Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

There was a time and place for Hillela to give account of herself.

Olga’s Rover kept by Jethro shiny as the taps in her bathroom stood outside the gate. Olga sat in Pauline’s worn livingroom with Pauline, waiting. Olga got up and hugged her; —Hillela, oh Hillela. — She was sweaty from the day at school and did not know when it would be all right to break the sweet-smelling embrace. — You want to tidy up a bit? — Olga lifted the hair at the back of the girl’s head, gauging it needed an expert cut.

— There’s a chicken sandwich in the kitchen, darling. Leftovers from the grand lunch I gave Olga.—

— It was a perfectly good lunch, believe me. I usually have an apple and a bit of cheese.—

— Yes, one can see that by the shape you keep. But I can’t be bothered. There are too many other things to do. I’m hungry; I eat bread and peanut butter to fuel myself; I spread around the arse …—

She came back barefoot, her face washed, hair pushed behind her ears.

— Your sandwich.—

She turned and fetched it from the kitchen.

Olga kept smiling at her, frowning and smiling at once, as people do in order not to make fools of themselves in some way. Olga would leave it to Pauline: Pauline accepted with the gesture of inevitability. — It’s all been passed off just as if you’ve been — I don’t know, spending the weekend with a friend, as if it were any other time you or Carole …? But the fact is, my dear little Hillela, you gave us all a terrible twenty-four hours. Not only us, your immediate family here where you belong, but also Olga … Olga was running around hospitals and police stations, just like us.—

Olga’s smile broke. — We don’t want to reproach you, darling. We only want to know why. Why you could just go off like that.—

— You know how much freedom I give you and Carole and Sasha. If you had an invitation, if you planned to go to Durban, you could so easily have asked me …—

Pauline told Joe, Olga told Arthur: the girl answered unnaturally openly: —On Friday after tennis we were hot, and we began talking about the sea. So we thought, why not go?—

— Without money, without a change of clothes?—

The girl reassured Olga. They had their gym shorts, pullovers and swimming costumes in their attaché cases; Mandy had money. They had no trouble getting lifts. First a man and his wife going to their farm near Harrismith, and then they waited about half-an-hour at the roadside before a van driver stopped, he was on his way back to Cato Manor because his boss let him keep the van over the weekend, but he specially went right into Durban, for them.

— Isn’t Cato Manor a black location?—

Pauline broke in across her sister. — Prejudice is one thing, Hillela, and you know in this house I take full responsibility for bringing you up without any colour-feeling, any colour-consciousness. But you must realize that there are risks one doesn’t take. Just as I often tell you children one shouldn’t leave money lying around where it can be a temptation to poor people … Young girls just do not take lifts from men — men of any colour.—

Olga had her hand at her own throat. — We’re so afraid for you, Hillela.—

Mandy von Herz was removed from the school by her parents, since she refused to remain there under a ban on associating with Hillela Capran. Mr von Herz came to see Joe — he did not think such matters should be discussed with women — because he believed Hillela’s family should know that Mandy had been afraid to take a lift with the black man, and the black man himself had been afraid to pick up two white girls, but it was Hillela who had flagged him down and Hillela who had persuaded him. He was an elderly black man, apparently, and had some respect for his position as well as theirs, thank God.

— Sanctimonious creep! — Pauline was only sorry she hadn’t been allowed to get at von Herz and tell him what she thought of him. Of course, his way of dealing with his daughter was to take the easy way out, and blame someone else’s child.

Pauline herself never explained why she brought in Olga to deal with Hillela that time. Perhaps there had been the suggestion, since Olga was always saying she, too, was responsible for Ruthie’s child, that she might try her hand again. Olga could take her away, to a new environment; Pauline had heard Arthur was thinking of emigrating to Canada.

Maybe the girl would be happier there.

— Why? — Joe disliked unqualified statements. There was nothing to substantiate that the girl was unhappy, anyway.

— Maybe even Olga would be different, there.—

But that was no reason. Pauline could offer no reason except the one unexpressed because he knew it well enough: Hillela didn’t resist, it was simply that she seemed not to notice all that Pauline and Joe had to offer that was worthwhile. It had been a misconception to think she had to be rescued from among Olga’s objets d’art, Olga’s Japanese screens placed before the waste ground of torn plastic and human excreta, Olga’s Carpeaux Reclining Nude (even if its provenance was merely ‘attributed to’) in place of surplus blacks, not fit for any labour force, sleeping under bushes. To resist Pauline would at least have meant to have belonged with Olga; why didn’t Hillela understand that was the choice? The only choice. Pauline was moved by her ignorance, innocence one must call it, at that age. She could not be abandoned. Pauline said it as if a note from the school had just informed her of the child’s undetected astigmatism or dyslexia: —She’s a-moral. I mean, in the sense of the morality of this country.—

Pauline had won the battle with her son; she had no need to think about it. But from the jagged glass of his attack needle-splinters were travelling unfelt through her, maiming the exercise of certain powers in her as a limb is maimed by the lodging of a minute foreign body in the bloodstream, and forcing her to use substitutes, as the body adapts another of its parts to take over the function of the nerve-damaged one. She no longer surged forward to provide what would keep the girl’s mind healthily engaged with the realities of the country, but apparently was trying to circle round what might occupy that mind itself, what needed to be dealt with and got out of the way.

She would never come empty-handed. She did not bring fancy clothes and chocolates as Olga did, but the shared instinct remained, vestigial, from the neighbourly conventions of her discarded Jewish childhood. She wandered into the girls’ room when her own daughter was not there. — Look what I found. Ruthie’s things. We each had boxes like this one, but mine was yellow. They were supposed to be for sewing, although we never did any …—

When Ruthie finally went away, her sisters came in and packed up her possessions as if she were dead. Len had wanted them given to charity. Pauline and Olga took some souvenirs of the life Ruthie had abandoned; might she not come back for them some day?

Their sister was not dead; here was her daughter; maybe she had come for them.

The box was padded and covered with water-marked taffeta that buzzed under the girl’s drawn fingernail like breath over a paper-covered comb. There were spill-stains and a seal — red nail-varnish dried stony. Pauline sat on the bed beside Hillela, a fellow schoolgirl, while they picked about together in the box. Pauline explained tarnished metal wings and crowns from the war. — Insignia. Our boyfriends sent them, we had pins attached at the back so we could wear them as brooches. We were so ignorant and silly. And so far from the war. No air raids, no blackout. No rationing. No brothers. There’s something about a colonial society that trivialises. Often I think: the fact that civilians here missed out the war has got something to do with whites feeling they can avoid the reality of the other experience, too. Even though that’s all round them. Being black, living as blacks have to — it’s a misfortune that happens to somebody else … oh what’s this? Old bus tickets … we used to live in Mountain View, one time.—