A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  His slender hand moved over her head as over a piece of sculpture. He received her fastidiously through all the senses.

  —I want you to grow your hair.—

  Softly stroking, now and then stiffening his fingers to press the plates of the skull.

  She said nothing, perhaps took the request merely as a murmured endearment, along with the caress.

  —No.— Her eyes moved rapidly under the thin skin of closed lids. —No, it’s not practical.—

  She jumped out of bed and then stood stock-still as if she had suddenly discovered where she was; then busied herself, drawing the curtains, picking up discarded clothing.

  He closed his eyes for the pleasure of hearing her moving about near him. He put out a hand where he thought she was passing, but it caught at air.

  The wedding of Mrs Hillela Kgomani and Bradley Burns was delayed several times—not through her, one would never have suspected anything capricious about her. For family reasons. The death of Mr Burns’s brother; the absence of two of the sisters at summer school in Florence. She was always understanding about such things, not selfish the way most young women would have been. And his mother knew why. —She’s lived. She’s been through a lot in her young life.— The future husband accepted the family claims because Hillela did—Hillela had never known what it was to be at the centre of a family (future wife of the eldest son); the comfort and protection of its place in a homogeneous society. Anyway she was his wife already, they had made a home together in the brownstone that would never have been one without her. His only unease—not a fear, half-developed—was again that he might be changing her by the cherishing; whereas he wanted to be transformed by her. And so the one time the marriage was delayed for her reasons this was an opportunity for self-testing. She was going with Leonie to the country from which one of Leonie’s trophies, Reuel, was exiled, where the civil war had produced a terrible exodus of Southerners to refuge in the North. He knew it was dangerous although Leonie’s vocabulary turned bullets to water and blunted spears—they would ‘liaise’ with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the ‘logistics’ provided for military escorts and ‘safe conducts’. The cholera areas would be no go. The prophylactics were standard prescription. —We’ll most likely meet a lot of great people and have an inspirational time, Brad, the horror stories you keep hearing are months old, it’s always like that. I’d have spent my life on my front porch and never been any use to anyone if I’d listened to people’s disinformation.—

  He delivered Hillela to the airport an hour after making love at five in the morning. He had said nothing, but the fear and anguish in the transparent control of his face had made her suddenly notice, and come back to the bed from folding something into her suitcase, smiling to blot out his wretchedness. He let her go. Greater than the reassurance in his body was the reassurance that he could pass the test. He would risk her, to keep her as she was.

  She drank the water and ate the forbidden fruit. Of course she returned safely. These trips to misery under the sun grotesquely produced the sunburnished forehead and wind-scoured hair others brought back from Florida or the Bahamas. It was difficult to believe where she had been, what she had seen. Frightening; he embraced it all in her. It seemed the hair was a little longer, she had not cut it again, but he didn’t make any remark for fear of spoiling a slow surprise that was being prepared for him. She was working very hard at her reports and papers, consulting people here, hopping on local planes there (back to him by evening). In their bed, or drinking wine in deck-chairs under their yard elm, he shared it all. Everything was recounted. Over the forest the burned villages seen from a helicopter like black holes in a green blanket, and as the craft swooped low, the pink palms upturned from black arms, beckoning for help— —And what could you do, for Christ’ sake?— —Oh the surveyor with us pinpointed each place on a special map, supplies were dropped to them within the next few days.— —Some would die before then. Some of the hands wouldn’t be there to take the food.— —Yes, some would die.— Those steady black eyes held; turned away from nothing.

  —It couldn’t simply have been a matter of what you grab first from all that must be left behind; not the things I saw. A woman with a mincer, one of those old-fashioned ones with a handle to turn, you know? She had nothing else—in rags; she must have abandoned or bartered for food everything else she’d managed to salvage. Those people had walked two hundred miles from their village. Another one had a heart-shaped mirror with a little wire stand at the back. And her baby. I saw her looking at herself. I saw a man almost kill another because that one wanted to kill the rabbit—no, must have been a hare, there aren’t any wild rabbits in Africa—he’d carried god knows how far in a cage made of twigs. They were both starving. There’re things people can’t live without.—

  He stared and half-smiled.

  But she had forgotten. Only he would measure the stature of his claim, diminished to nothing beside the kind of needs she knew.

  There were women who had been raped by soldiers, and school-children abducted for military training. —By which side?— She wasn’t always clear. —And some lied.— She opened up under their feet the pit of wretchedness where what was true and what was not hardly had any meaning. How could she stand such ugly confusion? —But if they had been raped and mutilated?— —Yes, but some were being fed and looked after by other soldiers. They gave them their own rations. We saw that, too.— —It’s sickening. And what kind of decent regime can come out of people like that, even if they do win. From what you say, half the time they behave like the crowd they’re trying to get rid of.— —Just as both sides have always done in every war. That crowd has to be fought with its own tactics—what else is war? You’re a victim, or you fight and make victims. There’s no other way. European countries are training that crowd, giving them planes and arms. The others can fight back only if the rural people support them—even if they have to force them sometimes.—

  Frightening. She took sides in the general horror, she condoned means for ends; but at the same time she wasn’t looking on, no-one could say that of her, she was at home with polluted water and mined roads as well as in their brownstone. When he swelled with desire for her, he swelled also with admiration for her. Where is the line between lust and esteem? Hillela confused him, for ever.

  She told him with true kindness, the impulse with which her guerrillas cared for some of the homeless and starving in their war. —Brad, I don’t think you should marry me. I’ve been with Reuel, on and off, when I was in Africa. I don’t think you’d be able to—well, to manage with that.—

  He did not know where in the brownstone to go to get away from what he had heard, and he knew would never be unsaid, withdrawn by her. He blundered into the bathroom because there was a bolt on that door. Fixed to the tiles with plastic putty were the drawings of the stick-limbed, smiling symbols of Hillela, himself and the child, the happy family outside the house whose boldly smoking chimney signifies the security of the fireside.

  A Face for a Postage Stamp

  Reuel was the General—the General who had led an army coup in his country, returned it to civilian rule under his presidency, and then escaped when the former colonial power sent in paratroopers to restore the regime it favoured. Escaped with his life—the phrase goes; how manifest this was, in him. If he were in reach of a swimming pool, a river, the sea, he swam in all weathers in all countries, he could still run a mile (in his fifties, perhaps—he was discreet as an actress about his age), like all men who lead crowds and must be constantly visible, he needed only three or four hours’ sleep a night, and he ate and drank greedily or could manage as well without sustenance for days. His wide and fleshy chest under barathea or blue lounge suit moved grandly with deep breaths, as if always fresh from some exhilaration.

  The General did not tell her he could not live without her. It was in his face, and hers—they recognized it in each other without ever having it stated: each could live as long as individual
life lasted, independent of anyone, in the momentum of moving on.

  He did not take much notice of her, nor she of him, in the brownstone. Leonie was useful but he was too large in every way to be anyone’s trophy. At finger-suppers and colloquies, boredom dulled his male responses and the efflorescence of his strong ability to attract. It was far away from that, on an evening in Nairobi when he and Hillela were having a drink after Leonie had retired to write up her journal, that the recognition was there. —The only old women I like around me are my mother and my grandmother. They made me, êh, Hillela? D’you know what name my mother gave me, my African name—it means ‘God has done very well’.— Hillela laughed at his own estimate of himself, and he with her, confidently. —Isn’t it a good thing to have a name to live up to? We Africans always give names that mean something, not your Marys and Johns—what does it mean to be a Mary, that you’ll give birth without a man? Is that something you’d want for a daughter?—

  —Good god, no. That’s why I called her after Mandela’s wife.—

  —So you want to influence her to be an African liberationist, you want her to be a heroine?—

  —God may have done very well with you … but it doesn’t always work out the way the parents intended. I’m named for a Zionist great-grandfather.—

  —We’ll give you an African name—oh I know you have one, I mean the first name. What can we call you?—

  —Well, what do you suggest?—

  —I’d have to know you better to find out. You know that the name has to do with many things, the circumstances when it is given. Whether there’s been a drought, or a war.—

  —What has already happened.—

  —No, more important, what is going to happen. What the name will make happen.— The atmosphere between them took these swallow dips into seriousness, instantly skimming away. —D’you think I’d still be alive if God hadn’t done so well!— The commanding shine that was always on his full face and majestic jowl used the dim theatrical lighting of the bar as a star performer attracts the following beam of a spotlight. A big hand with a thick ring embedded in the little finger covered hers a moment in the pleasure of laughter. —We’re going to celebrate something—I don’t know what.— He ordered champagne; she read the label—South African. But they didn’t send the bottle back. They drank—to Mandela, to freedom. —Amandla!— The language was different from that of his people, but the meaning was the same: power. Their talk burrowed deeper and deeper into the night, safe from interruption. This was not West Africa, where a woman could be picked from any table as a dancing partner. —This kind of place isn’t Africanised—you see that? Dull. It’s still the European style, it belongs to the new white compound, businessmen, safari tourists, journalists instead of settlers, that’s all—and the local bureaucrats—what does Leonie call them?—fat cats—for them it’s just an extension of business lunches with foreigners at the Norfolk, it’s got nothing to do with having a good time our way. West Africans haven’t let the Muslims or the Christians tie them up inside themselves as they did on this side … That’s why I like them. You know how it is in West Africa, if some fellows spread a mat and pray five times a day, there’s still high-life in Ghana; if the nuns teach little black girls their catechism, there’re still girls in Brazzaville who know how a woman should show herself off to a man—and the places where you can dance and drink! The blacks have taken over the European nightclub and made an African party out of it, êh. But here. It’s the Arab religion more than the Christians. Can’t drink, hide the women behind that ugly black cloth. It wasn’t our way in Africa, we’ve always known how to enjoy life … even when they took us to sell as slaves, we sang and danced and the Arabs and the Christians only watched.—

  —But you like the whites’ champagne.—

  —Why not. Even what the Boers make.— He emptied his glass.

  —But you don’t like the Arabs. That must be a difficulty.—

  —Of course, we’re allies—and at the U.N., as you know, without them … they’re the ones who count with the European countries, East and West, and the Americans. What could we hope to do, on our own. But I’ll tell you … their style doesn’t appeal to me … not politically, either. Religious fatalism becomes fanaticism in politics. We Africans, we don’t go in for jihads and suicide missions. We’ll fight our enemies and die if we have to, but we’d rather kill and get away with it, êh, stay alive!— He laughed and filled their glasses with froth. —I don’t mix politics and religion. They didn’t get me and I’m going back to fight for my people, no gods. God changes sides too often, for me. The people can worship whatever they like—sacred crocodiles, Mohammed—we are all men and women, êh. We don’t know why we are in this world; we have religions to tell us why. So I’m a Catholic.—

  —You’re a Catholic?— Her face kept changing with enjoyment, curiosity, flashes of disagreement or fellow-feeling.

  —Of course I’m a Catholic. Brought up in it. I was going to train for the priesthood, at one time. That’s a fact! But once in this world, you have to decide what you are doing here. I became an African nationalist; but it wasn’t the church, it was Marx who told me why that was. So I’m a Marxist. My own kind. A Catholic Nationalist Marxist—African-made—

  —Like the nightclubs in West Africa.—

  —No, don’t laugh—it’s part of the same thing. Whether I’m inside, in our bush headquarters, or outside, making deals with our brothers (oh of course, Arab brothers, too) or in bed with a woman, it’s all part of my African-made—work, love-making, religion, politics, economics. We’ve taken all the things the world keeps in compartments, boxes, and brought them together. A new combination, that’s us. That’s why the world doesn’t understand. We don’t please the West and we don’t please the East. We never will. We don’t keep things separate. Isn’t that what orthodoxy is—separation? We make our own mess of things. They interfere; we ask them to interfere—what else am I doing? What else were you doing in Europe? I don’t know what you’re doing in the United States—

  She turned her face towards her palm, covering her mouth in a gesture as if to grant whatever he thought. He passed his ringed hand absently, without intimacy, down her cheek.

  —We ask them to interfere because power—the question of power—always divides again the combination that it brought together, looks for strength outside the unity, breaking it. Then the old gang—they come in again. The world powers. We fight their battles for them with our own. Everyone knows that. They send us guns and soup powder, êh. Some get the guns. That’s the important thing, to be the side that gets the guns. You will never come to power on soup powder.—

  —So I’m wasting my time.— A swig of evidence, she swallowed the champagne.

  —lf it’s really only on soup powder … That’s all right for Leonie, people are suffering. But it won’t stop the wars, and the wars make the refugees—

  —Leonie knows that.—

  —When I get back to the capital in my country, this time I’ll have not only the arms to take power again, I’ll have the money for development the other side can’t get. You have to be in power to be able to feed your own people. You get there with guns and you stay there with money.—

  A crowded bar has no attentive faces, no ballpoints moving over scratchpads ready to record. Someone with fibre coarse enough to grasp at the high-tension cable of power will not be distressed by what would fuse the gentle lamplight by which evenings pass in a brownstone. —What I thought I was doing … I wanted to get rid of the people who came to the flat and shot Whaila. I knew who they were, by then. From him, and even before that, in Dar … although I didn’t realize. The farmers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers in parliament, sitting in that lovely old building at the Cape Town Gardens under the Mount Nelson Hotel, where I had such a good time as a kid, staying there with my aunt. The teachers in the girls’ school I went to, the people I worked for in Johannesburg, the doctor, the advertising agency ones. Even the others. My o
ther aunt and her husband—Joe, he was so wonderful to me—who tried to show me I ought to resist what was going to kill Whaila. Although it was no good. Not only because I treated them badly—but because all of them, they let it happen. I never understood my life until there he was. In the kitchen. It happened in the kitchen.—

  He was listening without embarrassment or the simulated horror that invariably hid embarrassment when the subject came up; without the fatherly shelter of a Karel, the distraction of a Pavel, without even the perfect tender acceptance of the young man she was going to marry. He was looking at her, and he offered the cautery of desire for her: in her raw sorrow, far away, buried under the snow and the brownstone, she had felt that only a man could comfort for the loss of a man, only the smell of a man could make it impossible to disbelieve that a man actually came to an end on the kitchen floor.

  When he spoke it was back on the level of conventional indiscretions that could be ignored in the light of day; he and she knew that when the bar closes and the music stops there are cockroaches and the sweat of cleaners. —And now? When did you marry the American fellow?—

  —We’re not married.—

  —He seems—okay. Nice house. Leonie and her crowd. Good people.—

  They smiled—at his dismissal or approval.

  —It’s been postponed a couple of times. Now until September.—

  —What’d you actually mean by ‘get rid’?—

  —The same as you mean—when you talk about power. But now it’s soup powder I’ve been doling out. Most of the time. Since Europe. When you see everything reduced to hunger, nothing, nothing but the terrible way eyes look at you, men, women, children, cattle, dogs—the eyes become the same—you can’t remember anything else. You only want to find something to stuff in those mouths. You lose all sense of what you wanted to do. And the same thing with pain. You just want to stop it, for them, for the hour you’re there with them. There’s no other purpose you can even think about.—