1972 - A Story Like the Wind (25 page)

Mopani, from François’s point of view, could not have come at a better moment. Apart from his sadness over Xhabbo’s going, he was feeling neglected and anxious because he had as yet received no letters from Lammie and Ouwa, although it was perfectly possible for letters to have reached him at Hunter’s Drift Siding at least three, if not four days before. His delight at seeing Mopani, therefore, could not have been greater. That part of Africa in which he lived, as Ouwa was so fond of saying, was truly ‘Old Testament country’. Both men and women tended to behave in Old Testament ways and it was the custom even for men when meeting after a long time to embrace and kiss each other in a truly Biblical manner. François’s embrace on this occasion was long and rather desperate. Indeed it is doubtful whether François had ever realized until that moment just how devoted he was to this singular, lonely and great old hunter.

His embrace ended, he took Mopani by the hand, begged one of the Matabele on duty at the house to see to his horse, and led Mopani to the most comfortable chair on the stoep before rushing to ask Ousie-Johanna to bring them a pot of her hottest coffee and a large plate of rusks and cake. This she gladly did, but not without adding to her greeting an implied rebuke that a visit from him was overdue, even remarking, ‘Has there been then an outbreak of horse-sickness in your camp to prevent you from coming sooner to a place that has always been home to you?’

Not so François. Seizing one of Mopani’s brown, long-fingered sensitive hands between his own, he just said: ‘Oh Uncle, I’m so glad you’ve come! Are you on your way after more poachers, or have you come just to see us? You know of course that Lammie and Ouwa have gone to the capital?’

As he said this, François felt quite angry because suddenly he was rather sorry for himself and stupidly on the verge of tears.

Happily Mopani was not looking at him, as he answered understandingly, ‘No, Little Cousin, I’m not after poachers this time and of course I know that Ouwa and Lammie have gone. I have come entirely because I wanted to see how you and that dog of yours are getting on, though it is true I also have a message for you.’ He did not add that he had already promised Lammie whom he loved, that he would keep regularly in touch with François.

‘A message, Uncle?’ François was puzzled, because who could there be in that vast game park of which Mopani was warden who knew him well enough to want to send him a message?

Mopani immediately explained: ‘You know of course that I have a telephone line to the capital at my main camp. I spoke to Lammie last night and she gave me a message for you. She asked me to explain that neither she nor Ouwa have had a moment to write to you. She asked me if I would come and tell you all her news. And as in any case I was coming to see you the next day, of course, I said ‘yes’.’

He did not even then hint at the fact that Lammie had expressed great anxiety as to how François, on his own for the first time, might be getting on at Hunter’s Drift. He thought that even a hint of such an anxiety might hurt François’s self-respect. So knowing how hungry François might be for reassurance at that moment he repeated, ‘No, Little old Cousin, I was indeed about to visit you. It is far too long since you and I have had a talk together.’

The wise old hunter could not have chosen words to please François more. Yet the fact that he had by-passed Lammie’s message made François uneasy.

‘I’m so glad to have you here, Uncle,’ he said, ‘but what did Lammie say? What did the doctors say? When are they coming back? How is Ouwa?’

These and a dozen or more related questions fell from him so fast that Mopani, smiling one of his rare smiles said, ‘Little Cousin, slowly please! Slowly over the stones, as the old pioneers said. Besides, you know the Sindabele saying, one anxious person can ask more questions in half a minute than seven
Indunas
can answer in a year. Be patient, please, and I’ll tell you all.’

Mopani spoke very slowly in that deliberate voice so characteristic of him. It was as if thinking and searching for the right word to express a thought were another form of hunting; the human mind following the track of meaning like a hunter the faint and enigmatic spoor of the most elusive of animals through a tightly tangled bush. He started wisely by giving François all the messages of love which Ouwa and Lammie had sent him, elaborate apologies and explanations for their not writing and reminders of things they wished François to do at Hunter’s Drift in their absence. Only then did he get to the heart of the matter. Ouwa had already seen two of the foremost specialists in the capital. Both had declared that they could find nothing organically, or indeed seriously wrong with Ouwa. They thought it possible that he had been too long without a break in the hot climate pf Hunter’s Drift and was suffering only from a prolonged kind of climatic exhaustion for which they had a long, strange word which Mopani could not remember. It was not important however because, in essence, in their view all that Ouwa needed was a change. They urged Lammie to take him at once far down south to the sea at the Cape of Good Hope, not only to recuperate there as they had every belief he would, but also to have confirmation from more specialists, whom they regarded as the greatest of their kind in the whole of Africa, if not in the entire world.

Mopani did all he could to exclude the tone of discouragement with which Lammie had told him this, also her deep disappointment and increased concern that such eminent people could only repeat themselves as before in general terms, without a specific diagnosis of Ouwa and exact prescription of a remedy. In fact Mopani himself, in that quick, intuitive way all great hunters have, had put the telephone down feeling far more uneasy about his friend than he had ever felt before.

Some of this uneasiness of his got through to François from the way he told the story. When he had ended, François sat for some moments in silence, becoming so uneasy himself that the taste he had rediscovered only half an hour before vanished and he could not face his coffee. He just watched Mopani, not unnaturally after that long ride in the heat of the day, enjoying coffee, rusks and cake, as if he had not eaten for days. Watching him, François felt this uneasiness build up inside him like electricity in a thunder-cloud, until finally, before he could even think a clear thought, a question was suddenly completed in his mind and darted like lightning out of him. Yet it was not fast enough for him not to feel so frightened by its nature that he again took Mopani’s hand as he asked it. ‘Is Ouwa going to die?’

Mopani was so startled that his steady hand trembled and some coffee spilt over the edge of his cup. He was by nature as truthful a man as there has perhaps ever been. Truth, or accuracy as he, in that quiet, unassuming way of his, would have preferred to put it, was perhaps the greatest of life’s commandments for him. If it were not for the fact that he put truth and accuracy before anything else, he could not have been so accurate, or should one say so true a shot and hunter. It was precisely because there was nothing false anywhere in his person that there could be nothing false in either his hunting and his shooting. And, out of this love of accuracy of his, it had become an axiom of behaviour to him that any human being, no matter how small, was entitled to a precise answer to any question which he could form. He believed that when a person could form a question, it was a sign from life that the person was ready for a truthful answer.

After a long hesitation he put his arm round François’s shoulder and said, ‘Coiske [not Little Cousin as in the past], look at me. I have told you what the doctors have said. They know far more about these things than I or you do. And it would be wrong to ignore the importance of what they have said. But I myself have to tell you in reply to your question that my own feeling is that Ouwa is about to die.’

François’s reaction was the most moving vindication of Mopani’s belief in the truth which he had ever experienced. All traces of the tendency to self-pity which had assailed François a moment before had vanished. On the contrary, there was that odd look of relief which comes when pretence and unreality are at last defied and banished from the imagination.

Knowing that he had finally found honest companionship on a fearful road he had previously walked alone, François exclaimed, ‘D’you really think so? You know, I’ve feared this ever since the day Ouwa brought Hintza home as a puppy from your camp. It’s so good of you Uncle, to tell me what you really think. I can’t thank you enough.’

At this unexpected reaction from François, it was the old hunter’s turn to look away, his eyes blinking for the first time in many years.

Mopani, of course, was right. No imagination has yet been great enough to invent improvements to the truth. Truth, however terrible, carried within itself its own strange comfort for the misery it is so often compelled to inflict on behalf of life. Sooner or later it is not pretence but the truth which gives back with both hands what it has taken away with one. Indeed, unaided and alone it will pick up the fragments of the reality it has shattered and piece them together again in the shape of more immediate meaning than the one in which they had been previously contained. Yet one must hasten to admit that even that was not the whole of the matter.

Like Mopani, François had the natural life of the bush to aid him in this moment of truth. Young as he was, death was no stranger to him. He could hardly remember, had he found it necessary to give so routine a matter a thought, a single day in his life in which he had not witnessed the death of some living thing. For instance, he had seen animals he had known personally as it were at Hunter’s Drift, killed daily for food. He had learned to make his peace with the fact because it was death inflicted in a cause of life. He had been encouraged in this acceptance of this aspect of reality by seeing the same law at work in the life of animals, birds, insects and even plants. Moreover, he himself had been forced to be an instrument of death, by helping to shoot from an early age for food. He had also on several occasions seen people dying what men call a natural death. Lammie and Ouwa both insisted, when any of their friends or servants were dying, that they all should rally to their side and stand around them so that they should know that they were not left to face that great departure alone in their little beehive huts. It was utterly impossible, therefore, young as he was, for him to think of death as the outrage which it is increasingly becoming in the view of metropolitan man, who keeps himself and his young as far as he can from witnessing death of any kind and-so allows all the natural aids life has built into man for facing death to crumble by neglect and default. Death was as much part of the natural landscape of the spirit for François as that of the physical world. It was always near. One crossed the Amanzim-tetse river at one’s peril from crocodiles and hippopotami. One entered daily the great bush so full of danger that from time to time men vanished into it, never to return. Nature, one’s instinct informed one, was the example one neglected at peril to one’s progress through life, was perhaps the world of the spirit made manifest without so that one could recognize it from within.

All this did not mean that one was tamely fatalistic about death. As François had learned, there was in the bush a vast difference between killing for survival and giving into death oneself before absolutely forced to do so. Even the mortally wounded animal fought death, as if a point of ultimate honour, until, it seemed to men like Mopani, it achieved at the final transition a transfiguration of anguish into utter peace of spirit which was clearly recognizable in the expression as one looked down at the face of the body lying dead at one’s feet. Of course there came a point when death was inevitable and natural. Then the reward appeared even greater because no one, not even a child, could have stood beside a deathbed in one of those beehive huts without being deeply impressed by the majesty, the impartial authority, the tenderness and reverence with which it did its final work.

‘Death,’ the Matabele said, ‘knows no kings, it is its own king.’ But until that moment came, as Mopani knew even better than François, to whom he had been the great example and teacher in the ways of nature, both animal and man were charged by life to do everything in their power to defeat death, if only to make certain that when it ultimately came it was the right kind of death.

Once again one has been compelled to draw attention to concepts which a person so young as François could not have articulated because without them one cannot map, as one is in duty bound to do in the interests of his story, the great new area into which his urgent feelings were carrying him with an unutterable logic of their own to the next natural stage in his reaction to Mopani’s tragic evaluation of Ouwa’s condition.

Mopani’s face was still averted, his eyes still blinking at the west, when François’s voice, unexpectedly loud, determined, perhaps even angry, since he was prodded by a notion that if only Ouwa and Lammie had been franker with him earlier, he would not have hesitated so long, asked, ‘May I tell you something, uncle?’ The question was purely rhetorical, because François, his voice louder and more intense, did not wait for an answer. ‘I’m not going to let Ouwa die.’

Mopani was so startled by this outright declaration, as it were, of war on fate that all his pity and compassion for François vanished. He turned his head sharply to face François, the sun-wrinkles at the corner of his eyes vanishing as his keen, long-distance look focused on the determined young face turned up to him. One might have thought a gun shot had just gone off in his ear, so abrupt was his movement.

‘You will not let it happen, Little Cousin?’ he exclaimed with unbelief. ‘Like you I would do anything to prevent it from happening, but what could you and I do, when the greatest doctors in the land can do nothing, except perhaps to pray for him, as I have done now for more than a year.’

‘Never you mind, Uncle,’ François replied, his odd new resolve stimulated by the discovery in himself of a greater confidence which in fact was the result of the growing realization that perhaps he had handled without outside help of any kind, the whole of the difficult Xhabbo affair in a way not without credit to him. He already had his suspicion that what people called growing up was, in a measure, one of being educated out of reality, above all the great invisible realities which matter so much more to a young person than the physical ones by which men set by far a greater store as they grow older. So many evasions and unrealities, so much wishful thinking seemed to have been inflicted on him, young as he was, that the time seemed to have come when he should take counsel only with himself more often. The less that other minds, even a mind so experienced and close to his own as Mopani’s, interfered with his own, the better it would be for the plan forming inside him.