Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

— I still think we should take up Michael’s offer to look round for us in Italy.—

Arthur had a way of blinking, refusing to acknowledge the regard of others, conversely, as Pauline always felt that regard, sought it. His head hung forward from his thick shoulders while he chewed — like an ox, yes.

Hillela had her first driving lesson on the day a republic was declared; the day on which one drives for the first time is like that on which one first found one’s balance on a bicycle — something never forgotten. Her cousin Clive had just passed his driving test. Stopping, starting, giggling at herself, with Clive sitting beside her she went up and down Olga’s long drive the whole afternoon, pausing only when admiring Jethro came over the lawn with the cream scones and tea, and finally ending her first journey only when Olga called out that drinks were being served, and the car must be ‘put to bed’. Very carefully Hillela drove it successfully into its bay beside Arthur’s two other cars.

Clive presented his pupil, an arm across her shoulders the way he would walk off a sports field with a fellow player. — You should just see how quickly Hillela caught on. She can even declutch properly, already. — By some quirk of heredity, he had Pauline’s black, demanding eyes, and the red, live mouth of the handsome male. No-one took a photograph. But Olga kept the image of the pair, the children belonging to her sister Ruthie and herself, so full of their little achievements, so happy, so innocent in their burgeoning, although she could never place the day, the year when it was imprinted.

Olga drove her niece back to Pauline’s house. She embraced her and held her hands before letting her leave the car. She seemed saddened by something she could never say — all children who are sent to boarding-school know this mood in adults, who have exiled them.

— I’ll see you next Monday, then, Olga. And thanks for a lovely day.—

Olga took comfort and forgiveness. — Oh yes, darling. And I know exactly what we’re going to buy. Monday — if everything’s all right. But I’m sure this whole business is over now.—

Nelson Mandela went Underground after the All-In African Conference Pauline had attended in Maritzburg. When he surfaced he was tried and imprisoned; and when he was taken from prison and tried once again, this time for treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment, no-one was allowed to record the speech he made from the dock; so the schoolgirl Hillela, present when her aunt played a tape-recording of his speech made at Maritzburg, was one of the few people to hear the sound of Mandela’s voice for many years, and perhaps to remember it. She had the opportunity to do so, anyway.

Through the high hum of the blood in adolescence, that distances the voices of adults, the tense discussions between Pauline and Joe continued as if taking place somewhere else and from time to time breaking in with a name or phrase overheard. It was cold; the snug of a sweater round the neck; a fire at night; it must have been June. Mandela was the name. From that Underground where he had gone he sent portents and messages like those the Latin writers Hillela was having to construe for the winter exams said came from the flight of birds or from sibyls speaking through the mouths of caves. Pauline supported Mandela’s call for an international economic boycott of South Africa. ‘Supported’, when obtruding from adult conversation at Olga’s, applied to whether or not a divorced wife received alimony from an ex-husband, or whether a relative was adequately provided for by her family. (For example Len — his daughter understood from oblique references — did not ‘support’ her.) ‘Supported’, in Pauline and Joe’s dialogue which plunged into tunnels of silence or absent attention to other things but never ceased, perhaps not even in dreams, meant that one or both of them thought they had found some sort of sign. Not the sure and certain instruction they had been waiting for, but something to which one could attach oneself, and feel the tug of history. Pauline supported economic boycott as a way out: for the thousands of blacks imprisoned and banned as, it seemed, the dismal only result of the politics of protest; for the whites, her friends, braver than herself, who were also banned or imprisoned as part of the same tactical failure Mandela admitted. And for herself, companion of the blacks’ route, with nowhere to go now that marches were banned, fearful of and not free to enter (a family, a husband’s surer contribution within legal opposition to consider) the unimaginable darkness of the Underground — for her, rescue from being stranded, from ending up white as her sister Olga was white.

There was the unaccountable doubt of Joe to set Pauline’s hands raking up through the electric crackle of her hair.

— But what are you talking about? Who will suffer? People who work in towns and have shoes on their feet and drink bottled beer and spray their armpits with deodorants? Or the ones on the farms and in the ‘homelands’ who live on dry mealie-meal? How much more can they suffer than they do already? What will boycotts deprive them of they don’t already lack? What’ve we got we couldn’t do without if it means bringing down this government — if we really mean we’re ready to sacrifice these wonderful privileges everyone’s afraid we’ll miss so much—

— And what do those rural people use to buy that bit of mealie-meal? Money sent home by the labourers in the mines and the factories, the construction workers. And if — if — what an hypothesis that is, when has economic boycott ever been fully imposed — and if American and European investment were to dry up, what would happen to those mines, factories, building projects? What happens to the men they employed, the men who sent back the money for mealie-meal?—

— You sound like a member of the Chamber of Commerce. I can’t believe it. As if you were trying to explain economics to a five-year-old. For Christ’ sake! I know the consequences as well as you do. They’ve made the calculation because there’s nothing else left to do — except kill. Don’t you see? They’ve made the decision — one generation more to suffer, but if it’s going to be worse than it’s ever been, it’ll be for something.—

— Pauline … you can’t even pass a starving cat in the street.—

— I’ll leam. I’ll learn.—

— No, my girl. Against your own good sense and reason, you actually imagine it quite differently. You dream the American bankers will all band together in the name of FREE-DOM for South African blacks and the boys in Pretoria will take down the flag and tear up the statute book.—

Pauline’s hair fell across her cheeks, flew back. — Hah, you’re the one who doesn’t face facts. Everything’s going to come right through the loopholes you manage to find in disgusting laws. The government stops up one mouse-hole, you find another. You work yourself to death, but what’s changed? What will you be at our Nuremberg? — In her face was the cruel pleasure, already distressing her while indulged, of turning her fears for Joe into hurt inflicted on him. — The one who tried to serve justice through the rule of law, or the one who betrayed justice by trying to serve it through the rule of unjust laws?—

Yet soon the controller of the four winds in that house was back in self-conflict again, a state felt by others in the house as a change in atmospheric pressure, in diet, rather than understood. The Swazi fruit bowl was often empty; Bettie borrowed the girls’ pocket-money to buy soap flakes on Rebecca’s ‘day’ because she had told Pauline ‘two time’, without result, that the supply had run out. Another sign had come from the Underground. It was a spear; the shape of the object itself, its clear and familiar associations (the dates of Kaffir Wars to be memorised, the mascot shields and assegais sold along Len’s roads in Rhodesia) pierced the half-attention with which the new phase of the Pauline-Joe dialogue was registered by the children. Umkhonto we Sizwe: translated for whites as ‘The Spear of the Nation’; the voice from nowhere and everywhere — Mandela’s — announced it.