1972 - A Story Like the Wind (39 page)

Mopani found this part of the account much the most difficult to render, indulging in an ambivalent attitude which passed under the euphemism of ‘seeing all sides of the question’. He deplored it as part of the profound incapacity of civilized people for single commitment in thought and action. One must admit oneself, indeed, to be somewhat on his side and to suspect that Lammie, in offering these alternatives to François, despite all the necessary allowances for the state of indecision Ouwa’s death must have inflicted on her, was subject to at least a shadow of that initial concept of François which was summed up in the by now famous, or notorious, phrase, ‘that other little person’. One is disposed to join Mopani in feeling that there are moments in life when it is not helpful to be what the civilized person regards as sensible, and that the suspension, in moments of tragedy, of what is called common sense and controlled reasoning in favour of an indulgence in simple, natural grief and fellow-feeling, is far more sensible and reasonable than being sensible and reasonable in the accepted sense would have been. Nor can one help leaning somewhat to Mopani’s conclusion that, despite François’s proof of unusual self-reliance, this necessity to choose was imposing upon him a responsibility which was not really his.

Whether François had any of these reservations or not, we cannot say, except that the very first mention of the suggestion that he might have to hasten south to spend weeks, if not months there with Lammie threw him in a condition akin to panic. He felt he no longer had the right to absent himself from Hunter’s Drift for so long a time because of his pact with Xhabbo. What if Xhabbo returned to look for him and he were not there to answer Xhabbo’s call? If he failed in such an event, he was certain he would never see Xhabbo again, and would have betrayed the first human relationship which was uniquely his own. He knew, conflicting as his feelings were, that this was one risk he was not prepared to take. Yet the confusion inwardly was so great that he was compelled to ask Mopani’s advice.

This added to Mopani’s predicament. He had always abhorred giving advice to people. He had certainly never advised anybody unless asked to do so and then only with extreme reluctance. For unless one were in someone else’s situ ation so completely that one could be described as being ‘inside his skin’, one’s advice would inevitably be based on an inade quate comprehension of all the facts essential for constructive counsel. Moreover, giving advice in general appeared to him to presuppose a lack of respect—if one may borrow from Lammie’s phrase for the ‘otherness’ of human beings—an intru sion into their personal fate which his experience had proved to be followed usually by undesirable consequences. If there were one person who had a right in this instance to violate the ‘otherness’ of François, or not even perhaps to violate it so much as to help towards a conclusion by expressing a single, clear command or just a warm and direct living wish in the matter, it’ seemed to him it could only be Lammie. So he shrank, from giving François a direct answer and groped in his mind for a way of bringing the issue back to a straight-forward one be tween François and Lammie and their feelings for each other. He found this in the suggestion that instead of the two of them; taking counsel there and then, François could return with him to his camp, talk to Lammie herself on the telephone and then; see what came out of their discussion.

François jumped at the idea. All that was urgent and forward-moving in him longed to come to terms with his grief as soon as possible and the prospect of a journey with Mopani, however) short, and the change of scene it would involve, presented itself as a shift of scene in his own heart and mind. One is not surprised, therefore, that he readily agreed, gulped down the rest of his breakfast and rushed out to get ready for the journey.

François of course had done the journey to Mopani’s camp many times and there was nothing unusual about it on this particular occasion. There was, however, an event just at the start of the journey, which brought an unexpected reaction from François. He had just come out of the house with Hintza to join Mopani, Nandi and !#grave;Swayo, when he found that !#grave;Bamuthi had saddled up for him not one of the salted ponies but Ouwa’s own horse.

Suddenly François was enraged at the thought that Ouwa should hardly be cold in death before he should be taking liberties with Ouwa’s favourite horse. Also, perhaps he was rejecting the implicit presumptions that he was already destined to step immediately into the place which Ouwa had vacated. He obviously had no clear concept of his own future except perhaps, one must stress, an instinct to be himself. Confused and dismayed, as he must have been, the instinct apparently was bold and clear enough to insist on defeating any other assumptions at source. Yet he himself was amazed at the violence and distress with which he rejected the horse, and peremptorily ordered !#grave;Bamuthi to bring him one of the other horses in the stable.

The second incident happened early the next morning. Having started so late in the day for Mopani’s camp they had to spend the night in the bush. The following morning, after their wayside breakfast of rusks, biltong and coffee Mopani, as usual, conducted François on an examination of the spoor the animals had left in the vicinity of their fire in the night; ‘a reading of the diary of the night’, as Mopani always called it.

Pausing to look back at the smoke of their fire, and the horses standing patiently close by, saddled up and ready in the dark blue shadows of the trees, Mopani remarked, ‘You know, Coiske, wherever a man has camped in the bush, no matter how bleak or uncomfortable the camp, he always leaves something of himself behind, when he goes.’

His words touched a deep response in François for if this were true of a mere camp, how much more true was it for the great cave which had been a ‘camp’ for Xhabbo and his people for so many thousands of years in their tragic way through life?

It was extraordinary how prominent a role his thoughts and feelings of Xhabbo played on this journey. Perhaps they helped to suppress his own feelings of failure in his mission to uLangalibalela, removing in the process the temptation that he should try and tell Mopani about the meeting. But in any case he was not certain how much even so understanding a person as Mopani would understand about the mission. He thought, rightly, that on occasions Mopani was near to asking him what precisely he had done to try and prevent Ouwa’s death. But happily the old hunter never put the question. As a result the journey to uLangalibalela remained unmentioned, and its record became part of the secret self of François which had been born with the coming of Xhabbo.

It was to have important consequences in François’s life, not the least of them being that, in becoming secret, it prevented François from telling Mopani about the strange encounter with the ‘men of the spear’ on the way to uLangalibalela’s kraal. Had he been able to do this and confide it to Mopani, he might have changed the whole of the future for himself and everyone else in and around Hunter’s Drift. Through this omission he contributed materially to the sinister pattern of events which, unbeknown, life was inexorably weaving with gathering momentum in the immediate world around them.

Late that night in Mopani’s camp François spoke to Lammie on the telephone. The line was by no means clear, nor conversation easy. But it all ended in the conclusion that Lammie would confide Hunter’s Drift to François’s care and she would stay in the south until she had settled Ouwa’s affairs.

She had come to this conclusion not without a certain obvious relief. Though her dutiful self was prepared to take the first train north to join François, her own natural inclination was to keep close to the place where Ouwa had left her. It was as if she could not accept the fact of his death and some archaic belief inclined her to stay on the scene of his death as if by so doing she would still be able to keep in touch with him. She was comforted too, thinking that François , in agreeing so willingly to carry on alone at Hunter’s Drift, had implied a readiness to take Ouwa’s place in their lives. Consequently she had not hesitated to emphasize how necessary it was for them to carry on the work which Ouwa had begun at Hunter’s Drift.

François obviously could not quarrel with such a conclusion although one suspects it made him oddly uncomfortable, as if Lammie were in a sense presenting him, as !#grave;Bamuthi had done at Hunter’s Drift the day before, with another of Ouwa’s ‘horses for his journey through life’. Had he been able to see into Mopani’s mind, after he had given the hunter an account of his conversation with Lammie, he would have been surprised how critical of Lammie Mopani had become.

Adding together what François told him, and what he knew of Lammie and Ouwa’s life together, Mopani feared that Ouwa, dead, might be even more alive in Lammie’s emotions and intentions than he had been in actual life. Yet he said nothing. With the possibility before him of a future with a wounded and slanted mother, however dear, François might well need all the time he could get on his own to grow and gather himself together. Mopani even thought it as well not to insist when François refused to stay on with him for a week or two, much as he, who after all was so much more alone, enjoyed François’s company. He compelled himself to approve even when Fran-?ois turned down his offer to accompany him back to Hunter’s Drift and merely nodded his quixotic head in acceptance when François said, ‘You have already been troubled far too much by us, Uncle. I know the way well enough. If I leave early in the morning, I’ll easily be home before sundown.’

So, starting at dawn the next morning François travelled so well and without incident that he reached the Punda-ma-tenka, the great Hunter’s Road, which forded the Amanzim-tetse hard by his home, soon after noon. On this road, despite the fact that it was now considerably overgrown through lack of regular use, the going was much easier and François could put his horse into a fast trot. He did this despite the heat, because he longed to be home as if his only hope of re-beginning depended upon his return. Since it was the dead hour of the day, when life in the bush slept soundly, feeling itself for that brief, suspended hour free of fear, François was perhaps not as alert as he normally was, or had been earlier. He too felt free to give himself over to his own tumult of feelings and rode along in a mood of melancholy introspection.

He was abruptly jerked out of his self-absorption by the sound of many voices, shouting and calling out somewhere along the road far ahead. The voices sounded like those of the drivers of wagons exhorting spans of oxen to greater effort, which was not surprising because, in that fiery hour of the day, even animals as patient and accepting as oxen would have expected a rest from their heavy labours. Judging by the fact that the sustained shouting and calling was audible above the shimmer of song of the mopani beetles, François realized that if it were indeed a wagon train ahead, it must be a singularly long one. Even one wagon on that road at that hour was unusual because the coming of railways, and the rapid development of air travel, had brought about a great decline of traffic on Hunter’s Road. Now the famous road was little more than a broad footpath on which men of the far interior of Africa travelled from their kraals to look for labour in the great mining and industrial cities in the south. Occasionally, too, it was used by the dilapidated trucks of Indian traders.

As a result François brought his horse to a quiet walk, resolved to approach the source of such unusual commotion with care. One motive for his extreme caution was the lesson he and !#grave;Bamuthi had learned from their recent encounter with ‘the men of the spear’ in the depression on their way to uLangalibalela. That experience, somehow, had robbed the bush forever of the innocence it had once possessed for him. But so intent was he on the noise ahead that he did not pay sufficient attention to the bush on his flanks. Had it not been for Hintza he might well have missed something of vital importance.

The voices ahead at that critical moment had become so loud and clear that François could hear the occasional electric crack of long, lightning ox-whips followed by the wagoners’ cries: ‘
Trek Staatsman!
[Statesman], Wake up, President! Step out,
Vaderland!
[Fatherland] Pull, you
Swartland
there! [Black country].’ These were all the traditional names given by the Cape-coloured people to the oxen which drew the long heavy transport wagons that they alone still used in the interior.

At that precise moment Hintza, who was fully expecting François to stop his horse for a closer scrutiny of the bush on their left, was outraged to discover that François was looking straight ahead. Always a dog of action, he immediately bounded forward to François’s side, leapt into the air so high that he could utter his characteristic note of warning right in François’s left ear. François with a start of alarm turned quickly to look in the direction in which Hintza’s nose and tail, body aquiver like a compass needle, were already aligned.

Some fifty yards to the side, right in the middle of a clump of enormous wild fig trees, rose a steady plume of blue smoke. Between them and the smoke, he could just make out the large canvas top of what he took to be a truck.

Feeling dangerously conspicuous on his horse, quickly he swung out of his saddle, and pulled the bridle reins over the head of his horse, which was trained, as were all his kind, to stand until his rider’s return. Unslinging his rifle, he carried it at the ready on his right arm and whispered to Hintza to go carefully ahead of him.

He had not gone far when the sound of unhurried voices in normal conversation reached him. He stopped Hintza and lay down on the ground beside him to listen carefully. He could not distinguish any single word of the conversation but the general tone sounded English; but not the English of people like himself, Lammie and Mopani. None the less, since he was never again taking anything in the bush for granted, he went on stalking the sound as he had stalked Xhabbo in the last phase of their first encounter by the lion trap. In this position he arrived unnoticed on the edge of a small but natural clearing.