A Sport of Nature

Under The Snow

Saved by a refrigerator door. In the undeclared wars that maim and kill without battlefields or boundaries, in the streets, cafés and houses of foreign towns, on tourist planes and cruise ships, it was a campaign ribbon from a front that is anywhere and everywhere. In her confusion, she had felt herself hit; and, indeed, the story went round that the baby had been killed by a bullet inside its mother’s belly at the same time as its father was shot. She kept to herself the true story, telling only Sela: —It died because I cheated Whaila into making it. So it went with him. — Sela calmed these fantasies of shock; she knew her friend was young and healthy and would regain an equilibrium.

And it was also true that the persistent rumour that she had seen not only her husband but his child, as well, sacrificed to the cause, provided her with credentials of the highest order. There are lacunae again, mainly because she was deployed in Eastern Europe and Western hysteria over such contacts made it necessary for her to ignore, in one period, the existence of another. But it is certain that the organization accepted full responsibility for Whaila’s wife and daughter. She went first back to London, where she worked in its office. Personality clashes with other white women employed there, some of them the veterans of political imprisonment and exile who remembered her from Tamarisk Beach, cut short that posting.

They did not understand that even if she had not been hit, the little beach girl was buried.

The fiery surf of veld fires was the last Mrs Hillela Kgomani saw of Africa, leaving it, and the first she saw of it, coming home to Africa. Whaila Kgomani’s widow flew back to be present at a memorial-day ceremony held for him and others a year after his death. Twenty-five years old, very thin except for her breasts, the cheekbones prominent beneath black eyes, she wore African dress and headcloth and made a speech on behalf of wives and mothers who had given husbands and sons to the cause of liberation. It was clear from her delivery that this was not the first time she had spoken in public, and the emotion she conveyed was not only private but also skilfully drawn from that generated by the crowd. A day or two after the ceremony, she changed into the duffle coat and boots of a European winter and flew away again to the other hemisphere, to an ancient Eastern European city whose gothic and baroque and art nouveau buildings, so beautiful and strange to her, were poxed with the acne of gunfire from generations of wars and revolutions. Muffled in clothing that gave a new dimension to her body (—It’s like driving a bus when you’ve been used to a racing bicycle. — Her observations of things they took for granted amused local citizens) she came out of the steamy fug of an apartment into a seizure of cold every morning. She took her child to a nursery-school, and then walked to her place of work. It was along gangrene corridors whose colour had nothing to do with forgotten summers of trees and grass, and — when the dented lift did not work — up flights of cold stairs. The room itself was like the others above rotting stairs in hot climates thousands of kilometres away: the old typewriters, the posters and banners, framed declarations and newspaper collages, with the addition of photographs of the host country’s heroes displayed like a shopkeeper’s licence to trade. She typed letters and was brought into negotiations as a translator when there were people who could speak French, which was not their language any more than it was hers, but which served as a means of communication if they had no English. She apologized briskly for her poor ability: —I was nursemaid to French-speaking kids, once, in Ghana, that’s all.—

Sela was right, Mrs Kgomani had gained an equilibrium that discarded girlish fantasies. She was also discovered to have an ability to talk to women’s worker-groups, herself through a translator. She crossed borders to the North, was useful in still colder places, Stockholm, Oslo, Moscow — everywhere that Whaila had gone, on journeys for which she now needed no proxy. Most of these were taken with Citagele Koza, head of mission, who had been Whaila’s close friend, but several times she was deputed to accompany Arnold, who came back and forth between Africa and Europe. She kept notes for him. Perhaps he had asked specifically to have her assistance; the decision would have to be Citagele’s. Alone together in dusty hotels like the museums of the Europe before the war and revolutions, afternoons in the colonial house rapped out in memory by a press agency’s telex were never resumed. Arnold grieved for the loss of the beach girl. In her place was a young woman who had experienced tragedy and who did not have the same appeal for him. She was no longer a distraction to catch the eye. She was part of the preoccupation she once had disrupted so naturally. They were concentrated together in a struggle within the struggle, bargaining or begging (there was only the collateral of an uncertain future to offer) for arms and money. He did not need to take her in hand, although he had the opportunity to do so, now. The education Whaila had begun, she completed alone. She taught herself not the old theories of ends, but the diplomacy and technicalities of means, that were immediate. She mastered specifications of guns and missiles and their relative suitability for the conditions under which they would have to be used. The men who had crossed the Zambezi again before Whaila was killed in his ambush had lasted out three months in the bush, lugging these weapons towards home, towards the army, the police, power lines and government buildings — Soft targets. No. Not yet. But the other side, they were not waiting, they had no distinction between steel-and-concrete and human bodies. Whaila’s warm black flesh dissolved red.

She toured factories where women with kerchiefs on their heads made parts for guns as neat as the components the street watchmaker put together in perfect functional harmony. On flights between one city and the next, liquid shudders in glasses and, watching it, thoughts surface. — If Whaila had had a gun he might have got them before they got him. We should all be armed with Parabellums.—

Arnold has told people, over the years: —If things had turned out differently, she was the type to have become a terrorist, a hijacker. A Leila Khaled. She had it in her, at one time. I don’t think we’d have been able to contain her. It wasn’t that she was undisciplined; no discipline was demanding enough for her — you know the sort of thing. — When he himself spoke out of his drowsiness in a plane, he asked a question. — What happened to the yellow swimsuit? — She did not seem to find the reference odd or suggestive. — In this climate?—

Other men had no beach girl to regret, of course. A man she was known to be associated with, eventually, had — like everybody else in that city — experienced tragedy and survived grief. Among such people she was not changed; they knew no other state of being. She was sent to a meeting for cultural solidarity of the Eastern bloc with the Third World, one day — contacts at all levels had to be kept up — and the chairman had a big, Balkan head with thick, grey-black hair rising from a peak like a dart set in a broad low forehead, a short, humorously-obstinate nose, and a brush moustache to show off well-worn lips and teeth. The details remain because the head was all that was visible of him above the rostrum; the head of handsome maturity to which years cannot be accurately attributed. When the meeting was over she saw that he was heavy and had the sideways gait of ageing. She went up dutifully to present her credentials and he asked her to stay on and allow his committee to take the opportunity to discuss African literature in English with her over a glass of wine. She knew much less about the subject than he, but when his committee members had all left and he and she were still talking, he took her to dinner at a restaurant she would not have known still existed in that city. They crossed the river and walked a long way in the cold. His left leg swayed him and he was short of breath, never stopped talking. Until then, all the city had run together for her in the overlapping stone statements, destruction, reconstruction, of its past; such density impenetrable, not only by reason of the ignorance of the historical significance of architecture in which the advantage of a colonial education had left her, but because she was accustomed to a thin layer of human settlement in countries where cities are a recent form of social focus. Underneath the skyscrapers of Johannesburg were only the buried gin-bottles of a mining camp where her great-grandfather Hillel had hawked second-hand clothing to blacks who came in their blankets to earn hut-tax. And she was not even aware that he had had this role in history. Under Britannia Court were the migratory trails by which Whaila’s and the namesake’s ancestors had explored their continent, begetting living monuments in their descendants rather than marking their generations in stone. The European read off to her as they walked the history of his city that he knew by heart, in marble stumps of Roman ruins, the iron rings embedded in medieval walls, the church with the bombed tower, the scaffolding round the restoration of a 17th-century palace, the piles stroked by the flow of water where a bridge was blown up, the withering forbidden wreaths placed at an empty lot where victims of the last uprising were shot down.

— They’ll never build anything on that spot. They know if we can’t have a monument there, there must be nothing else. — A rough bronchial laugh. — So they just let the weeds grow. It’s a way of dealing with realities you can’t handle: neglect. Not such a bad way. It works with other things, too. — He pointed at a red star which hung crookedly from the pinnacle of a public building and was lit up only on three neon points.

— You were mixed up in it? That uprising? Nobody else mentions it.—

— No. Because it’s not, how do you say, my dear, healthy … if you were in it, it’s better to keep quiet. And if you were not, well, some people have a reason to be ashamed because of that. It did bring some benefits, you see. Apparent lost causes always do … Mixed up! Yes, I was in prison for thirteen months. But I have friends … The President and I were at the gymnasium together — young boys, we joined the youth group of the Party while it was still an Underground movement… One night, they come for me, in my cell. (It wasn’t so bad, that time, I was allowed books, I worked on my translations of Neruda.) I thought, they’ve changed their minds, they’re going to shoot me. I’m on the journey to the river, where they threw the others. But they push me into a car and the next thing, I’m in the State chambers. He’s there in his windowless study — it’s like the last of the Chinese boxes, nothing can get at him once he’s inside there. A big fire burning, and a chair with a glass of brandy beside it. For me. He reads me a lecture, and then he comes over and gives me a push in the chest, like this, the way we used to start to wrestle when we were boys. Then he said to me, he pleaded with me, ‘You know I can’t do what you people asked. You know that. “Freedom”—we used that kind of talk when we were waving banners at sixteen. We give them our coal at their price, and they close their eyes to our trade union independence. We never criticise them in our newspapers, and they ignore the books we publish here by writers they ban. That’s freedom. We didn’t know it would be like that, when we were young. But you, Karel, you know, now.’ So they let me out. Again. Each time I’ve been rescued by someone different; the Russians let me out when the Germans imprisoned me as a communist, our first communist government let me out after the Russians imprisoned me as a nationalist. Oh, and our fascists had to let me out, of course, when the war came, and I was sent to the army.—

He took her gloveless hand and tucked it under his arm between the thicknesses of his enormous coat, laughing. How old could he be? Old enough to be her father, her grandfather, in terms of the wars, invasions, military occupations, uprisings, imprisonments he had lived. The restaurant was warm, warm. A conservatory. It had palms under its glass dome and the waiters were crook-backed and wispy-haired. So was the violinist who played from table to table. Her host ordered little packets made of stuffed vegetable leaves, fish soup, a duck dish and a veal dish, and ‘a wine that isn’t exactly champagne, but it will make you happy tomorrow’. He touched his big head; no headache. He tasted from her plate and encouraged her to taste from his. The wan violinist, bent in one curve with his instrument, came over and played passionately to her, and her new friend was delighted to see that she was not embarrassed, as so many women would think it necessary to be, but listened as if receiving what was her due as a rather beautiful young woman — whether it was the cold they had tramped through, or some private mood, she gave the impression of a coursing of new blood through the vessels of her being, a brilliance of colouring and brightness of gaze, a flow of words. — I’ve been rescued, too. A few times. A bullet went into a door instead of me. But nothing like you … More like a beetle that’s flicked out of a swimming pool. I used to lie on my stomach and do that, as a kid. There’d be rose beetles that had fallen into my aunt’s pool, and I’d flip out one, and let the others drown. Why that one?—

— Someone may just be passing by — that’s the only chance. Two boys teased the girls together in the school yard; then he happened to be President, and I was in jail. So I got flicked out. What are you looking round for? Is there a man you don’t want to see you with another man? But look at my grey hair.—

— No … Is it all right to talk about anything, here?—

He laughed. — Oh I know what’s worrying you, there have been times when we couldn’t talk, either … but it’s all right — everybody talks, everybody says what they think, it doesn’t change anything, now …—

— What do you believe?—

— Ah, that’s the kind of talk my friend the President says we used to have at sixteen! But you’re not much more than that yourself — no, no, I’m insulting you when I think I’m paying you a compliment. You are a woman. Nothing less. — He had asked about a husband, children, and she had told him, walking across the bridge.

— You were against the old regime, you were a socialist when you were young.—

He signalled with a full mouth; he enjoyed his food. — Like everyone. Like you, yes?—

— No. No. I didn’t know what it meant. Everybody told me, explained — but I was white, you see.—

— What has that to do with it? There are white, black and yellow socialists, millions of them …—

— White made it impossible to understand. For me, anyway. Everybody talked and argued, and I thought about other things. And whenever I heard them again, they were still talking and arguing, living the same way in the same place. Liberalism, socialism, communism.—

— What other things? I don’t know what life must be like, down there.—

She sat back against her chair, smiling for herself; the movement drew him to lean towards her across the table in the familiar invitation and approach between a woman and a man.

— Someone to love. A man. Somewhere to go.—

— Where there would be — what?—

— What the others didn’t know about.—

— And did you know what that was?—

— No. But I knew it wasn’t to be found in their talk, they would never find it. Oh it sounds such rubbish — but I’ve never tried to tell anyone before. Oh and now I’m getting like them, all the people I behaved so badly to, I’m talking, talking.—

— You weren’t asking me about God, were you? For god’s sake, my dear! Here religion has been allowed again to offer its soporific until you wake up in the next world, as even we can’t seem to get this one right. But I stick to my cigarettes and wine.—

— Not that. Can I ask you something — you were in that uprising, and this is a communist regime; does that mean you’re no longer a communist? If that’s so, how could you be running that meeting this afternoon? For the Ministry of Culture?—

He put up a large, long-fingered hand with a thin seal-ring on the third finger. He made to comb down the moustache but stopped himself fastidiously as if a gesture might trivialise seriousness or honesty. — It’s right that you should ask me. Don’t be afraid. If we are going to be friends, in your position you must know about me, my dear.—

— My position?—

— Your somewhere to go is right at the centre of this century. In my country you’ve come to ask for backing from the regime, and you’ve got to get that backing. That must be your one and only objective. You must be careful not to give any impression that you have fraternising connections with dissatisfied, critical elements in our population.—

— So you’re no longer a communist.—

— I have been a Marxist since I was sixteen and I’ll die one. That’s what I’ve spent years of my life in prison for, whether it was the fascists or capitalists who put me there, or whether it was the comrades who called me a revisionist. I don’t want this to come back. — He made a conductor’s gesture, taking in the palms, the chipped gilding, the weary servility of the old waiters. — I don’t want my grandfather’s estate with its illiterate peasants dying of tuberculosis. People like me are run down, I can’t afford to buy foreign books anymore, I have to burn them — excuse me, I learnt that from the British, during the war — through boring myself stiff in cultural organizations, I can travel to Rome to see my beloved Piranesi wall only by getting myself invited to conferences — (short of breath or caught by laughter) — bourgeois hardships! But life is better for people who were wretchedly poor before. I wanted that. I still want it. That’s freedom, too. You see, it’s turned out that freedom is divisible. My schoolfriend is right. And I still prefer the way it’s divided here to the way it’s divided in the great riches of the West.—

A moment later he filled her glass and put a hand on her wrist. — But don’t go asking your kind of question among people here.—

— Oh I should keep my mouth shut! But — again — you see, being in this kind of country’s not like talking about it. Reading about it. I read quite a lot, in Ghana — the university library … because Whaila — he hadn’t been brought up in a house with books, the way I was, but he’d managed somehow to know so much; so much you need to know. For me, everything happens for the first time, for him everything grew out of what had already happened. I just think about how to manage; the way people do it, wherever you find yourself.—

— It’s all right with me. With me you don’t have to worry.—

— No, but I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have started asking. I don’t even know you.—

— There are some people who have never been strangers.—

No need to explain why some subjects were invaded out of sequence by others; talk between them wove back and forth closely a pattern of its own; their pattern. While he was examining the bill, spectacles balanced on his nose but not hooked behind the ears, she set out firmly before herself like a hand at cards to be read — You have an empty place where they were shot, we … Some are buried in the veld, nobody knows where, maybe hyenas have dug them up. He died on the kitchen floor. Another family eats there, now, there’s a housing shortage.—

He was querying an item, kindly, with the wraith-faced waiter, and counted out notes in their language, but he knew what she was saying to him. — Yes, we are lucky. Yours is the hardest kind of struggle, in its worst phase — a battle going on in exile, with no place that belongs even to the dead. That is the greatest dispossession there is. Even to be in prison in your own country is to have a place there. I know. — As a cat sees the movement of a mouse while apparently not looking its way, he noticed the bottom of her glass was still coloured, and drank off the mouthful of wine left. A drop shone on the brush of moustache. She thought she felt it, although that was ridiculous, it must have been the frost of the streets, the wind across the river, when he kissed her goodnight under the statue without a nose above her apartment building’s entrance. It was a kiss on either cheek, but not the butterfly flit of the Ambassador’s household. It was of the order of the handclasp; to which she belonged, held by the hand of the dead.

A warning was not necessary for a good worker like Hillela. She had — she made — all the right connections. Citagele has always admitted he never anywhere had anyone more energetic (even if she was a woman, even if she was white). And watchful; as if life depended on never forgetting for a moment what they were there for. She entered various circles, or drew from these a certain circle around her — it is not possible that one did not attract people, whether she had the heart to or not. From among them she cultivated the most useful — nothing new in that, for her, but the focus was different, and calculated, as it had not been. So she disappears. She disappears into what is known about the mission, in that country at that time. No history of her really can be personal history, then; its ends were all apparently outside herself. There was someone named Pavel — he was not a native of that country but an envoy or expert sent from outside; Karel had told her there used to be many of them, ‘experts’ watching even members of the government, but now they were fewer — only their army units remained stationed in certain parts of the country.

Pavel was young and did not limp. Surely more to her taste, but how can anyone know? He had the wild face associated with ballet dancers who defect to the West, and that face was the centre of a group of State officials and press functionaries who met often in the same café or at the apartment of a painter. — From Africa. You are strange to us like a giraffe. — She had the answer for this first remark addressed to her. The namesake was with her: — Today I went to the hairdresser, and the girl who was cutting my hair spoke a few words of English. She gave Nomzamo chocolate and pointed at her—‘Where did you get that?’—

— Maybe she thinks at hard currency shop, like any other luxury she knows foreigners can buy.—

The café was for repartee, the painter’s apartment for discussion where attitudes outside the insulation of book-and-canvas stacked walls, between other, official walls, could be gauged, and the movements up and down the ladder of influence and favour traced, even advanced or retarded. They made conclaves there, in their own language, but broke into English in the company of English-speakers. She heard Karel referred to as ‘the hero of the revolution’. Why was he called that? — Because that’s what he is, we have One Hundred Heroes of The Revolution, old boys who fought the Germans and were honoured by our first communist government after the war. The trouble is, some of them think that’s a free pass to grab everything that’s going, for the rest of their lives. — Well, the Minister knows all about the Hero, so there’s no danger he’ll get the Embassy appointment in London. — Oh but he’s got a friend higher up than that. — Maybe. But there are jobs younger men need to do, it’s not nineteen-fifty, you know. Attitudes have changed. Our representatives in the West shouldn’t be people who are remembering instead of thinking — that’s all forgotten now, it’s nuclear warheads not the Nazis we’re talking about with Western Europe and America. There is a new style of diplomacy entirely—

— Time to get rid of these old men. You have even more of them, Pavel.—

The other foreigner swallowed, the Adam’s apple bobbing almost humorously above his sweater. — His translations of Neruda are excellent. We’ll invite him to a conference with Latin American scholars at our institute. Nice old man. Let him stay happy with his Neruda and his chasing girls. That is heroic too for him.—

There was laughter.

— Well, he must be kept out of the West. He has the wrong friends in the West, he is here and there with the enemies of this country. You’ll invite him to a conference? What for? He’ll expect to see reactionaries like Borges there! Our hero … that house of his, how is he allowed to have such a house for two old people?—

Mrs Kgomani said nothing to defend her friend or correct misinformation. She continued to take the bus to the old suburb where most houses, withdrawn up green drives like the houses in the white suburbs where she had lived as a daughter, had been converted into institutions. Her friend lived in the house that had been vacated in a hurry by a general of occupying forces, and he had no wife alive but two very old aunts and several sons and daughters with their wives and husbands living with him. There were neat beds behind rigged-up curtains in passages, and a warped grand piano in an entrance hall where four carved dining chairs that had somehow survived being chopped up for firewood during bad times were oddly-assorted round a plush-clothed table in anticipation of a vanished occasion. The aunts sat there and did not speak, even in their own language. Karel had a room at the top of the house with french windows and a balcony. — But don’t step out, it’s unsafe.—

Grass up there, growing from blown seeds between cracks in the cement. Inside, so much was safe. The room was perhaps meant for a reception room or studio, in the days when people like him had separate rooms for each function of living, and his grandfather’s peasants were crowded into huts like the ones where Whaila’s people lived now. Karel worked, slept and ate there, in the middle of an entire, assembled life. It was abundance of a kind she had not known existed, a fullness beyond money, although here and there was a fragment of something costly but damaged, like the Imari cat. She wandered about this life of his. A photograph when young; handsome as she had never seen a man to be, with the wing of black hair pointing back from the brow, and a cigarette holder between beautiful lips. Plaster maquettes of vanished structures; a piece of thick embroidery detached from its ceremonial occasion, hanging on a cord, dictionaries in five languages, solid as furniture, step-pyramids of journals shedding press cuttings, a plate of smooth stones, the painting of a man in braid and medals, dated 1848, who looked like Karel in fancy dress, framed letters in foreign languages signed ‘Lukács Gyorgy’ and ‘Thomas Mann’, scrap-paper drawings and sheets of music manuscript with dedications, old lamps that had scorched their shades, long fixing with an amber eye among books one left open at a poem or an engraving, a child’s clumsy posy of dried flowers, a draped flag worn thin as an old dress, theatre programmes, abstract paintings of the modest size presented by artists themselves, even a tin canister — What’s this?—

He looked at her hand for a moment as if it held one of the grenades whose features and performances she was studying. He came over to her. — Don’t you see? The label is still there. Like a can of beans. It’s Zyklon B, the gas the Nazis used in their death chambers. It was issued with — what d’you call it — rations to the camp commandants. — He translated from the German: —‘For the control of vermin’—and there are instructions to be careful not to contaminate yourself when using it. —

He took the canister slowly from her and replaced it on a scroll-ended bibelot shelf stained with circles made by wine glasses at long-past parties. He adjusted the position so that the label would not be obscured. — I was with the Russians who went in when Berlin fell. Most of Hitler’s men had fled but we opened doors and found some. One had this can on his desk. — His head seemed too heavy for him and under raised eyebrows his face sagged before her. — A sample. Something to (he ran his fingers round some invisible gadget) play with, while talking on the phone. I put the can in my pocket. That was the looting I did. And I keep it here where I can see it every day among the books, and the photographs of the women and children and friends because that’s where it belongs, that’s how it was used, as some ordinary … commodity—

An urge came upon her crudely as an urge to vomit or void her bowels. She began to tremble and to flush. Her eyes were huge with burning liquid she could not hold back. She wept in his arms, blotted against the solid body thick with life in which the constricted breathing of age was like a great cat’s purr. He knew she was not weeping for the man he had shot dead at his desk, or even for the innocents for whom death was opened like a can of beans. The kitchen floor; it was the kitchen floor.

She came from so far away, down there in a remote country, belonging to a privileged class at home, and far, far from the bombardments, the childhood existence on frozen potatoes, the firing squads for partisans set to dig their own graves, and the gas chambers for families. The necessity to deal in death, no way out of it, meeting death with death, not flowers and memorials, was just coming to the people among whom she had grown up.

*

Where the city of the intermediate thousand years had been bombed to rubble in the war, excavations for a new subway line had unearthed Roman baths belonging to a garrison from the first foreign occupation of the country. With enough time, foreign occupations become part of a treasured history which is threatened by the latest foreign power: asserting national heritage in stone restored everywhere, the local authorities raised the marble columns in a park laid out above the subway. Behind, at the distance of a crowd from a spectacle, was the solid horizon of workers’ housing blocks. The nursery-school teacher who lived there took Nomzamo’s mother home for coffee to what she called ‘The Great Wall’. In a kilometre of ten-storey buildings with windows set like close type she pointed at one she alone could distinguish from all others. — That’s where we are.—

The mythical wooden beasts of a children’s playground were furred with snow, here. The women and their small children moved at once into the hot, echoing concrete walks beyond double doors. — Everybody in this block has not less than three children. That’s the way housing is allotted. In the school holidays you can’t think, you can’t hear yourself speak … your own children are among them, and they make a hell. — The teacher was studying to improve her qualifications and become an official translator for a State publishing house. — I’m lucky, my two eldest can look after themselves and my mother takes the little one, so I can go and work at night in a library. — Here, too, were neat beds disguised as livingroom furniture; the preoccupations of different members of the household staked out in corners and shelves of territory: musical instruments and reference books (the husband taught in a college of music), children’s sports banners and bicycles, models on box-lids, an ironing board before a television set. — D’you want to go away?—

She was a soft-voiced blonde with all her tension and emotion in her neck. — Only to a better apartment. That’s all. To have another room! I know very well why we can’t have it, it’ll take another generation to make up what was destroyed and provide for all the people who have come to the towns. But I want it. If I had money, I know I’d try and buy the way … although I think it’s wrong.—

— Can people do that?—

— Always, everywhere, people do that. It can’t be stopped, altogether.—

— We’ve got something … a charter. Something like this ‘… the people shall have the right to live where they choose, to be decently housed’.—

The coffee cups were special ones, the teacher’s laugh rang from the cupboard where she sought them. — Oh yes, that’s what the leaders say, but when they are in power, they have to do it … that’s the trouble. But it’s a rich country down there? You didn’t have wars. Maybe you can.—

There was no African family here in which the namesake was common responsibility. Mrs Kgomani could not go out at night unless she could find a baby-sitter. Pavel took up the instruction begun long ago by a naughty boy and girl in Joe’s study among documentary evidence of the kind of activity she was engaged in now. Pavel came to the apartment and taught her chess. Snow did not keep him away; looking out the window at the expected hour she saw him in his fur boots and elegant coat, moving through the white like one of those antlered creatures in his own latitude who graze in cold wastes, digging for nourishment only they know is there.

— The longer the revolution takes to come in your country, more danger there is to be a bourgeois revolution. That is what people like your lady friend — she wants to have here. She will tell you she is glad the big estates are gone. State has taken over banks and capitalist industry. She is glad for that, because she was not big land-owner, not factory owner. So she is glad those people have not got what she did not never have. — ‘Never had’.—Yes, never have. But she wants, wants to get house to leave to her children, and then it’s a shop, and so it must go on … She’s dreaming of unearned income — no good for the old regime, but good for her … Do you know that those apartments are heated, free? Maybe that’s nothing for her, she was always living in a heated house. But generations of peasants, and those who became proletariat with industrialization in nineteenth century, they never knew what it is to have heat, electric light! Danger is, for your country, with industrialization maybe there is coming a class — blacks — like here. They want the little house, the little shop, the little farm, for their children. Even some who come here … Bourgeois in the heart. What does Citagele care for landless peasants? He doesn’t need land, he wants a fine office. Kotane, J. B. Marks, Tambo, Nzo, Makatini — they care for the people. But him … You must not forget what kind of a life, what kind of an education does a little black kid get on your farms, and in your ghettos, before you tell us in Eastern Europe we haven’t solved the housing problem for the masses.—

She needed no reminder. — I’ve got a little black one of my own, you know.—

— Yes, and I love her. She is just like her mother, only nicer—

Laughter at the double-edged compliment. — Only darker.—

— Why you don’t let me finish? Nicer to me.—

The change of subject stopped the laughter.

— What have you to complain of, Pavel.—

— When you are tired with your work, it’s time for me for an hour. And even that time — you are working, maybe.—

— For Christ’ sake, what do you think I am — a spy? An agent of the South African government? — The laughter came back.

— No. But you are working too much. And I don’t know … if you are right for what you are doing.—

— I know what I’m working for, Pavel.—

— All right. I believe it. You are good material, yes. But I’m not sure you should be typist and translator — things like that. Sitting in an office. Oh yes, don’t be offended, yes I know you make a speech to women sometimes … But it’s not for you … A functionary. I feel it. You try to be, what is it in English — not ‘nice’—careful, no, ‘tactful’ that is it, but you can be something different! You got your own talent.—

— What are you talking about? I get on very well with the others. With Citagele. With Arnold. So what are you talking about?—

— How to live. We’ve got some people like you. In the end, valuable if they are, you can’t do much with them in bureaucracy, and even freedom movement, it has bureaucracy. You can say: dangerous individualism; you shut them away. Because if they know something, it’s not what other people can know. So what is use? But you are too clever for anything to happen to you, Hillela.—

Winter is burial. The days are shorter and shorter intervals between longer and longer nights. Everything that had opened, everything that was full to overflowing has contracted. The snow falls like the clods of red earth, on the living. Layer by layer, month by month, frozen then sodden then frozen, buried deeper. How to emerge from it, from the yellow ceiling-bulb that is daylight and the suffocation of human and cooking smells that is the warmth of their sun. There is no rainbow-coloured family. Only the one who came out black; there remains, black-to-white, the little foot that feels for the comfort of the white thigh, under covers, while steam in the pipes hisses; the small, open-mouthed face that is all there is on the other pillow. No rainbow-coloured family; that kind of love can’t be got away with, it’s cornered, it’s easily done away with in two shots from a 9-mm Parabellum pistol. Happiness dancing in a shop window behind glass, while outside there are hungry crowds in the street, looking on. Not for long. The glass explodes; their arms reach up to drag, to claim. The only love that counts is owed to them. Waves of resentment towards him, for not firing first, for not saving himself for the rainbow-coloured family, the only love made flesh, man gloved inside woman, child emerging to suck the breast the man caressed: the perfect circle, cycle. But he never belonged to it, the beloved — the bastard! — he belonged to the crowd outside and he died for them. The other wife, whom he left behind in Krugersdorp location, would not be lying in bed alone reproaching him. She was one of the crowd, she knew what belonged to them. The balancing rocks seen through a rep’s car window; embraces fall at the soundwaves of the next word spoken, the first crack of a bullet discharged.

The dear old one says, White people who settled in other countries have no past, so you’re not surrounded, like me … but you tried to live — there’s something von Kleist wrote—‘in a time that hasn’t yet come’! Ridiculous, crazy, but I like it.

And the other one: You’re too clever for anything to happen to you. Repeats it, another night, adding, Oh I know, I smell it on your skin.

What you smell is the black market perfume you bought for me.

The handclasp is the only love made flesh. Learn that. Read the handclasp, learning the kind of love in the calibre and striking power of hardware.

The slums along the river destroyed by bombardment had made way for a park and as the snow melted it was there: sheen on the grass and the namesake running after a ball. Pale sun unrolled slanting rugs. Water trickled under remnants of ice like cracked wine glasses. An age of winter remained shut up in apartments, offices, and on the other side of restaurant doors. Perhaps it would never leave, it would store next winter there as it did the one before. Pavel took Mrs Kgomani and her child to the woods to pick early snowdrops. He made boats out of sticks and leaves and the three of them raced these vessels on a stream. He lay on wet ground with his pure-pale wild face and delicate eyelids up to the weak sun as if it were blinding; this was the ‘they’ many people in that country resented and feared, this young man to whom the season of emergence from snow was a worshipful ceremonial. Karel, following the same impulse to share pleasure that the young woman brought out in people, drove her and the child to the town where the country’s first king had had his palace, in the 13th century. The ruins of European feudalism were the namesake’s playground, that day; she rode worn heraldic lions and griffins. Near the town was a garrison with the red star over the barbed wire at the sentry gates. — Poor devils, the men are kept shut up for the whole time they’re posted here, only the officers are allowed to mix in the town. — Pavel Grushko says they help people with the harvests. — Karel turned to look at her with sleepy-eyed compassion for the soldiers, for the youth of all men. — Once a year, in autumn? Never to see a girl for the rest of the year? Mr Grushko doesn’t deprive himself of anything, does he.—

They must have missed her when she emerged from her winter as the park did, as the woods did, as the streams did. The old man for quite a long time, whether as a lover (no-one knows) or more likely — once again, for her — as if she had been a daughter. Pavel not for long, because he was young and very attractive to women. Karel did not live to hear of the times that have come, for her. Grushko — his position merits that he be referred to by surname alone — has surprised nobody by making a career for himself, first as a diplomat in English-speaking and Arab countries, then as his country’s representative at United Nations, where, at a reception recently, he recognized her instantly. He remembers her, in their youth, with an English phrase he does not know is long out of date: a good sort.

Why she left the Eastern European mission is a matter for speculation. It happened very abruptly: one week she was in the thick of the midday clique at the café, already gathered at outside tables for the touch of the spring sun. The next week people were asking where she was. Suppositions were carried by particular turns of phrase in their language that had gathered ironies from dour discretion under many foreign occupations. — Pavel has flown her off for a weekend at his dacha. — But while they were laughing (and what was there to laugh at? He was to have his dacha before long, and his chauffeur-driven limousine) he arrived with his quick, wide stride and flying scarf and joined the table. Where was Hillela Kgomani? Nobody could tell him.

When Citagele was approached in the office, his raised brows lifted his bald pate, through which he felt, he had complained to his efficient assistant, the cold reached right into his brain in winter. (She had found for him — maybe knitted it herself? — a cap like those black workmen wear down to the eyebrows in all weathers, at home, and it comforted him when they were alone in the office and there was no-one to see.) — Her time was up. She’d been here what — two years?—

— You should know, of course. But not two years.—

— Okay, about … well, nearly.—

— Why did she not say? She never told me.—

Citagele clasped his hands and looked at Grushko to see what he might know. Then he spoke within the four walls, as he would wear the knitted cap. — It wasn’t what I wanted. But there you are. You’ll hear about it eventually, I suppose. There has been some discussion, we’re making some changes.—

A quirk dented one corner of the European-tailored mouth, so different from the soft African one that was looking for words that would say nothing.

— Personnel being shifted around in accordance with needs.—

— She has gone where?—

— To the United States. Eventually. Oh she might be in London now.—

— America! You get nothing from them! — (the laugh that has made him popular in Western diplomatic circles)— Where are your friends there! You’ve got rid of her!—

— I’ve told you. Transferred. Maybe somewhere else. I don’t make these decisions alone.—

One version of her departure was that she had left in a fit of temperament because she had quarrelled with a Russian lover she expected to marry her. This seems gossip’s inversion of the other, political theory, that the Africanists in the organization wanted to oust the influence of white communists, and, somehow, because she was white and was too close to the Russians living in the country that was hosting her, she had got swept up. Not in a purge, exactly; the worst that happened to Arnold — one of the important figures — for example, was that he temporarily lost his place on the Revolutionary Council.

Some gossip found the second story unlikely: for heaven’s sake, Whaila leaned towards the Africanist wing, why should his widow suddenly have become a communist? But there was the rumour that she had joined the South African Communist Party in London, on which of her stays there rumour could not specify: never mind ‘Whaila Kgomani’s widow’, she had her life in her own hands, apparently she had done well in Eastern Europe, even learned something of the cursedly difficult language. If that wasn’t devotion to the cause! Oh, maybe it was some other kind of devotion — the young widow had intimate friendships, it was said; she would never lack admirers, or the means of communicating with them.

These generalities have gathered the velvet of the years, befitting the past of someone who has achieved a certain position. Her Russian lover kept a house for her in a Black Sea resort where she would join him from all over the world, under an assumed name and false passport; or, if you prefer, the government of the host country had told Citagele’s mission she must leave because she had become the mistress of one of the dissident intellectuals intent on overthrowing the regime.

Who knows.

She has always been loyal, whatever (as Pauline might say) her lack of other qualities. A child in a Salisbury park, she quit the company of her buddies but did not betray the secrets of the shrubbery to the schoolmistress under the mnondo tree. She has never given a reason (even one that would reflect well on her!) for her sudden departure from the Eastern European mission. Maybe she left as she had hitched a lift to Durban one afternoon after school. That is a judgment that has to be considered. A harsh one.