Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Pauline and Joe walked in on him dancing with Carole and Hillela. Pauline’s eyes had a moment of stillness, hesitation, when she saw who he was: one of those whose followers said things, now, she had read out aloud. I want them to call us baas. Their wives are going to wash the clothes for our wives. I don’t want to be equal with Europeans. We left the African National Congress because we saw Europeans among us . But the innocent bodily warmth, the faint odour of black beneficed the house, absolved whiteness; she came forward in irresistible pleasure of release. Joe offered more beer and then excused himself; he had work to finish. — You legal men do your best for us, we know. — Joe smiled his creased smile. The compliment tossed at him was a convention of guestly graciousness, total insincerity innocent of critical innuendo: the delightful man knew Joe was aware he was an initiator of a move that blacks should not take bail and should refuse defence in the white man’s courts against the white man’s laws. — Lovely kids you’ve got. They’ve been giving me a good time. Really nice. And she can play the guitar — this one!—

— I’m so glad they looked after you. How are you, Donsi? Good god, you come out of detention looking as if you’ve been on holiday — I saw your name listed in the paper and I was so pleased … but I didn’t know where you’d be — somebody told me your wife and the children had gone to her mother somewhere in Natal.—

— Yes, mealie-pap, mealie-pap, nothing but mealie-pap, you put on weight, they fatten you up for the kill.—

— Well, you were never exactly dainty.—

— But it was muscle, you know? I’ve always been keen on body-building … but in there, man! Look — can I talk to you now? — He leaned in a swift sketch of urgency and confidentiality, then looked up beaming dismissal at the three young people. — Bye-bye girls, and thanks, hey. Bye, Sasha.—

As they left the room sharing the mood of his good nature he was already speaking at a different pitch, his chair pulled close to Pauline. — Bongi and our kids are there in the car. Outside your house.—

In the passage, Carole stopped. — All this time, in the car! Ma’ll be furious with me. Why didn’t he say … — Her brother, at once irritated by his sister’s subservience to their mother, left them, and her cousin soothed her by closing their bedroom door on the adults and making her giggle: —Can you just imagine Pauline sitting for an hour in a dark car while Joe was inside dancing?—

They read in bed. Then Pauline was there, as a window flies open in a storm. — Now listen — you are not to mention this to anyone. D’you understand? Anyone at all. Give me the extra blankets out of your cupboard. You don’t need two pillows, Carole … They’re going to sleep here for a couple of hours and then they’ll be gone. If ever anyone mentions his name, you’ve never heard of him, all right?—

The wind of pursuit, of exposure, the wind snuffed by police dogs entered the frail shelter of personal talismans, blew on the Imari cats and the records of love songs. In the night, there was the refugee wail of a baby; very early, the unmistakable sounds of Pauline, her pace, her pattern of movements producing clinks and clatters in the kitchen, accompanying dreams with the sound-track of consciousness. Carole probably woke as well, but did not speak. Before she sank back to sleep again, or perhaps in the precious shallows before it was time to emerge for school, Hillela heard with the obscure anguish of the subconscious, Donsi Masuku’s laugh. Happy dangerous laugh, affirmation that, like the baby’s cry of protest, could prick the ears of straining dogs and vibrate the antennae of police cars.

Sasha had slept in the livingroom. The wife had neatly made up again Sasha’s bed after she and her husband had occupied it. There were still-warm places on the rug where the black children had been bedded down. One of them must have been a boy; a small toy car with one wheel missing was left where it had rolled. Sasha did not hoard souvenirs, posters and photographs the way the girls did. When he was away at school, there was nothing of him in his room at home that could not as well have belonged to the household in common: books, chess set, squash racket. He rescued the little car from some other small boy’s childhood, and kept it on his desk.

The house had the air of having been suddenly quit. Joe always left early; Pauline was not there. The night visitors were gone; Carole went into the yard to feed the cat: —Their car’s still here. — A horn of hair stood up on her brother’s unbrushed head. She twirled it, he batted at her hand. — You look like a unicorn. No, a cross rhino. — Leave me. — But the girls’ teasing attention was a kind of homage. His cousin came to the breakfast table in pyjamas. Her softness rose and fell here and there against the pink cotton knit, thinned by many launderings, as she helped herself to jam or juice. She spoke with her mouth full, smiling and gesturing, instinctively choosing her moment. — You should have seen him yesterday, when a couple of us went to say hello — he stuck up his neck behind a pile of boxes just like an ostrich, you know that snooty look they have, looking down at you.—

While the family were eating the early supper Bettie had cooked, they heard a familiar car rattle into the yard; Pauline’s imminent presence was, as always, like the turn of a tide. Expressions changed. Then she was among them, her hair smelling of dust, a streak of red from inner corner to pupil in one of her great eyes. No-one asked where she had been. — What has Bettie given you? Chicken and rice and potatoes — nice and starchy. Oh, I bought a box of avocados on the road — Carole, let’s have a salad — there’s a dear. — Sasha was suddenly smiling at his mother in amazement, amusement, in love; another benediction on the house. He left the table and came back with a glass of wine for her. — I don’t know if it’s all right. There’s a bottle open in the fridge.—

Someone must have come to fetch the car Masuku left behind. Next evening Carole remarked that it was gone, to Sasha and Hillela, who seemed to have forgotten it was ever there.

Pauline kept the mood, like a heightened colour rising to the cheeks, of having allowed herself to act purely on the impulse of her nature, which was simply to give. Principles, political allegiances with their attendant reservations were the rational and intellectual restraints laid upon this instinct; she revered them, and so the mood alternated with a kind of nervous shame. She had commandeered all the money in the house that night — her own, Sasha’s first week’s pay, even got Joe to drive to his office at midnight to fetch whatever might be in the petty cash kept there — to give to the family in flight. The spectacle of the woman with her open-mouthed sleeping baby on her back, trooping into the kitchen, the two other children dressed for the journey to exile in white knee-socks, as if for the only occasions the young woman had to go by, roused in Pauline some sort of atavistic consciousness of like journeys she herself with her children could have been propelled on — the panic of pogroms, the screech of cattle trains leaving a last station, the crawl of the homeless along the roads of war. Alone in the kitchen at five in the morning, she cooked food for the family to take along; she prepared a suitcase of medicaments and clothes. Without comment, at her request, Joe helped Donsi Masuku siphon petrol from his car to fill the tank of hers.

Bettie had found cupboards left in disorder, the kitchen raided. Pretending not to know, she demanded where the big plastic container was. And the flask to keep the breakfast coffee hot?