A Sport of Nature (43 page)

The namesake sang softly in his ear; she did not like attention to be on her mother instead of herself. Her breathy buzzing was warm on his skin; it roused him alarmingly, it was the warmth and humidity of Hillela, who—difficult to believe—existed within the specifications of an impersonal function, up there, the simplified, line-drawn figure from a banner or poster, among the ritualistic paraphernalia of water carafes and glasses, microphone and taperecorders, scratchpads and pencils stamped with the acronym appropriate to the occasion.

She continued with the work although it kept them apart too often; it had more, even, than the connotations of a career, and commanded more respect from him and others. He had frequently to explain she couldn't accompany him because she was put of town or even out of the country. When there was mumps or measles in the namesake's usual surrogate homes, he took her into his calm bachelor brownstone during her mother's absence, and called in one of his willing sisters to help take care of her. Hillela often brought Leonie's trophies into his company, along with Leonie. He met all kinds of interesting people he never would have met, without Hillela; more than he had known since India. They carried with them demands that stretched muscles of response which atrophy where a common background provides always foreseeable demands and appropriate ways of meeting them. There was the supercilious black journalist from South Africa, a Nieman fellow, who tried to provoke him into academic quarrels
over economic theory when sober, but with whom he got rather happily drunk whenever the fellow came over from Cambridge for a weekend. There was the black woman with purplish hollows under her eyes—combined with the bewilderment in her face, these appeared to be the marks of unseen blows—who flung herself in tears to embrace Hillela. That woman drank only Coke. It was another kind of intoxication that compelled her to explain to everyone: —She was just a kid, when we slept at her people's place that night we left the country. I'll never forget those people, they did everything for us. And look—how she's grown up just as good as her mother! How can I forget how her mother drove us to the border in her own car? Packed up food for the children. I always say it to Donsi.—

—We danced with him, that night, my cousin and I. It wasn't my mother, it was my aunt who drove you.—

Bradley followed attentively the stumbling, laughing excursion into Hillela's adolescence, which he had tried to explore for himself—wrongly, he knew—in terms of his own.

—Look at her! Even though politically we're not on the same side—

Leonie put an arm round the woman. —Bongi dear, we don't recognize any split in the liberation movement, PAC or ANC, in my house. We're a bit premature, we know, but here we have African unity!—

—Just like her mother, not like other whites at home, she's in the struggle, like a real black girl.—

—Where's your
real
black girl, Hillela?— Leonie gleefully stage-managed her party. —Somebody go get Nomzamo to meet her mother's old friend Bongi.—

Samora Machel came to the brownstone with Leonie and Hillela, though it was kept out of the papers that he was in the U.S.; Leonie was on such close terms with FRELIMO that she was now a prohibited immigrant in Mozambique as well as
South Africa. SWAPO Ovambos from Namibia bent their heads, huge with great beards meeting their thick hair, in comradely embrace of Whaila Kgomani's widow. Patrice M'ba, slender, neatly-shod and elegant as the French masters who had a price on his head in his own country, talked with another Hillela, one who spoke the language with softness, as if it had been learnt in some intimacy whose cadence it kept. With others, there was no nuance for Bradley to pick up—Marc Nz
kou, the Cameroonian who had been in prison in four countries, having each time sought refuge just before coups that changed Pan-African alliances; disaffected Ghanaians; a Somali novelist for whom Leonie had found a publisher; another exile, Reuel (surname unpronounceable), who always sat aloofly in a room as if there only for someone influential he'd been promised and who wasn't present. These were the material or rather the subjects of the Work; merely associated in her future husband's mind with the purposeful young woman's dedication to their cause.

It was taken for granted by everyone that that was what he was going to be—Leonie's fine young woman's new husband. His father thought she was very lucky to have caught his son. He said so to the boy's mother—fine young woman without much of a background, from all appearances, and saddled with a small child; Brad was so young. The mother was the one who played Schubert with Brad. —
Appearances
. He isn't concerned with appearances. If he had been, his life would have been spoiled, wouldn't it? Have you forgotten that? Brad is used to difficulties, he's not shallow like some of our other children. He wouldn't be satisfied with one of the girls he went to college with. He's like my father.—

Hillela moved again in the spring of the third year in the United States; but not on. Merely a practical domestic move, just down the road from the apartment where the namesake would never allow a door to be shut, to the brownstone whose mortgage was being regularly paid off. It was foolish to waste a monthly
sum for housing in two places. That was how he broached it. She was delighted. He saw she was delighted. She was shelling peas; she took him by the shoulders, at arms' length, and her eyes held him in that gaze of hers. —Brad, you're so good to us. It'll be so much more convenient, when I have to be away. Nomo loves the yard. Will you put up a swing for her?— And then the kisses, tasting green of the vegetable she ate while she shelled.
She
was so good, so generous with herself, as if the bountiful pleasures welled up in her, the more she gave—here, here, Brad—the more she had to give. Nomzamo, possessive about her new room, reversed her edict about doors: all had to be closed. And all was open, to him, the pale mushroom flesh discovered under sunburned breasts, the little twirled butter-curl of the navel, the cleft of buttocks, the hollow beside the poor crooked toe, the satin-walled cave of the mouth, the triumphal way between thighs. Usual enough to become erect, alone in an office thinking back on the night or early morning; but he found himself actually trembling.

The brownstone investment contained the imbalance of luxury and austerity common in the household of a bachelor in the intellectual professions. The floors had been sanded and the bookshelves put up from floor to ceiling when he moved in, but some rooms were empty of anything else, and others had pieces of inherited furniture for which no definitive location had yet been found. There was a bed of the size that can be bought only in America, hemmed in by hi-fi installations and towers of books and newspapers. There was a large empty freezer but few pots, a microwave oven and lattice wine-rack, but no cupboard for basic supplies. Some of the empty rooms quickly filled up with the child's possessions—bicycle and doll's house in the livingroom, construction sets fragmented all over what was supposed to be the study; in the bathroom, drawings of happy houses with smoking chimneys, moons and suns, and a male, female and child, figures whose faces sometimes were all crayoned black, and sometimes pink.
The bachelor and the child; there was still no provision for the median mode of living. —We've got to decide how we want it all to be. What suits us. We must sit together and make a list, room by room—

Hillela took his hand. —What's wrong with the way it is? I like your house.—

—Yes, but it's our house. There're things we need that I didn't. What kind of furniture did you like—where you lived … What are the sort of things you miss?—

She was at once, in the new familiarity of the kitchen, in her nightgown, a stranger to him, smiling. —From where? My one aunt had antiques—rather like your parents', but more elaborate. She collected. In the Embassy where I worked, everything was a diplomatic issue—gilt this and that—standard, nobody chose it.—

—I mean, when I think … I have had my paternal grandfather's desk since I was fourteen.—

—I had a pair of Japanese china cats. I gave one away, I don't know where the other is.—

—I'll get you a real cat. Much nicer. We ought to have a cat sitting here on the window-sill.—

—In Lusaka the flat was furnished.—

—I see.—

—And in Europe.—

—Well, now we're going to find out the kind of thing you really like. We can mix contemporary styles with my stuff, or we can hunt around for the same Early American period. Whatever you want.—

On Saturdays they went to antique fairs and bric-à-brac shops crowded with the continuity of his past—the cigar-store Indians as well as the samplers—and to the clinical, glassy spaces where contemporary Japanese- and Italian-designed furniture looked ready to accommodate extraterrestrials only. They bought a child's
19th-century naïvely-painted bed and modern Czech lamps, absolutely functional. She chose an old patchwork bedcover whose price he concealed from her (she might be thinking how many antibiotics for wounded freedom fighters in Machel's, Mugabe's or Reuel's country those dollars would buy). They found a New England farmhouse table to go with the six chairs he had inherited from Big Uncle Robert (not to be confused, he explained dryly, making fun of the hierarchy, with Boston Uncle Robert, the offshoot of another Burns branch). Laughing and staggering, with the namesake running wild around them, they lugged heavy pots of decorative plants to the windows. They were always within touch and happiness came simply, like sweat from activity; he looked across at her while they paused to drink coffee, and saw the faint lift of the flesh at the corners of the eyes; for him. She was, as Leonie remarked, ‘blooming'.

The house had turned out rather like the parents' house. The objects from the past gave it the soft patina of somewhere long lived in and the products of high technology brought it alive in the current phase of the Burns chronology. Mrs Burns told Brad's future wife secretly that she was going to give him the piano; it was not only for him, the little Nomzamo was old enough to begin taking lessons. Every Burns child started at the age of six or seven. She never forgot how the girl, Hillela, embraced her, moving—a stranger's—curly head against her shoulder, as if she could not find words. There was no doubt that the emotion was genuine, no doubt at all. That girl understood, all right, that with the piano Brad was being given into her hands; as a secret between two women who loved him.

There was certainty, waking up in the morning. It flowed in with the light every day. Depend on it. The beautiful young man sleeping beside her; a pale body like her own, the body familiar as that of a brother. He would get up soon and go to his office—a real office, glass rearing up to the open sky confidently without
need of protection—and come back safely every evening when the glass became a giant painting of the sunset. The huge bed into which they slid as an envelope of warmth and comfort was not on loan; nobody else's clothes would hang in the cupboard. No need to watch out about how to manage—make out, the way people do it; not here. No caution necessary about whom you are seen with, because their factions are all announced out loud with brass bands and rosettes. No need to watch for what can be traded—searching pockets for attributes: martyr's wife, expressive Latin eyes and large breasts, the probably unacceptable currency of avowal to a revolutionary cause—in exchange for a stamp on a piece of paper. Once married to a bona fide citizen of a country already existing and not still to be won back, there is full citizenship of the present.

She lay following the flaxen and gold threads shaded horizontally in the hand-woven curtains they'd chosen. —Like a field of grass.—

—Yes, they're a real success. What do we still need?—

—Nothing. Nothing.—

—There's always something you discover you still need.—

—Stop it. Stop measuring.—

His slender hand moved over her head as over a piece of sculpture. He received her fastidiously through all the senses.

—I want you to grow your hair.—

Softly stroking, now and then stiffening his fingers to press the plates of the skull.

She said nothing, perhaps took the request merely as a murmured endearment, along with the caress.

—No.— Her eyes moved rapidly under the thin skin of closed lids. —No, it's not practical.—

She jumped out of bed and then stood stock-still as if she had suddenly discovered where she was; then busied herself, drawing the curtains, picking up discarded clothing.

He closed his eyes for the pleasure of hearing her moving about near him. He put out a hand where he thought she was passing, but it caught at air.

The wedding of Mrs Hillela Kgomani and Bradley Burns was delayed several times—not through her, one would never have suspected anything capricious about her. For family reasons. The death of Mr Burns's brother; the absence of two of the sisters at summer school in Florence. She was always understanding about such things, not selfish the way most young women would have been. And his mother knew why. —She's lived. She's been through a lot in her young life.— The future husband accepted the family claims because Hillela did—Hillela had never known what it was to be at the centre of a family (future wife of the eldest son); the comfort and protection of its place in a homogeneous society. Anyway she was his wife already, they had made a home together in the brownstone that would never have been one without her. His only unease—not a fear, half-developed—was again that he might be changing her by the cherishing; whereas he wanted to be transformed by her. And so the one time the marriage was delayed for her reasons this was an opportunity for self-testing. She was going with Leonie to the country from which one of Leonie's trophies, Reuel, was exiled, where the civil war had produced a terrible exodus of Southerners to refuge in the North. He knew it was dangerous although Leonie's vocabulary turned bullets to water and blunted spears—they would ‘liaise' with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the ‘logistics' provided for military escorts and ‘safe conducts'. The cholera areas would be no go. The prophylactics were standard prescription. —We'll most likely meet a lot of great people and have an inspirational time, Brad, the horror stories you keep hearing are months old, it's always like that. I'd have spent my life on my front porch and never been any use to anyone if I'd listened to people's disinformation.—