Rage

by Wilbur Smith

  Behind his newspaper Shasa smiled reflectively as he remembered Marylee from MIT and her IBM 701. He wouldn’t mind another visit to Johannesburg himself in the near future.

  ‘It’s absolutely riveting stuff,’ Tara was saying, ‘and it all fits in with the new discoveries at Sterkfontein and Makapansgat. It really does seem that Southern Africa was the true cradle of mankind, and that Australopithecus is our direct ancestor.’

  ‘So you will be away for at least four days?’ Shasa interrupted. ‘What about the children?’

  ‘I have spoken to your mother. She will be happy to come across and stay at Weltevreden while I am away.’

  ‘I won’t be able to join you,’ Shasa pointed out. ‘The third reading of the new Criminal Law Amendment Bill is coming up, and all hands are needed in the House. I could have flown you up in the Mosquito – now you’ll have to take the commercial flight on the Viscount.’

  ‘What a pity,’ Tara sighed. ‘You would have enjoyed it. Professor Dart is a fascinating speaker.’

  ‘You’ll stay at the Carlton suite, of course. It’s standing empty.’

  ‘Molly has arranged for me to stay with a friend of hers at Rivonia.’

  ‘One of her Bolshies, I presume.’ Shasa frowned slightly. ‘Try not to get yourself arrested again.’ He had been waiting for an opportunity to talk about her political activities and he lowered the newspaper and looked at her thoughtfully, then realized it was not the correct moment and merely nodded. ‘Your grass orphans and your widower will try to bumble along without you for a few days.’

  ‘With your mother and sixteen servants at hand, I have no doubt you will survive,’ she told him crisply, letting her irritation show through for an instant.

  Marcus Archer met her at the airport. He was affable and amusing and while they listened to a Mozart programme on the car radio as they drove out to Rivonia Marcus discussed the composer’s life and works. He knew much more about music than she did, but although she listened to his dissertation with pleasure and attention, she was nevertheless aware of his enmity. It was well concealed, but flashed out in a barbed remark or a spiced glance. He never mentioned Moses Gama’s name, and nor did she. Molly had said he was a homosexual, the first she had ever encountered to her certain knowledge, and she wondered if they all hated women.

  Puck’s Hill was a delight, with its shaggy thatch and unkempt grounds, so different from Weltevreden’s carefully manicured splendour.

  ‘You’ll find him at the end of the front stoep,’ Marcus said, as he parked under one of the bluegums at the rear of the house. It was the first time he had referred to Moses, but even then he did not use his name. He wandered away and left her standing.

  She had not known how to dress, though she imagined that he would not approve of slacks. So she had chosen a long loose skirt made of cheap but colourful trade print that she had purchased in Swaziland, and with it wore a simple green cotton blouse with sandals on her feet. Again, she had not been sure whether she should wear make-up, and she had compromised with a pale pink lipstick and just a touch of mascara. She thought she looked well enough in the mirror of the women’s room at the airport as she combed her dense chestnut curls, but was suddenly stricken by the thought that he would find her pale skin insipid and unattractive.

  Now standing alone in the sunshine, she was once again attacked by doubts and that terrible sense of inadequacy. If Marcus had been there, she would have begged him to drive her back to the airport, but he had disappeared and so she summoned up all her courage and walked slowly around the side of the whitewashed house.

  She paused at the corner and looked down the long covered verandah. Moses Gama was sitting at a table at the far end with his back to her. The table was piled with books and writing materials. He was wearing a casual white shirt with open neck that contrasted with the marvellous anthracite of his skin. His head was bowed and he was writing rapidly on a block of notepaper.

  Timidly she stepped up on to the verandah and although her approach was noiseless, he sensed her presence and turned abruptly when she was halfway down the verandah. He did not smile, but she thought she saw pleasure in his gaze as he stood up and came to meet her. He did not attempt to embrace her, or kiss her, and she was pleased, for it confirmed his differentness. Instead he led her to the second chair placed beside his table, and seated her in it.

  ‘Are you well?’ he asked. ‘Are your children well?’ The innate African courtesy, always the enquiry and then the offer of refreshment, ‘Let me give you a cup of tea.’ He poured from the tray already set on his cluttered desk, and she sipped with pleasure.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.

  ‘I came as soon as I received your message from Molly, as I promised I would.’

  ‘Will you always keep your promises to me?’

  ‘Always,’ she answered with simple sincerity, and he studied her face.

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘I think you will.’

  She could hold his gaze no longer, for it seemed to sear her soul and lay it bare. She looked down at the table top, at the closely written sheets of his handwriting.

  ‘A manifesto,’ he said, following her gaze. ‘A blueprint for the future.’

  He selected half a dozen sheets and handed them to her. She set aside her tea cup and took them from his hand, shivering slightly as their fingers touched. His skin was cool – that was one of the things that she remembered.

  She read the sheets, her attention becoming fastened upon them more firmly the more she read, and when she finished them, she lifted her eyes to his face again.

  ‘You have a poetry in your choice of words that makes the truth shine more luminously,’ she whispered.

  They sat on the cool verandah, while outside the brilliant highveld sun threw shadows black and crisp as paper cut-outs beneath the trees and the noonday swooned in the heat, and they talked.

  There were no trivialities in their discussion, everything he said was thrilling and cogent, and he seemed to inspire her for her replies and her own observations she knew were measured and lucid and she saw she had aroused and held his interest. She no longer was aware of her small vanities of dress and cosmetics, all that mattered now were the words that they exchanged and the cocoon they wove out of them. With a start she realized that the day had slipped away unnoticed and the short African twilight was upon them. Marcus came to fetch her and show her to her sparsely furnished bedroom.

  ‘We will leave for the museum in twenty minutes,’ he told her.

  In the lecture theatre of the Transvaal Museum the three of them sat near the back. There were half a dozen other blacks in the crowded audience, but Marcus sat between the two of them. A black man beside a white woman would have excited interest, and certain hostility. Tara found it difficult to concentrate on the eminent professor’s address, and though she glanced in his direction only once or twice, it was Moses Gama who occupied all her thoughts.

  Back at Puck’s Hill they sat late in the cavernous kitchen, while Marcus hovered over the Aga stove, joining in their conversation while he produced a meal that even in her preoccupation Tara realized was as good as anything that had ever come out of the kitchens of Weltevreden.

  It was after midnight when Marcus stood up abruptly.

  ‘I will see you in the morning,’ he said, and the look he gave Tara was once again spiced with venom. She could not understand how she had offended him, but soon it did not matter for Moses took her hand.

  ‘Come,’ he said softly, and she thought her legs might not support her weight.

  Long afterwards she lay pressed to him, her body bathed in sweat and her nerves still spasming and twitching uncontrollably.

  ‘Never,’ she whispered, when she could speak again. ‘I have never known anyone like you. You teach me things about myself that I never suspected. You are a magician, Moses Gama. How do you know so much about a woman?’

  He chuckled softly. ‘You know we are entitled to many wives. If a man cannot
keep them all happy at the same time, then his life becomes a torment. He has to learn.’

  ‘Do you have many wives?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ he answered. ‘But one day—’

  ‘I will hate every one of them.’

  ‘You disappoint me,’ he said. ‘Sexual jealousy is a silly European emotion. If I were to detect it in you, I would despise you.’

  ‘Please,’ she said quietly, ‘never despise me.’

  ‘Then never give me reason, woman,’ he commanded, and she knew she was his to command.

  She realized that the first day and night with him, spent alone and uninterrupted, was exceptional. She realized also that he must have set the time aside for her, and it must have been difficult to do so for there were others, hundreds of others, demanding his attention.

  He was like one of the ancient African kings holding tribal court on the verandah of the old house. There were always men and women waiting patiently under the bluegum trees in the yard for their turn to speak to him. They were of all types and ages, from simple uneducated folk newly arrived from the reserves in the country to sophisticated lawyers and businessmen in dark suits arriving at Puck’s Hill in their own automobiles.

  They had one thing in common only — the deference and respect they showed Moses Gama. Some of them clapped their hands in the traditional greeting and called him Baba or Nkosi, father or lord, others shook his hand in the European manner, but Moses greeted each of them in their own dialect. ‘He must speak twenty languages,’ Tara wondered.

  Mostly he allowed Tara to sit quietly beside his table and he explained her presence with a quiet word.

  ‘She is a friend – you may speak.’

  However, twice he asked her to leave while he spoke to his more important visitors and once when a great black bull of a man, bald and scarred and gap-toothed, arrived in a shiny new Ford sedan, he excused them.

  ‘This is Hendrick Tabaka, my brother,’ he said, and the two of them left the verandah and strolled side by side in the sunlit garden just out of earshot of where Tara sat.

  What she saw during those days impressed her immensely and confirmed her feelings of reverence for this man. Everything he did, every word he uttered, marked him as different, and the respect and adulation showered upon him by his fellow Africans proved that they also recognized that he was the giant of the future.

  Tara felt awed that he had selected her for special attention, and yet already saddened by the certain knowledge that she could never have for herself alone any part of him. He belonged to his people, and she must be grateful for the precious grains of his time which she could glean for herself.

  Even the evenings that followed, unlike that first evening, were crowded with people and events. Until long after midnight they sat at the table in the kitchen, sometimes as many as twenty of them at one time, smoking and laughing and eating and talking. Such talk, such ideas that lit the gloomy room and shimmered like angels’ wings in the air around their heads. Then later, in the quiet dark hours, they made love and she felt_as though her body no longer belonged to her but that he had taken it for his own, and devoured it like some darkly beloved predator.

  She must have met a hundred new faces in those three short days and nights, and though some of them were hazy and made little lasting impression, it seemed as though she had become a member of a large diffuse new family, and because of the patronage of Moses Gama, she was immediately accepted and accorded complete unquestioning trust by both black and white.

  On the last evening before her return to the dream world at Weltevreden, there was a guest beside her at the kitchen table to whom Tara took an instant unqualified liking. She was a young woman, at least ten years junior to Tara, barely into her twenties, but with an unusual maturity for one so young.

  ‘My name is Victoria Dinizulu,’ she introduced herself.

  ‘My friends call me Vicky. I know you are Mrs Courtney.’

  ‘Tara,’ Tara corrected her quickly. Nobody had used her surname since she had left Cape Town and it sounded a jarring note in her own ears.

  The girl smiled shyly in acknowledgement. She had the serene beauty of a black madonna, the classic moon face of the high-bred Zulu with huge almond eyes and full lips, her skin the colour of dark amber, her hair plaited into an intricate pattern of tiny curls over her skull.

  ‘Are you related to the Courtneys of Zululand?’ she asked Tara. ‘Old General Sean Courtney and Sir Garrick Courtney of Theuniskraal, near Ladyburg?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tara tried not to show the shock she felt at the mention of those names. ‘Sir Garrick was my husband’s grandfather. My own sons are named Sean and Garrick after them. Why do you ask, Vicky? Do you know the family well?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mrs Courtney – Tara.’ When she smiled, the Zulu girl’s face seemed to glow like a dark moon. ‘Long ago, during the last century, my grandfather fought at General Sean Courtney’s side in the Zulu Wars against Cetewayo who stole the kingship of Zululand from my family. It was my grandfather, Mbejane, who should have been king. Instead he became General Courtney’s servant.’

  ‘Mbejane!’ Tara cried. ‘Oh, yes. Sir Garrick Courtney wrote about him in his History of Zululand. He was Sean Courtney’s faithful retainer until his death. I remember they came up here to the goldfields of the reef together and later went on to what is now Rhodesia, hunting ivory.’

  ‘You know all about that!’ Vicky laughed with pleasure. ‘My father used to tell me the same stories when I was a little girl. My father still lives near Theuniskraal. After my grandfather, Mbejane Dinizulu, died my father took his place as the old general’s body servant. He even went to France with the general in 1916 and worked for him until the general was murdered. In his will the general left him a section of Theuniskraal for his lifetime and a pension of a thousand pounds a year. They are a fine family, the Courtneys. My old father still weeps whenever he mentions the general’s name—’ Vicky broke off and shook her head, suddenly perplexed and saddened. ‘Life must have been so simple in those days, my grandfather and my father were hereditary chieftains and yet they were satisfied to spend their lives subservient to a white man, and strangely they loved that man and he, in his way, seemed to love them. I wonder sometimes if theirs was not the better way—’

  ‘Do not even think that,’ Tara almost hissed at her. ‘The Courtneys have always been heartless robber barons, plundering and exploiting your people. Right and justice are on the side of your struggle. Never entertain the slightest doubt of that.’

  ‘You are right,’ Vicky agreed firmly. ‘But sometimes it’s nice to think of the friendship of the general and my grandfather. Perhaps one day we could be friends again, equal friends, both sides stronger for the friendship.’

  ‘With every new oppression, with every new law passed, the prospect fades,’ Tara said grimly, ‘and I become more ashamed of my race.’

  ‘I don’t want to be sad and intense tonight, Tara. Let’s talk about happy things. You said you have sons, Sean and Garrick, named after their ancestors. Tell me about them, please.’

  However, the thought of the children and Shasa and Weltevreden made Tara feel guilty and uncomfortable, and as soon as she could she changed the subject again.

  ‘Now tell me about yourself, Vicky,’ she insisted. ‘What are you doing in Johannesburg, so far from Zululand?’

  ‘I work at Baragwanath Hospital,’ Vicky told her.

  Tara knew that was one of the largest hospitals in the world, certainly the largest in the southern hemisphere, with 2,400 beds and over 2,000 nurses and doctors, most of them black, for the hospital catered exclusively to black patients. All hospitals, like schools and transport and most other public facilities, were strictly segregated by law, true to the grand concept of apartheid.

  Vicky Dinizulu was so modest about her own achievements that Tara had to draw out of her the fact that she was a qualified theatre sister.

  ‘But you are so young, Vicky,’ she protested.


  ‘There are others younger,’ the Zulu girl laughed. Her laughter had a pleasing musical lilt.

  ‘She really is a lovely child,’ Tara thought, smiling in sympathy, and then corrected herself. ‘No, not a child — a clever and competent young woman.’

  So Tara told her about her clinic at Nyanga, and the problems of malnutrition and ignorance and poverty they encountered, and Vicky related some of her experiences and the solutions they had found to the terrible challenges that faced them in caring for the physical well-being of a peasant population trying to adapt to an urban existence.

  ‘Oh, I have enjoyed talking to you,’ Vicky blurted out at last. ‘I don’t know when I have ever spoken to a white woman like this before. So natural and relaxed and,’ she hesitated, ‘just like an elder sister or a dear friend.’

  ‘A dear friend. Yes, I like that,’ Tara agreed. ‘And Puck’s Hill is probably one of the few places in the whole of this country where we could meet and talk like this.’

  Involuntarily both of them looked up towards the head of the long kitchen table. Moses Gama was watching them intently, and Tara felt her stomach flop over like a stranded fish. For a few moments there, she had been totally engrossed with the Zulu girl, but now her feelings for Moses Gama flooded back from full ebb. She forgot Vicky, until the girl spoke quietly beside her.

  ‘He is a great man – our hope for the future.’

  Tara glanced at her sideways. Vicky Dinizulu’s face glowed with hero worship as she smiled shyly at Moses Gama, and jealousy struck Tara such a sickening blow in the pit of her stomach that for a moment she believed she was going to be physically ill.

  The jealousy and terror of imminent separation persisted even after Tara was alone with Moses that night. When he made love to her she wanted to hold him within her for all eternity, knowing that this was the only time that he truly belonged to her. Too soon she felt the great dam burst and flood her and she cried out, pleading for it never to end, but her cry was incoherent and without sense, and then he was gone from within her and she was desolated.