1972 - A Story Like the Wind (24 page)

No one, not even !#grave;Bamuthi, could supply the answer, and a triumphant Ousie-Johanna, her round face glowing like a full moon, was declared to be the great princess of riddles when she answered, once the noise of clapping which the people of Osebeni used to show approval, had ended, ‘A clothes peg’.

There was only one riddle which for a moment took François out of that warm, friendly atmosphere of the crowded hut. That was when one of the other Matabele herdsmen asked, ‘Could any of you tell me the name of the longest snake in the world?’

When the answer came—a road—François found himself thinking, ‘And the longest of the long snakes of the world is the track which Xhabbo is walking out there in the dark.’

When he was back safely in his room with Hintza, the light extinguished and, tired as he was, trying to sleep, this vision of a road, or rather one of those unending footpaths and tracks of the Dark Continent, wriggling westwards like a snake through the bush and out across the great desert, stayed vivid in his imagination, so much so that he found himself sitting up from time to time listening as carefully as he had ever listened before to the sounds of the night, to discover if they were out of tune with themselves, and whether the rhythm of the dark had not gone out of life outside. He even woke Hintza several times, much to Hintza’s displeasure, since he obviously felt François ought to know by now that if there were anything wrong in the night he would be the first to know of it.

All the same, Hintza had sat up and gone through all the motions of sniffing the air, turning his head sideways, hither and thither and listening dutifully. The hippopotamuses were grunting down on the banks of the river where they were feeding on lush green grasses. A gallant bushbuck was barking to show its courage. Some auburn-haired baboon, now and then, whimpered with fear as, perhaps, a leopard prowled under the tree in which his family was sheltering. An elephant on the other side of the hill was stripping bark from a tree with such appetite and force that the sound snapped out in the night like a pistol shot. The bull-frogs were ogling the starlight in the pools of muddy water in that wide, shallow tributary of the Amanzim-tetse near the homestead. Night-plovers, too, were calling and re-calling to one another with flute-like voices, and the great old ghost owls were making philosophical noises at one another in order to answer that perpetual: ‘Why, what, how and who?’ that the Matabele attribute to them. But there was nothing, absolutely nothing, unusual happening. So Hintza instantly fell asleep again.

Yet François could not do so because the meaning of all the immense variety of night sounds had become different. His feelings recognized the harmony. But it was harmony implicit with a kind of terror of its own. François had seen enough of life in the bush to know (though of course he could not put it in that way to himself) that it was a counterpoint of great and terrible opposites, always at one another’s throats: like life and death, and light and dark. All were forces of perpetual threat and fear which demanded constant vigilance and courage from all living things, animals as well as human, to combat them.

How often indeed had not both Ouwa and !#grave;Bamuthi exhorted him to know that in the end only courage made a person free. As he thought of courage, he remembered all that Xhabbo and Koba had told him of the great star hunters up there in the sky, hunting bravely in the terrible forests of the night, fighting for light against the Antarctic darkness above, with their bows, arrows and spears so that even in his bed the distant star din vibrated at his ears. A new reassurance resulted from it, forming the one clear thought that Xhabbo, making his way so gallantly through the danger of night and bush, was not alone but was travelling in the company of embattled and belted constellations. Only then, utterly exhausted, he fell into a deep sleep from which Ousie-Johanna woke him with great difficulty the next morning.

One need not emphasize how pointless the day ahead appeared to François; how he wondered if he could ever again get through the routine of a normal day. He had no doubt that he would try because all the examples of the people around him, no matter of what race or colour had so profoundly influenced his behaviour that it would not have occurred to him that there was any alternative to trying and trying, however helpless and pointless all might seem. All the same, before slipping back into the uniform of everyday behaviour there was one imperative; he had to be absolutely certain that Xhabbo had indeed left and had not been prevented at the last moment from going by something awful. So between lunch and reluctantly joining his friends where they came down to water the cattle in the afternoon by the river, he allowed himself half an hour to look in at the cave.

Yes, Xhabbo had gone. Moreover he had left the cave as clean and tidy as if no one had ever been inside it, except that right in the centre, where the strongest shaft of sunlight fell on the yellow sand, he found that the surface had been smoothed over, levelled out and damped down with water, and right in its centre there was a clear imprint of Xhabbo’s spread-out hand and arm. Beside the hand and arm, drawn with Xhabbo’s finger, there was a large, symmetrical cross.

The cross, as he knew from Koba and Xhabbo, was not only a magic sign of healing for the Bushman but was also used a great deal in desert and bush, to show the place where two vital tracks met. He had no doubt that the hand imprinted in the sand in that gesture of greeting and the cross drawn beside it was to confirm Xhabbo’s promise and belief that they would meet again one day in the cave, and that between now and that unknown moment, all would be well.

Mopani

F
or a week after Xhabbo’s going, François tried to behave as if nothing unusual had happened to him but it seemed a hard, if not impossible task. Even his appetite went, to such an extent that Ousie-Johanna was seriously worried and thought he might be sickening for something. He did his best but the taste of food seemed to have gone from his tongue, ‘utterly’ as Xhabbo, who was perpetually in his mind, would have had it. Everything tasted alike. Suddenly he was aware of how insupportable life was when a person could no longer feel hunger. Up to then he had always taken it for granted that hunger was the great terror of a young person’s life. Now he found as the slow, long days went by that the absence of hunger was a far, far greater one. He was too young, of course, to wonder whether all this might not be because a greater hunger that had nothing to do with food had possessed him, particularly since for the first time even the taste for things like playing with his friends on the river bank and going through the tangled fringes of the whispering bush with Hintza and one of his guns to hunt for his and Ousie-Johanna’s pot, had vanished. By the end of the third day after Xhabbo’s going he just had to give up all pretence of wanting to play with his friends.

More significant still, instead of helping with the milking, slaughtering, loading up the mule wagons with fresh meat, vegetables, fruit and milk for the great mining city whose needs were making Hunter’s Drift so prosperous, all things he had done spasmodically in the past, his inclination now was to help in the irrigation of the immense vegetable garden and orchards which were perhaps the greatest glory of the ranch. In the past he had regarded all this as the dullest work because it meant he had to stand patiently by the irrigation furrows at the loveliest time of the evening, letting water slowly into one great vegetable bed after the other, waiting for the beds to fill gradually with water, then shutting off the sluices, opening others and allowing water into the next bed, and so on and on until the bat-black end of day.

He did what he did instinctively. Yet responsibility for an accurate report on his life forces one to ask oneself something about the nature of this instinct. One wonders whether it was not the process of growth, produced by the urgent feeling for life within himself, hastening to the rescue of an inexperienced and vulnerable nature, in danger of having its evolution arrested, compelling him to concentrate on the growth of things in the world without so that their example would set in motion again growth within himself. World without and world within, after all, whether one knows it or not are expressions of one another; interdependent and ceaselessly in communication, serving something greater than the sum of themselves. They are, however stern and exacting, allies of a questing spirit, particularly a young spirit, charged to join them both in a little garden allotment of space and time. Happy for François, therefore, despite the miseries of the moment, that he was free of the mistrust of instinct and intuition wherein contemporary Europe tends to imprison human imagination, and that the pagan influences of his environment encouraged an unquestioning acceptance of this impulse which came to him.

So for some days, he kept to watering the garden so diligently that !#grave;Bamuthi praised him for it in public. Yet it had so little apparent effect on François’s state of being that one might have thought this reflection irrelevant to the story. Then a week after Xhabbo’s going something, slight as it was, did happen to Fran-pois in the garden which suggested that time once more had started to move on for him.

With a thoroughly disgruntled Hintza at his side, because Hintza made no secret of the fact that he regarded irrigation as utterly below the dignity of a self-respecting hunting dog, François was turning the water into the broad beds of tomato plants. The plants were tall and strong, covered with fruit in all stages of their growth from white flowers open to the sun, to tiny shrill-green berries, bigger yellow ones and so on to tomatoes of an explosive Oriental red, a colour imparted to them by the passionate, sun-inflamed earth of Hunter’s Drift. The moment the water reached the plants it began gurgling as the parched dried earth at their feet greedily sucked it in.

Such was the intensity of the scent from the tomato bushes and so evocative the yellowing air, the rays of sun vibrating like the strings of a great harp between the emerald garden and the proud west, that François was provoked into plucking one of the biggest tomatoes. He bent over and rinsed it quickly in the water in the furrow. As he did so, he saw the head of an enormous thunder-cloud which was building up in the Madonna blue above him now reflected, like a giant cauliflower, in the shadowy water: quivering in the moving water his own face stared up at him like that of a stranger. The sight seemed to touch an odd feeling of guilt, as if he were suddenly confronted with the face of a friend shamefully neglected. Quickly to dispel the feeling he bit deeply into the tomato. To his amazement, he felt the taste for food ready to welcome it on his tongue. The tomato was cool. It had a sharp, wild, barbaric tang.

A feeling of excitement, quite disproportionate to the stimulus, possessed him. A lost savour was back in his being. Excited and delighted, he plucked another tomato and offered it to Hintza, who gulped the tomato down.

Hintza was still licking his long black lips with relish when there came another of those meaningful coincidences which appeared to be such a speciality of their life in the bush. Something new assailed Hintza’s acute senses. His tongue vanished, his mouth shut so violently and quickly that the air unexpectedly trapped inside made him sneeze and shake his head. That done, he started leaping up and down in excitement, finally posing himself in front of François, looking intently into his eyes and uttering that high-pitched code of his to indicate that a new element was entering the circumstance of their day.

François, of course, took immediate notice but he could not tell for all his trying what was the cause of Hintza’s sudden emergence from sullen indifference to active interest in the measured life of that placid, platinum afternoon. Indeed he appeared so slow in the uptake that Hintza started again to bounce up and down as if he wanted both of them to make for the homestead as fast as they could.

François was still hesitating when the noise of all the mongrel dogs around the homestead barking out wildly reached him, to prove that Hintza was right and immediate action was needed. Sticking his spade into the wet earth beside him, he set off at the double for the homestead. He was not fast enough for Hintza who, without waiting for orders, was running on ahead as if entering a race for his life.

Hintza vanished beyond the fig trees before François was half-way there. When he finally reached their far side, from where he could see the approach to the front of the homestead, he observed Hintza and two other dogs almost exactly like him going through all the choreographies of greeting for which dogs of their kind have so great and gracious a gift. Just beyond the dogs he saw the tall, lean, ascetic figure of Mopani Theron getting down from his favourite, though obviously tired, horse.

The dogs, of course, were Nandi and !#grave;Swayo, Hintza’s mother and father. François could not help smiling because it was obvious as he came nearer that neither Nandi nor !#grave;Swayo felt that they were getting all the respect from Hintza to which their senior status entitled them. Though Hintza could not have been more pleased to see them, he was pleased only on his own terms, there on his home ground. He clearly had long since lost all respect for any ridge-back establishment that there might have been in the life of the bush, if he ever had had any. The moment Nandi and !#grave;Swayo started to look down at him along their aristocratic noses to avoid his exuberant advances, he showed them what he thought of such stuffiness by turning his back on them disdainfully. He calmly trotted away to join François as if they did not exist, pushed his way through the homely mongrels, ignored their own disproportionate display of greeting, and gave Mopani an almost suburban paw, wishing a refined ‘How do you do?’

Nandi and !#grave;Swayo, thus rebuked, had to make the first advance back into Hintza’s favour, an advance he accepted as some sort of apology. With an air of exaggerated authority he led them round to the kitchen because he knew it was just about the moment when Johanna would be extracting some of those delicious marrow bones from the vast cauldron in which she prepared the stock for the soups at which she excelled. He was not disappointed and as a result of having had scientific proof, as it were, of superior knowledge, it was most noticeable from then on how both Nandi and !#grave;Swayo respectfully allowed him to lead and set the tone in all things during their stay at Hunter’s Drift.