A Sport of Nature

A Face for a Postage Stamp

Reuel was the General — the General who had led an army coup in his country, returned it to civilian rule under his presidency, and then escaped when the former colonial power sent in paratroopers to restore the regime it favoured. Escaped with his life — the phrase goes; how manifest this was, in him. If he were in reach of a swimming pool, a river, the sea, he swam in all weathers in all countries, he could still run a mile (in his fifties, perhaps — he was discreet as an actress about his age), like all men who lead crowds and must be constantly visible, he needed only three or four hours’ sleep a night, and he ate and drank greedily or could manage as well without sustenance for days. His wide and fleshy chest under barathea or blue lounge suit moved grandly with deep breaths, as if always fresh from some exhilaration.

The General did not tell her he could not live without her. It was in his face, and hers — they recognized it in each other without ever having it stated: each could live as long as individual life lasted, independent of anyone, in the momentum of moving on.

He did not take much notice of her, nor she of him, in the brownstone. Leonie was useful but he was too large in every way to be anyone’s trophy. At finger-suppers and colloquies, boredom dulled his male responses and the efflorescence of his strong ability to attract. It was far away from that, on an evening in Nairobi when he and Hillela were having a drink after Leonie had retired to write up her journal, that the recognition was there. — The only old women I like around me are my mother and my grandmother. They made me, êh, Hillela? D’you know what name my mother gave me, my African name — it means ‘God has done very well’.— Hillela laughed at his own estimate of himself, and he with her, confidently. — Isn’t it a good thing to have a name to live up to? We Africans always give names that mean something, not your Marys and Johns — what does it mean to be a Mary, that you’ll give birth without a man? Is that something you’d want for a daughter?—

— Good god, no. That’s why I called her after Mandela’s wife.—

— So you want to influence her to be an African liberationist, you want her to be a heroine?—

— God may have done very well with you … but it doesn’t always work out the way the parents intended. I’m named for a Zionist great-grandfather.—

— We’ll give you an African name — oh I know you have one, I mean the first name. What can we call you?—

— Well, what do you suggest?—

— I’d have to know you better to find out. You know that the name has to do with many things, the circumstances when it is given. Whether there’s been a drought, or a war.—

— What has already happened.—

— No, more important, what is going to happen. What the name will make happen. — The atmosphere between them took these swallow dips into seriousness, instantly skimming away. — D’you think I’d still be alive if God hadn’t done so well! — The commanding shine that was always on his full face and majestic jowl used the dim theatrical lighting of the bar as a star performer attracts the following beam of a spotlight. A big hand with a thick ring embedded in the little finger covered hers a moment in the pleasure of laughter. — We’re going to celebrate something — I don’t know what. — He ordered champagne; she read the label — South African. But they didn’t send the bottle back. They drank — to Mandela, to freedom. — Amandla! — The language was different from that of his people, but the meaning was the same: power. Their talk burrowed deeper and deeper into the night, safe from interruption. This was not West Africa, where a woman could be picked from any table as a dancing partner. — This kind of place isn’t Africanised — you see that? Dull. It’s still the European style, it belongs to the new white compound, businessmen, safari tourists, journalists instead of settlers, that’s all — and the local bureaucrats — what does Leonie call them? — fat cats — for them it’s just an extension of business lunches with foreigners at the Norfolk, it’s got nothing to do with having a good time our way. West Africans haven’t let the Muslims or the Christians tie them up inside themselves as they did on this side … That’s why I like them. You know how it is in West Africa, if some fellows spread a mat and pray five times a day, there’s still high-life in Ghana; if the nuns teach little black girls their catechism, there’re still girls in Brazzaville who know how a woman should show herself off to a man — and the places where you can dance and drink! The blacks have taken over the European nightclub and made an African party out of it, êh. But here. It’s the Arab religion more than the Christians. Can’t drink, hide the women behind that ugly black cloth. It wasn’t our way in Africa, we’ve always known how to enjoy life … even when they took us to sell as slaves, we sang and danced and the Arabs and the Christians only watched.—

— But you like the whites’ champagne.—

— Why not. Even what the Boers make. — He emptied his glass.

— But you don’t like the Arabs. That must be a difficulty.—

— Of course, we’re allies — and at the U.N., as you know, without them … they’re the ones who count with the European countries, East and West, and the Americans. What could we hope to do, on our own. But I’ll tell you … their style doesn’t appeal to me … not politically, either. Religious fatalism becomes fanaticism in politics. We Africans, we don’t go in for jihads and suicide missions. We’ll fight our enemies and die if we have to, but we’d rather kill and get away with it, êh, stay alive! — He laughed and filled their glasses with froth. — I don’t mix politics and religion. They didn’t get me and I’m going back to fight for my people, no gods. God changes sides too often, for me. The people can worship whatever they like — sacred crocodiles, Mohammed — we are all men and women, êh. We don’t know why we are in this world; we have religions to tell us why. So I’m a Catholic.—

— You’re a Catholic? — Her face kept changing with enjoyment, curiosity, flashes of disagreement or fellow-feeling.

— Of course I’m a Catholic. Brought up in it. I was going to train for the priesthood, at one time. That’s a fact! But once in this world, you have to decide what you are doing here. I became an African nationalist; but it wasn’t the church, it was Marx who told me why that was. So I’m a Marxist. My own kind. A Catholic Nationalist Marxist — African-made—

— Like the nightclubs in West Africa.—

— No, don’t laugh — it’s part of the same thing. Whether I’m inside, in our bush headquarters, or outside, making deals with our brothers (oh of course, Arab brothers, too) or in bed with a woman, it’s all part of my African-made — work, love-making, religion, politics, economics. We’ve taken all the things the world keeps in compartments, boxes, and brought them together. A new combination, that’s us. That’s why the world doesn’t understand. We don’t please the West and we don’t please the East. We never will. We don’t keep things separate. Isn’t that what orthodoxy is — separation? We make our own mess of things. They interfere; we ask them to interfere — what else am I doing? What else were you doing in Europe? I don’t know what you’re doing in the United States—

She turned her face towards her palm, covering her mouth in a gesture as if to grant whatever he thought. He passed his ringed hand absently, without intimacy, down her cheek.

— We ask them to interfere because power — the question of power — always divides again the combination that it brought together, looks for strength outside the unity, breaking it. Then the old gang — they come in again. The world powers. We fight their battles for them with our own. Everyone knows that. They send us guns and soup powder, êh. Some get the guns. That’s the important thing, to be the side that gets the guns. You will never come to power on soup powder.—

— So I’m wasting my time. — A swig of evidence, she swallowed the champagne.

— lf it’s really only on soup powder … That’s all right for Leonie, people are suffering. But it won’t stop the wars, and the wars make the refugees—

— Leonie knows that.—

— When I get back to the capital in my country, this time I’ll have not only the arms to take power again, I’ll have the money for development the other side can’t get. You have to be in power to be able to feed your own people. You get there with guns and you stay there with money.—

A crowded bar has no attentive faces, no ballpoints moving over scratchpads ready to record. Someone with fibre coarse enough to grasp at the high-tension cable of power will not be distressed by what would fuse the gentle lamplight by which evenings pass in a brownstone. — What I thought I was doing … I wanted to get rid of the people who came to the flat and shot Whaila. I knew who they were, by then. From him, and even before that, in Dar … although I didn’t realize. The farmers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers in parliament, sitting in that lovely old building at the Cape Town Gardens under the Mount Nelson Hotel, where I had such a good time as a kid, staying there with my aunt. The teachers in the girls’ school I went to, the people I worked for in Johannesburg, the doctor, the advertising agency ones. Even the others. My other aunt and her husband — Joe, he was so wonderful to me — who tried to show me I ought to resist what was going to kill Whaila. Although it was no good. Not only because I treated them badly — but because all of them, they let it happen. I never understood my life until there he was. In the kitchen. It happened in the kitchen.—

He was listening without embarrassment or the simulated horror that invariably hid embarrassment when the subject came up; without the fatherly shelter of a Karel, the distraction of a Pavel, without even the perfect tender acceptance of the young man she was going to marry. He was looking at her, and he offered the cautery of desire for her: in her raw sorrow, far away, buried under the snow and the brownstone, she had felt that only a man could comfort for the loss of a man, only the smell of a man could make it impossible to disbelieve that a man actually came to an end on the kitchen floor.

When he spoke it was back on the level of conventional indiscretions that could be ignored in the light of day; he and she knew that when the bar closes and the music stops there are cockroaches and the sweat of cleaners. — And now? When did you marry the American fellow?—

— We’re not married.—

— He seems — okay. Nice house. Leonie and her crowd. Good people.—

They smiled — at his dismissal or approval.

— It’s been postponed a couple of times. Now until September.—

— What’d you actually mean by ‘get rid’?—

— The same as you mean — when you talk about power. But now it’s soup powder I’ve been doling out. Most of the time. Since Europe. When you see everything reduced to hunger, nothing, nothing but the terrible way eyes look at you, men, women, children, cattle, dogs — the eyes become the same — you can’t remember anything else. You only want to find something to stuff in those mouths. You lose all sense of what you wanted to do. And the same thing with pain. You just want to stop it, for them, for the hour you’re there with them. There’s no other purpose you can even think about.—

His nostrils widened and his big mouth creased down in emotional rebuttal. — It’s not for you. It’s not for you to spend your young life with those poor devils — and I can call them that because they’re my people, I’ve been one of them, I’m telling you, I’ve been without food or a place to go … That’s not getting rid. I’m going to tell you something — But he glanced up away from her rapidly as if at some sudden presence invisible to her, and returned with a change of mind and tone. — Come along with me to Mombasa tomorrow, you need a day off. All that misery, it gets on a person’s nerves.—

— Oh I can’t, we’re seeing Mzee in the morning.—

— Leonie will see the old Man. She’ll do all the talking, anyway, you won’t get a word in. You’re not really necessary.—

— Of course not! — She laughed at the airy offence. — But she expects me, and it might be useful for me to know him.—

— He’d see you any time, as soon as he recognized your name. Come for the ride.—

— I’ve never been to Mombasa.—

— Beautiful. I’ll drop you at the beach or the hotel — don’t you want to swim? Bring your things… I’ll be busy, you can do what you like. But we leave early, êh — five-thirty in the morning, can you get up?—

— I’ll be up!—

— Of course you’ll be up!—

— When would we get back?—

— Late tomorrow night. If it gets too late, we can find somewhere to sleep on the road. I have to be here by lunch-time, whichever way.—

— To see Mombasa! Why not?—

— But you better put on another dress …—

She amusedly presented herself, stretching her back upright against her chair, palms open. He gave her a quick, up-and-down military inspection. — Haven’t you got something else? It’s a five star, the hotel where we’ll have lunch.—

The General saw in her, that first evening, someone who could keep abreast of him; moving on.

Shoved, the sliding doors of the wardrobe in her hotel room rolled back, lighting the interior. There hung the few garments of those who wear the sackcloth rejection of the West’s plenty or the battledress of identification with an eternal guerrilla struggle of humans against the evil in themselves. She put on the garments every day, replacing dirty with clean. There was nothing that would please an exiled Third World general preparing his liberation army for reinvasion. She felt a sudden impatience with these jeans worn white at the knees and these baggy shifts. If the shops had been open — she had the impulse to buy that splashy African cotton and wrap herself in the fancy-dress ‘confections’ the beach girl had displayed on the camel-saddle chair at Archie’s Atrium. She put out a shift and found some sort of token adornment in a necklace made of red seeds and porcupine quills — a tourist thing she had in her suitcase to take back as a gift for one of the Burns sisters who was looking after the child. The traveller’s alarm clock beside her bed was set for five o’clock. This time, before she went off on a jaunt to the sea, she left a note. It was pushed under Leonie’s door at dawn.

A navy-blue blazer with gold buttons swayed on a hook provided between the front and back windows of the hired car. The General wore pale beige tropical trousers with a crease ruled exactly down each monumental thigh, hand-stitched Italian brogues on high-arched feet, and a batiste shirt whose placket and buttons strained to contain the rise of a punchbag-hard belly and the spread of pectoral muscles. His big head almost grazed the roof; his presence filled the car, giving off the pleasant scent of good soap and after-shave cologne. When he got out and went into the bush to have a pee, his passenger felt the weight of that presence emphasized by its absence. The moments scarcely interrupted their talk; within the landscape they were cleaving — villages, cyclists, roaming children, distorted crones with loads of wood or produce supported by a thong across the forehead — they were in the familiar territory of exile, that knows no hemispheres; a globe of blank spaces between those areas where one has been allowed in, whose climates are characterised not by rainfall and temperature but by whether one is tolerated only in inactivity or may seek alliances, support, and bases. There was no need to censor. Each knew the social and personal codes and morality of that territory, which those who had never been there could not, need not, know. — How can you ever explain? — He knew she was talking of the finger-supper questions, silences (of judgment), assumptions of understanding that understood nothing. — I don’t answer about Europe because no-one who hasn’t worked that way there can follow. It’s like when my little girl asks me where babies come from. I tell her. They grow in the mother’s tummy. That’s as far as she can go. Her innocence makes it unthinkable she could grasp how they get there — and more important, why. She doesn’t know enough to want to ask. The questions aren’t even ever the right questions — you know what I mean? In each society there’s a different way of putting things, a different way of interpreting what happens or what’s been said. What seems a lie to someone at Leonie’s wouldn’t be one somewhere where relations between people take place in completely different circumstances — politically, socially, oh, every way there is. Every way they can’t imagine.—

— That’s what makes the easy life tough in the States. — A glance, to see her laugh. — It’s happened to me, too. But what about the other way round? The other side of the world? Got to wear a different hat there, êh.—

— People seem — older.—

— Not so much innocence and icecream.—

— The trouble there’s more likely to be they’re on to everything you haven’t said, when you ask or answer … But your hat’s always the one with gold braid, everywhere.—

— The best place is here and now, on this road in Africa, with no hat on at all. Bare head, bare-foot. The chance doesn’t come too often. (His passenger had taken off her sandals and was lying back with her feet up on the dashboard.) D’you want to drive for a bit? The road will be passing through the Tsavo reserve soon and we can’t change over among the lions.—

In command of a hired car, alone in the front with a casual acquaintance asleep on the rear seat (—I need to be fresh for what I have to do when we arrive—) there was in this trivial and marginal circumstance a sense of being that really belonged with permanence, not a day-trip. He rumbled a little, an inactive but not extinct volcano, back there. She snuffed at the old hot smells of grass digested and excreted, of wet grass growing, blowing with the wind-flow of her speed, that flushed away the scent of after-shave. The road was empty; the rump of a buck or two whom the approach of the car startled long before she was close enough to see more. At a detour she scarcely slowed down on the loop of sand road. The car sang a different tune, shuddering softly over corrugations beneath a fluffy surface. Then the wheel was wrenched away under her hands — she clutched at it, shocked, almost laughing, on a roller-coaster — and the space that enclosed her and the sleeping man went wild, displaced fiercely this way and that, back and forth across the road. She had her foot down on the brake as if on the stirrup of a bucking monster, the wheel twirled uselessly, the enclosed space tilted sideways, righted, tilted completely, she was upside-down, struck on the head, feeling at the same instant a huge thud at her back.

The car landed on its four wheels and careered away through grass and trees, hitting nothing and coming to a stop where its own momentum ended. She had been thrown into the empty seat beside her. She saw him struggling up from the floor behind with the grouchy clumsiness of someone inconsiderately woken by a shake on the arm. He must have unfastened the buckle of his elegant belt for ease before he took a nap, and his first instinct was to close it dignifiedly. She began to laugh. He saw her laughing at him with eyes shaking and glittering with tears. The tears splashed onto her mouth: he laughed at her. — My God, what did you do? What did you do?—

She could not stop laughing. — Woke you up. Sorry I woke you up.—

— My God, what did you do?—

Their amazement at being unhurt turned to euphoria. The doors were not jammed; they got out of the car and examined each other, knees, arms, heads. — Are you sure you’re all right? You can’t be all right? — But I am! Maybe a bump’ll come up here on my head. — He took her head entirely between his hands and felt it all over. — Does it hurt here? Here? — No. No. Just a little there, where I told you.—

— No sign of a cut. You should let your hair grow, it’s a protection. — Idiot, idiot I am, I braked. Everyone’s taught never to brake in a skid. I knew it, but I didn’t do it.—

He got into the car and it started at the turn of the ignition key. Their faces exchanged triumph as he looked up at her through the window. — I’ve never before believed in miracles. — But I’m a Catholic, so I do.—

Slowly rolling back to the road; she gave a little shudder and put her hand, as if to steady herself, on his broad knee as he drove. It was the touch with which they had examined each other for hurt. Quiet and emptiness of the landscape closed over the startling rupture as if it had never happened. A few hundred yards from where they had broken into the environment with their steel capsule gone amuck, he stopped the car, took up her hand and pointed it into the trees. Five or six elephants were browsing there at various distances, to be made out, patiently, one by one, by the fan of ears like giant leaves among dark foliage or the stir of a tree-trunk become a huge foot; had been there in their vast and dreamy existence, outside the short violent incident taking place in human time. If the skid had happened a few hundred yards farther along the road, the car would have burst down upon the beasts with an alien present. The car and its occupants could have been crumpled like a chocolate wrapper under their rage. The travellers sat in silence watching life on this grand scale of size and time. — It’s not so easy to kill me. It’s been tried three times. — He was looking out turned half-towards her with his elbow leaning on the open window and his hand hanging on the steering wheel: a face composed always to be observed, ambivalent nuance erased, features boldly and definitively simplified for emphasis. A face for a postage stamp.

— Shall I tell you something? — From the moving car the forest scrub they were passing through again appeared uninhabited. They were alone as human beings are alone only among animals. — What I’m going to do when we get there? Certain people I’m going to meet? Nobody else in the world knows this, it’s going to happen in Mombasa because in Nairobi everyone’s got big ears. I’m going to meet people who are willing to kidnap my son.—

Willing? But she asked nothing, her attention fixed hovering on the hieroglyph of a profile. The small nose, whose nostrils rested low and broad seen full-face, was curved, polished along an arch of bone like a weapon lodged in the flesh.

— My son, that I trained in my own army, he was one of those who threw over my government. Yes, he was willing to have me killed. Now he’s going to have his chance: they’ll bring him to our bush headquarters and there, in the North, where we’re in control again, I’ll give him the choice — to defect to us.—

He was waiting to see if there was any need to explain what could not be said, whether the experience of this white girl with whom nothing had needed an explanation so far, went so far as to ‘follow him’ as she would put it.

She did not ask the question. Without moving his head he slid his glance. Her head was cocked back as if she had taken a deep breath, but the full lovely breasts were stirred only regularly, calmly, shallowly. She asked a different question; and that was his answer. — Your only son?—

— No. The eldest — by the second wife. The first has daughters. My eldest — and the best of them. Right from the day he began to walk.—

Alone on an East African beach again, among strangers. The General dropped her where there was no tamarisk but the same cloisters of palms to stroll along, and a swim was a gentle engulfment through ghost-pale shallows until the body was taken, like the streak of another substance into the watery layers of an agate, into the still, clear sea. Lusaka was landlocked, Eastern Europe and the brownstone locked each year in snow, in West Africa the open surf flung high and hissing upon sand tainted with cholera. She went back into the Indian Ocean through groups of tourists talking German, English children squealing, and a few black rocks, stepped round, that were African bodies. She floated and recalled without pain the yellow swimsuit and the emergence of the obsidian arms, head and torso from the sea. The water itself washed pain away; there was only the sensuality with which it did. She floated, and had nothing in the world but a pair of jeans held together with a safety-pin.

The General did not arrive for lunch at the five-star hotel. She waited at the terrace bar, as arranged, and lazily refused the approaches of a handsome young German who had noticed her on the beach and now offered a Pimm’s Cup. As the bar emptied towards two o’clock, he did not believe she was really expecting any particular man (a girl like her would not be waiting for a woman) and came up to her again, his flat pink ears gristly clean and his blond hair marked round the hairline with dried salt. She shook her head, but with a smile that softened offence. — Anozzer time, maybe? — She ate a sandwich in place of the five-star lunch and gave the barman a note, describing to whom it was to be handed: —A large man in a blue blazer and beige pants. African.—

In the hotel’s glossy gallery of shops she amused herself. There were the carved tusks and cotton galabiyas she had once sold but there was also a jeweller’s with amber from the Persian Gulf and a boutique displaying silk tunics and suède jackets: she went in and suddenly was trying on the kind of clothes she had not worn since Olga had taken her shopping each change of season. The adjustable mirrors showed a triptych of anxious concentration, making decisions between garments she was not going to buy anyway. With this or that one, she met — stopped dead by, as it were — herself, remarkably elegant; a possibility never considered. A whole hour in the booth smelling of other women’s perfume! Agitated, she fished her shift and spiky necklace from behind the layers of fancy dress, but as she was about to leave the shop, came back and did buy something, a French bikini swimsuit she had seen in the window before she first entered. She had brought a traveller’s cheque along with her because the jaunt was in the company of someone she hardly knew, and Mrs Whaila Kgomani was no longer a beach girl.

The General came onto the terrace a moment after she was back there. He was carrying the blazer looped by one finger over his shoulder and his tie was loosened, but whatever experience he was fresh from left him unmarked in contrast with the attack of lust whose evidence was beside her in a black-and-gold plastic bag and the tendrils of hair stuck in sweat on her forehead. He was unperturbed at having missed lunch, or having been kept waiting by her when he did arrive: —I went to freshen up. — At ease with the rituals of five-star hotels, he looked a moment at his nails, twisting into place the ring that had been turned by a towel. The long time they had known each other — all that had passed since five-thirty that morning — made apologies understood, as between partners preoccupied in a joint enterprise not to be trivialised.

— Is everything all right? — Her words were almost those they had used to assure no bones were broken.

— That depends on him. — His eyes moved rapidly in confirmation of orders gone over. — Whether he resists — really. — The eyes fixed on her. — I’ve told them to be careful.—

She did not arrive back in Nairobi that night. Leonie was not worried; she had found the note, Hillela was safe with Reuel, splendid fellow, Leonie herself would be confident to go to the end of the world with him. If only she could convince the State Department to be as confident that he was the man to support.

They came to a country hotel. The wooden building stood on stilts among fever trees whose slender trunks gleamed phosphorescent green in a dark roaring with insect song. An old nightwatchman gave them a key attached to a slab of wood marked Room 8. They stood on a rickety gallery that was supposed to allow tourists to watch hippos come out of the river down below, but nothing moved in the frantically vibrating humidity. In Room 8 there was a fan that turned its face, clicking and creaking, this way and that over them as they lay naked. They had already touched and felt one another, that morning, and that kind of familiarity was natural to turn into the other between a sexually-experienced man and woman. Yet she was a surprise to the General as his big body blotted hers from the face of the fan and the chilled layer of his skin and hers melted in his heat. She bore his weight vigorously and gave him great joy. And he could see in the dark the river-shine of eyes and the white of teeth — she kept her eyes open and was smiling — and when he had done with her he had the best feeling of all, that all he had felt was only the possibility of what she could make him feel.

She was not sentimental in the morning, either. Each lay, before the other was aware, wakened by the farting grunts of hippos. — I thought it was you, snoring. — She leapt up, breasts jumping, wrapped the giraffe-printed bedcover round herself and went out to see the animals. He lay in the smell of her body, already specifically identifiable to him, and thought about the man who was his son.

Leonie had to admit: if the State Department wouldn’t, Hillela had the nous to take up with the General when he was on the up-and-up again. She must have had a pretty good inkling he was sure of getting back into power. Perhaps she even knew something conventionally well-informed circles on African affairs didn’t? The love affair with Reuel went on for several months, after it apparently had started — that time when they went to Mombasa together — before she broke off with Brad. She was back in Africa on two or three working trips during the period; though nobody but she and Brad themselves knew for sure when the break actually came? Brad’s mother — who couldn’t believe anyone could do such a thing — said it seemed she had stayed on in the brownstone (presumably platonically?) quite a while after she told Brad. And he never said a word to anyone. Probably ashamed to.

It was said she wanted to marry Brad to qualify automatically for American citizenship. That theory fell away as malicious gossip — she didn’t marry him, that was the point! Leonie defended her spiritedly, romantically; among the protégés two had ‘found each other’, there was a new career opening if the one in the brownstone had been abandoned. But the young white widow and her African child, ikon of liberation and reconciliation between the Third World and the Western World, taken on by a local Joseph who found room for her in a house with storm windows like their own, had no options, for others. In Committee, the ikon could only be turned to the wall. She ended there, for them. She had not even given the opportunity for an embarrassed farewell presentation.

At a bookshop in London Pauline met a friend who passed on news of Hillela she was not aware was already out of date. The friend had been to a seminar in Boston while on a visit to her daughter, married to a professor of International Relations, and actually heard Hillela speak. The name ‘Kgomani’ had meant she expected a black, and then she realized who this white girl must be. Pauline’s niece spoke very well, very knowledgeably, it turned out she was quite a figure in circles concerned with African problems, now. Somebody said her husband had been assassinated by the South African secret service, in Zambia? Yes, Pauline could confirm something like that had happened; the South Africans had denied it, of course, put the blame on rivalry among his own exiled comrades — sickening.

Pauline herself — Pauline and Joe — had left all that, left South Africa. She was defiantly miserable in London, with its civilised pleasures of parks and ponds, art galleries and theatres, pubs where house painters, advertising men and middle-class women up for a day’s shopping reached over each other’s shoulders for draught beer — democratic pleasures she had so enjoyed on the few visits as a tourist she, unlike her rich sister, had been able to afford. It was Pauline who had persuaded Joe they should leave. His offices had been broken into and some evidence stolen — who but the security police could have done that? The evidence was vital in a case he was defending; being Joe, he went doggedly through the proper channels, seeking an indictment against the police, working himself to death as a detective rather than a lawyer to find the individual culprits. And being successful, of course; exposing the false alibis, the cover-ups by one department of the police hierarchy for another, in cross-examination. For what? The men he was defending were members of the Black Consciousness movement, who rejected white participation in the liberation of the country. She burst out laughing every time she reminded him of this; she did so before friends as well as when they were alone. Her Saturday classes in the church had closed down. The South African Students’ Organization didn’t want black children to take white charity education, and what SASO said dwindled attendance as the students’ authority grew. The children sang freedom songs instead of the songs of gratitude they used to offer to Pauline and her helpers. One of the parents came to her to ask whether madam couldn’t make the children come back to her Saturday mornings? But there was nothing madam or the Soweto woman could do; that was exactly what the students, even quite small children, were saying: they had done nothing, they could do nothing, together. The other non-racial groups to which Pauline belonged had gone white. It was the only advice to be got out of Black Consciousness. Work to change your own people, not us. Joe kept suggesting there was still plenty to be done that was worthwhile at the Black Sash advice bureaux, where some women with views just as politically advanced as Pauline’s helped blacks resist by asserting to the limit such rights as they had. But Pauline could not take the place assigned to her, among whites. The revolutionary temperament that had been unsuccessful in driving her Underground more than ten years before became vanity that would accept black rejection only as some schism within the central movement towards liberation, not as the exclusion of whites like herself who were ready to opt out of their colour and class. — If it’s not simply a revival of the old split between the ANC and PAC, then what is it? If it’s not a revival that favours the others, because the ANC’s at a low ebb in influence within the country, at the moment?—

Joe had to remind her that when she drove a certain friend of hers and his family to the border one night years ago, the friend was one of those who, at that time, merely put it another way: ‘did not want to dance with whites’. Her theatrical laugh spluttered upon him again. — What are you saying? And we found him dancing with our daughters!—

So they sold the house and he took Pauline away to London. She was convinced they could stay only as collaborators with the whites, now, whatever they did, however many legalistic triumphs he had. All conversations or arguments with her ended in reiteration of this. Their divorced daughter Carole and her small boy left the country with them, the elder boy had been given into the custody of his father. Joe found a position with a firm of solicitors who employed him mainly on litigation over football-team disputes. He worked as conscientiously as he had done against charges of treason, the documentation of which he had taken with him to Frognal Green, where it occupied one whole wall of bookshelves in the livingroom (the flat was too small to provide him with a study) and was available to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the African National Congress, the Defence and Aid Fund, the International Commission of Jurists, the National Council for Civil Liberties — Pauline went out as soon as someone from any of these arrived, or shut herself in the kitchen and cooked. Carole — at this stage in her life, after having two children and emigrating — had decided she wanted to study law, after all, and was articled to her father’s firm; he helped her with the degree course at London University she studied at night. On the other hand, Sasha, of course, had given up law; he was the only member of Hillela’s adoptive family who had stayed behind. Unless she would have counted (who knew, with her) Olga and the other cousins.

The one who had contingency plans had not left. Olga had had both breasts amputated and was no longer afraid of blacks. She went courageously to the knife and would do so again if the cancer were to recur elsewhere in her well-cared-for body; she had had fitted artificial breasts that couldn’t be told from her old shapely ones, even in a swimsuit, and she lived on in the house with her antiques — that selection from the past only of what is beautiful, lifted cleanly from the context of its bloody revolutions — her étagére, guéridon, George IV dining table and gilded Blackamoor. She lay beside her pool; only Jethro was gone; one of Jethro’s sons, a cook in a resort hotel in the Vumba Mountains in Rhodesia, was imprisoned for provisioning and hiding freedom fighters, and Jethro went home. Her own sons had all been commissioned during their military service in another kind of army. There was no correspondence between the two sisters after Pauline left and it is unlikely Olga received hearsay about the platform career of the girl she would have brought up to a different life as her own daughter.

Sasha heard because Pauline passed on the news to him. They could not leave one another be, Sasha and his mother. Pauline phoned once a month and he spoke to her. Before she went into the bedroom and shut the door and dialled the long-distance call, she washed her hands and combed her thick-streaked grey hair at the bathroom mirror: still not too much the old hag. The haughty eyes in the mirror saw Sasha — many Sashas, after even a few months had passed, the last sight of him became a reconstruction out of many, many, like the changing face produced by riffling the pages of one of those booklets of ‘moving pictures’—the expression on the same face drawn on each page different from that of the previous page — that are supposed to have led to the invention of cinematography. There was never much to say to each other. Not ‘What are you doing?’; god knows what he was doing with himself. At least it was something to relate: —I bumped into a woman I know who heard Hillela speak, in Boston recently. Apparently she’s working with some institute concerned with refugees in Africa. It was a seminar at M.I.T. This woman said she was good — knowledgeable. I’d hardly think it was Hillela’s field. — Sasha didn’t respond; what could one find to talk about that would rouse his interest. That old childish fuss over Hillela was forgotten long ago, otherwise Pauline herself couldn’t have brought up her name, to him, so easily. But maybe it was just as well he was crossing her voice with his own, asking whether an acquaintance of his could look up Joe for advice, in London. If she had annoyed him by a judgment in her remark (didn’t she know they annoyed each other always, unavoidably, inevitably, making judgments) and he had pressed her over the implication of what she did think was Hillela’s field, then she would only have made things worse by coming out with it: Hillela’s field was, surely, men.