by Unknown
“How will you find your way?” I ask Habib. “By the sun?”
He grins and holds out a scratched compass. “I also have a Slingsby map. Once we get to the Atlantic, we just keep it on our left.”
And so it is that we set off west, heading for the sea. Habib leads the way, with Marlene taking up the rear with Tracy. Shannon walks behind me, occasionally skipping ahead as the mood takes her and if the vegetation allows, but still saying nothing. Marlene tells me she has said nothing since almost her entire class died around her, including her three best friends. Instead, Tracy behind me has all the words. Eight years of age she is, chatting about how she finally realises she does actually miss her school – she’d been in her third year at Muizenberg Primary, although perhaps it is her own best friend she misses most - Shireen, who liked dappled ponies…
Habib takes up the theme before we drown in Tracy’s words. “So what do you miss most about life before the Week of Invisible Death, gogo?” he asks.
“My partner,” I say shortly, thinking too of my online sisters on Behind the Mask.
“Oh…” He is suitably quiet for a while. “I miss the soccer - Man U, Ajax Cape Town, those were my teams - maybe with the odd Castle Lager for company.”
“Or Jack Daniels, you old hypocrite,” shouts Marlene from behind. “I just want a supply of tampons at the right time of the month and some birth control pills.”
Perhaps being an old woman is not all bad.
We stop for lunch in the heat after making our way up and along another slope that affords us a view of a glittering beach in the distance. “Noordhoek,” says Habib. The Atlantic coast indeed.
The children groan when he hauls another chicken out of his rucksack, salted and sealed.
“I was a chicken farm manager,” he says to me. “I have a map of all the company’s free-range farms as well as their security access codes in the Western Cape, all the way up the coast. But the remaining chickens get less, tougher and harder to catch and eat, anyway. There are fewer farms after Saldanha, so we will need to learn to catch fish and eat mussels and perlemoen on the way.”
“Hooray for fish,” shouts Tracy, suddenly turning to look at me. “Can you tell us a story, gogo?”
The flies are buzzing now and we are all well-pasted with insect repellent, the birds quiet in the mid-day warmth as we shelter under a pincushion protea, still charred but having burst its seeds. I try to think of a story that fits our plight and remember our morning visitor. Ah, ‘The Day Monkey Saved his Heart’ – not an amaXhosa tale from my own culture, but a Bemba tale from Zambia that my Aunt Mams told me when I was around Shannon’s age.
So I launch into the story of how God created the world of Man and the world of Animal as separate, and they had never seen each other, until Monkey was elected by the Animals to visit Man, as he was both clever and quick. Once Monkey saw Man from a distance, all fur-less and carrying shiny tools that were planting and harvesting strange foods in the field, he was not so sure it was wise to meet them, however. So he waited until it was night and then he stole into the field and ate the wonderful food until he was stuffed like a melon. As he was about to head home, a Man leaped out with a net to catch him, saying: ‘In my culture, we take the hearts of all who steal from us. I know not what manner of creature you are, but I want your heart…’.
“And?” asks Tracy, her eyes big.
“More tonight,” I say. “At bedtime.”
“That’s not fair! I want a whole story.”
“Endings don’t come in one easy telling,” I say. “It is good to learn to wait for them.”
There is a grumble behind me. Turning, I spot a few vague and shifting child shapes in the bush. Some dead still follow – what would they have of us?
We head off again, Tracy moaning until her tired legs eventually still her mouth. It is sticky hot but cooler in the blustery South-Easter moments as the wind swirls through the reeds and bushes around us. Three children pace alongside in the nearby bush, as if herding us.
Marlene calls the evening camp within sound of the surf thumping through wild dune vegetation ahead of us. She was P.A. to a middle-manager of a local lumber company and a good one at that, it seems.
She looks at the plant ground-cover beneath us with some curiosity; a strange mix of thick, succulent creeper leaves with thorny aloe edges, trailing from the bushes we’ve just gingerly negotiated. “Better put plenty of soft reed bedding underneath, this fynbos is deurmekaar – weird man, true’s God, I don’t know this plant. It’s like things have changed since it’s re-grown from the Big Burn.”
Habib snorts. “Evolution doesn’t work that fast, ’Lene.”
She looks at him severely. “I’m talking God and devil stuff here, ‘Bib, not science.”
He’s another man of intelligence, with words like that. He shades his face from her and rolls his eyes at me, smiling. I’m not sure though – I’m not a plant person, but I’ve never seen anything like it before either. Habib sighs. “Fynbos is the most diverse range of plants per area in the world – do you claim to know every one of the thousands of species here?”
He is right. I heard a tourist guide say the same thing about fynbos once, a good few years back now.
I make sure the bedding is very thick, spending the better part of an hour, according to Marlene, collecting both wood and restio reed bedding to put between our mats and the spiky creepers.
Night comes in fast and some baying noises hover momentarily on the dying breeze, curdling my blood, for I do not recognise the sound either. I scratch my itchy wrist as Habib gets the fire going. He is aiming to char the last of the chicken and says he is hopeful that we will reach another company farm by tomorrow evening, Hout Bay way, on the coastal path along the ridges of the Twelve Apostles that spine Table Mountain.
“Please finish my story, gogo,” asks Tracy. Shannon comes to sit next to me. She gives a little discreet wave and I look up. The three dead children sit on a protea bush, as if settling down to listen too.
“So the Man had caught Monkey and wanted his heart. Monkey thought quickly. He told the Man that animals don’t keep their hearts in their bodies but their Lion king keeps their hearts for them. Could the Man row him to the king so that he could get his heart? he asked. The Man agreed. But as he rowed the Monkey to the forest shore, Monkey started singing, calling on the Crocodiles to help him. The Man could not understand the animal language and so the Crocodiles surrounded them, forming a bridge from the boat to the land. The Monkey ran across their backs and shouted back from the safety of the jungle: ‘Foolish Man, don’t you know that Animals keep their hearts in the same place that Men do, and feel pain as strongly as you do?’ Today, if you see a Monkey, watch what they do to their chests. They beat their fists in the place their heart lives, as a reminder to man they have hearts also.”
“Wow!” says Tracy. “So do chickens have hearts too?”
I laugh and nod, wondering if my answer will put her off chicken even more. Still, hunger always tells in the end.
Aunt Mams stands before me and a chill trickles through my body. I feel I have almost told her story well, but the words have perhaps slipped a little too easily off my tongue and sound both strange and detached from the twilight-burnt bush around us. Mams puts a finger to her lip, pointing her left arm behind me. The hairs on my neck tingle as I turn.
The thick vegetation is quiet and still. I move towards Habib, who raises a questioning eye. He startles with alarm when I reach in and pull out his gun from under his nearby jersey.
With a rustle of leaves two men stand in the twilight, one wielding a tree-branch, the other a knife. They have big tog-bags on their backs and wild hair and thick muscular arms. The one I have not yet fully seen from yesterday stands both darker and shorter than the other. Habib leaps up, small and fierce, with a large panga in his hand that I had not noticed before, big enough to gut an ox.
They laugh and step forward as if two to one, but I level the gun t
o stop them. It is heavier than I expect, waving a little as I try to steady it in their direction.
“Where is Penny? Where is my niece?” I ask the white man with the tree branch and the wildest hair. He hears me, his glance flickering to his companion. I see her death in the shorter man’s eyes.
With horror that feels like cold vomit in my bowels, I pull the trigger.
But the gun is not cocked.
They laugh and both move now as if to flank us, for I am just an old woman, I can see it in their smiling faces.
I drag the hammer back with a loud and vicious click. I rest the gun on my upper left arm and spread my legs to brace for the recoil, aiming squarely at the taller and bolder one. (I have dealt with a few men before, who would correct my sexuality.)
He frantically waves the other man to stop, but it is too late.
I hear screams behind me.
And Janet hovers like a ghost over both the men, shaking her grey, pony-tailed head.
My finger freezes. The men turn and run clumsily, crashing through the woods, scratching themselves silly in the process, no doubt. I wish the creeper spines were laced with puff adder venom, to give them a slow and painful death.
With sudden stillness, they are gone.
As is Janet, not even a drifting mist on the breeze.
She didn’t even stay one moment to say goodbye. The gun is a block of pain in my hand and Habib takes it quietly from me, un-cocking it, while I sink to my knees with a salty blurring in my eyes.
Shannon cradles my head in her wiry, bony arms.
I cry like a baby, ashamed, but unable to stop.
I feel her small hand in my trouser pocket. Child, my pockets are empty, I have nothing to give you.
It seems as if the dead have all gone too. Do they still have their hearts?
(A glimpse of Janet is not nearly enough. Why did you come for them, killers and monsters, but not for me, Janet le Grange?)
The others sleep, but not me.
I feel the pull of the sea. I walk over the dunes and down towards the water, feet straining through sand in the bright moonlight. The surf churns out at me like froth from space and my ankles chill with the cold ache of its touch. There is no one riding the surf-foam that batters my body and steals my breath – not the dead, nor my ancestors, nor Janet herself. The night and the sea are numbingly empty ahead of me.
I carry on walking, although I cannot swim. It will be quick then, I hope.
The water burns the wound on my wrist and I stop, waist high. Wait. Perhaps my clothes might still be of use to them.
Marlene has isandla esishushu, a warm hand indeed underneath her brusque manner, and the oldest girl feels kind, hanging on my words as if she has none of her own. (Habib himself refused to put down his gun and gave me a warning look before sealing their tent for the night.)
I turn back to shore, unzipping my track-top and folding it neatly on the wet sand. The tide is on the way out; my clothes should be safe here for a while. I feel in my shorts pockets to empty them first, in case there is anything of use to leave lying in sight there, like a coin or two.
There is indeed something, a little hard and feathery. I cup my palm and hold it up against the half-moon’s light. It is a flower-head – dark and heart-shaped, translucent, papery petals wet and fraying from its edges. An everlasting it’s called. I remember seeing them sprouting from a few of the bushes along our march to the coast.
I remember Shannon’s thin fingers in my pocket.
Gingerly, I put the flower-head back in my trouser pocket. Shivering, I zip on my damp top.
I look up at the sky.
Above me flies the half-moon, bounced along on scudding clouds.
The moon is an alien world, scarred, old and barren. There must be dead men and women there too, I think, the lunar base now filled with emaciated corpses rotting in the diminishing air; supply rockets from China and America stranded like huge, empty steel candles on Earth.
But I can’t see them in my mind’s eye. The moon blinks down at me, white and cold.
The wind howls like Machelanga’s cries for the moon, long let loose from his pot by one of his children, Machelanga who falls and dies trying to get the moon back. The moon is too far gone now and there’s no going back, it’s above and beyond his failing reach, drifting ever further away.
And I can’t see Machelanga either. The stories in my head are harder to piece together, the meanings of the words dry and crack further with each telling and retelling.
A voice calls my name from the sea; parched and thin, but twenty years familiar. I step forward until the waves are round my ankles and knees, tugging me in. A cloud of shadow and vague shape spins before me but I can smell it’s her. She always had a slightly minty smell on her skin.
“It’s good to see you, ‘Thando, but the dead ask me why you pursue them, sister.”
“I don’t, they pursue me!” I try to think of something else to say, but there is nothing in my throat, my heart is squeezing sore. I am no sister.
“They ask why then came you so deep in water when you cannot swim?”
Ah, I understand. I hold out my hand, but the shape spins away from me. Her smell recedes, leaving a trace of sadness in the air. “I can’t stay, ‘Thando. For now, there can be no more.”
“Why?” I plead.
“I may not find you if you walk to your death – even now, old lives and memories fade, new spaces and new lands call … so please stay … and you’d better learn to swim, Thandietjie.”
I cannot say anything, but she is gone anyway. She leaves me the last of her tart comments, sweetened by that Afrikaner miniaturisation of my name, which was always a sign she wished to repair things.
But what is there to repair? She has gone … but ‘for now,’ she said, and I can still smell her sadness hanging in the salty air. The dead do have hearts, it seems, but I am left alone in the here. How long is ‘for now’ – what is time to the dead? Where has she gone? And why did she die before me; after twenty years of love and strife and love again? Questions fly through me but I know better than to ask them of this cold wind.
I breathe the last faint whiff of mint on the breeze and pull on my numbed ankles, my feet locked under wet sand from the retreating tide. There is only the sharp stink of seaweed. Janet is gone. I do not know if I will ever see her again.
I turn from the sea, but stop when I glimpse a huge, dark woman with fiery eyes rearing out of the ocean, an army of living dead and massed cattle spattering out of the waves behind her. Her name ripples through me -Nongqawuse, the prophetess of old who claimed the living dead would sweep the British into the sea, provided the amaXhosa all had faith and slaughtered their cattle.
More than a hundred thousand died for their faith. (Perhaps now, a hundred and seventy years later, she has finally repaid their dead doubts?)
Her blazing red gaze sweeps the land, but she doesn’t see me. Perhaps I am too small.
Small is good. I feel the tiny, fragile cone and leaves of the damp everlasting in my pocket.
Me, I would live.
Yes, there is someone I would see still. I have looked into her brown eyes. Shannon, they call her, but she deserves a new name in a new world. She is building a story inside her and I want to be there when her mouth opens to speak, for it will be a strange and terrible story indeed.
Shrieks, cries and howls erupt from further along the shore to the north. I don’t know what they mean, but still I shiver … we must go that way tomorrow. We must learn the words of the monkeys and the crocodiles if we are to survive in this burnt but flowering world.
I walk over the dunes, looking back just once to see the empty and pounding shore.
I walk down the slope to my new family. As my amaZulu brothers and sisters say ‘umuntu ungumuntu ngabanye abantu.’ We are only human through sharing our being with others.
Ow. I am indeed glad the creeper thorns do not have puff adder venom.
A host of dead children
stands on the edge of our camp, a few turning to glance as I pass, if only briefly. (They no doubt wait to share the young girl’s story when she finally finds her new voice and learns her new name.)
As for me, my name is Noluthando Ngobo Bhele and I am still alive.
We shall see what stories the new day brings.
CONCERNING HARMONIES AND OCEANS
BY K. A. DEAN
The Third City drifted slowly across cresting water - a blue-green sheet of rippling shades, sunlight dancing - moving against the wind. A floating island of glass and gold and silver, frozen towers like ice, basking. Behind, left by the motion of the massive propellers beneath water’s surface, a faint trail of froth.
Spires of polished metal reached upward, fingers grasping at the elusive sun as it journeyed above through a crystal sky - a vertical expanse. The city was alone. In all directions the ocean stretched, unbroken and empty; endless.
Within its high gloss walls goliaths shouldered domes - miniature globes held in the hands of striding giants, perfect male and female forms carved from glass, glistening - high archways and columns topped with gardens and ponds, proud trees dwarfed into insignificance by the towering scale. Inside, visible through translucent walls, moving through labyrinthine innards, the citizens buzzed.
I wake from dreams in a cold sweat, tangled in sheets. I lie still, shrouded in the heavy darkness, and listen to my racing heart, waiting for it to settle; fading dreams hang over me like ghosts. The rumble of the engines, a constant companion, calms me.
The sound of my brother’s breathing is audible over the mechanical lullaby, slow and heavy. I roll onto my side and stare into the blackness. I shiver. My pillow is damp and stale, my sheets cling unpleasantly.
The room reeks, a familiar atmosphere of sweat, the scent of human bodies and old, lingering impressions of meals. I can make out the dim outline of the bedroom floor, piles of clothes and litter. I can hear the constant dripping of condensation from the ceiling. It ripples from one end of the room as false rain falls into puddles.