The mythical wooden beasts of a children’s playground were furred with snow, here. The women and their small children moved at once into the hot, echoing concrete walks beyond double doors. —Everybody in this block has not less than three children. That’s the way housing is allotted. In the school holidays you can’t think, you can’t hear yourself speak … your own children are among them, and they make a hell.— The teacher was studying to improve her qualifications and become an official translator for a State publishing house. —I’m lucky, my two eldest can look after themselves and my mother takes the little one, so I can go and work at night in a library.— Here, too, were neat beds disguised as livingroom furniture; the preoccupations of different members of the household staked out in corners and shelves of territory: musical instruments and reference books (the husband taught in a college of music), children’s sports banners and bicycles, models on box-lids, an ironing board before a television set. —D’you want to go away?—
She was a soft-voiced blonde with all her tension and emotion in her neck. —Only to a better apartment. That’s all. To have another room! I know very well why we can’t have it, it’ll take another generation to make up what was destroyed and provide for all the people who have come to the towns. But I want it. If I had money, I know I’d try and buy the way … although I think it’s wrong.—
—Can people do that?—
—Always, everywhere, people do that. It can’t be stopped, altogether.—
—We’ve got something … a charter. Something like this ‘… the people shall have the right to live where they choose, to be decently housed’.—
The coffee cups were special ones, the teacher’s laugh rang from the cupboard where she sought them. —Oh yes, that’s what the leaders say, but when they are in power, they have to do it … that’s the trouble. But it’s a rich country down there? You didn’t have wars. Maybe you can.—
There was no African family here in which the namesake was common responsibility. Mrs Kgomani could not go out at night unless she could find a baby-sitter. Pavel took up the instruction begun long ago by a naughty boy and girl in Joe’s study among documentary evidence of the kind of activity she was engaged in now. Pavel came to the apartment and taught her chess. Snow did not keep him away; looking out the window at the expected hour she saw him in his fur boots and elegant coat, moving through the white like one of those antlered creatures in his own latitude who graze in cold wastes, digging for nourishment only they know is there.
—The longer the revolution takes to come in your country, more danger there is to be a bourgeois revolution. That is what people like your lady friend—she wants to have here. She will tell you she is glad the big estates are gone. State has taken over banks and capitalist industry. She is glad for that, because she was not big land-owner, not factory owner. So she is glad those people have not got what she did not never have.— —‘Never had’.— —Yes, never have. But she wants, wants to get house to leave to her children, and then it’s a shop, and so it must go on … She’s dreaming of unearned income—no good for the old regime, but good for her … Do you know that those apartments are heated, free? Maybe that’s nothing for her, she was always living in a heated house. But generations of peasants, and those who became proletariat with industrialization in nineteenth century, they never knew what it is to have heat, electric light! Danger is, for your country, with industrialization maybe there is coming a class—blacks—like here. They want the little house, the little shop, the little farm, for their children. Even some who come here … Bourgeois in the heart. What does Citagele care for landless peasants? He doesn’t need land, he wants a fine office. Kotane, J. B. Marks, Tambo, Nzo, Makatini—they care for the people. But him … You must not forget what kind of a life, what kind of an education does a little black kid get on your farms, and in your ghettos, before you tell us in Eastern Europe we haven’t solved the housing problem for the masses.—
She needed no reminder. —I’ve got a little black one of my own, you know.—
—Yes, and I love her. She is just like her mother, only nicer—
Laughter at the double-edged compliment. —Only darker.—
—Why you don’t let me finish? Nicer to me.—
The change of subject stopped the laughter.
—What have you to complain of, Pavel.—
—When you are tired with your work, it’s time for me for an hour. And even that time—you are working, maybe.—
—For Christ’ sake, what do you think I am—a spy? An agent of the South African government?— The laughter came back.
—No. But you are working too much. And I don’t know … if you are right for what you are doing.—
—I know what I’m working for, Pavel.—
—All right. I believe it. You are good material, yes. But I’m not sure you should be typist and translator—things like that. Sitting in an office. Oh yes, don’t be offended, yes I know you make a speech to women sometimes … But it’s not for you … A functionary. I feel it. You try to be, what is it in English—not ‘nice’—careful, no, ‘tactful’ that is it, but you can be something different! You got your own talent.—
—What are you talking about? I get on very well with the others. With Citagele. With Arnold. So what are you talking about?—
—How to live. We’ve got some people like you. In the end, valuable if they are, you can’t do much with them in bureaucracy, and even freedom movement, it has bureaucracy. You can say: dangerous individualism; you shut them away. Because if they know something, it’s not what other people can know. So what is use? But you are too clever for anything to happen to you, Hillela.—
Winter is burial. The days are shorter and shorter intervals between longer and longer nights. Everything that had opened, everything that was full to overflowing has contracted. The snow falls like the clods of red earth, on the living. Layer by layer, month by month, frozen then sodden then frozen, buried deeper. How to emerge from it, from the yellow ceiling-bulb that is daylight and the suffocation of human and cooking smells that is the warmth of their sun. There is no rainbow-coloured family. Only the one who came out black; there remains, black-to-white, the little foot that feels for the comfort of the white thigh, under covers, while steam in the pipes hisses; the small, open-mouthed face that is all there is on the other pillow. No rainbow-coloured family; that kind of love can’t be got away with, it’s cornered, it’s easily done away with in two shots from a 9-mm Parabellum pistol. Happiness dancing in a shop window behind glass, while outside there are hungry crowds in the street, looking on. Not for long. The glass explodes; their arms reach up to drag, to claim. The only love that counts is owed to them. Waves of resentment towards him, for not firing first, for not saving himself for the rainbow-coloured family, the only love made flesh, man gloved inside woman, child emerging to suck the breast the man caressed: the perfect circle, cycle. But he never belonged to it, the beloved—the bastard!—he belonged to the crowd outside and he died for them. The other wife, whom he left behind in Krugersdorp location, would not be lying in bed alone reproaching him. She was one of the crowd, she knew what belonged to them. The balancing rocks seen through a rep’s car window; embraces fall at the soundwaves of the next word spoken, the first crack of a bullet discharged.
The dear old one says, White people who settled in other countries have no past, so you’re not surrounded, like me … but you tried to live—there’s something von Kleist wrote—‘in a time that hasn’t yet come’! Ridiculous, crazy, but I like it.
And the other one: You’re too clever for anything to happen to you. Repeats it, another night, adding, Oh I know, I smell it on your skin.
What you smell is the black market perfume you bought for me.
The handclasp is the only love made flesh. Learn that. Read the handclasp, learning the kind of love in the calibre and striking power of hardware.
The slums along the river destroyed by bombardment had made way for a park an
d as the snow melted it was there: sheen on the grass and the namesake running after a ball. Pale sun unrolled slanting rugs. Water trickled under remnants of ice like cracked wine glasses. An age of winter remained shut up in apartments, offices, and on the other side of restaurant doors. Perhaps it would never leave, it would store next winter there as it did the one before. Pavel took Mrs Kgomani and her child to the woods to pick early snowdrops. He made boats out of sticks and leaves and the three of them raced these vessels on a stream. He lay on wet ground with his pure-pale wild face and delicate eyelids up to the weak sun as if it were blinding; this was the ‘they’ many people in that country resented and feared, this young man to whom the season of emergence from snow was a worshipful ceremonial. Karel, following the same impulse to share pleasure that the young woman brought out in people, drove her and the child to the town where the country’s first king had had his palace, in the 13th century. The ruins of European feudalism were the namesake’s playground, that day; she rode worn heraldic lions and griffins. Near the town was a garrison with the red star over the barbed wire at the sentry gates. —Poor devils, the men are kept shut up for the whole time they’re posted here, only the officers are allowed to mix in the town.— —Pavel Grushko says they help people with the harvests.— Karel turned to look at her with sleepy-eyed compassion for the soldiers, for the youth of all men. —Once a year, in autumn? Never to see a girl for the rest of the year? Mr Grushko doesn’t deprive himself of anything, does he.—
They must have missed her when she emerged from her winter as the park did, as the woods did, as the streams did. The old man for quite a long time, whether as a lover (no-one knows) or more likely—once again, for her—as if she had been a daughter. Pavel not for long, because he was young and very attractive to women. Karel did not live to hear of the times that have come, for her. Grushko—his position merits that he be referred to by surname alone—has surprised nobody by making a career for himself, first as a diplomat in English-speaking and Arab countries, then as his country’s representative at United Nations, where, at a reception recently, he recognized her instantly. He remembers her, in their youth, with an English phrase he does not know is long out of date: a good sort.
Why she left the Eastern European mission is a matter for speculation. It happened very abruptly: one week she was in the thick of the midday clique at the café, already gathered at outside tables for the touch of the spring sun. The next week people were asking where she was. Suppositions were carried by particular turns of phrase in their language that had gathered ironies from dour discretion under many foreign occupations. —Pavel has flown her off for a weekend at his dacha.— But while they were laughing (and what was there to laugh at? He was to have his dacha before long, and his chauffeur-driven limousine) he arrived with his quick, wide stride and flying scarf and joined the table. Where was Hillela Kgomani? Nobody could tell him.
When Citagele was approached in the office, his raised brows lifted his bald pate, through which he felt, he had complained to his efficient assistant, the cold reached right into his brain in winter. (She had found for him—maybe knitted it herself?—a cap like those black workmen wear down to the eyebrows in all weathers, at home, and it comforted him when they were alone in the office and there was no-one to see.) —Her time was up. She’d been here what—two years?—
—You should know, of course. But not two years.—
—Okay, about … well, nearly.—
—Why did she not say? She never told me.—
Citagele clasped his hands and looked at Grushko to see what he might know. Then he spoke within the four walls, as he would wear the knitted cap. —It wasn’t what I wanted. But there you are. You’ll hear about it eventually, I suppose. There has been some discussion, we’re making some changes.—
A quirk dented one corner of the European-tailored mouth, so different from the soft African one that was looking for words that would say nothing.
—Personnel being shifted around in accordance with needs.—
—She has gone where?—
—To the United States. Eventually. Oh she might be in London now.—
—America! You get nothing from them!—(the laugh that has made him popular in Western diplomatic circles)— Where are your friends there! You’ve got rid of her!—
—I’ve told you. Transferred. Maybe somewhere else. I don’t make these decisions alone.—
One version of her departure was that she had left in a fit of temperament because she had quarrelled with a Russian lover she expected to marry her. This seems gossip’s inversion of the other, political theory, that the Africanists in the organization wanted to oust the influence of white communists, and, somehow, because she was white and was too close to the Russians living in the country that was hosting her, she had got swept up. Not in a purge, exactly; the worst that happened to Arnold—one of the important figures—for example, was that he temporarily lost his place on the Revolutionary Council.
Some gossip found the second story unlikely: for heaven’s sake, Whaila leaned towards the Africanist wing, why should his widow suddenly have become a communist? But there was the rumour that she had joined the South African Communist Party in London, on which of her stays there rumour could not specify: never mind ‘Whaila Kgomani’s widow’, she had her life in her own hands, apparently she had done well in Eastern Europe, even learned something of the cursedly difficult language. If that wasn’t devotion to the cause! Oh, maybe it was some other kind of devotion—the young widow had intimate friendships, it was said; she would never lack admirers, or the means of communicating with them.
These generalities have gathered the velvet of the years, befitting the past of someone who has achieved a certain position. Her Russian lover kept a house for her in a Black Sea resort where she would join him from all over the world, under an assumed name and false passport; or, if you prefer, the government of the host country had told Citagele’s mission she must leave because she had become the mistress of one of the dissident intellectuals intent on overthrowing the regime.
Who knows.
She has always been loyal, whatever (as Pauline might say) her lack of other qualities. A child in a Salisbury park, she quit the company of her buddies but did not betray the secrets of the shrubbery to the schoolmistress under the mnondo tree. She has never given a reason (even one that would reflect well on her!) for her sudden departure from the Eastern European mission. Maybe she left as she had hitched a lift to Durban one afternoon after school. That is a judgment that has to be considered. A harsh one.
Special Interests
Everything is known about her movements. Americans are such industrious documenters: the proof of her presence among them, like that of their own existence, is ensured by reports of symposia and conferences, prospectuses of institutes and foundations, curricula vitae, group photographs, videos, tapes, transcripts of television interviews. She and her child came to the United States under the auspices (that’s the vocabulary) of a political scientist who roved Africa as a new kind of white hunter. Dr Leonie Adlestrop’s trophies were causes, exiles, aid programmes and black political intrigues. In her sixties, in socks and sandals, floral dresses scoop-necked for the climate showing the weathered hide of her bosom as two worn leather cushions crumpled together, she bore her trophies from Nigeria, Ghana, Angola, Mozambique, from Tanzania and Kenya, from little Swaziland and Lesotho, back to America. The university where she had tenure as a Distinguished Professor was merely a base. On first-name terms with the Presidents of African states already independent and the leaders of black liberation movements who would one day be presidents, she was also able to make herself accepted, motherly yet sexless (perhaps in the precedence of those post-menopausal women who are given a special, almost male, status in certain tribal rituals), into the confidence of all kinds of ordinary groups—religious, political, educational. These attributes brought her, first, lecture tours round African studies departments, then fellowships from
foundation-funded institutes for social and political research, co-option to para-governmental commissions on international affairs, and finally a status where her name listed among trustees, executive members, advisers meant she was a consultant to a succession of Assistant Secretaries of State for African Affairs, and an influence on lobbyists in Congress.
There was not much American popular interest in Africa in the late Sixties. Preoccupation with the war in Vietnam, the neo-Gothic thrills of Weathermen terrorism and even with the great black civil rights pilgrimages to Washington did not distract Ma Leonie; she took up Africa long before the students and black Americans did, and maybe without her it would have taken even longer for America to do so. Her government did not recognize the liberation movements for whose exiles she obtained entry visas and totally unorthodox admission to her own and other universities. Those who were academically qualified had teaching niches made for them; others were given scholarships she could expect on demand from a roster of sources her secretary did not even have to call up on the computer—Dr Adlestrop had them all, under the first names of their directors, at hand in her head.
A beach girl would have been too marginal to have met Dr Adlestrop in Dar es Salaam. But Dr Adlestrop—Leonie, she asked at once that you call her Leonie—passing through Accra to add the officers of Ghana’s new National Liberation Council to her rotary card file, of course had called Whaila, and met his new wife. Leonie and Whaila made the easy elliptical exchanges of old acquaintances. She had just seen Julius in Dar, spent an hour at the airport with K.K. when he arrived from a state visit to Yugoslavia, unfortunately missed Oliver—and, landing in Accra, was quite overcome with grief to realize Kwame was no more … Whaila was anti-American as a matter of policy, since the United States government supported the South African government and gave neither overt recognition nor covert encouragement to the African National Congress. But apparently Leonie was different; Leonie was with him. She was supplying funds in a small way through some of her numerous private organizations, opening cracks that might widen into future access. —I’m keeping at it, Whaila, I’ll go on beavering away.— Like most Americans highly critical of their government, she was at the same time patriotic and anti-communist. —You know that I’ve never been able to stand the idea that you’re going to have to be grateful to the Eastern bloc.—
A Sport of Nature Page 30
