A Sport of Nature (37 page)

Sela was right, Mrs Kgomani had gained an equilibrium that discarded girlish fantasies. She was also discovered to have an ability to talk to women's worker-groups, herself through a translator. She crossed borders to the North, was useful in still colder places, Stockholm, Oslo, Moscow—everywhere that Whaila had gone, on journeys for which she now needed no proxy. Most of these were taken with Citagele Koza, head of mission, who had been Whaila's close friend, but several times she was deputed to accompany Arnold, who came back and forth between Africa and Europe. She kept notes for him. Perhaps he had asked specifically to have her assistance; the decision would have to be Citagele's. Alone together in dusty hotels like the museums of the Europe before the war and revolutions, afternoons in the colonial house rapped out in memory by a press agency's telex were never resumed. Arnold grieved for the loss of the beach girl. In her place was a young woman who had experienced tragedy and who did not have the same appeal for him. She was no longer a distraction to catch the eye. She was part of the preoccupation she once had disrupted so naturally. They were concentrated together in a struggle within the struggle, bargaining or begging (there was only the collateral of an uncertain future to offer) for arms and money. He did not need to take her in hand, although he had the opportunity to do so, now. The education Whaila had begun, she completed alone. She taught herself not the old theories of ends, but the diplomacy and technicalities of means, that were immediate. She mastered specifications of guns and missiles and their relative suitability for the conditions under which they would have to be used. The men who had crossed the Zambezi again before Whaila was killed in his ambush had lasted out three months in the bush, lugging these weapons towards home, towards the army, the police, power lines and government buildings—Soft targets. No. Not yet. But the other side, they were not waiting,
they had no distinction between steel-and-concrete and human bodies. Whaila's warm black flesh dissolved red.

She toured factories where women with kerchiefs on their heads made parts for guns as neat as the components the street watchmaker put together in perfect functional harmony. On flights between one city and the next, liquid shudders in glasses and, watching it, thoughts surface. —If Whaila had had a gun he might have got them before they got him. We should all be armed with Parabellums.—

Arnold has told people, over the years: —If things had turned out differently, she was the type to have become a terrorist, a hijacker. A Leila Khaled. She had it in her, at one time. I don't think we'd have been able to contain her. It wasn't that she was undisciplined; no discipline was demanding enough for her—you know the sort of thing.— When he himself spoke out of his drowsiness in a plane, he asked a question. —What happened to the yellow swimsuit?— She did not seem to find the reference odd or suggestive. —In this climate?—

Other men had no beach girl to regret, of course. A man she was known to be associated with, eventually, had—like everybody else in that city—experienced tragedy and survived grief. Among such people she was not changed; they knew no other state of being. She was sent to a meeting for cultural solidarity of the Eastern bloc with the Third World, one day—contacts at all levels had to be kept up—and the chairman had a big, Balkan head with thick, grey-black hair rising from a peak like a dart set in a broad low forehead, a short, humorously-obstinate nose, and a brush moustache to show off well-worn lips and teeth. The details remain because the head was all that was visible of him above the rostrum; the head of handsome maturity to which years cannot be accurately attributed. When the meeting was over she saw that he was heavy and had the sideways gait of ageing. She went up dutifully to present her credentials and he asked
her to stay on and allow his committee to take the opportunity to discuss African literature in English with her over a glass of wine. She knew much less about the subject than he, but when his committee members had all left and he and she were still talking, he took her to dinner at a restaurant she would not have known still existed in that city. They crossed the river and walked a long way in the cold. His left leg swayed him and he was short of breath, never stopped talking. Until then, all the city had run together for her in the overlapping stone statements, destruction, reconstruction, of its past; such density impenetrable, not only by reason of the ignorance of the historical significance of architecture in which the advantage of a colonial education had left her, but because she was accustomed to a thin layer of human settlement in countries where cities are a recent form of social focus. Underneath the skyscrapers of Johannesburg were only the buried gin-bottles of a mining camp where her great-grandfather Hillel had hawked second-hand clothing to blacks who came in their blankets to earn hut-tax. And she was not even aware that he had had this role in history. Under Britannia Court were the migratory trails by which Whaila's and the namesake's ancestors had explored their continent, begetting living monuments in their descendants rather than marking their generations in stone. The European read off to her as they walked the history of his city that he knew by heart, in marble stumps of Roman ruins, the iron rings embedded in medieval walls, the church with the bombed tower, the scaffolding round the restoration of a 17th-century palace, the piles stroked by the flow of water where a bridge was blown up, the withering forbidden wreaths placed at an empty lot where victims of the last uprising were shot down.

—They'll never build anything on that spot. They know if we can't have a monument there, there must be nothing else.— A rough bronchial laugh. —So they just let the weeds grow. It's a way of dealing with realities you can't handle: neglect. Not such
a bad way. It works with other things, too.— He pointed at a red star which hung crookedly from the pinnacle of a public building and was lit up only on three neon points.

—You were mixed up in it? That uprising? Nobody else mentions it.—

—No. Because it's not, how do you say, my dear, healthy … if you were in it, it's better to keep quiet. And if you were not, well, some people have a reason to be ashamed because of that. It did bring some benefits, you see. Apparent lost causes always do … Mixed up! Yes, I was in prison for thirteen months. But I have friends … The President and I were at the
gymnasium
together—young boys, we joined the youth group of the Party while it was still an Underground movement… One night, they come for me, in my cell. (It wasn't so bad, that time, I was allowed books, I worked on my translations of Neruda.) I thought, they've changed their minds, they're going to shoot me. I'm on the journey to the river, where they threw the others. But they push me into a car and the next thing, I'm in the State chambers. He's there in his windowless study—it's like the last of the Chinese boxes, nothing can get at him once he's inside there. A big fire burning, and a chair with a glass of brandy beside it. For me. He reads me a lecture, and then he comes over and gives me a push in the chest, like this, the way we used to start to wrestle when we were boys. Then he said to me, he pleaded with me, ‘You know I can't do what you people asked.
You
know that. “Freedom”—we used that kind of talk when we were waving banners at sixteen. We give them our coal at their price, and they close their eyes to our trade union independence. We never criticise them in our newspapers, and they ignore the books we publish here by writers they ban. That's freedom. We didn't know it would be like that, when we were young. But
you
, Karel,
you
know, now.' So they let me out. Again. Each time I've been rescued by someone different; the Russians let me out when the Germans imprisoned me as a communist, our first communist
government let me out after the Russians imprisoned me as a nationalist. Oh, and our fascists had to let me out, of course, when the war came, and I was sent to the army.—

He took her gloveless hand and tucked it under his arm between the thicknesses of his enormous coat, laughing. How old could he be? Old enough to be her father, her grandfather, in terms of the wars, invasions, military occupations, uprisings, imprisonments he had lived. The restaurant was warm, warm. A conservatory. It had palms under its glass dome and the waiters were crook-backed and wispy-haired. So was the violinist who played from table to table. Her host ordered little packets made of stuffed vegetable leaves, fish soup, a duck dish and a veal dish, and ‘a wine that isn't exactly champagne, but it will make you happy tomorrow'. He touched his big head; no headache. He tasted from her plate and encouraged her to taste from his. The wan violinist, bent in one curve with his instrument, came over and played passionately to her, and her new friend was delighted to see that she was not embarrassed, as so many women would think it necessary to be, but listened as if receiving what was her due as a rather beautiful young woman—whether it was the cold they had tramped through, or some private mood, she gave the impression of a coursing of new blood through the vessels of her being, a brilliance of colouring and brightness of gaze, a flow of words. —I've been rescued, too. A few times. A bullet went into a door instead of me. But nothing like you … More like a beetle that's flicked out of a swimming pool. I used to lie on my stomach and do that, as a kid. There'd be rose beetles that had fallen into my aunt's pool, and I'd flip out one, and let the others drown. Why that one?—

—Someone may just be passing by—that's the only chance. Two boys teased the girls together in the school yard; then he happened to be President, and I was in jail. So I got flicked out. What are you looking round for? Is there a man you don't want to see you with another man? But look at my grey hair.—

—No … Is it all right to talk about anything, here?—

He laughed. —Oh I know what's worrying you, there have been times when we couldn't talk, either … but it's all right—everybody talks, everybody says what they think, it doesn't change anything, now …—

—What do you believe?—

—Ah, that's the kind of talk my friend the President says we used to have at sixteen! But you're not much more than that yourself—no, no, I'm insulting you when I think I'm paying you a compliment. You are a woman. Nothing less.— He had asked about a husband, children, and she had told him, walking across the bridge.

—You were against the old regime, you were a socialist when you were young.—

He signalled with a full mouth; he enjoyed his food. —Like everyone. Like you, yes?—

—No. No. I didn't know what it meant. Everybody told me, explained—but I was white, you see.—

—What has that to do with it? There are white, black and yellow socialists, millions of them …—

—White made it impossible to understand. For me, anyway. Everybody talked and argued, and I thought about other things. And whenever I heard them again, they were still talking and arguing, living the same way in the same place. Liberalism, socialism, communism.—

—What other things? I don't know what life must be like, down there.—

She sat back against her chair, smiling for herself; the movement drew him to lean towards her across the table in the familiar invitation and approach between a woman and a man.

—Someone to love. A man. Somewhere to go.—

—Where there would be—what?—

—What the others didn't know about.—

—And did you know what that was?—

—No. But I knew it wasn't to be found in their talk, they would never find it. Oh it sounds such rubbish—but I've never tried to tell anyone before. Oh and now I'm getting like them, all the people I behaved so badly to, I'm talking, talking.—

—You weren't asking me about God, were you? For god's sake, my dear! Here religion has been allowed again to offer its soporific until you wake up in the next world, as even we can't seem to get this one right. But I stick to my cigarettes and wine.—

—Not that. Can I ask you something—you were in that uprising, and this is a communist regime; does that mean you're no longer a communist? If that's so, how could you be running that meeting this afternoon? For the Ministry of Culture?—

He put up a large, long-fingered hand with a thin seal-ring on the third finger. He made to comb down the moustache but stopped himself fastidiously as if a gesture might trivialise seriousness or honesty. —It's right that you should ask me. Don't be afraid. If we are going to be friends, in your position you must know about me, my dear.—

—My position?—

—Your somewhere to go is right at the centre of this century. In my country you've come to ask for backing from the regime, and you've got to get that backing. That must be your one and only objective. You must be careful not to give any impression that you have fraternising connections with dissatisfied, critical elements in our population.—

—So you're no longer a communist.—

—I have been a Marxist since I was sixteen and I'll die one. That's what I've spent years of my life in prison for, whether it was the fascists or capitalists who put me there, or whether it was the comrades who called me a revisionist. I don't want this to come back.— He made a conductor's gesture, taking in the palms, the chipped gilding, the weary servility of the old waiters.
—I don't want my grandfather's estate with its illiterate peasants dying of tuberculosis. People like me are run down, I can't afford to buy foreign books anymore, I have to burn them—excuse me, I learnt that from the British, during the war—through boring myself stiff in cultural organizations, I can travel to Rome to see my beloved Piranesi wall only by getting myself invited to conferences—(short of breath or caught by laughter)—bourgeois hardships! But life is better for people who were wretchedly poor before. I wanted that. I still want it. That's freedom, too. You see, it's turned out that freedom is divisible. My schoolfriend is right. And I still prefer the way it's divided here to the way it's divided in the great riches of the West.—