Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Hillela lay in bed and patted the place beside her. He padded over the cool marble floor of what had been the governor’s bedroom, reluctantly; but took her nightgown off over her head and gazed at what he had revealed to himself. He moved in beside her; moved on.

The mother of the Colonel, the second wife, has treated Hillela with respect that Hillela has sometimes been able to cajole into some kind of affection — but the second wife cannot make a sister out of a white woman. The respect — for her usurper, a foreigner, it’s not as if the President had done the normal thing and simply taken a third wife from among his own people — probably comes about because the second wife knows Hillela went to protect the eldest son in some far country, after he had done a wicked thing and joined the people who wanted to kill his father. The Colonel himself must have told his mother; and told her never to talk about it, because it has never been mentioned between Hillela and her. She does not live in State House but has a large house of her own, in town, and maybe the President still visits her occasionally; she was married at fifteen and is not much older than Hillela. Visitors entertained at State House in the last few years have come upon charming young children chasing the peacocks and tame guinea-fowl from their roosting places in the flamboyant trees, and riding bicycles over the lawns. The visitors presume these are the children of the President by his present wife (although they look quite black — it is said those genes prevail in mixed progeniture). But no-one knows for sure whether Hillela has had any children as the President’s wife; whether she ever had any child other than the namesake. It seems unlikely; the President has seen her in a light other than that of perpetuator of a blood-line. Any woman could be that. In fact, no man wanted Hillela to be like any other woman, would allow her to be even if it had been possible for her, herself. Not even the one who supplied a brown-stone. The charming children, who have the composure and good manners of black and the precocity of white upper-class children, dressed by Hillela and educated at schools chosen by her, probably have been born to the President since his third marriage, by the second wife. Anyway, that one will never lose her position as mother of the best of them. That is something between the President and her no other woman will ever have. It would not trouble Hillela. What others perceive as character is often what has been practised long as necessity; the President’s highly intelligent intuition, that has made him so successful in his allocation of portfolios in his government, recognized the day she hopped into the hired car and set off for Mombasa with him that Hillela is a past mistress of adaptation. But Hillela has not been taken in by this African family; she has disposed it around her. Hers is the non-matrilineal centre that no-one resents because no-one has known it could exist. She has invented it. This is not the rainbow family.

The President and his wife were hosts to experts from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, East Germany and the Soviet Union attending a workshop on his country’s trade and economic links with Eastern European countries (Hillela entertained some old friends at State House). The President succeeded in obtaining a loan from the World Bank to form his Rural Development Corporation for the upgrading of provincial towns. Abdu Diouf of Senegal (an old friend of the President, this one), then Chairman of the OAU, paid the President’s country a state visit. It was also the year Pauline was back in Africa.

The monthly telephone calls to her son had tailed off several years earlier. But at least he made the effort to reply to her letters irregularly, and she wrote regularly although the letters were about people he did not know and a life far removed from what mother and son had experienced together. That was childhood and adolescence; their battleground, to be avoided.

There were no letters from him and when she tried to telephone, she heard the plaintive siren of disconnection. It was a voice that was no voice; an alarm. Joe got in touch with his old colleagues in Johannesburg and they investigated. It was as Pauline had known, as she had told Joe, she knew from that mindless voice — Sasha was in detention. It was logical for Joe to be the one to fly back, since he was the man to deal with the law, legal representation, prisoners’ rights—

— What law? What rights? They’re holding him under Section 29. What lawyer among your friends has been able to get permission to see him? They can keep him in solitary confinement indefinitely. The only ways of getting to him, helping him, must be other ways, and I’m the one to find them.—

Her face surrounded by stiff grey hair was incandescent with the manic excitation of anxiety he had seen sometimes in clients whose mental balance was threatened; Joe understood that if he tried to make Pauline wait in London, take a bus every day at ten o’clock to her pleasant job at a Kensington Church Street book shop, she would simply go mad. Not just in a manner of speaking.

They flew together to Johannesburg, awake all night on the plane, silent together, as they had once hurried back along the footpaths in the Drakensberg. But that time they had not found an arrest, what they had found that time was nothing, nothing, child’s play, this time was the real horror that hung over your life, all your life, if you belonged in that country, no matter where you ran to.

Joe did what lawyers can do; and that was a lot, despite Pauline’s dismissals. Applications for the parents who had come from abroad to see the detainee were finally approved after Joe reached, link by link of connections — members of parliament, judges, influential friends-of-friends — the Minister himself.

The meeting was terrible. Pauline’s blazing red face, steamy with tears, relived it for hours in the Rosebank flat friends had lent them. It was Sasha’s fault, it was Joe’s and hers: there he stood behind the cage and faced them as if he expected them to be facing him as a criminal, prisons are for criminals, aren’t they? — and that wasn’t the way they had come at all, that long distance to find him, endured that sycophantic struggle to get to see him!

He was all right. What was ‘all right’? He was not ill or apparently depressed. No thinner if paler than they remembered him on his last visit to London. No more difficult to talk to, taking into consideration that the awkward platitudes exchanged, which were one part of the customary mode of communication between them, couldn’t have been anything more, anyway, in present circumstances, with a warder on either side of him listening in, and the other part of their family communication, the clashes between mother and son, were too preciously intimate for a non-contact visit. What was ‘all right’ about his being led away by two louts back to solitary confinement, a bible and a sanitary bucket? ‘All right’ was the report given by white liberal members of parliament when they received parliamentary privilege to visit such prisoners: it meant that prisoners were still alive, in possession of their senses and with no immediately apparent evidence of the wounds, bruises and burns of torture. One was supposed to be grateful to the prison authorities, the Minister of Justice, the government, for that? As an aside, there was also the routine Opposition condemnation of the principle of preventive detention. That was ‘all right’, too. That was all the conventions of justice, of humanitarian concern meant in this country Pauline had rejected but where she had left a hostage. Joe went back to London because — she let him know — these were his conventions, in all good faith they represented all he could do; she stayed to do what she had failed to after the Maritzburg All-In African Conference more than twenty years before; to find what else there was for her, beyond them.