Hillela Kgomani travelled; even to Africa sometimes with Dr Adlestrop, those years; the interests of their commissions coincided or Leonie contrived that they should. With the pride of a teacher leading a school outing Leonie arranged for unmarked planes, boarded on hidden airstrips shaved out of the bush, to take them behind the guerrilla lines in several countries. They ate with bearded commanders who were old (scholarship) students of Leonie, but had had to finish the kind of education they needed in the Soviet Union, Cuba or China, depending on the alliances of their movements. Some had known Whaila; the grip of the hand, when Leonie introduced the young woman, tightened; she had been taken out of the ranks of useful onlookers and silently accepted among the commanders in their garb composed of distinguishing styles of many liberations, from the Risorgimento to the Thousand Days, from Liebknecht to Castro. She watched men—like those who had shared the hospitality of the Manaka flat, drinking beer and grumbling because they couldn’t buy the brand of razor blade they had used in Soweto—drilling in a mismatch of captured fatigue dress, and sitting about tending their weapons, talkative and expert as the tinsmiths in Lusaka market fashioning their buckets and braziers. There were women among them. Enclosed in third-hand battledress, the generous breasts (like her own) characteristic of black girls seemed to have atrophied to meet conditions; their chests were the hard shields of males’. Only their feet escaped, bare. Hillela pushed off her sandals and socks while she sat in the hot, paper-bag glow of a tent, writing notes for a report. All became typed paper. The voices that brightly skimmed the surface above sleep in the early morning were at first puzzling, then—again, as always—the most familiar assurance; words that meant nothing (a language not understood), and everything; the rep’s ‘boy’ talking in a dorp street outside the car, Jethro heard while face-down beside the pool, and the spill of harassed chatter flying through the service doors as the waiters served the schoolgirls. It was a home. An audile, sensory home like that soundmen provide for the sequences of film where there is no human speech, holding up their microphones in an empty room where the quality of silence contains vanished voices, vanished heartbeats.
Single-file paths behind the training camp had been made by bare soles and the brush of heads against twigs. They were so tentative they disappeared into the bush here and there or came to a stop at the obstacle of a red earth funnel higher than a man, built by ants. There was no concept of ‘place’ in this wilderness, fiercely undefined in reconquest by its original inhabitants of territory defined on maps of colonial possessions. She and Leonie found their way not to a place but a presence of several hundred people there in the bush like companies of storks or cranes come upon when insects surface in one area or another. They had no more possessions than scavengers. They waited; or at least the only aspect they had was that of waiting; as Hillela saw human beings do when they have lost everything of the past, have no hold upon the present, no sign that there is a future. They appear to be waiting because there is no state appropriate to their existence. Leonie picked a baby like a phoenix from ashes of a small fire; its whole small being was fascinated by the gingerish hairs, flashing with sweat, at either corner of her smiling lips. Family love casts out squeamishness. She touched scabby heads and called out cheerfully. —Scurvy. And look at the belly—oh you potbelly, you—kwashiorkor as well.—
Hillela returned with the freedom fighters who brought maize porridge or beans by way of the paths, once a day. When the children had eaten, they roused from the dust and began to play; they slowly began to chase and laugh, make weapons out of sticks. When she smiled at them, they pointed the sticks and stuttered machine-gun fire. And then the fuel of food was burnt up, they lay about on their mothers again, and the women searched for lice in their hair, whether there were lice or not. The ritual was all that was left of providing for their children’s needs. A feeble old man fought the children for the roll of peppermints Hillela found in her pocket. She grabbed the stick he was wielding—but whom was she to defend? He was so thin that pulses beat visibly at his temples and jumped beneath the skin on his hands.
Leonie knew better. —First your peppermints, then your clothes, then your malaria prophylactics—and what use will you be to anybody, then? What they need is what we’re going to go back and get sent out here, high-protein foods and basic medicines. What they need is for the U.S. to stop giving covert aid to keep those gangsters down in the capital in power.—
One of the freedom fighters who perhaps understood a little English watched the old woman with something of the incredulity with which the filthy children had surrounded the distributor of small discs sweet and strong, the taste of a whole other existence. His gaze fingered Dr Adlestrop’s assurance as if she were a magic crone from a life he used to know—someone who brushed with others in city streets, who saw clothes in shop windows, travelled in taxis, drew pay once a week and walked into the fanfare of talk and music in the rich fermented scent of bars.
‘In addition to the large number of fighting personnel, which includes women as well as men (no figures available because these would provide useful information to the government forces), there is the added logistical burden of feeding and providing minimal care for hundreds of refugee families. These have been victimised by the government forces for aiding freedom fighters, or in some cases were simply caught up in areas where fighting was intense and no normal life—planting of crops etc.—was possible.’ In hotels and planes all was transformed into reports, studies and working papers. The phrasing of a banality could make the difference between approval or rejection in a committee room thousands of miles away from the bush, the dry seams of river-beds, the deserted sands and green-massed forests passing under the plane’s belly. The inclusion of an observation better left out could give the high-minded (Lord save us! Those are the dangerous ones, worse than the open reactionaries, my dear Hillela) the chance to carry a ‘no’ vote.
The self-same sight of people in a place that was no place, waiting: these were over the border where they had fled to another country, saying they had been beaten and robbed of their cattle when they would not help the freedom fighters. That sight would not be transformed into typescript and serve as self-righteousness for people who experience nothing for themselves and have not the courage to distinguish between ends, only to condemn the ugly necessities to which means are driven. Lines crossed out, the sight crossed out with a finger tapping on the upper case X. If she could have found the ones who ran away down the corridor of Britannia Court, would she not have shot them with her souvenir Makarov?
Leonie Adlestrop’s special position in Africa made it possible for her to move with ease back and forth from conservative to radical regimes, in fact, everywhere except to South Africa and Namibia, where she had been declared a prohibited immigrant—and so proudly joined the status of political refugees from that country. —We can’t get in, but we can kick up a heck of a lot of dust outside, can’t we, Hillela?— They were in Dar es Salaam for a day or two, and Hillela, keeper of the papers and briefcases, was part of Dr Adlestrop’s gatherings of useful contacts in the bar of the Agip Hotel. Neither Udi nor Christa encountered her, she was not available—in meetings, when Christa phoned—and Udi she called from the airport only just before she left; a voice he could attach only to the flamingo-girl in the pink skirt.
—How do you look now?— It was his way of asking many things.
—I don’t know.— The line drew a long hum of passing time between them. —I really don’t know. I’m so busy.—
—I didn’t know where to reach you—well, I could easily have found out from the office here. But I just wanted to tell you you’d be all right. That time. And it might have been the last thing you could bear to hear.—
—Udi, I’ve got to go now.—
—Yes of course. But if you suddenly phone when you know the flight is going to be called, it means you want to say something, Hillela.—
—Udi? No … just to say hello. I’m too tired to think o
f anything—and there are meetings to prepare for the moment we arrive back in the U.S. So much I haven’t written up.—
—You, a bureaucrat. I didn’t think that was the way you’d be all right. Well.
—What other way is there. If you’re not carrying a gun in the bush you have to do it with documents and committees. I’m not a bureaucrat, I have to use bureaucracy.—
—You must be formidable. You sound it. But I can’t imagine … Hillela, your voice is just the same, you know.—
—You have to dig up bad consciences and good intentions and put them both on the line. Give them no out. Confront them with the way you’ve calculated they can give you what you want while they’re using this in their own interests. That may be to build up one of their ‘caring images’ before some election or get them promoted to responsibility for a funded project. You have no idea what it’s like, Udi.—
—I hope not. You didn’t ever use those kinds of words … And your child, the little boy—
—Nomzamo. For Nelson’s wife. Oh she’s got the Americans wound round her fat finger, all of five years old now …—
—She must be just like you.—
—The time I wasted. I should have learned the things I need now. I’ve had to teach myself how to prepare budgets and estimates—
—What are you going to do, Hillela?—
—What d’you mean?—
—You know what I mean. Is it going to be for the rest of your life … oh Hillela.—
—Do what I’m doing. Looking for ways to free Whaila.—
That was why she had not been able to go away without reaching him: he was the one who would understand what she had just said. That was his place. He was ashamed to think she could hear the weakness of emotion that changed his voice. —That drudgery … for you … and what can that sort of thing achieve. It will be the big powers who’ll decide what happens to blacks. And the power of other black heads of state influencing the big powers. A waste, yes… it’s this that’s a waste of your life—The line cut off. He waited, but she did not ring again. She must be walking to the plane with that old ghoul who grinned as if from a bridal group in newspaper photographs of people who would kill or be killed when she had gone.
If Hillela Kgomani had not a spare moment to see old friends, she found time to meet people from the African National Congress. Not in their office (which was why she missed running into Christa) but at a private house. This suggests that if it were true she had been expelled from the movement while in Eastern Europe, she was back in favour. Maybe had earned her way by turning some of the paper-rustling drudgery to the organization’s advantage in the unpromising conditions of the United States. It is also possible she was never expelled at all, but that this was a planned pretext to get her into the States in the status of disaffection (as the euphemism for defection goes) so that she could work secretly on the prospects of getting a mission opened there. Certainly in the early Seventies offices were opened in New York, for the first time. Probably she was working for the organization all along, under the spread breast-feathers of mother hen Leonie and her aid and research projects in many African countries. Bradley Burns, who is given to quiet analysis of the time when he was the man in a position to know, says she confused him. Deliberately. At times it was clear that for her only sexual love—and oddly this included her feeling for the little girl—was to be trusted. All the rest (his phrase) was shit and lies. And he did not know whether she was thinking of the killing of her husband, or some other kind of treachery that happened to her while she was in exile politics in Eastern Europe. Then at other times she could also say love ‘can’t be got away with’; or it wasn’t ‘enough’. What she seemed to mean by this last was that in spite of all evidence against it, another kind of love had to be risked.
Acronyms the language of love. United States Institute for African-American Cooperation, USIFACO; Third World Committee for Africa, TWOCA; Operation Africa Education, OPAD; Co-ordinating Committee for Africa, COCA; Commission for Research into Under-development, CORUD; Foundation for Free People, FOFREP. The child plays with alphabetical blocks on the floor, builds houses with them. A career can be built out of acronyms; everyone here must have a career, you fulfil yourself with a career, there are books that specify what a career is by listing what is available. Pauline would be happy, she was more than willing to supply the advantage of a career, whatever Sasha said. Leonie couldn’t have done more if it had been for her own daughter; Leonie will go on with her promotion, beavering away. Leonie knew him. Leonie is the only person in the board rooms, at the working breakfasts in motels, at the Thanksgiving dinner, who knew him—the one who came out just like him does not remember. Not even a trauma to know him by; she was carried away with a towel across her eyes so that she would not see what was on the kitchen floor.
Twenty, forty years after they have received the advantages of a career they still form their version of a songololo, singing their songs as they stride along under the same elm trees in the same avenue. Everything remains in place, for them. The storm windows will be put up, as theirs are, every late autumn and removed to let the smell of spring in. The namesake will grow up as a little black American with civil rights and equal opportunity to protect her, like everybody else, and the distinction of her African names to assert that individuality everyone here says is so important in making a career. She won’t have to have engraved on her bracelet, I am me; she’ll say, I’m Nomzamo Kgomani, and that will impress.
No need ever to run out of acronyms. There is a career of continued useful service ahead; there is the example of Leonie, loverless lover of all those she is entitled to call by their first names, fulfilment (as they sum up, here) shining out of every group photograph in which she appears. But no need to emulate entirely. The documentation will be read in bed beside a young man advancing well in his own career, ready to help with the dishes and to perform—woman, man, and the little black daughter he regards as his own—the safe and pleasant rituals of a family, here; parent-teacher co-operation, playing games, going to the lake shack and Cape Cod house.
The real family, how they smell. The real rainbow family. The real rainbow family stinks. The dried liquid of dysentery streaks the legs of babies and old men and the women smell of their monthly blood. They smell of lack of water. They smell of lack of food. They smell of bodies blown up by the expanding gases of their corpses’ innards, lying in the bush in the sun. Find the acronym for her real family.
Housewarming
Bradley was her own age, like the men the young alumnae had. He was an economist with a promising position in a multinational company. His grandfather had been one of the editors of The New Republic, an associate of Edmund Wilson, and a victim of the McCarthy hearings. The leftist tradition was a family heirloom sufficient in itself; a claim to a way of life that no longer actually need be practised, just as the painting of an ecclesiast ancestor in ermine on the wall is prestige enough for descendants who never go to church. It was adequate for the family image to be brushed up from generation to generation during the youthful period when the social conscience, along with spontaneous erections, naturally evinces itself. Brad had done his stint—in opposition to the Vietnam war, and a year with an aid agency in India. Now he could settle down with the complete set of The New Republic published during his grandfather’s years, on display in his study—handed down to him as a housewarming present when he found his own brownstone.
Of course people with his parents’ background would not show any reaction to the appearance of a black child with their son’s new friend. And when the explanation came, bringing into the big living-room with its grand piano (Brad and his mother played), New England samplers and bowls of tulips, distant horrors the Burnses were accustomed to being able to shrink with the flick of a switch to blank on the face of the television, this provided proof by association that they were still on the right side, just as, conversely, guilt by association provided danger for those other parents, Pa
uline and Joe. The parents’ house was a generous thoroughfare where the adult children made their long-distance telephone calls, cooked, borrowed cars and electrical equipment, used the basement laundry, slept over with friends or lovers; snatches of their independent lives were enacted there—before Hillela, or even drawing her in—whose contexts were elsewhere. Brad’s ‘find’, brought home (good for him!), was just such a snatch of his life. The brothers and sisters chattered with her, regaled themselves with laughter when they encouraged her cute little black girl to be sassy, and were lavish with invitations for brother to bring her along to jazz clubs, sailing trips, cinemas and parties.
Only Brad was quiet. He watched and listened to the girl and her child he had contributed, getting on so well with his siblings. The pair represented him in the way he could not represent himself, now that these brothers and sisters were no longer children.
He was quiet when he made love the first time. Nothing in the room, in the world, would distract him from the act of worship now approached, and his trance produced blind excitement in which only the body knew its way. When she was seeing with her eyes again she smiled appreciatively, cheekbones lifting a little fold under her dark, lazy gaze. And he spoke.
—Was it the first thing you saw.—
—Yes. I thought of a puppy, the kind with a velvety patch over one eye.— She withdrew her lax hand from between his arm and side and stroked the dark birth-blot that all his life others pretended was not there.
This man talked after love-making. Not the mumblings of dreams and names in a Slav language, but a wide-awake fluency, entered by way of her body. He told again and again: —Hillela, I don’t care how many lovers you’ve had, no-one can have loved you as I do.—
A Sport of Nature Page 32
