A Sport of Nature (40 page)

There was not much American popular interest in Africa in the late Sixties. Preoccupation with the war in Vietnam, the neo-Gothic thrills of Weathermen terrorism and even with the great black civil rights pilgrimages to Washington did not distract Ma Leonie; she took up Africa long before the students and black Americans did, and maybe without her it would have taken even longer for America to do so. Her government did not recognize the liberation movements for whose exiles she obtained entry visas and totally unorthodox admission to her own and other universities. Those who were academically qualified had teaching niches made for them; others were given scholarships she could expect on demand from a roster of sources her secretary did not even have to call up on the computer—Dr Adlestrop had them all, under the first names of their directors, at hand in her head.

A beach girl would have been too marginal to have met Dr Adlestrop in Dar es Salaam. But Dr Adlestrop—Leonie, she asked at once that you call her Leonie—passing through Accra to add the officers of Ghana's new National Liberation Council to her rotary card file, of course had called Whaila, and met his new wife. Leonie and Whaila made the easy elliptical exchanges of old acquaintances. She had just seen Julius in Dar, spent an hour at the airport with K.K. when he arrived from a state visit to Yugoslavia, unfortunately missed Oliver—and, landing in Accra, was quite overcome with grief to realize Kwame was no more … Whaila was anti-American as a matter of policy, since the United States government supported the South African government and gave neither overt recognition nor covert encouragement to the African National Congress. But apparently Leonie was different; Leonie was with him. She was supplying funds in a small way
through some of her numerous private organizations, opening cracks that might widen into future access. —I'm keeping at it, Whaila, I'll go on beavering away.— Like most Americans highly critical of their government, she was at the same time patriotic and anti-communist. —You know that I've never been able to stand the idea that you're going to have to be grateful to the Eastern bloc.—

He teased her; she loved it. —But look at all those Marxists you smuggle into the USA.—

—He's a great flirt, your man. We're always like this together.— She bridled happily to the new wife. —Don't you know, Whaila, it's because I'm really intending to have the FBI brainwash them?—

The documentation begins only with arrival in the United States. Whether Hillela remembered Dr Adlestrop and got in touch with her from London, or if it was Leonie who made the approach, is not known. Whichever it was, Hillela's instinct for calculation or Dr Adlestrop's nose for a trophy, another form of power—the power of Leonie Adlestrop's kindness—could be counted on. Without adequate papers, with a history of residence in an Eastern European country, Hillela Kgomani and child slipped in easily under the armpit of the Statue.

If she had no passport, no money, few marketable qualifications, in a country more concerned with shoring-up repressive regimes than providing so much as working space for those whose professional skills were to oppose them, she had the qualification of tragedy. There is no-one so safe, so secure, so frivolous or hard-headed as to be able to be unaware of that. Leonie knew Americans would be impressed, even intimidated by her presentation: a white widow and her fatherless black child, the black husband assassinated before the wife's eyes by a racist regime. The namesake's small black hand in her mother's white one: the shame of the slave yard, of the years of the Klan, the centuries-long march
before Washington had been reached, the bullet that lodged in the dream of Luther King—this simple sight brought it all to them. For them, Hillela came straight from the kitchen where Whaila died on the floor. It was all of her they needed to know. She began there. It was the signature of her life; what she had been, what she was, and would be.

Dr Adlestrop commandeered the frame house of a professor on sabbatical and a place in the primary school for faculty members' children. These facts are recorded in the yearly newsletter, released at Commencement, Leonie had distributed by her Department to colleagues on the campus, to alumnae, and pandemically to friends and contacts. ‘Ms Hillela Kgomani and her delightful small daughter, Nomzamo (named for Ms Nomzamo Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson Mandela), joined us early this spring semester. I had the privilege of knowing, for some years, Ms Kgomani's late husband, Whaila Kgomani, who was tragically killed in Lusaka. Ms Kgomani has been seconded to the Robert and Elsie McCray Program for African-American Social Research. REMASOR will make her available to special interest organizations—African studies, women's studies, international relations and refugee studies—throughout the state. Her personal experience in having lived close to the needs of the people in a number of African countries will be invaluable to us. She and Nomzamo are presently occupying Professor Herbert Kleinschmidt's house on College Walk, and Nomzamo has settled happily at our excellent school. We welcome mother and daughter most heartily.'

Nomo, when interviewed about her increasingly successful modelling career, sometimes varies replies to questions about her background by adding that she was, in fact, partly educated in America. Hillela stood at the double-glazed window in Professor Kleinschmidt's study and watched the little girl chase squirrels with the stooping gallop of Groucho Marx. She couldn't get the window open but she knew before she saw the parade that
the child, forgetting the squirrels and turning her face in curious amazement, had heard something pleasing. Then through the glass it came, the singing and the wavering blare of music, as it had rejoiced the birth of the one who had come out just like him—him, lying on the kitchen floor. The alumnae parade advanced from under lettuce-green of spring elm trees and the little black face kept glancing back to her mother in bliss to confirm proudly what small children feel about all phenomena passing before them for the first time—that it was for her, for her delectation, the college band and the bannered ranks, class of '40 grey-haired and smiling on false teeth, '52 wearing well through sensible diet and exercise, '60s, some pregnant, some got up in a kind of retrogression to college days, some lovely with the flyinghaired zest of having been qualified adult for a whole year.

The alumnae were the first group Hillela addressed in America. Her audience was mostly the classes of the '40s and '50s; the younger ones, her own age, were with their husbands and children on the lawns or drinking beer with their boyfriends. What should she talk about? —Oh, my dear, you have so much to tell them! The role of women in the new Africa, a few personal touches to lighten things up … but you know, lordy, you know— The winter-pink or cruise-tanned faces, the perfect coiffures and gold costume jewellery quickly made the lecturer change, as she went along, the talk that had been prepared for factory workers in peasant kerchiefs. Dr Adlestrop, mistress of the broadcasting medium of discretion, had ensured in undertone asides that everyone knew about this young woman; she stood there on the podium touched by eyes that wanted to search out the mark—suffering's grace or Cain's slash—that set her apart, as the eyes of larger crowds still did with the widow of their assassinated president. The college had acquired its own house-version widow: was endowed with her, this year, along with a poet-in-residence and a Japanese garden established in previous ones.

Americans take in each other's children the way Africans do. The namesake had many temporary brothers and sisters, was made free of all the bunk-beds and milk-and-cookie sustenance she could possibly need. As Hillela had adapted her subject to the kind of expectations she sensed available in the alumnae, so she moved on to more exacting forums around the Eastern Seaboard, the Middle West and even California. The exaction was not only exercised upon her; it soon was exercised by her upon those who brought her among them. She had to go back to libraries (Leonie's houseful of abstract Africa in words and statistics that shared the shelves with displaced ritual carvings and vessels, ceremonial beadwork and artisans' tools) to find the supplement she had always said she could not trust: what she had not experienced for herself. It was necessary, for the practice of exaction. She had moved not merely on, but up; over academic elms to the Foundations and Committees with money to spend. People running development projects in Ghana were surprised to receive under her name, with the title of co-ordinating assistant or deputy director of this or that programme, letters offering and outlining the conditions of grants. (Good god, Hillela. Well! —Trust her.) Some working in Tanzania corresponded on these matters without making the connection between the colleague of Democratic congressmen and senators and the girl in the yellow swim-suit on Tamarisk Beach. It might have taken even old friends, old intimates, a moment or two to recognize her, if they could have come upon her at a conference table or head-down over an open briefcase on a shuttle flight. Christa, Sophie, Marie-Claude, Busewe—would they have found Hillela in this cropped-headed girl who had adopted Leonie's practical socks and sandals, walked official corridors instead of dancing high-life, and carried reports, agendas and minutes instead of a guitar? Even Emile. He might have been tricked by the absence of obvious beauty women can't help having. Only Udi would have known her instantly, for the signals this particular one
could not help giving. And Sasha. Sasha would have known her anywhere, at any stage or age in any life.

It was at this stage that he wrote the first letter.
Seven years since you left this country. Not that I saw you for the year or so before that, but at least you were here. We could always still have bumped into each other somewhere
.

I can imagine
—
or I think I can
—
something of what your life is like, extrapolate from what I pick up in newspapers and books and even in the office about the kind of situation(s?) you must be living in. (I work with Joe, articled
—
I didn't go back to university after the army.) I imagine it quite well but there's a sort of cut-out shape in the middle
—
I can't quite put you in. But I suppose you've changed enough, outwardly anyway, to fit
.

They heard you'd got married
—
the family. You'll be able to read off the predictable reactions like a hand of cards. The queen declared: It solves nothing. The king isn't played; he always loved you for yourself, as the saying goes, didn't want anything else of you. Loved you more than he does our namby-pamby sister but could not show it. I knew, though
.

I know your husband was killed. Hillela's husband. I was angry with the others because I was the one who should have felt the most for you and I couldn't feel anything. It was because I couldn't believe in his wife. If you really haven't changed, you'll laugh at that, at me. I don't know what's the matter with me, Hillela, that's the fact of it. I'm sorry Whaila Kgomani was killed. That's lame but what other way is there to approach what happened to you, one can't walk right up to it. Pauline pronounced you'd be all right. And of course what Pauline says is definitive. On the other hand, you're the only one of us who didn't let it be. So I don't know. But my mother's no fool, and you made her respect you. No matter what she did. No, ‘made' is not true; you never entered into the wrestling game she and I have, to the last gasp
—
she or me. You never recognized its existence, so you didn't have to. I continue to wound her savagely. I've told her: she sneers at her sister Olga, the Jewish mother, and certainly she herself is no Jewish mother, she's the Medusa. I live with a girl but I keep going back to the house. Pauline is not the explanation for this
.

What would you want to know? I went with my girl to England, France and Italy last year but I don't suppose you were there. Or we might have bumped into one another. I have part of a house with her on the old Crown Mines property—you might remember Crown Mines, no longer being worked, although I'm not sure the former staff houses were for rent when you were still around. Seven of us share, two more
—
nice queers
—
live in what were the servants' quarters. No prejudice involved, just that they wanted to fix up their own place in housewifely style, everything just so. The seventh tenant has an unofficial eighth, a black girl who works for some church organization
—
so we have our token or totem or whatever you want to call it. Big whoopee, as we used to say to bring each other down a peg or two, when we were kids. Alpheus had three more children and had to leave the garage. He never completed his articles with Joe, but him I did bump into recently, and he's making a good living as a furniture salesman. I won't complete my articles, either. You probably won't read this (I haven't any address for you) so you won't be able to tell anyone, even supposing there were to be someone around who might be remotely interested. I'm a champion at writing letters that never get sent
.

What else? Well, I still read a lot. The other day l read a story, a translation from the Hungarian writer, Dezsö Kosztolányi, where the girl dies and the man longs for her for years, wants to see her again for only half-an-hour. His concentration is so fervent that he actually brings her back from the dead. There she is, just as she was, in his room, and they have nothing to say to each other. All they can think about is how much of the half-hour is still to pass. Eventually, she leaves after twenty minutes
.

Why can't I end off? I never know how to end off. I did my year in the army, you know. A good thing. Good thing to learn how easy it is to be one of them. To you, one of those who killed him; I can come up very close to that fact. My god, that story about the dead was tactless; I didn't think. Another thing I won't do
—
I won't go to the army camps I'm supposed to spend a month in each year. So far I've managed by lying, aided and abetted by my girl, by Pauline and Joe, who approve finding ways of getting round things. When the call-up telegram comes my girl replies I'm no
longer at this address, and when another comes to Pauline's, she does the same. I disappear for a while, and the army calls up a substitute, putting my name down for the next camp. So far, military police came round only once, and my girl put on the innocent act and dealt with them. So that's where I am: between call-ups. The alternative is to be like the Seventh Day Adventists and go to jail for conscientious objection on holy-roller grounds. But we kids were brought up without all that mumbo-jumbo, weren't we, to cope with this world, not the next. I'm doing useful work helping prepare defence material for Joe's cases, when I'm not hiding away. He has had a coronary but still slaves in that study night after night. He has pale moon-rings round his pupils although he's only about sixty
.