A Sport of Nature

Trust Her!

The young guest did a little typing — a task invented by her host to make her feel useful — and some evenings played the guitar for him and sang those old coffee-bar songs, ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘House of the Rising Sun’, while swallows flew in and out of mud nests they had made in the brick lattice of his livingroom. He would not come to Tamarisk to swim; would not accept her casual invitation to join her, any time, when she went to the Manakas’. Njabulo Manaka had permission from the Command in exile to live outside the camp provided for refugees, but his friends were those who still lived in the camp. Some on their way to refuge had been captured in Northern Rhodesia and repatriated by the British colonial authorities; they had had to escape from the police at home, once again. Some were from the areas, at home, of hut-burnings and rural police posts whose methods of interrogation, the sjambok, suffocating plastic bag over the head, heavy boot on the spine, were less sophisticated than city facilities of electric shock. The office space up rotting stairs, the administrative titles, the few chairs were not sufficient to accommodate everyone who got away, even at that early stage, and neither did everyone have the education to be of use there. Along with other rank and file, from the cities, these men waited in the camp to be sent to the countries where the Command was negotiating for them to receive military training for their future as freedom fighters. A world refugee organization fed them meagrely, and although the host government made it a condition of refuge that they should not take jobs from local inhabitants, a few, like Njabulo himself, while waiting clandestinely made use of skills they had that most local inhabitants didn’t have: he worked as a garage mechanic.

The smell of mealie-meal and cabbage that never cleared from the Manaka flat wafted out a signal: food and privacy among friends, with a woman in charge. The cushions of the old sofa that had one wooden arm missing never recovered shape from the impress of one trio of behinds before another flattened them. The snorting gulp of the lavatory emptying was as constant a punctuation of talk as laughter, argument, and the greetings of new arrivals. In the company of Christa and Sophie there was no question of women being ignored; and hadn’t the girl slept there, on the kitchen floor, like any one of them? Many did not frequent Tamarisk Beach, feeling out of place in that high-ranking, half-naked, intellectual colloquy, and did not know the difference between the status of this white girl and that of Christa the revolutionary, one of themselves.

Newspaper cuttings and smuggled reports on the Lilliesleaf trial were coming to the office. — It’s a white man who betrayed everything, all of us! Terrible, terr-ible. That’s what I always said, we whites in the movement must be ve-ery careful, if anything happens through one of us, what is our position with blacks? Who’s going to accept us? We going to isolate ourselves, we not going to be trusted ever again … I thought when I met that Gotz fellow … I don’t know … He was too eager to tell you all about himself, make a clean breast of it, you know—ek is ’n ware Afrikaner, plaas seuntjie, maar—like some religious conversion he wanted you to be convinced of. Ag, man, I felt like telling him, I’m an Afrikaner, too, plaas meisie, it’s not such a big deal that you’ve come over to the movement. But some of them, they did think he was a catch for us—

— Meantime, they were on the hook — Christa’s soprano distress was counterpointed by the low, black bass.

— Oh my god, they were. And the way he went for the women! Well, you see what one of them let herself in for … Oh he tried something with me, but I never liked him, I never trusted him, he was clever all right, he smelled out that I didn’t and then he kept clear. Terr-ible. Terrible fellow. And look what he’s done. A white’s blown the whole High Command.—

The volubility of high spirits that was Christa had changed to hysteria. In the silence of the black men on the old sofa she struggled against some kind of responsibility that suddenly had come between them and her.

— And in Umkhonto? There’s infiltration there already. And Lilliesleaf, you’ll see, as the State brings them into the witness box, there’re blacks who were mixed up with informing there, too. Just the same, Christa. A thing we don’t know how to deal with. A pro-blem. — In this company the euphemism took on weight with a long, round African O.

— But not right among the High Command. Close to them, eating with them, talking to them about important things with a tape-recorder going under his clothes or wherever it was, even under a pillow in bed, ugh, it disgusts me. Look, Njabulo, ever since I read that this morning my hands have been shaking — look, Elias—

— No, man, traitors are traitors. He’s right. But the brothers at home will know what to do with them, don’t worry.—

— With the High Command in jail? With life, if they don’t get hanged? Not worry?—

— Anyway, those bastards who put them there, they won’t live to get old.—

— Who’s going to get Gotz in a location alley, the way they’ll get the black ones? I’ll bet he’ll live a long life of promotion in the police or become a successful private detective, spying for divorce cases. I know the Boere. He can use his tape-recorder under some more pillows.—

— Is there anything new from Umtata and Engcobo?—

— I don’t know, I didn’t see …—

— Oh I asked Johnny. He showed something from the Star, just said the usual, ‘peasant unrest’ still going on among the Tembus. ‘Agitators’ are still at work.—

— Man! Tax was almost doubled for us there from nineteen-fifty-five up to nineteen-fifty-nine. You know? Ever since, how we have been suffering! You remember Dalindyebo’s meeting in sixty-one against the rehabilitation scheme? That thing that took our land and pushed us tight together like cattle? A thousand chiefs came to that meeting. By the time I was grown up, Influx Control wouldn’t let us out to find jobs. My uncle was chief in our place, he didn’t want us forced back into the reserves, so the government made another man chief in his place. They do those things! My uncle was the one who said, They just want us chiefs to sign a piece of paper that says, destroy me, baas. He said, Let them destroy us without our signatures.—

— You know, we should have been better organized in the Western Cape, man. Too many Tembus who were working on contract around Cape Town joined Poqo instead of us.—

— Well! What do you know about the unions? ANC-affiliated unions were pretty active, I was working in one. — Christa shed her self-assumed burden at the turn towards a subject where the integrity of her contribution could not be questioned, even by herself.

Among such talk her protégée must have felt at ease, even if she were an impostor in its implied status. She had listened for years to people talking about these people; now they were real, the daily strategies of survival preoccupied them also, as these did her. There was much grumbling talk to which, at least, she could contribute, of where to get ordinary comforts they had taken for granted under oppression at home — soap and razor blades, batteries and insecticide sprays, in short supply here. People from the Command office might not meet these men on Tamarisk, but they kept close to them beneath barriers of sophistication and education through that other place in themselves nothing could alienate, where no bane of conquest, law or exile had ever touched them — the relationships codified in their language, the common embrace of their own tongue. People from the office ran classes in political and general subjects in the camp, and often one or the other would come on to Njabulo and Ma Sophie’s to continue a point of discussion that would ravel into small-talk in English and their own language. Johnny Kgomani was there a few times, when the girl was; the one who had swum out with bad news. — We are spoiled, man, that’s what it is. We all had it too soft. Wilkinson’s Sword, passes in our pockets, first-class prisons … — He watched faces waver from solemn acceptance or resentment to laughter. He had a way of drawing his lips to a line and giving a twitch to his nostrils, the skull mocking himself within the tight modelling of his face. Sophie translated for Christa and Hillela what the laughter was about.

There were not enough tin spoons or forks to go round at the Manakas’. Everyone got a plate piled by Ma and ate neatly African-style with their fingers, balling stiff pap the way a dung-beetle efficiently rolls together its cargo with the tips of prehensile legs. It was easier to learn to do that than to handle chopsticks at a Commissioner Street Chinese restaurant; and further than a few streets away from the embroidered place-mats, Bavarian crystal glasses and Zitronencréme where Hillela had herself nicely fixed up, now. There was not much chatter to join, round Udi’s table. He sometimes went out to dinner but the impression left with her was that while she was staying with him they had always been alone at meals; the servant, with that air servants have (even Bettie, Jethro) of suppressing judgments that await their time, passed behind the two chairs, presenting each dish silently to the master of the establishment before dispensing the interloper’s share. After she had been occupying her large, cool room for a few days, Udi asked her not to continue making her own bed in the mornings. — Mohammed thinks you don’t sleep in it. It upsets him.—

Her laughter, her guitar, the slap of her sandals, the clear-struck notes of her voice — each time these sounded they seemed to make a splash into the stillness of those rooms. — Does he think I liked sleeping on the floor so much I can’t give it up?—

— I don’t think he knows you slept on the floor. Though I could be quite wrong … in the kitchens, they know everything about all of us, it’s all picked up in the markets.—

— So where does he think I sleep?—

The ferny, magnified lashes moved dismissingly. Udi did not quite smile. — That’s the trouble.—

Arnold had warned her. But if this was the to-be-expected approach, broached in a European way she was supposed to interpret, she could always appear not to understand. And it would not be Udi’s way to be obliged to be explicit; although there were many things she did not know or understand that he did explain. Why wouldn’t he get up out of his eternal chair and turn off his eternal Bach and Penderecki (the latter had to be explained, his music had not been among the records in Joe’s collection) and come along to the Manakas’? He had said Christa’s friends were his friends, any time. Christa had invited him again and again. The flat was only just down the road, in the old part of town.

— I am not lonely. A dear girl to worry … I am alone, that’s different. Like the difference between the pink flamingo balanced on one leg and someone else wearing a pink skirt.—

She told him he was a stick-in-the-mud, coaxingly. Alone must be lonely. — To have another meaning for ‘alone’ there have to be two of you.—

— One can love one’s neighbours at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible. D’you know who said that true thing? Said it for me. A man named Ivan to his brother Alyosha, in a book called The Brothers Karamazov.—

Among all the possessions he had in that deep room with the frieze of live swallows, the African drums each with its ashtray and pipe beside each chair, the collection of Malian and Nigerian masks on the walls, the Fon hangings, the rugs from Khartoum with their counter-pattern of his pipe-burnings, the wall covered with shelves of damp books that gave the place its own bodysmell — there must have been that same novel. Again that novel. He didn’t have to explain about that! — I’ve read it, long ago. — She wouldn’t be expected to remember the whole of such a long book, even if she had.

— That’s why, although I believe all this (the room was kept dim against heat, the spines on the shelves shone titles of studies of revolutions, of colonialism, communism, social democratic theory) — all that Christa goes to prison for, I sit here in this chair … I can’t take part. That’s why I’m worried about this trade-union foundation thing … nearly as bad as politics. If only what Teacher — you know that’s what the people call him, our President? — says could be true: ‘People, not money’ make development. The trouble is, I’m stupid enough to believe in what is being attempted in this place since the British got out … and anyway… I can’t go away. And I can’t just sit here and approve out of books. So there you are … at this time in my life … It’s funny, some people open the bible to see what message a page has for them. I find my message any-old-where. Listen to this I’ve just read, here. ‘He avoided all the confusion and absurdity present in the efforts of those who say they are living for others’—now it goes on—‘but in fact are living on others — on their gratitude, their opinions, their recognition’. The first part of that sentence — that used to be me. The second half — that’s what I am now. The president invites me. The minister thanks me.—

— We all thank you. — She pulled a prim, pert face, her aubergine-coloured, shining eyes contradicting it. He saw that he amused her; she would not say ‘I thank you for taking me off the beach, off the kitchen floor, using your influence with the immigration men to let me stay on in this town that has no place for me, where, if I have a reason to be, it is not the kind provided for on application forms!’ Impossible for this girl not to be flirtatiously elusive, even with someone as clearly out of the running as himself; it came naturally from her as the sweat that, with the rising humidity of midday, painted on her lip a little moustache of wet that must taste salty to her lovers.

Udi showed Hillela something of the country. Around about that time — just before she started working in the curio shop, — he drove her along the coast for the weekend. — I am going to take you to Bagamoyo, where Livingstone started out to cross Africa from east to west. — But when they got as far as the new hotel where he had intended they should return to spend the night on the near side of the historical destination he had in mind, she hung back irresistibly. She ran to marvel at it from all perspectives, from sand so hot she danced across it as a fakir over the white ash of a bed of coals, to the cool of palms, remnants of the oil plantation the site once had been, now reified by a Scandinavian landscape gardener into his idea of a tropical garden. Her benefactor took his first photograph of Hillela there; the shadow of a palm tree falling before her. It could be measured for progress, like notches on a doorpost, against that other souvenir image under a palm.

He didn’t insist on continuing the drive according to schedule; was content to study, as one standing back in a museum from a canvas whose conception he could not share but was fascinated by, her greedy pleasure in the post-colonial kitsch of the place — a Holiday Inn pervasion of piped music over poolside bars and buffets composed of a German-Swiss chef’s attempt at reproducing his kind of food out of unidentifiable flesh and fowl decked with hibiscus flowers — all housed within a facsimile, as Udi informed her, of the 13th-century palace of Sultan al-Hassam Ibn Sulaiman. She ate the food with appetite. She had seen there were boats for hire and did not want to waste time accompanying the Arabian Nights-garbed black boy who would show them to their rooms. Under the sun of two in the afternoon, that was not in the sky but was the sky, had consumed both sky and sea in a stare of pure and terrible light, the black boat with the thin black oarsman slid away into dazzling evanescence. They sat side by side in the stern. The only detail to cling to in this total blankness of light was the legs of the oarsman, dark and sparsely hairy as the dried skin of a mummy. But when they reached the limit of the reef, heard the ocean open the roar of its surf at them, and the boat turned back, he, Udi, saw in the distance the entrancing pleasure palace she had been able to see all along, a mirage of the coast’s past, shimmering there.

He took his hetaira to see something he could show her, even if she wasn’t interested in Bagamoyo. They drove along narrow parallel tracks with grass stroking the underside of the car and thick shrubs running screeching thumbnails along the windows. Wind-maimed trees closed over, and they left the car. He led the way. At first she saw only the butterflies, so many they softly pulsated the still, dense air. Small white flowers scented it. She buried her face where the butterflies did. The competitive selection of nature — shiny, thick-tongued trees that had starved scrub from beneath them to make a clearing for plants and grasses; creepers and lianas closing off arbors where other trees had made the mistake of flourishing too close together — had created what seemed a garden; or there was the pattern of a human rearrangement of nature, far back, still faintly discernible under the natural aesthetic of growth, as the outline of a lost city may be traced from the height of an aircraft. Then she saw the pieces of china among the green; who had lived here, once, and owned beautiful things that got broken and were thrown away? But these were not broken vessels — they were tiles? Their azure, their unfaded brilliant designs were not designs but fragments of Arabic script? She had seen it, in her adoptive city. Wait, wait; he took her hand. With his other, he pushed aside creepers, lianas and webs: gravestones were sunken there, leaning; they were faced with the tiles, ornately embellished by their scrolling colours, like the pages of an illuminated manuscript. What was written? But he did not know the language, he couldn’t tell her. — Nothing out of the ordinary, I’m sure. Christians have a line from the bible on their tombstones, these will be the same sort of quotation, consolation from the Koran. The only interesting thing to make out would be the dates, if there are dates. I’ve always meant to come with someone who could read Arabic … This cemetery is probably six hundred years old. Under the Imams of Muscat in the Persian Gulf, this whole coast from Mogadishu to Mozambique was ruled by the Sultan of Zanzibar.—

The butterflies mistook the ceramic colours for those of flowers, they touched at the hands of the two humans as the hands touched the stones. She tried to read the braille of the past: —They lived here, there was a real palace? A town? It must have been lovely!—

— For them, yes. Many palaces. Not necessarily lived in; they moved from one to the other. They traded, in slaves principally. It wasn’t lovely for the blacks. And after the Arabs came the Germans, and then the British. No more slaves taken, but not much difference otherwise: Now Teacher — he’s about to join this country to the island as one republic. God knows what will happen. Zanzibar is still Zanzibar; the people who rule don’t have the same ideas as Teacher, the Arabs there are still the rich and the blacks the poor. I think the blacks are ready to kill the rich and try to take over… I don’t know how the combined republic’s going to work, if they don’t. But you see how it all looks as if it’s buried, like this, in another few years these elaborate tombstones of powerful people will be covered entirely, like many others, we won’t be able to find this place if ever we come back here—

— Oh I’d keep it clear, if I were the government, it’s so beautiful — the most beautiful place I’ve seen—

— For picnickers, yes? For people like you and me, out for a drive? The only monuments preserved in Africa are those of people who conquered Africans; no-one wants to keep such memories. But they will only be buried … the old patterns of power, which were based on eternals like trade winds, that have no influence in the technological world, they remain as some kind of instinct from long ago, far back. Strange, uh? So that little island and this country will be called one again, under his African socialism, as they were by the old invaders, the Imams of Muscat.—

She sat on a tombstone. — They could be taken away from here, put in a museum, at least.—

He spread his hands. — No-one wants to interfere with a site that may have religious significance for some people.—

— Then why don’t they keep it up?—

— It’s here. So long as nobody disturbs it. That is what matters. It’ll always be here, even when it’s completely overgrown. It’s not only the religious ones. We all have things like that, that will always be there. So long as nobody touches. But you are still too young.—

Immobile as the stone she rested on, she was hoping for a butterfly, hovering nearer and nearer, to land on her bare knee.

— You’ve been here often, then.—

— Yes. But not recently. And this will be the last time.—

If he wanted her to ask why, he swiftly changed his mind. — Come. We are thirsty.—

— Can I take just a small chip? — The fragment a half-stroke of script, in deep orange and blue.

— No. Take nothing. — But he laughed. — You want to make a museum out of this and yet you steal its treasures.—

They drove away, lost the site in a wake of swaying branches and stripped leaves. As they reached the main road, she called out. He braked for her. — Oh look! They’re feeding on something! — There were the butterflies again; dozens of them, settled on a splatch in the road. — It’s cow-shit! I always thought they lived on flowers.—

That was what he had brought her along for, her eager responses, her lack of pretension — to amuse him. — My poor Hillela! The most beautiful place she finds turns out to be a graveyard full of slave-dealers, and her wonderful butterflies eat dung! — But he saw that irony and disillusion could not tarnish her; pessimism a pleasantry, a manner of speaking associated with him. She was innocent: that is all anybody has ever been able to draw out of him when he has been approached by the curious as one who apparently knew her, once — rather well. He says it with a sense of discovery, adamant and unexplained.

Now at the hotel she was ready to go to her room and change into the yellow knit rag for a swim. The pink heels of the black boy in Arabian Nights dress led the way; there was one room, a large, beautiful room on two levels, with keyhole openings onto the sea, sofas, lamps, a bar corner, and one bed. Udi’s bag and hers were already in place on a luggage rack.

She was looking at the bed. A strange bed, wide, low, and enthroned on a carpeted area between the two levels. She did not turn to her companion. The corners of her mouth dented a moment, then with a flick of the head, as if a fly had been encircling it, she went over and snapped open the elegant overnight bag the rich aunt had given her for one of the holidays to Cape Town — it was all she had had time to snatch from the cottage. She took out her yellow swimsuit.

Udi left the room. When he came back they saw one another first in the mirror she was standing before, tying a piece of Kanga cloth round her breasts over the yellow suit. He felt himself a voyeur thrust in to replace the figure in a favourite painting in one of his damp-rippled books, Manet’s Nana watched at her toilet by a gross man. His face showed it; but dismay was all the girl read. Hillela smiled at him in the mirror.

— I’ve been to tell them we must have two rooms. I’m terribly sorry. I kicked up a fuss but it doesn’t help. They are completely full tonight, they’ve promised that if we stay tomorrow … Anyway, I can sleep on the sofa, they will bring bedding. Or in this climate … look at the carpet, how thick (now he was able to smile, and distance himself in one of his pleasantries) — my turn to sleep on the floor. Everyone has his chance, in this life, good and bad. — I’m really sorry, Hillela, that idiot on the phone got the booking wrong. Believe me, I didn’t expect this.—

— Oh it doesn’t matter. Are you coming to swim? I’ll wait for you. — She was wiggling her toes in the white sheepskin carpet; he saw one little crooked toe folded over a straight one.

He came out of the bathroom bearing his familiar unattractive head on an unfamiliar body; taken out of its wrappings, a hidden self appeared. It belonged to a younger, happier man, this well-made thick body with finely-turned muscular thighs and calves, and tight buttocks in black trunks. She had not been able to coax him out of his chair, but now he emerged of his own accord — or rather out of the volition of that hidden body — from the avuncular category in which a young girl would regard him. He hired skin-diving equipment and they laughed and clowned with Chaplin-flippered feet. He swam better than she did and led her into the green and purple-dark of passages undersea; be-goggled and rubber-finned, they were companionably identified with each other, the human species among other species that glowed with phosphorescence, steered past — hundreds of striped, ovoid discs making up one living streamer — or felt timidly with twiddling antennae from nests of rock, the blind silently tapping their way across the ocean bed. At sunset they walked on the beach like any other oddly-assorted couple seeking the retreat of a place like this: laughing black government Ministers from neighbouring states with their away-from-home girls, Greeks and Lebanese with their women, the wives sourly carrying their high-heeled shoes and trailing children, the mistresses hanging on the men’s arms and inclining their heads with animated affection, earning the trip.

At dinner he ordered grilled fish. Again she ate with appetite the dubious food he avoided. — If I keel over and die during the night, you aren’t responsible.—

— Don’t say that. I brought you here. I am responsible.—

His sudden moments of solemnity were something she ignored, like an embarrassing tic disturbing someone’s face.

A band shook and plucked at rattles and electric guitars. She did not seem to expect him to go so far as to dance with her; they drank wine, intensifying sea-laved well-being and the little, delightful shudders that puckered their sunburned bare arms with the night breath off the ocean. When a young olive-coloured man came across and asked her to dance, Udi watched her enjoying herself. The young man was a good dancer, someone transformed from obscurity by the grace and skill — perhaps the only skill? — he knew he had. She did more than follow; she moved as one body with the man she had never seen before in her life. Watching her, Udi had the impression she might never stop, that she might dance away, return night after night to the dance, to the man because he was the dance, something someone so young could mistake. dance her life away. My poor Hillela. An echo sounded from him, of another country and another time, set off by a body, moving thighs, embracing arms inherited from another dancer. That was what was unexplained, to himself as well, when he said it always adamantly, bluntly: —She was innocent.—

But she came back. This dancer was not one to make mistakes. Trust her! — that was what others said of her. She came back and asked for soda and ice, took a cube out of the drink with her fingers and passed it over her forehead and neck. When the young man approached again to take her away she shook her head, smiling as if he knew very well why she was smiling; no, no.

They walked on the dark beach again, late. A fine luminous mist made an element neither air nor sea; they could barely see each other. He did not speak and — a small vessel calling out at sea — she spoke only once. — I wish I had my guitar. — He knew she was happy.

In the room with its ridiculous harem-bed he found Hillela lying plumb in the middle, a sheet over her shape up to the armpits. He came out of the bathroom in pyjamas. She gave an exaggerated sigh at her luxury. Then she shifted over to one side of the bed. He stood there with the spare bedding he had picked up from a chair. She patted the empty side of the bed.

He went over to the higher section of the room and started arranging the bedding on the floor. When he turned her hand was lying palm up, rejected, where she had patted the bed.

He came and picked up a pillow for himself. But could not walk away and leave her: her generosity, her honesty. He sat down on the bed and slowly took the sunburned empty hand. Her head was sunk deeply in the billows of down, her curly hair bleached the colour of bronze-brown seaweed and sticky with damp. Against cheeks shiny, reddened and slightly puffy with the fever of sun her eyes were glistening convex black in whose expression he saw only himself, himself as she must be seeing him.

She smiled, in spite of that. — Mohammed won’t know.—

He kissed the hand with his sad, marked lips and, not familiar with the old-fashioned gesture, she casually pulled the hand away. On his back, laying himself out straight beside the body of the girl that was volume and weight and softness, the angle of each flexed and relaxed limb rounded-off by the soft bed as a Matisse odalisque has no angles or Picassos of a certain period have no joints in the continuous curved lines of bodies in a bacchanal, he took the hand again. The odd-assorted couple were now figures on a tomb; he put an end to the image in himself by gently coming alive to turn and give her a child’s goodnight kiss on the cheek. But it was a long time since one of her surrogate parents sent her to sleep like that; she turned obediently, as a woman, so that he kissed her on the mouth, and was received by her mouth. She drew close to him and although she did not touch him with her hands, her body laid its caress along his side. For a long time he stroked her hair while she waited for the next well-known moves in love-making, and he waited to speak.

— Hillela. — Try out the possibility by pronouncing her, invoking her. Take again the hand, the empty hand he could not fill. — I can’t, Hillela. Since my wife died it’s finished.—

Of course he saw the girl misunderstood: so this was the famous love you read about in books, the eternal faithfulness, remote as the love religious people know for a god you can’t see or touch.

— It’s not out of some vow or conviction, some such nonsense. It’s not at all even what Petra would want. She wasn’t that kind, trying for promises ‘you’ll never marry another woman’. My god no. From time to time, we both … we had others, and neither of us made a fuss. It wasn’t important for us while we were together; it only concerned each of us separately, you know. So it’s not that.—

— Oh it doesn’t matter. — The phrase had served for the discovery there was only one bed; it served just as well for the decision that there was to be no obligation to make love. And in its banality — its innocence! yes — it absolved from humiliation, from loss of manhood, even from the pricklings of impotent desire, the shame of wanting what one was not able to take. He did not have to repeat with this child who by some instinct understood the male, loved men as one is allowed to say a man ‘loves women’, the panting and seesawing and desperate, hang-head feebleness (oh to take a knife and cut the useless thing off) that the bodies of bought women had abetted while bored and pitying, despising. Her ordinary little phrase brought about something else, if she could not — bless her — bring sexual relief. He could tell her. You could tell her anything; it suddenly became possible just because Hillela was there, lying beside him. — It’s because I killed her.—

There could be no experience available to make it possible for the girl to deal with such a statement. She corrected him mechanically from a source that was all she had: something mentioned by Christa.:—No, no, she died in an accident.—

— Yes. I was driving and I killed her. It was just before dawn and I’d insisted we drive all night to get home from a trip. I must’ve fallen asleep a moment, she didn’t have the seat-belt on, she was asleep. She never woke up, she was flung out and when I looked for her everywhere, the road, the bushes, she was dead, there. I’d hit a buck that must have jumped out into the road. Headlights blind them. She was quite dead. And the buck was still alive. Dying, but alive. I had no gun to shoot it. I’d killed her but I couldn’t kill the buck. I sat with the buck, because she was dead … and the buck knew there was someone there with it. That night was over, light came, and it looked at me all the time while her eyes were closed. It was a female, too. It looked at me until I slowly saw the sight going from its big eyes. I can tell you, I followed it wherever it was going, dying out. I followed all the way. And then. They were both dead and I was hours alone on the road with them.—

He was stroking her hair again, comforting her for what he had told her.

— I’ve never seen a dead person.—

— I know. I can see it in your face.—

— But you didn’t kill her. That’s not killing.—

— I was driving, I’m alive, I killed her. Dead asleep. And the buck, the buck was witness. My body seems to know. So there it is. Since then, my body calls me murderer.—

She made no routine protestations, offered no platitudes of sympathy. They lay a while; what had now been put into words for the first time must find its level in consciousness. Then she got up and went over to the miniature refrigerator and bent to choose. The short spotted cotton shift she wore hitched over her rump as she came back to the bed with a bottle whose label’s lettering had run with condensation. — I think it’s beer. — She took a swig and handed it to him. — You should go and live somewhere else. Then it will be all right again.—

He pulled himself up against the pillows to drink. — The murderer can’t leave the scene of the crime.—

— Udi, it wasn’t this road?—

— No. — But she would never know; intimacy and confidence come and go between an odd-assorted couple like the moon passing in and out of clouds.

She sat cross-legged on the bed, schoolgirl style.

— I’d go away if something terrible like that happened to me. Somebody of mine dead. Nothing really terrible’s happened to me, so I suppose … Something that did — something I did — it seemed awful at the time, everyone said how awful … but … not like dying! D’you know why I had to leave home? Where I lived with one of my aunts? My cousin and I used to make love. He was a bit younger than I was. For a long time, we made love.—

— A real cousin? First cousin?—

— Our mothers are sisters.—

— How did it come about?—:

— My fault. — The moon passed behind a cloud again. He respected that. He leaned over and put his arm round her, shared the beer turn-about. Hillela choked because she had begun to laugh while drinking. — When they found us. — She gasped, laughing. — It was like the three bears. Who’s been sleeping in my bed?—