A Sport of Nature (47 page)

What has been, what was, what will be: nobody else can decide.

That was understood, lying tenderly apart in the biggest bed in America. His choice, to lie apart; he could have been comforted, why not, he knew he was still loved the way he had been loved. It was never any different. Staying would not have made this house safe for him
.

But that is what is always said by the one who is going
.

No need to leave yet
—
nobody knew, and nobody could know there was happiness in that house, yes, still there, during those months. Like brother and sister lying there, tempting
—
but he thought it was wrong. Not for us. Sometimes he panted in his sleep, from his wound. But nothing to be done; tenderness only salts. There would have been many more wounds, because that love would never be any different
.

That's what is always said
.

He was thinking about the other one all the time
—
nearly all the time; sometimes both forgot, in the little American family of three, playing in pyjamas in the tropical warmth of the brownstone's insulation. What's he like? What's he like? You were thinking of nothing else but never said it. You sweated it. The child sensed something; tugged uneasily at those frizzy plaits. You tweaked her ear or nose
—
What'you staring at, Nomikins, what's the matter
.

Nothing like. With all the intelligence and willingness and understanding shining the golden-brown lantern so steadily from the dark side of your gaze, you would not be able to follow. Because of that, he could never have told you what he told me. And because he could tell me, and I could follow
—
no, you'll never follow, it can't be done in this old house full of heirlooms, the things handed by fathers to sons. A desk, a complete set of The
New Republic,
and soon a piano; that's heritage
,
here. Possible only to stroke your hair, if you'll allow it, and let them say what they like; you will never explain to anyone why we stayed on a while, your first little family (you'll play the piano, one of the tall, hunch-shouldered American girls will give you more brothers and sisters for your first Nomikins), and although you'll never follow what he's like, what she's like, the one who is going, you did know, oh you did know
—
no-one can draw a proxy signature beneath a life
.

The other will not die. Not even a herd of elephant will trample him out. He is not beautiful, he carries his Parabellum, he knows how to deal with sons, in him the handclasp compresses the pan-pipe bones of the hand with which it makes convenant; it is, on recognition, irresistible
.

The General did not many her for some time—or Hillela did not marry him. They moved about Africa, warp and weft of purpose, trading decisions and carrying out, separately and together, the actions these required. He made the decision over the namesake: —Send her to a decent school in England. An eight-year-old child can't be dragged around the place, she needs a settled life, and that schooling is still the best in the world. I have two kids there. Give her the advantage. I'll pay.— He meant it, but it was not necessary; Hillela had her connections to revive on behalf of Whaila Kgomani's daughter. If Nomo doesn't know her father's tongue, she hasn't grown up speaking the colonial-accented English of her mother; she was educated at Bedales.

It became evident afterwards that Hillela went on several missions for the General, to countries where he could not go, and to which, on her decision, he could not trust anyone else to go. At the beginning she had the unique advantage: no-one in Africa yet connected her with him. If he had been seen to spend the night in an hotel with a young white woman—well, he had never been known to be able to resist a pretty girl, particularly a white one. Such girls have no names. People who came across Hillela in various African states knew her as one of the aid functionaries whose criss-crossing of closed frontiers was tolerated by all sides for reason of what they could hope to get. She looked up old friends without their realizing she was no longer doling out soup powder; and if they did, as perhaps on the night she dined with Tambo, Amojd and Busewe (upgraded) in Algiers, maybe it was the mission itself, on that occasion, to do so. It has never been clear what her position with the African National Congress was, beyond that of Whaila Kgomani's widow, at that period. And the uncertainty of future political alliances between countries makes it always wiser for references other than ‘she played her role in active support of her husband's determination to restore
peace, prosperity and justice to his country' to be excluded from data available at the General's Ministry of Information and Public Relations.

Anyway, he took her with him to Mozambique in 1975 when he attended the independence ceremonies and saw another of the community of exiles return to his own country as President. The official invitation was in itself a political statement; his old friend Machel showed by it his country's non-recognition of the regime that had ousted the General from his. If the General brought along a consort who was not his wife—she was the widow of a martyr to the cause of African liberation, and Machel had known her personally as one of Leonie's American lobby. And if once she drove in some official car past the old Penguin Nightclub where her mother had danced night after night, she did not know that that was the place, that it had ever existed: closed up, along with all the other nightclubs, and the prostitutes whose kind of freedom had excited poor Ruthie were being re-educated for occupations more useful to a country than the sexual relief of white South African tourists. She could not search for any face among the crowds. It belonged to the recollection of the child beneath the palm tree, and that was overlaid by so many shadows.

In Africa the General wore a black beret bound with leather in place of the gold-braided cap. He grew a beard. It was not only to the great occasions of flag-raisings she accompanied him, sitting there with the growing feeling—binding them together more than if their flesh had been in contact—that next time, or the year after that, he would be the one making the victory speech. Her experience in Africa made it possible to take her even to his bush capital in the expanding area his army was able to declare liberated territory. She was as accustomed to drinking contaminated water and eating off the land as she was to
making dinner-table conversation with a Minister. He took her everywhere; a characteristic of the qualities developed by a mistress that she should be, unlike a wife, someone who can be taken everywhere. The language of their intimacy was as much the terse anguish when supply lines of ammunition broke down or a go-between dealer failed to deliver the Stalin organs, Kalashnikovs, Israeli UZI submachine guns, Belgian FAL assault rifles dearly paid for in trade-offs and money, as it was love-talk. Her sexuality, evident to every man watching her pass as he sat in the bush oiling his gun, or stood at attention for review before the General, was part of the General's Command. For him it seemed to grow, to be revealed with the success of his push towards the real capital. Her small, generous, urging, inventive body was the deserts of success; some bodies are made only for consolation, their sweetness touches with decay. But he had known from the first time he made love with her that that was only an experience of her possibilities—without realizing exactly what these would turn out to be.

Everyone has some cache of trust, while everything else—family love, love of fellow man—takes on suspect interpretations. In her, it seemed to be sexuality. However devious she might have to be (he realized he did not know why she should have wanted to be chosen by him) and however she had to accept deviousness in others, in himself—she drew upon the surety of her sexuality as the bread of her being.

You cannot run a country, in exile you cannot equip and train an insurgent army, augment it with villagers, local recruits, establish safe houses both within and without your country, without having an instinct for finding the right people to whom responsibility may boldly be delegated. Right at the start of their relationship he offered this bedfellow a mission for which she was an unlikely candidate—by anyone else's judgment. But
he did not solicit any. It was Hillela, on one of those working trips to Africa while she and the namesake were still living with Brad, who went to the safe house in a country to which the General's eldest son had been taken when he was successfully kidnapped. It was an Arab country that had agreed to this hospitality. He had to disappear; a strategy to confuse the General's enemies, with whom his son had allied himself, by not transporting him directly to the bush capital. Hillela was sent because she would be so unexpected an envoy that the hit men who had had to be employed for the job would be uncertain what interests beyond the General's her presence might represent, and therefore would be more likely (the General repeated the phrase without elaboration) to be careful with the young man they had abducted.

Her arrival also threw the defiance, anger and fear of the young man into confusion. All he had prepared for the confrontation with his father was become a set of cumbersome armour of which this feminine apparition was not worthy; for which his posture was useless. Whatever explanations she gave, he was sure he did not really know who she was and why she was there. She could not be from the CIA, because the CIA had helped oust his father. Was she from the KGB? Or from Castro?

She said his father had sent her to see if he was ‘all right'. They were figured-over, the two of them and his guards, like patterned cloth, by lozenges of orange and purple light that came through closed velvet curtains in a suburban villa. He would not speak to her. She told him that what he had been hearing in the capital for the past six months was the regime's propaganda: the General was not routed and in retreat, the whole of the Northern region was liberated territory, he was now receiving massive material and other support from outside, village after village was welcoming his men. Within the year he would be in the capital. —Whatever happens to the government people, he can't
leave you to be among them. He wants you to know that is why you are here. I know you don't believe it, yet, but he doesn't want you to come to any harm.—

A servant interrupted with coffee and sweetmeats glazed with honey. The General's son ate. He had the air of unreality of one taking the last meal before execution, unable to imagine the actuality of what he dreaded. She could not open her mouth to reassure him.

Back in her hotel room between visits to the villa, she lay following the screen of the television with the sound switched off; she did not know, so far removed now from the General's presence, whether there was any reassurance to be given. How long had she known the General? Behind the shared territory of exile, the shared beds in safe houses and Intercontinental Hotels, there was a whole lifetime of which not even the testimony of souvenirs, as in a beautiful room in Eastern Europe, was open to her.

She bought jeans and T-shirts and took them to the villa. The heat hammered at the walls. It was a prison—the General's prison—with marble-topped tables, thick hot carpets, and pictures, to be made out in the moted stuffiness, someone must have chosen. Furniture can be anonymous but someone has always chosen the pictures. The General's son did not speak to her during those days but they experienced together, a drowsy gaze, over and over, on the Swiss alpine view and the Belle Epoque woman in a carriage at the Place de l'Opéra; the room buzzed with prayers being said in the adjoining one by the off-duty guards, who were not allowed to leave the house for the mosque. After a few days he still did not speak but appeared in the clean clothes looking like one of the black students, eager to demonstrate to free somebody, who came to hear her speak on American campuses. He was slim, with a bunched mouth and delicate pointed jaw; no resemblance to his father, his fingers
were long and tentative in their movements. The favourite must have been a fragile child. Even though she had a child of her own, the abstract relations of her own childhood—Len the Other Man, Ruthie dancing, dancing in a nightclub—meant she had no understanding, was free of the patricidal and infanticidal loves between parents and children. It was another advantage her aunts had not intended.

In her hotel room, piped music instead of prayer came through the back of the bedhead from the room next door while she telephoned Reuel. There was no direct dialling to the safe house he was in, in another country. A chocolate had been placed on a paper doily inscribed:
The Management Wishes You Goodnight
. She was eating it by the time the connection was established, and he heard that her mouth was full, a signal of calm audacity that reassured and at the same time delighted him.

—Not a mark on him. But it's an awful place.—

—How's that? I arranged for a house, a nice house!—

—It's hot and ugly, and the curtains are kept closed all the time.—

He was laughing thunder down in his deep chest. —If he's got any sense, he'll never be in a worse place, my God, if you call that awful … ! You've been a lucky girl.—

She told his father he wouldn't speak to her. But the day she was to leave and explained he would be following, separately, to his father's bush headquarters, he stood up—for a moment she thought he was going to clutch at her physically, not wanting to be left. —Who are you?—

He knew her name; she had given it to him the first time she saw him, and seen disbelief in his face.

—I'm your father's lover. My husband was assassinated seven years ago.—

He looked at her; appeared to be looking at her dark eyes, all shining pupil, her tight-skinned cheeks, mouth with the
beginnings of the lines of her most habitual expression—generous, wary confidence—overprinting the relaxation at the corners of her lips, but he was following something else. Every feature of her—the breasts slung from the angle of bare collarbones, the dent of her navel visible under the thin cotton of her skirt, the ringless brown hands and dabs of red paint on her toenails—all these, of face and body, were markers and footholds showing the way. He had enough of his father in him to recognize this one not only knew the need to move on, but also what she would not reveal to his father: what it was necessary to do, to bring this about.