Read Online A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer - Free Book Online Page A

all the way from Soweto in their eagerness for education. Carole stayed with Joe, at home, to be there for Hillela if she came.
    In the afternoon there was the slam of a car door and footsteps running up the drive; all three in the livingroom stood up ceremoniously to receive Hillela restored to them—but Sasha, Sasha was in the doorway. Sasha walked into the familiar house empty of the presence of Hillela. An amazing rage broke over them. He smashed their sensible calm like a bottle flung against a wall, and his words were the jagged pieces held before the faces of his mother, his father, Carole. —What’ve you done?—
    He stood in the doorway apart from them, turned to Pauline. He was unshaven, a grown man, and his nose was running, a little boy’s. —You bitch. What’ve you done? You think everything you do is the only thing. Only you know what to think, how to live. Everybody’s got to be like you. Something’s right because it fits in with you. If it doesn’t it’s stupid, it’s shit. Not everybody’s going to be exactly like you and dad. You
understand
what everybody needs, you never ask them. You know what blacks ought to have and you know what Hillela needs, you’re so sure it’s not Olga, it’s not her father, it’s
you …
You send me to school with blacks because that’s normal, that’s the way it ought to be here but isn’t, it
isn’t
, and
you
don’t have to go into the army afterwards and kill them, only I, I have to do that, I have to do what’s wrong, not you. You take Hillela in, that’s the
right thing
, and now, if she’s dead … (Carole wept with shock to see her brother weep.) … If you’ve killed her then she’s done what’s wrong, you’ve got nothing to do with it, she doesn’t
fit in …
And if I get blown up or shot defending this bloody country where do I fit in? You despise Olgafor wanting to run away to Canada, but you don’t have to go into the army, I do,
I do
. You don’t know what happened to Hillela, no, because you’re careful not to let anything happen to you—
    Pauline stood still, breathing deeper and deeper, her intimacy with her son making certain the sense under the ridiculous tirade would find the vital places, known only to him and her, to wound her.
    And because of Hillela, then, Joe did something inconceivable for him: he called his son a bastard. The hollow house filled with anger and pain that would never have been let loose, things were said that should never, would never be said by people like them.
    Pauline tugged out one by one the crude homemade shafts that pierced her, shameless, as if exposing before her husband and almost-grown children the privacy of the body where he had begotten them and from which she had ejected them into the world. Her hair was a great wick by which she might catch alight. —Yes cheap, stupid, shit, this place, and you’ve been sent away so’s you don’t have to dirty yourself with it while you’re growing up. You haven’t had to listen to it from your friends at school, the way the girls have to. You haven’t got to teach Alpheus to spell while he dreams about being a lawyer, the way your father has to—you know only blacks who’re your equals, getting the same education you’re getting. You’re too high and mighty to make any compromises because you don’t have to, you’re a spoilt brat. There’re all kinds of ways of making a spoilt brat, I see that, and—you’re right—this is
my
way. I’ve had my way and I’ve done it. You’re my way. We can’t all live at Waterford Kamhlaba School, you know. There’s the world out there—There’s this place. And Joe and I have to decide every day of our lives how to live here,
whites only
, no choice about that, no phalanstery without passes and black locations, white