Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

But she came back. This dancer was not one to make mistakes. Trust her! — that was what others said of her. She came back and asked for soda and ice, took a cube out of the drink with her fingers and passed it over her forehead and neck. When the young man approached again to take her away she shook her head, smiling as if he knew very well why she was smiling; no, no .

They walked on the dark beach again, late. A fine luminous mist made an element neither air nor sea; they could barely see each other. He did not speak and — a small vessel calling out at sea — she spoke only once. — I wish I had my guitar. — He knew she was happy.

In the room with its ridiculous harem-bed he found Hillela lying plumb in the middle, a sheet over her shape up to the armpits. He came out of the bathroom in pyjamas. She gave an exaggerated sigh at her luxury. Then she shifted over to one side of the bed. He stood there with the spare bedding he had picked up from a chair. She patted the empty side of the bed.

He went over to the higher section of the room and started arranging the bedding on the floor. When he turned her hand was lying palm up, rejected, where she had patted the bed.

He came and picked up a pillow for himself. But could not walk away and leave her: her generosity, her honesty. He sat down on the bed and slowly took the sunburned empty hand. Her head was sunk deeply in the billows of down, her curly hair bleached the colour of bronze-brown seaweed and sticky with damp. Against cheeks shiny, reddened and slightly puffy with the fever of sun her eyes were glistening convex black in whose expression he saw only himself, himself as she must be seeing him.

She smiled, in spite of that. — Mohammed won’t know.—

He kissed the hand with his sad, marked lips and, not familiar with the old-fashioned gesture, she casually pulled the hand away. On his back, laying himself out straight beside the body of the girl that was volume and weight and softness, the angle of each flexed and relaxed limb rounded-off by the soft bed as a Matisse odalisque has no angles or Picassos of a certain period have no joints in the continuous curved lines of bodies in a bacchanal, he took the hand again. The odd-assorted couple were now figures on a tomb; he put an end to the image in himself by gently coming alive to turn and give her a child’s goodnight kiss on the cheek. But it was a long time since one of her surrogate parents sent her to sleep like that; she turned obediently, as a woman, so that he kissed her on the mouth, and was received by her mouth. She drew close to him and although she did not touch him with her hands, her body laid its caress along his side. For a long time he stroked her hair while she waited for the next well-known moves in love-making, and he waited to speak.

— Hillela. — Try out the possibility by pronouncing her, invoking her. Take again the hand, the empty hand he could not fill. — I can’t, Hillela. Since my wife died it’s finished.—

Of course he saw the girl misunderstood: so this was the famous love you read about in books, the eternal faithfulness, remote as the love religious people know for a god you can’t see or touch.

— It’s not out of some vow or conviction, some such nonsense. It’s not at all even what Petra would want. She wasn’t that kind, trying for promises ‘you’ll never marry another woman’. My god no. From time to time, we both … we had others, and neither of us made a fuss. It wasn’t important for us while we were together; it only concerned each of us separately, you know. So it’s not that.—

— Oh it doesn’t matter. — The phrase had served for the discovery there was only one bed; it served just as well for the decision that there was to be no obligation to make love. And in its banality — its innocence! yes — it absolved from humiliation, from loss of manhood, even from the pricklings of impotent desire, the shame of wanting what one was not able to take. He did not have to repeat with this child who by some instinct understood the male, loved men as one is allowed to say a man ‘loves women’, the panting and seesawing and desperate, hang-head feebleness (oh to take a knife and cut the useless thing off) that the bodies of bought women had abetted while bored and pitying, despising. Her ordinary little phrase brought about something else, if she could not — bless her — bring sexual relief. He could tell her. You could tell her anything; it suddenly became possible just because Hillela was there, lying beside him. — It’s because I killed her.—

There could be no experience available to make it possible for the girl to deal with such a statement. She corrected him mechanically from a source that was all she had: something mentioned by Christa.:—No, no, she died in an accident.—

— Yes. I was driving and I killed her. It was just before dawn and I’d insisted we drive all night to get home from a trip. I must’ve fallen asleep a moment, she didn’t have the seat-belt on, she was asleep. She never woke up, she was flung out and when I looked for her everywhere, the road, the bushes, she was dead, there. I’d hit a buck that must have jumped out into the road. Headlights blind them. She was quite dead. And the buck was still alive. Dying, but alive. I had no gun to shoot it. I’d killed her but I couldn’t kill the buck. I sat with the buck, because she was dead … and the buck knew there was someone there with it. That night was over, light came, and it looked at me all the time while her eyes were closed. It was a female, too. It looked at me until I slowly saw the sight going from its big eyes. I can tell you, I followed it wherever it was going, dying out. I followed all the way. And then. They were both dead and I was hours alone on the road with them.—

He was stroking her hair again, comforting her for what he had told her.

— I’ve never seen a dead person.—

— I know. I can see it in your face.—

— But you didn’t kill her. That’s not killing.—

— I was driving, I’m alive, I killed her. Dead asleep. And the buck, the buck was witness. My body seems to know. So there it is. Since then, my body calls me murderer.—

She made no routine protestations, offered no platitudes of sympathy. They lay a while; what had now been put into words for the first time must find its level in consciousness. Then she got up and went over to the miniature refrigerator and bent to choose. The short spotted cotton shift she wore hitched over her rump as she came back to the bed with a bottle whose label’s lettering had run with condensation. — I think it’s beer. — She took a swig and handed it to him. — You should go and live somewhere else. Then it will be all right again.—

He pulled himself up against the pillows to drink. — The murderer can’t leave the scene of the crime.—

— Udi, it wasn’t this road?—

— No. — But she would never know; intimacy and confidence come and go between an odd-assorted couple like the moon passing in and out of clouds.

She sat cross-legged on the bed, schoolgirl style.

— I’d go away if something terrible like that happened to me. Somebody of mine dead. Nothing really terrible’s happened to me, so I suppose … Something that did — something I did — it seemed awful at the time, everyone said how awful … but … not like dying! D’you know why I had to leave home? Where I lived with one of my aunts? My cousin and I used to make love. He was a bit younger than I was. For a long time, we made love.—

— A real cousin? First cousin?—

— Our mothers are sisters.—

— How did it come about?—:

— My fault. — The moon passed behind a cloud again. He respected that. He leaned over and put his arm round her, shared the beer turn-about. Hillela choked because she had begun to laugh while drinking. — When they found us. — She gasped, laughing. — It was like the three bears. Who’s been sleeping in my bed?—