A Sport of Nature (19 page)

At the Resettlement Board Headquarters it was decided from where and when black people—African, Indian and of mixed blood—would be moved away from areas declared for whites only. At the Bantu Affairs Commissioner's offices it was decided for how long and in what capacity black people could live and work in the city. In the city, during the eighteen months Hillela was somewhere about (at least there was the evidence that Olga's stipend was drawn regularly, and under the circumstances, in all good conscience, there was nothing else her mother's family could do for her) there were thirty-one other targets. Most were hit by incendiary bombs. It was long before the Underground organizations were to have limpet mines, SAM missiles and AK 47s; these bombs were homemade, with petrol bought in cans from any service station. Letter boxes, electrical installations, beerhalls owned by the white administration boards in the black townships and railway carriages owned by the State monopoly—explosions attacked what represented the white man's power where blacks could get at it: in the places where blacks themselves lived. A man named Bruno Mtolo, a traitor to the liberation movement who turned State witness at a treason trial, said that ‘recruitment presented no difficulty' if volunteers were promised they would be allowed to undertake sabotage immediately. And Joe was right; it was not possible to adhere completely to the intention to avoid bloodshed. Timing devices or the indiscipline of recruits caused things to go wrong. In the beerhalls and railway carriages black people were killed or hurt.

White people did not hear the blast, smell the fires; not then, not yet. In another part of the country, black policemen regarded as collaborators with the government were killed, and so were a few white ones, but no white suburbanite or farmer was harmed; not then, not yet. Somewhere about, Hillela worked—probably not in this order—as an apprentice hairdresser, in a car-hire firm (until it was discovered that when she had to deliver a car to a client she was driving without a licence) and in an advertising agency. She was the kind of girl whom people, on very short acquaintance, invite to parties. The advertising personnel drank white wine, their symbol of the good life, instead of tea at the usual breaks in the working day; they had many parties. It was certainly at one of these that she must have met her Australian, Canadian, or whatever he was. Categories were never relevant to her ordering of life. He stared out of beard, eyebrows, brown curls. —So I suppose you're one of the great ‘creative team' that persuades people to buy beer and dog-food.— She was not; she was hardly more than a messenger, she carried copy about and opened bottles of white wine. As soon as he realized she was working to eat, not out of devotion to the art of advertising campaigns, he began to assume a scornful collusion with her.

—Oh you mustn't be so hard on them. They're very easy-going people. They're fun.—

—You're quite wrong. They take themselves absolutely seriously. They believe they're writers and artists. The muse of consumerism is the new Apollo. Look at that androgynous creature with his pink shoes and little boy's braces. He epitomises the whole crowd. I don't mean because he's queer. They're all neither one thing nor the other. Not workers, not artists. All the exhibitionism they imagine is unconventional—meanwhile they are the paid jesters of the establishment, selling the conditioning of the masses on billboards showing girls big as whales.— His yellow eyes rested amiably here and there in the room while he said these
things; he even waved a hand at someone in the semaphore of this set that signalled ‘I'm making it over here'. —I'd rather watch a snake swallowing a rat, a cat stalking a bird for a meal. I'm for lives lived by necessity.—

This turn of phrase came back to Hillela as the language of childhood, from the voices in Pauline's house. Since his manner contradicted the content of what he was saying, she thought, that first night, he might be drunk. Everyone at these parties was always drunk to some degree, with the consequent rapid changes of mood and disoriented awareness that made them so lively—they called it ‘letting your hair down'.

She smiled. —Why do you come, then.—

He turned his face away from the company, an actor going offstage, and spoke as if he half-hoped she would not catch it: —It's necessary for me to be seen in places like this.—

He danced with her and stood in uproariously-laughing groups, an arm around her neck as a casual sexual claim understood in this circle, while jokes were told about copywriters, Afrikaners and Jews, who were present to laugh at themselves, and about blacks, who were not. It was usual for people to pair off after these parties, slipping away; outside she ran with him through the blows of a rain so strong it seemed to be attempting to strip off their clothes. It was so black and close around them that it was not until next morning she saw the outside of the house where they made love and slept the night together. It was the converted servants' quarters of a larger house whose occupants, he said, were ‘all right'. She understood the inference, and also that she must not ask why it was necessary for him to have vetted them. (That was the advantage of having lived with Pauline and Joe.) It is doubtful if she was ever quite sure why. Everyone called him Rey, Andrew Rey, but he showed her, once she had moved in with him, a passport in another name with which he had entered the
country. That was not his real name; ‘too long a story' to explain why if he entered the country under a false identity he lived there under yet another persona. He worked as a free-lance journalist for several newspapers, including a black one, though his byline appeared only in one that was regarded as liberal while at the same time being a respectable part of the economic establishment. —Editorials full of fine phrases about the fight for freedom of the press, but when I bring in my copy on the Mineworkers' Union Congress, the brave editor puts the red pencil through the fact that blacks are seventy-five per cent of the labour force, and they weren't there—they can't be members. And why does the bastard slash my piece? Because the consortiums with their half-dozen company aliases who own the mines, who own everything here, also own the paper, and they don't want any ideas put into the blacks' heads. It's okay to ‘deplore' the bombs, to be ‘horrified' at the murder of white people in their holiday caravan by blacks who've turned to the Xhosa ruler of the spirits because the white man's Christ hangs on his cross in a segregated church. But it's not done to be ‘horrified' and ‘deplore' the fact that the only say blacks have is the choice between working on the white man's terms or starving.—

Under his good-time image in the kind of company in which she had met him, his sullen watchfulness from an out-of-the-way seat at the bar where journalists drank and talked sport as noisily as politics, his different, insider's watchfulness drinking in the dens of blacks (where he would soon catch a particular eye and turn aside for murmured, monosyllabic privacy) there was a resentment like oil under the earth, welling constantly, flammable in him. Since he could not let it blow before editors and other hypocrites, it found another path, heating him sexually. He would be withdrawn and bitter, and tell her he couldn't tell her why—another one, perhaps, who thought her too stupid to understand. But out of this mood he would make love to her with
the mastery of means, single-mindedness and passionate manipulation of human responses he could not muster in another, his chosen field of endeavour. This one didn't make love like a boy. He might not confide, but he knew how to make bodies speak. People who saw Hillela at that time might recall the nerve-alive brightness of a young face, where he took her among people and dumped her for others to talk to; at each stage in life a face in repose, neglectful of composure, sets in the current dominant experience of the individual whose face it is—her expression was, in fact, amazement. She was aware, all the time, of the orchestration of her body conducted by him. The art director whose pink shoes had annoyed her lover complimented her kindly: You look well-fucked, darling. And she laughed and at the same time burned with embarrassment—for Olga, for Pauline; and for Joe.

She was, perhaps, happy; she would not remember. The happiness may have been partly to do with something she was not conscious of: working in an advertising agency, living with this man, she achieved a balance. A balance between leaving them all, the advantages they had offered—released by putting them in a position where they had to put her out—and rejoining
without them
what each had offered: Olga, after all, would approve of an artistic career in the fashionable advertising industry; the lover was someone she could have taken home to Pauline's house. Not that the girl did; not that she wanted to. But this life, even though it was lived in an out-house like that Alpheus occupied, was not the dropout's ramshackle of sleazy clubs and fairground jobs they believed she had left them for.

It might have been a kindness to let them know where she was and what she was doing: A single letter was found some years later among Len's ‘effects'—two bottles of vodka, a pot of peanut butter and several copies of
The S.A. Commercial Traveller
in which he appeared, as a young man, in a group photograph—when he died in a home for the chronically sick in what had since become
Zimbabwe.
Dear Len, You probably know I'm working now, I've got a fun job in advertising?! I hope to make a career. It's great to be independent and I'm lucky not to be alone. I have a wonderful boyfriend, quite a bit older, he's about thirty and a writer. Nothing to do with advertising—he doesn't approve of that! We may leave the country; he is half Canadian, with
—
he says
—
some Red Indian blood from way back. But we won't go to Canada, thank goodness, I don't like the idea of cold countries. And he's never lived there. Maybe we'll pass your way. I know you're in the North now, and it's soon going to be a separate country from Rhodesia, they say. But maybe you'll come back down to Salisbury?

I don't know whether or not to say I'm sorry about Billie, but I am. I'll send this, with love, to the old address, in the hope someone will post it on
.

Five majuscular X kisses and the signature:
Hillela

It was not quite true that she was independent at that time: she still collected her stipend supplied by what her lover called her ‘rich aunt', putting that aunt at a further remove by the loss of a name. It was justified, though an eighteen-year-old's boastfulness, to make some claim for him as a writer. The yard cottage was padded with cuttings. The suitcases under the bed were so heavy with manuscript notes they could not be shifted by Hillela when she wanted to clean the floor—an immense physical gratitude moved her, she was quite housewifely, doing for him all the things—washing shirts, sewing on buttons—Olga's males had done for them by servants, and Pauline's males (in the case of loose buttons and holes in socks) were expected to do for themselves.

He talked about ‘his book' as a companion and a leg-iron by which he had been shackled a long time, dragging it around the world with him. It depended before whom its existence was confirmed or denied; sometimes he said five years' work was already virtually completed, at others he said dismissingly he was going to scrap all that, events had overtaken him (in Marxist company, the version was History had done this), corrected perspective, and at other times he would lug out a suitcase and spend a whole night
rewriting a sheaf of its contents, while she slept. Next morning the result would be pitched into the suitcase along with older papers flattened under their own weight. He never discussed ‘his book' with her and she did not expect him to, assuming its political nature gave it the status of classified: after an enjoyable day in the white-wine camaraderie where a shampoo was being transformed by lyrical images into an elixir of youth, or smoking a particular brand of cigarette was in the process of becoming a ritual of success and distinction, she came home to someone who was almost certainly doing the kind of things most admired and seldom successfully aspired to, in the Pauline home. There, they would have regarded ‘his book' as something more important than himself, than his girl, than the lovers together; for her, it was present as someone he had known before her, before she was even grown up, with claims she must walk round on the quiet rubber soles of respect.

Of course—correcting perspective—hadn't she always lived in the eye of the storm? That eye that meteorologists say is safe, a ball of security rolled up in fury, that eye that was whiteness. Pauline, given away by wild-blown hair, put her head out into the cyclone briefly. Others went out and did not come back. But fixedly, the white eye was on itself; Mandela came up from Underground that year with the gales of August that sandpapered the city with mine dust, while white children were waiting for the segregated swimming pools to be opened on September 1st. He went on trial in October for inciting the strike of the previous year and for leaving the country illegally; by then Olga was already planning ahead for December holidays at Plettenberg Bay, phoning friends who, like her, had houses there, to make sure there would be enough young company to keep her sons amused. Fire-bombs continued to explode, according to the news. There had been that ghastly murder of whites in their caravan at Bashee Bridge; but the numerous well-organized caravan camps throughout the official recreation areas of the country were whites-only and perfectly
safe. As for the murders of headmen in the Transkei who collaborated with government officials—who knew a headman? All that was ignored as tribal unrest among black peasants. It was satisfactorily reassuring that the last communist front organization, the Congress of Democrats, had been banned in September. And the Sabotage Act was passed, defined widely to include strikes as acts of sabotage—restoring confidence to industrialists while Pauline and Carole had eggs thrown at them from a city balcony when taking part in the last public protest march before the Act put an end to such demonstrations for the duration—of what? The regime was then already in its fifteenth year.