Others were cutting shapes from the sheets as she cut out dresses for her child. Saucepans, pots, funnels, buckets, ladles, braziers for the charcoal most blacks used for cooking were set out for sale. —Those pots burn the food if you put them on electric stoves, Hillela, I’m telling you.— —Oh come and see these funny little things!— Hillela did make one purchase, in spite of Sela’s good sense. She held up a tiny object formed as an inverted, hollow pyramid, with a handle like that of a cup soldered to it. —What’s this?— —You must have seen the women selling groundnuts in Cairo Road. They’re measures—for a handful, when you buy. What will you do with it, Hillela? Don’t give it to Nomzamo to play with—these things are not well finished, they’ve got sharp edges.—

  The children belonging to Sela’s relatives made a doll out of the namesake and never wanted to part with her. This was one of the many evenings when they wandered back with Hillela to Britannia Court. Hillela taught them songs the songololo had sung, as they walked home with her past Sandringham Mansions and Avonlea Place; a sunset first stamped out every coarse leaf of the flamboyant trees against translucent lakes of sky and then clotted the black metallic cut-outs into a cage of earthly dark. The little straggle of woman and children made their cheerful chorus far beneath, and stumped up the stairs to the flat. When Whaila came home, the streetlight that could be seen from the kitchen window was on, bats circling it like the rings round a planet. He held his little daughter up to look, but she wriggled away to the other children. There was the static of frying behind loud play; Hillela, barefoot in her broad stance of pregnancy, was cooking chips for their supper. The eldest girl had made herself at home with the radio playing monotonous African music; on one of those sudden impulses children have, all scrambled out of the room to some game in the bathroom but the music wound on. The level of noise was raised by a tumble of running water. Neither Hillela nor Whaila was sure, for a moment, whether or not the doorbell was ringing. He said something she didn’t catch, where she bent at the open refrigerator to fetch a carton of milk, but she was aware that he had passed behind her to go to the door and she took off the shelves a couple of cans of beer as well—it was the time in the evening when one or another of the men from the office or camp would call in. The door was swollen by summer damp and she seemed to hear all at
once the prelude of its scrape along the linoleum, a pause in which she had no time to grasp that there were no greetings exchanged, and then a crack that splintered the thick homely hubbub against the thin walls of the flat. Something fell. As she turned there was another crack and a bolt of force hit the refrigerator door she stood behind. Someone—one, more than one—ran clattering down the corridor of Britannia Court; the doorway was open and empty: and Whaila? Whaila? As she came out from behind the shield of the refrigerator, he was there, on the floor. Whaila was flung before her, red flowing from the side of his head, his neck, under the shirt pocket where his pen still was hooked. His open eyes faced the wall and his lips stretched finely in that expression drawn by his life.

  His life running away in red like the muddy filth in the gutters of the market.