Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Newspaper cuttings and smuggled reports on the Lilliesleaf trial were coming to the office. — It’s a white man who betrayed everything, all of us! Terrible, terr-ible. That’s what I always said, we whites in the movement must be ve-ery careful, if anything happens through one of us, what is our position with blacks? Who’s going to accept us? We going to isolate ourselves, we not going to be trusted ever again … I thought when I met that Gotz fellow … I don’t know … He was too eager to tell you all about himself, make a clean breast of it, you know— ek is ’n ware Afrikaner, plaas seuntjie, maar —like some religious conversion he wanted you to be convinced of. Ag, man, I felt like telling him, I’m an Afrikaner, too, plaas meisie , it’s not such a big deal that you’ve come over to the movement. But some of them, they did think he was a catch for us—

— Meantime, they were on the hook — Christa’s soprano distress was counterpointed by the low, black bass.

— Oh my god, they were. And the way he went for the women! Well, you see what one of them let herself in for … Oh he tried something with me, but I never liked him, I never trusted him, he was clever all right, he smelled out that I didn’t and then he kept clear. Terr-ible. Terrible fellow. And look what he’s done. A white’s blown the whole High Command.—

The volubility of high spirits that was Christa had changed to hysteria. In the silence of the black men on the old sofa she struggled against some kind of responsibility that suddenly had come between them and her.

— And in Umkhonto? There’s infiltration there already. And Lilliesleaf, you’ll see, as the State brings them into the witness box, there’re blacks who were mixed up with informing there, too. Just the same, Christa. A thing we don’t know how to deal with. A pro-blem. — In this company the euphemism took on weight with a long, round African O.

— But not right among the High Command. Close to them, eating with them, talking to them about important things with a tape-recorder going under his clothes or wherever it was, even under a pillow in bed, ugh, it disgusts me. Look, Njabulo, ever since I read that this morning my hands have been shaking — look, Elias—

— No, man, traitors are traitors. He’s right. But the brothers at home will know what to do with them, don’t worry.—

— With the High Command in jail? With life, if they don’t get hanged? Not worry?—

— Anyway, those bastards who put them there, they won’t live to get old.—

— Who’s going to get Gotz in a location alley, the way they’ll get the black ones? I’ll bet he’ll live a long life of promotion in the police or become a successful private detective, spying for divorce cases. I know the Boere . He can use his tape-recorder under some more pillows.—

— Is there anything new from Umtata and Engcobo?—

— I don’t know, I didn’t see …—

— Oh I asked Johnny. He showed something from the Star , just said the usual, ‘peasant unrest’ still going on among the Tembus. ‘Agitators’ are still at work.—

— Man! Tax was almost doubled for us there from nineteen-fifty-five up to nineteen-fifty-nine. You know? Ever since, how we have been suffering! You remember Dalindyebo’s meeting in sixty-one against the rehabilitation scheme? That thing that took our land and pushed us tight together like cattle? A thousand chiefs came to that meeting. By the time I was grown up, Influx Control wouldn’t let us out to find jobs. My uncle was chief in our place, he didn’t want us forced back into the reserves, so the government made another man chief in his place. They do those things! My uncle was the one who said, They just want us chiefs to sign a piece of paper that says, destroy me, baas . He said, Let them destroy us without our signatures.—

— You know, we should have been better organized in the Western Cape, man. Too many Tembus who were working on contract around Cape Town joined Poqo instead of us.—

— Well! What do you know about the unions? ANC-affiliated unions were pretty active, I was working in one. — Christa shed her self-assumed burden at the turn towards a subject where the integrity of her contribution could not be questioned, even by herself.

Among such talk her protégée must have felt at ease, even if she were an impostor in its implied status. She had listened for years to people talking about these people; now they were real, the daily strategies of survival preoccupied them also, as these did her. There was much grumbling talk to which, at least, she could contribute, of where to get ordinary comforts they had taken for granted under oppression at home — soap and razor blades, batteries and insecticide sprays, in short supply here. People from the Command office might not meet these men on Tamarisk, but they kept close to them beneath barriers of sophistication and education through that other place in themselves nothing could alienate, where no bane of conquest, law or exile had ever touched them — the relationships codified in their language, the common embrace of their own tongue. People from the office ran classes in political and general subjects in the camp, and often one or the other would come on to Njabulo and Ma Sophie’s to continue a point of discussion that would ravel into small-talk in English and their own language. Johnny Kgomani was there a few times, when the girl was; the one who had swum out with bad news. — We are spoiled, man, that’s what it is. We all had it too soft. Wilkinson’s Sword, passes in our pockets, first-class prisons … — He watched faces waver from solemn acceptance or resentment to laughter. He had a way of drawing his lips to a line and giving a twitch to his nostrils, the skull mocking himself within the tight modelling of his face. Sophie translated for Christa and Hillela what the laughter was about.

There were not enough tin spoons or forks to go round at the Manakas’. Everyone got a plate piled by Ma and ate neatly African-style with their fingers, balling stiff pap the way a dung-beetle efficiently rolls together its cargo with the tips of prehensile legs. It was easier to learn to do that than to handle chopsticks at a Commissioner Street Chinese restaurant; and further than a few streets away from the embroidered place-mats, Bavarian crystal glasses and Zitronencréme where Hillela had herself nicely fixed up, now. There was not much chatter to join, round Udi’s table. He sometimes went out to dinner but the impression left with her was that while she was staying with him they had always been alone at meals; the servant, with that air servants have (even Bettie, Jethro) of suppressing judgments that await their time, passed behind the two chairs, presenting each dish silently to the master of the establishment before dispensing the interloper’s share. After she had been occupying her large, cool room for a few days, Udi asked her not to continue making her own bed in the mornings. — Mohammed thinks you don’t sleep in it. It upsets him.—

Her laughter, her guitar, the slap of her sandals, the clear-struck notes of her voice — each time these sounded they seemed to make a splash into the stillness of those rooms. — Does he think I liked sleeping on the floor so much I can’t give it up?—

— I don’t think he knows you slept on the floor. Though I could be quite wrong … in the kitchens, they know everything about all of us, it’s all picked up in the markets.—

— So where does he think I sleep?—

The ferny, magnified lashes moved dismissingly. Udi did not quite smile. — That’s the trouble.—

Arnold had warned her. But if this was the to-be-expected approach, broached in a European way she was supposed to interpret, she could always appear not to understand. And it would not be Udi’s way to be obliged to be explicit; although there were many things she did not know or understand that he did explain. Why wouldn’t he get up out of his eternal chair and turn off his eternal Bach and Penderecki (the latter had to be explained, his music had not been among the records in Joe’s collection) and come along to the Manakas’? He had said Christa’s friends were his friends, any time . Christa had invited him again and again. The flat was only just down the road, in the old part of town.