Nadine Gordimer - A Sport of Nature

‘Gordimer writes … with a relish that is sometimes wicked and an authority that seems absolute.’

— The New Yorker

‘There is an emotional tension in the prose that is cumulative and subtle. The novel gathers force like a slow-moving avalanche of words, breaking from time to time into italicized passages close to prose poems. With Hillela, Nadine Gordimer continues to bear testimony that writing can matter as much as skin and hair.’

— Washington Post Book World

‘ A Sport of Nature is a valiant, beautifully rendered attempt to do justice, its heart unbowed by the enormity of its burden.’

— The Boston Globe

‘What is riveting in this novel is the people themselves, the moments, the situations. The triumph of A Sport of Nature is not so much Hillela’s triumph as the exquisite accuracy with which Gordimer has, once again, exposed the complicated nervous system of her country.’

— Lynn Freed, San Francisco Chronicle

‘Fine, incisive … Wraps moral and political struggle in elegantly spun incident and luminous prose. … Gordimer distills political events into personal pain, and the pain depicted here … resonates.’

— Kirkus Reviews

‘Achieves a remarkable imaginative integration of private and public experience. … A brilliant, engrossing novel’

— Library Journal

Somewhere along the journey the girl shed one name and emerged under the other. As she chewed gum and let slide by the conveyer belt of balancing rocks, the wayside halts where black children waved, the grazing buck sloping away to the horizon in a blast of fear set in motion by the passing train, she threw Kim up to the rack with her school panama and took on Hillela. The brown stockings collapsed down her legs, making fine hairs prickle pleasurably. She would dig sandals and a dress out of her suitcase and change without concern for the presence of other women in the compartment. She was going, each time, to her aunt, one of her mother’s sisters, in whose home she was given every advantage. She was coming from the Rhodesian girls’ school to which, she would say when asked why she didn’t go to school in South Africa, she was sent because her father had grown up in Salisbury. She was not the only child whose parents were divorced or parted or whatever it was they were. But she was the only Hillela among Susans and Clares and Fionas. What sort of a name was that? Didn’t know, couldn’t tell them. What she did tell them, without a moment’s hesitation, was that anyway she was always called by her second name, Kim. As the years passed, not even her teachers called her anything but Kim. Noone remarked when she went with the other Kims, Susans, Clares and Fionas to the Anglican Church on Sundays, although in her school record ‘religious faith’ was filled in as Jewish.

Olga met her at the station. Later, it was at the airport; Olga must have told her father it was ridiculous to subject her to that two-day hot and tedious train trip. Or maybe Olga paid for the air-ticket; she was generous: she would say, never to the child herself but to company while she ruffled the child’s fringe or put an arm round her — Oh this’s the little daughter I didn’t have.—

The room was made ready with a rose in the summer holidays and in winter freesias or jonquils that smelled like Olga’s embrace, towels thick as sheepskin coats, and a fluted dish of her favourite Liquorice All-Sorts. There were some things that were hers: holiday clothes left behind each time when she went back to school, books, trinkets fallen out of favour. Her absence was more permanent than her presence. There was always the sign of some other occupancy of the room. Olga stored out-of-season clothes in the cupboards; other guests who slept in the pretty bed forgot things; books that Olga didn’t want on display downstairs but didn’t want to throw away made a jumble-sale assortment on the bookshelf. One holiday, a photograph of the girl’s mother in a Victorian plush-and-silver frame stood beside the Liquorice All-Sorts. The face was composed in a way the girl had never seen: hair scrolled like a parchment roll from either temple and again from the forehead, lips a lovely shape shiny as liquid tar. The shape was not disturbed by a smile. The eyes were the only feature that matched any recognizable living reality; they were the eyes of a woman seeing herself in a mirror.

Her mother ended at the shoulders. They were squared in a jacket with shoulder-tabs and revers.

— Was she in the army?—

Olga was watching the girl the way she watched people she brought together in careful selection for the harmony and interest of her dinner parties, and she laughed as at the reward of some original remark outside the usual pleasantries. — Ruthie in the army! That’s what we wore, in the Forties. The last word in fashion. You had to look glamorous in something that suggested a uniform. That jacket was dark red — I remember it as if it were in front of me. And see the ear-rings. She would have her ears pierced. We thought it was old-fashioned or common: grandmothers had floppy lobes with holes in them, and young Afrikaans girls from the plaas wore those thin gold circles. But Ruth paid Martha to do hers. That was our old nannie; when we were quite grown up she still used to come to help with the washing. Ruth sat down to the table one lunch-time with cotton threads hanging through little crusts of blood on her ears. Ugh. We squealed and made a fuss, of course … she must have been fourteen.—

They looked at the photograph politely, together. (It was about this time that Olga would take her eldest son, Clive, and Hillela to art exhibitions.) Hillela did not come out with anything else unexpected.

— It’s for you to take back to school. Isn’t that an enchanting frame I found—

It was standing there in its place on the bedside-table after the girl left, and was there when she came back each time for other holidays. Her mother was not dead. She lived in Mozambique and never visited. The child had asked questions once or twice, when she was young enough to believe adults gave you answers worth hearing, and had been given an oblique reply. Her father said her mother had ‘made another life’. Olga, deciding when the child was ‘old enough to know the truth’, told her her father had forbidden her mother to have any contact with her. Her mother lived with ‘another man’.

The man to whom he was an other, then, must be her father; yet she called her father ‘Len’ as someone might for whom he was another man.

Len was a rep. A title of profession to her, like doctor or professor, although she found she had to explain to other girls this meant he represented firms that sold hotel lines. And what were ‘lines’? Really — was there anything those kids did know? Lines . Different kinds of things that hotels and restaurants need. Breadcutters, food-warmers, slicers, trays, fish-fryers, even plastic flowers, mirrors, pictures for decoration. There had been a time, she must have been very small, when she had played and slept and eaten beside him in his big car with all the boxes of samples, catalogues and order-books piled up in the back. He had made her a nest in there, on rugs stained with cold drinks and icecream she spilt. — A Suncrush for my sweetheart. — She sat on bar-stools in country hotels. He bought her sweet orange-coloured drinks. He washed her panties in the hotel basins while she fell asleep watching him.