Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

It is unlikely that Hillela will have remembered at any time the exaggerated emotions and highly-coloured scroll of unrolled life that absorbed her totally when she was seventeen. It is the torn streamers that were to come back to her: killing is killing, violence is pain and death .

Sasha worked in a bottle store that winter’s school holidays and his cousin and her current band of friends came in one lunchtime to buy beer and a yellow concoction they had a craze for, called — the sort of useless detail that is all that remains of a period — Neptune’s Nectar, made of cane spirit and synthetic passion-fruit flavouring. Sasha, stacking wine bottles, lifted his head from behind boxes only to meet Hillela’s eyes (she gave him an imitation of himself for Carole’s sisterly amusement, later) and then disappeared as if he had not seen the band. For her it was the old game of shop, from the occasions when all the cousins played together. The band surrounded him. It was his turn as shopkeeper; but Sasha refused to serve them. — You’re under age.—

Sasha changed so much each time he was away at school; once it was his voice, now it was his jaw which, anticipating the man’s face it would one day support, had set out the structure of a squared chin dented where the two halves of his face had joined in Pauline’s womb. It always took a few days for Hillela to forget what he had looked like the last time he was home; to find him again.

— Oh don’t be wet. — She balanced between irritation and wariness, and he knew it, knew Hillela. By claiming family influence over him, she would gain prestige if he gave in, but if he refused, she would on the contrary be associated with his ‘wetness’.

— Go and ask one of the others. — He indicated, eyes on his uninterrupted activity, two men attending to customers along the aisles of bottles glaucous as cabochon rubies and emeralds.

— The hell with it, let’s push off.—

— There’s another place right on the corner.—

Hillela stood willing him to turn round and do her bidding. Two girls and a boy began pulling bottles at random out of cases and clinking them onto shelves all around Sasha, pushing and laughing. — Let’s give him a hand, man. — Slow’s a funeral.—

Hillela looked at them as if she had just walked into the shop and had had her attention to her own errand momentarily distracted by an incident taking place there. The cashier’s head was turned; the pudgy ears of the man behind the counter responded with shopkeepers’ alertness, specific to petty theft as a hunting dog’s to gunshot. They were Hillela’s friends; Sasha could have turned, now, and cried out— Hillela …! To save his pocket-money job, schoolboy well-fed by Pauline and Bettie, being educated for higher occupations at a school open to all races? (There were things Sasha was cursed, from the beginning, to know beyond his years.) Or to give her ‘friends’ the satisfaction of confirming that he didn’t have his share of their mindless boldness, happily, swaggeringly defying harmless conventions of behaviour while remaining perfectly safe within the terrible conventions of this country. Hillela! He didn’t cry. She didn’t hear.

Hillela walked out of the shop. The manager came down the aisle, his male breasts spread by shoulders drawn back authoritatively. — These are your friends? I don’t want them here.—

— Calm down, old man. We don’t want to be here either, old man. — They talked all over him agilely. Looked for Hillela, but she was gone; out they sauntered.

Only when they had left did Sasha commit his kind of disloyalty to her, that she would never know. — I don’t know any of them. They walked in and started.—

That evening brother, sister and cousin gathered in the girls’ room; Hillela was at home, for once. Carole was grateful and shyly expressed her pleasure in whatever small ways she could when Hillela stayed in; they did not listen to, but she played again and again a record singing about love in a hoarse, laryngitic style that had become her unconfessed mating call. Carole was working in the library of a newspaper; Hillela was a temporary hand in a depot for a photographic laboratory. Like rookies in an army, these recruits to the world of daily bread-winning compared and gossiped about their holiday jobs. — I’d rather dig ditches. Anything’s better than selling people stuff for more money than you’ve paid for it. — The great-grandson of a Lithuanian pedlar was generations away from his progenitor’s necessity; and he was also Pauline’s son. — What about writing out dockets for little rolls of film all day long—‘Why aren’t they ready?’, ‘This print’s got a scratch’, “There’s something wrong with the colours’.—Well at least developing film is a service, it’s doing something for the money — But Hilly’s not the one who does it, is she? She’s just in between. — Most of the people in the big cities are just that. Taking money, handing over something they know nothing about. I’d rather dig ditches.—

The record had come to an end and Carole glided to place the arm at the start again without the other two noticing. Hillela addressed her male cousin’s lowered eyes and the mouth that adults interpreted as sulky but was an expression of need for answers they could not give him. — Most people know nothing about anything they do. About why they do anything. It’s just because they feel like it … it’s fun. Doesn’t mean anything. They just go ahead.—

If that might have signalled the surfacing of what had happened at the bottle store in her lunch hour, a confession or a defiance, how could one tell, with Hillela — incidents of that magnitude in the adolescent world which would have caused a family rumpus at Olga’s, where political passions were the politics of family relationships, at Pauline’s could not expect to attract any attention. Certainly not in comparison with what was about to happen in her house that night. Before Sasha could respond — if he would have responded at all — Bettie came in (Bettie never knocked on the children’s doors, even though they were grown up, now). — There’s someone who wants Miss Pauline. I told him she’s out but he says no, then he wants someone else to come.—

— Who is it? Man or woman?—

— A boy. (Bettie’s way of indicating a black man.) I think I see him sometime here before … He won’t say the name. — She was used to Pauline’s semi-clandestine black visitors; pulled a you-know-the-kind face: these people always got money out of Pauline, while she had to work for hers.

Sasha followed her, but came back at once. — He says he knows you, Carole. I’ve never seen the guy.—

He sat at the kitchen table with his elbow resting on it and the chair turned away, legs stretched and spread, smiling, a man in the self-confidence of his rotundity and charm. It was as if the three young people were arriving before him by appointment, for an interview. He leaned forward and held out a hand. — Carole, how’s it? Your mummy not here? You remember me, mmh?—

Carole’s voice rose to cover embarrassment at Bettie’s confining a friend of the family to the kitchen. — Oh yes! But come inside!—

— Donsi. Donsi Masuku. And I’ve seen your sister, too. So this’s the young man of the family—

In the livingroom he made himself comfortable. — When do you think she’ll come, your mother? Okay, whenever it is, that’s all right — I’ll wait. What’s your name? Sasha. Sa-sha. That’s a Russian name, ay? Sasha, can you get me a beer — why don’t we have a beer together? What kind of records have you got — I heard some music going … You got any Duke? How I love that man. I used to play trumpet, I used to play drums, one time … I was even with a group. Did you ever hear of the Extra Strongs — the name comes from those peppermint sweets, you know them, XXX Mints. Yes. That was our group. We took part in the Big Band shows, Soweto, Cape Town, Durban. We cut a disc. Old seventy-eight. One day if I find it, I’ll bring it to play for you, Carole, you’ll see. But nowadays I haven’t got the wind (slapping his belly) or it’s got stuck there inside (making them laugh at him). Haven’t got the time, maybe haven’t got the heart for it … Now — come on, Donsi, what’s the matter with you, man! Must never lose the heart, you know that — I’m telling you, kids, never lose the heart, because if you lose that … they’ve got you!—