by Robert Drewe
Felix Locke is yet to find a way of dealing with his hospital calls as he has learned to deal, at the other end of his professional processes, with the cemetery. The art of distancing. The distancing of art.
This is his cemetery ploy. Whenever the minister is conducting a mass burial service for young victims, Locke picks a dune to stare at. He looks at the dune and narrows his focus until he finds a perfect segment of sand-dune detail. No weed stem or animal track is allowed to mar its surface. Here the desert atmosphere is written: calm, nothingness. Like the sheet of empty paper before a poem, it will be what he makes it.
Then he makes his mind like this sheet of dry dune sand, this moonscape across which nothing but the wind may pass for hours or weeks. The only movement, as the wind rises, is the thinnest streaming of sand from the dune crest, like spindrift blowing back from a wave, and the occasional slide and trickle of gravity. And in his mind he writes on this page of sand a long streaming breathless sentence until the service is over.
Like the sea, too, the blown sand renews its gentle curves and rippled harmless surface when they move away.
Maybe there is a way of dealing with the hospital call. Loading bodies onto the hearse, he smiles at the exhausted young nurse, Inez, standing under a tent fly, squinting into the glare and rubbing her dark-ringed eyes.
‘Nice day for it,’ he says.
She snorts with laughter—out of surprise, emotion, fatigue. The easterly is already picking up heat and stench and grit and momentum. Drought roars again across the continent. The ore batteries thunder and grind. Bright stinging sunrays slant across the hotel and hospital yard and stripe the withers of the undertaker’s horse.
‘Looks like it’ll stay fine,’ she says.
Is it possible that the dark act of driving a full hearse back to the mortuary during an epidemic can still allow a chink of pleasurable light?
In the night he had dreamed he was playing a flute with a golden mouthpiece. Tunes came out like birdsong. Felix Locke, relishing anew his love of women, their way of instantly changing the scheme of things, taps the horse’s flank and actually trots up to his funeral parlour.
How plans, schedules, orthodoxies, careers, lives all swing on their changing moods and prescient caresses, their soft agreements and implicit acknowledgments! And on the pressing urgencies of their flesh and childhoods, their forbidding self-interest.
Inez. An Australian girl. A nurse. Humorous, capable, ironic. Who could be more understanding or matter-of-fact about the undertaker’s role? The other day Malebranche had said something worth passing on to an optimistic, philosophical sort of girl: ‘The water in our blood will be cloud one day. And was a glacier aeons ago.’ That put things in perspective.
‘Nice day for it,’ he repeats to himself.
Dust spins in the sun as the undertaker jumps lightly from his hearse.
Coming off duty at seven, Inez wakes her replacement, Blanche Brill, a freckly Nightingale nurse from Leeds, and sits in her corner of the tent sponging her face with half a cupful of condensed water. She wipes her hands with disinfectant and then washes them with toilet soap and the remainder of the water. She would like to cry, as she often tries to when coming off duty, and tries again this time, but cannot cross the threshold, cannot raise the final necessary impulse any more.
She makes herself a cup of tea and drinks it slowly outside as crows flop heavily onto the rubbish heap with appropriate retching cries. She turns her head so she can’t see what they have found there. Then she brushes her hair and changes into the dress she was wearing when she arrived in town.
Abruptly she undresses, powders herself, and puts on the dress again. She dabs some cologne on her pulse points.
The sun already has a concentrated sting to it. Before she can change her mind, before the street becomes busy and the pall of dust hangs over the town, she hurries to the studio of Axel Boehm.
She knocks. She can’t, and doesn’t, say anything.
That night she went with him to photograph men cooking water.
Ninety-one condensers ringed the shores of the lake. She counted the ninety-one fires burning under them. All night long bent figures stoked the burning wood while others wearily splashed back and forth, drawing salt water from the lake.
These men kept their hats on at night, she noticed, and no matter what time new parties of men arrived at the lake, they immediately started work, unloading the tanks and firewood from the carts and boiling the water (three or four or five times the salinity of sea water) in a tank and condensing the steam. Axes rang frenziedly through the night to feed the fires. Flame-haunted, shiny faces anxiously checked the boilers for leaks, waiting to taste the result. Praying that it was drinkable. Thirsty horses whinnying as they also waited.
He moved around the shore below her, through the saline mud, lugging his cameras, tripod and case of plates, his magnesium lights. Now and then his accent snapped up from the shore and he was lit up by the intense white flash of a magnesium flare. No one had the time or curiosity or energy to look at her, sitting there on a lump of rock breathing salt and sulphur and woodsmoke while the granite exhaled the day’s heat under her thighs.
Her thighs flickered suddenly against the granite. He had played Mozart’s clarinet concerto for her on the gramophone.
Surrounded by fire glow, the lake was the colour of varnished rosewood, or burgundy by candlelight. A decanter of burgundy catching the deep light on the sideboard in St George’s Road. A fire burning in the dining room fireplace; her father pouring the supper wine. Blood, she knew now, was wine-dark in a glass.
Who or what was she now?
The fiery shore, his intense white lights, made the sky and earth even blacker by comparison, dimmed her night vision, subdued the stars. Night penetrated the water like an old remorse. In the dry air of the water famine the sparks streamed up and levitated over the lake like gusts of mad angels.
BLACKWATER
THE SMELL OF DRYING SHARK overpowers the scent of cloves. The shark smell invades the cabin and her senses and her dream, which this sweaty, rolling night happens to be of a handsome white horse, a wise creature that can fly and talk and is stressing on her the urgent need to adopt the urchins of Naples and teach them the art of massage.
When the smell intrudes, just before its force wakes her, the horse looks disappointedly at its suddenly decaying flanks and moulting wings, then at her, and says, ‘I notice you are killing me.’
A day out of Mombasa and their Union Castle steamer City of Edinburgh has already called at Port Said, Suez, Port Sudan and Aden. But Africa only begins for her after Mombasa when, still twenty miles from the island of Zanzibar, her dream catches a moment’s exotic whiff of cloves and spices (and in a second creates this beautiful animal around the fragrance), then, over and above the smell of cloves, the overwhelming stink of dead sharks.
The smell comes on the breeze from the great open vats of sharks salting and drying twenty miles away at Zanzibar, but when, awake now, she peers out of the porthole the dawn ocean is smeared with the dried-blood coloured sails of Arab dhows carrying more sharks down to Zanzibar.
To Angelica the smell heralds Africa. Later she will believe that the first overlaying whiff never actually left her senses. For a time whenever she drifts into the first stages of sleep she also has a recurring feeling of loss and guilt for the beautiful but rotting winged horse.
She mentions the dream as they climb into her lower bunk. Even travelling together as an ostensibly married couple allows for only a cramped saloon cabin with two single, tiered bunks. From Marseilles to Naples they had slept entwined in her bunk—both at night and during their daily siesta. But by Port Said, as it became warmer, they had begun to sleep touching only at the hip or shoulder, straining politely apart towards the cooler edge of air or bulkhead. By Suez, separating after lovemaking with sweet, sweating apologies, they would claim their individual beds.
‘Try to dream the horse well again,’ Will suggests. He�
��s hardly awake, but awake where it’s necessary. At the ship’s bar of an evening he has made the acquaintance of pink gin and appreciates not being able to think yet. Operating by instinct. Pushing in with the dozy lubrication of sleep and their surface moisture. Rolling with the creaking ship. ‘Maybe you can cure him.’
The shark smell is lodged in her sinuses. ‘I can never make dreams do what I want.’
‘I can. I’m actually asleep now.’
‘We are melting.’
Even at 5 a.m. their bodies are squelching as if they had dropsy.
Rolling with the ship, dreamily licking the salty stream of the neck and breasts and bitter armpits as they move.
She hadn’t looked at all surprised. ‘You must take it,’ she’d said of O’Connor’s offer.
‘There is nowhere on earth further away,’ he’d said, unnecessarily. He was pleased and embarrassed at her genuine enthusiasm—and, uncomfortably, missing her already. Of course the distance was part of the attraction. Halfway round the world! He’d already made up his mind to go.
‘But you?’ he said.
‘I’m coming with you.’ As if it had never been in question.
He was relieved and touched and, in this grateful mood, thought the moment right to give her the gypsy ring plaited from river rushes. He dropped it silently in her palm. From carrying it in his pocket these past weeks it was a little frayed and flattened.
‘What is this?’
‘Village lovers use these rings instead of the wedding ring.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s just a country gesture.’ Then he looked at her. ‘Why do you want to come?’
She was looking curiously at her finger. She thought of her card with her gift parrot, its shorthand inscription unnoticed.
‘For change’s sake. To get away from Charley’s Aunt.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe to be with you.’
He thought of the river rushes where they had first made love. Didn’t she see the connection?
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s wonderful.’
Her father had wept as he farewelled her. It had awakened dramatic echoes in Ham. Of course the farewell at the water’s edge is the most theatrical and heart-rending of partings. The classic myth of death conceived as a departure over water, the image of the boat as floating coffin. But the vessel was only the Dover–Calais ferry, the weather was fine and the Channel calm as a dewpond.
They would travel by train to Marseilles and board the City of Edinburgh there.
Ham had worn a dramatic greatcoat to signify the seriousness of her departure. Something also suitable for a gusty wharf. An emphatic collar, epaulettes. His chest pushed out the lapels. It was unfortunate that the day was unseasonally humid. She had cried, too.
Will had said his own farewells at home. His parents’ quiet grief, the way they stared at him like a pair of sad martens—dark-ringed bewildered eyes glinting out from their den—had disturbed him but hastened his leaving.
As he left, his father’s arm was around his mother’s waist. She even waited a moment before inching away from it. Both of them seemed to have shrunk. Even Sarah was pale and wan. They placed his budgerigar on the mantel by the white otter and the holy water. He saw this for the important gesture it was. He was travelling a long way, after all.
By Dover he was again eagerly anticipating the journey.
Sailing down the east coast of Africa to Australia had been O’Connor’s suggestion. ‘It’s not as popular a route as the west coast, but it’s more direct and more interesting for people in our line of work to experience the canal. And of course there is Inyanga.’
It was less a suggestion than an instruction. And, as it happened, unnecessary. Will had an ambition of his own to fulfil.
The Union Castle Line operated a monthly East Coast passenger service from Europe to Portuguese East Africa via the Suez Canal, then a fortnightly service on to Durban and Cape Town, from where other monthly steamships plied to Australia. They took their five daily grains of quinine, put on their new khaki colonial-wear and their solar topees against sunstroke and disembarked at Beira. They travelled west on the Beira & Mashonaland & Rhodesia Railways’ boat train across the narrow strip of Portuguese East Africa, through the shrieking, dripping Amatongas rainforest and across the southern Rhodesian border to Umtali.
The railway was new and the country still unaccustomed to it. In eighty miles they rose five thousand feet and saw the rare flash of a departing leopard. Wart-hogs scattered before the train, holding their tails like signallers’ flags. Baboons nipped and pinched their children off the line. Will and Angelica were agog. Like the baboons, they kept squeezing and pinching each other at new sights. All the scenes of life and death and territorial conflict, but none more than their own adventuring natures, impressed them.
He liked her taking in all this creation and weighing up their place in it. It made him self-conscious but proud, their being a species pair in the scheme of things.
Following O’Connor’s directions they got off at Rusapi Station, the depot for the Inyanga District, then travelled by coach another sixty miles into the Inyanga Range, wild mountainous country rising ten thousand feet above sea level, and still covered over sixty square miles with the remains of structures erected in remote times by some long-forgotten people.
Here, in O’Connor’s view, was the whole point of Africa: the mysterious aqueduct terraces of Inyanga. As he had said, ‘It’s important to see mankind’s visionary feats so you can weather the inevitable mundane minds and cock-ups.’
Vultures hovered proprietorially over the terraces. Angelica had always imagined the worst of vultures, imbued them with ugly natures, but these birds launched into the air currents with a heavy, thoughtful grace, bobbing and soaring like old widowers taking to the dance floor. Will was more caught up in the grace of the aqueducts below them, their sinuous crossing from hill to hill. He visualised the forested mountains before their ingenious construction, their origins in downpour and mountain stream and dam, the reasoning and labour and wild travails of the ancient engineers.
Twenty thousand years old? More? They predated the arrival of the Bantu, if not the Bushmen, and were built by people who thoroughly understood irrigation. The aqueducts were two feet wide and two feet deep. They had no paving or constructed sides and in spite of natural obstacles their levels were exactly carried out, with not an inch of fall wasted throughout the length of their courses.
‘These are a marvel.’ He believed such precision was beautiful. The marvel was repeated over and over. On the summits of a hundred hills were a hundred stone forts, each encircled by terraces and, twining round its flanks, an aqueduct. And on the downs, in the valleys and on the lower reaches of the hills, positioned approximately every fifty yards, were the remains of stone shelters. He imagined teeming populations and thriving agriculture. Everything was efficient and exact, striking to the eye and in harmony with the terrain. Above all, lasting.
On the paths, leopard pug marks overlay and mingled with bare human footprints and the old spoors of many beasts. The air was as sharp as a carnivore’s breath.
He was breathless from excitement, exercise and altitude. ‘This is art.’
Wherever he looked was a sign of importance. Huge straggling grape vines, lemon trees, figs, cottony shrubs, all sprouting from the dusty terraces. He gestured at the plants and trees. ‘These are a clue to the mystery of the aqueducts. Most are of Arabian and Indian origin. Archaeologists assume that long before Christ there was an Arabian civilisation here and that it recruited labour from India.’
But she was looking at the vervet monkeys leaping on the terraces, the sunbirds flicking after insects in the crumbling stonework, a determined dung beetle rolling a ball of manure across the path. She was looking all around at different signs—bones and dung and copulation and the marking of territory.
They drank sundowners under a big-rooted, pungent tree at the coach station camp. A party of sunburned Rhodesians joined them with their gins and quinine water. O
ne of the men occasionally punctuated the conversation by leaning down, picking up some dried animal turd, breaking it open and sniffing it before continuing drinking. Dour and laconic bush types, the Rhodesians bluntly corrected their idea that animals were plural. It was a herd of elephant, four lion, half a dozen bloody monkey. In Africa where animals abounded, where animals made the landscape, animals were strangely singular.
With the sunset, hundreds of small, red-beaked birds came instantly to life and started flying in frenzied, chattering loops about the big-rooted tree, and simultaneously defecating everywhere, so that the camp soon smelled like a poultry yard and the African drink waiters padded past with birdshit in their hair.
‘Red-billed quelea,’ the Rhodesians said. Quelea, singular. As night fell, the chattering hubbub and throbbing wings of the swarming birds fell into a regular rhythm and sounded like ocean waves rolling in.
‘This is nature,’ she said.
On their train journey to Salisbury he read to her from the Royal Geographical Journal.
At one time, in a not very remote geological period of the continent, the Zambezi delivered its waters not eastwards, as at present, but southwards into a depression known as the Kalahari Desert, which afterwards became filled up with sediment, thus necessitating the enforcement of a new escape route.
In a country where few rivers flow all year, the Zambezi is an anomaly. The flood time of the Falls occurs after the rainy season is over, and continues well into the dry season. This phenomenon is due to the existence of swamp and marshes along its own banks and the banks of its tributary streams. These swamps or ‘sponge areas’ take the first four months of the wet season to become soaked and full, and do not start to yield their waters until the start of the dry season …