A Sport of Nature (27 page)

Leopard skins mounted on scalloped green felt, dead snakes converted into briefcases, elephants turned into ivory filigree carvings, bracelets, necklaces and paper knives, and table-legs with a copper rim decorating what was once a pachyderm foot—the AFRICAN ARTS ATRIUM did not sell powdered rhino horn, however; that sort of disgusting stuff was for local people in the magic and medicine trade down the road. Hillela wore—‘modelled', as Archie Harper, the old Africa hand of a special kind, who employed her, insisted—the dashikis or galabiya-inspired dresses of African cloth her employer had made up by his ‘connection' of Indian piece-workers who sat at their machines on the earth pavements all over the old town. The long dresses became bizarrely slit—some from the first vertebra to the small of the back, as well as to the thigh on both sides—during the period of her employment, because Archie found his assistant-cum-model so ‘innocently inspiring'. He was not himself attracted to women, but had the homosexual's shrewd and kindly understanding of how they like to make themselves attractive to men: this girl (a real poppet; he knew from the beginning she would go far) inside his one-of-a-kind creations was the best way to encourage customers to clear the racks.

Business was torpid (—No tourists where you can't buy contraceptives or whisky, my dear—) but this expatriate, an Englishman, couldn't leave, either. He was quickly on girlish confiding terms with his assistant: he wouldn't leave his two young Arab lovers, twin brothers they were, he'd brought them up in his own house since they were fourteen. —You will never find anything ne-early like them in England. Ne-ever. Guardsmen with smelly feet who're only after what's in your pocket, that's all. Revolting.—

He had other connections, anyway, that made it possible for him to keep the shop open more or less for fun. Among them were sources of supply for his restaurant, ARCHIE'S ATRIUM TOO, which was the only one in town where French and Italian wine was still obtainable. The connections with airline personnel, Lebanese, Greek and Arab traders kept him, a coloured balloon-figure in one of his own extra-outsize unisex dashikis, moving about from rendezvous to rendezvous all day; his assistant was most often alone in the shop.

It was there that Marie-Claude—but Hillela did not think of her as that, then, of course—Madame Mézières found her. Picked her up, as Madame Mézières explained her luck to other diplomatic wives. She came in with a visitor from Europe who wanted gifts to take home; after several years in this posting, Madame Mézières was herself not interested in tourist kitsch, but the young girl assistant looked so charming in a cotton robe that she actually did buy one for herself, for wear around the pool—impossible to go to the beach now that it was full of all sorts of strange people. The girl said the thigh-slit certainly could be reduced as Madame Mézières wished, by five inches; the visitor could not speak English and the girl equally accommodatingly (even bravely) spoke to her in ill-pronounced schoolgirl French. When Madame Mézières came back a week later to fetch her altered robe, she invited the girl to have a swim at the Embassy, where she met the children, but not the Ambassador.

However Olga might be regarding her niece, of whose whereabouts sitting on a camel-saddle transformed into a chair Olga had no knowledge at that time; whether she might have felt occasional anguish at what had not been done for her sister's daughter, or regretted the waste of all that had been done for her, it is clear that the advantage of having been sent at Olga's expense to a school where she had learnt the elements of a foreign language was the deciding factor in her becoming part of an embassy
household. There were very few customers at the shop. When she had occupied herself for an hour a day with disentangling the silver-wire jewellery webbed together by the hands of those who picked over but didn't buy, Hillela sat on the camel-saddle chair in the chrysalis of her long slit dress as if she would have to be carried from there by force. She had been twice called to the Immigration Offices and warned that she would be deported if she did not leave of her own accord, or produce refugee status supplied by an accredited organization. Udi's few words in the right quarter apparently had reached the limit of audibility; they did not carry far enough. Arnold, no doubt, she would not have scrupled to ask to intercede for her. Perhaps she had asked, and been refused because Arnold could not put the integrity of the cause at risk for any personal reason whatever; or, more likely, she was—clever enough?—to understand this and did not approach him, in the sense of seeking some advantage, although there is reason to believe—Udi had reason—she still spent Arnold's rare leisure hour somewhere with him from time to time.

So the move from the care of an Udi willing but unable to advance her status, via the camel-saddle chair in Archie Harper's shop to an embassy, with the Ambassador arranging residence papers for her to answer his wife's convenience, was rescue. Arnold, with her for what he had a feeling would be the last time, saw it differently, even distantly admiring: —And now you've got yourself really nicely fixed up.— She was vague about what her capacity was to be in the ambassadorial household but certain of one thing. —I'm not going to be deported.—

Malice has it that she was once a nanny; but she was much more than that.

Here, once more, there were flowers in her bedroom and silver on the dining-table. Pauline would have smiled confirming this ‘refugee' hardship, and Olga would have been relieved. Madame Mézières' lucky find helped the children with their homework
(they were disadvantaged at an English-medium school), supervised their safety while they played in the pool, shopped for their bothersome childish needs; it seemed that through the contacts of her friend and former employer she could get commodities the ambassadorial staff no longer had the trouble of ordering from Europe. She blow-dried Madame Mézières' hair so creditably that it looked better than it ever had while Madame Mézières had suffered the heat and din of piped music in Salon Roma under the hands of an Italian from Somalia. She ran errands on foot, not fussy about where she went in this filthy town, and proved much more compatible as a driver than the Embassy's black chauffeur. —Emile, he smokes kif, or whatever they call it here, I don't know; I smell it on him.—

The Ambassador did not exert himself to deny any of Marie-Claude's obsessive fantasies directly. —One smells drink on people's breath, not drugs. You've got Hillela to drive you.— Marie-Claude could not pass on to her lucky find the oppressive responsibility that was compounded with the oppressive heat, in this posting: every afternoon, she had to sit over her children while they whiningly completed a daily quota of schoolwork from the syllabus and in the language of their home country. Here, however, positions were reversed for an hour; instead of receiving services from the girl, she did her a service. Hillela sat in on the lessons and improved her knowledge of the language along with the children. Now, because she joined in with them, the children tackled the task as if it were another of the games they played with her. —She's my big sister.— —Idiot, I'm your sister. She didn't come out of maman.— —Then she's our cousin, like Albert and Hélène at home.—

It was a relationship in which Hillela had had plenty of experience, to explain her success.

Not only a find; she was a blessing. —Look at me, Emile, I'm myself again. I don't have a headache all the time, that twitch in
my eyelid was driving me crazy—it's gone. Don't I look like your Marie-Claude again?—

Eating a mango, licking her fingers, the girl was the amiable witness of private bonds recalled between the couple. With his usual indirection, the Ambassador addressed himself to the cause rather than gave the opinion of the result that was expected of him. He was slitting the wrappers on European newspapers with a fruit-knife. —Hillela has changed the life of this house.—

It was in that first ambassadorial residence, behind gates where black guards strait-jacketed in gabardine and braid slouched on homemade stools, and sometimes a visiting wife and children squatted humbly behind the hibiscus, that she must have picked up, just as Marie-Claude had picked her up, much that has made her assurance so provocatively perfect. Olga, looking through a magnifying glass years later at a newspaper cutting in which she is told she will be able to identify the hostess sitting between Yasir Arafat and the President of a European country, cannot take more than half the credit for having sat down that hostess, as a child, at a dinner table the way a dinner table should look. The duty of helping Marie-Claude arrange official dinners would have been what instructed Hillela so usefully in protocol, and her own usefulness as a personable dinner-table partner to fill a place beside a bachelor, or someone whose wife was not present, was what has given her the range of safe subjects and the permissible limits of response, the appropriate lies, level of voice and laughter between guests at official gatherings. In true tradition, her youth and bountiful bodily confidence, not modesty, made the run-up Archie Harper cottons pass among the formal clothes white diplomatic wives equipped themselves with in Europe. They had the jewellery they wore as the badge of an occasion, as men wear decorations; but she was unadorned by the nervous tensions that redrew their faces like tribal markings. Hers was the real, not the fairy story of Cinderella and the sisters.

With the corporate female sense of protection, Marie-Claude imperceptibly intervened when she saw among her guests men reading the wrong signal in the shining cheeks and market cottons. —Don't worry, you won't sit next to Frédéric again. And Henning Knudsen, too! I was watching … And he's got a daughter your age.—

Hillela laughed. —He told me he could arrange for me to finish my studies in Denmark.—

—What studies?—

—I don't know. Don't you think he meant it?—

—I know what he meant. When we first arrived here, and Emile was recalled for a few weeks, he kept coming in to see if I was all right. Then I realized … what he meant, by looking after me …— And Marie-Claude herself gave the sexual beckon of the patchy blush she seemed able to summon at will from the warmth of her breasts in low-necked dresses, deepening the Old Masters' pearl-pink of her skin against her Flemish gold hair.

—But you're so pretty, Madame Mezieres!—

—Pretty! Is it our fault? We women. Can we help it?—

—You put a lot of work and money into it,
mijn skatteke
.— The Ambassador liked to tease his wife, and never simply; she did not like being reminded, even by an endearment, that she was a Fleming and not French-speaking by birth.

In the confidence that grew between her and her find, the secret mother tongue became a relaxation and a bond. Hillela could understand her when, alone together lying at the pool, no-one about to hear, she took up Flemish like a homely garment; Hillela could even answer, in a fashion, through her knowledge of Afrikaans. It was not possible to go on being addressed as Madame Mézières; as if she were old. When they were lying there, two young women in bikinis! (She had at once replaced the yellow knit rag with something from her own wardrobe.) And talking about Emile—how they had met, variously-edited
versions of decisions they had made together about his career, etc., the Ambassador quite naturally became referred to and addressed as ‘Emile' by the girl, as well.

Hillela's old benefactor, Udi, would have agreed with Arnold on one point, at least: a prediction that she would never look back. Udi probably meant it in both senses. She was nicely fixed up, for a penniless, deserted girl whose refugee status no-one would vouch for. From the kitchen floor through a guest bedroom to an ambassadorial residence; no need to return, ever, with her blankets to the hospitality of the Manaka flat. When she met Christa and Sophie as she came out of the bank one morning (Emile insisted that her salary be paid into a bank account, not left lying about as a temptation to the black staff in the Residence) she had not seen them for months. Being Hillela, she made no apologies or excuses; but she clung to them and kissed them in a different way from the bird-necked dart from cheek to cheek, grazing contact, she had learnt to exchange with the ambassadorial family. Christa looked after her affectionately: Poor Hillela! Sophie's cheeks concertinaed up against her eyes: —Are you mad? Oh I'm glad she's so okay in this bad place.— Archie Harper was encountered at British diplomatic cocktail parties that included local personalities from the old regime. He would put his arm round her and squeeze her to his enormous globe of a body; but nobody could interpret this as predatory on his behalf or a sign of availability on hers. Only after she had gone were there stories that although she dropped her political refugee friends once she'd installed herself at the Embassy, she still used to spend afternoons at Archie's house, when he would dress up in women's clothes, some elephantine duchess or brothel madam (that was how people could imagine it), and they'd dance with his Arab boys and drink black market champagne. The stories originated with Mohammed, who knew the boys, and had made her bed; the details were visualized by gossip among white people. While she was still in that country, a
letter came from Canada to the hotel where her lover had left her. The proprietress propped it up, visible, in the bar for a few days, then threw it away. The girl's other lover (his rivals and political enemies among the gathering on Tamarisk said) was seen entering the garden of an old house where the ambassadorial car that the girl was allowed to drive was parked, even after it was well known she had become the Ambassador's mistress.

Those who have choices have morals, he says, after love-making, smelling home in the flesh, the rank sweetness of polished floors and gardener-tended roses, the leather-scent of three-car family garages beside backyard rooms with their clandestine fug of beer and cold pap. The smell of all things lost and repugnant, that is home, and that must be destroyed. It prompts him to talk of acts people are having to go through with, back there—the bombs and grenades whose targets are monolithic but whose shrapnel may pierce, three centuries of murderers cry, an innocent white. Who is innocent, after more than three centuries, among more than twelve generations of people who have paid for labour with a bag of mealies a month, beaten, imprisoned, banished, starved and killed? Those who can choose a candidate for a parliament
—
they can have their morals. The others have no choice but to meet, after three centuries, violence done to them with a violence of their own
.