A Sport of Nature

Time Off for a Love-Letter

Where was the seventeen-year-old on the Day of the Covenant, 16th December 1961, when bombs exploded in a post office, the Resettlement Board Headquarters, and the Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s offices?

The public holiday of that date had only recently been renamed. On the 16th December 1838, the Boers defeated the impis of the Zulu king, Dingane (tradition misspelt his name), in revenge for his attempt to save his land and independence. Some months before, Dingane, pressed into trading for a token of cattle a vast tract of his kingdom, had first agreed and then killed the Boer, Piet Retief, and his parleying party, routed the Boer settlements already established in the kingdom, and chased the other whites, the British, from what they called Port Natal. At the cost of three white men wounded, the Boers slaughtered three thousand Zulus. Dingaan’s Day curiously was then named for the vanquished rather than the victors. It was perhaps this aspect of the commemoration that moved the government to shift the dedication of the holiday to a biblical, less equivocal focus. The Covenant had been made, before the battle, with God — another piece of cattle-trading; in return for victory over the blacks, the whites would vow to hold an annual service of thanksgiving for the preservation of white civilization as carried into Africa by the guns of the Boers.

Whatever the holiday was dubbed, those white South Africans who did not gather to pray for their civilization in churches, or to listen at rallies to political speeches on the subject, traditionally went picnicking. So did many blacks, if they could find some place where they were allowed upon the grass — riversides, lakes and resorts were reserved for whites; it was only this year, as a consequence of the formation of the organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe, announced by Mandela and so troubling to Pauline, that the spear of Dingane’s resistance had been taken up by blacks to mark the day as his and theirs.

If it hadn’t been Dingaan’s Day and if the first bombings in Johannesburg had not been reported to have taken place that very day, the psychiatrist’s wife would not have been able to claim with the certainty of historical confirmation that she actually had met and could even recognize the girl subsumed beneath the woman’s face in newspaper photographs seen many years later. The picnic itself was like many other picnics. The psychiatrist was newly qualified, in junior partnership, and not yet prosperous; the young couple had twin babies, lived in a small flat, and got out into the fresh air every Sunday. Hillela was with them on that picnic because she was now working as his receptionist; her third job — count can be kept at least that far. She had come to the consulting rooms he shared with his senior, peddling The World Atlas and Encyclopaedia of Modern Knowledge on ten per cent commission. The receptionist turned her away and she was taking advantage of the privacy of the corridor outside the rooms to eat a hamburger she had brought into the building, when the psychiatrist came out and punched all the lift buttons in turn. His impatience had no effect, and while he was waiting she looked for somewhere to put down her hamburger, could not, and so approached him with sample Volume 1 of the encyclopaedia and a half-eaten bun in her hands. They both laughed. He refused the bargain offer of the encyclopaedia and sympathetically told the girl nobody really ever wanted to buy that sort of thing; in fact, he explained, going down in the lift with her, the fraudulent offer of encapsulated knowledge was a survival of post First World War aspirations, long before television provided popular culture among the poor in Europe, England particularly, when unemployment rose and people hoped to survive by ‘bettering themselves’. —It’s pretty heavy to lug around, anyway. — That was all the young sales-woman knew. He asked if she wouldn’t prefer some other job? She was swallowing the last of her hamburger but — with a hand over her mouth — eyes that attracted attention with their dark opacity signalled eagerly. Fortunately practical Pauline had made sure all three children had learned to type. And of course, on those visits to Olga Hillela had learned to drive a car; it wasn’t necessary to add to her qualifications by saying she had no licence. The psychiatrist did not need a driver, but he told her to see the receptionist about a vacancy at his rooms. She dumped the sample encyclopaedia on a bench at a city bus stop. Somewhere in forgotten records her name appears, written off to the percentage of bad debts the publishing company expected from those who answered their advertisement: ‘Would you like to earn up to R500 a week in your spare time?’

Because she had first approached him with an encyclopaedia and a hamburger with a big bite taken out of it, the professionally-regulated contact of learned doctor and unskilled employee had an element of shared amusement that held good through working days. He asked her if she was Jewish, too. — I suppose so. — Her reply amused him, once again; he felt the same about his Jewishness — at least he thought he did. But there was the occupational habit of asking gentle, insistent questions. — Why do you ‘suppose’?—My father was Portuguese. — He did not yet have the experienced insight to recognize a fantasy instantly. — It doesn’t necessarily follow. There are Portuguese Jews. What did he do? — Even if she had been found traipsing around hawking educational ‘lines’, it was evident in her style and the way she spoke that the girl was from the educated middle-class. — He was a dancer. — Oh, that’s interesting? — Not surprising that this — how had he described her to his wife? — ‘striking-looking kid’—should have a strain of artistic heredity.

— A dancing-partner in a nightclub.—

Now he laughed; she laughed; he did not exactly believe her but respected what he interpreted as a surprisingly mature way of reminding that a humble receptionist’s private life was her own business. He suspected some history of running away from home, some chosen displacement, here; she was clearly of his and his young wife’s milieu, so he suggested out of kindness that she join them on a picnic one day. She brought a guitar along, with charming innocent assurance that she could contribute something to the enjoyment of the outing, and his wife, seated under the willows with a baby tugging each breast sideways, was delighted with her. No girlish friendship developed, however; although his wife asked him to many times, he never brought them together again. He sent his junior receptionist out for hamburgers, as the kind of service her position was expected to fulfil, and then shared them with her in his consulting room while everyone else was out for lunch. On the picnic, first names had been adopted, though she understood without having to be told that he must never be addressed as ‘Ben’ before the receptionist or patients. In his room they sat together on the couch he kept as barbers keep a painted pole — he preferred to have his patients upright across the desk from him in a comfortable chair of contemporary design. She amused him greatly with her comments on patients. — They all sit in the waitingroom trying to look as if they’re not there.—

— That’s it. They don’t want to be there. They’re all people on the run from something.—

She smiled, unconvinced, her mouth full again. A healthy appetite. — I knew someone on the run, laughing and joking all the time. He wanted beer and music.—

— On the run from what? — He did not deal with criminal cases.

— Security police. And he got away, safely over the border. We knew he had because he sent such a ridiculous letter — he asked for a pair of brown lace-up shoes, size twelve, and then signed the letter, your loving sister Violet!—

— Asked whom?—

— I can’t tell you. Well, you’re used to secrets. — It was her job. to take each patient’s file from the office cabinets and, preceding the patient silently into the doctor’s room, place it before him.

He left off using a medicated toothpick to warn her, in collusion, smiling. — You’re not supposed to read them, you know.—

— But Ben, I’d never believe anyone would have the thoughts they have!—

— You’re a naughty girl. You know that?—

He insisted that she use toothpicks, too, to take care of her pretty teeth which were marred by only one misalignment. He often drove her, after work, to her room in the second commune she had joined. None of the other occupants would have recognized him, or cared, if they did. All brought men or girls home for a night or as long as an attraction lasted. After a few afternoon rides, he asked if he could see her room. She invited him in without fuss. But she would not make love. Was it because it would be her first time? Ah no — sexual knowingness proclaimed itself in her laugh, from the very day she approached him with the bun and the book, in the unselfconscious ease with which she was at home with her body in a way that none of his patients, poor things, were, squeezing her soft breasts past the hard metal filing cabinets, swivelling her little behind as she bent to pick up the pen that wouldn’t stay efficiently clipped to the pocket of her white coat.

— You’ve got a boy you want to keep yourself for.—

Her answers were always so unmistakably hers. — No, Ben, not at the moment.—

Like a chemical change in the blood, he felt his attempt to put himself in his place with fatherliness turn to jealousy. Yesterday, tomorrow, another man; not today. — Why, Hillela? — He could not delude himself that hers was a moral objection, his wife etc. She spoke kindly, it sounded like a privilege: —I don’t want to with you, Ben.—

He bought her an expensive leather sling bag, a gooseneck reading lamp (had noticed there was only a central naked bulb on a cord in her hole of a room) and an anthology of poetry in which one of the names of contributors was his nom de plume. He did not confess authorship until he had asked for and been given her reaction to the poems. She said she liked one of them very much, it reminded her … — Of what? Oh, something she’d once read in a book by that Russian …

So she read Dostoevsky? What a pleasure to talk with her about Dostoevsky, to give her some psychoanalytic insights into the irrationality of his characters.

No, not exactly — she’d looked into the book while someone else was reading it.

— Who?—

— A cousin of mine.—

He wrote poems to her in which she did not recognize herself. In his professional experience of human vanity, her lack of it was amazing. He learnt something he didn’t know; it is difficult to make oneself necessary to one who is free of vanity. He offered something better than hamburgers on the couch where nobody ever lay; they began going to lunch at Chinese restaurants down in Commissioner Street, the Indians’ and coloureds’ end of town, where no colleagues would be likely to be met with. They drank white wine and she teased him. He was treating some patients for alcoholism: —What about your drunks? You, breathing at them across the desk!—

— Doesn’t matter. I can control my impulses within the pleasure principle, they can’t! You’d better worry about Mrs Rawdon — if she gets a whiff of you in the office …—

In the little shops of the restaurant neighbourhood he bought her a slippery satin dressing-gown with a gold dragon embroidered down the back, and incense she liked to burn in the hole of a room where she would take a man yesterday and tomorrow. — You’re going to get more money from next month. Then you can move out of that place.—

— More money?—

— I’m going to raise your magnificent salary. And in six months, I shall do so again. I’m beginning to get the kind of patients who’ll stick with me for years.—

She shook her head as if refusing a chocolate or another glass of wine. — I won’t stay much longer, Ben. They’re so solemn and miserable there in the waitingroom. Those ladies with perfect hairdos, those horribly skinny girls, those sulky kids who look as if they’re handcuffed between mothers and fathers. And there’s nothing wrong with them! Any of them! It’s all made up, imagination? Isn’t it? Those kids go to nice schools, they have toys and bicycles. Those girls can have as much food as they want, they’re not starving, they just don’t eat. Those men who talk to you for hours about sex — they never even take a glance at any woman who happens to be in the waitingroom … just sit there looking at the same old ratty magazines Rawdon arranges every morning.—

For the moment, fascination distracted him from the shock of her casual farewell. — Oh my god, Hillela, you are so healthy it appals me! It’s wonderful. I don’t know where they got you from!—

Indeed, he literally never knew who ‘they’ might be, apart from that one piece of absurd information about her father. She was there, for him, without a past before yesterday and a future beyond tomorrow (she had just announced it), unlike those bowed under the past and in such anticipatory dread that they were, as she rightly observed, unable to look up and eat, learn, fuck in the present at all.

The psychiatrist never again suggested that he might make love to her. They sat at lunch in a Lebanese restaurant also unlikely to be frequented by the medical profession. — I am going to divorce Elaine and we’re going to get married. You and I are perfectly matched. It would be a terrible waste of my life and yours to leave things as they are. It would be unfair to Elaine for me to go on living with her; you are the only woman I can live with. So you don’t have to see my patients ever again. You don’t have to go, away.—

But she went; the darling girl with the hamburger and the book, the only woman, the one who was not a beauty but completely desirable to him, the one who was not an intellectual but whose intelligence was a wonderful mystery to him. She walked out the way she had walked in, the little tramp, clever cock-teaser, taker of free lunches and presents, bitch — she became these successively as he treated himself for the morbid obsession of his passion for her. And when in London, all those years later, his wife recognized her with Indira Gandhi in a newspaper photograph, he could not admit to remembering her because she had once reduced him to the condition of being one of his own patients.

Carole saw her suddenly, at the Easter industrial and agricultural fair. Hillela, in red shorts, black boots and a Stetson, handing out publicity at a stand displaying stereo equipment. Carole was with a boy; Pauline and Joe, the family, did not patronise this fair, which at that time was still segregated, for whites only. Carole squeezed the hand of the cowgirl, but the cowgirl hugged her. The pamphlets took flight and Carole’s beau gathered them up. The beat of the music was so loud that speech appeared as mouthing. Hillela wrote an address on the back of one of the pamphlets. So Carole saw another one of the places in which Hillela lived at that period. (She had visited her at the first commune.) Carole arrived at an old flat with leaded light panes in the front door. She rang the bell for a long time, looking at the dead swordferns and empty milk and beer bottles in the corridor. The bell didn’t work but when she rapped on the glass Hillela came. Carole had in her hands the record player from their shared bedroom; Carole had brought it to give to Hillela because the music at the stereo equipment stand reminded her that Hillela had no player; just as she had seen Alpheus and his wife had nothing beautiful in their garage home, and had given them the Imari cat she treasured, her gift from Hillela.

At the Resettlement Board Headquarters it was decided from where and when black people — African, Indian and of mixed blood — would be moved away from areas declared for whites only. At the Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s offices it was decided for how long and in what capacity black people could live and work in the city. In the city, during the eighteen months Hillela was somewhere about (at least there was the evidence that Olga’s stipend was drawn regularly, and under the circumstances, in all good conscience, there was nothing else her mother’s family could do for her) there were thirty-one other targets. Most were hit by incendiary bombs. It was long before the Underground organizations were to have limpet mines, SAM missiles and AK 47s; these bombs were homemade, with petrol bought in cans from any service station. Letter boxes, electrical installations, beerhalls owned by the white administration boards in the black townships and railway carriages owned by the State monopoly — explosions attacked what represented the white man’s power where blacks could get at it: in the places where blacks themselves lived. A man named Bruno Mtolo, a traitor to the liberation movement who turned State witness at a treason trial, said that ‘recruitment presented no difficulty’ if volunteers were promised they would be allowed to undertake sabotage immediately. And Joe was right; it was not possible to adhere completely to the intention to avoid bloodshed. Timing devices or the indiscipline of recruits caused things to go wrong. In the beerhalls and railway carriages black people were killed or hurt.

White people did not hear the blast, smell the fires; not then, not yet. In another part of the country, black policemen regarded as collaborators with the government were killed, and so were a few white ones, but no white suburbanite or farmer was harmed; not then, not yet. Somewhere about, Hillela worked — probably not in this order — as an apprentice hairdresser, in a car-hire firm (until it was discovered that when she had to deliver a car to a client she was driving without a licence) and in an advertising agency. She was the kind of girl whom people, on very short acquaintance, invite to parties. The advertising personnel drank white wine, their symbol of the good life, instead of tea at the usual breaks in the working day; they had many parties. It was certainly at one of these that she must have met her Australian, Canadian, or whatever he was. Categories were never relevant to her ordering of life. He stared out of beard, eyebrows, brown curls. — So I suppose you’re one of the great ‘creative team’ that persuades people to buy beer and dog-food. — She was not; she was hardly more than a messenger, she carried copy about and opened bottles of white wine. As soon as he realized she was working to eat, not out of devotion to the art of advertising campaigns, he began to assume a scornful collusion with her.

— Oh you mustn’t be so hard on them. They’re very easy-going people. They’re fun.—

— You’re quite wrong. They take themselves absolutely seriously. They believe they’re writers and artists. The muse of consumerism is the new Apollo. Look at that androgynous creature with his pink shoes and little boy’s braces. He epitomises the whole crowd. I don’t mean because he’s queer. They’re all neither one thing nor the other. Not workers, not artists. All the exhibitionism they imagine is unconventional — meanwhile they are the paid jesters of the establishment, selling the conditioning of the masses on billboards showing girls big as whales. — His yellow eyes rested amiably here and there in the room while he said these things; he even waved a hand at someone in the semaphore of this set that signalled ‘I’m making it over here’. —I’d rather watch a snake swallowing a rat, a cat stalking a bird for a meal. I’m for lives lived by necessity.—

This turn of phrase came back to Hillela as the language of childhood, from the voices in Pauline’s house. Since his manner contradicted the content of what he was saying, she thought, that first night, he might be drunk. Everyone at these parties was always drunk to some degree, with the consequent rapid changes of mood and disoriented awareness that made them so lively — they called it ‘letting your hair down’.

She smiled. — Why do you come, then.—

He turned his face away from the company, an actor going offstage, and spoke as if he half-hoped she would not catch it: —It’s necessary for me to be seen in places like this.—

He danced with her and stood in uproariously-laughing groups, an arm around her neck as a casual sexual claim understood in this circle, while jokes were told about copywriters, Afrikaners and Jews, who were present to laugh at themselves, and about blacks, who were not. It was usual for people to pair off after these parties, slipping away; outside she ran with him through the blows of a rain so strong it seemed to be attempting to strip off their clothes. It was so black and close around them that it was not until next morning she saw the outside of the house where they made love and slept the night together. It was the converted servants’ quarters of a larger house whose occupants, he said, were ‘all right’. She understood the inference, and also that she must not ask why it was necessary for him to have vetted them. (That was the advantage of having lived with Pauline and Joe.) It is doubtful if she was ever quite sure why. Everyone called him Rey, Andrew Rey, but he showed her, once she had moved in with him, a passport in another name with which he had entered the country. That was not his real name; ‘too long a story’ to explain why if he entered the country under a false identity he lived there under yet another persona. He worked as a free-lance journalist for several newspapers, including a black one, though his byline appeared only in one that was regarded as liberal while at the same time being a respectable part of the economic establishment. — Editorials full of fine phrases about the fight for freedom of the press, but when I bring in my copy on the Mineworkers’ Union Congress, the brave editor puts the red pencil through the fact that blacks are seventy-five per cent of the labour force, and they weren’t there — they can’t be members. And why does the bastard slash my piece? Because the consortiums with their half-dozen company aliases who own the mines, who own everything here, also own the paper, and they don’t want any ideas put into the blacks’ heads. It’s okay to ‘deplore’ the bombs, to be ‘horrified’ at the murder of white people in their holiday caravan by blacks who’ve turned to the Xhosa ruler of the spirits because the white man’s Christ hangs on his cross in a segregated church. But it’s not done to be ‘horrified’ and ‘deplore’ the fact that the only say blacks have is the choice between working on the white man’s terms or starving.—

Under his good-time image in the kind of company in which she had met him, his sullen watchfulness from an out-of-the-way seat at the bar where journalists drank and talked sport as noisily as politics, his different, insider’s watchfulness drinking in the dens of blacks (where he would soon catch a particular eye and turn aside for murmured, monosyllabic privacy) there was a resentment like oil under the earth, welling constantly, flammable in him. Since he could not let it blow before editors and other hypocrites, it found another path, heating him sexually. He would be withdrawn and bitter, and tell her he couldn’t tell her why — another one, perhaps, who thought her too stupid to understand. But out of this mood he would make love to her with the mastery of means, single-mindedness and passionate manipulation of human responses he could not muster in another, his chosen field of endeavour. This one didn’t make love like a boy. He might not confide, but he knew how to make bodies speak. People who saw Hillela at that time might recall the nerve-alive brightness of a young face, where he took her among people and dumped her for others to talk to; at each stage in life a face in repose, neglectful of composure, sets in the current dominant experience of the individual whose face it is — her expression was, in fact, amazement. She was aware, all the time, of the orchestration of her body conducted by him. The art director whose pink shoes had annoyed her lover complimented her kindly: You look well-fucked, darling. And she laughed and at the same time burned with embarrassment — for Olga, for Pauline; and for Joe.

She was, perhaps, happy; she would not remember. The happiness may have been partly to do with something she was not conscious of: working in an advertising agency, living with this man, she achieved a balance. A balance between leaving them all, the advantages they had offered — released by putting them in a position where they had to put her out — and rejoining without them what each had offered: Olga, after all, would approve of an artistic career in the fashionable advertising industry; the lover was someone she could have taken home to Pauline’s house. Not that the girl did; not that she wanted to. But this life, even though it was lived in an out-house like that Alpheus occupied, was not the dropout’s ramshackle of sleazy clubs and fairground jobs they believed she had left them for.

It might have been a kindness to let them know where she was and what she was doing: A single letter was found some years later among Len’s ‘effects’—two bottles of vodka, a pot of peanut butter and several copies of The S.A. Commercial Traveller in which he appeared, as a young man, in a group photograph — when he died in a home for the chronically sick in what had since become Zimbabwe. Dear Len, You probably know I’m working now, I’ve got a fun job in advertising?! I hope to make a career. It’s great to be independent and I’m lucky not to be alone. I have a wonderful boyfriend, quite a bit older, he’s about thirty and a writer. Nothing to do with advertising — he doesn’t approve of that! We may leave the country; he is half Canadian, with — he says — some Red Indian blood from way back. But we won’t go to Canada, thank goodness, I don’t like the idea of cold countries. And he’s never lived there. Maybe we’ll pass your way. I know you’re in the North now, and it’s soon going to be a separate country from Rhodesia, they say. But maybe you’ll come back down to Salisbury?

I don’t know whether or not to say I’m sorry about Billie, but I am. I’ll send this, with love, to the old address, in the hope someone will post it on.

Five majuscular X kisses and the signature: Hillela

It was not quite true that she was independent at that time: she still collected her stipend supplied by what her lover called her ‘rich aunt’, putting that aunt at a further remove by the loss of a name. It was justified, though an eighteen-year-old’s boastfulness, to make some claim for him as a writer. The yard cottage was padded with cuttings. The suitcases under the bed were so heavy with manuscript notes they could not be shifted by Hillela when she wanted to clean the floor — an immense physical gratitude moved her, she was quite housewifely, doing for him all the things — washing shirts, sewing on buttons — Olga’s males had done for them by servants, and Pauline’s males (in the case of loose buttons and holes in socks) were expected to do for themselves.

He talked about ‘his book’ as a companion and a leg-iron by which he had been shackled a long time, dragging it around the world with him. It depended before whom its existence was confirmed or denied; sometimes he said five years’ work was already virtually completed, at others he said dismissingly he was going to scrap all that, events had overtaken him (in Marxist company, the version was History had done this), corrected perspective, and at other times he would lug out a suitcase and spend a whole night rewriting a sheaf of its contents, while she slept. Next morning the result would be pitched into the suitcase along with older papers flattened under their own weight. He never discussed ‘his book’ with her and she did not expect him to, assuming its political nature gave it the status of classified: after an enjoyable day in the white-wine camaraderie where a shampoo was being transformed by lyrical images into an elixir of youth, or smoking a particular brand of cigarette was in the process of becoming a ritual of success and distinction, she came home to someone who was almost certainly doing the kind of things most admired and seldom successfully aspired to, in the Pauline home. There, they would have regarded ‘his book’ as something more important than himself, than his girl, than the lovers together; for her, it was present as someone he had known before her, before she was even grown up, with claims she must walk round on the quiet rubber soles of respect.

Of course — correcting perspective — hadn’t she always lived in the eye of the storm? That eye that meteorologists say is safe, a ball of security rolled up in fury, that eye that was whiteness. Pauline, given away by wild-blown hair, put her head out into the cyclone briefly. Others went out and did not come back. But fixedly, the white eye was on itself; Mandela came up from Underground that year with the gales of August that sandpapered the city with mine dust, while white children were waiting for the segregated swimming pools to be opened on September 1st. He went on trial in October for inciting the strike of the previous year and for leaving the country illegally; by then Olga was already planning ahead for December holidays at Plettenberg Bay, phoning friends who, like her, had houses there, to make sure there would be enough young company to keep her sons amused. Fire-bombs continued to explode, according to the news. There had been that ghastly murder of whites in their caravan at Bashee Bridge; but the numerous well-organized caravan camps throughout the official recreation areas of the country were whites-only and perfectly safe. As for the murders of headmen in the Transkei who collaborated with government officials — who knew a headman? All that was ignored as tribal unrest among black peasants. It was satisfactorily reassuring that the last communist front organization, the Congress of Democrats, had been banned in September. And the Sabotage Act was passed, defined widely to include strikes as acts of sabotage — restoring confidence to industrialists while Pauline and Carole had eggs thrown at them from a city balcony when taking part in the last public protest march before the Act put an end to such demonstrations for the duration — of what? The regime was then already in its fifteenth year.

That year when Hillela was living in the city with some man was the same year when torture began to be used by the police. Political suspects — mostly black — who, defended by lawyers like Joe, made such allegations when and if they could get to the courts, were dismissed from any concern of most white people, put out of mind as isolated agitators, left-overs of communist influence who had to be dealt with somehow; liars by ideology, who either invented injury or — looking at the issue paradoxically but righteously — deserved it anyway. And even those who were humanely and morally opposed, on principle, to beatings, applications of electric shocks, disorientation by extended denial of sleep, generally took their stand from under the centre of the white eye’s hypnotic gaze. A doctor who had given vital testimony of torture that won the case Joe’s team brought on behalf of a black man in a provincial town, described over a drink in the Pauline house his appalling findings on the man’s body, and concluded: —By the way, Joe … while you were appearing in Durban, were you ever invited to the Club? I was given a surprisingly good lunch there … a charming place, lovely old colonial style … I really enjoyed it.—

Pauline stared into her glass. — How did you reconcile the two?—

He smiled and quizzed, not following.

She read the dregs of wine as if they were tea-leaves. — Your morning in court. Your evidence. What you’d seen. And the Club.—

He smiled again, broadening the understanding to encompass Joe, anyone. — But they had nothing to do with each other!—

Easy then, with hindsight, to sneer at what was only a young girl excited by the exhibitionism she was too naive to distinguish from concomitant courage; the ex go-go dancer nested amid testimony of horror, happy in the midst of torture. By day she chilled the white wine, at night she was in the alternating current of the man’s frustration and resolve, the thrilling tension into which, in his command of her body, he converted the dreadful happenings around her. He raged through a thinned line of mouth at the poor press coverage of revolutionary actions. He disappeared from the yard cottage for days. She was to tell no-one he had gone away; if anyone phoned or called in, he was simply out for a while. This was an important task she had. His reports of what he had seen of the scale of resistance coming from blacks pushed back to starve in the Bantustans, of the violence used by the police against rural people, of the sour and lethal misery this caused between government-paid headmen and desperate villagers — she watched him tear up these reports (rejected by his editors) in a tantrum and throw them into the big bin that served the main house as well as the cottage. She had once cast certain papers in other people’s dirt, like that. But, these bits of paper she helped pick out again from under eggshells and vegetable peelings. They taped facts together; he sat down and wrote an article using the same material, but in the context of an accusation — press collusion with white domination. This, like the articles he wrote on concealed evidence of torture, she took in her elegant souvenir sling bag to the advertising agency; although the piece would be published under an alias abroad, its author might be traced by the identification of his typewriter with the typescript — it had happened to other journalists, before: envelopes addressed to newspapers, or even to cover addresses, were opened at the post office before despatch and photocopied for the secret police. It was another important task for her: the sipping and banter of copywriters and models going on around her, she made her fair copy of subversive documents on one of the agency typewriters. — Time off for a love-letter? I don’t blame you, love, they work us to extinction in this loony bin, can’t call a thought your own. — It was with this (genuinely female) art director whose yellow-veined blue eyes stood out like an octopus’s from a mound of forehead that the girl fell to the childish, vain temptation one day to hint that she was ‘sometimes scared’ on behalf of Rey, with whom, it was generally known in temporary pairings-off hardly kept count of, the little junior assistant had ‘got together’ at an agency lush. The woman whose loose, black-dyed hair was designed to make her look more like an elder sister than a mother not only picked up at once the scent of political danger holed up in its love-nest, was stirred by it and passed it on as a rill of risk to touch the agency with daring-by-association; she was also the one who kept absolute discretion when the girl’s confidence was taken further. What Sasha had feared did come to pass, but not when he was looking for his cousin in the cinemas where they had spent autumn afternoons. While electric currents were passing through the reproductive organs of others, Hillela had an abortion. It was arranged for her in good hands, by the kindness and understanding of the woman art director. Hillela was nineteen. It happened inside her; her body, her life: and the torture was one of the things he — Rey — had ways of knowing about, outside.

On his birthday they took wine along to the house where, lately, they often met the same group of black men. Rey didn’t take any notice of birthdays, but it was somebody-or-other’s birthday every few days at the agency, and Hillela had acquired a style of adult celebration from there. She wrapped both serious and jokey presents elaborately, bought wine and a cake. The sexy card he glanced at without comment. The witty present (a beard-comb stuck into the orange whiskers of a toy orangoutang) he unwrapped and ignored, and the real elephant-hide attaché case with gilt fittings he looked at, lying there, as one does at something one is confused to see anyone could think one would want.

The wine was drunk, anyway. That was all right. The black men were not those African National Congress Youth Leaguers she had met with him when first she had moved into the yard cottage. He was perhaps collecting other material; they talked closely with him, watching him, some with moving, responsive eyes, others with the in-turned glaze between lids that sometimes dropped, with which blacks keep themselves intact from the invasion of white presences. He was telling them about his ‘quiet trips’: whom he saw, where he had got himself into, in the Transkei, in Tembuland and Pondoland. He brought messages they tested in silence. She felt indignation welling in her as it did permanently, from another source, in him: Trust him! Trust him! But she was not expected to speak. Halfway through the evening a white man came in, apparently from having been only in some other part of the house. His murmured upper-class courtesies and round face that in its texture and tender colouring appeared to be stripped down of several outer skins, seemed to belong to an English climate, yet his recognition of the younger white man signalled acceptance to the blacks: —Of course — you interviewed me in Cape Town, at my house. Some Swedish or German paper …?—

The free-lancer changes journalistic alliances too often to be expected to remember or to answer. This one grasped the finger-hold of credentials to press his own questions both stoutly and humbly, in the manner of whites demonstrating loyal support for a black cause and aware of the superiority of the blacks’ inner circle of involvement, drawn by experience, language and blood. About ‘Qamata’—it had been described to him, in these rural inner circles in which his familiarity suggested he had been received, as a sort of church?

They took their time. There was a spokesman from out of the lazy, acquired deadpan: —It’s their god, there. He comes from the sea.—

— One of our gods, Xhosa gods… our religion we had, before.—

— I was told he was the ‘ruler of the spirits’, a kind of Pantokrator … top man among the gods …?

— Yes, ruler of our other spirits… them all. Those country people, they still believe those things.—

The journalist, with a movement of legs and behind, shifted his chair nearer the spokesman. — Or believe in them again? Weren’t they all dosed with Christianity at school?—

Shrugs, and everyone waited for someone else to speak.

— Many people were Christians, but they kept the old customs.—

— Oh I know — I’ve been among the young abakwetha hidden away in the circumcision camps. That’s not quite the same thing. I mean, Qamata, as I understand, isn’t a hero who once lived, a warrior from precolonial or early colonial times. The old days. He’s a different thing, different kind of inspiration, isn’t he? A spirit that makes people fearless? Tells them what to do? White people are saying Poqo is like Mau Mau — of course you know that, it’s inevitable. But is the idea that Qamata … an African god, a Xhosa god is something that can chase away the god of submission, the Christian god who says ‘thou shalt not kill’, and make killing a sacrifice for freedom?—

— What’s new with that? The Christian god’s killed plenty, plenty! Here and in the world! He gives his blessing to the wars of white people.—

— You’re right! So how will he give it to blacks! That’s where Qamata comes in.—

The spokesman’s broad, relaxed chest, naked under a football jersey, heaved to life. He kept everyone waiting while he dropped his head to one side, rolled it against the sofa back. — The Qamata thing … it’s really among the rural people, man, you must understand that. It’s not policy. But regionally … the people work out a lot of things for themselves, we don’t interfere unless …—

— But it’s useful, it brings people together where political concepts like constitutions and programmes don’t reach? — The lover put his fist on his breast.

— If you want to know about the Xhosa religion, man, you should talk to a guy like Prof here, I don’t go along too much with that kind of stuff.—

— I just want to understand what I’ve seen, what I’ve been told. I don’t want to misinform anybody — and that’s for your sake… You don’t want people believing, that Mau Mau story. Then tell me—

A small man who had been listening with distended nostrils, an alertness displaced from his ears, blew words like cigarette smoke across her face. — Let them believe. Kenyatta won. He’s getting the country. Without Kimathi, the Queen of England would still have it. Let them believe.—

Rey was laughing, rubbing his taut palms along his thighs. — Qamata! — He drew himself into a knot of the white man, the man they called Prof, the spokesman and a very young man whose upper body danced up and down as he tried to interject and sometimes laughed harshly with frustration. The white girl was accustomed to being left to occupy or entertain herself until, as she saw it, ‘his book’ had garnered what was wanted for it. The black men around her began talking in their own language. It grew long, the night of the uncelebrated birthday. She dozed off, sitting on the sofa with the cadences and exclamations of an African language flying round her, accumulating in layers between the layers of smoke, wavering away and towards her ears; the lullaby without words, for her, surrounding all her childhood. The platteland towns where the commercial traveller took his little sweetheart, the Rhodesian boarding-school, the rich aunt’s villa at the sea, the old church path where children sang picking their way past excreta, the shop window where schoolgirls danced, the kitchen where a former trumpet player with the Extra Strongs took refuge.

When they got back at two in the morning the cottage was in darkness as they had left it, but the door stood open as if they were expected. He felt round the jamb for the light switch. Again, there was the shock of light on a disorder; a blinding exposure. This time, it was she herself who called out: Rey! And he was beside her, but could not make what was there fly back to the way it was before — clothes, paper-spewing suitcases, books, the stuffing from eviscerated cushions — as a film run in reverse. There was no-one waiting. This was confirmed at once; the cottage was small. Whoever had ransacked it had found or not found what they wanted and gone. But this time, this exposure, was different. What had been turned up in the middle of the night had no context of other lives to resorb it. They went back to the house they had left and threw pebbles at the windows until the gentle-complexioned white man came down in a handsome towelling gown and took them in. Next day they went to stay with other friends-of-friends. Every day, her lover believed, must be lived at a further remove from the cottage. Nothing was ever to be restored of the life she lived there. Only the object that he himself had thrown aside, the toy orang-outang with the beard-comb, had become something in place, lying on the floor where it was dropped among its torn gold wrappings as if it had drawn down everything about it.

He was convinced that he was going to be arrested. Whether this was so or not nobody can say. Many premises are raided; there are not always consequences of the kind he foresaw, building up for her and for those who sheltered them a case against himself. Fear and self-esteem — his conviction of his own threat to others confirmed as it could be only by the assumption of himself being in danger — burned his old resentments as the fuel of elation. He made love more often than ever, and each race to the finish might be the last. His face presented itself as the face that must be looked at as a last look, at any ordinary moment of the day. She opened white-wine bottles and no-one knew the other tipsiness that animated her, now. She confided in no-one; no longer, not she. Sitting a moment on someone’s desk, swinging her legs and chattering; no-one knew that next day she might not be there, one day soon would simply not be there. She and he: gone.

He did not even risk going back for what might be left of ‘his book’. A friend-of-a-friend would go to the cottage and send later whatever papers were there. He — and the little girl, of course — would bum a few clothes (friends who weren’t in danger surely owed them that much) and disappear as they were. The only problem was money. — I can manage, I don’t care. But with you … Maybe you should follow.—

For the first time, there was fear to be seen in her shining, opaque black eyes. — I’ll get money. For both.—

It must have been in June 1963, exact date unknown, she left South Africa. Whether by air under assumed names, or by some Underground route overland, they were gone, she and whoever the man was. His name does not appear in any accounts of resistance during the period, his book seems never to have been published. No-one even gives him the credit for having been the one who, however reluctantly, moved her on.

*

It was to Joe Hillela went so that she wouldn’t be left behind. To his rooms, asking to see him and sitting in the waitingroom among clients. These were blacks as well as whites, sharing the same chairs and journals, The Motorist and Time passed on, perhaps, from the household of one of Joe’s new partners, the English Guardian and local liberal reviews she recognized as from the stacks in Pauline’s livingroom. She didn’t have to pass time with any of these. Joe appeared as soon as her name was taken in to him. Being Joe, there was no demonstration of surprise, pleasure or displeasure. He simply put up a hand and flagged a quiet, coaxing movement. He stood back to let her pass before him through his doorway: Joe, the smell of the shaving cream standing like a tongue’d icecream cone on the bathroom shelf, the buzzing cello voice sustained behind the high babble at family meals. He kissed her gently and held a moment the fingers of the hand she awkwardly took back.

— How have you been? — Even when she and his own daughter were children he had always treated them like grown-up ladies; she was under an old guidance, taking a chair he displaced from where clients customarily faced him across his desk. He drew up another, leaving his professional place empty. Her face was ready to fawn in parrying smiles, culpability, girlish charm at the formula of insincere reproaches that did not come; months and months, not a word, thought you’d forgotten us!

— Oh fine. I’m working in an advertising agency. Oh yes, and they haven’t kicked me out yet, marvel of marvels. I’ve actually been there — what — about six months or so.—

She knew his pace. He didn’t pretend not to be studying her. The last season of good clothes Olga used to supply was lost, along with the cottage, but friends who had offered her ‘something to wear’ had not failed to notice she took the best garments, not the most ordinary, hanging in their modest cupboards. For this visit she had picked a full black skirt that sank round from her small waist as she made herself comfortable, and an Indian shirt of thin red silk slit from a high collar down her brown neck to her wide-set breasts. Thin chains slid in and out of the opening as she gestured.

— There were quite a few jobs before then? Turnover pretty high? — They laughed together, after so long, she and Joe.

— Don’t tell me! You were right about qualifications … you have to be prepared to take anything.—

— Anything?—

— Well, just about.—

After a moment, he spoke. — You didn’t take ‘anything’.—

There was the ‘on my honour’ tone of childhood. — I didn’t—

He confirmed with his slow turn of the head, aside.

— We don’t have the right to ask, anyway. — But he saw she was still so young that she was afraid of references to the family’s rejection of her; the taboo she had broken made responsibility towards her a taboo subject, as well. Her mouth opened a moment, in unease. It seemed to him to contradict the new maturity, clenched hardness, of the way her cheekbones stood out. (She had lost weight after the abortion.) The eyes, without the differentiation between iris and pupil that makes it possible to read eyes’ expression, were drawn miserably half-closed and then opened again, full on him. Her concern and confusion jumped at him like the attention of an affectionate puppy. — Of course, of course you’ve got the right, of course you have! You’ll always have, I promise you!—

He was able to turn the emotion to a gentle, shared joke that gracefully accepted bonds between him and her, belonging to but surviving the past. — Now that’s the correct way with the verb! Future tense! You and Carole used to drive us crazy by using it in the context of something already achieved: ‘I did my homework last night, I promise you’—

— So you see I have learnt something … a little.—

— A lot, Hillela, a lot. You have earned your own living and lived your own life, without help from any of us. — Olga’s handout was not worth his mention.

Joe’s silences were comfortable. At the end of them, there was always some sort of understanding, as if, coming from him as the thread the spider issues from its body and uses to draw a connection from leaf to leaf across space, some private form of communication had been spun.

— So … here I am.—

— And so you should be.—

— I’m going to ask you something. Something big. It’s a lot to ask for. I won’t blame you at all if you won’t — can’t.—

His old gesture: he rested an elbow on the arm of the chair and pressed a finger into the sag of his cheek. — Go on.—

She smiled with calculation, innocent in knowing, showing it to be so. — Not the others, just you.—

— What is said in these professional rooms is naturally confidential. — Dear Joe, teasing her a little while giving another, serious assurance — whatever she was going to ask, he would grant by the default of those whom she could not ask. — Go on, Hillela.—

The small taut fold of skin that formed beneath each eye sank away, drawn back over her cheekbones. It was a feature of her particular image she had had since childhood. She looked at him out of childhood, her darkness, where the natural moisture of her eyes made a shining line along the membrane of each lower lid.

— It’s money.—

Slowly as he watched, her face changed; the molecules of this girl’s being rearranged themselves into the exact aspect they had had when she lay under the sudden bright light, his gaze and Pauline’s, calm in bed beside his son.

Joe judged himself, in the end, no more trustworthy than anyone else. He did tell Pauline. Pauline heard of the escapade — flight, defection, or whatever it was supposed to be — from Olga, of all people. Olga, who herself had long had contingency plans, was the first to hear that her niece had been out of the country for some weeks. The news came to her through the husband of a friend, a client of the advertising agency where, apparently, the girl had had the latest in a series of all kinds of jobs. The husband was told in confidence; the agency’s directors did not want to shake clients’ confidence by allowing any suggestion that their advertising portfolios would be handled by politically suspect people. The girl in question had no position of access to the creative process — she was described (euphemistically) as hardly more than a tea-maker. But the husband remembered his wife talking of her friend Olga’s adoptive daughter of that unusual name; so he was able to supply a piece of gossip for dinner parties. His wife came out with it tactlessly in the presence of Arthur. Olga, from across the table, had to make a quick correction: —We’d never actually adopted—no — she has her father … She already hadn’t lived with us for some years — we’ve been completely out of touch—

Pauline burst the news to Joe: —That’s a laugh! Hillela, ‘having to flee the country’! That’s how my sister puts it, I could feel her trembling in her boots, at the other end of the phone … What could Hillela have done, she didn’t even have any interest in helping black schoolchildren on Saturday mornings! Smoking pot in a coffee bar, that was more in that little girl’s line. — Joe’s customary considered reactions meant that Pauline did not notice he already knew what she had just learned. But he told her, then, of the girl’s visit to his rooms because he saw that jealousy was mixed, in distress, with guilt, for Pauline. He made the mistake of phrasing it: —She came to me.—

— Came to you!—

How expressive these faces of his women were, how frightening in their importunity: the dyes of hurt, resentment, indignation were always so quickly there to flood the cheeks and brow of Pauline.

— It was what she was told to do, you know.—

— But this kind of trouble! Hillela! She has no political sense, no convictions, not the faintest idea, that child! Hillela a political refugee — from what, I’d like to know! Now no-one can keep an eye on her. None of us can do anything, she’s made sure of that. We’ve let it happen. Hillela a political refugee. What idiocy. What a final mess. God knows what will become of her.—

— She has the money. In good foreign currency.—

— And how did you get that for her?—

But what was arranged within the walls of professional confidence was not to be divulged further; his wife knew that he must have done what the ethics of that profession did not allow, and that he had never done before — contravened currency restrictions in some shady way. Hillela, of course, would not stop to think of consequences for others, then as at any other time. Yet suddenly anger became tears in Pauline’s eyes.

— How long will it last.—

At least Joe’s breach of confidence enabled her to telephone Olga and let her know that no-one in Pauline’s family was trembling in their boots; on the contrary, Joe had done the practical thing, Joe had seen to it that the girl had funds of some sort for whatever predicament, real or imaginary, she had got herself into.

In July a country estate, in the area near the city where the rich lived to escape suburbia, was raided by the police. The people living at the evocatively-named Lilliesleaf Farm were not enjoying their gardens and stables but were the High Command of liberation movements planning to put an end to the subjection of blacks by whites by whatever means whites might finally make necessary. Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada and a whole bold houseparty of others, white and black, were arrested, and Nelson Mandela was brought from prison to be tried with them on new charges. Olga — by now afraid to talk over the telephone; the girl was a blood relation, after all, it couldn’t be denied if the police should make enquiries — came to see her sister. Was there anything to the story that it was known at the agency Hillela had gone with a man? Only a month earlier? Maybe he was mixed up in the Farm affair, perhaps it had been just in time …? Pauline gave a light laugh at this—flattery; at Olga. But the idea provided the base for some sort of explanation that slowly came to serve, in the end. Attached herself to some man — that’s what it was all about. He was the one who had to go.

Pauline and Olga were only two of three sisters, after all; still.

Attached herself to some man.

My poor Ruthie.

I, me.

Time, now. They had always, they went on fitting that self into their conjugations, leaving out the first person singular. Except one of the cousins, poor boy; he didn’t.

It’s not possible to move about in the house of their lives. A china cat survived two centuries and was broken. Awful.