A Sport of Nature

by Nadine Gordimer

  But the old wife did not live to see whether this would happen. The news came to State House that she had died; as customary with Africans, the President said, there were a half-dozen versions of the apparent cause. He gave her a funeral in keeping with her status. There are many sides to the President no-one would suspect but that Hillela seems to know through some matching in herself, although outwardly they have always appeared an incongruous pair—it is not the matching of beauty in the couple of the Britannia Court photograph. Sadness, like every other emotion, is diffused powerfully by the President’s physical presence: after the funeral it was again in the lament of the rhythm of his breathing, the lie of his hands and the look of the nape of his neck, so broad that the delicate, tiny ears appear stamped back into it. He was ashamed because he could not manage to weep at the funeral. (Hillela was listening, if he wanted to talk.) It was his first woman he was burying, the mother of his daughters; the young man who had been her husband was going down into the grave, too. Yet he had no tears.

  Hillela lay in bed and patted the place beside her. He padded over the cool marble floor of what had been the governor’s bedroom, reluctantly; but took her nightgown off over her head and gazed at what he had revealed to himself. He moved in beside her; moved on.

  The mother of the Colonel, the second wife, has treated Hillela with respect that Hillela has sometimes been able to cajole into some kind of affection—but the second wife cannot make a sister out of a white woman. The respect—for her usurper, a foreigner, it’s not as if the President had done the normal thing and simply taken a third wife from among his own people—probably comes about because the second wife knows Hillela went to protect the eldest son in some far country, after he had done a wicked thing and joined the people who wanted to kill his father. The Colonel himself must have told his mother; and told her never to talk about it, because it has never been mentioned between Hillela and her. She does not live in State House but has a large house of her own, in town, and maybe the President still visits her occasionally; she was married at fifteen and is not much older than Hillela. Visitors entertained at State House in the last few years have come upon charming young children chasing the peacocks and tame guinea-fowl from their roosting places in the flamboyant trees, and riding bicycles over the lawns. The visitors presume these are the children of the President by his present wife (although they look quite black—it is said those genes prevail in mixed progeniture). But no-one knows for sure whether Hillela has had any children as the President’s wife; whether she ever had any child other than the namesake. It seems unlikely; the President has seen her in a light other than that of perpetuator of a blood-line. Any woman could be that. In fact, no man wanted Hillela to be like any other woman, would allow her to be even if it had been possible for her, herself. Not even the one who supplied a brown-stone. The charming children, who have the composure and good manners of black and the precocity of white upper-class children, dressed by Hillela and educated at schools chosen by her, probably have been born to the President since his third marriage, by the second wife. Anyway, that one will never lose her position as mother of the best of them. That is something between the President and her no other woman will ever have. It would not trouble Hillela. What others perceive as character is often what has been practised long as necessity; the President’s highly intelligent intuition, that has made him so successful in his allocation of portfolios in his government, recognized the day she hopped into the hired car and set off for Mombasa with him that Hillela is a past mistress of adaptation. But Hillela has not been taken in by this African family; she has disposed it around her. Hers is the non-matrilineal centre that no-one resents because no-one has known it could exist. She has invented it. This is not the rainbow family.

  The President and his wife were hosts to experts from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, East Germany and the Soviet Union attending a workshop on his country’s trade and economic links with Eastern European countries (Hillela entertained some old friends at State House). The President succeeded in obtaining a loan from the World Bank to form his Rural Development Corporation for the upgrading of provincial towns. Abdu Diouf of Senegal (an old friend of the President, this one), then Chairman of the OAU, paid the President’s country a state visit. It was also the year Pauline was back in Africa.

  The monthly telephone calls to her son had tailed off several years earlier. But at least he made the effort to reply to her letters irregularly, and she wrote regularly although the letters were about people he did not know and a life far removed from what mother and son had experienced together. That was childhood and adolescence; their battleground, to be avoided.

  There were no letters from him and when she tried to telephone, she heard the plaintive siren of disconnection. It was a voice that was no voice; an alarm. Joe got in touch with his old colleagues in Johannesburg and they investigated. It was as Pauline had known, as she had told Joe, she knew from that mindless voice—Sasha was in detention. It was logical for Joe to be the one to fly back, since he was the man to deal with the law, legal representation, prisoners’ rights—

  —What law? What rights? They’re holding him under Section 29. What lawyer among your friends has been able to get permission to see him? They can keep him in solitary confinement indefinitely. The only ways of getting to him, helping him, must be other ways, and I’m the one to find them.—

  Her face surrounded by stiff grey hair was incandescent with the manic excitation of anxiety he had seen sometimes in clients whose mental balance was threatened; Joe understood that if he tried to make Pauline wait in London, take a bus every day at ten o’clock to her pleasant job at a Kensington Church Street book shop, she would simply go mad. Not just in a manner of speaking.

  They flew together to Johannesburg, awake all night on the plane, silent together, as they had once hurried back along the footpaths in the Drakensberg. But that time they had not found an arrest, what they had found that time was nothing, nothing, child’s play, this time was the real horror that hung over your life, all your life, if you belonged in that country, no matter where you ran to.

  Joe did what lawyers can do; and that was a lot, despite Pauline’s dismissals. Applications for the parents who had come from abroad to see the detainee were finally approved after Joe reached, link by link of connections—members of parliament, judges, influential friends-of-friends—the Minister himself.

  The meeting was terrible. Pauline’s blazing red face, steamy with tears, relived it for hours in the Rosebank flat friends had lent them. It was Sasha’s fault, it was Joe’s and hers: there he stood behind the cage and faced them as if he expected them to be facing him as a criminal, prisons are for criminals, aren’t they?— and that wasn’t the way they had come at all, that long distance to find him, endured that sycophantic struggle to get to see him!

  He was all right. What was ‘all right’? He was not ill or apparently depressed. No thinner if paler than they remembered him on his last visit to London. No more difficult to talk to, taking into consideration that the awkward platitudes exchanged, which were one part of the customary mode of communication between them, couldn’t have been anything more, anyway, in present circumstances, with a warder on either side of him listening in, and the other part of their family communication, the clashes between mother and son, were too preciously intimate for a non-contact visit. What was ‘all right’ about his being led away by two louts back to solitary confinement, a bible and a sanitary bucket? ‘All right’ was the report given by white liberal members of parliament when they received parliamentary privilege to visit such prisoners: it meant that prisoners were still alive, in possession of their senses and with no immediately apparent evidence of the wounds, bruises and burns of torture. One was supposed to be grateful to the prison authorities, the Minister of Justice, the government, for that? As an aside, there was also the routine Opposition condemnation of the principle of preventive detention. That was ‘all right’, too. Tha
t was all the conventions of justice, of humanitarian concern meant in this country Pauline had rejected but where she had left a hostage. Joe went back to London because—she let him know—these were his conventions, in all good faith they represented all he could do; she stayed to do what she had failed to after the Maritzburg All-In African Conference more than twenty years before; to find what else there was for her, beyond them.

  She went to the house of another couple whose child—a daughter, this one, a student and not a trade unionist—was in detention. Being Pauline she had neither sought an introduction through anybody nor telephoned first; just was there, with her great quick eyes ready to stare down timidity, scepticism or distrust, on the doorstep and then in the livingroom. The professor of chemistry and his wife found she had burst in not to commiserate in misfortune but to share action against it. Out of this intrusion on meek despair she became one of the founders of a committee of detainees’ parents; the professor and his wife became numbered among those who did not beg for mercy for their sons and daughters but demanded justice, and by justice meant nothing less than the abolition of laws, opposition to which had sent their young and thousands of others to prison—laws that in those years removed whole populations of black people from their homes and dumped them elsewhere at the will of whites; divided blacks’ own country into enclaves under dummy flags from beneath which blacks could not move about freely; kept education segregated in favour of white privilege; tried for treason leaders of non-violent opposition, turning it to violence; attacked black trade union action with mass dismissals, police intimidation, banning and imprisonment of officials; and created the last institution and edifice of white domination, the Parliament with three Houses provided by the State, one for Indians, one for people of mixed blood, one for whites—and none for the mass of the people, the blacks.

  The Committee members, too, respected no conventions of how things were being done in the official best interests of the country. They would not be turned away from State doorsteps; they unearthed facts and figures—how many people were detained each month, each week, each day, and who they were—that were not revealed by the police or the Minister of Law and Order. They learnt to use Underground—or rather under-prison-wall—means by which they were able to inform the newspapers of a hunger strike among detainees anywhere in the country, while the police denied such a strike was taking place. They followed word-of-mouth to find the evidence of parents of black schoolchildren who were scooped into police vans and detained, in that long period of boycotts; they produced at public meetings in church halls (the only assembly places where there was some chance of proceeding without a ministerial ban) children of nine and ten whose precocity, here, was a terrible fluency to describe their experience of the cell, the solitude, the plate of pap pushed across the floor, the sanitary bucket and the beatings.

  Black parents’ committees set up in the segregated townships, but they did not keep themselves apart from whites and the whites did not confine their concern to the smaller number of their own in detention but were active on behalf of the thousands of black sons and daughters; with her son shut away, Pauline received back the acceptance she had been deprived of when the Saturday morning children ceased to come singing up the brick-lined path in the garden laid waste with broken bottles and human shit.

  The acceptance was happening at the same time as petrol bombs and limpet mines began to explode in streets where whites went by. Countless black children (even Pauline’s colleagues could not keep tally in the burning townships) had been killed; now the first white children were. This was the kind of bond between white and black the whites had not foreseen and were never to recognize.

  Sasha also found ways and means. It was from Maximum Security that he wrote the last letter to his sibling cousin.

  I am incommunicado, so might as well try to reach you. That’s not so much more hopeless than trying for anyone else now. Little Hendrik who comes on duty at night has smuggled in this paper for me. He had it under the plastic lining of his warder’s cap; just now, when he took off the cap, there it was. He’s about nineteen and has a double crown, the hair stood up all bright yellow and sticky-shiny He always wants to get out of my cell quickly because he’s agitated—he likes me, and is afraid of that. He likes me because I don’t curse him—gaan kak, Boer—the way the brave ones do. These maledictions are scratched into the walls where I’m kept.

  I suppose there are prisons like this where you are, too. That’s a ridiculous thing to say—I’m not quite crazy, don’t decide that—of course there are prisons, but I mean ones where politicals are held. There surely have to be those. Every power has to put away what threatens it—that’s where the just and unjust causes meet. Okay, I know that, I accept it. Not cynically. I still believe. But l hope you don’t think about these places. Because it’s no good, you can’t imagine what it’s like. I had read so much—the Count of Monte Cristo to Dostoevsky to Gramsci!—and I thought I had a maximum security Baedeker in my head, I knew my way around every 7-by-7 cell, along every caged catwalk, saw the bit of sky through bars and had ready-paced-out the exercise yard, had my ingenuity kit to keep track of days with bits of unpicked thread. And the mouse or cockroach that would become a friend. (Sources: from Ruth First to Jeremy Cronin and Breytenbach.)

  Even the business of the thread is wrong. I know every day when I wake up what day it is and whatever else has gone out of my head in seven months the calendar beside the phone in Point road is there, with the volk’s holidays figured in red, Day of the Vow that if Dingane killed Piet Retief it would be only whites killing blacks from then on, Family Day when the whites picnic and the dockworkers and miners get drunk alone in their single-sex hostels. Today is the 214th day I’ve been incommunicado.

  Oh my mother has seen me, and Joe was here, there were two visits with him before he went back to London. But what is there to say. The reasons I’m here are not negotiable (as Joe would put it). I’m where I have to be. Yes, Joe, I want to overthrow the State, I can’t find a way to live in it and see others suffer in it, the way it is or the way it revises its names and its institutions—it’s still the same evil genie changing shapes, you have to smash the bottle from which it rises. Rhetoric. That’s the fancy language of my speechifying to unions that the Major reads back to me in interrogation. But I am my fancy language. I used to read a lot of poetry—as you know. Well, that’s my poetry. That’s the meaning of my life.

  Oh I tell him: it’s fancy to you because even now when you can see it’s all up with white-man-baas, you see the real end as a ‘fancy’ you’ll knock out of the heads of a horde of ignorant blacks incited by romantic white radicals. The Major snorts with laughter (every mannerism these interrogators have that one wouldn’t notice in anyone else becomes piggish) when I say there is unbeatable purpose expressed in the horrible mishmash of Marxism, Castroism, Gandhism, Fanonism, Hyde Park tub-thumping (colonial heritage), Gawd-on-our-sideism (missionary heritage), Black Consciousness jargon, Sandinistism, Christian liberation theology with which we formulate. He thinks he’s getting somewhere with me. He thinks I’m beginning to have doubts, and they’ll soon be able to produce me as a State witness at somebody’s trial. He’s not getting anywhere. I have no doubts; I only see better than he does that if the means are confused, the end is not.

  Gaan kak, Boer. I’ve always died a thousand deaths. You remember how when we went to the dentist as kids, I couldn’t eat breakfast, my knees and elbows were pressed together, I wanted my steps to take me backwards when the nurse called me to the chair. And the big fuss about the army I was always scared stiff I wouldn’t be able to stand things. But that was dread, which is fear of something that hasn’t yet happened. There are times when I’d do anything to get out. I’m craven. But never when I’m with the Major or his team. All the things you’ve read about have happened to me; even if my feet are swollen from standing and I have a thirst for sleep that’s the strongest desire I’ve ever known—Hillela, forget about s
ex—even then when they lead me back here I always have the feeling I’ve won.

  There’s nothing more to dread. Is there? If they put me on trial and the skills of all Joe’s colleagues can’t get me off, I’ve stood it for seven months in prison, if I go in for years, I won’t have to die that death again.

  I’m going to tell you that at first Pauline actually had the idea you might be able to ‘do something’ about me! Olga recognized you in a newspaper photograph, Hillela is Madame la Prèsidente. How you got there, that’s confusing, too. When I wrote some years ago you were supposed to be married to an American professor, but the letter came back. Pauline was in one of her hyped-up states when she arrived here: you would get your President to pull strings. What strings? Through the OAU; she had rushed off to one other old chums still teaching African Politics at Wits and checked your husband’s standing, which proved high. Joe had to point out that the OAU was not exactly influential with the South African security police. It was only a lapse; my mother’s really always been cleverer than Joe, we know. She’s still here. I realize she’ll never go back while I’m inside. She’s tremendously active with a group that supports us—detainees, and politicals on trial. It’s possible she might land up inside, too. She looks wonderful. I’ll tell you: happy. She’s the only person I see except the Major’s team, and Hendrik and his mates in uniform. The visits are in the presence of warders, you can’t say much, but all Pauline and I have to say to each other is political and we’ve come to some strange kind of intuition between us, a private language by which we’re able to convey information back and forth in a form Hendrik and co. can’t follow. Family sayings, childhood expressions—we have access through them.