Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

— Sasha knows the drill. — They were travelling in the car in which Pauline had taken the Masuku family to escape over the border. Police investigations into such things often took a long time when they were preparing a case pertaining to state security and involving many people. Both were thinking about this, but said nothing. When Pauline was not driving there was no other claim to distract her attention, and foreboding built within her a whole construct of consequences from a single act, made by her, it now seemed on impulse, that would trap the considered, continuing usefulness of Joe and his kind. She experienced a new guilt; through her, hands that should never touch, eyes that should never see the papers in Joe’s modest study might have been going through them.

That was the first room in the house she went to, and there was some evidence of disorder — Joe’s rug was not under the desk, files were on the floor, the chess set was not in its usual place. She could not wait to verify if anything had been taken but ran at once to be reassured that the children were all right, that Sasha was in his room.

Joe was already on the telephone, waking up his partner’s wife.

Coming back from that room, Pauline waited a full minute, standing there looking at Joe, not hearing what he was saying, unable to understand anything, neither what she had just seen nor the purport of his expression as he asked questions and received answers.

And in the days that followed, which was one to think about, how could one grapple with the one, the always-to-be-expected crisis, while the other … how was one to think of anything but the other? Joe had no choice. He was preparing applications, making representations, following procedures and looking (always looking) for the loopholes in Acts through which he could reach the detained man, while at the office doing the work of both of them. He phoned Pauline at odd moments of day, as a busy man will find time to do usually only to keep contact with a mistress. A few murmured, elliptical words, to which the response was equally laconic. Everything all right? Anything happened?

Yes. Nothing.

After Pauline had pushed past Joe that night, gone over to the bed and hit Sasha across the face, hit him for the first time in her life, hit him twice, jolting his head first this way then that, what could be all right. But outside that room where he lay naked, smelling of sex, with his sister — outside that house, all over the country, there were parents whose sons were in prison, whose sons had had to flee, like Donsi Masuku, and whom they would never see again.

For the first time, what there was could not be talked over ‘frankly and openly’ between the parents and children. There was no formula of confidence that would do. Pauline and Joe searched for one, as he searched for loopholes in the law. The attraction that had overcome taboo was something no-one could be asked to explain. Could one ask the fifteen-year-old Carole if she had noticed anything about — what? Could a father collude with his daughter in the old adult euphemism for sexual relations, ‘something between’ her siblings? The incident — how would one phrase it to Sasha, to the girl — was it an incident, a piece of sexual bravado (there was the empty wine bottle as a clue) in the defining family’s absence, or was it something—

— Oh worse, worse. — Pauline stopped Joe. — Love, then, incest, going on who knows how long.—

Joe told her again and again, she shouldn’t call Hillela Sasha’s ‘sister’.

— Not in actual terms of kinship, no, but in fact, how they’ve been brought up, how we live, they are brother and sister, they are, they know they are. And she is his first cousin. My sister shares my blood, doesn’t she! Their mothers are one!—

— In some countries even marriages between cousins were not illegal. Until very recently. Where your grandfather was born, lots of Jews married cousins. Not only secular, but religious law allowed it. — Joe offered the information not to comfort his wife and himself, but to defuse emotion that they might apply reason to the unspeakable.

In the end, Joe closed the door in his study as was customary when he and Sasha wanted to be left in peace to play chess, and said to him as Len once said to Hillela: —I don’t understand, either. — He was concurring, perhaps, with the state of mind of Pauline, who never before had excluded herself from any discussion concerning her son. — We’re prepared to accept that you yourself do not understand. So let us put it behind us. Forget it.—

Such abject desolation burned over the boy that Joe sensed this like a fever emanating from him.

— Come. Set up the men. I’ve had a hellish day in court. Let’s play.—

Sasha would go back to school, but Hillela would remain there, in the house.

Carole, younger and impressionable, shared a room with her. Already the parents could sense a protective hostility in Carole: ganging up for, rather than with, the old triumvirate, because Sasha was withdrawn, he spoke to the two girls only when others were present, in the conventional exchanges at table, and Hillela — no-one had confronted Hillela with anything. One of the things Hillela had done — Sasha and Hillela had done — was to take away from Pauline the single area where Pauline was certain always to know what to do, the area where she had been sure nothing could shock her, nothing elude understanding or alienate love. Joe had to shut himself up, alone, with Sasha; she could not bring herself to take on Hillela. When Hillela came over quietly — astonishingly — to kiss her goodnight as usual (this was a house where affection was displayed, normal emotions had never been suppressed) every evening of the very week that followed what had happened, Pauline touched that young cheek with lips like charred paper. Hillela went to her holiday job, Carole to hers, and in the evenings, if Hillela did not go out with those friends of hers (and god knows who they were, what ideas she had picked up from them and brought home) she was shut up with Carole in their shared room in schoolgirl intimacy — creaming faces, squeezing blackheads, pushing back cuticles; whatever they were doing or saying concealed by the music they played. Some of the nights of that week Pauline wept in the dark beside Joe, after they had talked in bed about the things that really mattered in the world, the clandestine investigations Joe was making, through contacts in the police, to find out whether his partner was going to be charged with subversion, and the progress of the trial of others, already in session. He patted her back, stroked her hip; uncertain whether it would be a good thing to go on to make love to her. Once, when his caress of comfort began to change, she spoke. — I have the feeling Carole knew all along …—

— Oh surely not. Hillela will have told her? Not possible. I can’t believe that — He did not say it: even of Hillela.

— Not told , nobody will have said anything, but you know how she adores the girl. More than any sister. Sensed it. Whatever Hillela does is always right, for her. You remember the Durban business. How she lied for her?—

It was because of Carole that a decision had to be made. Hillela had caused Pauline to strike her son, Hillela had used him as a man while he was still his mother’s son, Hillela, made a sister out of Pauline’s love for a sister, had misused the status granted her, but it was because of Carole that the petty domestic normality of the house, the goodnight kisses and cosy chess games that persisted binder danger and political upheaval, could not be allowed to return under this kind of threat. Carole was exposed; even supposing what happened were to have been an isolated incident, and when Sasha came back from school for other holidays it would not be necessary to wonder, every time one went out for a few hours, whether one should have locked grown children in their rooms … Carole was exposed.