A Sport of Nature (23 page)

A man among passersby noticed her in that moment; she did not distinguish him. But he had come into her orbit as others had done and were to do. A few days later Christa took her along to a friend's flat. A free meal was never to be by-passed; on the way, she scarcely bothered to listen to Christa: —German fellow, I think he used to be in import and export, now he's going to represent a trade union foundation that's helping to organize in industry here. He got friendly with Mapetla and that crowd from home. That's how I know him, and now he's after me all the time,
you know how persistent Germans are, wants me to teach him how to organize among blacks! He's a very generous fellow. He keeps giving me books, newspaper cuttings, I don't know what else. You'll see what a lunch we'll have … he's got a cook and everything.—

He wasn't one of the beach people. Hillela had never before seen their host, with his deep T-shaped transverse and vertical clefts where the razor could not reach properly in the stubby chin, the red underlip with dark patches like tea-leaves he had forgotten to wipe away, and imprisoned behind thick glasses in that botched face, magnified grey eyes with ferny lashes. They changed at once when he saw her. For him there was no need of introduction. —You can stand like a flamingo on one leg. With your bright pink skirt.—

—Udi, what on earth are you talking about—this is Hillela, you don't mind me bringing her along—

—I am de-lighted … also, you are very welcome to bring along anyone of your friends … any time. I am glad her shoes are mended. But I wish she would be wearing her lovely pink skirt.— He held in his diaphragm with an almost military courtesy as he showed them into his livingroom.

—I couldn't. It's Christa's. Don't you notice, she's got it on?—

—So? Oh you're right… she has … So … But two legs, that's not the same thing,
that's a bird of a different feather …
how could I be expected …—

There was fish cooked in green coconut milk, then the cook brought in a dessert called
Zitronencréme
he had been taught to make. Alsatian wine revived trade union anecdotes in Christa and set flowing one of those instant friendships of tipsy laughter. —Isn't she wonderful, our Christa, with her funny oohs and aahs and her thick Boer accent?— —Hillela, do you hear that! From zat Cherman!— Even the mock insults were pleasing and approving. —Well, I've just heard him speaking Swahili to the
cook, and I don't hear you saying anything but
jambo, jambo
after how long? You've been here a year?—

—And you?— The man's attention raced flatteringly between the woman and the girl. —How long are you going to go on saying only
jambo?
—

—Oh well, Hillela's right about me … but she doesn't need any Swahili, she's on her way to Canada.—

The atmosphere was not one in which kindly lies were necessary.—No, I'm not. Christa, you know I'm not.— The man smiled sadly at the charming head shaking curls in a disclaimer. —Good. You stay here. This's a nice place. Hot, dull, poor, nice. Isn't it, Christa. Let's keep her here.—

—Then will you give her somewhere to stay? You've got this big flat… how many rooms …— Christa tucked her head back to her shoulder, a child looking up round a palace. —All this to yourself. She's sleeping under a kitchen table. I'm telling you! And there are cockroaches—oooe, I hate those filthy things—

The other two laughed at her expression of horror, she laughed at herself; she who had survived interrogations and prison cells.

—That is your Room 101, Christa. Now we know.— But neither of the women caught the reference to Orwell.

Finishing the wine extended lunch. Hillela was not seen on Tamarisk that afternoon; they went off for a drive in his car, Christa still entertaining them, he solicitous and even momentarily authoritarian: —Fasten that strap across you, please. Now, this is how it opens—you try it once or twice, please—Hillela had not worn a seat-belt before. They were not compulsory back where she came from. —I feel like a kid in a pram.—

—All right. I'll adopt you.— It was said dryly, inattentively; he was turning out of his parking space into the street. Bicycles shot zigzag past and he called after them in Swahili, black-robed women congealed together out of the way. His lips pursed thickly
on that chin, the chin pressed on the shirt-collar; he had about him the stubborn weariness of one who lives as a spectator.

Udi Stück demanded nothing. Christa came home—she had a job as a part-time receptionist to an Indian doctor as well as her title as some kind of welfare officer at Congress headquarters—not sure whether or not to be pleased with herself. —I was only fooling, that day … But I bumped into Udi this morning, and you'll never guess, he's taken me seriously—he says he'll give you a place to stay in the meantime. I was only fooling … I feel a bit bad … as if I pushed him to it, taking advantage because he's so generous.—

Hillela used the schoolgirl phrase. —Is he keen on you?—

Christa's burst of laughter that shook her like a cough: —Me? Oooe, I hope not! No-oo-o. That's why I like him, poor old Udi, he's not like the others who think once you're on your own here, got nobody, no family … you can't get away from them. That Dr Khan—I don't know how much longer I'll be able to keep on that job. He's always coming in and making some excuse to lean over to see what I'm doing. He presses his soft tummy against me. Oh it's no fun being a woman. Sometimes.— She wriggled her shoulders in one of her exaggerated exhibitions of revulsion. —I can't get over Udi taking me seriously … Oh I think he feels guilty, us with nothing, living all over the place, and he didn't even have to leave Germany because of Hitler, he's not a Jew. He's got that lovely flat—didn't you like the way the sittingroom has open brick-work at the top of the wall so's the air comes in? And at night, there's always a breeze from the bay, he's so high up, it must be cool to sleep there. I only feel bad because of his wife—apparently his wife died last year and he sort of doesn't want to have people around, he wants his privacy. But you must jump at it! You'll have a room to yourself. Fish in coconut milk. That whatsis-zitron pudding—oh my god, I could eat that every day—She hugged the girl while they laughed.

—But don't
you
want to take the room, then?—

—No, no-ooe, I'm okay here with the Manakas, I couldn't leave Sophie and Njabulo. They'd be terribly hurt.— Christa, the real refugee, one who knew prison just as did the black refugee couple with whom she and her protégée were staying.

It would surely be a relief to the Manakas not to have their tiny kitchen doubling as a bedroom any longer, but Sophie kissed the girl she had given shelter and was gracious as any Olga with a private bathroom and a rose to offer. —A-ny time. Bring your blankets and come back to us a-ny time. We always find a place for you. We must help each other in these strange countries. It is terrible, terrible to be far from home. But we must stick together, fight together, and we are going back!—

So it was not for long that Hillela as a young girl slept on the beach or a kitchen floor and lived on over-ripe fruit and Sophie Manaka's mealie-meal with cabbage.
Trust her
. That was the observation that went around on Tamarisk Beach. She was still seen there most afternoons, in the yellow swimsuit. She was part of the company that lay like a fisherman's catch spread out on the sand, holding post-mortems on political strategies used back home, exchanging political rumours and sometimes roused, as a displacement of the self each had accustomed to living like this, by the arrival of a new member for their ranks, standing there urgently vertical to their horizontals, dazed, the tension of escape seeming to throb in the throat like the life pulsating in some sea creature taken from its element and peddled round the beach before them in the sun. Arnold of the Command or one of his designates usually accompanied such people; a bodyguard not against any physical dangers but to ensure that the relief of being ‘out' and bringing firsthand news from home would not result in loose talk. A Beach Rat was sure to be grooming its whiskers in every group. It must be assumed that everything that was said on Tamarisk became what is known in the vocabulary of police
files and interrogation rooms as intelligence, and would result back home in more arrests; more valuable people forced out to approach slowly, over the sand, to join the company.

Arnold would walk up the beach with newcomers; they sat apart, and the flash of his rimless glasses was enough to keep away anyone who might think of joining them. Their absorption was intense as can be only in those in whom singleness of purpose has taken hold of every faculty of intellect and feeling, so that even if that purpose is to be frustrated for a lifetime in prison, or to be exercised far removed from the people and places where its realization begins to take place, all other purposes in life are set aside, perhaps for ever, because each in some way contradicts the single one. Arnold was a lawyer—like Joe—who would never practise law again; the law in his country enforced the very social order his purpose was to end. He had a wife—like Pauline?—with whom he would never set up home again in the house where only white people could live. His children would grow up here and there—like Hillela herself—without his knowing them; there could be no family life for whites, with blacks, at best, illegally given a place in their converted garages. Christa's brother with his farm on land from which blacks had been removed could not be her brother while Sophie and Njabulo were her family. Mothering girls without a decent pair of jeans to their names, she could not have married the Afrikaner doctor in Brits who was in love with her, and mothered children he would take to the segregated Dutch Reformed Church every Sunday.

Arnold, rising from a conclave, paused on the beach as a bee holds, in mid-air. At the signal of the flower-yellow swimsuit, he waded into the water. There was no surf. A transparent grass-green was a huge lens placed from shore to reef over sand like ground crystal. He kept his own glasses on when he swam; the image of the girl's body under water swayed and shone, broke and reformed. His hairy toes struck him as ugly as crabs. He and she
began to swim around each other. He had a soft way of speaking, conspiratorial rather than sexually modulated. —So you've got yourself nicely fixed up.—

—Oh … ? Yes. Somewhere to stay.—

—Clever girl. Lucky Udi.—

—I was fine with Sophie and Njabulo but it was hard on them.—

—Left the beach—high and dry.—

She pinched her nose between thumb and forefinger and submerged herself, like a child at a swimming pool. When she came up, smiling, he was still talking.‘

—You'd better watch out, with him.—

—He's a good friend of Christa's, really nice. I've got a room as big as Sophie's whole flat! You can see the town and the bay.—

—Are you sure it's to yourself?—

She turned like a porpoise, floated on her back, water beaded her flesh with light in the sun, in his sight.

—Well of course. I want Christa to come and share, but she won't leave the Manakas.—

—He won't need an invitation in his own house.—

She turned her head; not understanding, or thinking she ought to pretend not to? He took off his glasses, which she had splashed. The little beach girl was a lovely blur. He put them back again. —You'd better keep the door locked. Or maybe it hasn't got one?—

—Arnold … he's an old man … old as my uncle …— It was in character with the footlooseness of this pretty girl, the ruptured kinships and displaced, marginal emotions of exile that, to his ears, made a slip of the tongue where the usual comparison would have been with a father.

—You don't know old men. The older we get, the younger we like 'em.—

—Well how would you know, you're not old.—

—Thank you for those kind words, obvious as they are. Isn't there anything you know without experiencing it for yourself?—

Both floated on their backs now, and it was not only the water-jewelled breasts, down to where the yellow swimsuit just covered stiff nipples, that surfaced, but also the thick index finger and fist of his penis and testicles under their pouch of wet blue nylon. They saw what there was to be seen of each other, while feeling identical delicious coolness and heat—the water on submerged and the sun on exposed flesh.

—Didn't you hear what I asked?—

—I thought you were telling me something.— A figure of such authority on Tamarisk; she had seen how the appearance of a line above the bridge of his nose made a voice stop short in mid-sentence, and how, when he was asked the kind of question that was not to be asked in such circles, his evasion of an answer came from complete intelligence of all that happened, was thought, discussed, investigated and decided there. What could he be interested in that she could tell him? The odd hours they had spent together (he worked very hard, even on Tamarisk he had time to take pleasure only when he left the last sandy foothold of the continent and entered the neutrality of the non-human element, the water) those times—caresses, the universal intelligence of pleasurable sensations, a rill from it present in wet coolness and heat, now—were the exchange with him in which she could take part. —I don't know. Let me think.— Her eyes were closed against the sun; her smiling lips moved, he saw her so seriously young that she spelled out thoughts to herself the way children learning to read silently mouth words. The giant of desire woke in him to kiss her while she saw nothing but the red awning of her eyelids, and he slew him with the sling of priorities. Sexual pleasure was everyone's right; dalliance when he had simply taken a breather from the discussion on shore was not something he himself or those who could watch from Tamarisk should tolerate.