A Sport of Nature

The Diplomatic Bag

Leopard skins mounted on scalloped green felt, dead snakes converted into briefcases, elephants turned into ivory filigree carvings, bracelets, necklaces and paper knives, and table-legs with a copper rim decorating what was once a pachyderm foot — the AFRICAN ARTS ATRIUM did not sell powdered rhino horn, however; that sort of disgusting stuff was for local people in the magic and medicine trade down the road. Hillela wore—‘modelled’, as Archie Harper, the old Africa hand of a special kind, who employed her, insisted — the dashikis or galabiya-inspired dresses of African cloth her employer had made up by his ‘connection’ of Indian piece-workers who sat at their machines on the earth pavements all over the old town. The long dresses became bizarrely slit — some from the first vertebra to the small of the back, as well as to the thigh on both sides — during the period of her employment, because Archie found his assistant-cum-model so ‘innocently inspiring’. He was not himself attracted to women, but had the homosexual’s shrewd and kindly understanding of how they like to make themselves attractive to men: this girl (a real poppet; he knew from the beginning she would go far) inside his one-of-a-kind creations was the best way to encourage customers to clear the racks.

Business was torpid (—No tourists where you can’t buy contraceptives or whisky, my dear—) but this expatriate, an Englishman, couldn’t leave, either. He was quickly on girlish confiding terms with his assistant: he wouldn’t leave his two young Arab lovers, twin brothers they were, he’d brought them up in his own house since they were fourteen. — You will never find anything ne-early like them in England. Ne-ever. Guardsmen with smelly feet who’re only after what’s in your pocket, that’s all. Revolting.—

He had other connections, anyway, that made it possible for him to keep the shop open more or less for fun. Among them were sources of supply for his restaurant, ARCHIE’S ATRIUM TOO, which was the only one in town where French and Italian wine was still obtainable. The connections with airline personnel, Lebanese, Greek and Arab traders kept him, a coloured balloon-figure in one of his own extra-outsize unisex dashikis, moving about from rendezvous to rendezvous all day; his assistant was most often alone in the shop.

It was there that Marie-Claude — but Hillela did not think of her as that, then, of course — Madame Mézières found her. Picked her up, as Madame Mézières explained her luck to other diplomatic wives. She came in with a visitor from Europe who wanted gifts to take home; after several years in this posting, Madame Mézières was herself not interested in tourist kitsch, but the young girl assistant looked so charming in a cotton robe that she actually did buy one for herself, for wear around the pool — impossible to go to the beach now that it was full of all sorts of strange people. The girl said the thigh-slit certainly could be reduced as Madame Mézières wished, by five inches; the visitor could not speak English and the girl equally accommodatingly (even bravely) spoke to her in ill-pronounced schoolgirl French. When Madame Mézières came back a week later to fetch her altered robe, she invited the girl to have a swim at the Embassy, where she met the children, but not the Ambassador.

However Olga might be regarding her niece, of whose whereabouts sitting on a camel-saddle transformed into a chair Olga had no knowledge at that time; whether she might have felt occasional anguish at what had not been done for her sister’s daughter, or regretted the waste of all that had been done for her, it is clear that the advantage of having been sent at Olga’s expense to a school where she had learnt the elements of a foreign language was the deciding factor in her becoming part of an embassy household. There were very few customers at the shop. When she had occupied herself for an hour a day with disentangling the silver-wire jewellery webbed together by the hands of those who picked over but didn’t buy, Hillela sat on the camel-saddle chair in the chrysalis of her long slit dress as if she would have to be carried from there by force. She had been twice called to the Immigration Offices and warned that she would be deported if she did not leave of her own accord, or produce refugee status supplied by an accredited organization. Udi’s few words in the right quarter apparently had reached the limit of audibility; they did not carry far enough. Arnold, no doubt, she would not have scrupled to ask to intercede for her. Perhaps she had asked, and been refused because Arnold could not put the integrity of the cause at risk for any personal reason whatever; or, more likely, she was — clever enough? — to understand this and did not approach him, in the sense of seeking some advantage, although there is reason to believe — Udi had reason — she still spent Arnold’s rare leisure hour somewhere with him from time to time.

So the move from the care of an Udi willing but unable to advance her status, via the camel-saddle chair in Archie Harper’s shop to an embassy, with the Ambassador arranging residence papers for her to answer his wife’s convenience, was rescue. Arnold, with her for what he had a feeling would be the last time, saw it differently, even distantly admiring: —And now you’ve got yourself really nicely fixed up. — She was vague about what her capacity was to be in the ambassadorial household but certain of one thing. — I’m not going to be deported.—

Malice has it that she was once a nanny; but she was much more than that.

Here, once more, there were flowers in her bedroom and silver on the dining-table. Pauline would have smiled confirming this ‘refugee’ hardship, and Olga would have been relieved. Madame Mézières’ lucky find helped the children with their homework (they were disadvantaged at an English-medium school), supervised their safety while they played in the pool, shopped for their bothersome childish needs; it seemed that through the contacts of her friend and former employer she could get commodities the ambassadorial staff no longer had the trouble of ordering from Europe. She blow-dried Madame Mézières’ hair so creditably that it looked better than it ever had while Madame Mézières had suffered the heat and din of piped music in Salon Roma under the hands of an Italian from Somalia. She ran errands on foot, not fussy about where she went in this filthy town, and proved much more compatible as a driver than the Embassy’s black chauffeur. — Emile, he smokes kif, or whatever they call it here, I don’t know; I smell it on him.—

The Ambassador did not exert himself to deny any of Marie-Claude’s obsessive fantasies directly. — One smells drink on people’s breath, not drugs. You’ve got Hillela to drive you. — Marie-Claude could not pass on to her lucky find the oppressive responsibility that was compounded with the oppressive heat, in this posting: every afternoon, she had to sit over her children while they whiningly completed a daily quota of schoolwork from the syllabus and in the language of their home country. Here, however, positions were reversed for an hour; instead of receiving services from the girl, she did her a service. Hillela sat in on the lessons and improved her knowledge of the language along with the children. Now, because she joined in with them, the children tackled the task as if it were another of the games they played with her. — She’s my big sister. — Idiot, I’m your sister. She didn’t come out of maman. — Then she’s our cousin, like Albert and Hélène at home.—

It was a relationship in which Hillela had had plenty of experience, to explain her success.

Not only a find; she was a blessing. — Look at me, Emile, I’m myself again. I don’t have a headache all the time, that twitch in my eyelid was driving me crazy — it’s gone. Don’t I look like your Marie-Claude again?—

Eating a mango, licking her fingers, the girl was the amiable witness of private bonds recalled between the couple. With his usual indirection, the Ambassador addressed himself to the cause rather than gave the opinion of the result that was expected of him. He was slitting the wrappers on European newspapers with a fruit-knife. — Hillela has changed the life of this house.—

It was in that first ambassadorial residence, behind gates where black guards strait-jacketed in gabardine and braid slouched on homemade stools, and sometimes a visiting wife and children squatted humbly behind the hibiscus, that she must have picked up, just as Marie-Claude had picked her up, much that has made her assurance so provocatively perfect. Olga, looking through a magnifying glass years later at a newspaper cutting in which she is told she will be able to identify the hostess sitting between Yasir Arafat and the President of a European country, cannot take more than half the credit for having sat down that hostess, as a child, at a dinner table the way a dinner table should look. The duty of helping Marie-Claude arrange official dinners would have been what instructed Hillela so usefully in protocol, and her own usefulness as a personable dinner-table partner to fill a place beside a bachelor, or someone whose wife was not present, was what has given her the range of safe subjects and the permissible limits of response, the appropriate lies, level of voice and laughter between guests at official gatherings. In true tradition, her youth and bountiful bodily confidence, not modesty, made the run-up Archie Harper cottons pass among the formal clothes white diplomatic wives equipped themselves with in Europe. They had the jewellery they wore as the badge of an occasion, as men wear decorations; but she was unadorned by the nervous tensions that redrew their faces like tribal markings. Hers was the real, not the fairy story of Cinderella and the sisters.

With the corporate female sense of protection, Marie-Claude imperceptibly intervened when she saw among her guests men reading the wrong signal in the shining cheeks and market cottons. — Don’t worry, you won’t sit next to Frédéric again. And Henning Knudsen, too! I was watching … And he’s got a daughter your age.—

Hillela laughed. — He told me he could arrange for me to finish my studies in Denmark.—

— What studies?—

— I don’t know. Don’t you think he meant it?—

— I know what he meant. When we first arrived here, and Emile was recalled for a few weeks, he kept coming in to see if I was all right. Then I realized … what he meant, by looking after me … — And Marie-Claude herself gave the sexual beckon of the patchy blush she seemed able to summon at will from the warmth of her breasts in low-necked dresses, deepening the Old Masters’ pearl-pink of her skin against her Flemish gold hair.

— But you’re so pretty, Madame Mezieres!—

— Pretty! Is it our fault? We women. Can we help it?—

— You put a lot of work and money into it, mijn skatteke. — The Ambassador liked to tease his wife, and never simply; she did not like being reminded, even by an endearment, that she was a Fleming and not French-speaking by birth.

In the confidence that grew between her and her find, the secret mother tongue became a relaxation and a bond. Hillela could understand her when, alone together lying at the pool, no-one about to hear, she took up Flemish like a homely garment; Hillela could even answer, in a fashion, through her knowledge of Afrikaans. It was not possible to go on being addressed as Madame Mézières; as if she were old. When they were lying there, two young women in bikinis! (She had at once replaced the yellow knit rag with something from her own wardrobe.) And talking about Emile — how they had met, variously-edited versions of decisions they had made together about his career, etc., the Ambassador quite naturally became referred to and addressed as ‘Emile’ by the girl, as well.

Hillela’s old benefactor, Udi, would have agreed with Arnold on one point, at least: a prediction that she would never look back. Udi probably meant it in both senses. She was nicely fixed up, for a penniless, deserted girl whose refugee status no-one would vouch for. From the kitchen floor through a guest bedroom to an ambassadorial residence; no need to return, ever, with her blankets to the hospitality of the Manaka flat. When she met Christa and Sophie as she came out of the bank one morning (Emile insisted that her salary be paid into a bank account, not left lying about as a temptation to the black staff in the Residence) she had not seen them for months. Being Hillela, she made no apologies or excuses; but she clung to them and kissed them in a different way from the bird-necked dart from cheek to cheek, grazing contact, she had learnt to exchange with the ambassadorial family. Christa looked after her affectionately: Poor Hillela! Sophie’s cheeks concertinaed up against her eyes: —Are you mad? Oh I’m glad she’s so okay in this bad place. — Archie Harper was encountered at British diplomatic cocktail parties that included local personalities from the old regime. He would put his arm round her and squeeze her to his enormous globe of a body; but nobody could interpret this as predatory on his behalf or a sign of availability on hers. Only after she had gone were there stories that although she dropped her political refugee friends once she’d installed herself at the Embassy, she still used to spend afternoons at Archie’s house, when he would dress up in women’s clothes, some elephantine duchess or brothel madam (that was how people could imagine it), and they’d dance with his Arab boys and drink black market champagne. The stories originated with Mohammed, who knew the boys, and had made her bed; the details were visualized by gossip among white people. While she was still in that country, a letter came from Canada to the hotel where her lover had left her. The proprietress propped it up, visible, in the bar for a few days, then threw it away. The girl’s other lover (his rivals and political enemies among the gathering on Tamarisk said) was seen entering the garden of an old house where the ambassadorial car that the girl was allowed to drive was parked, even after it was well known she had become the Ambassador’s mistress.

Those who have choices have morals, he says, after love-making, smelling home in the flesh, the rank sweetness of polished floors and gardener-tended roses, the leather-scent of three-car family garages beside backyard rooms with their clandestine fug of beer and cold pap. The smell of all things lost and repugnant, that is home, and that must be destroyed. It prompts him to talk of acts people are having to go through with, back there — the bombs and grenades whose targets are monolithic but whose shrapnel may pierce, three centuries of murderers cry, an innocent white. Who is innocent, after more than three centuries, among more than twelve generations of people who have paid for labour with a bag of mealies a month, beaten, imprisoned, banished, starved and killed? Those who can choose a candidate for a parliament — they can have their morals. The others have no choice but to meet, after three centuries, violence done to them with a violence of their own.

And all this while lying in the house that serves as a foreign news agency, the foreign correspondent himself out interviewing the Minister of Agriculture about a collective scheme for coffee farmers.

No mention, ever, of what is planned up the rotting stairs, only what already has been done. Because how can there be trust? What is there to go by? One who left that home uninstructed, ignorant, like most of her kind — for personal reasons which are no reason, in the measure of what has to be done. What credibility has she to show for herself, now, but the protection of yet another man?

Without a cause is without a home; lying here. I’ve learned that. Without a cause is without a reason to be. That’s all decreed by others, as elsewhere everything was decreed by the absence of one sister, the decisions made by two more, and the long-distance authority of a putative father on the road. Looking at him; gazed at by him. How well does he see, how well does he see into the other self, this man who swims and makes love with his glasses on to see better — this man in whose narrow crowded face is concentrated the pull of a gravity that excites while it excludes.

What choice is there?

He could take her in hand, maybe, with help from Christa and others. She might be made useful. But the real life of exile isn’t giving the boys an eyeful on Tamarisk Beach, you know.

Ah no, I’ll tell about that, the real life of exile is, for your whole life, going home for the holidays wherever it’s been decided you’re to go.

Exile is the inevitable — for whites like us, he is instructing. But the claim doesn’t enter, the way his body does; it talk away from her without purchase, the way she now slides off his body. This one won’t accept to be a humble apprentice to the only objective worth living for. Who does she think she is? Unreliable: and this judgment tantalizes him to come back into the flesh again, to find that just consolation, that peace and freedom that is certain, and lasts only minutes.

The glisten of black eyes opening again.

Why don’t you go back? Let them deport you. Probably you’d be let in; your lawyer uncle could maybe get you off prosecution for having come out illegally: you’re still under age. You’ve got a guardian or something? At worst you’ll get a suspended sentence and a fine — your rich aunt’ll pay, won’t she?

But he is nibbling, kissing, feeding on me, his face wet with me, exasperated. Because if she isn’t the right material, she isn’t one of that kind, either. God knows what will happen to her — it is not his affair — but she has one sound instinct to share with him, it’s expressed in her laughter if not in conviction, it’s dense in her flesh: she will never go back to the dying life there, never.

What choice? When the Ambassador and his family are posted to another country, of course I’ll go with them. Of course; the credentials of the household contingent of such people are never disputed by immigration officials.

*

At certain times, in certain places, harmony settles over a human nucleus like the wings of some unseen sheltering bird. Marie-Claude was a woman who had constantly to be going through the wardrobe of her blessings before others. Sometimes her actual wardrobe was invoked: —Emile insists he must give me a fur coat for leave in Europe, but I’m not the kind of woman who needs that sort of present, I’m not repressed in any way, not deprived of any kind of satisfaction, I mean, far from it — Hillela was so responsive; she stroked the fur against her cheek, so that Marie-Claude knew, could see the present was beautiful and rich in meaning; that she lacked for nothing; And in this country on the other side of Africa the language of the former colonists was her children’s mother tongue, and she was freed of the tedious afternoon hour of acting schoolteacher. She could sleep, sleep, for that hour after lunch, knowing the children were not left in the care of some local black or half-caste. Her breasts released from straps and lace, her waist free of elastic, she lay naked in the shuttered dark of their room — hers and her husband’s. Sometimes — now that she didn’t have to shut herself up over schoolbooks — when he came in quietly to fetch something on his way back to the office, she murmured, so that he would come over to her, and then deliciously tense but playing sleepy, she could put his hand on her soft, heat-dampened pubic hair, and after merely submitting for a moment (of course, she knew he was thinking he ought to be going back to his office) he would silently and efficiently take off his clothes (of course, he had to keep them uncreased to put on again immediately for the office) and make love to her. It was years, and several postings, since they had made love like lovers, in the middle of a working day. No child would burst in; they were safely with Hillela.

He came from the office — merely across a loggia in another part of the Embassy complex, all of their life was securely under one roof — and saw Hillela, many afternoons, sitting among a tumble of children and cushions, the children’s limbs tangled close about her, their hands playing with her hair or fingers.

— Come, papa, it’s a guessing game. Come and play.—

— Papa, there’s a lion and two hippos and they want to eat him up but he won’t come into the water — Hillela’s telling that story again because it’s such a nice one …—

Smiling at him from among his children, her face as firm and clear as theirs; with his arrival, domestic content was perfectly rounded.

She did not have many duties — duty being what does not come naturally — in that posting, where the Ambassador was temporarily relieving a colleague recalled. In a French-speaking city, Marie-Claude had found more friends, liked to do her own shopping in boutiques run by French people who had stayed on under a black government civilisedly tempered, it was felt, by the fact that the President had a white French wife. Some people said the young girl in the Ambassador’s household was a housekeeper, others assumed she was a relative of Marie-Claude — and Marie-Claude did not deny, only corrected this: —No, no, no relation at all! But it’s true, she’s like a young sister, a member of the family. The children adore her. — Certainly she played tennis, took part in sightseeing and dining-out parties, as any visiting favourite from Europe experiences Africa in pursuits imported long before her.

But there were times when the surrogate was alone in the house with only the half-awareness of the presence somewhere of servants that is like the sound of her own heart to any white brought up in Africa. Alone as if she were an ambassador’s wife in a succession of interleading rooms, passing furnishings and objects with which she has no connection, interchangeable from Residence to Residence. If the Ambassador happened to come in he seized her sufferingly. Under his elegantly-hung suit his body swelled and prodded her; but that presence outside the beating of blood reminded that nothing further was permissible, not here, not now. — Look what you do to me. — He was handsome, proud. She would shake that curly head, not culpable. — You know just what you do, my little girl, don’t you.—

Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman had never been here but the town floated as flower and palm fragments, islands and isthmus, on lagoons covered with a mail of waterlilies; a breeze touched, as if it were the black rags of bats themselves, flapping the air round the streetlamps as lights threaded on across bridges. She was seen in the town, where the cry of Edith Piaf came from the bistros, but mostly she kept to the quarter of embassies, villas and hotels. Regularly a young First Secretary from the British Embassy ran to meet her at an open-air bar for their six o’clock rendezvous. — You had better be seen with one or two young men — believe me, my treasure, no-one will believe you haven’t got a man somewhere, if they don’t see him. — A First Secretary was eminently suitable. — But you won’t sleep with him, will you? — She was such a sensible girl, she understood a man has to sleep with his wife; that was different. — You won’t, will you, eh? — When there was a sortie to a nightclub, where the presence of wealthy local blacks and the strident sexual beauty of black prostitutes was the amusement, Marie-Claude appointed the young First Secretary to partner her protégée. Emile danced with her dutifully once or twice, flirting publicly in exactly the harmless degree expected of the married males in homage to the irresistibility of the female sex that had, of course, delivered them to their wives.

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.