by Tim Jeal
It was just after sunset, and a bloody stain hung in the sky. Clara was walking home with Paul, while little boys shooed goats into their kraals and scrawny hens into their huts for the night. From far away they heard a stuttering beat, as if of muted drums. As usual at this time of day, a light breeze came dipping down from the chief’s crag, whispering so quietly it seemed as if the earth itself were breathing. Already soft stars were smiling.
Paul was the first to realize that the distant thudding was not being made by drums.
‘Master’s mules,’ he screamed, flinging up his arms and starting to run.
‘Dear God!’ cried Clara, in joy and gratitude.
Women looked up in amazement from their cooking, and old men gaped. The white woman was chasing the little schoolteacher through the village.
*
As Clara undressed, she was in a daze. Only days ago, she had imagined what it might be like to return to England without Robert, and now she could not believe she had ever thought it. Incredibly, it was possible to wish one had never met a man and yet almost at the same moment to be glad one had. Robert had been extraordinarily quiet and gentle with her since his return. Minutes before, he had put his arms around her and kissed her neck lightly at the nape. Then, gazing at her with sorrowful intensity, he had kissed her lips softly again and again. She felt herself responding as he stroked her naked body with the tips of his fingers. She was safe now and need not feel tense or frightened. By the time he began to take off his own clothes, Clara felt radiantly expectant. But just as they lay down on the bed, the evening drums started up. In that instant, Clara felt a change in him, not just the tension in his face but a sense that he was withdrawing from her.
The drumming went on, and though they were both naked, he did not stroke or kiss her any more. Instead he sat on the edge of their bed with his head bowed. A lamp in the adjacent room cast a yellow square on the bedroom floor. When he raised his head, his eyes were intent and sharply focused, but not on her. Something beyond her seemed to absorb him completely – or so she thought until she realized that he could not bear to face her.
‘You must tell me,’ she murmured with a sinking heart. ‘Please, Robert. I must know.’
And so he told her, not sparing himself, or her, anything. The rifles; the defended hill; the men from the north; the probability of an uprising. It was all laid out before her, without any attempt at mitigation. By the time he finished his recitation, she was shivering, and her mouth was very dry. Yet she was excited too.
Her voice shook. ‘Does it mean we’ll be able to leave this place?’
He raised his heavy-lidded eyes, plainly knowing how much his answer mattered to her. ‘I’m sorry, my love. We’ll be much safer here than on the veld. Mponda will defend us.’
‘You think he will?’
‘I do.’
She looked at him expectantly, her voice scratchy with hope. ‘Suppose we face up to the dangers of a journey and go away … Surely they’ll patch things up, father and son. If we are the problem, we owe it to them to go.’
He stared at her in astonishment. ‘But, Clara, we owe it to them to stay. How else can we set an example and influence them for good?’ His voice throbbed with certainty. ‘When God is testing us, we cannot run away.’
So there was to be no escape after all. As Robert reached out and touched her breasts, she felt her cheeks burning. How could he fondle her like this after being the cause of such disappointment? But her anger was short-lived. What a hypocrite I’ve been, she thought: praying for his return, but only so long as he could save my life. And now that he’s made it clear he can’t, am I going to wish he’d never come back?
For Robert, the truth-telling appeared to have been entirely beneficial. As if they had magically returned to the time immediately before his revelations, his face resumed its rapt solemnity. Her own desire to make love had not survived his revelations, but if he took pleasure in her body, should she deny it to him after his long abstinence? And who knew how many more times there might be? Very few, perhaps.
After they had made love, he fell asleep at once; but she lay awake, listening to the bats in the thatch, as her husband’s sweat and semen dried on her body. She tried to build a bridge between this night and others that might lie ahead, but she could not do it. Her future was unimaginable.
*
On no other Sunday since her arrival had Clara seen even thirty people in the little wooden chapel; yet today more than that had already assembled outside. Before Paul rang the bell, a broad phalanx of warriors was snaking towards the building. Most were daubed with clay colours and carrying weapons. None had been near the place before. As they shuffled past the doorway, Clara turned to Robert with a wildly beating heart.
‘Don’t they wear paint when they fight?’
‘Red ochre? That’s right; and blue shining stuff on their heads – it’s mica dust mixed with grease.’
Clara caught her breath as she saw the glint of blue on their shaven heads. ‘Why are they wearing it now?’
‘To protect them from the power of the white man’s God.’ Robert smiled encouragingly and took her arm.
Clara was still standing in the doorway, eyes screwed up against the sunlight. Remembering their lovemaking of the night before, Robert’s heart was filled with tenderness. She looked lost and heartbreakingly young. He took her hand and said gently, ‘When I first came to live with Mponda’s people and washed my hair, they thought I was washing my brain. The soapsuds, you see. They’re very easily frightened. You should remember that.’
But frightened people often lash out, she thought, as she and Robert caught up with Simon and Paul. They were leaning against a broken fence that bordered a dusty enclosure. Inside, a woman was braiding a child’s hair. Clara’s hand tightened on her husband’s arm. How could Robert suppose that his words would ever matter to these people? If we are murdered, people will carry on just as before. To her right, a man was urinating against a tree and a boy was chopping wood, just as on any other day.
Simon and Paul were in their best clothes, and both were scared. The stiff and ceremonious way in which Robert was walking seemed ominous to Clara.
He spoke, in his hoarse, slightly awkward voice. ‘Dear friends, these are Our Lord’s words to his disciples in Saint Luke’s Gospel: “When ye shall hear of wars and commotions be not terrified. Though they shall lay their hands on you, do not meditate before what ye shall answer: for I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries will not be able to resist.”’
As they approached the chapel, Clara wanted nothing so much as to run back to the house. But what good would it do? She would be found wherever she hid. As Robert embraced them all and said a prayer, Clara wondered how she would survive the tension of this moment, let alone endure the minutes to come. Robert intoned:
The Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall keep thee from all evil:
The Lord shall keep thy going out and coming in,
From this time forth and for evermore.
They entered the building, and Clara was conscious of smelling rancid fat and old leather. The warriors had placed themselves in the seats immediately behind those that the converts always occupied. Not being used to furniture, they sat as if on the ground, with their feet on the benches and their knees drawn up to their chins. A dog was wandering among them, yelping as it received blows in the ribs. As usual, there were mothers with squalling babies on their backs, and strangers who had come out of curiosity. But these people had been careful to sit in the back rows. They seemed unusually quiet.
Robert recited the Lord’s Prayer in Venda and then, eyes on the armed men, declared in a friendly, encouraging voice:
‘I know you feel suspicious. I understand that. But it really isn’t as hard as you think it is to believe in something you can’t quite understand. I’ll show you wh
at I mean.’ He pulled an egg from his pocket like a conjuror. Everyone was very still. ‘Just look at this egg. If I break it, only a yellow slime comes out.’ He cracked the shell and let the contents splatter on the floor. He reached down and touched the broken yolk. ‘Just slime. But place an identical egg under the wings of a fowl, and in no time at all a living thing is born. Who can understand how a little warmth can make a chicken out of slime? I certainly can’t explain it, but I don’t deny the fact. Some of you can’t understand why Lord Jesus died for your sakes. But please, my friends, be like the hen. Place that fact in your minds and hearts, as the hen places the egg under her wings, then dwell upon it and take the same pains, and something new and wonderful is sure to hatch out.’
They then sang a hymn, which Robert had translated from the English:
Thy Kingdom come, O God,
Thy rule, O Christ, begin;
Break with Thine Iron Rod
The tyrannies of Sin.
Robert was always moved by the vigour of African singing, and today the shrill, defiant voices of the female converts made him feel brave and joyful. Looking at the poor, half-naked pagans, with their ochre-painted bodies, he no longer feared death at their hands. The way they were stealing covert glances at one another and seemed loath to lower their eyes told Robert that they were afraid to be in the white man’s spirit house. A moment’s inattention, and they might be bewitched or forced into some action against their will. He had been so certain that they had come as enemies that no alternative had occurred to him until now. And yet if Mponda had really decided to espouse the Christian faith, it would be perfectly natural for people to come here in order to show their chief that they were not ill disposed.
Robert caught Clara’s eye and smiled. He knew how disillusioning she had found earlier visits to the chapel. Once, a man had called out to a friend to give him sweet reed during the blessing, and several women had snored throughout the service; on the same occasion, a group of men had smoked hemp noisily, and a chameleon had fallen from the rafters, provoking an uproar. But today he sensed that their shared danger had restored Clara’s faith in his vocation. And this, he told himself – along with their very survival – he owed entirely to the power of the Holy Spirit.
Sometimes when Philemon preached, Robert thought him too tolerant of his listeners’ foibles; but now when the old man rose to speak, he railed most bitterly against the evils of circumcision and blamed the Venda for bringing all their present ills upon themselves.
‘Look upon the panting oxen,’ Philemon cried in his strangely high-pitched voice. ‘Have they sinned against Thee, God? Have the dying plants sinned, or the trees and grass blasphemed? Nay, brothers, they have not. So why does God deny us rain? I will tell you. It is because of the evil of the boyale that God punishes us all. Who can deny it?’
A club clattered to the floor, and Robert braced himself for the warriors’ reaction to Philemon’s call to repentance. A man jumped up and lifted his assegai. Its point was aimed at Philemon’s heart. Robert jumped up, his finger jabbing the air:
‘You will burn if you cast that spear … forever and ever. And your children will know eternal fire.’
In the eerie silence that followed, the young man gasped out a deep sob, and his spear fell from his hand. Someone behind him began to moan. Then, one by one, others started to weep, so that soon the chapel was filled with the rustle of people murmuring aloud. The very sound, thought Robert, that had filled the upper room at Pentecost, a rushing mighty wind. Within him, like a resurrection, faith and courage blazed. Mesmerized by the missionary’s eye, men and women gazed in awe, then hid their faces. Clara’s spirit soared. They were saved. Joy filled her heart. At the moment of crisis, Robert had not failed her.
Compassion and pity lit his features. These ignorant children had sinned and blasphemed, but they should not be punished. No, he would intercede for them. Christ had died for all mankind, so why should they be denied His bounty? As if stilling stormy waters, Robert raised a protecting hand.
CHAPTER 11
For almost a month after Robert’s triumph in the chapel, there was hardly a breath of wind, a circumstance the villagers attributed to the white man’s magic. The metal of sky and hill and the rough stubble of the thorn trees had fused into a grey so uniform that it was impossible to tell where sky and land met. For hours on end, the people lay in their dark huts or rested under the shade of their grain bins. The stars hung large and low. Only days before, there had still been mice to dig up, but all had been eaten now, and Clara was shocked to see women reduced to stewing rotten figs. At night, she heard hungry children crying. They reminded her of Homani, with their stick-like legs, running noses, and overlarge eyes.
In these dusty days, as the rains failed to come, Robert strode purposefully through the village on his way to Mponda’s crag as if he alone could see beyond the hard times. He spent most of his days with the chief and was optimistic about his progress towards conversion. Clara tried to put out of her mind the violence that seemed more likely to materialize if Robert succeeded than if he failed. But from a personal perspective, she found his renewed confidence much more attractive than his anxiety before he had gone away. He really seemed a man inspired. God had worked through him in the chapel and would do so again. How else could she explain what she had seen with her own eyes? The warriors had come, determined to commit murder, but they had been thwarted by a power greater than their own.
When Robert touched her, she imagined she could feel this new force emanating from him. When she saw him working on the village dam, she was overwhelmed by how hard he himself laboured in order to inspire his African diggers. At the mission, he was constantly harried by sick or hungry people. His resilence amazed her. And when he came home in the evening too tired to talk, she understood and did hot press him. Remembering how his silences had once exasperated her, she was surprised by her new tolerance. Can I be falling in love with him again? she wondered. Yet quite often she feared for him. He believed so completely in Mponda’s coming conversion that Clara worried about how a serious setback to his hopes might affect him. Mponda was vitally important to Robert, but Clara could not understand her husband’s absolute faith in him. If she could only share Robert’s optimism, they could be as close to each other as they had ever been. Yet one particular doubt prevented that. Why should Mponda choose to oblige Robert by deciding to be baptized before the rains? What the chief stood to lose was crystal clear. If he accepted Christ too soon, he would risk being blamed for extending the drought. Knowing how sensitive Robert would be on this subject, she felt acutely anxious before finally putting this point to him.
‘But can’t you see, Clara?’ he demanded, in a deep and resonant voice. ‘When God decides that the moment has come, nobody on earth can resist Him.’ However, earlier in the day, he had admitted that Mponda had been complaining about God’s unfairness in denying to black people the goods that white people had enjoyed for generations. How long, he had demanded, would God allow this injustice to continue after he had been baptized?
‘What did you say?’ asked Clara, disturbed by the gulf of understanding that this anecdote suggested.
Robert smiled. ‘I explained to him the quite different values of spiritual and material wealth.’
‘Did he appreciate the distinction?’ asked Clara faintly.
‘Why shouldn’t he?’ asked Robert, evidently nettled by her question. ‘Former believers in witchcraft have great respect for things they can’t touch or see.’
Though far from reassured, Clara did not say so. Often she found herself wanting to talk of less weighty matters, but when she tried to gossip about Hannah or Chizuva, Robert rarely responded. In England, a wife whose husband was bound up with his work would have her circle of friends to fall back on, but not in this wilderness. On many nights Clara lay reading by lamplight long after Robert had fallen into an exhausted sleep.
Of all the things that pained her in the village, Clara found the
people’s sullen expressions the worst. Robert had long since become hardened to them, and he encouraged Clara to learn from him. Yet she felt that he was wrong not to contradict the widespread rumour that he had stopped the rain. And what would have been lost by pointing out that the chief’s conversion would not threaten all their old customs?
Unless villagers were sick, he rarely spoke to individuals. When not with Mponda, Robert would generally be working on his dam, across the dried-up riverbed. His aim was to create a reservoir large enough to provide the Venda with water for their fields throughout the dry season. The dam was half a mile from the village – an ideal spot, given the many hours he spent there, for any would-be assassin to seek him out. Robert’s literal belief in God’s protection terrified Clara. He was sure that no harm could come to him until his work was done, and therefore he saw no need to cajole or reassure opponents.
Early one evening, a group of Mponda’s counsellors came to the mission and begged Robert to allow their chief to take part in the witch doctor’s rainmaking rituals. Their bodies were lubricated with grease and mica dust, and they wore cloaks of spotted cat and silver jackal. Behind them trailed a swarm of small flies. Clara moved closer to hear what these men wanted. She had started to make good progress with the language and every day understood a little more.
Robert greeted his visitors courteously. But with a heavy heart, Clara recognized his cruel-to-be-kind expression. He wished he could help them, truly he did; he could understand their distress; indeed, he shared it; but no missionary on earth could help them unless they first opened their hearts to God.
One counsellor said that if Robert would allow Mponda to help them make rain just once, then they would come to church as often as he liked. Everyone knew that the chief’s absence would damage the ritual.
Robert shook his head sadly and said, ‘I’m sorry, but Chief Mponda must act according to his conscience. He is a free man.’