A Sport of Nature

The Shadow of a Palm Tree

There was a time and place for Hillela to give account of herself.

Olga’s Rover kept by Jethro shiny as the taps in her bathroom stood outside the gate. Olga sat in Pauline’s worn livingroom with Pauline, waiting. Olga got up and hugged her; —Hillela, oh Hillela. — She was sweaty from the day at school and did not know when it would be all right to break the sweet-smelling embrace. — You want to tidy up a bit? — Olga lifted the hair at the back of the girl’s head, gauging it needed an expert cut.

— There’s a chicken sandwich in the kitchen, darling. Leftovers from the grand lunch I gave Olga.—

— It was a perfectly good lunch, believe me. I usually have an apple and a bit of cheese.—

— Yes, one can see that by the shape you keep. But I can’t be bothered. There are too many other things to do. I’m hungry; I eat bread and peanut butter to fuel myself; I spread around the arse …—

She came back barefoot, her face washed, hair pushed behind her ears.

— Your sandwich.—

She turned and fetched it from the kitchen.

Olga kept smiling at her, frowning and smiling at once, as people do in order not to make fools of themselves in some way. Olga would leave it to Pauline: Pauline accepted with the gesture of inevitability. — It’s all been passed off just as if you’ve been — I don’t know, spending the weekend with a friend, as if it were any other time you or Carole …? But the fact is, my dear little Hillela, you gave us all a terrible twenty-four hours. Not only us, your immediate family here where you belong, but also Olga … Olga was running around hospitals and police stations, just like us.—

Olga’s smile broke. — We don’t want to reproach you, darling. We only want to know why. Why you could just go off like that.—

— You know how much freedom I give you and Carole and Sasha. If you had an invitation, if you planned to go to Durban, you could so easily have asked me …—

Pauline told Joe, Olga told Arthur: the girl answered unnaturally openly: —On Friday after tennis we were hot, and we began talking about the sea. So we thought, why not go?—

— Without money, without a change of clothes?—

The girl reassured Olga. They had their gym shorts, pullovers and swimming costumes in their attaché cases; Mandy had money. They had no trouble getting lifts. First a man and his wife going to their farm near Harrismith, and then they waited about half-an-hour at the roadside before a van driver stopped, he was on his way back to Cato Manor because his boss let him keep the van over the weekend, but he specially went right into Durban, for them.

— Isn’t Cato Manor a black location?—

Pauline broke in across her sister. — Prejudice is one thing, Hillela, and you know in this house I take full responsibility for bringing you up without any colour-feeling, any colour-consciousness. But you must realize that there are risks one doesn’t take. Just as I often tell you children one shouldn’t leave money lying around where it can be a temptation to poor people … Young girls just do not take lifts from men — men of any colour.—

Olga had her hand at her own throat. — We’re so afraid for you, Hillela.—

Mandy von Herz was removed from the school by her parents, since she refused to remain there under a ban on associating with Hillela Capran. Mr von Herz came to see Joe — he did not think such matters should be discussed with women — because he believed Hillela’s family should know that Mandy had been afraid to take a lift with the black man, and the black man himself had been afraid to pick up two white girls, but it was Hillela who had flagged him down and Hillela who had persuaded him. He was an elderly black man, apparently, and had some respect for his position as well as theirs, thank God.

— Sanctimonious creep! — Pauline was only sorry she hadn’t been allowed to get at von Herz and tell him what she thought of him. Of course, his way of dealing with his daughter was to take the easy way out, and blame someone else’s child.

Pauline herself never explained why she brought in Olga to deal with Hillela that time. Perhaps there had been the suggestion, since Olga was always saying she, too, was responsible for Ruthie’s child, that she might try her hand again. Olga could take her away, to a new environment; Pauline had heard Arthur was thinking of emigrating to Canada.

Maybe the girl would be happier there.

— Why? — Joe disliked unqualified statements. There was nothing to substantiate that the girl was unhappy, anyway.

— Maybe even Olga would be different, there.—

But that was no reason. Pauline could offer no reason except the one unexpressed because he knew it well enough: Hillela didn’t resist, it was simply that she seemed not to notice all that Pauline and Joe had to offer that was worthwhile. It had been a misconception to think she had to be rescued from among Olga’s objets d’art, Olga’s Japanese screens placed before the waste ground of torn plastic and human excreta, Olga’s Carpeaux Reclining Nude (even if its provenance was merely ‘attributed to’) in place of surplus blacks, not fit for any labour force, sleeping under bushes. To resist Pauline would at least have meant to have belonged with Olga; why didn’t Hillela understand that was the choice? The only choice. Pauline was moved by her ignorance, innocence one must call it, at that age. She could not be abandoned. Pauline said it as if a note from the school had just informed her of the child’s undetected astigmatism or dyslexia: —She’s a-moral. I mean, in the sense of the morality of this country.—

Pauline had won the battle with her son; she had no need to think about it. But from the jagged glass of his attack needle-splinters were travelling unfelt through her, maiming the exercise of certain powers in her as a limb is maimed by the lodging of a minute foreign body in the bloodstream, and forcing her to use substitutes, as the body adapts another of its parts to take over the function of the nerve-damaged one. She no longer surged forward to provide what would keep the girl’s mind healthily engaged with the realities of the country, but apparently was trying to circle round what might occupy that mind itself, what needed to be dealt with and got out of the way.

She would never come empty-handed. She did not bring fancy clothes and chocolates as Olga did, but the shared instinct remained, vestigial, from the neighbourly conventions of her discarded Jewish childhood. She wandered into the girls’ room when her own daughter was not there. — Look what I found. Ruthie’s things. We each had boxes like this one, but mine was yellow. They were supposed to be for sewing, although we never did any …—

When Ruthie finally went away, her sisters came in and packed up her possessions as if she were dead. Len had wanted them given to charity. Pauline and Olga took some souvenirs of the life Ruthie had abandoned; might she not come back for them some day?

Their sister was not dead; here was her daughter; maybe she had come for them.

The box was padded and covered with water-marked taffeta that buzzed under the girl’s drawn fingernail like breath over a paper-covered comb. There were spill-stains and a seal — red nail-varnish dried stony. Pauline sat on the bed beside Hillela, a fellow schoolgirl, while they picked about together in the box. Pauline explained tarnished metal wings and crowns from the war. — Insignia. Our boyfriends sent them, we had pins attached at the back so we could wear them as brooches. We were so ignorant and silly. And so far from the war. No air raids, no blackout. No rationing. No brothers. There’s something about a colonial society that trivialises. Often I think: the fact that civilians here missed out the war has got something to do with whites feeling they can avoid the reality of the other experience, too. Even though that’s all round them. Being black, living as blacks have to — it’s a misfortune that happens to somebody else … oh what’s this? Old bus tickets … we used to live in Mountain View, one time.—

There was an autograph book with gilded edges: —‘Speech is silver, Silence is golden’—that was contributed by a teacher, for sure, and what about this one, ‘When in this book you look, and on this page you frown, think of the friend who spoilt it, by writing upside-down’. We kids didn’t think anything could be wittier.—

A small box within the box held a doll’s comb and hair-rollers. — Oh for her Shirley Temple doll, I remember, she wouldn’t let me touch its hair—

Hillela found a photograph.

Pauline looked from the photograph to her, from her to the photograph.

— That’s you, Hillela, that’s you.—

A little girl whose stomach pushes up her dress stands in a public playground before a seesaw and swings. The shadow of palm fronds lies on the ground. Her long hair is rumpled into a topknot and sand shows in matt swathes clinging to her stumpy, baby legs.

— Where was I?—

— Oh at the sea.—

— Is it Lourenço Marques? — Hillela was looking for landmarks in a tourist’s amateur focus where towers tilt and historic features are cut off.

Olga explained sexual intercourse when the time came for that; now it was Pauline’s turn to find her appropriate moment.

— Yes. Yes. It must have been Lourenço Marques.—

Pauline had evidence other than the shadow of a palm tree. — My sister went on a holiday with you to Lourenço Marques when you were two, and it’s not quite the way they’ve told you … if they’ve told you anything. She’s quite unlike me in most ways, but I understand her. You see, she had been handed over from our father to Len, there were his mother and aunts watching her waist to see if she was going to be pregnant, as she should be, in the first year. They were an orthodox Jewish family — oh it’s only thanks to Ruthie, whose name poor old Len never speaks, that he’s been freed to marry his little Cockney waitress! There were the family dinners on Friday nights, the cake sales for Zionist funds, and especially the same old parties — weddings, barmitzvahs; those tribal Jews don’t know what it is to enjoy themselves spontaneously. Ruthie drank whisky and other nice young Jewish wives didn’t, Ruthie danced as if she were not married, with the prospective husbands of other girls. She went on holiday to Lourenço Marques and she fell in love, yes — but it was with what she suddenly imagined real life to be. She fell in love with that wailing fado, she wanted passion and tragedy, not domesticity. Passion and tragedy were not where she would have looked for them, here — they were around her, but in the lives of blacks, and she was somehow never able to be aware of anything outside her own skin (that’s her charm, in a way), let alone skin of another colour. So she took the kitsch as real. She fell in love with the sleazy dockside nightclubs, the sexuality and humidity, the freedom of prostitutes. That’s what she kept going back for. To wash off the Calvinism and koshering of this place. The way people go to a spa to ease their joints. That’s really what she went for, and then there was the young man in the white suit who could hardly speak English and danced with her all night. It all took place in half-darkness (you can’t imagine how dingy and sordid those places were), she never saw it clearly, she never wanted to come back into the daylight. I know Ruthie. Poor thing, she was all our colonial bourgeois illusions rolled into one; she thought that was Europe. Latin. She thought it was European culture. And she hated South Africa — but she thought what was wrong with this country was that it didn’t have that—

Hillela heard someone else’s story through with polite attention. Towards the end she picked up the photograph again; she had the self-absorption of someone trying to get into a garment too small for her. — I loved swinging, and a seesaw with a wooden head at either end, I don’t think they were horses’ heads, something like a bull’s, they bumped me up and down.—

Pauline was almost delicate in the old suggestion: —D’you think you really remember? You were not quite two. Other playgrounds, perhaps. — She shared with Olga and other adults the idea that life begins, for children, at a period set existentially by adults.

— With Len, on the road. He used to stop in little dorps and take me into school playgrounds wherever there were swings.—

And then the girl held out the photograph of herself, which she seemed to have succeeded in inhabiting. — Would you like to have it?—

Pauline had decided what was needed was to fill up the vacuum of the past so that the young life could take root in the grit of the present. She should have said: Now, why don’t you want the photograph? But a sliver of glass paralyzed the nerve. What took over its function was something she despised: a pretence at being pleased, moved etc. — I’d love to. Oh thank you.—

Hillela was looking at her with something — love? — that was natural, she was not like Sasha, not a child who judged — something not exactly compassion, more open and invading than that. With knowing. Pauline tried to remember what. She tried to arrange the knowing logically, to apply to the confidences about Ruthie, her sister, the girl’s mother, shared for the first time on an adult level. But she had the strange feeling it was something it couldn’t be, impossible — what she knew about herself: her refusal to hide a man on the run.

And then, that day, Hillela kissed her on the cheek.

What is to be done with these things? They can’t be thrown away. Just as it is necessary to keep the broken and repaired porcelain cat Olga gave her to ask forgiveness for something — Pauline’s offering cannot be refused, either. Autograph book, toy hair-rollers, tokens from boys away in a war — the box goes into a cupboard that can be reached only by standing on a chair, where old tennis rackets and compendia of games are stored. There is a writing-case of grey leather stamped with a picture of the Sphinx Pauline found, as well. Carole likes to write letters. Emptied of junk, it shall be for her. Inside, two porcupine quills, a broken ear-ring; the case is very nicely made, Carole will love it, there are loops for pens and an inner compartment — a few papers still in there.

Letters. Ruthie’s letters she had not wanted; she left behind her what she did not want to be (so Pauline had explained) and what was not wanted by its owner surely does not belong to anybody? The letters are not in envelopes and not tied together by ribbons the way such things are described in the love stories lent by girls at school. As they are turned over the ends and beginnings of lines, divided by folds, are deciphered automatically as signposts presenting themselves in passing.

Don’t worry if

terribly for you

because I’ll never, never

their idea of what

but that’s not how I want

tongue in your ear, in your

Go away somewhere in the house to read. The cat passes through the house sometimes like that; a secret in its mouth, avoiding all contact. The letters are in English … how could they be understood if they had been in Portuguese? They aren’t letters, no, but drafts, the page numbers changed, lines crossed out and rewritten or restored — exactly like the drafts made for weekly school essays. I wake up in the morning and I don’t open my eyes because then I’ll see where I am, that you’re not here, that it’s him lying there. The last phrase scratched over and a full-stop stabbed over the comma after ‘here’. What’s the good of living like this, always with your thoughts somewhere else. It’s a waste, a waste. I go about like a zombie, a robot (you understand what that is? A dead person walking, or a traffic light where you cross the street, you go when it’s green, you stop when it’s red). My body somewhere else, also. I can’t tell you how I long for you. I put my hands where you do and pretend it’s you.

A rippling sensation up the back makes the shoulders hunch. The hand that wrote the words was like this one — the one that holds the paper: the same.

When I got out of the bath this morning I saw myself in the mirror and thought of you looking at me and you won’t believe me but my nipples came out and got hard. I watched in the glass.

The same, the same. As a deep breath taken fills the lungs, so the hands open as if to do things they did not know they could, the whole body centres on itself in a magical power. It sings in the head, the sense of the body.

They say this or that is ‘only physical’ but when you see something ugly and horrible like L’s grandmother, can’t eat, smells, can’t see (she doesn’t recognize anybody but he drags me along to show her the baby) you know that a body is what you are left with when you get old, so why should you ignore (crossed out) take no notice of it when you are young and it is marvellous, marvellous. If only they knew how marvellous. Maravilhoso. Is that right, my darling darling, how’s my progress? I’ve bought a dictionary. I know you don’t like to hear about anything that happened to me before you — real Latin jealousy, I laugh to tease you, but really it’s so sweet to me to have a man inside me who possesses a woman completely, nothing to do with being introduced: this is my wife. And this is my child, this is my dog.

Singing in the head, and the flush that comes before tears, but in another part of the body, and another kind of wetness.

I look at the others — my poor sisters, the one with that circumcised ox Arthur who will soon be rich enough, that’s for sure, to climb on top of her in a bed that used to belong to the Empress Josephine or someone, and the other one with her musty ‘professional man’ she shares the serious things in life with, even if the ‘only physical’ can’t be too great with a good soul like that. And she’s such a magnificent girl — I wish you’d meet her. No I don’t! What I wish is she had a man like you to bring her to life. What’s the use of trying to change other people’s lives if you don’t get a chance to live the only one you’re going to have. We didn’t ask to be born here. Nobody’s going to give it back to you, nobody’s going to thank you. I know, through you, I can be sure of what I feel and that’s the only thing you can be sure of (written above: ‘that matters’). I’ve had a husband, I’ve given birth. So what does it mean? 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, and I’m there wherever I touch you. My tongue in your ear, in your armpit fur and your sweet backside. Oh my god Vasco, Vasco, my Vasco, the taste of you!

The same, the same. All sensations alive in the body, breasts, lips of the mouth and the vagina, thorax, thighs, charged, the antenna of every invisible hair stretching out. A thirst of the skin.

When I come back here you are still in my mouth. Like what? I read somewhere it’s supposed to be the taste of bitter almonds. Not true, not for yours, anyway. I wish I could describe it. Like strawberries, like lemon rind. I always did eat the rind of the slice of lemon people put in drinks. I’m crazy today, don’t listen to me. It was so sad not to know all these wonderful things for 24 years. My sister was talking today about fellow man. I don’t know what she’s going on about. There’s only one other person, and if you don’t find him … nothing else. It is so sad to be alone in your body. Do you understand what I write, my love? I can’t help writing to you, anyway. I never used to write letters, even during the war, my boyfriends used to send reams and I’d hardly write back. Honestly. I didn’t know letters could be like this. When you read, do you understand enough? Enough to love me. Do I make you grow big for me. Do I

The draft is unfinished. But there is an avowal written large and dug deep across the page: RUTH. Ruthie. Ruth; mother. Sweating and trembling with Ruthie’s desire; Ruthie has become mother.

The letter is being torn into small pieces, torn again through the syllables when an intact word stares up. On the way to bury the fragments in the yard bin outside the kitchen: there stands, in the path, the girl Alpheus has living with him in the garage. The girl’s stomach lifts her dress as the babyish potbelly of the child did in the photograph. The girl is pregnant; tries to efface herself from the notice of the white people in the house, and so, cornered, murmurs to the white girl her own age, Good afternoon, madam. The bits of paper cannot be put into the bin under anyone’s eyes. The fragments are taken to school and buried in the communal trash there, with the banana-skins and half-eaten sandwiches of tea-break.

It must have done some good. To bring the past into the open — in particular the past she didn’t have in memory, only heard obliquely referred to by others — would draw the girl herself more into the open? At least, Pauline thought it might have done. She had suggested to Joe that through Portuguese legal colleagues in Mozambique they might try again to make contact with Ruthie; middle-aged, like the rest of them by now, though who could imagine Ruthie fortyish!

Joe could. — A woman alone, no profession, drifting. It’s downhill.—

— But she’s not alone.—

— A woman who had a lover years ago. D’you think that type of thing lasts? Fourteen years hanging around nightclubs and bars. Poor Ruth. What was it he was supposed to be? Disc jockey? Professional dancing partner?—

But Joe had things to think of other than writing to ask colleagues to investigate a family matter, the whereabouts of a woman last known to have been cohabiting with a Portuguese citizen of no fixed employment. If Ruthie came to mind it was incongruously as one of the sentimental Latin love songs to which she once danced all night would have sounded against the singing of political prisoners caged in the Black Maria between prison and court.

The adolescent children continued to live a normal life — if, Pauline objected, one could regard as normal any life in the context of what was happening. Joe did not agree wholly with Pauline, in practice — though of course he did in principle — that they were old enough to pitch the tenor of their young lives entirely to the defiant cries and dirges of the time and place in which they were growing up. The atmosphere at home was enough to counteract that of the school where — yes, he knew, he knew — at prayers every morning Hillela and Carole had to offer thanks for the infinite mercy of a God in whose name other children were given an inferior education, were banished with their mothers to barren reserves, and deprived of fathers forced to become migratory labourers in order that the children might not starve. That was what was happening in the Transkei, where the family had had such wonderful camping holidays, where they had bought delicious oysters for nothing — in the new currency, the equivalent of twenty-five cents a dozen! — from the Mpondo women who gathered them off the rocks. Carole, although only ten at the time of a great bus boycott, had been old enough to understand the issue through the cloud of sunset dust in which thousands of black people tramped at the roadside; for many weeks, when her mother had fetched her from school in the afternoons, they had not driven home to milk and biscuits but taken the road to Alexandra Township and picked up as many of those people as the car would hold. Carole sat on the knees of washerwomen and office cleaners, to make room; there was a rotting-cheese smell of dirty socks; she had been afraid when the police made her mother stop, asked for the passes of the black people, and told her she would be fined for overloading her car. Hillela was not living with the family then. She had been taken in later. The year before Sharpeville; so this epoch in Hillela’s history was dated, in Pauline’s house, by the public one, as at school human history was dated by the advent of Christianity, B.C. or A.D. By the time Hillela was living there, Pauline used to come home from regular visits to someone in prison (could it have been the red-haired woman?) and tell of the cockiness and courage of this person who must have been a friend — Carole knew her, Carole iced a cake Bettie baked for her, but the prison matron wouldn’t allow the prisoner to receive it; Pauline brought it home again and the girls ate it.

Hillela, too, had driven with Pauline on an issue that could be understood through participation. Pauline canvassed in a campaign for a ‘No’ vote in the referendum for white people to decide whether the country should leave the British Commonwealth and declare itself a republic with a whites-only government. Hillela had not been frightened when men or women who came to the door were rude to Pauline: and she and Pauline laughed and didn’t care, drove on comradely to the next street.

This seventeenth year — Hillela’s — Joe was sometimes away in country districts defending chiefs who were deposed by the government for resisting laws which forced their people to reduce their herds and give up grazing rights, huddle out of the way of whites. When he was home she or Carole would be sent to carry a cup of tea into his small study where he once looked up — a smile for Hillela — and told her he was ‘trying to find a legal needle in a haystack of bad laws — grounds to defend people who have no rights to defend, anymore’. At Olga’s Friday night seder there was in the background a radio report of the hut-burnings and murders between chiefs who, Joe told in the other house, opposed the government and those who were bribed to support it. Arthur did not submit to Olga’s objection that the temporal babble of the radio had no place in the timeless state of grace invoked at a Friday night ceremonial dinner. — A bunch of savages. What do they understand about culling, over-grazing. What’s the point of throwing out money trying to teach them something. Let them go ahead and kill each other, that’s all they know.—

There were no challenges over such statements in this house; Olga’s George IV table was a peat-coloured pool reflecting the flowers of the centre piece, the tiny silver nest of sugared almonds before each place, the agreeable controlled faces of Olga’s kind of people. Olga always took the option of compassionate distress, never choosing sides; her fears for herself were the basis of her abhorrence of violence. — My cook’s afraid to go home there. It’s too awful.—

Pauline and Carole were often out at protest meetings when Hillela came home from wherever it was she had been ‘with her friends’—the explanation Pauline accepted, so long as Hillela phoned to say if she wanted to spend the night with one of the friends, and left the telephone number where she could be reached; a reasonable enough rule. Hillela helped Carole paint banners, NO TO A RACIST REPUBLIC; at school the headmistress announced a special church service and election of a student committee to plan a celebration for the public holiday on which the republic was to be declared. Once Hillela was going into a coffee bar when she saw a straggle of people coming down the centre of the city street, white people gathering flanks of accompanying black bystanders as they hampered traffic, NO TO A RACIST REPUBLIC: she handed her guitar to one of her friends and watched the group as if it were a wedding procession. Suddenly she ran forward, waving wildly, grasped Carole’s hand; smiling, half-hopped-and-skipped, keeping up with her cousin and aunt for a few paces. Then she fell back. Pauline’s grand head, made out among many, was disappearing round the corner.

In the coffee bar Hillela was greeted: Are you nuts? Where’d you go off to like that? She and her friends took turns to play the guitar and they sang ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and a new hit from America, ‘We Shall Overcome’. The Greek proprietor did not mind these gatherings in Nick’s Café, renamed, to keep up with somebody’s times, somewhere, Arrivederci Roma; the impromptu music attracted custom. But when the kids started sharing round among themselves a home-rolled cigarette he recognized the scent of the stuff and lost his temper, chasing them out. At the same time — it must have been — a street or two away the police were breaking up an illegal procession. Pauline and Carole (she was under age, she would have had to appear in camera) were lucky not to have been among those arrested and charged under the Riotous Assemblies Act. Of which Pauline was perfectly aware, Joe warned.

Pauline’s eyes were searching her invisible audience, her judges. — You must take some risks.—

— Not this particular one. With a child who’s a minor. It isn’t worth it.—

Mandy von Herz’s removal to another school and the parental ban on her association with her friend Hillela made no difference, for a few months: they continued to spend most of their time together. The friendship ended of itself. Hillela’s friend left school and took courses in beauty culture and modelling; she was a very pretty girl, her parents approved of her planning a future through the marketable assets of her face and body, so long as this was done in good taste. She went to country club dances with young men in velvet butterfly ties and white dinner jackets, instead of roaming away from the white suburbs. Hillela had moved on with friends-of-friends out of the group Mandy von Herz abandoned; she played her guitar on Sunday nights in a disused warehouse taken over by young people in the decaying end of town and, crammed into the cars of people she didn’t know, went to parties that came about in Fordsburg and Pageview, areas Pauline had never taken her to because the people who lived there were not white and had no vote to canvass. She brought to Pauline and Joe’s house one day someone introduced as Gert. Joe asked for the surname and Hillela turned to its owner. Prinslop, he said. Not coloured, but an Afrikaans boy: he seemed unable to put a sentence together — whether in his own language or English — in the company of Pauline, Joe, Carole, and Sasha back for the holidays, but he was offered supper. Pauline and Joe encouraged the young people to bring home their friends; the only way to know with whom they were mixing. Perhaps the boy was overwhelmed by the fluency of this highly articulate and talkative family. He looked like any bullet-headed blue-eyed son of a railway worker from Brixton or miner from a Reef dorp, the half-educated whites who were also the master race.

Hillela took Sasha along to the warehouse with Gert Prinsloo an evening soon after.

Indians and coloureds among the white boys and girls there are no shock to him; he doesn’t go to a segregated school as his sister and cousin do. But Gert Prinsloo; the black boys at school call that kind ‘the Boere’: in a year or two he’ll be a foreman yelling at black workers or a security policeman interrogating political prisoners.

Hillela has come to look for Sasha, missing in the herd-laughter of young males with newly-broken uncontrolled voices. — D’you want to go home? — She picks up her guitar; she is going to stay, anyway.

— What does that chap do? He looks like a cop.—

She gestures: he’s just one of the people who turn up here. — I think works in a shop that sells tape-recorders and things. Radios. Or repairs them. But what he really does is play weird instruments — the homemade ones Africans play. It’s fantastic, wait till you hear.—

She sits down on the floor beside Sasha, cross-legged, the guitar on her lap. She slips her hand over his forearm and opens her palm against his; their fingers interlace and close. As she has gestured: here, he and Hillela are just people who have turned up among others, known only by first names, there is no familial identity.

After a lot of noisy confusion, records set playing and taken off, girls shrilling and boys braying, this Gert Prinsloo settles himself in a space with two oxhide drums, a wooden xylophone and the little instrument of which out-of-tune reproductions are sold in every tourist shop. (Sasha has an mbira on the wall of his cubicle in Swaziland.) The son of the Boere has begun to drum. The girls and boys begin to clap and sway and stamp. They, crowd round him so that, from the sitting level, the player cannot be seen any more. But Hillela has pressed Sasha’s hand down on the boards to show he and she will not get up. She is smiling, with her body swaying from the waist (like a snake rising from the charmer’s basket, he was to remember, or like one of those nature films shown at school, where the expansion of a flower from its calyx is speeded up). This happens to the sound of Gert Prinsloo’s drumming that makes of the walls of that place one huge distended eardrum, and to the flying notes, hollow and gentle, that he hammers out all over from the anvil of the wooden xylophone; but the rain-drop music of the mbira is lost in the beat of the crowd’s blood, they overwhelm it with their own noise.

He comes over sniffing gutturally and making awkward genteel gestures to wipe the sweat off the back of his neck. His mouth is pegged down in bashful happiness.

— Where’d you learn?—

He laughs and hunches. — No, well, I just picked it up. First from listening, you know, watching. Then having a go myself. I’d always played guitar and that.—

But where? Someone must have taught you the music — it’s not written down, is it? It’s traditional African stuff.—

He moves his hands about, begins to speak and stops; he is embarrassed by and will only embarrass by what he has to tell. — We had a fish and chips shop. My mother, after my pa passed away. One of the boys that worked in the kitchen, he used to play these things. I got my guitar when I was about fourteen, and we both used to play it. He first taught me guitar.—

— He sings in their languages, too. Come on Gert, one of their songs. Come on. Please.—

It is always difficult for anyone to refuse Hillela; even people who don’t have, like Pauline and Olga and the family, a duty towards her. She butts the boy with her guitar. He takes it with lowered head but when he begins to sing, in the black man’s voice and cadence, in the black man’s language — as white people hear work-gangs sing in the street, only their song making them present among the whites driving by — his inarticulacy, his fumbling self is broken away. That he is singing against the sobbing beat of a pop singer does not matter; a song that is not his own sings through him.

Hillela asks him to tell what he’s singing about; producing him for Sasha; she knows the sort of thing Sasha likes to know.

At once there is difficulty, again, finding words. — Not really a song. Not really. It’s like, you know, it’s a native boy who’s come here to town to work. He’s singing, saying, we come to Jo’burg because we hoping we get something nice, but now we don’t get it. That’s all it’s about.—

When the joint comes round Sasha feels her — Hillela — look to him before she takes a draw. But she needn’t have worried, the weed has been smoked traditionally, long before white kids discovered it, by the local people in the country where he goes to school; he hasn’t ever brought any home only because he doesn’t want to be the one to be blamed for corrupting the two girls. And Hillela doesn’t drink; he sees that.

Hillela was all right that night;—a member of the family, after all, was keeping an eye on her. Sasha had his mother’s car to take her home in. First they delivered a lot of other people to various parts of town. It was late. Pauline was away at the All In African Conference in Maritzburg. Joe and Carole were so deep in the hibernation of the small hours that the house seemed empty; without Pauline all the watchtowers of the spirit were unattended, its drawbridges down. Anything could be let in, nothing would be recorded. Hillela fell asleep in Sasha’s bed, this bed which his cousin and sister used to raid, beating him with pillows. There had been a coup; he had usurped and was on guard in place of his mother. He kept himself awake and measured the passing of darkness by the soft sensation of the girl’s breath spreading on his neck and then drawing back like breath clouding and disappearing on a window pane. When he gauged he must, he separated her warmth from his own, so that once again she became herself, he became himself.

Carole did not know that her cousin was home from a party, had come into their bedroom and slid into her own bed.

Sasha switched on the witness of his lamp and searched his sheets for frail dark question-mark hairs that Bettie, who insisted on making his bed as a holiday treat for him, would recognize as not his brassy-blond sheddings. He did not want to be reminded — to have to remember in the morning.