But that was no reason. Pauline could offer no reason except the one unexpressed because he knew it well enough: Hillela didn’t resist, it was simply that she seemed not to notice all that Pauline and Joe had to offer that was worthwhile. It had been a misconception to think she had to be rescued from among Olga’s objets d’art, Olga’s Japanese screens placed before the waste ground of torn plastic and human excreta, Olga’s Carpeaux Reclining Nude (even if its provenance was merely ‘attributed to’) in place of surplus blacks, not fit for any labour force, sleeping under bushes. To resist Pauline would at least have meant to have belonged with Olga; why didn’t Hillela understand that was the choice? The only choice. Pauline was moved by her ignorance, innocence one must call it, at that age. She could not be abandoned. Pauline said it as if a note from the school had just informed her of the child’s undetected astigmatism or dyslexia: —She’s a-moral. I mean, in the sense of the morality of this country.—
Pauline had won the battle with her son; she had no need to think about it. But from the jagged glass of his attack needle-splinters were travelling unfelt through her, maiming the exercise of certain powers in her as a limb is maimed by the lodging of a minute foreign body in the bloodstream, and forcing her to use substitutes, as the body adapts another of its parts to take over the function of the nerve-damaged one. She no longer surged forward to provide what would keep the girl’s mind healthily engaged with the realities of the country, but apparently was trying to circle round what might occupy that mind itself, what needed to be dealt with and got out of the way.
She would never come empty-handed. She did not bring fancy clothes and chocolates as Olga did, but the shared instinct remained, vestigial, from the neighbourly conventions of her discarded Jewish childhood. She wandered into the girls’ room when her own daughter was not there. — Look what I found. Ruthie’s things. We each had boxes like this one, but mine was yellow. They were supposed to be for sewing, although we never did any …—
When Ruthie finally went away, her sisters came in and packed up her possessions as if she were dead. Len had wanted them given to charity. Pauline and Olga took some souvenirs of the life Ruthie had abandoned; might she not come back for them some day?
Their sister was not dead; here was her daughter; maybe she had come for them.
The box was padded and covered with water-marked taffeta that buzzed under the girl’s drawn fingernail like breath over a paper-covered comb. There were spill-stains and a seal — red nail-varnish dried stony. Pauline sat on the bed beside Hillela, a fellow schoolgirl, while they picked about together in the box. Pauline explained tarnished metal wings and crowns from the war. — Insignia. Our boyfriends sent them, we had pins attached at the back so we could wear them as brooches. We were so ignorant and silly. And so far from the war. No air raids, no blackout. No rationing. No brothers. There’s something about a colonial society that trivialises. Often I think: the fact that civilians here missed out the war has got something to do with whites feeling they can avoid the reality of the other experience, too. Even though that’s all round them. Being black, living as blacks have to — it’s a misfortune that happens to somebody else … oh what’s this? Old bus tickets … we used to live in Mountain View, one time.—
There was an autograph book with gilded edges: —‘Speech is silver, Silence is golden’—that was contributed by a teacher, for sure, and what about this one, ‘When in this book you look, and on this page you frown, think of the friend who spoilt it, by writing upside-down’. We kids didn’t think anything could be wittier.—
A small box within the box held a doll’s comb and hair-rollers. — Oh for her Shirley Temple doll, I remember, she wouldn’t let me touch its hair—
Hillela found a photograph.
Pauline looked from the photograph to her, from her to the photograph.
— That’s you, Hillela, that’s you.—
A little girl whose stomach pushes up her dress stands in a public playground before a seesaw and swings. The shadow of palm fronds lies on the ground. Her long hair is rumpled into a topknot and sand shows in matt swathes clinging to her stumpy, baby legs.
— Where was I?—
— Oh at the sea.—
— Is it Lourenço Marques? — Hillela was looking for landmarks in a tourist’s amateur focus where towers tilt and historic features are cut off.
Olga explained sexual intercourse when the time came for that; now it was Pauline’s turn to find her appropriate moment.
— Yes. Yes. It must have been Lourenço Marques.—
Pauline had evidence other than the shadow of a palm tree. — My sister went on a holiday with you to Lourenço Marques when you were two, and it’s not quite the way they’ve told you … if they’ve told you anything. She’s quite unlike me in most ways, but I understand her. You see, she had been handed over from our father to Len, there were his mother and aunts watching her waist to see if she was going to be pregnant, as she should be, in the first year. They were an orthodox Jewish family — oh it’s only thanks to Ruthie, whose name poor old Len never speaks, that he’s been freed to marry his little Cockney waitress! There were the family dinners on Friday nights, the cake sales for Zionist funds, and especially the same old parties — weddings, barmitzvahs; those tribal Jews don’t know what it is to enjoy themselves spontaneously. Ruthie drank whisky and other nice young Jewish wives didn’t, Ruthie danced as if she were not married, with the prospective husbands of other girls. She went on holiday to Lourenço Marques and she fell in love, yes — but it was with what she suddenly imagined real life to be. She fell in love with that wailing fado, she wanted passion and tragedy, not domesticity. Passion and tragedy were not where she would have looked for them, here — they were around her, but in the lives of blacks, and she was somehow never able to be aware of anything outside her own skin (that’s her charm, in a way), let alone skin of another colour. So she took the kitsch as real. She fell in love with the sleazy dockside nightclubs, the sexuality and humidity, the freedom of prostitutes. That’s what she kept going back for. To wash off the Calvinism and koshering of this place. The way people go to a spa to ease their joints. That’s really what she went for, and then there was the young man in the white suit who could hardly speak English and danced with her all night. It all took place in half-darkness (you can’t imagine how dingy and sordid those places were), she never saw it clearly, she never wanted to come back into the daylight. I know Ruthie. Poor thing, she was all our colonial bourgeois illusions rolled into one; she thought that was Europe. Latin. She thought it was European culture. And she hated South Africa — but she thought what was wrong with this country was that it didn’t have that—
Hillela heard someone else’s story through with polite attention. Towards the end she picked up the photograph again; she had the self-absorption of someone trying to get into a garment too small for her. — I loved swinging, and a seesaw with a wooden head at either end, I don’t think they were horses’ heads, something like a bull’s, they bumped me up and down.—
Pauline was almost delicate in the old suggestion: —D’you think you really remember? You were not quite two. Other playgrounds, perhaps. — She shared with Olga and other adults the idea that life begins, for children, at a period set existentially by adults.
— With Len, on the road. He used to stop in little dorps and take me into school playgrounds wherever there were swings.—
And then the girl held out the photograph of herself, which she seemed to have succeeded in inhabiting. — Would you like to have it?—