A Sport of Nature (52 page)

She went to the house of another couple whose child—a daughter, this one, a student and not a trade unionist—was in detention. Being Pauline she had neither sought an introduction through anybody nor telephoned first; just was there, with her great quick eyes ready to stare down timidity, scepticism or distrust, on the doorstep and then in the livingroom. The professor of chemistry and his wife found she had burst in not to commiserate in misfortune but to share action against it. Out of this intrusion on meek despair she became one of the founders of a committee of detainees' parents; the professor and his wife became numbered among those who did not beg for mercy for their sons and daughters but demanded justice, and by justice meant nothing less than the abolition of laws, opposition to which had sent their young and thousands of others to prison—laws that in those years removed whole populations of black people from their homes and dumped them elsewhere at the will of whites; divided blacks' own country into enclaves under dummy flags from beneath which blacks
could not move about freely; kept education segregated in favour of white privilege; tried for treason leaders of non-violent opposition, turning it to violence; attacked black trade union action with mass dismissals, police intimidation, banning and imprisonment of officials; and created the last institution and edifice of white domination, the Parliament with three Houses provided by the State, one for Indians, one for people of mixed blood, one for whites—and none for the mass of the people, the blacks.

The Committee members, too, respected no conventions of how things were being done in the official best interests of the country. They would not be turned away from State doorsteps; they unearthed facts and figures—how many people were detained each month, each week, each day, and who they were—that were not revealed by the police or the Minister of Law and Order. They learnt to use Underground—or rather under-prison-wall—means by which they were able to inform the newspapers of a hunger strike among detainees anywhere in the country, while the police denied such a strike was taking place. They followed word-of-mouth to find the evidence of parents of black schoolchildren who were scooped into police vans and detained, in that long period of boycotts; they produced at public meetings in church halls (the only assembly places where there was some chance of proceeding without a ministerial ban) children of nine and ten whose precocity, here, was a terrible fluency to describe their experience of the cell, the solitude, the plate of pap pushed across the floor, the sanitary bucket and the beatings.

Black parents' committees set up in the segregated townships, but they did not keep themselves apart from whites and the whites did not confine their concern to the smaller number of their own in detention but were active on behalf of the thousands of black sons and daughters; with her son shut away, Pauline received back the acceptance she had been deprived of when the Saturday morning children ceased to come singing up the brick-lined path in the garden laid waste with broken bottles and human shit.

The acceptance was happening at the same time as petrol bombs and limpet mines began to explode in streets where whites went by. Countless black children (even Pauline's colleagues could not keep tally in the burning townships) had been killed; now the first white children were. This was the kind of bond between white and black the whites had not foreseen and were never to recognize.

Sasha also found ways and means. It was from Maximum Security that he wrote the last letter to his sibling cousin.

I am incommunicado, so might as well try to reach you. That's not so much more hopeless than trying for anyone else now. Little Hendrik who comes on duty at night has smuggled in this paper for me. He had it under the plastic lining of his warder's cap; just now, when he took off the cap, there it was. He's about nineteen and has a double crown, the hair stood up all bright yellow and sticky-shiny He always wants to get out of my cell quickly because he's agitated
—
he likes me, and is afraid of that. He likes me because I don't curse him
—gaan kak, Boer—
the way the brave ones do. These maledictions are scratched into the walls where I'm kept
.

I suppose there are prisons like this where you are, too. That's a ridiculous thing to say
—
I'm not quite crazy, don't decide that
—
of course there are prisons, but I mean ones where politicals are held. There surely have to be those. Every power has to put away what threatens it
—
that's where the just and unjust causes meet. Okay, I know that, I accept it. Not cynically. I still believe. But l hope you don't think about these places. Because it's no good, you can't imagine what it's like. I had read so much
—
the Count of Monte Cristo to Dostoevsky to Gramsci!
—
and I thought I had a maximum security Baedeker in my head, I knew my way around every 7-by-7 cell, along every caged catwalk, saw the bit of sky through bars and had ready-paced-out the exercise yard, had my ingenuity kit to keep track of days with bits of unpicked thread. And the mouse or cockroach that would become a friend. (Sources: from Ruth First to Jeremy Cronin and Breytenbach.)

Even the business of the thread is wrong. I know every day when I wake up what day it is and whatever else has gone out of my head in
seven months the calendar beside the phone in Point road is there, with the
volk's
holidays figured in red, Day of the Vow that if Dingane killed Piet Retief it would be only whites killing blacks from then on, Family Day when the whites picnic and the dockworkers and miners get drunk alone in their single-sex hostels. Today is the 214th day I've been incommunicado
.

Oh my mother has seen me, and Joe was here, there were two visits with him before he went back to London. But what is there to say. The reasons I'm here are not negotiable (as Joe would put it). I'm where I have to be. Yes, Joe, I want to overthrow the State, I can't find a way to live in it and see others suffer in it, the way it is or the way it revises its names and its institutions
—
it's still the same evil genie changing shapes, you have to smash the bottle from which it rises. Rhetoric. That's the fancy language of my speechifying to unions that the Major reads back to me in interrogation. But I am my fancy language. I used to read a lot of poetry
—
as you know. Well, that's my poetry. That's the meaning of my life
.

Oh I tell him: it's fancy to you because even now when you can see it's all up with white-man-baas, you see the real end as a ‘fancy' you'll knock out of the heads of a horde of ignorant blacks incited by romantic white radicals. The Major snorts with laughter (every mannerism these interrogators have that one wouldn't notice in anyone else becomes piggish) when I say there is unbeatable purpose expressed in the horrible mishmash of Marxism, Castroism, Gandhism, Fanonism, Hyde Park tub-thumping (colonial heritage), Gawd-on-our-sideism (missionary heritage), Black Consciousness jargon, Sandinistism, Christian liberation theology with which we formulate. He thinks he's getting somewhere with me. He thinks I'm beginning to have doubts, and they'll soon be able to produce me as a State witness at somebody's trial. He's not getting anywhere. I have no doubts; I only see better than he does that if the means are confused, the end is not
.

Gaan kak, Boer. I've always died a thousand deaths. You remember how when we went to the dentist as kids, I couldn't eat breakfast, my knees and elbows were pressed together, I wanted my steps to take me backwards when the nurse called me to the chair. And the big fuss about the army I was always scared stiff I wouldn't be able to stand things
.
But that was dread, which is fear of something that hasn't yet happened. There are times when I'd do anything to get out. I'm craven. But never when I'm with the Major or his team. All the things you've read about have happened to me; even if my feet are swollen from standing and I have a thirst for sleep that's the strongest desire I've ever known
—
Hillela, forget about sex
—
even then when they lead me back here I always have the feeling I've won
.

There's nothing more to dread. Is there? If they put me on trial and the skills of all Joe's colleagues can't get me off, I've stood it for seven months in prison, if I go in for years, I won't have to die that death again
.

I'm going to tell you that at first Pauline actually had the idea you might be able to ‘do something' about me! Olga recognized you in a newspaper photograph, Hillela is Madame la Prèsidente. How you got there, that's confusing, too. When I wrote some years ago you were supposed to be married to an American professor, but the letter came back. Pauline was in one of her hyped-up states when she arrived here: you would get your President to pull strings. What strings? Through the OAU; she had rushed off to one other old chums still teaching African Politics at Wits and checked your husband's standing, which proved high. Joe had to point out that the OAU was not exactly influential with the South African security police. It was only a lapse; my mother's really always been cleverer than Joe, we know. She's still here. I realize she'll never go back while I'm inside. She's tremendously active with a group that supports us
—
detainees, and politicals on trial. It's possible she might land up inside, too. She looks wonderful. I'll tell you: happy. She's the only person I see except the Major's team, and Hendrik and his mates in uniform. The visits are in the presence of warders, you can't say much, but all Pauline and I have to say to each other is political and we've come to some strange kind of intuition between us, a private language by which we're able to convey information back and forth in a form Hendrik and co. can't follow. Family sayings, childhood expressions
—
we have access through them
.

Then why do I say I'm incommunicado
.

You couldn't experience it, of course, being more or less a lucky orphan, but hearing from outside exclusively in the voice of your mother, it's like being thrust up back again into the womb
.

I can never guess whether you'll be interested or not. Because I can't imagine what your life is. If I think of you in the morning, for instance, I can't imagine where you get up out of bed as you used to in your short pyjamas, that kind of baby dress with bikini pants, you having breakfast
—
what sort of room, not a kitchen!—you going off to do what? What do you do all day in a President's house? State House
—
Groote Schuur's the only one I've ever seen, and I'll bet yours isn't Cape Dutch-gabled. I'm lodged with the State, myself, so we've both landed up in the same boat, but you're at the Captain's table, and I'm pulling the oars down in the galley. That's supposed to be funny, in case you think I'm dramatizing myself. I was going to say
—
I don't know if you're interested in how I got here. I don't think it will be any surprise to you that I am. I was on my way while we were still kids, although I made a kind of nihilistic show of kicking against it. Pauline's Great Search for Meaning. It was a pain in the arse. You went off and plink-plonked on your guitar. I sneered at her. My school
—
the one she chose for me, did Joe ever decide anything for us?
—
its Swazi name meant ‘the world', one of those great African omnibus concepts (I love them), the nearest synonym in our language is a microcosm, I suppose. Nobody at home knew how happy I was there
—
certainly not you. Carole may have suspected. It was the world (and the world's South Africa for us) the way we wanted it to be, the way Pauline longed for it to be, and into which she projected me. But it had no reality in the world we had to grow up into, less and less, now none at all. It was all back-to-front. When I went to school, I went
home —
to that ‘world'; when I came to the house in Johannesburg, I was cast out. Good god, even you were more at home in that house than I was. Alpheus in the garage, Pauline and Joe's pals bemoaning the latest oppressive law on the terrace under that creeper with the orange trumpet flowers. At Kamhlaba blacks were just other boys in the same class, in the dormitory beds, you could fight with them or confide in them, masturbate with them, they were
friends or schoolboy enemies. At the house, my mother's blacks were like Aunt Olga's whatnots, they were handled with such care not to say or do anything that might chip the friendship they allowed her to claim
—
and she had some awful layabouts and spivs among them. I smelt them out, because where I was at ‘home', that sort of relationship, carrying its own death, didn't have to exist. Poor Pauline. I hated South Africa so much
.

When I was older
—
by the time you left the house—I hated them all, or I thought I did. Maybe even Joe. I expected them to have solutions but they only had questions. Do you realize I was the only answer Pauline ever had? She knew what to do about me: sent me to Kamhlaba, ‘the world'. But I had to come back. Joe half-believed his answer: the kind of work he was doing, but you know how she was the one who took away half the certainty. And she was right, in her way, you can't find justice in a country with our kind of laws. I feel as Bram Fischer did, that if I come to trial it's going to be before a court whose authority I don't recognize, under laws made by a minority government of whites. I'd like to reject that white privilege, too, but how can I take away from Joe the half he believes in? It's all my father has. And of course if I can get off and live to fight another day, so to speak, I want that. No sense in a white being a martyr. There's not enough popular appeal involved
.

I've no way of knowing how much you know. I mean, you certainly know the facts of what has happened in this country since you left. After all, you were married to a revolutionary. You probably knew more about it, from a politico-analytical point of view, than I did, at least during the years you were with him
—
and that's why I can't imagine you, Hillela, that's it, I can't imagine you living your life in the tremendous preoccupation that is liberation politics. Yet it seems this has been your solution, in your own way
—
and I never thought of you as in need of a solution at all, I still don't, I never shall. You know, in these places one suffers from something called sensory deprivation (Pauline's crowd apparently have published an extensive study of this which has horrified even people who think those like me ought to be kept locked up: they've revised their punitive premise, they think we deserve all we get, but nobody deserves quite that). I have it
,
too, ‘sensory deprivation', I won't go into the symptoms but the incoherent jumps in this letter are well known to be one. As I said, I'm not really crazy, and they won't get me that way. Thoughts are wonderfully free when you're in this state of sensory deprivation. Some hallucinate but it's not that with me. It makes me know things I didn't know. About you, Hillela. You were always in the opposite state. You received everything through your skin, understood everything that way. I suppose you still do. One can't judge change in others by change in oneself
.