Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Ruthie lived in one of these. The address was correct. The chalk-blue door was opened by a small girl with black eyes and thin gold rings in her baby ears — Hillela herself, if she had not been left behind twenty-nine years ago. Perhaps Ruthie owned or rented the house, perhaps she hired a room there; perhaps it was Vasco’s pleasure house in which Ruthie had been left behind, and she hired it out to share with others? The child ran away to the kitchen, which could be smelled (green peppers and coffee, the odours released when Pauline was preparing a treat lunch), and there were voices talking across each other in Portuguese.

Ruthie must have just washed her hair. She wore a towel turban that pulled firm the skin of her temples and cheeks; the lost beauty her sisters talked of almost emerged — useless beauty thrown away so cheap on the first man to take it up in a nightclub. It was her turn to lead the way, chattering and apologizing for her dressing-gown. They went into what must have been the communal room: paper flowers before a plaster Virgin Mary, piles of gritty records, a photograph of a frock-coated man and a woman in a high collar under oval convex glass. They sat on a sofa protected by crocheted headrests and arm-mats. The curtains were closed against the sun and again what was said was said in patterned dimness, twenty-nine years submerging their faces under the dissolving play of depths.

Ruthie’s chatter stopped instantly. — Europe. But what would I do there. I mean, I don’t know anybody.—

— We’ve got friends who would look after you.—

— Oh no. Thank you, it’s very generous, tell your husband, I don’t know what to say … No, I’d better stay. I’m used to it, now. I speak the language pretty well, you know. After such a long time. Some of the whites who went away when it was all finished for them, they’ve come back, they can’t settle down there, after here — even though everything’s changed so much. And would I get my job back … Europe. I’d better stay where I’m used to.—

Five weeks after a certain telephone call from his mother Sasha followed the impulse, and wrote to the Department of Political Science at M.I.T. asking whether the Department would be good enough to supply him with the address of Mrs Hillela Kgomani, who had taken part in a seminar on Africa (he apologized for not being able to be more precise) the previous spring. It was necessary for him to contact Mrs Kgomani for reasons of research. He requested that if it appeared that his letter was directed to the wrong department, it might be passed on to the appropriate one. He received a courteous reply, and the address of the brownstone. But although Hillela wrote several times to Brad over the next year, she never gave any address other than that which would place her in a city at the moment of writing: ‘Algiers’, ‘Luanda’. If there is nowhere to reply to, of course, the one to whom a letter is addressed cannot fall to the temptation to write back, and cannot deliver any slight through not doing so. Trust her to protect herself … She would not know the joy and pain her handwriting caused.

Brad wrote across the envelope from South Africa: return to sender.

Unwanted, unopened, dead letters come back slowly, by sea mail. Sasha opened his and could not stop himself from beginning to read: … my “field” (as my mother says, as if we were sheep she’d like to keep corralled chewing on this bit of grass or that) turns out to be not so different from yours, after all. I suppose that’s why I’m writing. I chucked up law (again, the first time was for the army) and I’m working with a black trade union in Durban, the place you once ran away to with your friend, I’ve forgotten her name, and left the whole house in a state of shock … I’m relieved to be away from JHB, I’m no longer with that girl, either. And the house is gone, they sold it before they left. But I hate the climate. I’ve never liked lying about on beaches, which is what everyone finds the compensation for breathing warm soup instead of air, night and day, in summer. I haven’t had a winter here, yet. What I do: I’m helping to organize workers. It’s as simple as that but of course it’s not simple at all here. You would have gone off to take a shower or gossip on the phone if I’d talked about such things, but now I suppose you’ll know something of them. Maybe more than I do. Pauline said you lecture. African problems — she didn’t know the details, she thought it was refugees, but anyway, refugees are ex-employees, potential labour, an unemployment problem among other things, so you’re certain to have picked up a lot from them. As you must know, blacks’ unions here at home still aren’t allowed to participate in the official industrial conciliation process, but this won’t be able to go on for much longer, whatever the government would like. As blacks have become the main work force, not only traditionally in mining, but in the engineering, construction and other secondary industries, being able to negotiate directly only with whites has left the bosses a fraction of the labour force to parley with. The recognized trade unions are a farce, and these pragmatic capitalists have to deal with reality. So it’s certain that in a year or two black unions will have to be recognized. And there’s the question of mixed ones — but I won’t go into all that. The only thing that was alive for me in law was labour legislation, and now at least I’m doing something practical with all that stuff I mugged up. Black workers have little or no experience of the kind of organizing skills they’re going to need, or the kind of structures, right from the shop floor, they have to set up. Not that there’s always a shop floor — I’m mostly concerned with dockworkers, at present. All I ever knew about them when I started was that they invented (should I say ‘choreographed’) the gumboot dance, you know, the calf-slapping-and-stamping performance, tin whistles shrieking between their teeth — teams of them used to be brought to put on for Pauline’s indigenous art shows. It’s not much of a career; I only mind for Joe — but believe it or not, Carole has taken up where I dropped out, she’s articled to the firm he joined in London! So that’s good, for him. He didn’t want to leave but my mother decided he was useless here. And that was that .

I don’t know what you want to know. If anything. But I imagine that you are back in a family now; you have your own family, a professor husband, a child (I know that’s not his, that’s from another marriage). I’ve never been to Uncle Sam’s great U.S. but I can choose and furnish your house from the movies … how else? And you in it. No movie to supply that one .

I suppose that house and you in it is a good idea. So that with it you may want to know the sort of things people want to know when they have family houses. The other cousins: maybe you’d like to hear about them. They all three have careers. Mark’s a urologist, a neighbor of yours, more or less, in Philadelphia. Brian’s in banking: Clive — I’m not sure what he’s doing, can’t remember for the moment, but whatever it is he’s very successful — I met him once, on a plane going to Cape Town. He gave me a card which I lost. Maybe you have a card now: Professor and Ms Hillela — what? Pauline didn’t say; you keep your other name when you lecture .

It’s wonderful to be with blacks. Working with blacks. Already there are some who are senior to me, one or two who have been, for training, to England and West Germany. I take my orders from them. So I suppose I’m like Pauline, really. Where I get my thrills. It’s wonderful and sometimes it’s a terrible let-down. Alpheus’s garage was luxury compared with the flat near the Point I’m living in, but I’m still cut off from the vigorous ugliness of the life they live, different from my ugliness; what they find to talk about in their endless dialectic — no, synthesis — of laughter, anger and mimicry, their Sunday booze-ups, the childhood loyalties they never seem to give up — it’s not in a manner of speaking that they call each other brother .