A Sport of Nature

Intelligence

Tamarisk Beach in the late afternoons was the place of resurrection. Those who had disappeared from their countries while on bail, while on the run, while under house arrest; that non-criminal caste of people from all classes and of all colours strangely forced to the subterfuge of real criminals evading justice — they reappeared on foreign sand in swimming shorts and two-piece swimsuits. While they swam, their towels, shoes, cigarettes were dumped for safety in numbers under the three etiolated tamarisks for which the British colonial families had named the beach once reserved for their use. Now hungry, raucous local youths hung about there all day, acrobatically light-fingered. If those of the new caste — big men, some of them, cultivated on distant soccer fields — looked warningly at the boys, they jacked themselves swiftly up palm boles and laughed, jeering from the top in their own language, that not even the strangers who were black as they were understood. Sometimes a coconut came down from there like a dud bomb, unexploded, from the countries left behind; the local boys fought over it just the way the scorpions they would set against one another in a sand arena fought, and the victor hawked it round for sale.

There was no respite from heat in weeks passing, months passing. Like exile itself, a sameness of time without the trim and shape of home and work, the heat was unattached to any restraints of changing seasons. Only in the late afternoons did something stir sameness: a breath blew in under it, every afternoon, one of those trade winds that had set history on course towards prehistory, bringing first the Chinese and then the Arabs to that coast. It brought to Tamarisk Beach the men from alley offices with unpaid telephone bills and liberation posters, from the anterooms of European legations where they waited to ask for arms and money, and from the comings and goings between taken-over colonial residences and ex-governors’ offices where rival political groups struggled to keep their credentials acceptable to their host country, lobbying, placing themselves in view of the powerful, watching who in the first independent black government there was on his way up to further favour, and worth cultivating, and who was dangerous to be associated with because he might be on his way down.

The exile caste came to the beach for air. And then the original impulse — to breathe! — became part of a social ritual, a formation of a new regularity, a necessary ordering of a place where other needs that cannot be done without might be met. Many had experienced this kind of formation even in jail. On Tamarisk Beach they strolled through the colonnades of palms, avoiding or meeting each other, eyeing across a stretch of sand faces separated by the distance of alliances dividing Moscow and Peking, East Germany and the United States, or the desert distance of solitary confinement and the stony alienation that succeeds screams in those who have known torture since last meeting. They paused to pick tar and oil-slick from the soles of their feet, and scratched the hair on their chests, smoked, shook water from their ears — just for those hours in the late afternoon could have been holiday-makers anywhere. There were some women among them, political lags, like the men, and defiantly feminine, keeping up with curled, home-tinted hair, ingenious cut of local cotton robes as sun-dresses, and cheap silver-wire jewellery from the market craftsmen, the high self-image needed to defeat the humiliations of prison. There was sensuality on Tamarisk Beach. It came back with the relief of a breeze; it came back with the freeing of bodies from the few clothes thrust into a suitcase for exile and worn in the waitingrooms and makeshift living quarters of exile. It became a pattern of human scale made by strollers in the monumental arcade of palms and swimmers dabbling in the great Indian Ocean at the edge of a continent.

There were hangers-on, at Tamarisk. Not only the thieving urchins, but friends and acquaintances picked up by the exiles, and the appendages of love affairs and casual dependencies of all kinds. There were also those who passed as these and were suspected, found out or never discovered to be part-time informers for the governments whose enemies the exiles were. Most of the ‘beach rats’, as they were known, were themselves expatriates — black and white — who had been expelled from or broken with a series of schismatic groups in the exile community; others had become misfits, easy to recruit for pocket-money spying, in a survival of the old European tradition of black sheep. In imperialist times, these whites were ‘sent out’ to the colonies; in the break-up of colonial empires, their counterparts took advantage of transitional opportunities to get by, far away from the censure of home, in some warm place whose different mores didn’t concern them. It would have been difficult to distinguish impostors from the genuine, those afternoons on the beach. The tall Jew whose incipient tyre around the waistline was being prodded at by a wobbly-breasted blonde girl — what was there to show, in his mock affront, that the black beard he still wore he had grown in order to escape across a border disguised as one of the White Father missionaries, dangling cross, breviary and all? Who could tell the difference between the credentials of a little beauty with a Huguenot delicacy of face-structure, speaking Afrikaans, and the black man, her fellow countryman, talking trade union shop with her in the same language? Hadn’t both served their apprenticeship as jailbirds, back there? Suspect everybody or nobody. Leaning on an elbow in the sand, talking to an intimate, wandering to borrow a cigarette and join this group or that, resting one’s back, in sudden depression, against a palm-pillar in this place of littered sand and urine-tepid shallows — gossip and guarded tongues erratically mingled with the long-held breaths expelled by the ocean on a coral reef. Among the regulars, every afternoon, there was a girl who looked as if she had slept in her clothes and hadn’t combed her hair. Probably true; many, through obscure quarrels of doctrine and discipline, found themselves not provided for by any liberation movement housed up rotting stairs. This one (a man who was doing his best, without funds, to drink himself to death on local gin) had left his country before receiving permission from his cadre to do so. That one (staring at the sea as if to blind himself with its light) belonged to another organization and had defied its policy: recognized the validity of the white courts by accepting pro deo legal defence.

The Afrikaner woman noticed the girl about: she was clean, the hair naturally like that, tangled because in need of a cut — just living through hard times, as everyone was, more or less. She seemed a loner, but not lonely; at least, the men appeared to know that she was approachable. She came by herself to the beach, but as soon as her presence was noted there was always some man, arms crossed over his chest, digging a toe in the sand, chatting to her. The tamarisks cast no more than a fishnet of shade. She sat there beside other people’s possessions the way the stray dogs came to settle themselves just beyond cuffs and blows.

When the Afrikaner woman saw the big safety-pin that held together the waistband of the girl’s jeans above a broken zipper, she had one of the contractions in her chest just where, whatever rational explanation there was, she knew there to be some organ capable of keener feeling than the brain. It was this organ, taking over from all the revolutionary theory she had studied since recruitment at seventeen in a jam factory, that had been responsible for her arrest along with black women protesting against the pass laws, and her bouts of imprisonment as an organizer of illegal strikes and defier of laws decreeing what race might live where. She asked about the girl. The story was doing the rounds, by then: that was the girl who had come with that Andrew Rey fellow, the journalist. The man who had disappeared, dumped her, now. The one who was found to be politically unreliable (the informant was a member of the Command in exile and had the authority to decide such things). As for his girl … what was anyone to do with her. She clearly didn’t belong to any movement at all; his camp-follower, pretty little floozy. But he had misrepresented himself, and she must have moved about with him in all his unacceptable contacts, so she wasn’t their responsibility, really.

Yet the Afrikaner woman brought her a pair of her own jeans, concealed in one of the straw bags from the market so the girl wouldn’t be embarrassed by receiving charity in front of everyone at the beach. As she became accepted — because Rey had betrayed her, too — as one at least by implication belonging to the cause Rey was suspected of double-crossing, the member of the Command was among the men on the beach, far from their wives and likely to be for many years, with whom she slept.

Certainly she had no place to sleep in alone. Not until the Afrikaner woman decided something must be done about her. Christa Zeederburg, urged to reminisce at the end of her life, never forgot the safety-pin. — Just an ordinary safety-pin, the kind you buy on a card, for babies’ nappies. That’s all she had, then!—

If you have lived your young life with Jethro and Bettie to feed you and at worst always an aunt’s stipend deposited monthly, it must be difficult to believe there is nothing for you in the houses you pass and the banks in their pan-colonial classical grey stone with brass fittings. For many weeks she was waiting for Rey to come back; that was her status. She was living in their room in an old hotel from British times which now functioned only as a bar; his radio was on the wicker table and his pyjamas were still under the pillows. He had gone on a quick trip to Sweden about a communications development project they wanted him to start in East Africa, or (depending to whom he was talking) to Germany to tie up a television documentary based on a book he was writing. She knew she could not go along. Already there had been problems; when the vehicle that took them from Northern Rhodesia arrived at their country of refuge, it turned out that although she had no passport he — quite properly, a professional in these matters — had an Irish one. He went with his companions to the local hotel in the small frontier town; she spent the night in the local jail — well, on an old sofa in the, chief warder’s office, they couldn’t put a white girl in the sort of cells they had. It was quite fun, really, she could sleep anywhere and wake up fresh. Her experience was something they joked about together, next day, all very exciting, like the leopard they saw crossing a red road at dawn. It disappeared into the bush as they themselves were doing, hour after hour, mile after mile, beyond pursuit.

He had taken only half the money. He wouldn’t hear of taking more than that; he was going to come back with grants that would keep them for two or three years, they were going to look for a flat — or an old house, why not occupy one of the nice old houses with gardens the colonists had fled when independence came to this country? She was in one, once, while he was away. Some people from the beach took her along to a party given by the representative of a European press agency. The agency operated comfortably; there was a telex chattering in what had been a children’s playroom, and the agency chief could refresh himself in the leaking swimming pool. She would have written immediately to tell what a good idea it would be to have a house like that from which the development project could be run, and the television documentary planned, but she had no address. She thought of looking round for such a house, in preparation. But the suburb along the sea was a long walk from town, and soon the taxis, reassuringly humble with their missing doorhandles and rust-gnawed mudguards, had become expensive in relation to the money she had left.

Unlike observers, she expected him back any day. She passed the days wandering purposefully about, looking, listening, smelling, tasting. The ancient town was a Mardi Gras for her, everybody in fancy dress that could not possibly be daily familiar: the glossy black men in braided cotton robes and punch-embroidered skull caps, the Arab women with all their being in their eyes, blotted out over body, mouth and head by dark veils, the skinny, over-dressed Indian children, bright and finicky as fishing-flies, the stumps of things that were beggars, and the smooth-suited, smooth-jowled Lebanese merchants touched with mauve around the mouth who sat as deities in the dark of stifling shops. Her watch was stolen in the hotel and she kept track of time by a grand public clock-face and the regular call of the muezzins from the mosques. There were no laws — nothing to prevent her going down into the black quarters of the town, here, except the rotting vegetables and sewer mud that had to be stepped through, and the little claws of beggar children that fastened on her whenever she smiled a greeting, not knowing that every day she had less and less to give away. She bought pawpaws and big, mealy plantains, more filling than ordinary bananas, down there; cheaper than in the markets. She picked them from the small pyramid of some woman whose stock and livelihood they were, arranged among the garbage, spittle, and babies scaled with glittering flies. She ate the fruit in place of lunch and dinner on a broken bench on the esplanade and did not get sick.

Olga, Pauline, even Len — they had never given her the advantage of knowing what to say to someone to whom one owes money and can’t pay. The wife of the hotel proprietor stopped her as she came along the verandah where her room was, and broke her silence.

— Going on for six weeks, and rates are strictly weekly, dear. You know that, don’t you? We aren’t running a charity. We have to pay even the yard boys the fancy new minimum wage this government’s set down, I don’t know how much longer we’re gonna be prepared to carry on, anyway. — A drop of water run down to one of the spiral ends of the girl’s hair had fallen on the dry sun-cancer of the woman’s forearm. — We have to pay for the water you’re using for those lovely cold showers you take whenever you fancy. — From the day that fellow went off with his briefcase, never mind the pyjamas left under the pillows, the proprietor had not been happy about the situation. There’d been bad experiences before with that CCC lot who’d taken over Tamarisk for themselves. That’s what the regular white residents from the old days called them: commies, coons and coolies. She looked at this cocky miss who played the guitar in her room as if the world owed her a living; looked in a way that made the girl feel she would be physically prevented, by the barrier of a scaly arm, from getting past her.

— I haven’t any money.—

She didn’t think of assuring that she was only waiting for ‘her friend’ to come back; of promising all would be set right and paid then — soon. It was only when she knew, quite simply, what to say that with that truthful statement another became true: she was not waiting. She was now one of the regular coterie of Tamarisk Beach, making out. She packed her bag and hung the room key on the board behind the unattended reception desk. The pyjamas she left under the pillows.

How are things? Oh, I’m making out. At best, the phrase used on the beach meant one had found somewhere ‘to stay’ (‘to live’ belonged to a kind of claim left behind in the home country) or that a relevant liberation organization had created a title, Education Officer, Publicity Secretary, Liaison Assistant, that provided a chair, if not a desk, in an office, and a stipend even more modest than that of a rich aunt. She had neither job, nor stipend, nor anywhere to stay unless the beach was somewhere, until Christa Zeederburg (her name should be recorded along with that of the woman art director with the octopus eyes) provided a sleeping bag on the floor of some other people’s flat. It is possible the girl actually did sleep out at Tamarisk a couple of nights, taking the warmth of the sand and the thick air for harmlessness, recklessly unaware of danger, as in one of those anecdotes about small children who are found happily unharmed, playing with a snake. More likely that whomever she drifted away from the beach with in the evening found themselves saddled with her for the night. And it was quite customary for people who had a place to stay to allow others to dump their suitcases and duffle bags there. One might live out of such a base, calling in when one needed a change of clothes. Why did she have only one pair of jeans, with a broken zipper? What had happened to the clothes, most of them quite good, she had appropriated by right of a hunted status before she fled with her lover? Clothing of ‘European’ cut and style was short in a poor country trying to save foreign exchange; probably, to buy herself pawpaws and plantains, she sold the clothes in the wrong places (Christa Zeederburg reminisces) at poor prices, foolish girl, compared with what could have been obtained on the other kind of black market. Oh if Pauline, if Olga had known how little one could make out on, in money, comfort, calculation, principles and respectability, and stay healthy and lively, with good digestion and regular menstruation!

But they were never to know, and no doubt she who had been their charge was to make sure she herself would forget.

Poor countries provide for poverty. There was not only cheap over-ripe fruit that had improved her figure — Christa, of course, had found a swimsuit and sewn in the sag, so that those who had not slept with the girl watched with the envious desire to know more the sucking movement of the flat belly under wet yellow knit, and the deep rift of breasts into which sea water trickled down out of sight. There were all kinds of vendors of goods and services without the surcharge of overheads. She was outside one of those stone-and-polished-brass banks she had no more business to enter than the old crippled black man who sat on the pavement with his portable workshop spread neatly handy. For days she had been flapping along with a broken thong on her only pair of sandals; for a coin the shoemaker repaired the sandal while she leaned against the bank walls with a bare foot tucked up beneath her. The sun on Tamarisk had provided her with the free cosmetics of a dark, fruit-skin tan and a natural bleach of her hair. The heat made her languid and patient; she was enjoying the sureness with which hands like black roots snipped a little patch of leather to size, folded and sewed it, attached it to the broken thong and hammered flat to the sole the nail that was to hold it in place. It was just then that she experienced a surge of something, a falling into place of people passing that came from the unfamiliar moments of standing still while all flowed, as if one belonged there like the shoemaker, instead of being in passage. And the Africans, the Arabs, the Lebanese, and the Europeans from embassies, economic missions and multinational companies wearing tropical-weight trousers wrinkled at buttocks and knees by sweat, no longer were a spectacle but motes in a kind of suspension, a fluid in which she was sustained.

A man among passersby noticed her in that moment; she did not distinguish him. But he had come into her orbit as others had done and were to do. A few days later Christa took her along to a friend’s flat. A free meal was never to be by-passed; on the way, she scarcely bothered to listen to Christa: —German fellow, I think he used to be in import and export, now he’s going to represent a trade union foundation that’s helping to organize in industry here. He got friendly with Mapetla and that crowd from home. That’s how I know him, and now he’s after me all the time, you know how persistent Germans are, wants me to teach him how to organize among blacks! He’s a very generous fellow. He keeps giving me books, newspaper cuttings, I don’t know what else. You’ll see what a lunch we’ll have … he’s got a cook and everything.—

He wasn’t one of the beach people. Hillela had never before seen their host, with his deep T-shaped transverse and vertical clefts where the razor could not reach properly in the stubby chin, the red underlip with dark patches like tea-leaves he had forgotten to wipe away, and imprisoned behind thick glasses in that botched face, magnified grey eyes with ferny lashes. They changed at once when he saw her. For him there was no need of introduction. — You can stand like a flamingo on one leg. With your bright pink skirt.—

— Udi, what on earth are you talking about — this is Hillela, you don’t mind me bringing her along—

— I am de-lighted … also, you are very welcome to bring along anyone of your friends … any time. I am glad her shoes are mended. But I wish she would be wearing her lovely pink skirt. — He held in his diaphragm with an almost military courtesy as he showed them into his livingroom.

— I couldn’t. It’s Christa’s. Don’t you notice, she’s got it on?—

— So? Oh you’re right… she has … So … But two legs, that’s not the same thing, that’s a bird of a different feather … how could I be expected …—

There was fish cooked in green coconut milk, then the cook brought in a dessert called Zitronencréme he had been taught to make. Alsatian wine revived trade union anecdotes in Christa and set flowing one of those instant friendships of tipsy laughter. — Isn’t she wonderful, our Christa, with her funny oohs and aahs and her thick Boer accent? — Hillela, do you hear that! From zat Cherman! — Even the mock insults were pleasing and approving. — Well, I’ve just heard him speaking Swahili to the cook, and I don’t hear you saying anything but jambo, jambo after how long? You’ve been here a year?—

— And you? — The man’s attention raced flatteringly between the woman and the girl. — How long are you going to go on saying only jambo?—

— Oh well, Hillela’s right about me … but she doesn’t need any Swahili, she’s on her way to Canada.—

The atmosphere was not one in which kindly lies were necessary. — No, I’m not. Christa, you know I’m not. — The man smiled sadly at the charming head shaking curls in a disclaimer. — Good. You stay here. This’s a nice place. Hot, dull, poor, nice. Isn’t it, Christa. Let’s keep her here.—

— Then will you give her somewhere to stay? You’ve got this big flat… how many rooms … — Christa tucked her head back to her shoulder, a child looking up round a palace. — All this to yourself. She’s sleeping under a kitchen table. I’m telling you! And there are cockroaches — oooe, I hate those filthy things—

The other two laughed at her expression of horror, she laughed at herself; she who had survived interrogations and prison cells.

— That is your Room 101, Christa. Now we know. — But neither of the women caught the reference to Orwell.

Finishing the wine extended lunch. Hillela was not seen on Tamarisk that afternoon; they went off for a drive in his car, Christa still entertaining them, he solicitous and even momentarily authoritarian: —Fasten that strap across you, please. Now, this is how it opens — you try it once or twice, please — Hillela had not worn a seat-belt before. They were not compulsory back where she came from. — I feel like a kid in a pram.—

— All right. I’ll adopt you. — It was said dryly, inattentively; he was turning out of his parking space into the street. Bicycles shot zigzag past and he called after them in Swahili, black-robed women congealed together out of the way. His lips pursed thickly on that chin, the chin pressed on the shirt-collar; he had about him the stubborn weariness of one who lives as a spectator.

Udi Stück demanded nothing. Christa came home — she had a job as a part-time receptionist to an Indian doctor as well as her title as some kind of welfare officer at Congress headquarters — not sure whether or not to be pleased with herself. — I was only fooling, that day … But I bumped into Udi this morning, and you’ll never guess, he’s taken me seriously — he says he’ll give you a place to stay in the meantime. I was only fooling … I feel a bit bad … as if I pushed him to it, taking advantage because he’s so generous.—

Hillela used the schoolgirl phrase. — Is he keen on you?—

Christa’s burst of laughter that shook her like a cough: —Me? Oooe, I hope not! No-oo-o. That’s why I like him, poor old Udi, he’s not like the others who think once you’re on your own here, got nobody, no family … you can’t get away from them. That Dr Khan — I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to keep on that job. He’s always coming in and making some excuse to lean over to see what I’m doing. He presses his soft tummy against me. Oh it’s no fun being a woman. Sometimes. — She wriggled her shoulders in one of her exaggerated exhibitions of revulsion. — I can’t get over Udi taking me seriously … Oh I think he feels guilty, us with nothing, living all over the place, and he didn’t even have to leave Germany because of Hitler, he’s not a Jew. He’s got that lovely flat — didn’t you like the way the sittingroom has open brick-work at the top of the wall so’s the air comes in? And at night, there’s always a breeze from the bay, he’s so high up, it must be cool to sleep there. I only feel bad because of his wife — apparently his wife died last year and he sort of doesn’t want to have people around, he wants his privacy. But you must jump at it! You’ll have a room to yourself. Fish in coconut milk. That whatsis-zitron pudding — oh my god, I could eat that every day — She hugged the girl while they laughed.

— But don’t you want to take the room, then?—

— No, no-ooe, I’m okay here with the Manakas, I couldn’t leave Sophie and Njabulo. They’d be terribly hurt. — Christa, the real refugee, one who knew prison just as did the black refugee couple with whom she and her protégée were staying.

It would surely be a relief to the Manakas not to have their tiny kitchen doubling as a bedroom any longer, but Sophie kissed the girl she had given shelter and was gracious as any Olga with a private bathroom and a rose to offer. — A-ny time. Bring your blankets and come back to us a-ny time. We always find a place for you. We must help each other in these strange countries. It is terrible, terrible to be far from home. But we must stick together, fight together, and we are going back!—

So it was not for long that Hillela as a young girl slept on the beach or a kitchen floor and lived on over-ripe fruit and Sophie Manaka’s mealie-meal with cabbage. Trust her. That was the observation that went around on Tamarisk Beach. She was still seen there most afternoons, in the yellow swimsuit. She was part of the company that lay like a fisherman’s catch spread out on the sand, holding post-mortems on political strategies used back home, exchanging political rumours and sometimes roused, as a displacement of the self each had accustomed to living like this, by the arrival of a new member for their ranks, standing there urgently vertical to their horizontals, dazed, the tension of escape seeming to throb in the throat like the life pulsating in some sea creature taken from its element and peddled round the beach before them in the sun. Arnold of the Command or one of his designates usually accompanied such people; a bodyguard not against any physical dangers but to ensure that the relief of being ‘out’ and bringing firsthand news from home would not result in loose talk. A Beach Rat was sure to be grooming its whiskers in every group. It must be assumed that everything that was said on Tamarisk became what is known in the vocabulary of police files and interrogation rooms as intelligence, and would result back home in more arrests; more valuable people forced out to approach slowly, over the sand, to join the company.

Arnold would walk up the beach with newcomers; they sat apart, and the flash of his rimless glasses was enough to keep away anyone who might think of joining them. Their absorption was intense as can be only in those in whom singleness of purpose has taken hold of every faculty of intellect and feeling, so that even if that purpose is to be frustrated for a lifetime in prison, or to be exercised far removed from the people and places where its realization begins to take place, all other purposes in life are set aside, perhaps for ever, because each in some way contradicts the single one. Arnold was a lawyer — like Joe — who would never practise law again; the law in his country enforced the very social order his purpose was to end. He had a wife — like Pauline? — with whom he would never set up home again in the house where only white people could live. His children would grow up here and there — like Hillela herself — without his knowing them; there could be no family life for whites, with blacks, at best, illegally given a place in their converted garages. Christa’s brother with his farm on land from which blacks had been removed could not be her brother while Sophie and Njabulo were her family. Mothering girls without a decent pair of jeans to their names, she could not have married the Afrikaner doctor in Brits who was in love with her, and mothered children he would take to the segregated Dutch Reformed Church every Sunday.

Arnold, rising from a conclave, paused on the beach as a bee holds, in mid-air. At the signal of the flower-yellow swimsuit, he waded into the water. There was no surf. A transparent grass-green was a huge lens placed from shore to reef over sand like ground crystal. He kept his own glasses on when he swam; the image of the girl’s body under water swayed and shone, broke and reformed. His hairy toes struck him as ugly as crabs. He and she began to swim around each other. He had a soft way of speaking, conspiratorial rather than sexually modulated. — So you’ve got yourself nicely fixed up.—

— Oh …? Yes. Somewhere to stay.—

— Clever girl. Lucky Udi.—

— I was fine with Sophie and Njabulo but it was hard on them.—

— Left the beach — high and dry.—

She pinched her nose between thumb and forefinger and submerged herself, like a child at a swimming pool. When she came up, smiling, he was still talking.‘

— You’d better watch out, with him.—

— He’s a good friend of Christa’s, really nice. I’ve got a room as big as Sophie’s whole flat! You can see the town and the bay.—

— Are you sure it’s to yourself?—

She turned like a porpoise, floated on her back, water beaded her flesh with light in the sun, in his sight.

— Well of course. I want Christa to come and share, but she won’t leave the Manakas.—

— He won’t need an invitation in his own house.—

She turned her head; not understanding, or thinking she ought to pretend not to? He took off his glasses, which she had splashed. The little beach girl was a lovely blur. He put them back again. — You’d better keep the door locked. Or maybe it hasn’t got one?—

— Arnold … he’s an old man … old as my uncle … — It was in character with the footlooseness of this pretty girl, the ruptured kinships and displaced, marginal emotions of exile that, to his ears, made a slip of the tongue where the usual comparison would have been with a father.

— You don’t know old men. The older we get, the younger we like ’em.—

— Well how would you know, you’re not old.—

— Thank you for those kind words, obvious as they are. Isn’t there anything you know without experiencing it for yourself?—

Both floated on their backs now, and it was not only the water-jewelled breasts, down to where the yellow swimsuit just covered stiff nipples, that surfaced, but also the thick index finger and fist of his penis and testicles under their pouch of wet blue nylon. They saw what there was to be seen of each other, while feeling identical delicious coolness and heat — the water on submerged and the sun on exposed flesh.

— Didn’t you hear what I asked?—

— I thought you were telling me something. — A figure of such authority on Tamarisk; she had seen how the appearance of a line above the bridge of his nose made a voice stop short in mid-sentence, and how, when he was asked the kind of question that was not to be asked in such circles, his evasion of an answer came from complete intelligence of all that happened, was thought, discussed, investigated and decided there. What could he be interested in that she could tell him? The odd hours they had spent together (he worked very hard, even on Tamarisk he had time to take pleasure only when he left the last sandy foothold of the continent and entered the neutrality of the non-human element, the water) those times — caresses, the universal intelligence of pleasurable sensations, a rill from it present in wet coolness and heat, now — were the exchange with him in which she could take part. — I don’t know. Let me think. — Her eyes were closed against the sun; her smiling lips moved, he saw her so seriously young that she spelled out thoughts to herself the way children learning to read silently mouth words. The giant of desire woke in him to kiss her while she saw nothing but the red awning of her eyelids, and he slew him with the sling of priorities. Sexual pleasure was everyone’s right; dalliance when he had simply taken a breather from the discussion on shore was not something he himself or those who could watch from Tamarisk should tolerate.

— No. Not really. No. — She kept her eyes closed, screwed up; the sun was making her see fire. — How can anyone know what hasn’t happened to them? People like you, who’ve been in prison … and once or twice others, I’d heard talking, back there. You can describe what it was like, but I … I never, I don’t really believe it’s all it’s like. The same with leaving the country. I was always hearing about it. I even once saw someone on his last night. But it’s only now that I’ve done it … it’s different from what you’re told, what you imagine. You are all different, all of you … from the speeches. Where I lived — at home, when I was still in what was my home — everything was read out from newspapers, everything was discussed, I went to a court once and there was another kind of talk, another way of words dealing with things that had happened … somewhere else, to somebody else … I couldn’t know. I can know what happens to me.—

— You’ll burn your eyelids. Turn over. — But what you read, what you learn, what people tell you, what you observe — good god, that’s what happens to you, as well! Not everything can be understood only through yourself — what do you mean? — and anyway, isn’t your comprehension, your mind, yourself? What are you saying? You don’t trust anything but your own body? It’s a nice one, my god, certainly — but I don’t believe you know what you’re saying.—

— Thinking about what happens to myself — yes, of course, that I can know.—

— Someone needs to take you in hand, my girl. You are not a fully conscious being. I wish I had the time. And it would be quite pleasant … I can imagine the sort of home you come from. Girls the ornaments who spoil their decorative qualities and betray their class as soon as they begin to think. How in god’s name did you get here? I mean I know — but how’d you ever take up with that fellow? You know he was a liar and a double-dealer? He was for us and at the same time he was really working for PAC*? And maybe if we’d not run him out of here he would be working for the government back there, as well.—

— He was collecting material for a book. That’s why he went all over the show, he had to talk to all kinds of people.—

— And you believed that? What did you believe? That he was really one of us?—

A pair of talking heads, buoys bobbing on the water, tethered to lazy fin-movements of hidden arms and legs. — Yes.—

Impatiently, he gave her a chance to explain herself. She would not or could not. What a thicket of roses surrounded the power-drugged intelligence of the white sleepers; even dragged out through the thorns by some would-be prince turned betrayer, she could not recognize the lesson of wounds.

— Why?—

— I’d have to tell you too many things … Well, the family where I used to live — I just naturally thought, because of them, if white people were mixed up in that sort of thing at all, it was on your side. When I met his black friends, I didn’t take much notice … whether there was any difference. Between them, I mean. Whether they were yours or some, others’. It was part of his work to know them all.—

— Yes, his work!—

— And he was in danger—

— Danger! — He scoffed.

— The police came and raided, you know that, they turned out all our things, took all the stuff for his book … He was writing for the papers under different names—

— And pushed different politics—

— Really, I think you’ve got it wrong. He told me, he had to have cover, that’s why. Even his name. He even had to show up at parties given by people where I worked — and nobody talked about politics. Just there for a good time. Nobody gave a damn.—

— Not you, either. — It was said in the tone of one wanting her to be otherwise.

A man was swimming out towards them, his flailing arms black and defined in the heat-hazy radiance as the wings of a cormorant that skimmed the water.

Their voices changed key with the approach of a third presence. — So you see … well, if you’re right, what I think is true: I believed him because I believed what he was telling me; and none of it was happening to me.—

The swimmer was almost upon them; he didn’t wave; he might not be making for them at all, just setting for himself the limit of his own horizon.

— Until the police came and gave you a big fright, ay?—

Wet hair slapped her throat as she shook her head. — Until I came here.—

By saying ‘I’ and not ‘we’ he saw she had begun to promise better human material. The girl was no longer jetsam on Tamarisk Beach. His desire for human dignity was gratified, his desire for the beach girl twinged with apprehension of loss. There was just time, before the black man, his sideways regard turned regularly upon them and away as his face was alternately hidden in water and lifted for breath in the movements of strong over-arm strokes, was upon them: —Don’t suppose I’ll be seeing you again.—

Low enough, but she heard. — Why?—

— Your elderly benefactor might object.—

— I’ve told you.—

— You’ll come?—

As she slowly smiled the gestures and nod became a polite greeting for the head of the black man, now among them. To eyes accustomed to the radiance above water his blackness was a blow, pure hardness against dissolving light, his head a meteorite fallen between them into the sea, or a water-smoothed head of antiquity brought up from the depths, intact; basalt blackness the concentration of time, not pigment. Even the hair — black man’s kind of hair — had resisted water and remained classically in place as a seabird’s feathers or the lie of a fish’s scales.

The man’s urgency did not acknowledge the girl. — Nwabueze’s been killed. A bomb in the car.—

Neither man noticed her go, the siren turning yellow tail and diving away from the navigators of the world’s courses for whom, at that moment, in that ocean, she was no more than a distraction totally out of place.

A series of mini-biographies of outstanding women cites the news of the assassination of an important West African leader as the turning-point in her political development. Why should it ever have been contradicted?

But in that hour she was gliding and turning through water as perfectly tempered to the body as amniotic fluid, she heard no commotion but the sound of water getting into her ears and air breaking free in them through bubbles; the dead leader was a name. The real significance of the moment when the news was announced within a coral reef of the Indian Ocean was there, in another man, corporeal.

They love you. They tell you they love you. Len when making the necessary despatch from Rhodesia because of that boy being coloured, Olga when handing over to Pauline, Joe — dear Joe — when he gave the money with which to escape them. When he called his son a bastard because nothing was said in that bed, not about love of fellow man, not about family love, not about sisterly, brotherly love, but it was done. Loved, let love. Used what you have to love with, you know? It is there, you feel it, it happens all over and inside you and there is no difference between you and the one you’re doing it with, you don’t have to try to reach him, help him, teach him — you can’t lie, or spy or kill, so what could ever be wrong about it? Left behind by my mother, they say, because of it; because they told her it was wrong. The man they call a double-dealer, who lied about Sweden and Germany: the place he told the truth was in bed, with his lovely body, the feelings he gave me were not his fantasies or his boasts. Those others, on the beach; they have no home — not out of clumsiness, a tendency to break what is precious — but because they are brave and believe in the other kinds of love, justice, fellow man — and inside each other, making love, that’s the only place we can make, here, that’s not just a place to stay.

*Pan Africanist Congress