A Sport of Nature

Liberated Territory

What has been, what was, what will be: nobody else can decide.

That was understood, lying tenderly apart in the biggest bed in America. His choice, to lie apart; he could have been comforted, why not, he knew he was still loved the way he had been loved. It was never any different. Staying would not have made this house safe for him.

But that is what is always said by the one who is going.

No need to leave yet — nobody knew, and nobody could know there was happiness in that house, yes, still there, during those months. Like brother and sister lying there, tempting — but he thought it was wrong. Not for us. Sometimes he panted in his sleep, from his wound. But nothing to be done; tenderness only salts. There would have been many more wounds, because that love would never be any different.

That’s what is always said.

He was thinking about the other one all the time — nearly all the time; sometimes both forgot, in the little American family of three, playing in pyjamas in the tropical warmth of the brownstone’s insulation. What’s he like? What’s he like? You were thinking of nothing else but never said it. You sweated it. The child sensed something; tugged uneasily at those frizzy plaits. You tweaked her ear or nose — What’you staring at, Nomikins, what’s the matter.

Nothing like. With all the intelligence and willingness and understanding shining the golden-brown lantern so steadily from the dark side of your gaze, you would not be able to follow. Because of that, he could never have told you what he told me. And because he could tell me, and I could follow — no, you’ll never follow, it can’t be done in this old house full of heirlooms, the things handed by fathers to sons. A desk, a complete set of The New Republic, and soon a piano; that’s heritage, here. Possible only to stroke your hair, if you’ll allow it, and let them say what they like; you will never explain to anyone why we stayed on a while, your first little family (you’ll play the piano, one of the tall, hunch-shouldered American girls will give you more brothers and sisters for your first Nomikins), and although you’ll never follow what he’s like, what she’s like, the one who is going, you did know, oh you did know — no-one can draw a proxy signature beneath a life.

The other will not die. Not even a herd of elephant will trample him out. He is not beautiful, he carries his Parabellum, he knows how to deal with sons, in him the handclasp compresses the pan-pipe bones of the hand with which it makes convenant; it is, on recognition, irresistible.

The General did not many her for some time — or Hillela did not marry him. They moved about Africa, warp and weft of purpose, trading decisions and carrying out, separately and together, the actions these required. He made the decision over the namesake: —Send her to a decent school in England. An eight-year-old child can’t be dragged around the place, she needs a settled life, and that schooling is still the best in the world. I have two kids there. Give her the advantage. I’ll pay. — He meant it, but it was not necessary; Hillela had her connections to revive on behalf of Whaila Kgomani’s daughter. If Nomo doesn’t know her father’s tongue, she hasn’t grown up speaking the colonial-accented English of her mother; she was educated at Bedales.

It became evident afterwards that Hillela went on several missions for the General, to countries where he could not go, and to which, on her decision, he could not trust anyone else to go. At the beginning she had the unique advantage: no-one in Africa yet connected her with him. If he had been seen to spend the night in an hotel with a young white woman — well, he had never been known to be able to resist a pretty girl, particularly a white one. Such girls have no names. People who came across Hillela in various African states knew her as one of the aid functionaries whose criss-crossing of closed frontiers was tolerated by all sides for reason of what they could hope to get. She looked up old friends without their realizing she was no longer doling out soup powder; and if they did, as perhaps on the night she dined with Tambo, Amojd and Busewe (upgraded) in Algiers, maybe it was the mission itself, on that occasion, to do so. It has never been clear what her position with the African National Congress was, beyond that of Whaila Kgomani’s widow, at that period. And the uncertainty of future political alliances between countries makes it always wiser for references other than ‘she played her role in active support of her husband’s determination to restore peace, prosperity and justice to his country’ to be excluded from data available at the General’s Ministry of Information and Public Relations.

Anyway, he took her with him to Mozambique in 1975 when he attended the independence ceremonies and saw another of the community of exiles return to his own country as President. The official invitation was in itself a political statement; his old friend Machel showed by it his country’s non-recognition of the regime that had ousted the General from his. If the General brought along a consort who was not his wife — she was the widow of a martyr to the cause of African liberation, and Machel had known her personally as one of Leonie’s American lobby. And if once she drove in some official car past the old Penguin Nightclub where her mother had danced night after night, she did not know that that was the place, that it had ever existed: closed up, along with all the other nightclubs, and the prostitutes whose kind of freedom had excited poor Ruthie were being re-educated for occupations more useful to a country than the sexual relief of white South African tourists. She could not search for any face among the crowds. It belonged to the recollection of the child beneath the palm tree, and that was overlaid by so many shadows.

In Africa the General wore a black beret bound with leather in place of the gold-braided cap. He grew a beard. It was not only to the great occasions of flag-raisings she accompanied him, sitting there with the growing feeling — binding them together more than if their flesh had been in contact — that next time, or the year after that, he would be the one making the victory speech. Her experience in Africa made it possible to take her even to his bush capital in the expanding area his army was able to declare liberated territory. She was as accustomed to drinking contaminated water and eating off the land as she was to making dinner-table conversation with a Minister. He took her everywhere; a characteristic of the qualities developed by a mistress that she should be, unlike a wife, someone who can be taken everywhere. The language of their intimacy was as much the terse anguish when supply lines of ammunition broke down or a go-between dealer failed to deliver the Stalin organs, Kalashnikovs, Israeli UZI submachine guns, Belgian FAL assault rifles dearly paid for in trade-offs and money, as it was love-talk. Her sexuality, evident to every man watching her pass as he sat in the bush oiling his gun, or stood at attention for review before the General, was part of the General’s Command. For him it seemed to grow, to be revealed with the success of his push towards the real capital. Her small, generous, urging, inventive body was the deserts of success; some bodies are made only for consolation, their sweetness touches with decay. But he had known from the first time he made love with her that that was only an experience of her possibilities — without realizing exactly what these would turn out to be.

Everyone has some cache of trust, while everything else — family love, love of fellow man — takes on suspect interpretations. In her, it seemed to be sexuality. However devious she might have to be (he realized he did not know why she should have wanted to be chosen by him) and however she had to accept deviousness in others, in himself — she drew upon the surety of her sexuality as the bread of her being.

You cannot run a country, in exile you cannot equip and train an insurgent army, augment it with villagers, local recruits, establish safe houses both within and without your country, without having an instinct for finding the right people to whom responsibility may boldly be delegated. Right at the start of their relationship he offered this bedfellow a mission for which she was an unlikely candidate — by anyone else’s judgment. But he did not solicit any. It was Hillela, on one of those working trips to Africa while she and the namesake were still living with Brad, who went to the safe house in a country to which the General’s eldest son had been taken when he was successfully kidnapped. It was an Arab country that had agreed to this hospitality. He had to disappear; a strategy to confuse the General’s enemies, with whom his son had allied himself, by not transporting him directly to the bush capital. Hillela was sent because she would be so unexpected an envoy that the hit men who had had to be employed for the job would be uncertain what interests beyond the General’s her presence might represent, and therefore would be more likely (the General repeated the phrase without elaboration) to be careful with the young man they had abducted.

Her arrival also threw the defiance, anger and fear of the young man into confusion. All he had prepared for the confrontation with his father was become a set of cumbersome armour of which this feminine apparition was not worthy; for which his posture was useless. Whatever explanations she gave, he was sure he did not really know who she was and why she was there. She could not be from the CIA, because the CIA had helped oust his father. Was she from the KGB? Or from Castro?

She said his father had sent her to see if he was ‘all right’. They were figured-over, the two of them and his guards, like patterned cloth, by lozenges of orange and purple light that came through closed velvet curtains in a suburban villa. He would not speak to her. She told him that what he had been hearing in the capital for the past six months was the regime’s propaganda: the General was not routed and in retreat, the whole of the Northern region was liberated territory, he was now receiving massive material and other support from outside, village after village was welcoming his men. Within the year he would be in the capital. — Whatever happens to the government people, he can’t leave you to be among them. He wants you to know that is why you are here. I know you don’t believe it, yet, but he doesn’t want you to come to any harm.—

A servant interrupted with coffee and sweetmeats glazed with honey. The General’s son ate. He had the air of unreality of one taking the last meal before execution, unable to imagine the actuality of what he dreaded. She could not open her mouth to reassure him.

Back in her hotel room between visits to the villa, she lay following the screen of the television with the sound switched off; she did not know, so far removed now from the General’s presence, whether there was any reassurance to be given. How long had she known the General? Behind the shared territory of exile, the shared beds in safe houses and Intercontinental Hotels, there was a whole lifetime of which not even the testimony of souvenirs, as in a beautiful room in Eastern Europe, was open to her.

She bought jeans and T-shirts and took them to the villa. The heat hammered at the walls. It was a prison — the General’s prison — with marble-topped tables, thick hot carpets, and pictures, to be made out in the moted stuffiness, someone must have chosen. Furniture can be anonymous but someone has always chosen the pictures. The General’s son did not speak to her during those days but they experienced together, a drowsy gaze, over and over, on the Swiss alpine view and the Belle Epoque woman in a carriage at the Place de l’Opéra; the room buzzed with prayers being said in the adjoining one by the off-duty guards, who were not allowed to leave the house for the mosque. After a few days he still did not speak but appeared in the clean clothes looking like one of the black students, eager to demonstrate to free somebody, who came to hear her speak on American campuses. He was slim, with a bunched mouth and delicate pointed jaw; no resemblance to his father, his fingers were long and tentative in their movements. The favourite must have been a fragile child. Even though she had a child of her own, the abstract relations of her own childhood — Len the Other Man, Ruthie dancing, dancing in a nightclub — meant she had no understanding, was free of the patricidal and infanticidal loves between parents and children. It was another advantage her aunts had not intended.

In her hotel room, piped music instead of prayer came through the back of the bedhead from the room next door while she telephoned Reuel. There was no direct dialling to the safe house he was in, in another country. A chocolate had been placed on a paper doily inscribed: The Management Wishes You Goodnight. She was eating it by the time the connection was established, and he heard that her mouth was full, a signal of calm audacity that reassured and at the same time delighted him.

— Not a mark on him. But it’s an awful place.—

— How’s that? I arranged for a house, a nice house!—

— It’s hot and ugly, and the curtains are kept closed all the time.—

He was laughing thunder down in his deep chest. — If he’s got any sense, he’ll never be in a worse place, my God, if you call that awful …! You’ve been a lucky girl.—

She told his father he wouldn’t speak to her. But the day she was to leave and explained he would be following, separately, to his father’s bush headquarters, he stood up — for a moment she thought he was going to clutch at her physically, not wanting to be left. — Who are you?—

He knew her name; she had given it to him the first time she saw him, and seen disbelief in his face.

— I’m your father’s lover. My husband was assassinated seven years ago.—

He looked at her; appeared to be looking at her dark eyes, all shining pupil, her tight-skinned cheeks, mouth with the beginnings of the lines of her most habitual expression — generous, wary confidence — overprinting the relaxation at the corners of her lips, but he was following something else. Every feature of her — the breasts slung from the angle of bare collarbones, the dent of her navel visible under the thin cotton of her skirt, the ringless brown hands and dabs of red paint on her toenails — all these, of face and body, were markers and footholds showing the way. He had enough of his father in him to recognize this one not only knew the need to move on, but also what she would not reveal to his father: what it was necessary to do, to bring this about.

I see, he said.

He saw.

By the time the General was ready to eliminate the government’s border outposts and push his forces, at last sufficiently large, properly clothed and well-equipped, to attack the second largest town in his country, his son had a black beret and a beard that broadened his face. His breast was crossed from shoulder to waist, on either side, by a sash like an Order made of the pointed steel teeth of machine-gun bullets. It is true that Hillela worked beside him for four weeks, that dry season of the General’s advance. They were with the General in an abandoned farmhouse that had once belonged to a white settler before the first war there, the old war of independence. It was the supply depot closest to the fighting; the farthermost point of a road able to carry heavy transport vehicles. The General’s men unloaded their cargo and stored the boxes in the house. The son was the best of them, yes; he worked until dawn. Hillela had a kitchen table at which she sat typing the serial number of each gun before distribution so that the General would know exactly what weapons were being deployed where. The specifications were not unfamiliar to her; her trips with Arnold stood her in good stead, as the Manaka cuisine once had done in other circumstances.

The house with its curtainless windows was a creature who has witnessed so much that its eyes can never close. But everyone slept there during the day. It was stacked with grenades. If one were to have been faulty all would have gone off as a bundle of deadly firecrackers, blowing up the whole place. At midday the sun stripped the walls bare, ransacking yet again: bare boards, shelves of dead insects. At the same hour every day a bar of light rested on the eyelids of the General. He woke, and often made love to her and then would stroll with her in what must have been the settler’s farmhouse garden. Among the mud huts, like burned broken pottery, of the peasants who had moved in when there was redistribution of land and then, in turn, fled from the new war, there was still the remains of a swimming pool. In it were skeletons of frogs and a dead snake lying like a lost leather belt, stranded from the last rainy season. The General wished there were some way of filling the pool; he would have liked to do his twenty lengths a day.

The small airport was taken with the town. When the General sent her out during the mopping-up operations (which included the looting of bars and brothels by some of his long-deprived troops) it was from his stance on this strategic bit of liberated territory that he saw her off in one of his Libyan planes. The son, now with the rank of colonel, was alongside his father. Not customary, among these people, to kiss when not making love, and so she did not offer any dab on either cheek to the young man, but they clasped hands and the corner of his bearded mouth went up in a smile, slowly exchanged. It was as if, at last, they had turned to acknowledge together the view of the Swiss Alps and the lady in the carriage on the Place de l’Opéra.

*

Agostinho Neto was another friend of the General who had become President of his country. Hillela waited safely in Angola while the General and his son advanced, captured airstrip by airstrip, village by village and town by town, towards the capital she had never seen. She must have lived for seven or eight months in that hotel in Neto’s capital, with one trip to England to see the namesake. She took Nomo to visit the Holland Park couple with whom they had stayed when she was small — at ten, what long thin black legs she had! The wife babbled on about her surely going to be a dancer or a model, she kept talking, afraid Hillela would take advantage of any gap to ask if she and her child could occupy the guest room again. But Hillela was in no need of being taken in; she had been provided with a flat by some organization or other, she didn’t name it, and, as the husband remarked, it was idiotic to be nervous, so obvious Hillela was not short of money, the child was at Bedales, and how well Hillela looked, prettier than ever. She was vague when asked what she was doing in Africa — Luanda, of all places. She had worked with various refugee organizations but now was not sure what would come next. From the way she got into the taxi he found for her when she left, from the way she settled herself and quickly remembered to smile through the window, her mind already discarding the visit like a used ticket, he knew — he couldn’t say why — what had come next was a new lover, and whatever role that meant. Once she had gone, the wife agreed: there was nobody quite like her; awful and rather marvellous.

The General came to Luanda expectedly unexpectedly, every few weeks. It was not only to fill with the scent of his after-shave, the grunts as he did his twenty morning push-ups on the carpet, the glowing weight of his body in bed, a room registered in the name of Mrs Hillela Kgomani, but also to consult with Neto and others in the Organization of African Unity. Alliances must be negotiated with foresight. Self-assured of winning his war, he was already looking towards his stature in peace. She always knew if he had arrived and entered the room while she was absent; his presence expanded it before she noticed his bag or the newspapers spilled on the bed. She was alone in that presence — he had been in town since the previous night and was out at a meeting — on a day when the telephone rang and it was not he ready to say where to join him for lunch. There was someone to see her, downstairs. Who? A woman asking for her.

What woman? — The lady won’t give her name.—

A strange hackle of fear rose from somewhere long quieted. She stood for an instant once again behind the refrigerator door and felt the thud of her own death.

— I don’t see people who won’t say who they are.—

The telephone rang again and it was the General. The young man behind the reception desk came running out on his two-inch-heeled shoes, bum-tight black pants waggling, to open the lobby doors as she passed. Colonists never leave; they leave their blood and style behind. He wore a pendant on a glossy chain dipping down into his open-necked shirt, like any Portuguese dandy, and in his watered-down African face his eyes were the polished aubergine-coloured ones — like her own. — That ’oman, she speak Portuguese to me. — But he saw madam was not interested, she had the face of someone who has just come from her bath and her mirror and is ready to be received by company that commands the best table in the restaurant.

The next afternoon the persistent caller was there again. — I tell her, without she says the name (a shrug in the voice) — she say, Mrs Nunes.—

A General’s consort meets many people and does not always remember doing so, particularly if they are wives, who appear only in marginal social contexts and usually don’t have much to say. It might be that this was one of those whose offers of invitations to visit she had accepted without any intention of pursuing.

Hillela came down into the lobby, thirty-three next birthday, not grown tall, grown to be a young woman with deep breasts and a curly head well-balanced on a straight neck, shiny cheeks without make-up, a black, brightly-suffused gaze.

A woman was sitting on the plastic-covered bench where only the nightwatchman ever sat. Her skirt was arranged round her knees and her feet were neatly together, pushed up by high-heeled sandals. She pressed the heel of her palms on the bench and got up. She came slowly nearer; stopped.

— I’m Ruth.—

The young woman tilted her head a moment; but the other was right, there was no need to make any other claim.

— The housekeeper here’s a friend of mine, she often talks about the people who come to stay, it’s only natural. She said there was someone with an unusual, pretty name—‘Hillela’. She’d never heard of anyone called that before — I didn’t say anything but I thought, what a great coincidence. So I asked what you were like, about how old …—

— Won’t you have some tea or something cool to drink.—

As if this were one of the wives to whom politeness was due. That’s what came out. That’s all. She heard the slither and clip of high heels behind her. They sat down between potted palms. No-one appeared to serve them. A long, long silence, twenty-nine years of silence uncoiled around the two women, it stretched and stretched to its own horizon, like the horizon drawn by a landscape of cloud rimmed by space, seen from a plane thousands of feet removed from the earth, from reality. Silence was another dimension: ‘mother’, ‘daughter’.

— You don’t mind my coming.—

The remark did not break the silence, it was nothing, swallowed up by it. She shook her head.

She got up and pressed a bell on the wall.

— Really — I’m not thirsty. Don’t bother.—

But she was pressing the bell again and again, it could be heard shrilling from behind the louvres of the patio bar.

Even for one so used to adapting to others, so skilled and quick to adjust, how does one talk when one doesn’t know to whom one is talking — acquaintance, secret friend, someone standing in a relationship never tried out? There was at least something in the silence, something to say — You live in Mozambique.—

— I did, in Lourenço Marques — used to be, Maputo now … We moved here in the late Sixties, my husband thought there was more opportunity. With the oil, you know.—

Vasco. The name torn in pieces and stuffed into a bin with the crusts of school sandwiches. To have inside me a man who has nothing to do with being introduced: this is my wife, this is my child, my dog. The woman had the creamy opaque skin of the generation that used face powder, the skin of Olga. The high brow of Pauline was still smooth and the neck unlined but its fullness quilted. The beautiful painted mouth, shiny as tar in the photograph beside the silver dish of Liquorice All-Sorts, opened on false teeth. — How is Pauline? Is she still married to old Joe? And Olga? I don’t suppose I’d recognize them, now — or them me (acknowledging good-humouredly the hair dyed red). Olga must be sixty! — she’s the eldest, and I’m fifty-three, I was twenty-one when you were born. Sixty! But I’m sure she won’t look it, she was always afraid of using herself up — you know? Precautions. ‘Don’t cry, it makes your eyes red.’ Even when we were children, she used to cream her elbows and knees when she got out of the bath. She was so pretty and so afraid — at fourteen, of wrinkles! I threw her into terrible confusion when we were young girls and I read somewhere that if you shaved your legs you lost your sex appeal — she was always perfectly depilated. Well, anyway, all she got was Arthur … I suppose he’s still around—

That circumcised ox, and he did become rich enough for her to buy a pair of Imari cats and an 18th-century Blackamoor holding up a globe, and Jethro carrying cream scones to her swimming pool.

— My darling Pauline … has she stuck with Joe? I’ve often wondered … though I didn’t write often … No, well, that’s not true, I didn’t write at all after about a year. I’m not going to lie to you. I can’t picture Pauline living a whole lifetime with that nice deadpan stuffed with legal documents, he was like a suit of old clothes filled with paper to keep birds away. I always knew, I hoped she’d still have some other life, she could have done anything — She wasn’t like Olga or me. And all she had was Joe and her drunken black friends sponging on her. How is Pauline?—

But she knew no more than this woman, about the sisters, the aunts. She had been gone since she was nineteen.

— And you don’t write?—

— No. — Gone, like Ruthie.

A black man in a waiter’s suit that gaped between the buttons on jacket and fly stood by with a tin tray. An icecream was ordered — Well, all right, I’ll have something! — and a soda.

— Did you live with Olga or with Pauline? In the end?—

Now it was two schoolgirls meeting years later; the icecream was being smoothed, tiny cardboard spoonful by spoonful, between sentences.

— With both. At different times. I went to boarding-school in Rhodesia and I used to spend the holidays with Olga.—

— She had only the three boys? She always envied me, getting a girl.—

— Clive, Mark and Brian.—

— And Pauline? — Ruthie had never written and now this woman wanted to register a preference for Pauline to have been the surrogate.

— Oh, I used to be invited a lot to Pauline’s. And then when I left Rhodesia, I went to live with her and Joe.—

A smile. — Len. It was he who didn’t want me to write, you know. You were too small to read, anyway.—

But not later. I’ve had a husband, I’ve given birth, these things were done to me, but with you I do things, I’m all over my body, I’m there wherever you touch me, my tongue in your ear, your armpit fur and your sweet backside.

— Pauline had only the two, didn’t she, Alexander — Sasha — and the little girl, just a baby, when I went away.—

— Carole, we went to school together.—

— Sasha was a darling little boy. Did you get on well? You and Pauline’s children?—

— Yes, it was fine.—

— No jealousy? We sisters never quarrelled, we were very, very close.—

— I know. They were always talking about you.—

Sideways on the iron café-chair, the legs were arranged exposed from the knees as they had been on the lobby bench; elegant legs narrow at knee and ankle, displayed as all that was left to display by a woman whose fine breasts (breasts of Hillela) now met, where a waist like Hillela’s had been, a solid bolster that was diaphragm, belly and hips in one. — You wonder why I came. Why I’ve bothered you. Hillela.—

She was smiling without admission or reproach. — No I don’t. Curiosity. It’s natural.—

Offended, all the same; and the momentary twitching expression of one who is used to enduring the carelessness of others. — It’s a bit different from my friend who happens to work here, I think. Not just ‘curiosity’; couldn’t be, could it? If you’d known I was here, would you have looked for me?—

— I don’t know, really. I wouldn’t have known whom to look for. — A lie. Resemblances, sisterly and filial, can’t be avoided. But the General’s consort did not look where she thought they were to be found, in Mozambique.

The red mouth opened a little, the hands with the puffiness round the nails that results from some sort of manual work drew ringed fingers slowly down the powdered cheeks in preparation: —So you don’t remember me at all.—

— I think I was only — how old? — about two. There’s a photograph in Lourenço Marques. I was there with you but I don’t remember — not where it was taken, not the palm tree, not being there with you. Olga framed a photograph — of you — one taken during the war.—

— Nothing later? — Laughter. — That’s Len. He must have torn them up. You had no other idea of me?—

— None. — No pictures, but letters. All sensations alive in the body, breasts, lips of the mouth and the vagina, thorax, thighs. Vasco. A thirst of the skin.

— What’d they tell you? Len?—

— That you’d made another life.—

— Was that all? What could that mean to a child? How ridiculous. Len’s phrase.—

— It didn’t really matter what he said, he was talking about someone I didn’t know, bringing up a subject that didn’t exist, you see. I travelled about with him when I was little, in the car.—

And now remorse. — Oh my God.—

— It was wonderful! I remember it all, sleeping on a teddy-bear cloth blanket in the back, between the sample boxes. We stayed together at hotels in little dorps; slept in the same room with him.—

—‘Another life’. Sounds as if I’d gone into a convent. Len just never could face facts. Wouldn’t let me write, you know. And my sisters? When you were bigger?—

— Pauline explained.—

— That I’d gone away with a man.—

Oh more than that. To another life — Len’s phrase wasn’t a euphemism. To look for passion and tragedy. The wrong place; when it really happens it happens on the kitchen floor.

But a daughter cannot instruct a mother. — Yes, that you hadn’t been — right — for Len, and you’d fallen in love with someone else.—

— So you were old enough to understand, by then.—

— Oh yes. Some of my friends’ parents were divorced.—

Vasco, my Vasco, the taste of you! You are still in my mouth. I read somewhere it’s supposed to be the taste of bitter almonds. Not true, not for yours, anyway. Like strawberries, like lemon rind, I always did eat the rind of the slice of lemon people put in drinks.

The silence came back. The woman braved it. — He left me two years after we moved here.—

— You’re not with Vasco anymore?—

Ruthie, childish, self-absorbed Ruthie, never able to be aware of anything outside her own skin, that’s her charm in a way — doesn’t notice that if nothing else is remembered, the man’s name is known.

— Oh, a long time. Things didn’t work out, here. We had nothing left. Neither of us had a job, so he went to Europe to look for something. He was going to send for me in Lisbon, but it’s never happened.—

Mrs Nunes. — You’re married to someone else, now.—

The woman shook her head slowly, smoothing into silence the remoteness of that possibility. — Not married. When I was still young … younger… I was fooled again a few times. I didn’t understand what men were. — A little late to begin explaining the facts of life. No doubt someone did that; so far as Pauline and Olga could be said to know them. Or poor Len.

But the young woman was smiling at Ruthie as if she were the one capable of giving instruction.

— And I hear you’ve got a daughter, too. I’m a grandmother!—

— Yes, ten years old, she’s called Nomzamo and she’s at school in England.—

— My friend saw the photograph in your room. Is she from this husband you’re with here?—

— She’s a black child. But not from the man your friend’s described.—

They laughed together for the first time. — Oh I’ve lived among them so long, it’s nothing to me, although I’ve never really had anything to do with them. And now, of course, they’ve taken over everything — I believe it’s the same in Mozambique — not like it was when I was there, there’s nothing in the shops, no water, even, half the time, in the old Polana. It was such a beautiful hotel. People used to say better than anything on the French Riviera — of course, you stayed there once with me! You did! When you were tiny! That’s where the photograph must have been … There were all the outdoor cafés, the nightclubs … and now nothing left. Just the same here; look at this dump of a hotel. They took over everything, but without the experience … that’s what happens. I often think, Pauline ought to be here, and see what it’s like — I was always supposed to be the impractical one, I lived in dreams, but what about Pauline …! I work for them. Yes, I do. — The mouth moved half-humorously, half-emotionally. — I’m a housekeeper, too. At the Hotel Continental. They want white or at least half-caste people for the job because the other poor things always fall to the temptation to steal towels and sheets. Of course — these things are such luxuries to them! What will Olga say when she hears her sister’s a glorified maid in a hotel! — But Olga will never know; neither mother nor daughter has any contact with her. — Are you a professional? Did my sisters send you to a university? There was no shortage of money, my father must have left a pile, and Arthur’s a money-making machine. The more I ask, the less I find I know about you.—

— No. They would have — Olga would have paid — but I left when I’d finished school. Left where I’d been living — at Pauline and Joe’s. I’ve done all sorts of things, doctor’s receptionist, sung in discos, served in a shop, been a kind of governess in Ghana, once; and then political work in Europe, and jobs with aid organizations — in Africa, in America.—

Ruthie followed as if she had planned it all herself. Now she could put a hand out and place it over Hillela’s, a parental blessing bestowed upon a bowed head. — Hillela, I’m so glad you’ve really lived. I knew you’d be well taken care of by my family but at the same time I felt ashamed that it would mean you’d grow up like them, and never know anything different. Every time I remembered you I thought that. It would come upon me suddenly in the most unlikely moments, moments when it seemed that the things I was doing, the things that were happening to me — they made it impossible that what I left behind in Johannesburg had ever existed, that I had ever been Olga and Pauline’s sister and Grandpa Hillel’s favourite granddaughter and married someone under a canopy.—

The first touch in twenty-nine years. Her hand was trapped under the stranger’s palm and neither turned to let the palms meet nor slid away.

— I know it couldn’t have been all honey. But I can see — you wouldn’t expect it to be. I don’t know you — don’t think I’m pretending to know you, I can’t — but I am your mother. The blood’s the same. You have a child of your own. And this man, I hear he’s some kind of politician, someone important — does he love you? Do things go well between you?—

If you never have had a mother you never have been asked such questions. She was smiling, conceding a right that didn’t exist. — Things go very well. We’ll soon be living in his own country.—

— You’ve turned out so good-looking, Hillela. And clever, I can tell. You remind me of Pauline when she was young — a certain look around the eyes.—

The eyes: that was the moment to ask the question. But did it matter, any longer, whether she was Len’s daughter or the child of Vasco; abandoned or abandoner, both were gone. No need to invent a reason for her particular kind of existence taken in among antiques or bedding down with a cousin (the blood the same), when for her, too, all that had happened to her made it impossible that what was left behind, there, had ever existed?

— Will you show me the photograph of the little girl? I need proof to believe I’m a grandmother!—

— Of course. I’ll fetch it for you.—

She ignored the elevator, raced up the stairs and the room was staring at her as she burst in and took the leather frame from the dressing-table. It was a double frame that balanced ajar like a book; on the side facing the namesake, laughter-dents in her cheeks and her arms raised joyfully, was a photograph of Hillela and Whaila with the baby in the crook of his arm. It had not been looked at for a long time, although it was there on the dressing- or bedside-table in every hotel room and in the duffle bag that lay among the guns and grenades in. the farmhouse. Whaila, thirty-eight years old for ever in the garden of Britannia Court, the light catching his strong slender forearm with the watch there, distinctly, and the lines of pain in his smile that struck deep and never faded from the print. She slipped the photograph out from beneath the plastic window and clumsily, tremblingly, put it in a drawer. The veins of her neck swelled and for a moment the room lurched in tears.

The woman had the good family manners to know she had stayed long enough; she had left the patio and was waiting in the lobby. She studied the namesake, considering fondly; maybe considering what to say, it was hard to find resemblances not blotted out by blackness. — She’s an adorable little girl.—

They stood seeing together the daughter’s daughter, smiling politely.

Hillela took back the photograph only for a moment. — Here, Ruthie, you have it.—

The General said of course she must come and live with them. — Your mother is our mother. She will have her own quarters in our house, or her own house, same as my mother.—

— She’s Ruthie. I don’t know her, I’ve never lived with her. I might as well take in anyone.—

This had no significance for the General. Among his people most children were brought up by grandmothers or other kin as well as or in place of their mothers — anyone who performed the function shared the title: the mother remained the mother. — Hillela, you’re not adopted?—

— Well, I was — but not by Ruthie.—

— Then she’s your mother, even if you don’t know her face. I don’t care. We look after our elders.—

— But even if we had a house—

— You will have a house soon, a house you can’t imagine, a house with I forget how many — fifteen, sixteen rooms — And the thought of regaining his official residence roused him, so that he pressed the breath out of her and kissed her with his hands encompassing her head, as he had held it at the beginning, to examine it for hurt.

— If we really want to do something …—

— Of course. You must look after your mother.—

— D’you think we could get a cheap ticket to Europe? I don’t believe she’s ever been. Even if it were only to Portugal — she Speaks Portuguese, apparently.—

— That’s easy, if that’s what you want. Airlines must make sure all eventualities are covered. — He was laughing, zestfully packing his bag to go back to his bush capital. — TAP wants to keep its landing rights if a change of regime is coming.—

Hillela had no address; it had not been pressed upon her, must have been clear in her face or manner that she would not know how to find any reason for another meeting. She went to the housekeeper to ask where Mrs Nunes lived. — You can h’ask for ’er at the Continental, madam, that’s where she works. — No, her address at home. Do you know when her day off is? — Like me, she’s off work Thursdays — tomorrow, you see, I’m not ’ere. — The housekeeper wrote a few lines on the torn-off border of a newspaper. — Is it far? — There’s a bus, madam — but you take a taxi.—

The General had left by the time the crows were squabbling on the balcony ledge in the early morning. It always was a day or so before she took possession of the deserted room again. The hearth-fire of the bed had gone out, cold. Hillela dressed, approached the/couple of taxis that leaned night and day against the kerb outside the hotel; and then went on walking. The heat of the day had not yet risen; there was a shimmer of humidity and the smell of salty wet stone and oil from the docks; the concrete of Tema rose from the waves, underfoot again, and sank away. She meant to walk in the direction of the fort, which she vaguely knew was that of the quarter indicated on the slip of newspaper in her bag, and pick up a taxi after she had had a breath of air, but she kept walking while the cross-wind on the causeway road that connected the town with the restinga, where the beaches were, blew about her its scarves and veils. The road to the fort hung as a slack, snaked rope from the walls. The Portuguese built their fortresses as indestructibly as the Danes and they have survived to be put to use everywhere on the coasts of Africa by successive powers, housing governors-general or colonial militia, and, at last, black heads of state or their army headquarters: the stony armour fits everyone, imperialist and revolutionary, capitalist and Marxist. She saw the fort up ahead with its great incongruously voluptuous bouquet of bougainvillea at the portal, then passed beneath it, and looked back once at it high behind her. She had not been up there, although she moved in official circles; Neto did not live in his palace as Nkrumah had done in Christiansborg, outside whose walls grass covered a grave: I saw the face of freedom … and I died. Military vehicles were tilting down the steep road and showering her with dust: this was army headquarters.

At the other end of the causeway road she stopped someone riding a bicycle and showed him the slip of newspaper. He gabbled directions in Portuguese, but her vivid incomprehension and feminine friendliness roused him to make further efforts and he drew her a map in the dust. She turned left, and then left again, passing rows of tiny pink, bright blue, acid-green and yellow facades like children’s, iced birthday-cake houses. Pastel picket fences enclosed minute spaces of sand. The streets seemed deserted; row after row, pink, blue, green, yellow. Pleasure houses; places to store surfboards and waterskis and barbecue grills for prawns, doll’s houses where one could keep a girl, even, and visit her during the week when families were back in town.

Ruthie lived in one of these. The address was correct. The chalk-blue door was opened by a small girl with black eyes and thin gold rings in her baby ears — Hillela herself, if she had not been left behind twenty-nine years ago. Perhaps Ruthie owned or rented the house, perhaps she hired a room there; perhaps it was Vasco’s pleasure house in which Ruthie had been left behind, and she hired it out to share with others? The child ran away to the kitchen, which could be smelled (green peppers and coffee, the odours released when Pauline was preparing a treat lunch), and there were voices talking across each other in Portuguese.

Ruthie must have just washed her hair. She wore a towel turban that pulled firm the skin of her temples and cheeks; the lost beauty her sisters talked of almost emerged — useless beauty thrown away so cheap on the first man to take it up in a nightclub. It was her turn to lead the way, chattering and apologizing for her dressing-gown. They went into what must have been the communal room: paper flowers before a plaster Virgin Mary, piles of gritty records, a photograph of a frock-coated man and a woman in a high collar under oval convex glass. They sat on a sofa protected by crocheted headrests and arm-mats. The curtains were closed against the sun and again what was said was said in patterned dimness, twenty-nine years submerging their faces under the dissolving play of depths.

Ruthie’s chatter stopped instantly. — Europe. But what would I do there. I mean, I don’t know anybody.—

— We’ve got friends who would look after you.—

— Oh no. Thank you, it’s very generous, tell your husband, I don’t know what to say … No, I’d better stay. I’m used to it, now. I speak the language pretty well, you know. After such a long time. Some of the whites who went away when it was all finished for them, they’ve come back, they can’t settle down there, after here — even though everything’s changed so much. And would I get my job back … Europe. I’d better stay where I’m used to.—

Five weeks after a certain telephone call from his mother Sasha followed the impulse, and wrote to the Department of Political Science at M.I.T. asking whether the Department would be good enough to supply him with the address of Mrs Hillela Kgomani, who had taken part in a seminar on Africa (he apologized for not being able to be more precise) the previous spring. It was necessary for him to contact Mrs Kgomani for reasons of research. He requested that if it appeared that his letter was directed to the wrong department, it might be passed on to the appropriate one. He received a courteous reply, and the address of the brownstone. But although Hillela wrote several times to Brad over the next year, she never gave any address other than that which would place her in a city at the moment of writing: ‘Algiers’, ‘Luanda’. If there is nowhere to reply to, of course, the one to whom a letter is addressed cannot fall to the temptation to write back, and cannot deliver any slight through not doing so. Trust her to protect herself … She would not know the joy and pain her handwriting caused.

Brad wrote across the envelope from South Africa: return to sender.

Unwanted, unopened, dead letters come back slowly, by sea mail. Sasha opened his and could not stop himself from beginning to read: … my “field” (as my mother says, as if we were sheep she’d like to keep corralled chewing on this bit of grass or that) turns out to be not so different from yours, after all. I suppose that’s why I’m writing. I chucked up law (again, the first time was for the army) and I’m working with a black trade union in Durban, the place you once ran away to with your friend, I’ve forgotten her name, and left the whole house in a state of shock … I’m relieved to be away from JHB, I’m no longer with that girl, either. And the house is gone, they sold it before they left. But I hate the climate. I’ve never liked lying about on beaches, which is what everyone finds the compensation for breathing warm soup instead of air, night and day, in summer. I haven’t had a winter here, yet. What I do: I’m helping to organize workers. It’s as simple as that but of course it’s not simple at all here. You would have gone off to take a shower or gossip on the phone if I’d talked about such things, but now I suppose you’ll know something of them. Maybe more than I do. Pauline said you lecture. African problems — she didn’t know the details, she thought it was refugees, but anyway, refugees are ex-employees, potential labour, an unemployment problem among other things, so you’re certain to have picked up a lot from them. As you must know, blacks’ unions here at home still aren’t allowed to participate in the official industrial conciliation process, but this won’t be able to go on for much longer, whatever the government would like. As blacks have become the main work force, not only traditionally in mining, but in the engineering, construction and other secondary industries, being able to negotiate directly only with whites has left the bosses a fraction of the labour force to parley with. The recognized trade unions are a farce, and these pragmatic capitalists have to deal with reality. So it’s certain that in a year or two black unions will have to be recognized. And there’s the question of mixed ones — but I won’t go into all that. The only thing that was alive for me in law was labour legislation, and now at least I’m doing something practical with all that stuff I mugged up. Black workers have little or no experience of the kind of organizing skills they’re going to need, or the kind of structures, right from the shop floor, they have to set up. Not that there’s always a shop floor — I’m mostly concerned with dockworkers, at present. All I ever knew about them when I started was that they invented (should I say ‘choreographed’) the gumboot dance, you know, the calf-slapping-and-stamping performance, tin whistles shrieking between their teeth — teams of them used to be brought to put on for Pauline’s indigenous art shows. It’s not much of a career; I only mind for Joe — but believe it or not, Carole has taken up where I dropped out, she’s articled to the firm he joined in London! So that’s good, for him. He didn’t want to leave but my mother decided he was useless here. And that was that.

I don’t know what you want to know. If anything. But I imagine that you are back in a family now; you have your own family, a professor husband, a child (I know that’s not his, that’s from another marriage). I’ve never been to Uncle Sam’s great U.S. but I can choose and furnish your house from the movies … how else? And you in it. No movie to supply that one.

I suppose that house and you in it is a good idea. So that with it you may want to know the sort of things people want to know when they have family houses. The other cousins: maybe you’d like to hear about them. They all three have careers. Mark’s a urologist, a neighbor of yours, more or less, in Philadelphia. Brian’s in banking: Clive — I’m not sure what he’s doing, can’t remember for the moment, but whatever it is he’s very successful — I met him once, on a plane going to Cape Town. He gave me a card which I lost. Maybe you have a card now: Professor and Ms Hillela — what? Pauline didn’t say; you keep your other name when you lecture.

It’s wonderful to be with blacks. Working with blacks. Already there are some who are senior to me, one or two who have been, for training, to England and West Germany. I take my orders from them. So I suppose I’m like Pauline, really. Where I get my thrills. It’s wonderful and sometimes it’s a terrible let-down. Alpheus’s garage was luxury compared with the flat near the Point I’m living in, but I’m still cut off from the vigorous ugliness of the life they live, different from my ugliness; what they find to talk about in their endless dialectic — no, synthesis — of laughter, anger and mimicry, their Sunday booze-ups, the childhood loyalties they never seem to give up — it’s not in a manner of speaking that they call each other brother.

But what am I saying. You were married to a black. It must have been different, for you. Perhaps I should marry a black girl — if that were possible. (By the way, the law against that is going to go, too, one of these days. They’re looking for ways they can trim off the straggly edges without harming white power.) But I have to tell you I’m not attracted to black girls. Not so far. As if they could care.

The kind of job I do — it’s neither legal nor illegal. It’s not really new, either. I’m making no great break-through for progress. It was done before we were born or when we were little kids by people whose names I’ve learned, Afrikaners like the Cornelius sisters and Bettie du Toit, and Jews like me, Solly Sachs and Eli Weinberg. Before the laws put a stop to it. Some of them landed in jail and exile, and others gave in and settled for working in white unions. So now it has to be begun over again, but this time there’ll be no stopping it. The gumboot dance won’t be hustled off the arena when the whites have had enough for their amusement. Our offices have been raided a few times; the police seem bewildered by what they find, might as well be reading upside-down. I’ve been questioned, along with another white involved. But they don’t seem to know what to do about us, yet.

It was not prying, to read the letter meant for Hillela. As he read he saw that when he was writing to her, he was writing to himself. He tore up his letter and dropped it into the office waste basket among memoranda, spoilt photocopies, and the Coke cans his colleagues aimed there.

The signals from the General’s free radio stations became stronger and stronger. His pilots, training in Bulgaria to fly MIGs, qualified and came back to the bush to operate from the captured provincial towns with their airports or airstrips. The government troops were fighting from besieged towns. The General rocket-attacked and bombed military bases but gave strict instructions that the oil refinery and the country’s two ports were not to be touched, nor were there to be any but unavoidable civilian targets. — I’m not going to walk into a ruined city and take on a wrecked economy. — But in the end there was fighting in the streets in which his former comrades, his neighbours when he was a young officer, his friends and perhaps even some members of his own family would be killed. Only the best of them was safe by his side, and no-one dared to recall that the Colonel had once belonged with the enemies his father had overcome. The General did not have to explain to Hillela his feelings about this; she had seen the homeless wanderers between army and army, war and war, sitting in the bush, she had brought the soup powder that comes after shrapnel.

Some time before the army headquarters, police headquarters, broadcasting station and telecommunications centre in the real capital were taken by the General’s troops, and he entered the capital in a procession of armoured cars and tanks whose engine power was quickly superseded by the lava of crowds that carried them forward in battered, ecstatic eruption, the marriage took place in some Hilton or Intercontinental hotel where he flew to join Hillela for twenty-four hours. It was then that the General gave her her African name. She had forgotten the promise, taken as one of the kind offered her meaninglessly so often in the playfulness of sexual advances. — You’ll be there on the register: Chiemeka Hillela. — Now she remembered. — What does it mean? — He took a smiling breath that expanded the muscles of his neck as well as his big chest. — It’s not a name in my language, it comes from another country, but it means the same as my real name does. ‘God has done very well’.—

His bell of laughter broke and reverberated, back and forth. She embraced him, the accolade of victorious commanders, her arms hardly able to reach around his shoulders.

She had drawn back. The shine of her one cheekbone was impressed with the ridges of the insignia he bore, her eyes were inescapable; he found the challenge very attractive. — Why in another language? Because I’m a stranger?—

— Now, now. Wait a minute. It’s an Igbo name, from Nigeria. I had a good friend there, I stayed with him and his mother, she treated me like her son. It’s in her honour I call you. She fed me, she clothed me the first time I was in exile, as a youngster. And her name was the same as mine, a female version; a name that was fated …—

The name that was ready for her has been hers for official purposes ever since, but between the couple she remained Hillela, as he remained for her Reuel, his colonial baptismal name at the Catholic font. So that ‘Hillela’ has become the name of intimacy, withdrawn from the currency of general use and thereby confusing her identity and whereabouts, for others, further than these already had been. It was only by her face that Olga recognized the President’s wife in the newspaper photograph, that time, sitting there right next to Yasir Arafat.