A Sport of Nature (42 page)

—I hope not. You didn't ever use those kinds of words … And your child, the little boy—

—Nomzamo. For Nelson's wife. Oh she's got the Americans wound round her fat finger, all of five years old now …—

—She must be just like you.—

—The time I wasted. I should have learned the things I need now. I've had to teach myself how to prepare budgets and estimates—

—What are you going to do, Hillela?—

—What d'you mean?—

—You know what I mean. Is it going to be for the rest of your life … oh Hillela.—

—Do what I'm doing. Looking for ways to free Whaila.—

That was why she had not been able to go away without reaching him: he was the one who would understand what she had just said. That was his place. He was ashamed to think she could hear the weakness of emotion that changed his voice. —That drudgery … for you … and what can that sort of thing achieve. It will be the big powers who'll decide what happens to blacks. And the power of other black heads of state influencing the big powers. A waste, yes… it's
this
that's a waste of your life—The line cut off. He waited, but she did not ring again. She must be walking to the plane with that old ghoul who grinned as if from a bridal group in newspaper photographs of people who would kill or be killed when she had gone.

If Hillela Kgomani had not a spare moment to see old friends, she found time to meet people from the African National Congress. Not in their office (which was why she missed running into Christa) but at a private house. This suggests that if it were true she had been expelled from the movement while in Eastern Europe, she was back in favour. Maybe had earned her way by turning some of the paper-rustling drudgery to the organization's advantage in the unpromising conditions of the United States. It is also possible she was never expelled at all, but that this was a planned pretext to get her into the States in the status of disaffection (as the euphemism for defection goes) so that she could work secretly on the prospects of getting a mission opened there.
Certainly in the early Seventies offices were opened in New York, for the first time. Probably she was working for the organization all along, under the spread breast-feathers of mother hen Leonie and her aid and research projects in many African countries. Bradley Burns, who is given to quiet analysis of the time when he was the man in a position to know, says she confused him. Deliberately. At times it was clear that for her only sexual love—and oddly this included her feeling for the little girl—was to be trusted. All the rest (his phrase) was shit and lies. And he did not know whether she was thinking of the killing of her husband, or some other kind of treachery that happened to her while she was in exile politics in Eastern Europe. Then at other times she could also say love ‘can't be got away with'; or it wasn't ‘enough'. What she seemed to mean by this last was that in spite of all evidence against it, another kind of love had to be risked.

Acronyms the language of love. United States Institute for African-American Cooperation, USIFACO; Third World Committee for Africa, TWOCA; Operation Africa Education, OPAD; Co-ordinating Committee for Africa, COCA; Commission for Research into Under-development, CORUD; Foundation for Free People, FOFREP. The child plays with alphabetical blocks on the floor, builds houses with them. A career can be built out of acronyms; everyone here must have a career, you fulfil yourself with a career, there are books that specify what a career is by listing what is available. Pauline would be happy, she was more than willing to supply the advantage of a career, whatever Sasha said. Leonie couldn't have done more if it had been for her own daughter; Leonie will go on with her promotion, beavering away. Leonie knew him. Leonie is the only person in the board rooms, at the working breakfasts in motels, at the Thanksgiving dinner, who knew him
—
the one who came out just like him does not remember. Not even a trauma to know him by; she was carried away with a towel across her eyes so that she would not see what was on the kitchen floor
.

Twenty, forty years after they have received the advantages of a career they still form their version of a
songololo,
singing their songs as they stride along under the same elm trees in the same avenue. Everything remains in place, for them. The storm windows will be put up, as theirs are, every late autumn and removed to let the smell of spring in. The namesake will grow up as a little black American with civil rights and equal opportunity to protect her, like everybody else, and the distinction of her African names to assert that individuality everyone here says is so important in making a career. She won't have to have engraved on her bracelet
, I am me;
she'll say, I'm Nomzamo Kgomani, and that will impress
.

No need ever to run out of acronyms. There is a career of continued useful service ahead; there is the example of Leonie, loverless lover of all those she is entitled to call by their first names, fulfilment (as they sum up, here) shining out of every group photograph in which she appears. But no need to emulate entirely. The documentation will be read in bed beside a young man advancing well in his own career, ready to help with the dishes and to perform
—
woman, man, and the little black daughter he regards as his own
—
the safe and pleasant rituals of a family, here; parent-teacher co-operation, playing games, going to the lake shack and Cape Cod house
.

The real family, how they smell. The real rainbow family. The real rainbow family stinks. The dried liquid of dysentery streaks the legs of babies and old men and the women smell of their monthly blood. They smell of lack of water. They smell of lack of food. They smell of bodies blown up by the expanding gases of their corpses' innards, lying in the bush in the sun. Find the acronym for her real family
.

Bradley was her own age, like the men the young alumnae had. He was an economist with a promising position in a multinational company. His grandfather had been one of the editors of
The New Republic
, an associate of Edmund Wilson, and a victim of the McCarthy hearings. The leftist tradition was a family heirloom sufficient in itself; a claim to a way of life that no longer actually need be practised, just as the painting of an ecclesiast ancestor in ermine on the wall is prestige enough for descendants who never go to church. It was adequate for the family image to be brushed up from generation to generation during the youthful period when the social conscience, along with spontaneous erections, naturally evinces itself. Brad had done his stint—in opposition to the Vietnam war, and a year with an aid agency in India. Now he could settle down with the complete set of
The New Republic
published during his grandfather's years, on display in his study—handed down to him as a housewarming present when he found his own brownstone.

Of course people with his parents' background would not show any reaction to the appearance of a black child with their son's new friend. And when the explanation came, bringing into the big living-room with its grand piano (Brad and his mother played), New England samplers and bowls of tulips, distant horrors the Burnses were accustomed to being able to shrink with the flick of a switch to blank on the face of the television, this provided proof by association that they were still on the right side, just as, conversely, guilt by association provided danger for those other parents, Pauline and Joe. The parents' house was a generous
thoroughfare where the adult children made their long-distance telephone calls, cooked, borrowed cars and electrical equipment, used the basement laundry, slept over with friends or lovers; snatches of their independent lives were enacted there—before Hillela, or even drawing her in—whose contexts were elsewhere. Brad's ‘find', brought home (good for him!), was just such a snatch of his life. The brothers and sisters chattered with her, regaled themselves with laughter when they encouraged her cute little black girl to be sassy, and were lavish with invitations for brother to bring her along to jazz clubs, sailing trips, cinemas and parties.

Only Brad was quiet. He watched and listened to the girl and her child he had contributed, getting on so well with his siblings. The pair represented him in the way he could not represent himself, now that these brothers and sisters were no longer children.

He was quiet when he made love the first time. Nothing in the room, in the world, would distract him from the act of worship now approached, and his trance produced blind excitement in which only the body knew its way. When she was seeing with her eyes again she smiled appreciatively, cheekbones lifting a little fold under her dark, lazy gaze. And he spoke.

—Was it the first thing you saw.—

—Yes. I thought of a puppy, the kind with a velvety patch over one eye.— She withdrew her lax hand from between his arm and side and stroked the dark birth-blot that all his life others pretended was not there.

This man talked after love-making. Not the mumblings of dreams and names in a Slav language, but a wide-awake fluency, entered by way of her body. He told again and again: —Hillela, I don't care how many lovers you've had, no-one can have loved you as I do.—

She did not ask how he knew she had had many lovers; it was simply one of his qualities that he knew things about her without troubling her with questions, sensitive to the repetition of
certain names in her conversation and able to read changes in her expression when certain subjects arose. She did not answer; sometimes smiled at him as she did at her child, but never in disparagement or disbelief. The fact that she believed him, when all that he could find to express so great a conviction was something like the line from a stupid song—this tortured him. He had to try and follow her reasoning; there must be a reasoning, and the reasoning would establish the state of the emotions between them.

—I'm not saying anything about him … And not just because he's dead. (A gesture, acknowledging that unchallengeable rivalry.) I'll never pry into your feelings for each other. Whatever they were. I'm talking about the nature of mine. That's what I mean.— But then he saw to what he might be leading. —No, no, it's not because of what you think, Hillela. The puppy isn't licking your hand.—

And again, in her apartment, with the door slightly ajar because the small girl in the next room insisted it be so: —Hillela, I really cannot live without you again. Not what you think, no. It's because there's something a bit frightening in you; it's that I can't do without.—

This time she laughed.

—How can I say that to you. You'll tell me one can live without anyone. You know. Lying here in bed with me, you're the proof, aren't you—

She was propped on one elbow, listening to him. She fell upon him and he rolled over with her.

Without explanation, there were times when she took up something he had approached in some other room, some other night.

—Whaila had another wife. Nomzamo's got brothers and sisters she hasn't seen yet.—

—A divorced wife.—

—I don't know if they were divorced, really.—

—What if he'd lived, and one day gone back to her and the other children? That's the kind of living without I mean.—

—We had our time together. She must have had hers … If we had been able to go back!— She stopped and slowly her hands made fists, came to rest on her naked thighs; the unselfconsciousness with which she accepted her nudity in moods and situations now removed from sex reminded him strangely of the women in Pascin and Lautrec brothel drawings seen in art galleries. —If he had lived to go back—oh, that would have been another time, that would have been … that would have been …—

—More than
love
.—

—Oh why this measuring, how can you measure?—

—Yes. Something I'll never know: exaltation. And awfulness. The way you have. Yes, you are a bit frightening. But I'll get used to you. No—I don't want to get used to you, I never shall.—

He had a long face with a slender nose the everted curve of whose nostrils was exactly repeated in the upward and downward curves of his upper lip. The skin of his throat below the shaving line was tender and fine down to the breastbone and its cup where a few glossy curls of chest hair began. The pulse in the throat was always visible and the network of nerves round the mouth and nose seemed like those of some sensitive plant—every face has them, but they are sluggish or hampered by a layer of fat or a thickened hide, while his changed his expression with every nuance of atmosphere generated by the people around him.

So he was beautiful—except for
that
, it had always been said with suitable regret. Among the commissioned pastel portraits of each of the Burns sons and daughters as children, his was in profile—the ‘good' side. His mother, when he was small, had made a habit of kissing him goodnight on the birthmark, so that the imprint of the kiss became for him the disfigurement; later, a vague forgiveness for what he did not know he had done—forgiveness for the ‘bad' side. Now the two sides had come together by
the unimaginable means of a rather tactless and childish remark.
I thought of a puppy, the kind with a velvety patch over one eye
. It had happened as a Zen sage flings enlightenment at disciples in the form of an outrageous and flippant half-sentence.

He sat in the audience listening to her speak on public platforms, sometimes with the namesake on his lap. The young woman up there was scarcely to be distinguished from the other men and women on the panels of the committed, wearing with them the much-washed clothing, varied only by slogans printed across backs or breasts, with which they showed their identification with the causes of the poor and oppressed by assuming their characteristic markings, as a certain kind of moth disguises the fact that it is alive and free by keeping perfectly still and exhibiting the lineaments of a skull on its wingspread. The blunt-cut nails of her clenched hands, as she opened them to emphasize a fact, were short as those of women she had walked with as they scratched for roots to eat, and her curly hair was cropped without consideration for looks but as it was done as a mass precaution for hygiene in refugee camps, among the lice-ridden. Now she was talking not of refugee camps but of three political trials that had taken place in South Africa in a year. —All real opposition is on trial as terrorist and communist. Four people were sentenced to five years' imprisonment for smuggling anti-apartheid pamphlets and records into the country; only four, because the fifth accused, a schoolteacher, thirty years old, Ahmed Timol, died by falling from the tenth floor of police headquarters while the police were interrogating him. In the Mzimela trial, a young man was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. What had he done? He left the country secretly and fought with the Rhodesian freedom fighters against Smith's illegal white regime, he attended the Morogoro liberation conference, and he re-entered his home country to organize support for the banned African National Congress. Are these people, risking their lives to be free of racial oppression, criminals? I knew
Mzimela in Tanzania. Yes, he was like many others; he went to the Soviet Union and to East Germany for military training because the West, which created South Africa militarily and economically, does nothing to influence the South African government to free people like him, neither will it help them to free themselves. Did any of these people on trial kill anyone in South Africa? There was one act of violence involved—and one only: when Timol's life, in the care of the South African police, smashed on concrete—