Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Leopard skins mounted on scalloped green felt, dead snakes converted into briefcases, elephants turned into ivory filigree carvings, bracelets, necklaces and paper knives, and table-legs with a copper rim decorating what was once a pachyderm foot — the AFRICAN ARTS ATRIUM did not sell powdered rhino horn, however; that sort of disgusting stuff was for local people in the magic and medicine trade down the road. Hillela wore—‘modelled’, as Archie Harper, the old Africa hand of a special kind, who employed her, insisted — the dashikis or galabiya-inspired dresses of African cloth her employer had made up by his ‘connection’ of Indian piece-workers who sat at their machines on the earth pavements all over the old town. The long dresses became bizarrely slit — some from the first vertebra to the small of the back, as well as to the thigh on both sides — during the period of her employment, because Archie found his assistant-cum-model so ‘innocently inspiring’. He was not himself attracted to women, but had the homosexual’s shrewd and kindly understanding of how they like to make themselves attractive to men: this girl (a real poppet; he knew from the beginning she would go far) inside his one-of-a-kind creations was the best way to encourage customers to clear the racks.

Business was torpid (—No tourists where you can’t buy contraceptives or whisky, my dear—) but this expatriate, an Englishman, couldn’t leave, either. He was quickly on girlish confiding terms with his assistant: he wouldn’t leave his two young Arab lovers, twin brothers they were, he’d brought them up in his own house since they were fourteen. — You will never find anything ne-early like them in England. Ne-ever. Guardsmen with smelly feet who’re only after what’s in your pocket, that’s all. Revolting.—

He had other connections, anyway, that made it possible for him to keep the shop open more or less for fun. Among them were sources of supply for his restaurant, ARCHIE’S ATRIUM TOO, which was the only one in town where French and Italian wine was still obtainable. The connections with airline personnel, Lebanese, Greek and Arab traders kept him, a coloured balloon-figure in one of his own extra-outsize unisex dashikis, moving about from rendezvous to rendezvous all day; his assistant was most often alone in the shop.

It was there that Marie-Claude — but Hillela did not think of her as that, then, of course — Madame Mézières found her. Picked her up, as Madame Mézières explained her luck to other diplomatic wives. She came in with a visitor from Europe who wanted gifts to take home; after several years in this posting, Madame Mézières was herself not interested in tourist kitsch, but the young girl assistant looked so charming in a cotton robe that she actually did buy one for herself, for wear around the pool — impossible to go to the beach now that it was full of all sorts of strange people. The girl said the thigh-slit certainly could be reduced as Madame Mézières wished, by five inches; the visitor could not speak English and the girl equally accommodatingly (even bravely) spoke to her in ill-pronounced schoolgirl French. When Madame Mézières came back a week later to fetch her altered robe, she invited the girl to have a swim at the Embassy, where she met the children, but not the Ambassador.

However Olga might be regarding her niece, of whose whereabouts sitting on a camel-saddle transformed into a chair Olga had no knowledge at that time; whether she might have felt occasional anguish at what had not been done for her sister’s daughter, or regretted the waste of all that had been done for her, it is clear that the advantage of having been sent at Olga’s expense to a school where she had learnt the elements of a foreign language was the deciding factor in her becoming part of an embassy household. There were very few customers at the shop. When she had occupied herself for an hour a day with disentangling the silver-wire jewellery webbed together by the hands of those who picked over but didn’t buy, Hillela sat on the camel-saddle chair in the chrysalis of her long slit dress as if she would have to be carried from there by force. She had been twice called to the Immigration Offices and warned that she would be deported if she did not leave of her own accord, or produce refugee status supplied by an accredited organization. Udi’s few words in the right quarter apparently had reached the limit of audibility; they did not carry far enough. Arnold, no doubt, she would not have scrupled to ask to intercede for her. Perhaps she had asked, and been refused because Arnold could not put the integrity of the cause at risk for any personal reason whatever; or, more likely, she was — clever enough? — to understand this and did not approach him, in the sense of seeking some advantage, although there is reason to believe — Udi had reason — she still spent Arnold’s rare leisure hour somewhere with him from time to time.

So the move from the care of an Udi willing but unable to advance her status, via the camel-saddle chair in Archie Harper’s shop to an embassy, with the Ambassador arranging residence papers for her to answer his wife’s convenience, was rescue. Arnold, with her for what he had a feeling would be the last time, saw it differently, even distantly admiring: —And now you’ve got yourself really nicely fixed up. — She was vague about what her capacity was to be in the ambassadorial household but certain of one thing. — I’m not going to be deported.—

Malice has it that she was once a nanny; but she was much more than that.

Here, once more, there were flowers in her bedroom and silver on the dining-table. Pauline would have smiled confirming this ‘refugee’ hardship, and Olga would have been relieved. Madame Mézières’ lucky find helped the children with their homework (they were disadvantaged at an English-medium school), supervised their safety while they played in the pool, shopped for their bothersome childish needs; it seemed that through the contacts of her friend and former employer she could get commodities the ambassadorial staff no longer had the trouble of ordering from Europe. She blow-dried Madame Mézières’ hair so creditably that it looked better than it ever had while Madame Mézières had suffered the heat and din of piped music in Salon Roma under the hands of an Italian from Somalia. She ran errands on foot, not fussy about where she went in this filthy town, and proved much more compatible as a driver than the Embassy’s black chauffeur. — Emile, he smokes kif, or whatever they call it here, I don’t know; I smell it on him.—

The Ambassador did not exert himself to deny any of Marie-Claude’s obsessive fantasies directly. — One smells drink on people’s breath, not drugs. You’ve got Hillela to drive you. — Marie-Claude could not pass on to her lucky find the oppressive responsibility that was compounded with the oppressive heat, in this posting: every afternoon, she had to sit over her children while they whiningly completed a daily quota of schoolwork from the syllabus and in the language of their home country. Here, however, positions were reversed for an hour; instead of receiving services from the girl, she did her a service. Hillela sat in on the lessons and improved her knowledge of the language along with the children. Now, because she joined in with them, the children tackled the task as if it were another of the games they played with her. — She’s my big sister. — Idiot, I’m your sister. She didn’t come out of maman. — Then she’s our cousin, like Albert and Hélène at home.—

It was a relationship in which Hillela had had plenty of experience, to explain her success.

Not only a find; she was a blessing. — Look at me, Emile, I’m myself again. I don’t have a headache all the time, that twitch in my eyelid was driving me crazy — it’s gone. Don’t I look like your Marie-Claude again?—