Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

Exhibit 14 included two envelopes. Within the first there was another: State House, the name of the capital, the country, this surely should have been an adequate address to have reached the one for whom it was intended. Exhibit 14 did not even reach the cover address on the outer envelope; but although Hendrik had failed to deliver it there, it had led the police to the friend Sasha had hoped would get it taken to England and forwarded. The friend was arrested and detained as another possible co-conspirator, but released after a week of interrogation.

There was a stir of comment in the public gallery the day Hendrik gave his reason for accepting the letter; typically soppy, probably thinking of his Koster meisie back on the farm. These backveld boys, plaasja-pies! His brother-in-law, a cartage contractor from Pretoria and not to be patronised, who had accompanied Hendrik’s mother to court, turned angrily on the faces behind him. No, a boereseun was no match for a Jewboy communist. The mother grasped his hand in a vice to quiet him; never looked up from under her hat.

The Defence disputed the Prosecution’s interpretation of the letter. The person to whom it was addressed was like a sister to the accused. She was a relative who had been brought up by the accused’s parents as one of their own children. He had been deeply attached to her, she was apparently his confidante through childhood and adolescence. It was not surprising that under conditions of sensory deprivation in solitary confinement, where time loses its normal dimension and partings of many years may seem the same as partings that took place a few weeks or months previously, he should have turned to her, in imagination, to review his life and set out his commitment to serve others. In no way could the intimate confidences of this letter be regarded as constituting a revolutionary document. And whom could it have been planned to incite? The intended recipient had lived abroad for a long time. Defence requested that the letter be read out in its entirety, not quoted from selectively.

The other mother was beside her husband and they heard it all. There were flashes in Pauline’s face. Joe made no move to touch her. There was the sense around them, in them, that the matings, the birth of children, the quarrels, the convictions that didn’t lie together, the unsaid, the spoken that should never have been said, the right questions, the wrong answers, the trust and distrust, the blame and the forgiveness were casting them in the bronze of a single fused figure. For them, there was nobody else in the court; the mass of their feeling occupied it, it would not have been surprising if everyone on the adjoining benches had edged away or silently trooped out with a bow to the judge.

Olga was very supportive. Whether Arthur liked it or not, she insisted that Pauline and Joe move out of that pokey flat and into her house, where they would be properly fed and looked after during their ordeal. After all, the two sisters had only each other — they had lost Ruthie, she might be dead, for all they knew. But Olga did not attend the trial. Pauline would not expect that of her. She had never been in court in her life; police vans from which hands clung through the diamond-mesh guard, men in shackles led to the dock, a red-robed protector with the authority — thank God — to lock away burglars, rapists, embezzlers, car thieves, murderers where they couldn’t threaten decent people any longer — all that belonged to the criminals and the poor. Poor devils, the latter; a matter of environment. Certainly not the environment to which the sisters belonged, and in which even Pauline’s children had been brought up. Poor Pauline, she hadn’t deserved Sasha. Olga’s Clive, hardly a year older, was consultant to exporters and importers in the wine industry, an authority on vintages, with a ‘nose’ equal to that of some of the great experts in France; sad for Pauline: when Clive’s name appeared in the newspapers it was not as an accused in a trial for treason but as author of his syndicated column for wine lovers. But Olga was loyal to her sisters, never would have heard a bad word said about the other one, and would not tolerate any condemnatory remarks about Pauline’s son. Once or twice she invited carefully-selected friends to dinner — her sister and brother-in-law surely needed some distraction, sitting day after day in what she imagined a court must be like. Olga deliberately did not avoid the subject that was in the guests’ minds, like a death in the family. Sasha was not disgraced; he was wronged. He had somehow fallen through one of the manholes of life into an environment that wasn’t his; there had been criminal carelessness somewhere, on somebody’s part, maintenance was a scandal, what did one pay taxes for if no-one was secure any longer. Her own nephew had been locked away by these Afrikaners, put on trial by them, arid he was a young man of good family, intelligent, cultivated. If Arthur wanted to (he didn’t look as if he wanted to, he was spitting out fish-bones without even putting his hand over his mouth) he could tell some tales about the real criminals, the swindling and finagling that went on high up in the financial world in connivance with members of the government. Whom had her nephew swindled? Whom had he cheated or hurt? — He’s done nothing! The government is mad!—

There was an abrupt change of atmospheric pressure which all felt without for a moment knowing why.

Pauline put down her knife and fork, stood up and flattened her hands on Olga’s Georgian table so that the wine jumped in the glasses. Then she lifted the hands and dug the spread fingers up through that wild head of hair that needed the attention of a good stylist. Her eyes held their audience as they had always sought to. — Olga, Sasha did not do nothing . Understand that. He did everything he could to bring down this government, and the power of white people who made it, and all their white governments before it. They recognize the danger he represents to their evil; don’t you sit here and minimize that. This trial is a sign of his effectiveness. He did something . — And she sat down to her plate while others did not know how to take up again the normal flow of the evening; for a few moments only she and Arthur were eating — he never listened when Pauline spoke, and had not been interrupted.

Since Olga did not come to court she did not hear the letter read out. There was merely a mention of its existence as evidence, no extract of its contents or mention of the name of the individual to whom it was written, in the day’s newspaper reports of the trial. When Joe’s colleagues, the team defending Sasha and his co-accused, came to confer with Joe and Pauline, Olga sent in Jethro’s successor with tea and cream scones (Olga’s servants stayed with her faithfully until pensioned; the old cook had been retired to KwaZulu — the recipe remained) but she ensured there would be absolute privacy for the discussion going on in her little sittingroom, where some of her favourite pieces were gathered, including the Blackamoor lamp that used to stand in the main lounge. When she walked past the door she rose on tiptoe.

Pauline did not talk of the letter to Olga. And Joe did not need to be told not to. So Olga was not caused pain by any unearthing of what else had been out of place in the environment of the family. Anyway, it was none of her business, never had been, she had not taken any responsibility for Ruthie’s child beyond buying her a new outfit every six months.

Pain was caused to the girl with whom Sasha lived for several years up to a short while before he was detained. They were parted by then, but although he never mentioned her in the letter, she had been with him in the tin cottage with the water-tank and the frangipani. She had married someone else while he was in detention; the husband was a friend of Sasha and the couple came up from Durban, in solidarity with those on trial, at least once to attend part of the proceedings. When the letter was read out she realized that for its writer she never had been in the cottage, that was what was wrong that she hadn’t understood, all the time they were together. There was no need to laugh at Hendrik, the boereseun , the plaasjapie .