A Sport of Nature (41 page)

I remember when we read it: ‘I want to know you, and then to say goodbye'
.

Sasha

They say you did have a baby. I can't remember whether you liked children
.

There were no scandals. Memoranda carefully prepared, files of cuttings up-to-date. No-one could catch her out in inaccurate statistics; she could always support her strongest and most challenged assertions, breaking down in a way new to her any resistance she encountered. At finger-suppers she convinced minority-report dissenters. Before a Senate committee she placed the long-term consequences, for United States interests, of backing repressive regimes in Angola, South Africa, Namibia, when these countries inevitably would become independent black states before the end of the century—and to whom would they supply their oil, gold, platinum, uranium, titanium, then? Those who had recognized them in their struggle for human rights (‘freedom struggle' was not in the preferred vocabulary for the West) or those who had ‘actively ignored' them? She showed a quick aptitude for the invention of euphemisms so like that the State Department could have taken them for their own; this one was to be understood to
mean that although it might have to be accepted that no ‘military hardware' would be forthcoming, no ‘humanitarian aid' was being given, either.

A senator, seated beside her drawing right-angled shapes while she talked, flourished a circle round them. —Mr Chairman, experience has shown that there is no way of controlling how so-called humanitarian aid is used. If it's given in the form of money, it goes to buy arms, not medicine. We are meddling in destabilization. If it's given in kind—look what happened to the famous Congo chickens: I'm told it's a fact that the ‘starving' Congolese sold the cans to specialty stores down in Rhodesia.—

But the circle was not closed. Hillela took something out of the wallet in her attaché case. —Mr Chairman, may I have permission to pass this round?—

They had already received from her several information sheets; the bush schools run by FRELIMO in the area of Mozambique where it was in control; clinics run for the refugees in Tanzania; figures for the number of villagers harassed out of their homes by the South African army in Namibia. But this was a photograph of the family kind those present themselves had in their wallets. The spokesman for the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs twitched his small moustache like a scenting rabbit; the namesake, her ecstatic black face under a stocking cap, looked out at him from snow. She went politely from hand to hand. What on earth was the purpose? The company was able to glance over human features as if over statistics, as accustomed to concealing embarrassment as to concealing lack of interest. The speaker's dark and brilliant eyes let her colleagues off nothing. She looked at them all with an acceptance of what they were thinking; with a confidence against which there was no defence. —That black child is plump and cared-for in the United States. She was born a refugee who has never seen her father's and mother's country. She's mine, so she's lucky. If she were one of those in Africa, her
life would depend on a handout of soup powder, the installation of a well to give her clean water, and a clinic to immunise her against disease.—

Leonie embraced her after such triumphs. Though it was not at all certain whether it was this emotional retrogression—intentional or not—or the hard work that went into the rational case presented, that succeeded. Funds were voted. Hank (as the Assistant Secretary of State's African Affairs man was known to his friends) was quoted at cocktail parties: —Lust is the best aid raiser.—

Not the breath of a scandal, nevertheless. Hank never had the good fortune to pursue further the possibilities he was sensitive to in Mrs Kgomani. Professor Kleinschmidt, a divorced man, returned from his sabbatical and would have liked to let the young woman stay on in the house but could not tolerate the noise of the child. The child was over-indulged by everybody, precocious and spoiled. The brat already knew how to exploit being black. So he had to make the choice. People invited him as Hillela's dinner partner from time to time but it was apparent that those who schemed to match them failed. Herbert Kleinschmidt was lonely, yes; but who could think of Hillela Kgomani as lonely? She was Leonie's promotion, Leonie's working partner; and Leonie's friendships were thickly gathered in, Leonie's emotions ran grandly as cables under the oceans back and forth between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. Leonie and Hillela had no nuclear family but their distant ties, obligations, dependants, held them fast.

Of course Hillela had the body. The old, like Leonie, have no body except in its necessities for food, drink and shelter, and its creakings of pain. The body quickly knows—is the first to know—it has not been shot. It is still alive, alive in the Eastern European snow as in the tropical sand-bed. But it also knows when it is being ignored. Neglect of the body doesn't mean not washing or cutting toe-nails. It's a turning away from its powers.
It's using it like a briefcase, to carry oneself around, instead of living through it.

Hillela Kgomani travelled; even to Africa sometimes with Dr Adlestrop, those years; the interests of their commissions coincided or Leonie contrived that they should. With the pride of a teacher leading a school outing Leonie arranged for unmarked planes, boarded on hidden airstrips shaved out of the bush, to take them behind the guerrilla lines in several countries. They ate with bearded commanders who were old (scholarship) students of Leonie, but had had to finish the kind of education they needed in the Soviet Union, Cuba or China, depending on the alliances of their movements. Some had known Whaila; the grip of the hand, when Leonie introduced the young woman, tightened; she had been taken out of the ranks of useful onlookers and silently accepted among the commanders in their garb composed of distinguishing styles of many liberations, from the Risorgimento to the Thousand Days, from Liebknecht to Castro. She watched men—like those who had shared the hospitality of the Manaka flat, drinking beer and grumbling because they couldn't buy the brand of razor blade they had used in Soweto—drilling in a mismatch of captured fatigue dress, and sitting about tending their weapons, talkative and expert as the tinsmiths in Lusaka market fashioning their buckets and braziers. There were women among them. Enclosed in third-hand battledress, the generous breasts (like her own) characteristic of black girls seemed to have atrophied to meet conditions; their chests were the hard shields of males'. Only their feet escaped, bare. Hillela pushed off her sandals and socks while she sat in the hot, paper-bag glow of a tent, writing notes for a report. All became typed paper. The voices that brightly skimmed the surface above sleep in the early morning were at first puzzling, then—again, as always—the most familiar assurance; words that meant nothing (a language not understood), and everything; the rep's ‘boy' talking in a dorp street outside
the car, Jethro heard while face-down beside the pool, and the spill of harassed chatter flying through the service doors as the waiters served the schoolgirls. It was a home. An audile, sensory home like that soundmen provide for the sequences of film where there is no human speech, holding up their microphones in an empty room where the quality of silence contains vanished voices, vanished heartbeats.

Single-file paths behind the training camp had been made by bare soles and the brush of heads against twigs. They were so tentative they disappeared into the bush here and there or came to a stop at the obstacle of a red earth funnel higher than a man, built by ants. There was no concept of ‘place' in this wilderness, fiercely undefined in reconquest by its original inhabitants of territory defined on maps of colonial possessions. She and Leonie found their way not to a place but a presence of several hundred people there in the bush like companies of storks or cranes come upon when insects surface in one area or another. They had no more possessions than scavengers. They waited; or at least the only aspect they had was that of waiting; as Hillela saw human beings do when they have lost everything of the past, have no hold upon the present, no sign that there is a future. They appear to be waiting because there is no state appropriate to their existence. Leonie picked a baby like a phoenix from ashes of a small fire; its whole small being was fascinated by the gingerish hairs, flashing with sweat, at either corner of her smiling lips. Family love casts out squeamishness. She touched scabby heads and called out cheerfully. —Scurvy. And look at the belly—oh you potbelly, you—kwashiorkor as well.—

Hillela returned with the freedom fighters who brought maize porridge or beans by way of the paths, once a day. When the children had eaten, they roused from the dust and began to play; they slowly began to chase and laugh, make weapons out of sticks. When she smiled at them, they pointed the sticks
and stuttered machine-gun fire. And then the fuel of food was burnt up, they lay about on their mothers again, and the women searched for lice in their hair, whether there were lice or not. The ritual was all that was left of providing for their children's needs. A feeble old man fought the children for the roll of peppermints Hillela found in her pocket. She grabbed the stick he was wielding—but whom was she to defend? He was so thin that pulses beat visibly at his temples and jumped beneath the skin on his hands.

Leonie knew better. —First your peppermints, then your clothes, then your malaria prophylactics—and what use will you be to anybody, then? What they need is what we're going to go back and get sent out here, high-protein foods and basic medicines. What they need is for the U.S. to stop giving covert aid to keep those gangsters down in the capital in power.—

One of the freedom fighters who perhaps understood a little English watched the old woman with something of the incredulity with which the filthy children had surrounded the distributor of small discs sweet and strong, the taste of a whole other existence. His gaze fingered Dr Adlestrop's assurance as if she were a magic crone from a life he used to know—someone who brushed with others in city streets, who saw clothes in shop windows, travelled in taxis, drew pay once a week and walked into the fanfare of talk and music in the rich fermented scent of bars.

‘In addition to the large number of fighting personnel, which includes women as well as men (no figures available because these would provide useful information to the government forces), there is the added logistical burden of feeding and providing minimal care for hundreds of refugee families. These have been victimised by the government forces for aiding freedom fighters, or in some cases were simply caught up in areas where fighting was intense and no normal life—planting of crops etc.—was possible.' In hotels and planes all was transformed into reports, studies
and working papers. The phrasing of a banality could make the difference between approval or rejection in a committee room thousands of miles away from the bush, the dry seams of river-beds, the deserted sands and green-massed forests passing under the plane's belly. The inclusion of an observation better left out could give the high-minded (Lord save us! Those are the dangerous ones, worse than the open reactionaries, my dear Hillela) the chance to carry a ‘no' vote.

The self-same sight of people in a place that was no place, waiting: these were over the border where they had fled to another country, saying they had been beaten and robbed of their cattle when they would not help the freedom fighters. That sight would not be transformed into typescript and serve as self-righteousness for people who experience nothing for themselves and have not the courage to distinguish between ends, only to condemn the ugly necessities to which means are driven. Lines crossed out, the sight crossed out with a finger tapping on the upper case X. If she could have found the ones who ran away down the corridor of Britannia Court, would she not have shot them with her souvenir Makarov?

Leonie Adlestrop's special position in Africa made it possible for her to move with ease back and forth from conservative to radical regimes, in fact, everywhere except to South Africa and Namibia, where she had been declared a prohibited immigrant—and so proudly joined the status of political refugees from that country. —We can't get in, but we can kick up a heck of a lot of dust outside, can't we, Hillela?— They were in Dar es Salaam for a day or two, and Hillela, keeper of the papers and briefcases, was part of Dr Adlestrop's gatherings of useful contacts in the bar of the Agip Hotel. Neither Udi nor Christa encountered her, she was not available—in meetings, when Christa phoned—and Udi she called from the airport only just before she left; a voice he could attach only to the flamingo-girl in the pink skirt.

—How do you look now?— It was his way of asking many things.

—I don't know.— The line drew a long hum of passing time between them. —I really don't know. I'm so busy.—

—I didn't know where to reach you—well, I could easily have found out from the office here. But I just wanted to tell you you'd be all right. That time. And it might have been the last thing you could bear to hear.—

—Udi, I've got to go now.—

—Yes of course. But if you suddenly phone when you know the flight is going to be called, it means you want to say something, Hillela.—

—Udi? No … just to say hello. I'm too tired to think of anything—and there are meetings to prepare for the moment we arrive back in the U.S. So much I haven't written up.—

—You, a bureaucrat. I didn't think that was the way you'd be all right. Well.

—What other way is there. If you're not carrying a gun in the bush you have to do it with documents and committees. I'm not a bureaucrat, I have to use bureaucracy.—

—You must be formidable. You sound it. But I can't imagine … Hillela, your voice is just the same, you know.—

—You have to dig up bad consciences and good intentions and put them both on the line. Give them no out. Confront them with the way you've calculated they can give you what you want while they're using this in their own interests. That may be to build up one of their ‘caring images' before some election or get them promoted to responsibility for a funded project. You have no idea what it's like, Udi.—