A Sport of Nature

Casualties

If Pauline and Joe had known it, the daughter of feckless Ruthie had what they couldn’t find: a sign in her marriage, a sure and certain instruction to which one could attach oneself and feel the tug of history. Pauline, for one, would have doubted Hillela was capable of appreciating this, while the irony of it was that her own children — Sasha and Carole — what direction had been given them, each with the highly-developed social conscience they had? Carole was jeered at by her brother for joining an all-white progressive youth group; Sasha himself, in his maddening changes of mood, had not allowed his father to arrange a further deferment for him to continue his study of law, but had gone into the army after graduating with a useless Bachelor of Arts degree. On weekend leaves he sat beside his mother at the family table in the murderous silence of a prisoner with his jailer. The love between them was a crude weapon each wanted to wrest from the other.

Early in 1967 the men in the camps in Tanzania were transferred to a camp in Zambia. Whaila was sent to Lusaka. It was the end of waiting about in the anterooms of Europe and Africa, for him. — No more running around. We’ll be in Lusaka a long time. — Hillela took it as her instruction to find something other than temporary hospitality. The headquarters were not up any rotting staircase, this time, but a row of prefabricated huts in what had been a builder’s supply yard, with a high fence of hammered oildrums and access only from a lane. Whaila told her dryly; South Africa was too near for safety. He and his family moved into a cement-grey flat in Britannia Court; streets had been renamed since independence but the buildings where white people had gathered to live apart bore still the claim of their nostalgia. Families of black minor officials in the Zambian government and civil service were Hillela’s neighbours. The ivy of Africa, noisy-coloured bougainvillea, overran what had been a garden kept clipped by a Scottish caretaker’s ‘boy’ for a residents’ association; what associated the residents now was the cheerful tolerance of baby strollers, plastic tricycles and crates blocking the corridors, the day-long banging of the blistered glass front doors that led straight into the kitchens, the tramping up and down stairs of relatives from the country who had to be taken in, and the makeshift accommodation for these rigged up on egg-box balconies. The first nostalgia of her life began for Hillela with the smell of pap and cabbage; she was back in Njabulo and Sophie’s flat in Dar.

Nostalgia implies the possibility of a home-coming. She had that, too, for the first time; a black husband in her bed, like anybody else behind the thin walls of Britannia Court, her baby exchanging snot and red earth with the other small children in the trampled garden; black, the same as they were. She tricked Whaila and soon was pregnant again, like any other young woman among her neighbours. She would not tell Whaila — there was still that expression round his mouth that set him apart from her, and that she did not want to provoke — until the right moment came, the moment when she had him beguiled. After all, he had said they would be in Lusaka for a long time. Christa had news of her and told Udi. — She’s settled down. — He smiled, as if Hillela were there and he were appraising her to herself. — Settled down. Mutter Courage, at home in war.—

Christa took it as a compliment for the protégée who had held survival together with nothing but a large safety-pin.

Afterwards, it seemed perfect, but it was not. It was happiness, it was life. There were people who noticed them criticise each other in those marital half-jests that surface in company. There were closer contacts with home, here, for Whaila — individuals who had emigrated rather than fled from there and were settled as doctors, teachers and clerks, and Zambians who in the colonial period had gone South to Fort Hare in the Cape to study, at a time when there were no universities in British-ruled territories. He spent evenings in male company, in the bars of what were still black working-class quarters of the town. She was disappointed at being left behind. He came home slightly drunk, sometimes — vulnerable, that expression of his gone from his mouth. They made love then in splendid tenderness. She pleased him so greatly that she was childishly proud of herself; and he delighted in this. They quarrelled when she told him she was expecting another child — then her childishness in tricking him annoyed him, she was ‘a spoilt little white girl without proper responsibility to the discipline of the struggle’—at which she looked as if she were going to cry but the tears spurted into a splutter of laughter at the pomposity so alien to his nature. — The struggle in bed? — No, seriously, seriously, Hillela, this isn’t the time to go ahead with your big ideas of an African family — that’s what I mean. — But it was done, another one was on the way, so they might as well — what?

— What is it now, Hillela? — She buried her head in his neck, her hair settled like a soft hand hushing his mouth. — Might as well make love, because we don’t have to bother about my getting pregnant.—

Nevertheless the novelty of the first child gave way to inattentiveness, sometimes. She would leave her (everyone here knew the little girl was dedicated by name to the cause) with one of the other women — that was the easy African fashion, children sharing each other’s mothers. She went about with Whaila in the aura of closeness within which lovers move among rooms full of people, the personal pronoun of her conversation ‘we’ and never ‘I’, their appearance together consciously striking: the spare, obsidian dignity of the man and the miniature voluptuousness of a young girl whose pregnancy by him does not yet show in any other way. There are always women who resent such happiness, which they have never had, or have lost; it was remarked among white women: —Of course, she was there — displaying her black husband, full of herself.—

Whaila had for her, beyond sensuality, a concentration within himself that kept her steadily magnetized. The presence of a power. It was related to, but not, in effect, the awareness she had had before the fallen statue. It did not bring fear. The concentration was like that a woman must feel when a general comes to her on the nights before a great offensive begins. A long culmination of tension was not only in his face, his lowered lids, but particularly in the lines of his back when she looked up and saw him standing dead still with urgency. So she shared, in the high emotion of some extraordinary purchase being taken on events, what he did not tell her: there was a decision to join military forces with Joshua Nkomo’s guerrillas fighting Smith’s army in Rhodesia. What Bra James had foreseen was about to be attempted. Umkhonto men would pass down Rhodesia guided by the guerrillas through the game park of the Western border, and hope to infiltrate South Africa by way of Botswana without encountering the Rhodesian army. It was the ultimate journey for which there had been years of others; for which the gatherings on Tamarisk, the discussions up rotting stairs and in the Manaka flat, the long wait in strangers’ lands, the missions to the cold hemisphere had been the victualling. Knowledge of it was growing in Whaila while he lay beside her at night, as the foetus was growing in her. After caresses were over she would clasp his hand tightly in friendship.

The trees in the streets wore puttees of whitewash, the clay-piped calves of the Governor’s guard, petrified, left behind. Splashes of blood in garden green were the poinsettias the songololo wound past in Salisbury. But Len was dead and his little sweetheart did not know that he was buried, would stay for ever, in this country to the North where she, too, had been assured she was going to be for a long time. The moment of falling into place that had come to her while a street shoemaker mended her only pair of sandals had been an assurance rather than a premonition of how she moved among the people in this town. The skill of the watchmaker, at his fruit-crate table in the push and flow of the pavement, whose concentration on the ordering of a confetti of wheels and screws was fine as the minute tools that handled them, made her marvel as skills that put a man to walk in space did not. She would pause to see him drop each tiny component of his whole exactly where it must go, and he and she had a greeting for each other; he gave the child the present of an old pocket watch as a plaything. Although she never had her shoes shined, she was acquainted with the man whose violent-coloured home-concocted polishes were ranged at the kerb in old medicine bottles. The opportunity taken by taxi drivers to wash their cars with water from a broken main was the kind of making out, stepping across the streams, she understood. When the little girl lagged against her mother’s hand, whining to play in the mud, the men reproached her. — You want to make your nice dress dirty? Why you want to make work for your mother? She so nice to you. — So, in laughter, Hillela became their acquaintance, too. A sign painter whose workshop was the hulk of an old truck parked on the route she walked from Britannia Court past Sandringham Mansions and Avonlea Place to town, was closer to her sense of reality than the dispensation of white wine at an advertising agency. She jostled and pushed along with the gaiety of the women who lined up in a soft-breasted, loud-mouthed army when a supermarket received supplies of cooking oil, and she was at ease in the caper with which they at once set up their own economy of distribution, getting their children to pour the oil from cans into small bottles for resale at the profit of a coin, and leaving the mess — broken bottles, spilt oil — of their defiance of the supermarket’s distribution on its doorstep; A young man made furtive by poverty and the unfamiliarity of a town tried to sell her a ‘stick’—a single cigarette from the packet which was his capital and stock-in-trade. — I don’t smoke. — When the white girl smiled and spoke instead of seeming not to see him, as he quickly had understood white women usually did, he begged for work. — I don’t have people working for me. — I can be good for kitchen, garden boy. Please madam. — She did not know if he had enough English to understand, but she was moved by some overflow, pride or plenty, to tell him. — I’m not a madam. We are refugees from down South. My husband’s like you … — Not quite true, of course; but if Whaila, the son of a Bettie or a Jethro, had not had a spirit resistant and brain bright as obsidian, it might have been.

The fullness overflowed into her friendships with women. She fell in love — the young mother’s equivalent of the school-girl pash — with this one or that, spent her days in the bosom company of the favourite and their pooled children, while Whaila was behind the tin security fence in town or out at the camp conferring with Nkomo’s men. Sela is the only one who has ever heard from her again. At one time, Hillela left Whaila’s bed only to walk down to Sela’s house. The children played in the garden, looked after by Sela’s relatives, and the two women settled in the cosy dark cool of the livingroom. Sela had her own car but her lively friend scarcely ever could get her to go out; she sat in calm and stillness, strangely like an object of contemplation rather than in contemplation. Before it, everything could spill over, spill out. There must have been many things about Hillela which she alone could tell; she has never offered them to anybody.

Selina Montgomery and Hillela Kgomani — personages in some race joke: there was this black woman married to a white man, and this white woman married to a black man … The quartet would have made a neat quadrilateral relationship if not a perfect circle, had Whaila had time for social life that did not in some way further the cause, and if Russell Montgomery had been materially present. Among the crocheted doilies of missionary artisanship and hammered copper plates representing idealized tribal maidens or trumpeting elephants that were African bourgeois taste, there hung in the dimness Edward Lear watercolours of Italy and Stubbs sporting prints swollen with humidity and spotted as blighted leaves. Russell St. John Montgomery was an engineer whose family made a colonial fortune two generations earlier in those raw materials that were exported and sold back, transformed, to those who could afford them. He himself was transformed; he came back to Africa as the member of the family who married a black girl instead of paying her forebears a few British pence a day to labour in field, plantation or mine. She was older than Hillela and had been married twelve years; his engineering projects, begun before independence to help build her new Africa, were more and more delegated to other hands and he spent more and more of his time attending to inherited interests in England and Scotland.

The children with whom Nomzamo played, decorating mud pies with the torn bloody strips of poinsettias and serving them on the split giant pods of the mahogany tree, were not really Sela’s but those of her relatives — she had no servants but many collateral retainers who lived in the back yard and the empty rooms of the house, and brought in at eleven and four o’clock cucumber sandwiches or soda-tasting scones on the tea-tray. A photograph of two coloured boys in kilts stood on the piano. (They had not come out beautifully black as the namesake.) A schoolgirl in a pork-pie hat smiling obediently to a photographer’s command over the crinkly plait fallen across her shoulder, looked down at her mother from the wall. Sela’s children were in England at the schools Russell and his sisters had attended. — He entered them when they were born. — She had a way of stopping to reflect after a short statement; and then saying something that, perhaps, was not what she might have said. — It’s very hard to get into those schools, apparently.—

— I wish I’d known you when we were in England! A house in London and one in Scotland! But you weren’t there, Sela, were you — why aren’t you ever there?—

Sela’s heavy and beautiful head was coiffured in sculptural wedges that seemed carved not combed into place, like those of the wooden figures vendors from Zaïre hawked in Cairo Road. She wore the gold, garnet and diamond Victorian ear-rings of Russell’s family jewels dangling to her neck, and from there down the matronly dresses and, no matter how great the heat, the tight varnish of stockings and the high-heeled shoes of a colonial generation of white women who had been her teachers. — When I was studying for my thesis, I stayed there. When I was young. The children were small. But Russell will invite you to his house. Russell has a lot of visitors, his friends. When you go back, you’ll see him.—

— Oh no, we’re here for good. Well, quite a long time. However long it takes, Whaila says.—

Sela had great delicacy. Her manner stopped any indiscretion that might be coming from Hillela about what it was rumoured was being planned behind the tin security fence; whatever indiscreet fantasy of imminent triumph and freedom, down South, the young girl was about to flaunt.

— But don’t you like London, Sela? I had such a good time. To have a house in London, of your own! I’ve never been to Scotland, but I suppose that must be something, too. Why don’t you spend part of the year there? Isn’t it lonely for Russell? I was so often alone in London when Whaila had to go away — I couldn’t stand it, I moved in with friends.—

— There’s this house to see to. My family. Always a lot of problems with our families, such big families … now my father is dead and my mother has to deal with the uncles. The children come out for the holidays — in their summer, over there. And there’s the garden.—

If Hillela did not find her friend in the dark house within its cave of towering trees, she was in her garden, the tightly-stockinged legs kneeling on a sack and the other family’s jewels looping forward over her flesh-ringed soft neck. Sela talked of her gardening as she might have been expected to talk of her profession as a physicist — with the achievement and concomitant responsibility of a vocation. She was the first woman in her country to graduate with a Master’s degree in science, one of the first to have a university education at all, let alone at an Ivy League American institution. She was not teaching at the local university ‘at present’, she said, in the tone of an official communiqué, and had not for a length of time she did not mention. On one of the few occasions when she appeared at a gathering, Hillela heard her respond to the reproachful bonhomie of one of the deans of the university. — It wouldn’t be fair for me to take a teaching post, I am away so much, you see, in England. — Her little white friend came up to her and embraced her, and Sela did not know why; well, she was an impulsively affectionate girl and the atmosphere at parties went to her head.

An odd couple. The women friends, not the Montgomerys or the Kgomanis. But while Hillela chattered and Sela, silent, attentive, overcast the seams of tiny dresses Hillela was sewing for her daughter, they complemented each other in a way nobody saw. Hillela, who had been like a daughter, had no longer a comparative status; was at the centre of a life in her marriage to a black man. Sela, in her marriage to a white man, for all her dowager dignity assumed at thirty-six was only making out; and Hillela had been a prodigy at that.

*

Yes, she knew them all. Except Mandela and the others with him. Mandela remained the voice on tape heard when she was a schoolgirl. Mandela was in prison down South, off the very last peninsula of Africa, pushed out to an island in the Atlantic by white men who frightened themselves with rhetoric that his kind would cast them back into the sea by which they came. Her old friendship with Tambo dates from those days when she used to serve him tea at Britannia Court and somehow produce enough food to go round whomever Whaila brought home. There hasn’t been anything she hasn’t profited by, at one period or another; the cuisine at the Manaka flat stood her in good stead, in its day. Oliver Tambo, even then, had the eyes of sleepless nights behind his thick glasses, and the opacity of flesh that, as it did in Whaila, marks the faces behind which decisions must be made: loosed boulders whose thundering echoes a passage out of sight, into consequences that cannot fully be foreseen. Tennyson Makiwane was one of those who came to Britannia Court, too — another namesake; inheritor of Victoriana — who was there in a Xhosa family who admired Tennyson? Tennyson Makiwane gave Nomzamo a stray kitten he had taken in — Makiwane who outcast himself, years later, from the cause for which, like the other frequenters of Britannia Court, he lived then; a man whose shame was obliterated for him by a traitor’s death.

Whaila knew at least an edited version of his young wife’s life; she had told him how she had got to Tamarisk Beach via Rey; and when she had expressed wonder that anyone (Rey) who seemed so committed to the cause had abandoned it (she had this wider interpretation, now), Whaila gave one of his held-back sighs that became a grunt. — We’ll have them, too. Casualties. And not only operational ones… There’ll always be some who won’t go the whole way.—

On the 8th of August 1967, he told her. The little girl had climbed into bed with them, early in the morning. She sat astride her father’s chest and he spoke it straight at her, who couldn’t understand and couldn’t betray. — Umkhonto is crossing the Zambezi today.—

Hillela turned her head to him, he saw her eyes, that were never bleary in the morning but opened from sleep directly into acceptance of the world as it is. — It’s begun?—

— It’s begun. Two parties. Nothing big in numbers.—

— How many?—

But even in the telling there was some instinct to hold back. — Enough. — The little girl rode him as her mother had loved to ride the playground’s mythical bull. — There’d be no hope of getting through with a whole company. I only hope the ZAPU crowd really know what they’re doing. Ours have to depend on them to find their way hundreds of miles through the bush. It’s all the way sticking to Wankie.—

— What about animals? Can you just walk about among lions and elephants?—

— That’s not the problem. Lions don’t come looking for men and if you sight a herd of elephants you can turn and head the other way for a bit. The danger is running into the Rhodesian army patrols; Wankie’s the only route you’ve got a chance against that.—

The child bounced her laughter into gurgles, thumping him. He lifted her gently under the arms, to regain his breath, gently put her down again.

Hillela sat up with one of her surges of energy, her sunburned breasts juggled between tightened arms. She took his hand, hard. Then she was out of bed and moving about the room as on the morning of some festival. She rushed back to kiss him, holding his head, her possession, between open palms. She rolled on the floor in play with the child and trod by mistake on the kitten. Amid laughter and miaowing he watched from the bed the excitement she felt, for him.

While he shaved she lay in the bath trickling water from a sponge onto her navel. Her belly was coming up; the creature in there was beginning to show its presence. She did not ask him, this time, what colour he thought it would be; they would be a rainbow, their children, their many children.

— What will happen when they get to South Africa?—

The sound of the razor scraping. — They’ll split, into smaller groups and operate in different areas. They’ll join up with people inside. There are specified targets to go for.—

— In the towns or in the country? Where they cross the border it’ll be farmland, won’t it? Are they going to attack white farms? Or is it going to be pylons and things like that, in the cities?—

— Military installations, power stations — hard targets.—

— There won’t be bombs in cafés and office buildings, or in the street? I can’t imagine what that would be like—

He dried his hands, ridding them of something more than shaving foam. He was aware of her waiting for him to tell her what she should be feeling about the unimaginable. — If the government goes on doing what it does, torturing and killing in the townships, in time … well, we’ll have to turn to soft targets as well.—

— Soft targets. You mean ordinary people. People in the streets. — Pressing her fingers into her belly, testing for a response from the life in there. She thought she felt a faint return of pressure and he mistook, with a flicker of displeasure, the beginnings of a smile relaxing her lips as lack of understanding of what she really had said.

— Ordinary people? What ordinary people? Our ordinary people have always been the soft targets. Our bodies, hey? Our minds. The police use violence on us every day and white people think they keep out of it, although the beatings-up and the killings are done on their behalf, they’ve let it happen for so many years. One day the blacks will have to carry the struggle into white areas. It’s inevitable. The violence came from there. Violence will hit back there. It must be, we know it. But not yet. Not now.—

— Innocent people?—

The answer echoed from another bed, another time. — Are there really any innocent people in our country?—

She was communicating in nudges with the third person present, inside her. — And me?—

Down on him came all the sorrow of pain and destruction that his people had endured, were suffering, and would endure no longer, and all the suffering they might have to inflict in consequence, in the knowing horror of victim turned perpetrator. Of course she brought it upon him; he had brought it upon himself by making such a marriage. Sometimes her lack of any identification with her own people dismayed him, he who lived for everything that touched upon the lives of his; there was something missing in her at such times, like a limb or an organ. — This secretly felt, paradoxically, in spite of the fact that he saw their own closeness as a sign; the human cause, the human identity that should be possible, once the race and class struggle were won. With her, it was already one world; what could be. And yet he looked at her lying pearly under water, the body prettily shaded and marbled as white flesh in its uncertain pigment and peculiarly naked nakedness is, and had to say what there was to say. — Yes, you too. If you happened to be there. You were born in sin, my love, the sins of your white people.—

But saved. She knows how to look after herself. She climbed out of the bath and he wrapped her in a towel tenderly, as if she had just been baptised.

Through the still heat before the rains men moved as the wild animals moved in the bush where tourists used to follow game rangers’ advice about the best areas to find and photograph them. There was silence. Whaila was silent about the silence. The occasional news that came back to the offices behind the tin security fence was confused in a way that did not allow an interpretation that was anything but bad. The maps had turned out to be inaccurate in a territory where the only true maps are the migratory paths of wild creatures drawn by the imperatives of the propagation of life, not the campaigns of war. The two parties lost their way, and the journey took much longer than provided for; they ran out of food. Moving like wild creatures in the bush, they were spotted like wild creatures by game rangers. On August 14th fighting with the Rhodesian army began. It was easier to hear the Rhodesian version of the combat over the radio than to keep up with how Umkhonto actually was faring. The Rhodesians, who lied so consistently in their own favour about every campaign in their civil war, claimed ‘overwhelming victories’ against the ZAPU and Umkhonto guerrillas. When news did come through from the freedom fighters, they claimed victories, too; and after two weeks they were still fighting.

Hillela searched Whaila’s face for news each time he entered the flat: still fighting! If certain people had thought her ‘full of herself’ before, what could they have said of her now! She went about with the beginnings of her big African family — the one by the hand, the other swelling her like a bellying sail — in animated confidence that she was escorting the first generation that would go home in freedom. She would deliver what she had heard discussed there at suburban tables, what had been aborted by hesitations and doubts, the shilly-shallying of what was more effective between this commitment or that, this second-hand protest or that. Her blood was up, the colour of her skin warmed her eyes, darker with what she saw in the inner eye. — Pregnancy suits you, you’re lucky. — Her friend Sela envied her energy, mistaking its source. Mutter Courage, as her older friend Udi knew, survived on war as well as survived it.

No-one reached home down South. By mid-September there was defeat; most of the guerrillas were either killed or captured by the Rhodesian army, and the few who had managed to get as far as Botswana were imprisoned for illegal entry. But one of the parties had been successful in mobilizing black Rhodesian villages as support bases for future attempts; planning must already have begun for a new incursion. The huge weight of Joshua Nkomo was lowered once or twice onto the cheap furniture at Britannia Court, the little namesake welcomed to sit on whatever space there was between his enormous stomach and knees — he, too, could have been regarded as an old friend, later; but Hillela has never lost her instinct for avoiding losers. Christmas had a significance other than the traditional when the time came; Sela invited the Kgomani family to the traditional kind of dinner Russell Montgomery would have expected had he been there, with a tinselled tree, presents and plum pudding, but over the wine Hillela grasped Whaila’s hand in covenant with another occasion — at the end of December brothers from the camp were going into Rhodesia once again.

Whaila was with Tambo and his other colleagues eighteen hours a day; she saw him, usually, only when she opened her eyes as he came into the bedroom late at night. She did not ask questions but behaved with her friend Sela as if she knew everything and was saying nothing. This empty boast became real when Whaila, in some inexplicable urge to honour the clasp of the hand in the way that his possession of her body could never do, in some certainty of trust that would transform both him and her and their relationship, told her the plans in detail. This time Umkhonto men were a much larger force, and under their own command. — We’ve learned our lesson. We’ve gone over the logistics again and again, this time. Nothing left to chance. One of the main objectives is going to be to help ZAPU prepare rural people for an uprising. It’s all one struggle. Their war’s ours.—

The handclasp held. She had more concealed inside her than a baby; weeks went by and the men in the bush moved about undetected, hidden by the local people down there. The nature of time changed. With each day, each week, it was something gained, not passed. Each morning, when she and the man beside her woke together, their first thought was the same. The intimacy was an entry into one of the locked rooms of existence. No-one could ever surprise them there; no-one could ever appear in that doorway and look upon them, judge them. He was lover and brother to her in the great family of a cause.

And all around, the marvel of daily life went on weaving continuity as the birds in the rampant bougainvillea threaded shreds of bright cloth, human hair combings, twigs and leaves into their nests. On the twenty-sixth morning in January Hillela smelt the scent of the frangipani as the breath of her own body, the thick pollen in the hibiscus trumpets as her own secretion, as she stretched, the baby inside lifting with her, to hang washing in the old garden of Britannia Court. Whaila came down from the building on his way to the office — that banal summing-up of an ordinary man’s day that had so little to do with the row of prefabricated huts behind the tin security fence. He strolled over to say goodbye and they laughed because her belly (her Nkomo, they called it) got in the way of an embrace, and instead he turned her about and crossed his arms over her breasts from the back, bending round her neck to kiss her cheek. His bare arms in a short-sleeved shirt were, for an instant, the black shining arms that had flailed the sea, coming towards her from the shore. She recognized now, in the heady oxygen of a morning after rain, that she had even then noticed that watch he still wore, flashing on the swimmer’s left arm.

Ten past eight when he left for ‘the office’. She went to the market in the afternoon. Sela was persuaded to come with her; —But leave Nomzamo at the house, Hillela. You know you’ll say you’ll only be half-an-hour there, and then you expect that little kid to trail around for two or three. — Sela was right; the smells and colours and sounds of the market were the adornments Hillela wore as brightness and bells of an extended self, and she could not pass any stall or squatting vendor without stopping to finger, admire, question and talk. What she was supposed to have come to buy she forgot, once in among the cloth-hung alleys, the yards with their pyramids of rape, cabbages, oranges, okra, bananas, groundnuts; she could not be kept to any purpose or time limit. They went through the sheds where dried split fish and grasshoppers were laid out neat and stiff as if lacquered. Sela had to ask, for her, the names of roots big as torn-off heads or fanged like drawn teeth. Hillela had dozens of lengths of Kanga cloth hooked down from the stallholders’ rails and draped them, one after another, over Sela’s crêpe two-piece. Wonderful, wonderful: a Nubian queen! As if Sela could be persuaded to wear such things; but she was stirred by some old familiarity that afternoon. The questions she was urged to ask on behalf of her friend, in the language she shared with the market people, developed into conversations, laughter, and even an insider’s scepticism about prices. — No, no. That’s far too much; don’t give it to him. — Sela was bargaining, with all the pauses of feigned loss of interest, the African organ-note hums required. Sela’s white shoes were splashed with the mud and scales from around the fish-vendors’ tables and the spurt underfoot of rotting vegetables studded with flies; a young madman naked except for a sack he held over himself did not beg but rootled in the mess: yet Hillela that day saw only wholeness. — Everything’s here. Everything in the world that you really need. Come and see. — There was furniture that delighted her with its parody, in cane and grass, of suburban coffee tables, and its brave approximation of white middle-class ugliness in sofas and chairs covered with acrylic-coloured plastic and hammered together, out of the memory of something seen in a white man’s house, in the cubist angles of the Thirties. She liked best the tinsmiths’ section set out under trees with exposed club-foot roots. — Come and see! — She followed every process of the ancient craft adapted to the waste materials a modern industrial society throws away. Here a man was cleaning the paint off tin containers and drums; there another was hammering them out into sheets. Others were cutting shapes from the sheets as she cut out dresses for her child. Saucepans, pots, funnels, buckets, ladles, braziers for the charcoal most blacks used for cooking were set out for sale. — Those pots burn the food if you put them on electric stoves, Hillela, I’m telling you. — Oh come and see these funny little things! — Hillela did make one purchase, in spite of Sela’s good sense. She held up a tiny object formed as an inverted, hollow pyramid, with a handle like that of a cup soldered to it. — What’s this? — You must have seen the women selling groundnuts in Cairo Road. They’re measures — for a handful, when you buy. What will you do with it, Hillela? Don’t give it to Nomzamo to play with — these things are not well finished, they’ve got sharp edges.—

The children belonging to Sela’s relatives made a doll out of the namesake and never wanted to part with her. This was one of the many evenings when they wandered back with Hillela to Britannia Court. Hillela taught them songs the songololo had sung, as they walked home with her past Sandringham Mansions and Avonlea Place; a sunset first stamped out every coarse leaf of the flamboyant trees against translucent lakes of sky and then clotted the black metallic cut-outs into a cage of earthly dark. The little straggle of woman and children made their cheerful chorus far beneath, and stumped up the stairs to the flat. When Whaila came home, the streetlight that could be seen from the kitchen window was on, bats circling it like the rings round a planet. He held his little daughter up to look, but she wriggled away to the other children. There was the static of frying behind loud play; Hillela, barefoot in her broad stance of pregnancy, was cooking chips for their supper. The eldest girl had made herself at home with the radio playing monotonous African music; on one of those sudden impulses children have, all scrambled out of the room to some game in the bathroom but the music wound on. The level of noise was raised by a tumble of running water. Neither Hillela nor Whaila was sure, for a moment, whether or not the doorbell was ringing. He said something she didn’t catch, where she bent at the open refrigerator to fetch a carton of milk, but she was aware that he had passed behind her to go to the door and she took off the shelves a couple of cans of beer as well — it was the time in the evening when one or another of the men from the office or camp would call in. The door was swollen by summer damp and she seemed to hear all at once the prelude of its scrape along the linoleum, a pause in which she had no time to grasp that there were no greetings exchanged, and then a crack that splintered the thick homely hubbub against the thin walls of the flat. Something fell. As she turned there was another crack and a bolt of force hit the refrigerator door she stood behind. Someone — one, more than one — ran clattering down the corridor of Britannia Court; the doorway was open and empty: and Whaila? Whaila? As she came out from behind the shield of the refrigerator, he was there, on the floor. Whaila was flung before her, red flowing from the side of his head, his neck, under the shirt pocket where his pen still was hooked. His open eyes faced the wall and his lips stretched finely in that expression drawn by his life.

His life running away in red like the muddy filth in the gutters of the market.

There was a wrenching upheaval inside her as the foetus convulsed and turned. The bullet that was lodged in the refrigerator door penetrated her consciousness in the bullets’ disorientation of sequence; she felt she was shot. She backed away from death, from death ebbing away Whaila. Backed away, backed away. Her shoulder hit the jamb of the doorway leading to the internal passage of the flat. She opened her mouth to wail but terror blocked her throat and instead of her cry there was the voice of a radio commercial enthusing over a brand of beer. She burst into the bathroom in the path of a plastic duck one child had thrown at another; the children saw in her terrible face grown-up anger at their game. She grasped the thirteen-year-old girl in charge. She dragged her to the kitchen, but when they reached the doorway, she herself turned to the wall and pressed her bent arms tight against her head, screaming.

It was the child who went in, and began to heave small, hard breasts in deep breaths that became sobs, and slowly went up to the dead man who had been Whaila, and touched him.

There have been others since then. They received parcels of death in mail from their home country. It seems that in the case of Whaila Kgomani, one of the first, the agents employed by the South African government might have bungled their mission. It was said in Lusaka that they were meant to kill Oliver Tambo, but came to the wrong address. Seeing a man through the blistered glass door, they did not wait to verify any identity; there is no margin for hesitation in such tasks. Others said the government’s instructions were carried out: Whaila was a key man in the planning of armed infiltration. In South Africa itself, of course, the death was reported as the result of rivalry and a power struggle within the movement; as any statements from the organization itself were banned and could not be published, that version became the accepted one for most white people, if they were aware of the assassination at all.

It was not surprising that news of Hillela’s whereabouts at that time should have come to the families of her aunts by way of violence. Trouble. She was always trouble. Olga hoped nobody would tell Arthur, recovering from a coronary on a low-fat diet with instructions that he should not be subjected to stress or annoyance. Anyway, there was no unpleasant publicity, fortunately, because no-one made the connection between Hillela and Ruthie’s sisters — it was merely mentioned that the ANC man had a white wife. Carole was about to be married, herself, to a young journalist. A simple wedding in the garden, no big Jewish show for Pauline’s daughter. He could have written a Sunday paper scoop that would have given him a byline, and Pauline certainly didn’t give a damn whether or not Arthur was upset by the family’s political connections, but Carole asked her boy not to. He would soon be her husband; she tried to imagine how it would be to have him killed, taken away from her. She could not have borne to have had her life with him taken away, as well, exposed in a newspaper. Perhaps a sign, already, nobody read: she was not the wife for a newspaperman.

Pauline knew Hillela was not little Carole. — Whatever else Hillela has lacked, it’s never been guts. She won’t shut herself away somewhere.—

— What’ll she do? She’s got a small child. So the paper said — he had a wife and daughter. But maybe that’s from a previous marriage — his child?—

Carole’s father reassured her. — People will look after Hillela and her child, the organization will take care of that. There are resources. — And of course Joe, through his legal cases, was in touch with the circumstances of political exiles — some of his clients became them.

— I want to write to Hillela, Daddy.—

Sasha, silent among them, was suddenly present. — What about? Your bridesmaids’ dresses?—

Carole was still emotional on the subject of Hillela. — Don’t you care about anybody anymore? What’s the matter with you? Maybe she’ll come home, now, maybe she can come home.—

The future husband had never seen Carole, of all people, shrill and angry. There were still so many currents in this family he couldn’t follow.

Her bastard of a brother looked as if she had slapped him across both sides of his face. — Don’t you understand anything about anything? What are you the product of, for Christ’ sake?—

And now the mother lifted her head and narrowed one eye, as if in pain.

There have been others. There were to be others. To begin with — O, what was grief, could anyone have guessed, explained, prepared for this — anyone, a quiet, wise lawyer-uncle, the father of the little sweetheart, for only a man can comfort for the loss of a man, only a man’s arms, the smell of a man’s shaven skin can make it possible to believe that a man actually came to an end, that it happens in a kitchen, on an evening like any other ordinary evening, and that there will never be another ordinary evening like that one again. If there had been a mother, if she had turned up the lights in the nightclub and seen the cockroaches and the dirty neck of the ageing fado singer, would she have been able to provide the advantage: to prepare the daughter against the lights going up on her romance of defiance and danger? Who knew about this? Who could bear to know about this? So that if it happened to someone, that one feared to tell what it was, and everyone feared to ask.

And what about the other survivor who had done the killing himself, driving his wife home on the road to Bagambyo? His body rejected life, afterwards, could not accept what had happened. The baby rejected life, wrenching itself from the body it was anchored in. It loosed with it the waters of grief: the longing of the body the man would never enter again, the untouched breasts, empty vagina, empty clothes in the cupboard, rooms without a voice: desertion. What am I without him? And if, without him, I am nothing, what was I? The loving gone, the African family of rainbow-coloured children gone, the innocent boast of the striking couple gone—

What was left behind was the handclasp. Because the handclasp belongs to tragedy, not grief. Udi explained it, once, not knowing the explanation would ever come to be understood. — No, the fact that I killed my wife is not a tragedy. I must not call it that. A tragedy, Hillela, is when a human being is destroyed engaging himself with events greater than personal relationships. Tragedy is an idea from the ancient Greeks; from the gods. A tragic death results from the struggle between good and evil. And it has results that outlast grief. Grief is a rot, it belongs with the dead, but tragedy is a sign that that struggle must go on. If I had experienced tragedy, I’d be all right… but it has nothing to do with someone like me.—

Whaila is dead. There have been others. There will be others.

When the police had gone away Sela brought an old relative to scrub Whaila’s blood from the linoleum. The man rolled up his trousers and carefully took off his laceless shoes so that they might not be spoiled, but he worked reverently, intoning some kind of lament to himself, or perhaps it was a hymn he was breathing. Hillela and her child were taken into the empty rooms of Sela’s house, dark as if they had been waiting for the occasion of such occupancy.

The obsidian god from the waves, the comrade was buried in the gold, green and black flag he died for. Tambo spoke of him, at an oblong hole in red earth that had been dug. Woza, woza, rose the responses to the verses of the national anthem that came from home and belongs to all Africa. Hillela’s bare feet in shabby sandals carried away red earth on the toes. Sela was correctly dressed in a black tailored skirt and jacket and she led from among the women in her band of relatives the traditional ululation. The high, unearthly, ancient sound is produced to release sorrow or hail triumph; it is both grief and tragedy.

Hillela stood, huge, at the graveside, like Joshua Nkomo, who had been the subject of a private joke. Her pregnancy appeared to have risen to her flushed and swollen face. But nobody seems to know what happened to that child. She was close to her term, then. It might have been born dead, or it died shortly after birth. The namesake who looks out from magazine covers, unsmiling with charming haughtiness, nostrils dilated, is her only child, her daughter.