The White Giraffe

by Lauren St. John

  As soon as Miss Volkner was out of sight, mayhem erupted. No one apart from Martine seemed to have the slightest interest in seeing the sugar birds feed. There were a few other visitors in the Protea Garden, but the noise of the children soon drove them away. Martine decided that now would be a good time to try to talk to Ben. She walked through the flower beds in search of him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where’s Ben?” she asked Lucy.

  “Who knows,” the blond girl said disinterestedly. “Probably hugging a tree or something.”

  Sherilyn interrupted: “What’s happening to the sky?”

  Eight heads tipped upward. The wispy cloud had become a vaporous gray blanket. It had consumed the top half of the mountain and was sliding furiously down the cliffs toward Kirstenbosch, driven by the wind. But the really creepy part was the sky, which boiled with an odd violet light. It looked less like a storm was approaching than some weather phenomenon, like a tornado or a tempest.

  “Please can we go back now, guys? It’s freezing,” whined Sherilyn, but the prospect of extreme weather had added to the atmosphere of silliness, and the other children started chasing moths through the Protea Garden.

  The sound of marimbas, conga drums, and African voices rising in exquisite harmony came to them on the gusting wind. The band had started playing.

  A flash of memory seared Martine’s brain. It was the music from her dream, she was sure of it! That explained it. That’s why Kirstenbosch was so familiar. Her dream was becoming reality. And this was the exact scene! The looming gray mountain, the plum-colored light, the swallowing cloud, and the children chasing moths through the proteas. Any minute now, someone would go: “Hey, look what I found . . .”

  “Hey!” Luke was standing by a stack of wooden stakes of the sort used to create fences. His voice was excited. “Look what I found.”

  The others rushed to his side, Martine included, although warning bells were clanging like a sixty-piece orchestra in her head.

  An Egyptian goose lay on the ground. It was a large bird with reddish-brown and white wings, but one of those wings hung broken and its webbed feet curled limply at its breast. It stared up at the peering faces with one red eye. Though it flapped feebly, it was unable to move. Luke scooped the bird up and it honked hoarsely in protest.

  “I bet it’s been attacked by a fox. Miss Volkner said there were foxes around.”

  “Put it down, Luke,” Lucy snapped at her brother. “It’s probably diseased.”

  “Yeah, Luke, it’s dirty,” agreed Jake.

  Martine tried to speak, but no sound came out.

  “Maybe we should put it out of its misery,” Luke suggested. “You know, hit it over the head or something.”

  Jake laughed. “How ’bout a braai, a nice little barbecue. We can put it on a spit. Should be enough to go around.”

  Martine found her voice. She said tearfully: “Please leave it alone. Please don’t hurt it.”

  “Ah, poor little English girl,” jeered Luke. “Cwying like a baby. You want it? Here, have it. Catch.”

  He launched the goose at Martine, who flailed blindly for the brown blur and, unprepared for the weight of it, tripped and toppled over backward. Somehow she managed to hold on to it through her fall. She struggled into a kneeling position with the goose still cradled in her arms, her face flushed scarlet with anger and embarrassment. The other kids burst out laughing.

  “Did you see that?” Jake crowed delightedly. “That was priceless.” He mimicked Martine’s windmill arms and plaintive voice. “Pleeease don’t hurt it.”

  Caught up in the madness of the moment, none of the children noticed that Martine had closed her eyes and was trembling violently. She was remembering the goose in her dream. That goose too had had a tiny pulse beating in its throat and brown silken feathers that were warm to the touch. This bird’s eyes slid shut as she watched it.

  Martine’s first thought was that she had to try to save it. Her second was, How? Then a voice in her head, a voice she recognized as Grace’s, said, “You know what to do, chile.” And right at that instant Martine realized that she did know what to do; that she had always known, all her life. Her hands ceased trembling and heated up to the point where they were practically glowing. After a few seconds the Egyptian goose jerked and its eyelids flickered. She loosened her palms. It shook out its wings and flew into the darkening sky.

  The world swam into focus again.

  Her classmates were staring at her with a mixture of fear, horror, and disbelief. The color had drained from Luke’s face and he was backing away from her as if she were possessed. “Hey, how did you do that? What are you, some kind of witch?”

  Martine was just as bewildered as he was. In the instant when her palms were at their hottest, she’d felt a power as ancient as the earth go through her like an ocean wave, and had seen, in a puff of smoke, a procession of what she could only imagine were spirits—Africans in antelope masks and rhinoceroses breathing fire. Dazed and shaky, all she could think was: So this is it. This is the gift.

  “What is it?” Luke was yelling at her. “Is it black magic? Voodoo?”

  “Maybe she’s an umthakathi,” accused Xhosa. “That’s the Zulu word for a wizard or witch, someone who bewitches others or casts spells on them. Be careful, she might change into a bat or a bird.”

  Martine stuttered, “I’m not an um . . . I’m not a w-witch.”

  “You know, in South Africa, some people say that there is only one thing to do with an umthakathi,” Xhosa said. “They must be eliminated. Otherwise they will do evil things.”

  Martine cast a desperate glance down the mountainside, hoping to see the sturdy figure of Miss Volkner coming to call them for the picnic. But no one was there.

  “You wouldn’t,” she said in a small voice.

  Nobody answered, but Jake took a threatening step toward her. Martine made a move toward the path that led to the main center, but the other children cut her off.

  She looked beseechingly at Lucy, but the blond girl was wearing the same supercilious expression she adopted whenever anyone spoke about Ben.

  That’s when she knew that they were serious.

  Martine spun on her heel and fled into the twilight, screaming for help as she went, but the band drowned out her cries. She ran down a short hill, over Nursery Stream and into an evergreen forest. Only then did she realize her mistake. Ahead of her was a daunting wall of 330 steps. She halted, panting, unsure what to do, but the clattering of feet and cries of her pursuers on the wooden bridge jolted her into action. She flew up the steps as if the hounds of hell were on her trail. With every one, the agony in her legs increased and her breath burned like acid in her chest. At the top was a road but no signs. Martine knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep going for much longer, so she plunged into the wilderness of yellowwood trees. Better to be lost than to be caught.

  Once in the greeny dark of the forest, she could no longer hear the noise of the city, just the tinkle of streams and the faint whisper and twitter of birds, bats, and snakes high up in the canopy. Clouds oozed through the branches and hung above the narrow path. Higher and higher Martine climbed. When she paused to suck air into her fiery lungs, she caught a panoramic glimpse of the hazy city miles below and of the Botanical Gardens, now in miniature like a village made of LEGOs, with toys for cars. Behind her, she heard the shouts of the children as they entered the forest. She dragged herself forward, wild asparagus thorns hooking her ankles, but even as she did so, she knew she couldn’t run anymore. Her legs were too rubbery to support her.

  All at once, an arm shot out from behind a tree and she was yanked sideways into a hollow. Martine opened her mouth to scream, just as she had in that long-ago dream, but she was so startled and breathless that all she could manage was a small whimper before crumpling into a bed of leaves. She steeled herself for a blow, but none came. Squinting up through the misty darkness, she made out the face of her captor. Ben! He wrapped his arms pro
tectively around her and, despite being small, he was warm and solid and she could feel the thud, thud, thud of his heart.

  “Martine,” called Jake in a singsong voice, “where are you?” Leaves crunched under the feet of the gang as they hurried by.

  Ben put a finger to his lips. He reached down and picked up a handful of small stones and threw them as far as he could. They made a series of popping noises as they landed, like tiny bullets.

  Luke shouted, “Over there! Come on, everyone.”

  There were whooping noises and the cracking of fallen branches as they pounded away down the track.

  Martine became aware that Ben was shaking with silent laughter. He laughed so hard that he doubled over and had to hold his stomach.

  “What is it?” Martine whispered. “What’s so funny?”

  Ben straightened up long enough to point at a sign propped against the tree. The base of it was still damp with fresh soil. On it was written:

  WARNING: RAW COMPOST TANK

  DO NOT ENTER

  12

  Martine said nothing to her grandmother about the Botanical Gardens drama, which had ended with six of her pursuers falling into a stinking stew of fermenting horse manure, rotting fruit, decaying leaves, and squashed bugs. Sherilyn had escaped because she hadn’t been able to keep up with the others, but the search party who found them had discovered her babbling incomprehensibly after an encounter with a lynx cat with glowing yellow eyes. Miss Volkner was apoplectic with fury. She was particularly enraged that no one would own up to what had happened. Even Mrs. Rathmore lost her sense of humor and said that if it wasn’t that she thought the six had been punished enough by missing out on the band and picnic, and being mercilessly teased on the bus to Storm Crossing (where they were made to sit at the back, hungry and scowling, like the broken survivors of a mud-wrestling competition), they would have spent the rest of the term cutting the school fields with nail scissors.

  What nobody could figure out was how Martine and Ben came to be sitting quietly on a picnic blanket near the band, enjoying hot buttered corn and big slabs of milk tart, a vanilla custard pie. Miss Volkner had her suspicions and told them she’d be keeping a very close eye on them, but it was the wrath of the Five Star kids Martine feared most.

  “We’ll get you for this,” Scott Henderson had hissed as he boarded the bus, dripping, and somehow she didn’t doubt that they would.

  Fortunately for Martine, ever since her grandmother had found her helping out in the garden the morning after the fight, a truce had been declared at home. So much so that Gwyn Thomas finally relented and allowed Martine to go with Tendai when he did his rounds of the reserve the following weekend. He picked her up in the jeep at four thirty on Saturday morning, when dawn was nothing but a smudge in a star-speckled sky, and drove her to Sawubona’s highest point, an escarpment densely covered in aloes, proteas, and a shrub that smelled like curry. Cacti clung to the lichen-plastered rocks.

  The track that led to the top of the escarpment was badly eroded and treacherous, so Tendai and Martine walked the last part of the way, and the sky was etched with fiery hues when they reached their destination. While Tendai unpacked their breakfast, Martine made herself comfortable on a boulder still warm from the heat of the previous day. Far below her was the biggest dam on Sawubona. As the sun rose and her eyes became accustomed to the honeyed light, Martine could make out herds of buffalo, springboks, and elephants drifting down to the water. White egrets watched from the trees like the stiff paper birds of Japanese origami.

  Martine thought that she had never breathed in purer air, seen a lovelier view, or heard any choir more amazing than the singing of the birds that morning. She wished her mum and dad could have been there to share it, but it made her feel good to think that her mum had probably visited this spot and watched the same sunrise.

  Tendai made a small fire and brewed up a pot of condensed milk-sweetened tea. He handed Martine some hot African bread made with maize meal, cooked in the coals in tightly wrapped banana leaves, and they munched contentedly and watched the animals in the valley below.

  After a while, Martine said, “Tendai, can I ask you a question?”

  “Yebo.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yebo.”

  “How did you get the scar on your face?”

  Tendai laughed, but it was a bitter laugh devoid of his usual good humor. “It was a long time ago, little one. Too long ago to be important. I was an angry young man, that’s all.”

  Martine could tell that he didn’t want to talk about it, but curiosity got the better of her. “Did an animal attack you, or did you get into a fight?”

  Tendai unbuttoned his khaki shirt and Martine clapped a hand to her mouth. His back and broad chest were criss-crossed with fifty or sixty thick, raised scars. It was as if someone or something had tried to cut him into a million pieces.

  “What animal would do this?” he said harshly. “No, little one, animals might scratch you, or bite you, or even rip you apart in hunger or in fear, but only a man can crush you inside, in your heart, for no reason other than the color of your skin.”

  Martine swallowed.

  Tendai had a faraway expression on his face. When he began to talk, it was as if he were seeing something that had happened in another land, in another lifetime. He had been twelve years old when his parents had moved from a peaceful village in the Drakensberg Mountains to the notorious township of Soweto, near Johannesburg, in search of work.

  “For many years,” Tendai recalled, “it was as if the devil himself had moved to Soweto and turned it into hell. But it was a hell just for black people. Whole families lived in corrugated iron shacks without toilets or running water. When darkness fell, we burned fires to keep away the cockroaches and rats, and armed gangs roamed the streets.” He stopped. “Perhaps I should not be telling you this. Your grandmother might not like it.”

  Martine got up off her boulder and moved nearer to him. “Please, Tendai,” she said. “I want to know.”

  In spite of the hardship of life in Soweto, Tendai considered himself luckier than most. His mother was a trained teacher and she’d helped him study in their shack. He worked hard and dreamed of one day being able to return to the mountains and buy a farm of his own. When he was seventeen, he managed to get a job as a clerk at a railway station. He was prouder than he had ever been in his life. There was only one problem. Every day he walked five miles to work and almost every day he was stopped by police wanting to check his papers. At that time it was illegal for a non-white—a man of color—to go anywhere without identification.

  “One policeman in particular, it was as if he hated me without even knowing me. Sometimes I felt that he was just waiting to catch me out.”

  Martine realized she was trembling. “And did he?”

  Tendai nodded. “He caught me without my papers. My mother had washed my shirt and had forgotten to return the papers to the pocket after it was dry. This policeman began to strike me with his stick and shout at me for having no identification. When I reminded him that he had checked it many times before, he called me names. Then he tore my shirt. I had kept my temper all this time, but when he tore my shirt—without it, I couldn’t go to my job—I’m sorry to say I punched him as hard as I could.”

  After that, Tendai remembered very little. When he regained consciousness, he was in a prison hospital, covered in the welts of a sjambok, a whip made of rhinoceros hide. When he was released from jail nine months later, he found that his parents had been taken away by the authorities. He never saw them again. At eighteen he was a broken man, living rough on the streets of Johannesburg, when Grace sent for him.

  “It was Grace who taught me that the best revenge is forgiveness,” Tendai said. “Sometimes the thing that hurts your enemies most is to see that you are not like them. Grace introduced me to your grandfather, who changed my life. He believed in a South Africa where men of all colors are equal. Not everybody does.”

  �
��Why not?” asked Martine. For some reason the face of Alex du Preez, as he threatened her, swam into her mind.

  “I don’t know, little one,” Tendai said tiredly. “I just don’t know.”

  They packed up the breakfast things, threw sand over the coals, and headed back down the escarpment. The grass was still wet with dew, but the early-morning sun was already hot on their skin. As they walked, Tendai gave Martine her first lesson in bushcraft. He picked an aloe leaf and showed her how to squeeze a gel from it that could soothe burns or rashes, heal wounds, or calm itching.

  That was impressive, but the aloe couldn’t even begin to compete with the marula tree, which was practically a one-stop pharmacy. Not only did its golden yellow fruit soothe stomachaches, Tendai told her, but it had four times as much vitamin C as an orange. Its leaves were great for dressing wounds or treating insect bites, and its bark reduced inflammation. And that wasn’t all. The pit of the marula fruit contained an oil that the Africans prized as nose or ear drops, or lit in its shell as a natural candle. The Zulus even believed that if a person suffering from measles rose before dawn, went down to the tree without speaking to anyone, and bit the bark, he’d be cured.

  Martine gazed around her in wonderment. With every passing day, she felt more and more that she belonged here. It was as if the landscape itself were creeping into her soul. She thought of it as a language. Every new bird call, every breath of wind, every new plant, and each fresh encounter she had with the local people or animals was like learning a new word. Put together, it made up the language of the bush. She hoped that if she studied hard enough, she’d be as fluent one day as Tendai was.

  “Show me more,” she urged him, and he did. He taught her how to identify a multi-layered orange mushroom that was delicious if it was roasted, and how to make a cone of leaves to trap dew or rainwater. He even showed her the “toilet paper” tree, which had soft fronds that came in handy if you were far from home and caught short!