Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Hillela, too, had driven with Pauline on an issue that could be understood through participation. Pauline canvassed in a campaign for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum for white people to decide whether the country should leave the British Commonwealth and declare itself a republic with a whites-only government. Hillela had not been frightened when men or women who came to the door were rude to Pauline: and she and Pauline laughed and didn’t care, drove on comradely to the next street.

This seventeenth year — Hillela’s — Joe was sometimes away in country districts defending chiefs who were deposed by the government for resisting laws which forced their people to reduce their herds and give up grazing rights, huddle out of the way of whites. When he was home she or Carole would be sent to carry a cup of tea into his small study where he once looked up — a smile for Hillela — and told her he was ‘trying to find a legal needle in a haystack of bad laws — grounds to defend people who have no rights to defend, anymore’. At Olga’s Friday night seder there was in the background a radio report of the hut-burnings and murders between chiefs who, Joe told in the other house, opposed the government and those who were bribed to support it. Arthur did not submit to Olga’s objection that the temporal babble of the radio had no place in the timeless state of grace invoked at a Friday night ceremonial dinner. — A bunch of savages. What do they understand about culling, over-grazing. What’s the point of throwing out money trying to teach them something. Let them go ahead and kill each other, that’s all they know.—

There were no challenges over such statements in this house; Olga’s George IV table was a peat-coloured pool reflecting the flowers of the centre piece, the tiny silver nest of sugared almonds before each place, the agreeable controlled faces of Olga’s kind of people. Olga always took the option of compassionate distress, never choosing sides; her fears for herself were the basis of her abhorrence of violence. — My cook’s afraid to go home there. It’s too awful.—

Pauline and Carole were often out at protest meetings when Hillela came home from wherever it was she had been ‘with her friends’—the explanation Pauline accepted, so long as Hillela phoned to say if she wanted to spend the night with one of the friends, and left the telephone number where she could be reached; a reasonable enough rule. Hillela helped Carole paint banners, NO TO A RACIST REPUBLIC; at school the headmistress announced a special church service and election of a student committee to plan a celebration for the public holiday on which the republic was to be declared. Once Hillela was going into a coffee bar when she saw a straggle of people coming down the centre of the city street, white people gathering flanks of accompanying black bystanders as they hampered traffic, NO TO A RACIST REPUBLIC: she handed her guitar to one of her friends and watched the group as if it were a wedding procession. Suddenly she ran forward, waving wildly, grasped Carole’s hand; smiling, half-hopped-and-skipped, keeping up with her cousin and aunt for a few paces. Then she fell back. Pauline’s grand head, made out among many, was disappearing round the corner.

In the coffee bar Hillela was greeted: Are you nuts? Where’d you go off to like that? She and her friends took turns to play the guitar and they sang ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and a new hit from America, ‘We Shall Overcome’. The Greek proprietor did not mind these gatherings in Nick’s Café, renamed, to keep up with somebody’s times, somewhere, Arrivederci Roma; the impromptu music attracted custom. But when the kids started sharing round among themselves a home-rolled cigarette he recognized the scent of the stuff and lost his temper, chasing them out. At the same time — it must have been — a street or two away the police were breaking up an illegal procession. Pauline and Carole (she was under age, she would have had to appear in camera ) were lucky not to have been among those arrested and charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act. Of which Pauline was perfectly aware, Joe warned.

Pauline’s eyes were searching her invisible audience, her judges. — You must take some risks.—

— Not this particular one. With a child who’s a minor. It isn’t worth it.—

Mandy von Herz’s removal to another school and the parental ban on her association with her friend Hillela made no difference, for a few months: they continued to spend most of their time together. The friendship ended of itself. Hillela’s friend left school and took courses in beauty culture and modelling; she was a very pretty girl, her parents approved of her planning a future through the marketable assets of her face and body, so long as this was done in good taste. She went to country club dances with young men in velvet butterfly ties and white dinner jackets, instead of roaming away from the white suburbs. Hillela had moved on with friends-of-friends out of the group Mandy von Herz abandoned; she played her guitar on Sunday nights in a disused warehouse taken over by young people in the decaying end of town and, crammed into the cars of people she didn’t know, went to parties that came about in Fordsburg and Pageview, areas Pauline had never taken her to because the people who lived there were not white and had no vote to canvass. She brought to Pauline and Joe’s house one day someone introduced as Gert. Joe asked for the surname and Hillela turned to its owner. Prinslop, he said. Not coloured, but an Afrikaans boy: he seemed unable to put a sentence together — whether in his own language or English — in the company of Pauline, Joe, Carole, and Sasha back for the holidays, but he was offered supper. Pauline and Joe encouraged the young people to bring home their friends; the only way to know with whom they were mixing. Perhaps the boy was overwhelmed by the fluency of this highly articulate and talkative family. He looked like any bullet-headed blue-eyed son of a railway worker from Brixton or miner from a Reef dorp, the half-educated whites who were also the master race.

Hillela took Sasha along to the warehouse with Gert Prinsloo an evening soon after.

Indians and coloureds among the white boys and girls there are no shock to him; he doesn’t go to a segregated school as his sister and cousin do. But Gert Prinsloo; the black boys at school call that kind ‘the Boere ’: in a year or two he’ll be a foreman yelling at black workers or a security policeman interrogating political prisoners.

Hillela has come to look for Sasha, missing in the herd-laughter of young males with newly-broken uncontrolled voices. — D’you want to go home? — She picks up her guitar; she is going to stay, anyway.

— What does that chap do? He looks like a cop.—

She gestures: he’s just one of the people who turn up here. — I think works in a shop that sells tape-recorders and things. Radios. Or repairs them. But what he really does is play weird instruments — the homemade ones Africans play. It’s fantastic, wait till you hear.—

She sits down on the floor beside Sasha, cross-legged, the guitar on her lap. She slips her hand over his forearm and opens her palm against his; their fingers interlace and close. As she has gestured: here, he and Hillela are just people who have turned up among others, known only by first names, there is no familial identity.

After a lot of noisy confusion, records set playing and taken off, girls shrilling and boys braying, this Gert Prinsloo settles himself in a space with two oxhide drums, a wooden xylophone and the little instrument of which out-of-tune reproductions are sold in every tourist shop. (Sasha has an mbira on the wall of his cubicle in Swaziland.) The son of the Boere has begun to drum. The girls and boys begin to clap and sway and stamp. They, crowd round him so that, from the sitting level, the player cannot be seen any more. But Hillela has pressed Sasha’s hand down on the boards to show he and she will not get up. She is smiling, with her body swaying from the waist (like a snake rising from the charmer’s basket, he was to remember, or like one of those nature films shown at school, where the expansion of a flower from its calyx is speeded up). This happens to the sound of Gert Prinsloo’s drumming that makes of the walls of that place one huge distended eardrum, and to the flying notes, hollow and gentle, that he hammers out all over from the anvil of the wooden xylophone; but the rain-drop music of the mbira is lost in the beat of the crowd’s blood, they overwhelm it with their own noise.