The Angels Weep (86 page)

‘All the credit for the successful negotiation of the
exchange between our two institutions must go to the honourable
minister who today honours us with his presence.’ He was
reading from a typed sheet, clearly anxious to have done with
speaking and sit down again. ‘It was at Minister Tungata
Zebiwe’s initiative that discussions first took place, and
he sustained these during the difficult period when we appeared
to be making little or no progress. Our great problem was in
setting a relative value on two such diverse exhibits. On one
hand you had one of the world’s most extensive and
exhaustive collections of tropical insects, representing many
decades of dedicated collecting and classification, while on the
other hand we had these unique artefacts from an unknown
civilization.’ Van der Walt seemed to be warming to his
subject enough to look up from his prepared script.
‘However, it was the honourable minister’s
determination to regain for his new nation a priceless part of
its heritage that at last prevailed, and it is to his credit
entirely that we are gathered here today.’

When at last Van der Walt sat down again, there was a polite
splattering of applause, and then an expectant silence as Tungata
Zebiwe rose to his feet. The minister had an immense presence,
and without yet uttering a word, he transfixed them with his
smoky unwavering gaze.

‘My people have a saying that was passed down from the
wise ones of our tribe,’ he started in his deep rumbling
voice. ‘It is this: The white eagle has stooped on the
stone falcons and cast them to earth. Now the eagle shall lift
them up again and they will fly afar. There shall be no peace in
the kingdoms of the Mambos or the Monomatopas until they return.
For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone
falcons return to roost.’

Tungata paused a moment, letting his words hang between them,
heavy with portent. Then he went on. ‘I am sure all of you
here know the story of how the bird statues of Zimbabwe were
seized by Rhodes’ plunderers, and despite the efforts of my
ancestors to prevent it, how they were carried away southwards
across the Limpopo river.’

Tungata left the podium and strode to the curtained-off
section at the back of the speakers’ platform. ‘My
friends, my comrades,’ he turned to face them once more.
‘The stone falcons have returned to roost!’ he said,
and drew aside the curtains.

There was a long breathless silence and the audience stared
avidly at the serried rank of tall soapstone carvings that was
revealed. There were six of them, and they were those that Ralph
Ballantyne had lifted from the ancient stone temple. The one that
his father had taken on his first visit to Zimbabwe thirty years
before had burned in the pyre of Groote Schuur. These six were
all that remained.

The soapstone from which each of the birds was carved was of a
greenish satiny texture. Each bird crouched on top of a plinth
that was ornamented by a pattern of intermeshed triangles like
the teeth in a shark’s jaw. The statues were not identical:
some of the columns supported crocodiles and lizards that crawled
up towards the bird image that surmounted it.

Some of the statues had been extensively damaged, chipped and
eroded, but the one in the centre of the line was almost perfect.
The bird was a stylized raptor, with its long bladelike wings
crossed over its back. The head was proud and erect, the cruel
beak hooked and the blind eyes haughty and unforgiving. It was a
magnificent and evocative work of primitive art, and the crowded
auditorium rose as one person in spontaneous applause.

Tungata Zebiwe reached out and touched the head of the central
bird. His back was turned to his audience so that they could not
see his lips move, and the applause drowned his whisper.

‘Welcome home,’ he whispered. ‘Welcome home
to Zimbabwe. Bird of my destiny.’

‘
N
ow you
do not want to go!’ Janine was shaking with fury.
‘After all the pains I have gone to, to arrange this
meeting. Now you simply do not want to go!’

‘Jan, it’s a waste of time.’

‘Thank you!’ She put her face closer to his.
‘Thank you for that. Do you realize what it would cost me
to face that monster again, but I was prepared to do it for you,
and now it’s a waste of time.’

‘Jan, please—’

‘Damn you, Craig Mellow, it’s you who are a waste
of time, you and your endless cowardice.’ He gasped and
drew away from her. ‘Cowardice,’ she repeated
deliberately. ‘I say that, and I mean it. You were in too
much of a blue funk to send that bloody book of yours to a
publisher. I had literally to tear it away from you and send it
off.’ She broke off, panting with anger, searching for
words sharp enough to express her fury.

‘You are afraid to face life, afraid to leave this cave
you have built for yourself, afraid to take the chance of
somebody rejecting your book, afraid to make any effort to float
this thing you have built.’ With a wide, extravagant
gesture she indicated the yacht. ‘I see it now, you
don’t really want to get onto the ocean, you prefer to hide
here, swilling gin and covering yourself with dreams. You
don’t want to walk, you prefer to drag yourself around on
your backside – it’s your excuse, your grand
cast-iron excuse to dodge life.’

Again she had to stop for breath, and then she went on.
‘That’s right, put that little-boy look on your face,
make those big sad eyes, it works every time, doesn’t it?
Well, not this time, buster, not this time. They have offered me
the job of curator at the South African Museum. I’m to see
the collection safely installed in its new home, and I’m
going to take it. Do you hear me, Craig Mellow? I’m going
to leave you to crawl around on the floor because you’re
too damned scared to stand up.’ She flung herself out of
the saloon and into the forward cabin. She began to snatch her
clothes out of the stowage and throw them onto the bunk.

‘Jan,’ he said behind her.

‘What is it now?’ She did not look around.

‘If we are going to be there by three o’clock,
then we’d better leave right away,’ Craig said.

‘You can drive,’ she said and pushed past him and
went up in the cockpit, leaving him to follow at his best
speed.

They drove in silence until they reached the entrance to the
long straight avenue of jacaranda trees. At the far end of it
were the white gates of State House, and Janine stared straight
ahead at them.

‘I’m sorry, Craig. I said things that were hard to
say and must have been harder to listen to. The truth is that I
am as afraid as you are. I am going to face the man that
destroyed me. If I can do it, then perhaps I can retrieve
something of myself from the ruins. I lied when I said it was for
you. It’s for both of us.’

The police guard came to the driver’s side of the maroon
Land-Rover, and without a word Craig handed him the appointment
card. The constable checked it against his visitors’ book,
and then made Craig fill in his name and address and the reason
for his visit.

Craig wrote: ‘Visit to Comrade Minister Tungata
Zebiwe’, and the guard took the book back from him and
saluted smartly.

The wrought-iron gates swung open and Craig drove through.
They turned left towards the minister’s annexe, with just a
glimpse of the white gables and blue slate roof of the main
residence between the trees.

Craig parked the Land-Rover in the public car park, and slid
into the wheelchair. Janine walked beside him to the steps that
led up onto the veranda of the annexe, and there was an awkward
moment while Craig negotiated them by the sheer strength of his
arms. Then they followed the signs down the trestled veranda,
beneath the blue wistaria and climbing purple bougainvillaea to
the door of the antechamber. One of the minister’s
bodyguards searched Janine’s handbag, frisked Craig quickly
but expertly, and then stood aside to let them enter the light
and airy room.

There were lighter square patches on the walls from where the
portraits of previous white administrators and politicians had
been removed. The only wall decoration now were two flags draped
on either side of the inner double doors, the flags of ZIPRA and
of the new Zimbabwe nation.

Craig and Janine waited for almost half an hour, and then the
doors opened and another suited bodyguard came through.

‘The Comrade Minister will see you now.’

Craig wheeled himself forward and into the inner room. On the
facing wall were portraits of the nation’s leaders, Robert
Mugabe and Josiah Inkunzi. In the centre of the wall-to-wall
carpeting stood a huge desk in the style of Louis XIV. Tungata
Zebiwe sat behind his desk, and even its size could not belittle
him.

Involuntarily Craig stopped halfway to the desk.

‘Sam?’ he whispered. ‘Samson Kumalo? I did
not know – I’m sorry—’

The minister stood up abruptly. Craig’s shock was
reflected in his own face.

‘Craig,’ he whispered, ‘what happened to
you?’

‘The war,’ Craig answered, ‘I guess I was on
the wrong side, Sam.’

Tungata recovered swiftly, and sat down again. ‘That
name is best forgotten,’ he said quietly. ‘Just as
what we were once to each other should also be forgotten. You
made an appointment through Doctor Carpenter to see me. What was
it that you wished to discuss?’

Tungata listened attentively while Craig spoke, and then he
leaned back in his chair.

‘From what you tell me, you have already made an
application to the exchange control authority for a permit to
export this vessel of yours. That permit was refused?’

‘That is correct, Comrade Minister,’ Craig
nodded.

‘Then what made you think I would want to or even have
the authority to countermand that decision?’ Tungata
asked.

‘I didn’t really think you would,’ Craig
admitted.

‘Comrade Minister,’ Janine spoke for the first
time, ‘I asked for this appointment because I believe that
there are special circumstances in this case. Mr Mellow has been
crippled for life, and his only possession is this
vessel.’

‘Doctor Carpenter, he is fortunate. The forests and
wilderness of this land are thickly sown with the unmarked graves
of young men and women who gave more than Mr Mellow for freedom.
You should have a better reason than that.’

‘I think I have,’ Janine said softly.
‘Comrade Minister, you and I have met before.’

‘Your face is familiar to me,’ Tungata agreed.
‘But I do not recall—’

‘It was at night, in the forest beside the wreckage of
an aircraft—’ She saw the flare of recognition in
those brooding smoky eyes. They seemed to bore into her very
soul. Terror came at her again in suffocating overwhelming waves,
she felt the earth sway giddily under her feet, and his face
filled all her vision. It took all that remained of her strength
and courage to speak again.

‘You won a land, but in doing so, have you lost for ever
your humanity?’

She saw the shift in that dark hypnotic gaze, the almost
imperceptible softening of his mouth. Then Tungata Zebiwe looked
down at his own powerful hands on the white blotter before
him.

‘You are a persuasive advocate, Doctor Carpenter,’
he said quietly. He picked up the gold pen from the desk set and
wrote briefly on the monogrammed pad. He tore off the sheet and
stood up. He came around the desk and towards Janine.

‘In war there are atrocities committed even by decent
men,’ he said quietly. ‘War makes monsters of us all.
I thank you for reminding me of my own humanity.’ He handed
her the sheet of paper. ‘Take that to the exchange control
director,’ he told her. ‘You will have your
permit.’

‘Thank you, Sam.’ Craig looked up at him, and
Tungata stooped over him and embraced him briefly but
ardently.

‘Go in peace, old friend,’ he said, in Sindebele,
and then straightened up. ‘Get him out of here, Doctor
Carpenter, before he unmans me completely,’ Tungata Zebiwe
ordered harshly, and strode to the wide sash-windows.

He stared out across the green lawns until he heard the double
doors close behind him, then he sighed softly and went back to
his desk.

‘I
t’s strange to think that that is
the same view of Africa as Robyn and Zouga Ballantyne had in 1860
when they arrived in the slaving clipper
Huron
.’
Craig pointed back over the stern at the great massif of Table
Mountain standing perpetual guard over the southernmost tip of a
continent, wreathed in the silver clouds that spilled over her
weathered brow of stark rock. Around the foot of the mountain,
like a necklace around the throat, were strung the white
buildings with their windows shining in the early sunlight like
ten thousand beacon fires.

‘This is where it all began, my family’s great
African adventure, and this is where it all ends.’

‘It’s an end,’ Janine agreed quietly.
‘But it’s also a new beginning.’ She was
standing in the stern, with one hand on the back stay for
balance.

She wore a thin tee-shirt and blue denim pants with the legs
hacked off short, exposing her long brown legs. During the months
of final fitting-out of the yacht, in the basin of the Royal Cape
Yacht Club, she had put herself on a strict diet: no wine, no gin
and no white food. Her waist had fined down, and the buttocks
that peeked out from under the ragged bottoms of her pants were
round and tight and hard once again.

She had cut her hair as short as a boy’s and the salt
sea air had made it curl tightly against her scalp. The sun had
darkened her face and burned away the blemishes around the
corners of her mouth and across her chin. Now she revolved
slowly, taking in the wide horizon ahead of them.

‘It’s so big, Craig,’ she said,
‘aren’t you scared?’

‘Scared as hell,’ he grinned up at her. ‘I
am not certain whether out next landfall will be South America or
India, but it’s exciting also.’