A Sport of Nature (11 page)

Mandela's voice said that should the government fail to summon a national convention before declaring a republic, all sections of the population would be called on to stage a stay-at-home, a general strike, for three days. This would be a protest against the establishment of that republic based completely on white domination over a non-white majority, and also a last attempt to persuade the government to heed blacks' legitimate claims. The last day of the strike would coincide with the day on which the government intended to proclaim the republic. Pauline read out something again: Nelson Mandela's statement to the press that these demonstrations would not be anti-white, and would be peaceful.

Round about the Easter holidays—must have been; Sasha was home—a heavy brown paper parcel arrived at the house. Joe saw it first. —What's this?—

—Leave it to me.— Pauline slit the wrapping with a bread-knife, taking care not to penetrate the contents. Inside were piles of leaflets with the terminology that brought comfort, a confirmation of what that house was, as the art dealers' catalogues, giving evidence of the survival of rare and beautiful objects, did in Olga's house.
All freedom-loving South Africans are called upon to make the next six weeks a time of active protest, demonstration and organization against a Verwoerd republic
. Carole went round the neighbourhood stuffing the leaflets into people's mailboxes and racing embarrassedly away while their dogs barked to get at her; Pauline kept a pile in her car from which she stuck sheets under the windscreen-wipers of other cars all over town, wherever she happened to park. Joe could not make any unprofessional outward
show of partisanship but even Sasha put up a leaflet on the door of his room. It was discussed at table that blacks were stock-piling mealie-meal, sugar, and cheap tinned fish, in some rumour or premonition of being starved into submission while the police would hold the townships under siege.

Sasha was in a phase of anxious concern for physical fitness; he and Hillela played squash at a health club, that month before the stay-at-home. So it was known where Hillela was passing her time. Sasha and Hillela also went very often to the cinema together on those Highveld autumn afternoons when there is no wind, no cloud to move across the sun, summer growth has ceased but no leaf falls: the day stands still. A crime to be inside a dark stale cinema on such an afternoon, Pauline would have said. There were few other people; expanses of empty seats separated dim figures. Sasha's forearm stayed aligned, rigid and tight, against Hillela's along the single armrest between them. They saw any film, many films; neither ever told Carole, Pauline or Joe about these films.

Sasha did not accompany his cousin again to her warehouse haunt; no-one was surprised that that sort of thing did not have much appeal for him. He played chess with his father, instead. One evening Joe got up in the middle of the game the moment Pauline came home. In Joe's pale face expression was buried in complicated folds; even urgency did not show.

—You'd better get rid of those leaflets.—

—I don't think there are more than a dozen or so left … why? What's happened?—

—Get rid of them now, tonight. It's what might happen. There are raids all over the place. Four whites have been detained in Pretoria. Liberal Party people. They're watching everybody.—

—Are we going to burn them?—

Pauline didn't answer Carole; her big head was lowered, not seeing her invisible audience, now.

—Put them down the lavatory, do whatever you like. Only get rid of them. And Pauline, we'd better go through other papers arid stuff we may have. If they come, there isn't anything they won't manage to find incriminating, at the moment. And don't use our dustbin. They grub everywhere.—

Joe took two cartons of papers away in his car before he and Pauline went to bed. But nobody noticed that Sasha had not taken the leaflet off his door.
All freedom-loving South Africans are called upon to make the next six weeks a time of active protest
. Only Hillela. —What about that?— She was passing him in the passage.

—What about it?—

It was not for her to say. She was accustomed to different practices in the different houses where she was taken in as one of the family.

He did not like to linger with Hillela just outside his bedroom door. He went inside and closed it.

On the Highveld in May the sun is still bright—always bright, up there, while the air enters the nose with a whiff of winter's freezing ether; something to be remembered in tropical parts of Africa, where much of the time it gives great heat but no light, buried in soggy cloud. May was the month when Olga changed her wardrobe. When Hillela used to come back from Rhodesia to spend the holidays with her, she would help Olga carry silky dresses and delicate-coloured sandals to the store-cupboards, and bring back from them garments of suède and angora against which she would pass her cheek. Olga still regarded it as her pleasure and her duty to fit out the girl at the same time as she shopped, each change of season, for new fashions for herself. An arrangement had been made for Hillela to come shopping with her, but she telephoned to postpone their date. —People say there's some trouble in town. We'll put it off until things settle down again.—

It was the appointed day for the beginning of the stay-at-home. As young freedom-loving South Africans Carole and Hillela had been kept home from school.

—Olga planned to take you shopping this afternoon? Today?—

Pauline smiled, shook her head, shook her head, over her sister. —Hundreds of people are being arrested, but of course they're black, and so far as they're concerned, she only knows her treasure Jethro and her treasure the cook and her treasure the gardener. Meetings are prohibited. You can be detained without trial. The place is swarming with police. And Olga's shopping trip is postponed.—

Hillela went to the city, anyway—with Carole and Pauline, to see how effective or not the strike was. Joe had told Alpheus not to come to the office but the black servants went about their work and moved as usual along their own backyard network, placing ten-cent bets with the Fah-Fee runner and borrowing a cup of sugar or an onion in the exchange of plenty from white kitchens. The garbage had not been collected but rot doesn't begin to smell in one day. All the white suburbs were quiet.

So was the city; but it was a different kind of quiet. There was only the static cackling gibberish from radio communication in passing police cars. Without its volume of blacks the city had gone mute. Without its blacks it was a place of buildings. —Like Sunday.— Carole was right; on Sundays the blacks were in their ghettos, that was where they were supposed to be, then, but this was a Monday, and they had not come back. The rhythm of life of this city, that had its black morning spate and black afternoon ebb, was withheld. The half-empty streets waited for a drama that was still to be written. For the present, there was an aspect strange as natural disaster, about which there is never anyone to question: the few blacks in straggling queues at the bus-stations, in the streets, looked the woman and two girls in the eye without a flicker of any acknowledgement. Why they had come to work, whether these white people approved them as the good kind of black or thought them traitors to their cause—that was not whites' business.

Pauline drove out in the direction of Soweto but could not risk getting too near, with the girls in the car. There were police patrol cars everywhere. From the vantage point where Pauline, Carole and Hillela stopped, the distant cubes of Soweto houses were miles of tombstones in a vast graveyard; yet all the life that was gone from the city was down there; if you had been able to get near enough.

Alpheus and his girl were walking out of the yard gate as Pauline and the girls arrived home. He opened the gate for the car, and Pauline paused as it passed him. —The stay-at-home seems to be fairly successful. We've just been into town.—

Alpheus and his girl were dressed to stroll out on a public holiday. He had a way of standing quietly as if waiting to be dismissed. He smiled. —Thank you.—

In the yard, Pauline sat a moment with her hands on the steering-wheel. —What does he thank for? The information? He's always like that. If every black were like him, nothing would ever change. If Joe hadn't told him to, he wouldn't even have supported the strike. Maybe it's a mistake to have removed him from the condition of his own people. I don't know, anymore.—

Carole and Hillela also stayed at home when the school held its prayers and celebrations for the Republic. On the day, Pauline and Joe kept open house for friends as depressed and confused as themselves; when Hillela left to go and lunch at Olga's (a compensation offered for the postponed shopping trip) they were arguing over Mandela's reasons for calling off the stay-at-home on its second day—as for the national convention, no-one had ever expected for a moment the government would consider that.

—This is the lovely young daughter I didn't have.—

It was too chilly to swim, but in Olga's pavilion beside the pool Jethro carried round a whole poached salmon—the stately pink corpse laid out with the cook's radish roses and swags of
golden mayonnaise—and Hillela was allowed a glass of the French champagne served in honour of some guests, in the way of Arthur's business, from another country. The lady was settled in her chair like a beautifully-marked butterfly—amber hair and the deep blue oval of a sapphire on each earlobe, pale fingers banded with gold and diamonds and tipped with red nails. She made soft noises of approval over Hillela. Jethro paused in his procession to beam on the girl, while everyone except Arthur smiled at them both. —Miss Hilly, you been there to my country again? You staying all the time here in Jo'burg now, you don't like go there sometime see you daddy?—

Olga charmed, speaking to him in the third person. —Next time Jethro goes home, he's going to take Miss Hilly with him, isn't that right?— And Jethro bowed his way round, laughing.

—He thinks of the children in this house as his own.—

—How wonderful. You can't get anybody loyal like that, not in Europe, not at any price.—

Olga took care not to neglect her young niece in the presence of distinguished company. She turned aside from talk of the villa in Italy, belonging to these guests, which she and Arthur were being pressed to visit, and had a confidential moment with Hillela. —How is Pauline … I worry about Pauline. What is the point of all the things she gets herself involved in. That bus boycott—they had to pay in the end, surely. The Republic—it's been declared … And she neglects herself. She used to be so striking-looking. If you live here you must abide by the law of the country.—

Olga and Arthur believed you must abide by the law of the country but were once again making contingency plans not to go on living there.

—There's a delightful place on the market, not far from ours. I think the position's even better than ours. Why don't you buy a little pied-à-terre in Italy? It'd be lovely to have you as neighbours now and then—

—The way things are going, it might have to be more than that!— Olga laughed when she said it, and the butterfly lady did not pause to take in the inference: —Though I can understand, if I lived in this beautiful country, with those wonderful vineyard estates at the Cape, and those marvellous beaches, so clean—not like Europe—uncrowded, I wouldn't see much reason to go anywhere else—

Arthur broke in when he saw an advantage in doing so. —We've got a place at the Cape. Nice place right on the best beach in the country. You can come out and spend as long as you like there, any time.—

—I still think we should take up Michael's offer to look round for us in Italy.—

Arthur had a way of blinking, refusing to acknowledge the regard of others, conversely, as Pauline always felt that regard, sought it. His head hung forward from his thick shoulders while he chewed—like an ox, yes.

Hillela had her first driving lesson on the day a republic was declared; the day on which one drives for the first time is like that on which one first found one's balance on a bicycle—something never forgotten. Her cousin Clive had just passed his driving test. Stopping, starting, giggling at herself, with Clive sitting beside her she went up and down Olga's long drive the whole afternoon, pausing only when admiring Jethro came over the lawn with the cream scones and tea, and finally ending her first journey only when Olga called out that drinks were being served, and the car must be ‘put to bed'. Very carefully Hillela drove it successfully into its bay beside Arthur's two other cars.

Clive presented his pupil, an arm across her shoulders the way he would walk off a sports field with a fellow player. —You should just see how quickly Hillela caught on. She can even declutch properly, already.— By some quirk of heredity, he had Pauline's black, demanding eyes, and the red, live mouth of the handsome
male. No-one took a photograph. But Olga kept the image of the pair, the children belonging to her sister Ruthie and herself, so full of their little achievements, so happy, so innocent in their burgeoning, although she could never place the day, the year when it was imprinted.

Olga drove her niece back to Pauline's house. She embraced her and held her hands before letting her leave the car. She seemed saddened by something she could never say—all children who are sent to boarding-school know this mood in adults, who have exiled them.

—I'll see you next Monday, then, Olga. And thanks for a lovely day.—

Olga took comfort and forgiveness. —Oh yes, darling. And I know exactly what we're going to buy. Monday—if everything's all right. But I'm sure this whole business is over now.—

Nelson Mandela went Underground after the All-In African Conference Pauline had attended in Maritzburg. When he surfaced he was tried and imprisoned; and when he was taken from prison and tried once again, this time for treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment, no-one was allowed to record the speech he made from the dock; so the schoolgirl Hillela, present when her aunt played a tape-recording of his speech made at Maritzburg, was one of the few people to hear the sound of Mandela's voice for many years, and perhaps to remember it. She had the opportunity to do so, anyway.