Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

On his birthday they took wine along to the house where, lately, they often met the same group of black men. Rey didn’t take any notice of birthdays, but it was somebody-or-other’s birthday every few days at the agency, and Hillela had acquired a style of adult celebration from there. She wrapped both serious and jokey presents elaborately, bought wine and a cake. The sexy card he glanced at without comment. The witty present (a beard-comb stuck into the orange whiskers of a toy orangoutang) he unwrapped and ignored, and the real elephant-hide attaché case with gilt fittings he looked at, lying there, as one does at something one is confused to see anyone could think one would want.

The wine was drunk, anyway. That was all right. The black men were not those African National Congress Youth Leaguers she had met with him when first she had moved into the yard cottage. He was perhaps collecting other material; they talked closely with him, watching him, some with moving, responsive eyes, others with the in-turned glaze between lids that sometimes dropped, with which blacks keep themselves intact from the invasion of white presences. He was telling them about his ‘quiet trips’: whom he saw, where he had got himself into, in the Transkei, in Tembuland and Pondoland. He brought messages they tested in silence. She felt indignation welling in her as it did permanently, from another source, in him: Trust him! Trust him! But she was not expected to speak. Halfway through the evening a white man came in, apparently from having been only in some other part of the house. His murmured upper-class courtesies and round face that in its texture and tender colouring appeared to be stripped down of several outer skins, seemed to belong to an English climate, yet his recognition of the younger white man signalled acceptance to the blacks: —Of course — you interviewed me in Cape Town, at my house. Some Swedish or German paper …?—

The free-lancer changes journalistic alliances too often to be expected to remember or to answer. This one grasped the finger-hold of credentials to press his own questions both stoutly and humbly, in the manner of whites demonstrating loyal support for a black cause and aware of the superiority of the blacks’ inner circle of involvement, drawn by experience, language and blood. About ‘Qamata’—it had been described to him, in these rural inner circles in which his familiarity suggested he had been received, as a sort of church?

They took their time. There was a spokesman from out of the lazy, acquired deadpan: —It’s their god, there. He comes from the sea.—

— One of our gods, Xhosa gods… our religion we had, before.—

— I was told he was the ‘ruler of the spirits’, a kind of Pantokrator … top man among the gods …?

— Yes, ruler of our other spirits… them all. Those country people, they still believe those things.—

The journalist, with a movement of legs and behind, shifted his chair nearer the spokesman. — Or believe in them again? Weren’t they all dosed with Christianity at school?—

Shrugs, and everyone waited for someone else to speak.

— Many people were Christians, but they kept the old customs.—

— Oh I know — I’ve been among the young abakwetha hidden away in the circumcision camps. That’s not quite the same thing. I mean, Qamata, as I understand, isn’t a hero who once lived, a warrior from precolonial or early colonial times. The old days. He’s a different thing, different kind of inspiration, isn’t he? A spirit that makes people fearless? Tells them what to do? White people are saying Poqo is like Mau Mau — of course you know that, it’s inevitable. But is the idea that Qamata … an African god, a Xhosa god is something that can chase away the god of submission, the Christian god who says ‘thou shalt not kill’, and make killing a sacrifice for freedom?—

— What’s new with that? The Christian god’s killed plenty, plenty! Here and in the world! He gives his blessing to the wars of white people.—

— You’re right! So how will he give it to blacks! That’s where Qamata comes in.—

The spokesman’s broad, relaxed chest, naked under a football jersey, heaved to life. He kept everyone waiting while he dropped his head to one side, rolled it against the sofa back. — The Qamata thing … it’s really among the rural people, man, you must understand that. It’s not policy. But regionally … the people work out a lot of things for themselves, we don’t interfere unless …—

— But it’s useful, it brings people together where political concepts like constitutions and programmes don’t reach? — The lover put his fist on his breast.

— If you want to know about the Xhosa religion, man, you should talk to a guy like Prof here, I don’t go along too much with that kind of stuff.—

— I just want to understand what I’ve seen, what I’ve been told. I don’t want to misinform anybody — and that’s for your sake… You don’t want people believing, that Mau Mau story. Then tell me—

A small man who had been listening with distended nostrils, an alertness displaced from his ears, blew words like cigarette smoke across her face. — Let them believe. Kenyatta won. He’s getting the country. Without Kimathi, the Queen of England would still have it. Let them believe.—

Rey was laughing, rubbing his taut palms along his thighs. — Qamata! — He drew himself into a knot of the white man, the man they called Prof, the spokesman and a very young man whose upper body danced up and down as he tried to interject and sometimes laughed harshly with frustration. The white girl was accustomed to being left to occupy or entertain herself until, as she saw it, ‘his book’ had garnered what was wanted for it. The black men around her began talking in their own language. It grew long, the night of the uncelebrated birthday. She dozed off, sitting on the sofa with the cadences and exclamations of an African language flying round her, accumulating in layers between the layers of smoke, wavering away and towards her ears; the lullaby without words, for her, surrounding all her childhood. The platteland towns where the commercial traveller took his little sweetheart, the Rhodesian boarding-school, the rich aunt’s villa at the sea, the old church path where children sang picking their way past excreta, the shop window where schoolgirls danced, the kitchen where a former trumpet player with the Extra Strongs took refuge.

When they got back at two in the morning the cottage was in darkness as they had left it, but the door stood open as if they were expected. He felt round the jamb for the light switch. Again, there was the shock of light on a disorder; a blinding exposure. This time, it was she herself who called out: Rey! And he was beside her, but could not make what was there fly back to the way it was before — clothes, paper-spewing suitcases, books, the stuffing from eviscerated cushions — as a film run in reverse. There was no-one waiting. This was confirmed at once; the cottage was small. Whoever had ransacked it had found or not found what they wanted and gone. But this time, this exposure, was different. What had been turned up in the middle of the night had no context of other lives to resorb it. They went back to the house they had left and threw pebbles at the windows until the gentle-complexioned white man came down in a handsome towelling gown and took them in. Next day they went to stay with other friends-of-friends. Every day, her lover believed, must be lived at a further remove from the cottage. Nothing was ever to be restored of the life she lived there. Only the object that he himself had thrown aside, the toy orang-outang with the beard-comb, had become something in place, lying on the floor where it was dropped among its torn gold wrappings as if it had drawn down everything about it.