Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Boutique, bistro, bar, nightclub — these were the marked routes of the diplomatic and expatriate community. There was a path of her own drawn through the grass; the grass closed it away behind her. It led across one of those stretches of ground that are called vacant lots in the cities of other continents; here it was a vacant patch in history, a place where once manioc had been grown and goats had wandered, now appearing on some urban development plan as a sports or cultural centre that would never be built. A tiny scratching of planted maize was hidden in the grass, like a memory. Her path crossed those made by the feet of fishermen, and servants moving from and to where she was going, the enormous hotel that multiplied itself, up and up, storey by storey, shelf by shelf of identically-jutting balconies and windows that eventually had nothing to reflect but sky. There was no other structure to give it scale, nothing to dissimulate its giant intrusion on the low horizons of islands and water, that drew the eye laterally. Even the great silk cotton tree and the palms left as a sign of its acculturation when the site was cleared were reduced to the level of undergrowth beside its concrete trunk.

Inside, the scale of unrelation, of disjuncture continued; through ceremonial purplish corridors she walked, past buried bars outlined like burning eyelids with neon, reception rooms named for African political heroes holding a silent assembly of stacked gilt chairs, crates of empty bottles and abandoned mattresses, sudden encounters with restaurant stage-props — plastic palm trees and stuffed monkeys from some Tropicana Room, rolled-up carpets from the Persian Garden. At the white grand piano outside a locked entrance where photographs of girls whom gilt text dated the previous year announced as direct from the Crazy Horse in Paris, she turned to a bank of elevator doors like the reredos of some cathedral. Her path was always the same; through the grass, through the carpeted tunnels of corridors, the soughing ascent to the same floor. She had her key to the room; the bed was big as the one in Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman’s fake palace. The Ambassador came by some path of his own through this dark ziggurat, pyramid, Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building raised to the gods of development; he could arrange everything as he arranged immigration papers. He shed the Ambassador. What a pleasure to be able to give so much pleasure! Enough to turn any young person’s head. One day when he made love to her he smelled his children on her. It was a great sweetness to him; it brought the two halves of his life together as they had never been before. An annealment, wholeness; a new eroticism.

— You have simplified everything.—

— Why me? — He had not concealed, despite the risk at the beginning that a young girl might have been shocked or even jealous, and withdrawn herself, that he had had many love affairs.

— I don’t know, I don’t want to know. Simplicity is the one thing that can’t be explained. Not that you are simple, Hillela. You won’t get away with that, my little girl! But that you are clever enough to make things simple.—

— Emile, why do you like other women so much? — She knew that was her category.

— Oh you are young, Hillela, you are still at the stage when you ask all the questions, you don’t propose any answers.—

— Marie-Claude is so beautiful.—

— To have one beautiful woman. Once she is always there — it makes no difference. It doesn’t help, you understand? Didn’t she say it herself, about women: ‘Is it our fault’—well it’s not their fault they are beautiful, so many of them, and how can I not … try? As soon as I have one, or sometimes two at once — although they don’t know it — I see another and I have to prove to myself I can possess her. And so it goes on … gets worse as I get older. I’m forty-seven … — The birthday was recognized between them in a different context from that of the children’s performance, arranged by Hillela, that marked it the week before. If he had ever met Udi Stück, he could have curiously confirmed the possibility of telling this girl anything , confiding amour propre to her stranger’s hands.

He was smoking; this one smoked after love-making, the member of the Command in exile had drunk water, and far back, there was the one who had shed sibling tears. The smoke seemed to be drawn down all through his body as it was through his nose; his toes flexed, and his hand bent hers. — I need it like I need smoking.—

He turned and looked at her. He was silenced by what he saw, by what she understood beneath the crude and paltry words. Her black eyes gave him back his meaning in yet another question, unspoken: is life terrible as that?

After the room was left empty he went away to his secretary, attachés, telex messages and distinguished callers, with the smooth look round the eyes of a man in harmony with his body and free to be alert; any experienced staff recognizes the signs of a successful love affair and is thankful for the calm it generates. Hillela did not make her path to the Residence. She wandered; her body moved with the suppleness limbered by love-making, the pretty loll of breasts and the rhythm of her thighs were a confidence that made another kind of path through people in the streets. Men turned, as if at a reminder, to look at her; it was not her fault. Where the European city grid of right angles was overgrown and broken up by the purposeful tangle of African pursuits — the shortest point-to-point meander taken on foot between barbers and fruit-sellers, scribes and bicycle repairers — to be white was to feel invisible; only a sensuous self-assurance, while it lasted, could counter that. Hillela came to the docks. Her nostrils widened to snuff in the spice of cargoes swinging out on cranes overhead — coffee and cocoa beans — and the scrubbed smell of tar, the grassy scents of wet rope and putrid whiff of fish guts. The sun sank and flung colours up the sky. The black labourers who did not see her in their inward gaze of weariness, their self-image of religion and race, suddenly unrolled mats towards the East and bowed their heads to the ground. Their seamed heels were raised, naked, as they kneeled, their feet tense. The draped fishnets enlaced the sunset like the leads of stained-glass windows. A flock of prayers rose murmuring, vibrating, buzzing all round her, a groan of appeal and answer, supplication and release.

There are many kinds of consolation. Not all can be orthodox, in the ritualistic or other, social, sense. Before the invisible bird lifted off as capriciously as it had settled, the Ambassador sometimes came to her room late at night and slid into her bed. He was breathing fast, with fear as much as passion; yet the moment he felt her small warm solidity he was sure no-one would discover them. She was proof against his recklessness; at the same time he was sure, in contradiction: she would go without fuss, if Marie-Claude found him out. It was a scandal, of course, among the white community, who followed the appearance of such phenomena through the spy-glass of their mores: a tranquil household, a whole family content, in its way, as few families ever are.

The men who had shared pap and cabbage with her at Ma Sophie’s went to Algeria and the Soviet Union instead of China, now. Alliances changed; she moved on.

It may have been because she was back in a country where she could speak her own language and therefore range more widely, but she is difficult to keep track of once the Ambassador’s extended family moved yet again and settled in his next West African posting. So there is another lacuna; she is somewhere, of course, in momentary glances stored in those who must have passed her in the streets of Accra on a Saturday, colliding as she jostled between the mammy wagons and the street vendors’ jingling dinner-bells, the shouts and the splurt of tyres through overflowing drains, but there is little to attach in a contiguous, concrete identity. Her good friends in Dar es Salaam had no word. The passport her Aunt Olga carried was not recognized in the African countries Olga overflew on her way to Israel or Europe; anyone in that blank bush down there between the clouds was lost. Pauline would have written if she had known where to find her niece, as she would have sought out Ruthie. Carole once made the suggestion that enquiries might be made through the African National Congress — that idea surely could not have been little Carole’s own; could Sasha have been behind it? But Sasha never spoke of his cousin, he was bored by family connections, and now that his schooldays were over, lived at home in Pauline’s presence like an estranged lover, turning away from her assertion of their bonds as affines and spending all his time with friends made at the university. As he had predicted, his name had come up in the ballot; but Joe arranged a deferment of military service. Joe had Afrikaner nationalist colleagues whom, although they knew he and his big-mouthed wife disagreed with them politically, professional buddyhood obliged to put in a word for his son. Carole’s suggestion was out of the question (typically Sasha). The ANC was a banned organization with which any connection that could be traced was treasonable; its leaders from the Lilliesleaf house-party had been sentenced to life imprisonment, and the only man who might have been trusted with such an enquiry, the advocate Bram Fischer — whom Joe, like everyone who abhorred racism, loved and admired but would not go so far as to emulate — had been arrested, gone Underground, been recaptured and sentenced to life imprisonment, declaring that his conscience didn’t permit him to recognize laws enacted by a body in which three-quarters of the people of the country had no voice. In any case, Pauline was dourly, depressedly amused by the romantic notion that Hillela was a revolutionary. More likely she had fallen on her feet in some way: Pauline never saw her as Olga did, as lost — Hillela was not the helpless Ruthie. After all, hadn’t she had the advantage of being brought up to independence and self-respect along with Pauline’s own children? There was nothing vulnerable in that persistent image of the girl lying beside, the trembling schoolboy, composed in a — distorted, wrong — manifestation of the self-respect she had been taught.