A Sport of Nature (17 page)

—Even though Clive is so sensible. But Olga, no-one expects it, you handed her over to me the moment adolescence arrived, don't you remember? But now I'm asking you: what about her future? What do you suggest?—

Olga dug her nails testingly into her flesh because she was afraid of telling Arthur. All the time she was talking to her sister, she was anticipating the dread of telling Arthur. She feared something from him, and did not know what it was until it came: —A little tart, like her mother. I could always see it. Bad blood.—

Olga, who had tears of excitement in her eyes when she bid successfully at an art auction, who cried at school prize-givings, did not burst into tears but took on the force that appalled her in Pauline. —Like me. My bad blood. My sister, you bastard. You talk about breeding. I had to teach you how to hold a knife and fork properly. This house is full of beautiful things I work so
hard to find and you never even look at. You bring people here you don't know how to talk to. D'you know how many times I'm ashamed of you?—

Pauline and Olga met again, with Joe as adviser; Arthur had business engagements and did not appear. Olga clung to the idea of getting Len to come down from Salisbury; this was not something to be discussed over the telephone, and a letter would be such a shock to him, poor devil, because he wouldn't be able to respond immediately, ask questions. Pauline and Joe were sceptical—Olga was stalling, as to be expected. Len would come, perhaps the solution already existing would be found; maybe boarding-school, once again, was the answer that would serve. Ah, and in the holidays? Where would she go in the holidays?

But Hillela herself provided the solution. She was leaving school. Yes. She had a job, ‘somewhere to stay'; she was going to move in with other young people who had rented a house.

It was Joe she told. Joe who had bought her a guitar during the court lunch-break in Pretoria. She knocked and came into his study, as she had done so many times, with a cup of tea, and when he murmured thanks, she told him.

—Not before matric! What can you do without matric? Your whole life, Hillela. You'll prejudice your whole life! You can't do that! For god's sake, what do you want to become of you! It's only just over another year—

She gave him a schoolgirl's answer that made it easy for them both: —I'm sick of school.—

The pen he held between second and third fingers seesawed, tapping at the desk. There was a strange sad echo between them. —You're in a hurry to live, Hillela. You don't stop to think.—

She chewed at the inside of her cheek, and looked at him boldly, openly, appealingly—he never decided which it had been. He was ashamed to see she understood that although he used the present
tense, he was referring to what he and she could not talk of, in the immediate past.

What could they be expected to have done about Hillela at that time? Her father had been reached after some difficulty; he no longer lived at the flat, his second wife had left him and he was working as a mine storeman up in Ndola. Len was clearly in no position or state of mind to take any responsibility. So there was nothing for it but to let a seventeen-year-old girl think she was the one who knew what to do.

Pauline believed it her duty, for Ruthie's sake, whatever might have happened, to see the place where the girl was going to live. Hillela took her obediently to an old house with peeling wallpaper, sash windows propped open with rolled newspapers, and in the bathroom (Pauline asked to see the bathroom) a lavatory bowl stained the colour of iodine. Olga, through Pauline, offered a small monthly allowance, to be sure the girl would have a roof over her head. The girl did not refuse; it was arranged that Olga would open a bank account in her name. It is unlikely that she ever saw Olga again; Olga could not very well invite her to Friday evening dinners at Arthur's house. Pauline telephoned, for Ruthie's sake, every week or two, while she could reach Hillela where she worked in some mail-order business, but she did not last long in that job and there was no information about where she was to be found next. She had been told that if ever she had any problems, she should come to Joe—problems were Joe's profession, he could deal with them disinterestedly; that was the one advantage she had left them to offer her. It would have been against Pauline's principles to forbid any child of hers anything, but Carole was kept so busy between school and the communal activities she shared with her mother that there couldn't have been much time or opportunity for her to seek out her cousin. And Sasha—Sasha was out of the way at school. When he came home for the Christmas holidays, Hillela had left her first job,
moved from the old house, and—unless she had written to him? Hillela had never been known to write—it was unlikely he could seek her out, even if he had ‘had the heart to'.

That was Joe's phrase, when they worried about the probability, and Pauline was somehow offended by it. What harm had been done Hillela? In that house, Pauline and Joe's, she had been treated like one of their own, as long as this was possible. Pauline could not resorb into mental balance the confusion of that Saturday night's return from the mountains—the eagles' air, so easily invaded by cackle of a cheap little radio, the fear of the State and police that roused a whole resource of heightened alertness, craft and strategy working above daily life, and then the unbelievable sight that stared from within the safety and familiarity of that daily life—a child's bed with the cheerful blanket crocheted by a black women's self-help group, on the floor the shirt she chose for him only last week, the telescope bought and kept concealed as a loving surprise for a birthday; the house cat purring in the aghast vacuum. Pauline did not allow herself to think about the last time in her life she had felt a like confusion. That was the sort of trite matching for Olga to go in for—Pauline had a lifetime of clear-headedness, passionate desire to face facts, in between, separating her from the ancient history when she was a young woman and their sister Ruth forsook them all, everything they knew, for a dockside nightclub in Lourengo Marques. Let Olga and Arthur compare the mother and daughter, if it would make them feel any better. Pauline loathed sanctimonious self-justification. She never abrogated her responsibility for that stage in Hillela's life. Never. It was not because of Ruthie they had failed with Ruthie's daughter.

The girl brought no problem to Joe, so she must have been all right. Whatever that meant in the way she must be living.

It is not easily understood why Pauline did not think about what the problem might be, if there were to be one. Perhaps she
assumed that a girl who could do what Hillela had done would know how to look after herself. And that practical conclusion, in itself, referred to all that was unthinkable, must be forgotten.

It had to be forgotten for Sasha's sake, so that he could come back, always come back, without sensing the restraint of tolerance in the feel of home, come back to looking at the stars, chess games with his father and fierce political arguments with his mother. Sasha wrote letters but he never asked about Hillela, even in those addressed to Carole.
Forget it
. He had always, since it began, forgotten ‘it' when he was at school; put it away, folded very small, and in code, in the centre of himself where no-one could get at it. Whether it was shameful or precious he had not needed to know until Pauline and Joe looked at it. Now he knew it had to be forgotten. It was all right at school; he feared the feel of home, the having to come back to its smell of fruit and Hillela's hair that was home; to sensing the odour of that hair that wasn't there anymore.

At school there was nothing to fear, until one weekend that term a girl in his class hanged herself in the gym. It was a Sunday, those who wanted to go to church had been in the town, others, including himself, had gone to help build a village school for the children of black peasants. She was a white Catholic girl and had stayed behind from church that day to hang herself; one of the juniors went into the gym to fetch cricket stumps and saw her dangling from the wall bars. She was not a particularly popular or pretty girl—people laughed behind her back at the dark hair that made her upper lip look dirty—but she had her little group, played tennis in the second team, was not left out at the Saturday night disco in the school hall. Sasha was among those brought running into the gym by the screams of the small boy, and her body hanging there was something without explanation. Another girl gave it to him: their classmate was pregnant. Her terror of her parents had been greater than her fear of death.

Sasha wrote in his weekly letter home about the brick-laying he was doing, building the village school.

Sasha had no fear of his parents. They were enlightened people. They had only looked. His mother had tried to hurt simply because she was hurt. He had not been afraid until now; he had only now remembered, discovered, there was something to be afraid of. This was the time when he would telephone home apparently for no reason; was there anything he wanted sent, anything he needed? They were always cheerful, pleased to hear from him. He tried, whenever he had a chance, to reach Carole when they were out, but never succeeded. The immense shock of curiosity with which he had seen the body of the girl turned into an obsession that blocked his co-ordination in the science laboratory and at games. He was able to bury himself in sleep the moment he went to bed at night in his senior boy's private cubicle, but he woke very early in the morning, as if something had taken him by the shoulder and shaken him. Or slapped him this way and that across the face. He did not open his eyes but was wide awake behind this sham of sleep, and what he saw was not a dream but like a film he had never seen yet remembered, or the images accompanying the reading of a book. He saw the carcasses he had passed so many times unremarked, hanging from hooks in the country butcher shop near the school, where
dagga
could be bought from old women in the yard behind. The pigs and sheep dangled; the girl dangled, the laces of one of her shoes untied. Her face was the face of Hillela with head drooped to one side, like the plaster statues of Christ on the cross. How many weeks passed? How soon did girls know for sure what was going on in their bodies? With the knowledgeable girl who was his friend he brought up the subject of their dead classmate, for whom prayers had been said at school assembly. —She could have had an abortion. I'm sure we'd have found someone to do it. Poor stupid, thing. It's not the end of the world …—

How many weeks to half-term? At last he could wander into Carole's room. She was putting safety-pins round the torn hem of a skirt; he watched for a while. —Any news.—

She kept her head down.

—You haven't seen her?—

The head nodded, so that no-one other than he would witness, by the spoken word, an admission.

—What's she doing.—

—She wanted to leave the job she had, I don't know what she's found now.—

—You do know.—

Carole's hair hung over her face, a little long-haired dog whose muzzle can't be seen.

—Is she okay?—

A splotch fell on Carole's hands, and another. —She's okay, but I'm not going to talk about her with you.—

There came from him, riled by her tears of loss: —It's not the end of the world.—

Yet what sort of assurance was Carole's ‘okay'. Who would confide trouble to little Carole? He spent a great deal of that weekend searching: the old haunts he remembered, the warehouse where Hillela had played her guitar, and the kind of places he thought she might frequent now, Hillbrow discos, pizza joints, jazz clubs. He ended up, the Saturday night of his half-term break, alone in one of the cinemas where they had sat on autumn afternoons.

Sasha never saw her, not then or any other weekend or in the school holidays. It was not that she was not to be found; she was there, in the city, all right, but not for him, or surely he would have seen her somewhere, as he constantly encountered others he knew. How many months passed? Slowly, he became used to the fear. He lived with it all the time. And then too much time had gone by; if what he feared really had been, something terrible
already would have come to pass, by now. And so this meant she was safe. She would not hang from a butcher's hook with one shoelace untied.
It's not the end of the world. Forget it
.

This is not a period well-documented in anyone's memory, even, it seems, Hillela's own. For others, one passes into a half-presence (alive somewhere in the city, or the world) because of lack of objective evidence and information; for oneself, the lack of documentation is deliberate. And if, later, no-one is sure you are really the same person, what—that is certain to be relevant—is there to document? Everyone is familiar with memories others claim to have about oneself that have nothing to do with oneself.

In the lives of the greatest, there are such lacunae—Christ and Shakespeare disappear from and then reappear in the chronicles that documentation and human memory provide. It is not difficult for a girl of seventeen (out of sight of the witness of family and friends) to be absent from the focuses of a woman's own mnemonic attention in later life: to be abandoned, to disappear.

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.