A Sport of Nature (16 page)

—Sasha?—

—Sasha?—

He waited, once again, to hear her call softly, again.

—Sasha?—

He opened his eyes and suddenly began to yawn, yawned till his eyes watered, full of tears.

They got up. She stood a moment, waiting for him.

—I would never go to Rhodesia.—

She was moving her head very slowly. Feeling him looking at her, a smile turned the edges of her mouth; she might have been being photographed. He approached her very shyly, and kissed her. They wandered through the house, arms about each other's waist, following the trail of their inhabitation: among the papers on the study desk, a packet of chocolate broken into, from which she took a square, records among the open tins in the kitchen, his telescope that he had been tinkering with (last year's birthday present for a boy interested in phenomena beyond his orbit) on the dining-table.

He took the telescope into his room and for a long time, until they got too cold, they drew the moon and stars near through the open window, just as their talk drew near ski resorts, the Bahamas, the anonymous freedom of foreign cities.

They were in the deep sleep of midnight when Pauline came quietly into her son's room and saw that there were two in his bed. She turned on the light. The room was cold and stuffy; warm in the core of it was the smell of a body she had known since she gave birth to him, unmistakable to her as the scent that leads a
bitch to her puppy, and it was mingled with the scents of sexuality caressed from the female nectary. The cat was a rolled fur glove in an angle made by Sasha's bent knees. The two in the bed opened their eyes; they focussed out of sleep and saw Pauline. She was looking at them, at their naked shoulders above the covers, and she called, as if she had come upon intruders in the house—
Joe
. She turned and walked out.

They did not move. Something grasped Sasha's innards and was shaking him; he trembled against Hillela. Her body was calm as sun-warmed stone. He spoke. —It's not Sunday.— Hillela said nothing. Her soft, clean, curly hair lay against his neck, the last sensation he had been conscious of as he fell asleep. Hillela was there. Now that terrified him.

Pauline came back with Joe, she was clutching his upper arm, taking protection. She stopped him in the doorway, against some danger. Sensing attention, the cat began to purr. Pauline's splendid head rose like an archaic representation of the sun, aureoled with wild filaments, blinding them and holding them in her gaze. —
Joe. Joe
.— Sasha's mother was imploring his father to tell the intruders not to be there. The cat stretched, jutted rump and tail and jumped off the bed.

The greatest shock was the confusion. It was days before Sasha (and Hillela, for all he knew) understood why his parents had come home on Saturday night. And Pauline and Joe had to grasp a total displacement of apprehension. They returned because of a crisis they knew how to deal with, in an anxiety not unexpected in the context of their lives. Someone had brought that curse upon peace, a radio, to the camping ground in the Drakensberg. He took the thing, the size of a cigarette pack, along with him when the party of friends went on a climb, and under another kind of waterfall (of static) its cackle told of the arrest of Joe's partner in the early hours of Saturday morning. Joe and Pauline left
Carole with the party and tramped back in the silence of shared preoccupation along the hikers' trail where, a few hours before, they had noticed the minute beauties of every fern and flower, and the grand surveillance of eagles. What both feared most, on the long drive back, was that their house had been raided while the other two members of the family were left alone there. —Well … they're not children … they'll know how to behave sensibly.— Pauline accepted the reassurance, but a mile or two farther on, while she was taking her turn to drive, allowed herself: —How d'you behave with those bastards raking through a house? It's all very well … but it hasn't happened to us. I'm not sure what my reactions would be. If I could shut up. And Sasha …—

—Sasha knows the drill.— They were travelling in the car in which Pauline had taken the Masuku family to escape over the border. Police investigations into such things often took a long time when they were preparing a case pertaining to state security and involving many people. Both were thinking about this, but said nothing. When Pauline was not driving there was no other claim to distract her attention, and foreboding built within her a whole construct of consequences from a single act, made by her, it now seemed on impulse, that would trap the considered, continuing usefulness of Joe and his kind. She experienced a new guilt; through her, hands that should never touch, eyes that should never see the papers in Joe's modest study might have been going through them.

That was the first room in the house she went to, and there was some evidence of disorder—Joe's rug was not under the desk, files were on the floor, the chess set was not in its usual place. She could not wait to verify if anything had been taken but ran at once to be reassured that the children were all right, that Sasha was in his room.

Joe was already on the telephone, waking up his partner's wife.

Coming back from that room, Pauline waited a full minute, standing there looking at Joe, not hearing what he was saying, unable to
understand anything, neither what she had just seen nor the purport of his expression as he asked questions and received answers.

And in the days that followed, which was one to think about, how could one grapple with the one, the always-to-be-expected crisis, while the other … how was one to think of anything but the other? Joe had no choice. He was preparing applications, making representations, following procedures and looking (always looking) for the loopholes in Acts through which he could reach the detained man, while at the office doing the work of both of them. He phoned Pauline at odd moments of day, as a busy man will find time to do usually only to keep contact with a mistress. A few murmured, elliptical words, to which the response was equally laconic. Everything all right? Anything happened?

Yes. Nothing.

After Pauline had pushed past Joe that night, gone over to the bed and hit Sasha across the face, hit him for the first time in her life, hit him twice, jolting his head first this way then that, what could be all right. But outside that room where he lay naked, smelling of sex, with his sister—outside that house, all over the country, there were parents whose sons were in prison, whose sons had had to flee, like Donsi Masuku, and whom they would never see again.

For the first time, what there was could not be talked over ‘frankly and openly' between the parents and children. There was no formula of confidence that would do. Pauline and Joe searched for one, as he searched for loopholes in the law. The attraction that had overcome taboo was something no-one could be asked to explain. Could one ask the fifteen-year-old Carole if she had noticed anything about—what? Could a father collude with his daughter in the old adult euphemism for sexual relations, ‘something between' her siblings? The incident—how would one phrase it to Sasha, to the girl—was it an incident, a piece of sexual bravado (there was the empty wine bottle as a clue) in the defining family's absence, or was it something—

—Oh worse, worse.— Pauline stopped Joe. —Love, then, incest, going on who knows how long.—

Joe told her again and again, she shouldn't call Hillela Sasha's ‘sister'.

—Not in actual terms of kinship, no, but in fact, how they've been brought up, how we live, they are brother and sister, they are, they know they are. And she is his first cousin. My sister shares my blood, doesn't she! Their mothers are one!—

—In some countries even marriages between cousins were not illegal. Until very recently. Where your grandfather was born, lots of Jews married cousins. Not only secular, but religious law allowed it.— Joe offered the information not to comfort his wife and himself, but to defuse emotion that they might apply reason to the unspeakable.

In the end, Joe closed the door in his study as was customary when he and Sasha wanted to be left in peace to play chess, and said to him as Len once said to Hillela: —I don't understand, either.— He was concurring, perhaps, with the state of mind of Pauline, who never before had excluded herself from any discussion concerning her son. —We're prepared to accept that you yourself do not understand. So let us put it behind us. Forget it.—

Such abject desolation burned over the boy that Joe sensed this like a fever emanating from him.

—Come. Set up the men. I've had a hellish day in court. Let's play.—

Sasha would go back to school, but Hillela would remain there, in the house.

Carole, younger and impressionable, shared a room with her. Already the parents could sense a protective hostility in Carole: ganging up for, rather than with, the old triumvirate, because Sasha was withdrawn, he spoke to the two girls only when others were present, in the conventional exchanges at table, and Hillela—no-one had confronted Hillela with anything. One of
the things Hillela had done—Sasha and Hillela had done—was to take away from Pauline the single area where Pauline was certain always to know what to do, the area where she had been sure nothing could shock her, nothing elude understanding or alienate love. Joe had to shut himself up, alone, with Sasha; she could not bring herself to take on Hillela. When Hillela came over quietly—astonishingly—to kiss her goodnight as usual (this was a house where affection was displayed, normal emotions had never been suppressed) every evening of the very week that followed what had happened, Pauline touched that young cheek with lips like charred paper. Hillela went to her holiday job, Carole to hers, and in the evenings, if Hillela did not go out with those friends of hers (and god knows who they were, what ideas she had picked up from them and brought home) she was shut up with Carole in their shared room in schoolgirl intimacy—creaming faces, squeezing blackheads, pushing back cuticles; whatever they were doing or saying concealed by the music they played. Some of the nights of that week Pauline wept in the dark beside Joe, after they had talked in bed about the things that really mattered in the world, the clandestine investigations Joe was making, through contacts in the police, to find out whether his partner was going to be charged with subversion, and the progress of the trial of others, already in session. He patted her back, stroked her hip; uncertain whether it would be a good thing to go on to make love to her. Once, when his caress of comfort began to change, she spoke. —I have the feeling Carole knew all along …—

—Oh surely not. Hillela will have told her? Not possible. I can't believe that—He did not say it: even of Hillela.

—Not
told
, nobody will have said anything, but you know how she adores the girl. More than any sister. Sensed it. Whatever Hillela does is always right, for her. You remember the Durban business. How she lied for her?—

It was because of Carole that a decision had to be made. Hillela had caused Pauline to strike her son, Hillela had used him as a man while he was still his mother's son, Hillela, made a sister out of Pauline's love for a sister, had misused the status granted her, but it was because of Carole that the petty domestic normality of the house, the goodnight kisses and cosy chess games that persisted binder danger and political upheaval, could not be allowed to return under this kind of threat. Carole was exposed; even supposing what happened were to have been an isolated incident, and when Sasha came back from school for other holidays it would not be necessary to wonder, every time one went out for a few hours, whether one should have locked grown children in their rooms … Carole was exposed.

No decision could be made by Pauline and Joe alone. She did not know whether to write to the father, to Len. It was not proposed to pack the girl off to Rhodesia, to end up a glorified waitress, like the new wife. —She's still Ruthie's child.— For Pauline, if love failed, became incomprehensible, there was still justice. It was necessary to speak to Olga. It had to be done; hadn't Olga always said she had as much right to Hillela as Pauline? Olga, too, bore the charge of Ruthie's child. Olga must face facts, like anyone else, once or twice in her life.

Everything Pauline found it impossible to be, at home, now, she was restored to the moment she found herself in Olga's presence, in Olga's room with the Carpeaux
Reclining Nude
and (an acquisition she noted with the subliminal attention that stores such things) a gilt-turbanned Blackamoor holding up a lamp. —Sasha and Hillela have been sleeping together. Don't ask me the details. They don't help at all. It happened; we know; that's all there is to it.—

Olga didn't want to believe what she was told so bluntly; Olga wanted to get out of believing. They almost quarrelled. How could Pauline say such a thing, and about her own child, too—as
if it were nothing! Matter-of-fact!
That's all there is to it
. Pauline was so
hard
. Pauline grinned shockingly at her sister. —What do you want me to say? Weep and wail? I've come to discuss what we ought to do next, as Ruthie's sisters. These things happen, they happen within closed walls, like these, you can't shut them out as you do so much else. They are in the family, Olga.—

—To think she grew up with Clive! And they're still together quite often! He's teaching her to drive—but Clive's a very steady, sensible boy—

—Of course, all parents are quite positive that the way
they've
brought up their children has produced models of virtue. I don't excuse Sasha, I don't exonerate him, it's all beside the point. And he's no concern of yours. We're talking about Hillela.—

Olga had a loose cashmere jacket over her shoulders, there was underfloor heating in her house and no need for the bulky winter clothing Pauline wore. Olga stood up giddily, taking courage in one certainty. —I can't take her, Pauline.— Pauline watched her pressing her oval red nails into the flesh of her slim arms.