The Dust Diaries (7 page)

What else did he remember? Talking with the Bishop, asking him where were the native settlements. And the Bishop telling him they had been cleared to make way for the railway. What else had the Bishop said that day? Words of advice, opinions. He had talked a lot, but he could only remember two moments now. In the first the Bishop is looking out at the passing veld, and he keeps looking out as he speaks.

‘You ask a native where they live,’ he says, ‘and they won’t say Southern Rhodesia. Doesn’t mean a thing to them.’ Then he’d stopped, rubbed his nose and said in a quieter voice, ‘Mind you they haven’t heard of Africa either.’

In the second he is more animated. He’s talking about the mission work he can expect.

‘You’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. It’s education most of them want, give them that and they’ll be happy. They can be pretty unforgiving Christians though, some of them. If the white God doesn’t bring the rains, the crops or the children they want, they’ll soon abandon him for their own again. They’re practical like that.’

He’d paused, cleared his throat, then carried on.

‘Anyway, it’s not them you should worry about, so much as the Europeans. They’re the ones whose souls need saving.’ He’d leant forward, looked him in the eye. ‘They can be a pretty rough lot. Think you can manage?’

He can’t remember what he’d said in reply, just the sensations he’d felt, then, fifty years ago. The hardness of the bench he sat on. The train stopping, jerking him forward, juddering then going still. Looking out of the window as its engine thrummed through the carriage. The sun burning in the sky and the tall blond grass, stretching away over the veld, unmoving in the windless air.

But he doesn’t want to remember anymore. And he doesn’t want to listen to his breath, weak and dry in his throat. So he thinks of Noel Brettell instead, the young teacher who will visit him today. Because there is, after all, something else that he knows, another foothold for his mind. That it is Thursday. The names of the days may not have much sense out where he is in the middle of the rural lands, especially to a blind man, but he needs to know them. He needs to know it is Thursday: the day Noel will visit him, bringing with him his books and his clear voice, that still bears the accent of a Black Country childhood. It’s an interesting lilt, and one he enjoys listening to. It was not often he had listened to poetry and heard the word ‘bronze’ rhyme with ‘sons’. Today Noel would read Keats and Tennyson. Last week it was Eliot, whose writing he’d found intriguing.
The Waste Land, Four Quartets
and others. To hear poems he had not heard before, even if Noel told him they had actually been written thirty years earlier, fascinated him.

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

Six o’ clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

He sighs, bringing his broken breath back to his hearing. That is how he feels. Burnt out. Burnt out under an African sun. And his eyes too (
look those were pearls that were his eyes
), those burnt out as well, by the sun during the day and by the quick-burning candles at night. He turns his thoughts back to Noel Brettell, who will ride to him this afternoon down the long dust trail from Wrcningham to read him poetry. (
Here I am, an old man in a dry month, ⁄ Beingread to by a boy, waiting for rain
.) He remembers their first meeting well, when Noel approached him in Enkeldoorn. He had stayed over after his weekly service at the hospital. It was early morning and he and his boy, Thomas, were preparing to leave once more for Maronda Mashanu, when Brettell approached them. This was over three years ago, but his eyes were already almost useless, the darkness seeping in from the edges, the patches knitting together across his cornea. So the first he knew of Brettell was his voice, that accent from so far away, a Black Country childhood, tempered by an adult life in Africa.

‘Good morning, Father Cripps.’

He hadn’t recognised the voice and was startled by the sudden interruption. He looked in the direction of its speaker and after a pause replied, ‘Good morning’, then turned back to his preparations for leaving. But the voice persisted;

‘Forgive me, let me introduce myself. My name is Brettell, Noel Brettell.’

He sensed a hand rising to greet him, and then Thomas’s was at his own, lifting it to meet Noel Brettell’s. An awkward pause, which he filled with nothing but his silence in return. Brettell squeezed his hand, calluses on his palm, working hands, a firm grip, then let go.

‘I’m the teacher at Wreningham school.’

He didn’t know what to say. He looked into the mist that was his vision and then addressed the form he saw there, ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good. I am glad the school is still doing well.’

As if sensing that the conversation would not continue much further, the young man came straight to his point. ‘I’ve read some of your poetry, Father, and I admire it. To tell the truth I was very impressed. I write a little myself, although I can’t pretend to be as accomplished as you.’

Brettell was aware he sounded sycophantic, and from what he knew of Father Cripps, this wouldn’t go down well. Praise was only more likely to send him back into the bush even faster than usual. He was nervous, but continued, speaking into Arthur’s silence and his still face, which looked back at him with unfocused eyes and an expression that conveyed both inquiry and a gentle alarm.

‘I was wondering if you might let me discuss poetry with you next time we are both in town. Maybe I could read to you. I have quite a good collection.’

He stopped, then added, ‘I know your eyes are not so good as they used to be.’

Arthur waited to see if this Brettell had anything more to say, but the only sounds to reach him were those of the town waking. He was thrown. These days he spoke to few of the Europeans, and then it was only with people he had known for most of his life. He had given up meeting new people, thinking he had met everyone he wanted to meet and had lost too many of them to want to build new friendships. As a consequence he was aware he had become awkward and irritable in the presence of strangers, that he had lost any ability he once had for small talk or for the speech of new acquaintances. His first reaction was to refuse the young man, to not disturb his way of things, but this was checked by a genuine sense of gratitude, as if this man’s words had punctured a tiny hole somewhere in his chest, through which a pressure had been allowed to ease. Eventually he answered.

‘Yes, I would like that. But not here, come to my place. Next Thursday.’ And then he added, in an awkward attempt at hospitality, dredging the formality from some distant memory, ‘I shall give you some tea.’

Noel watched the old missionary leave town, walking the dust track back to Maronda Mashanu, his tall frame, even with the arc of age in his back, stepping out beside the slight figure of Thomas. In one hand he held an African walking stick, ornately carved, and in the other the shoulder of his young helper who also carried his old leather satchel, spilling over with books and letters. Together they shuffled their way out of town, walking the unforgiving twelve-mile road that wound its way back to their peculiar church in the veld.

The following Thursday Noel borrowed a bicycle from a farmer and cycled down the winding track from the school at Wreningham, past the two huge gum trees that stood on the hill and down through the dropping lilac of the jacaranda trees towards Maronda Mashanu. Coming over the lip of the final dip before the clearing where the mission stood, he saw Arthur waiting for him. He was sitting outside his rondavel, beside his beloved, oddly deformed church, its five thatched, high-domed roofs looking like huge termite mounds growing from the granite of the misshapen walls. He was sitting alone, staring straight ahead, though it was hard to tell if his eyes were open or not, as he wore a pair of oversized round medical sunglasses. Beside him a table had been fashioned from some wooden planks and upturned oil drums. As he got closer he saw it was laid. With tea, biscuits and peanut-butter sandwiches. Along with the goat-cropped grass surrounding the church resembling a lawn the whole scene gave, for a moment, the impression of a proper tea party. And Noel could indeed have thought himself transported back to England, having tea with this eccentric priest, were it not for the eagles circling above the church and the screams of the baboons swinging in the branches at the edge of the clearing.

That day Noel had read Keats to him. And he would again today. Not that he needed the poetry read for him to remember it. He knew it off by heart. Keats, with his sensorium tuned to vibrancy. How could he ever forget those lines? No, he didn’t need it read to him, but it was not just for his reading that he still asked Noel to come to him every Thursday. And not just
for
his voice. He valued Noel for his mind too, for the contact it gave him with an intellect that was of the same making as his. An English education, a love of literature, and a life in Africa. A mind requires contact with another, he reasoned, if it is to have confidence in its own existence.

There was also the secondary physical experience Noel’s visits gave him: an appreciation of the veld by proxy. He liked to think of him cycling or riding over to his rondavel, down the narrow dusty paths, of the wind he would fed, at his back or at his side, cutting one cheek cold while the other heated in the sun. Of what he saw as he rode: the long horizon, the burnt colours of the trees, the granite rocks topped with orange lichen, sculpted and shaped by millennia of wind and rain. It was what he had not seen for himself for years, and what he mourned in the quiet hours of dusk and dawn. His lost landscape, just the other side of the thin wall he lay against and yet further from him than any distance on earth, being as it was, two blind eyes away.

The scratching at the hut wall has stopped, and there is no other sound to replace it other than the ongoing trill of the cicadas. The veld was waking, but the people of Maronda Mashona were not. The woman with the water must have been on her own, a lone early riser. Maybe the sun wasn’t even up, in which case it would be a long time until Noel arrived. He sh ifted himself on the straw mattress that made his bed, sensing sleep ebbing back to him and his mind beginning to loosen as it did so, like a boat slow-slipping from its mooring. He felt uncomfortable with this free-wandering of his mind. He was a man who had always valued control, both physical and mental, but his body had disobeyed him for quite some time now. Hurting. He had come to terms with this, but his mind, however, he would not let slip from under his restraint so easily. That at least was his wish. In reality he was helpless, as he lay there, feeling his head lighten, his linear thought waver, and the dreams and memories gather at the edges of his sleep.

A fleeting idea brought him some relief. If he
was
dying, then maybe this is how the soul prepares, emptying itself of memories so it can leave the body how it entered it—unburdened. But there were some memories he did not want to return to. He had kept himself at a distance from them for over twenty years now, and that is how he wanted it to stay. He refused to even think of them as memories anymore. They were just thoughts, thoughts from another life, a life before this, before him as he is now, lying here, sick and old. Thoughts and memories, the difference was important. Memory was a place revisited. And he could not re-visit. He had held on to those memories for long enough, until he could no longer endure the pull of them. The unbearable sadness of them, opening like a universe in his ribs.

So, just thoughts then, and old ones too, worn out with examination long ago. Thoughts that had happened, and had gone. Not just been but gone. He could not return there again.

Harare, Zimbabwe

Last night I danced on your grave. There must have been more than two hundred of us crammed into the ruins of your church: old men and women, children, mothers with babies swaddled on their backs, young men in Nike and Puma tracksuits, young women wearing coloured headscarves. And all of us dancing…

But this isn’t where we begin. This is the end of our story, and I should begin at the beginning. Before all this, when I didn’t know you at all. Before I had ever set foot in Zimbabwe. Three years ago. That is when we begin. The summer of 1997. The end of a hot day, when I entered my father’s study, the whisky-and-water light of an evening sun burning up the room, lighting up the bookshelves along the back wall and playing over a scattering of photographs propped there. The photographs are of my family in the past, together and apart. We look out from them, our future selves just beneath the skin, waiting to happen; the scars, the growing, the gaining and losing.

There is one of my mother as a young woman when she met my father. In monochrome, she smiles out of the shot, looking like a young Liz Taylor, dark hair, white dress, Welsh eyes. My father’s head is in her lap, held in the bottom left corner of the frame. He is looking up at her as she looks away. He looks young and completely happy.

I am escaping inside from the day outside and from the same family as in these photographs. We are all home, back in the old Welsh longhouse that has been home to me for as long as I can remember. Even when we didn’t live here it was home. We are all together, my parents, my grandparents, my two brothers and myself. We have been eating outside, and now the plates and leftovers litter the plastic table with the sun-shade at its centre, the odd bluebottle dog-fighting over them while my family rest back into the long light of the evening. Except for me. I have come inside to release the pressure of other people for a while. And, of course, to come and find you.

Your name was mentioned that afternoon, just in passing, by my grandmother. We were talking about writing, and about poetry in particular. She said that her uncle Arthur had written poetry, her uncle Arthur the missionary to Africa. I had never heard of you before and I asked who you were. My father said he had a book about you somewhere. That someone had written a book about you. And then the conversation turned, passed on, and you weren’t mentioned again. The swallows cut between the telephone wires above us, the horses flicked their tails in time to the touch of flies on their flanks, and somewhere in the distance a tractor turned waves of cut hay in a field. But already I was interested in you. A missionary in Africa. A poet. And a relation, tenuous, the shared blood thinned by marriage and time, but still a relation. It was enough to ignite an interest, and enough to send me inside the cool of our thick-walled longhouse to look for you, leaving my immediate relations outside in the sun while I looked for a distant one inside instead.