A Sport of Nature

Housewarming

Bradley was her own age, like the men the young alumnae had. He was an economist with a promising position in a multinational company. His grandfather had been one of the editors of The New Republic, an associate of Edmund Wilson, and a victim of the McCarthy hearings. The leftist tradition was a family heirloom sufficient in itself; a claim to a way of life that no longer actually need be practised, just as the painting of an ecclesiast ancestor in ermine on the wall is prestige enough for descendants who never go to church. It was adequate for the family image to be brushed up from generation to generation during the youthful period when the social conscience, along with spontaneous erections, naturally evinces itself. Brad had done his stint — in opposition to the Vietnam war, and a year with an aid agency in India. Now he could settle down with the complete set of The New Republic published during his grandfather’s years, on display in his study — handed down to him as a housewarming present when he found his own brownstone.

Of course people with his parents’ background would not show any reaction to the appearance of a black child with their son’s new friend. And when the explanation came, bringing into the big living-room with its grand piano (Brad and his mother played), New England samplers and bowls of tulips, distant horrors the Burnses were accustomed to being able to shrink with the flick of a switch to blank on the face of the television, this provided proof by association that they were still on the right side, just as, conversely, guilt by association provided danger for those other parents, Pauline and Joe. The parents’ house was a generous thoroughfare where the adult children made their long-distance telephone calls, cooked, borrowed cars and electrical equipment, used the basement laundry, slept over with friends or lovers; snatches of their independent lives were enacted there — before Hillela, or even drawing her in — whose contexts were elsewhere. Brad’s ‘find’, brought home (good for him!), was just such a snatch of his life. The brothers and sisters chattered with her, regaled themselves with laughter when they encouraged her cute little black girl to be sassy, and were lavish with invitations for brother to bring her along to jazz clubs, sailing trips, cinemas and parties.

Only Brad was quiet. He watched and listened to the girl and her child he had contributed, getting on so well with his siblings. The pair represented him in the way he could not represent himself, now that these brothers and sisters were no longer children.

He was quiet when he made love the first time. Nothing in the room, in the world, would distract him from the act of worship now approached, and his trance produced blind excitement in which only the body knew its way. When she was seeing with her eyes again she smiled appreciatively, cheekbones lifting a little fold under her dark, lazy gaze. And he spoke.

— Was it the first thing you saw.—

— Yes. I thought of a puppy, the kind with a velvety patch over one eye. — She withdrew her lax hand from between his arm and side and stroked the dark birth-blot that all his life others pretended was not there.

This man talked after love-making. Not the mumblings of dreams and names in a Slav language, but a wide-awake fluency, entered by way of her body. He told again and again: —Hillela, I don’t care how many lovers you’ve had, no-one can have loved you as I do.—

She did not ask how he knew she had had many lovers; it was simply one of his qualities that he knew things about her without troubling her with questions, sensitive to the repetition of certain names in her conversation and able to read changes in her expression when certain subjects arose. She did not answer; sometimes smiled at him as she did at her child, but never in disparagement or disbelief. The fact that she believed him, when all that he could find to express so great a conviction was something like the line from a stupid song — this tortured him. He had to try and follow her reasoning; there must be a reasoning, and the reasoning would establish the state of the emotions between them.

— I’m not saying anything about him … And not just because he’s dead. (A gesture, acknowledging that unchallengeable rivalry.) I’ll never pry into your feelings for each other. Whatever they were. I’m talking about the nature of mine. That’s what I mean. — But then he saw to what he might be leading. — No, no, it’s not because of what you think, Hillela. The puppy isn’t licking your hand.—

And again, in her apartment, with the door slightly ajar because the small girl in the next room insisted it be so: —Hillela, I really cannot live without you again. Not what you think, no. It’s because there’s something a bit frightening in you; it’s that I can’t do without.—

This time she laughed.

— How can I say that to you. You’ll tell me one can live without anyone. You know. Lying here in bed with me, you’re the proof, aren’t you—

She was propped on one elbow, listening to him. She fell upon him and he rolled over with her.

Without explanation, there were times when she took up something he had approached in some other room, some other night.

— Whaila had another wife. Nomzamo’s got brothers and sisters she hasn’t seen yet.—

— A divorced wife.—

— I don’t know if they were divorced, really.—

— What if he’d lived, and one day gone back to her and the other children? That’s the kind of living without I mean.—

— We had our time together. She must have had hers … If we had been able to go back! — She stopped and slowly her hands made fists, came to rest on her naked thighs; the unselfconsciousness with which she accepted her nudity in moods and situations now removed from sex reminded him strangely of the women in Pascin and Lautrec brothel drawings seen in art galleries. — If he had lived to go back — oh, that would have been another time, that would have been … that would have been …—

— More than love.—

— Oh why this measuring, how can you measure?—

— Yes. Something I’ll never know: exaltation. And awfulness. The way you have. Yes, you are a bit frightening. But I’ll get used to you. No — I don’t want to get used to you, I never shall.—

He had a long face with a slender nose the everted curve of whose nostrils was exactly repeated in the upward and downward curves of his upper lip. The skin of his throat below the shaving line was tender and fine down to the breastbone and its cup where a few glossy curls of chest hair began. The pulse in the throat was always visible and the network of nerves round the mouth and nose seemed like those of some sensitive plant — every face has them, but they are sluggish or hampered by a layer of fat or a thickened hide, while his changed his expression with every nuance of atmosphere generated by the people around him.

So he was beautiful — except for that, it had always been said with suitable regret. Among the commissioned pastel portraits of each of the Burns sons and daughters as children, his was in profile — the ‘good’ side. His mother, when he was small, had made a habit of kissing him goodnight on the birthmark, so that the imprint of the kiss became for him the disfigurement; later, a vague forgiveness for what he did not know he had done — forgiveness for the ‘bad’ side. Now the two sides had come together by the unimaginable means of a rather tactless and childish remark. I thought of a puppy, the kind with a velvety patch over one eye. It had happened as a Zen sage flings enlightenment at disciples in the form of an outrageous and flippant half-sentence.

He sat in the audience listening to her speak on public platforms, sometimes with the namesake on his lap. The young woman up there was scarcely to be distinguished from the other men and women on the panels of the committed, wearing with them the much-washed clothing, varied only by slogans printed across backs or breasts, with which they showed their identification with the causes of the poor and oppressed by assuming their characteristic markings, as a certain kind of moth disguises the fact that it is alive and free by keeping perfectly still and exhibiting the lineaments of a skull on its wingspread. The blunt-cut nails of her clenched hands, as she opened them to emphasize a fact, were short as those of women she had walked with as they scratched for roots to eat, and her curly hair was cropped without consideration for looks but as it was done as a mass precaution for hygiene in refugee camps, among the lice-ridden. Now she was talking not of refugee camps but of three political trials that had taken place in South Africa in a year. — All real opposition is on trial as terrorist and communist. Four people were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for smuggling anti-apartheid pamphlets and records into the country; only four, because the fifth accused, a schoolteacher, thirty years old, Ahmed Timol, died by falling from the tenth floor of police headquarters while the police were interrogating him. In the Mzimela trial, a young man was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. What had he done? He left the country secretly and fought with the Rhodesian freedom fighters against Smith’s illegal white regime, he attended the Morogoro liberation conference, and he re-entered his home country to organize support for the banned African National Congress. Are these people, risking their lives to be free of racial oppression, criminals? I knew Mzimela in Tanzania. Yes, he was like many others; he went to the Soviet Union and to East Germany for military training because the West, which created South Africa militarily and economically, does nothing to influence the South African government to free people like him, neither will it help them to free themselves. Did any of these people on trial kill anyone in South Africa? There was one act of violence involved — and one only: when Timol’s life, in the care of the South African police, smashed on concrete—

The namesake sang softly in his ear; she did not like attention to be on her mother instead of herself. Her breathy buzzing was warm on his skin; it roused him alarmingly, it was the warmth and humidity of Hillela, who — difficult to believe — existed within the specifications of an impersonal function, up there, the simplified, line-drawn figure from a banner or poster, among the ritualistic paraphernalia of water carafes and glasses, microphone and taperecorders, scratchpads and pencils stamped with the acronym appropriate to the occasion.

She continued with the work although it kept them apart too often; it had more, even, than the connotations of a career, and commanded more respect from him and others. He had frequently to explain she couldn’t accompany him because she was put of town or even out of the country. When there was mumps or measles in the namesake’s usual surrogate homes, he took her into his calm bachelor brownstone during her mother’s absence, and called in one of his willing sisters to help take care of her. Hillela often brought Leonie’s trophies into his company, along with Leonie. He met all kinds of interesting people he never would have met, without Hillela; more than he had known since India. They carried with them demands that stretched muscles of response which atrophy where a common background provides always foreseeable demands and appropriate ways of meeting them. There was the supercilious black journalist from South Africa, a Nieman fellow, who tried to provoke him into academic quarrels over economic theory when sober, but with whom he got rather happily drunk whenever the fellow came over from Cambridge for a weekend. There was the black woman with purplish hollows under her eyes — combined with the bewilderment in her face, these appeared to be the marks of unseen blows — who flung herself in tears to embrace Hillela. That woman drank only Coke. It was another kind of intoxication that compelled her to explain to everyone: —She was just a kid, when we slept at her people’s place that night we left the country. I’ll never forget those people, they did everything for us. And look — how she’s grown up just as good as her mother! How can I forget how her mother drove us to the border in her own car? Packed up food for the children. I always say it to Donsi.—

— We danced with him, that night, my cousin and I. It wasn’t my mother, it was my aunt who drove you.—

Bradley followed attentively the stumbling, laughing excursion into Hillela’s adolescence, which he had tried to explore for himself — wrongly, he knew — in terms of his own.

— Look at her! Even though politically we’re not on the same side—

Leonie put an arm round the woman. — Bongi dear, we don’t recognize any split in the liberation movement, PAC or ANC, in my house. We’re a bit premature, we know, but here we have African unity!—

— Just like her mother, not like other whites at home, she’s in the struggle, like a real black girl.—

— Where’s your real black girl, Hillela? — Leonie gleefully stage-managed her party. — Somebody go get Nomzamo to meet her mother’s old friend Bongi.—

Samora Machel came to the brownstone with Leonie and Hillela, though it was kept out of the papers that he was in the U.S.; Leonie was on such close terms with FRELIMO that she was now a prohibited immigrant in Mozambique as well as South Africa. SWAPO Ovambos from Namibia bent their heads, huge with great beards meeting their thick hair, in comradely embrace of Whaila Kgomani’s widow. Patrice M’ba, slender, neatly-shod and elegant as the French masters who had a price on his head in his own country, talked with another Hillela, one who spoke the language with softness, as if it had been learnt in some intimacy whose cadence it kept. With others, there was no nuance for Bradley to pick up — Marc Nzkou, the Cameroonian who had been in prison in four countries, having each time sought refuge just before coups that changed Pan-African alliances; disaffected Ghanaians; a Somali novelist for whom Leonie had found a publisher; another exile, Reuel (surname unpronounceable), who always sat aloofly in a room as if there only for someone influential he’d been promised and who wasn’t present. These were the material or rather the subjects of the Work; merely associated in her future husband’s mind with the purposeful young woman’s dedication to their cause.

It was taken for granted by everyone that that was what he was going to be — Leonie’s fine young woman’s new husband. His father thought she was very lucky to have caught his son. He said so to the boy’s mother — fine young woman without much of a background, from all appearances, and saddled with a small child; Brad was so young. The mother was the one who played Schubert with Brad. — Appearances. He isn’t concerned with appearances. If he had been, his life would have been spoiled, wouldn’t it? Have you forgotten that? Brad is used to difficulties, he’s not shallow like some of our other children. He wouldn’t be satisfied with one of the girls he went to college with. He’s like my father.—

Hillela moved again in the spring of the third year in the United States; but not on. Merely a practical domestic move, just down the road from the apartment where the namesake would never allow a door to be shut, to the brownstone whose mortgage was being regularly paid off. It was foolish to waste a monthly sum for housing in two places. That was how he broached it. She was delighted. He saw she was delighted. She was shelling peas; she took him by the shoulders, at arms’ length, and her eyes held him in that gaze of hers. — Brad, you’re so good to us. It’ll be so much more convenient, when I have to be away. Nomo loves the yard. Will you put up a swing for her? — And then the kisses, tasting green of the vegetable she ate while she shelled. She was so good, so generous with herself, as if the bountiful pleasures welled up in her, the more she gave — here, here, Brad — the more she had to give. Nomzamo, possessive about her new room, reversed her edict about doors: all had to be closed. And all was open, to him, the pale mushroom flesh discovered under sunburned breasts, the little twirled butter-curl of the navel, the cleft of buttocks, the hollow beside the poor crooked toe, the satin-walled cave of the mouth, the triumphal way between thighs. Usual enough to become erect, alone in an office thinking back on the night or early morning; but he found himself actually trembling.

The brownstone investment contained the imbalance of luxury and austerity common in the household of a bachelor in the intellectual professions. The floors had been sanded and the bookshelves put up from floor to ceiling when he moved in, but some rooms were empty of anything else, and others had pieces of inherited furniture for which no definitive location had yet been found. There was a bed of the size that can be bought only in America, hemmed in by hi-fi installations and towers of books and newspapers. There was a large empty freezer but few pots, a microwave oven and lattice wine-rack, but no cupboard for basic supplies. Some of the empty rooms quickly filled up with the child’s possessions — bicycle and doll’s house in the livingroom, construction sets fragmented all over what was supposed to be the study; in the bathroom, drawings of happy houses with smoking chimneys, moons and suns, and a male, female and child, figures whose faces sometimes were all crayoned black, and sometimes pink. The bachelor and the child; there was still no provision for the median mode of living. — We’ve got to decide how we want it all to be. What suits us. We must sit together and make a list, room by room—

Hillela took his hand. — What’s wrong with the way it is? I like your house.—

— Yes, but it’s our house. There’re things we need that I didn’t. What kind of furniture did you like — where you lived … What are the sort of things you miss?—

She was at once, in the new familiarity of the kitchen, in her nightgown, a stranger to him, smiling. — From where? My one aunt had antiques — rather like your parents’, but more elaborate. She collected. In the Embassy where I worked, everything was a diplomatic issue — gilt this and that — standard, nobody chose it.—

— I mean, when I think … I have had my paternal grandfather’s desk since I was fourteen.—

— I had a pair of Japanese china cats. I gave one away, I don’t know where the other is.—

— I’ll get you a real cat. Much nicer. We ought to have a cat sitting here on the window-sill.—

— In Lusaka the flat was furnished.—

— I see.—

— And in Europe.—

— Well, now we’re going to find out the kind of thing you really like. We can mix contemporary styles with my stuff, or we can hunt around for the same Early American period. Whatever you want.—

On Saturdays they went to antique fairs and bric-à-brac shops crowded with the continuity of his past — the cigar-store Indians as well as the samplers — and to the clinical, glassy spaces where contemporary Japanese- and Italian-designed furniture looked ready to accommodate extraterrestrials only. They bought a child’s 19th-century naïvely-painted bed and modern Czech lamps, absolutely functional. She chose an old patchwork bedcover whose price he concealed from her (she might be thinking how many antibiotics for wounded freedom fighters in Machel’s, Mugabe’s or Reuel’s country those dollars would buy). They found a New England farmhouse table to go with the six chairs he had inherited from Big Uncle Robert (not to be confused, he explained dryly, making fun of the hierarchy, with Boston Uncle Robert, the offshoot of another Burns branch). Laughing and staggering, with the namesake running wild around them, they lugged heavy pots of decorative plants to the windows. They were always within touch and happiness came simply, like sweat from activity; he looked across at her while they paused to drink coffee, and saw the faint lift of the flesh at the corners of the eyes; for him. She was, as Leonie remarked, ‘blooming’.

The house had turned out rather like the parents’ house. The objects from the past gave it the soft patina of somewhere long lived in and the products of high technology brought it alive in the current phase of the Burns chronology. Mrs Burns told Brad’s future wife secretly that she was going to give him the piano; it was not only for him, the little Nomzamo was old enough to begin taking lessons. Every Burns child started at the age of six or seven. She never forgot how the girl, Hillela, embraced her, moving — a stranger’s — curly head against her shoulder, as if she could not find words. There was no doubt that the emotion was genuine, no doubt at all. That girl understood, all right, that with the piano Brad was being given into her hands; as a secret between two women who loved him.

There was certainty, waking up in the morning. It flowed in with the light every day. Depend on it. The beautiful young man sleeping beside her; a pale body like her own, the body familiar as that of a brother. He would get up soon and go to his office — a real office, glass rearing up to the open sky confidently without need of protection — and come back safely every evening when the glass became a giant painting of the sunset. The huge bed into which they slid as an envelope of warmth and comfort was not on loan; nobody else’s clothes would hang in the cupboard. No need to watch out about how to manage — make out, the way people do it; not here. No caution necessary about whom you are seen with, because their factions are all announced out loud with brass bands and rosettes. No need to watch for what can be traded — searching pockets for attributes: martyr’s wife, expressive Latin eyes and large breasts, the probably unacceptable currency of avowal to a revolutionary cause — in exchange for a stamp on a piece of paper. Once married to a bona fide citizen of a country already existing and not still to be won back, there is full citizenship of the present.

She lay following the flaxen and gold threads shaded horizontally in the hand-woven curtains they’d chosen. — Like a field of grass.—

— Yes, they’re a real success. What do we still need?—

— Nothing. Nothing.—

— There’s always something you discover you still need.—

— Stop it. Stop measuring.—

His slender hand moved over her head as over a piece of sculpture. He received her fastidiously through all the senses.

— I want you to grow your hair.—

Softly stroking, now and then stiffening his fingers to press the plates of the skull.

She said nothing, perhaps took the request merely as a murmured endearment, along with the caress.

— No. — Her eyes moved rapidly under the thin skin of closed lids. — No, it’s not practical.—

She jumped out of bed and then stood stock-still as if she had suddenly discovered where she was; then busied herself, drawing the curtains, picking up discarded clothing.

He closed his eyes for the pleasure of hearing her moving about near him. He put out a hand where he thought she was passing, but it caught at air.

The wedding of Mrs Hillela Kgomani and Bradley Burns was delayed several times — not through her, one would never have suspected anything capricious about her. For family reasons. The death of Mr Burns’s brother; the absence of two of the sisters at summer school in Florence. She was always understanding about such things, not selfish the way most young women would have been. And his mother knew why. — She’s lived. She’s been through a lot in her young life. — The future husband accepted the family claims because Hillela did — Hillela had never known what it was to be at the centre of a family (future wife of the eldest son); the comfort and protection of its place in a homogeneous society. Anyway she was his wife already, they had made a home together in the brownstone that would never have been one without her. His only unease — not a fear, half-developed — was again that he might be changing her by the cherishing; whereas he wanted to be transformed by her. And so the one time the marriage was delayed for her reasons this was an opportunity for self-testing. She was going with Leonie to the country from which one of Leonie’s trophies, Reuel, was exiled, where the civil war had produced a terrible exodus of Southerners to refuge in the North. He knew it was dangerous although Leonie’s vocabulary turned bullets to water and blunted spears — they would ‘liaise’ with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the ‘logistics’ provided for military escorts and ‘safe conducts’. The cholera areas would be no go. The prophylactics were standard prescription. — We’ll most likely meet a lot of great people and have an inspirational time, Brad, the horror stories you keep hearing are months old, it’s always like that. I’d have spent my life on my front porch and never been any use to anyone if I’d listened to people’s disinformation.—

He delivered Hillela to the airport an hour after making love at five in the morning. He had said nothing, but the fear and anguish in the transparent control of his face had made her suddenly notice, and come back to the bed from folding something into her suitcase, smiling to blot out his wretchedness. He let her go. Greater than the reassurance in his body was the reassurance that he could pass the test. He would risk her, to keep her as she was.

She drank the water and ate the forbidden fruit. Of course she returned safely. These trips to misery under the sun grotesquely produced the sunburnished forehead and wind-scoured hair others brought back from Florida or the Bahamas. It was difficult to believe where she had been, what she had seen. Frightening; he embraced it all in her. It seemed the hair was a little longer, she had not cut it again, but he didn’t make any remark for fear of spoiling a slow surprise that was being prepared for him. She was working very hard at her reports and papers, consulting people here, hopping on local planes there (back to him by evening). In their bed, or drinking wine in deck-chairs under their yard elm, he shared it all. Everything was recounted. Over the forest the burned villages seen from a helicopter like black holes in a green blanket, and as the craft swooped low, the pink palms upturned from black arms, beckoning for help — And what could you do, for Christ’ sake? — Oh the surveyor with us pinpointed each place on a special map, supplies were dropped to them within the next few days. — Some would die before then. Some of the hands wouldn’t be there to take the food. — Yes, some would die. — Those steady black eyes held; turned away from nothing.

— It couldn’t simply have been a matter of what you grab first from all that must be left behind; not the things I saw. A woman with a mincer, one of those old-fashioned ones with a handle to turn, you know? She had nothing else — in rags; she must have abandoned or bartered for food everything else she’d managed to salvage. Those people had walked two hundred miles from their village. Another one had a heart-shaped mirror with a little wire stand at the back. And her baby. I saw her looking at herself. I saw a man almost kill another because that one wanted to kill the rabbit — no, must have been a hare, there aren’t any wild rabbits in Africa — he’d carried god knows how far in a cage made of twigs. They were both starving. There’re things people can’t live without.—

He stared and half-smiled.

But she had forgotten. Only he would measure the stature of his claim, diminished to nothing beside the kind of needs she knew.

There were women who had been raped by soldiers, and school-children abducted for military training. — By which side? — She wasn’t always clear. — And some lied. — She opened up under their feet the pit of wretchedness where what was true and what was not hardly had any meaning. How could she stand such ugly confusion? — But if they had been raped and mutilated? — Yes, but some were being fed and looked after by other soldiers. They gave them their own rations. We saw that, too. — It’s sickening. And what kind of decent regime can come out of people like that, even if they do win. From what you say, half the time they behave like the crowd they’re trying to get rid of. — Just as both sides have always done in every war. That crowd has to be fought with its own tactics — what else is war? You’re a victim, or you fight and make victims. There’s no other way. European countries are training that crowd, giving them planes and arms. The others can fight back only if the rural people support them — even if they have to force them sometimes.—

Frightening. She took sides in the general horror, she condoned means for ends; but at the same time she wasn’t looking on, no-one could say that of her, she was at home with polluted water and mined roads as well as in their brownstone. When he swelled with desire for her, he swelled also with admiration for her. Where is the line between lust and esteem? Hillela confused him, for ever.

She told him with true kindness, the impulse with which her guerrillas cared for some of the homeless and starving in their war. — Brad, I don’t think you should marry me. I’ve been with Reuel, on and off, when I was in Africa. I don’t think you’d be able to — well, to manage with that.—

He did not know where in the brownstone to go to get away from what he had heard, and he knew would never be unsaid, withdrawn by her. He blundered into the bathroom because there was a bolt on that door. Fixed to the tiles with plastic putty were the drawings of the stick-limbed, smiling symbols of Hillela, himself and the child, the happy family outside the house whose boldly smoking chimney signifies the security of the fireside.