The Whale Caller

by Zakes Mda

  “It is finished, ma’am,” says the puny man apologetically.

  The Whale Caller is scandalised. He shifts closer to her on the bench on which they are sitting and whispers in her ear: “You are blind, Saluni. How can you say such things?”

  By nine the Whale Caller is bored with poaching stories and Saluni wants to sleep. The puny man prepares a place for them on one side of the shack while he will sleep on the opposite side. The Whale Caller asks if he would allow them to leave the light on all night, but the puny man will have none of that.

  “I can’t sleep in the dark,” says Saluni. “If you think we are going to finish your paraffin in the lamp, I have my own candle in my bag.”

  It has nothing to do with saving paraffin, the puny man explains. He would not be able to sleep with the light on. It would remind him of prison, where he spent a few months for poaching. The solitary naked bulb was left on for the whole night in his cell, making it impossible for him to sleep. He spent many sleepless nights in that jail and wasted away. That is why he is so thin now. He could steal only a few winks at the work detail. Now that he is king of his own castle he cannot subject himself to that punishment again. The honoured guests must remember that without sleep he can’t harvest the sea the next morning. One needs all one’s energy to dislodge abalone from the rocks on kelp beds.

  “She is afraid of the dark,” pleads the Whale Caller.

  “She is blind for Christ sake!” the puny man bursts out. “What does she need the light for?”

  It is the same question that the Whale Caller had asked her last night when they were preparing to sleep in the deserted house by the sea. She insisted that she could feel the darkness even in her blindness. “I never imagined that darkness would find me even in blindness,” she said. So much for the freedom that she declared she had gained soon after losing her sight! They had the candle burning until daybreak.

  “You don’t talk like that about me,” says Saluni.

  “We are this man’s guests, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller. “We can’t start fighting him in his own house.”

  “He must not be selfish, man, even if it is his house. It is just a shack after all. Nothing like our beautiful Wendy house with electricity and everything.”

  The Whale Caller signals to their host not to worry for he will solve the whole problem. The puny man sits in the corner sulking. Saluni can sense his rebellion, and to pre-empt any stupid action on his part she thinks it wise to let him know who is boss even in his house. “Look at him,” she says to the puny man, pointing in the direction of the Whale Caller. “He is going to hit you. See those big strong hands? He’s going to hit you so hard you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

  “I don’t hit people, Saluni,” says an embarrassed Whale Caller.

  “You did hit the radio man who was being rude to me.”

  “And I have regretted it ever since.”

  Saluni turns to the puny man once more and says: “Don’t be deceived by his mild manner. You should see him when he is aroused. He is a tiger.”

  Saluni strips to her petticoat and gets into the bedding on the floor. In no time she is snoring. The Whale Caller takes the paraffin lamp outside and extinguishes the flame so that the smell of the wick does not alert Saluni to that fact. Back in the room he takes off his overalls and sleeps next to her. But she suddenly sits up and seems to have difficulty breathing.

  “He switched the light off, didn’t he?” she asks.

  “I don’t switch things off, ma’am,” says the puny man. “Unlike rich folk like you who live in better houses, I don’t have electricity here.”

  “I can feel the darkness in my body.”

  “It is just your imagination, Saluni,” the Whale Caller assures her. “The lamp is still on. I think you are just having a nightmare.”

  “Are you sure, man? Are you sure there is light?”

  In the cracks between corrugated iron and plastic sheets left by shoddy workmanship on the shack he can see the stars winking at him. There must be a moon somewhere out of his line of sight, even if it is a small piece floating in the sky. There is some light… out there.

  “There is light,” he says quite bravely. “Let’s sleep now, Saluni. We have a long way to go tomorrow.”

  His voice has the ring of truth. But Saluni cannot understand why sleep doesn’t come, however hard she tries to summon it. She fidgets and tosses and turns, making it impossible for the Whale Caller to sleep as well.

  She wants them to move further away from the coastal pathways lest some rude whales appear and distract his attention from the demands of the road. They almost did early in the morning. He spotted two Bryde’s whales and a group of the smaller triangular-headed minke whales off Pearly Beach and almost lost his head with excitement. That’s when she decreed that instead of following the coastline—which is in any event too rugged to negotiate safely even for a woman who is determined to punish their bodies—they should make their way inland.

  The Whale Caller has tied a rope—a gift from their gracious host, who was all too pleased to see them go—around Saluni’s waist and leads her with it. The paths meander back to a well-maintained gravel road. For a while they are followed by a group of mischievous baboons who seem bent on teasing them. They ignore the primates and walk on. The baboons scatter into the bushes when a donkey cart approaches and stops next to the walking couple. A toothless old man under a straw hat gives them a ride up to the village of Elim, almost twenty kilometres away.

  They walk among the expertly thatched cottages, past the church with a German-made clock that is reputed to have been ticking since 1764, past the village shopping centre and into the post office. The Whale Caller insists that he must write to the widower who lets him the Wendy house, and explain that he had to leave town unexpectedly and that the kindly landlord should rest assured that when he returns, whenever that will be, he will pay every cent of the outstanding rent. He is already gearing himself for months on the road since he does not know when Saluni will get tired and demand to be led on her leash back to peaceful Hermanus.

  After writing the letter and mailing it he suggests that they should have a nice meal at one of the cosy restaurants in the village. He reminds her of her yearning for civilised living. But she is not interested in any of that. All she wants is the road. They buy a loaf of bread and fish and chips at a café as provisions. The Whale Caller remembers to purchase a packet of candles as well as a box of matches. Just as they are walking out he sees a display of sunglasses.

  “I am buying you sunglasses, Saluni,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “So that people will not have expectations from you that cannot be fulfilled.”

  “Yeah. So that they can raise their voices when they speak to me.”

  He buys the glasses and she wears them. Once more they face the challenges of the road. They take a north-easterly direction, choosing a combination of well-paved roads and then looping off to overgrown pathways that are obviously rarely used by humans. They walk through a medley of green pastures and rocky terrain and apple orchards and deep gorges. They are like stars that have lost their way in the sky. Sometimes only echoes accompany their footsteps, and at other times flocks of sheep and a solitary shepherd break the rhythm. It is, in fact, in the hovel of a toothless young shepherd in brown South African Railways and Harbours overalls—the whole region abounds with toothless men and women—that they find refuge for the night, a few kilometres past the small town of Bredasdorp.

  The shepherd proves to be, according to Saluni’s declamations the following day, a man of boundless wisdom and home-grown philosophies. He, for instance, admires them for the courage of embarking on a journey without destination. If everyone in the world engaged in such journeys the world would know peace. He commends Saluni for opting for blindness in a world that would be better off with everyone in it walking in perpetual blindness. All the problems of the world emanate from the arrogance of sight. In blindness one i
s able to reach into a dimension buried in the very depths of one’s soul and recover the beautiful things that one has known in previous existences. Now that he has met Saluni he is considering blindness for himself because he believes that will give him two or three other parallel consciousnesses. He may not only stop with his own blindness. He may blind his sheep and goats as well. They have become his companions and he cannot leave them behind on his way to nirvana. He crowns his wisdom by allowing his guests to light their candle throughout the night.

  He takes advantage of the candlelight to read them passages from the Song of Solomon until Saluni is lulled into the deep sleep of content babies. It becomes obvious to the Whale Caller that these passages are directed at Saluni, and all of a sudden he finds the shepherd’s voice quite irritating. The shepherd is not aware that Saluni is fast asleep and continues reading: Behold, you are fair, my love! Behold you are fair! You have dove’s eyes behind your veil. Tour hair is like a flock of goats, going down from Mount Gilead. Tour teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep which have come up from the washing, every one of which bears twins, and none is barren among them.

  “You are wasting your breath,” says the Whale Caller. “She is asleep.”

  “She can hear my voice in her dreams,” says the shepherd, putting his tattered Bible next to his pillow. Soon he is competing with Saluni in snoring. The Whale Caller notes a self-satisfied smile on the shepherd’s face. He spends the whole night nursing an anger he never knew existed in him. What a brazen young upstart: making advances to his Saluni in his presence and not even hiding it!

  The Whale Caller wakes Saluni at the crack of dawn and says that they must leave right away. She protests that it is still early for the road, but he threatens to leave without her.

  “If he leaves you here I will take care of you,” says the yawning shepherd.

  “I take care of her all right,” says the Whale Caller.

  “And so you should. We don’t commend the eagle for flying.”

  Saluni wakes up and puts on her clothes.

  “You say you take care of her but you want her to go without even washing herself… without even brushing her teeth,” says the shepherd.

  Saluni does not comment. She is pleased to let the men fight it out.

  “What business is it of this young man whether you are clean or not?” the Whale Caller asks, tying the rope around Saluni’s waist. “We must leave at once. Imagine, comparing you to his sheep and goats!”

  “It is the Bible that compares her, not me,” says the shepherd proudly. “The Bible knows the beauty of her soul that lies behind the veil of blindness, and it knows the beauty of sheep and goats.”

  “Let us go, Saluni,” insists the Whale Caller. “We have a long distance to walk.”

  “I can walk the extra distance for her,” declares the shepherd. “I am willing to go blind for her. Me and my sheep and my goats will all go blind for her.”

  The Whale Caller picks up his rucksack and her paper bag and tugs her out of the hovel. The shepherd blocks his way and pleads: “At least let me read her one more passage from the Song of Songs.”

  “Get out of my way,” shouts the Whale Caller.

  “Let the man read, man,” says Saluni. “It is the Bible after all. How much harm can it do?”

  “Don’t you encourage him now, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller.

  The shepherd reads in the thin light of the morning: O my love, you are as beautiful as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners! Turn your eyes away from me, for they have overcome me. Tour hair is like a flock of goats going down from Gilead.

  The Whale Caller breaks out into what he imagines is mocking laughter.

  “She is blind, man,” he says in unconvincing guffaws, “and her hair is black. Well, it has traces of red now, but it is black in its natural state.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” says Saluni. “You are just jealous that the man sees my beauty to which you are blind; How many times have you told me how lovely I am?”

  “You know already that you are beautiful, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller defensively. “We all know that.”

  “I can sing songs of your loveliness every day if you stay with me,” says the shepherd. “I can read you the Song of Songs every dawn before I go to tend my flock.”

  “You will do no such thing,” says the Whale Caller, pushing the man very hard. He lands on the ground on his buttocks.

  “That’s not a nice thing to do to a man who reads such wonderful verses from the Bible,” says Saluni, feeling around with her feet until they find the shepherd where he is sitting on the ground, still holding his Bible. She says to the shepherd: “You are a very sweet man. But don’t anger him now. I have seen him hit a man with that huge fist and he was out cold for the whole day. We left before he came to his senses. Perhaps he is still unconscious even now.”

  “I don’t hit people, Saluni,” protests the Whale Caller.

  “He is obviously a violent type,” says the shepherd. “But he can’t keep you by force, Saluni. You must stay with me. You must stay for my Song of Songs.”

  “He is the only man who should read me the Song of Songs,” says Saluni sweetly. “The best you can do is to give us your Bible, and then he’ll read me the Song of Songs.”

  The shepherd reluctantly parts with his tattered Bible. He is still sitting on the ground as he waves her goodbye: “Go well, celestial lady!” The new information that she is celestial leaves her with a broad smile that lasts for hours.

  On the road the Whale Caller begins to get irritated by the smug smile.

  “I could see you were enjoying the attention,” he accuses her. “Don’t deny it now; you were leading him on.”

  “I don’t deny anything. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  He never thought he could nag, but now he does. He goes on about how disappointed he is in her that she should betray him at the sight of the first shepherd they come across, just like Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus. He goes on about honour and honesty and trust, until she bursts out: “Don’t talk to me like that, man, I am a love child.” And then, as usual when she has declared the fact that she is a love child, she goes into narrating the story of her conception: “It was a cloudy day as it is today.”

  “No, it is not cloudy, Saluni,” he says quite spitefully.

  “You were not there when I was conceived. It was cloudy.”

  “Today it is not. The sun will soon come up and it will be shining and hot. Not a single cloud in the sky.”

  “You like to contradict me for no reason, don’t you?”

  Today he must stand his ground: “It is bright, Saluni; it is bright!”

  “In my mind it is cloudy. I can make it cloudy if I want to,” she declares with finality, and then adds, breaking into that irritating smile again: “You are just jealous because the shepherd saw what you could not see in me.”

  She is still smiling, and he is still sulking when, at midday, they stop on the banks of the Breede River. The sulks and the smile continue as he washes their underwear and spreads it on the rocks to dry. She feels sorry for him and assures him that she will never leave him, even for a man as wonderful as the shepherd. She reminds him that the shepherd was offering a life of romance and fulfilment, yet she is prepared to sacrifice all that for her handsome Whale Caller. The handsome Whale Caller must also try to be romantic. He must tell her how much he loves her and how celestial she is. He must read her such wonderful love poetry as is found in the Bible. He must dream about her.

  He concedes to himself that it may be possible to meet her demands, however embarrassing they may be. But dreaming about her…

  “You must dream about me, man, willy-nilly!” she orders.

  Late in the afternoon they are still at the Breede River. Harmony has returned between them. With it the sickness. They are bathing in the water and are splashing it around. Their clothes are spread on the rocks to dry. She teaches him tavern songs—the cen
sored version that she used to sing with the Bored Twins—and they create a ruckus that brings the fish to the surface of the water.

  After this refreshing bath he brushes her hair and braids it into two long ropes.

  They have been walking for many days. From the Breede River they went northwards until they reached Swellendam. There Saluni insisted that they buy a bottle of wine and a packet of cigarettes. Now she occasionally takes a sacramental drop from the bottle and a puff from her long cigarette holder, diffusing her incense in the morning air of the N2 Highway. They have changed direction and are now walking westwards along the highway. He is not bothered by the smoke because he can only catch a whiff of it. They are separated by the two-metre rope with which he leads her.

  “I love you, Saluni,” he says, seemingly out of the blue. It is not easy to utter these words. He has agonised over them for a long time. He remembered the shepherd and then agonised one more time. But there, he has said it! And his nose has not fallen off. Saluni purrs like a pampered kitten. He likes the effect these words have on her. He utters them over and over again, jumping up and down in front of her and dancing with the rope that is tied around her waist. She cannot see the dance, but she can feel it and can also hear the rhythm of his feet as they hit the ground. She displays a wide toothless grin.

  She expects to hear the magic words every day. Sometimes he forgets to utter them, and she reminds him: “You haven’t told me that you love me today.”

  “I was going to.”

  “When? After I have reminded you?”

  The Whale Caller merely chuckles. Although he finds it a little stifling or even a chore when she turns it into a duty, he does not allow it to destroy their present fulfilment. He only hopes that it will not become another ritual, like her obsessing about small meaningless things such as counting the panels on the ceiling of their Wendy house. He remembers how she tried to initiate him into the rituals of her neurosis.

  When they sit in idleness under rest-stop trees he composes a song on the kelp horn for her. He blows his horn and Saluni giggles like a schoolgirl. She seeks him with her hands and feels his face with her fingers. Her unseeing eyes are glassy with unshed tears. Oh, this Saluni! She becomes so lovable and desirable when she is vulnerable. Breathless days return. On the side of the roads. In the bushes where they spend the nights. In the culverts and under highway bridges. Every time she hears Saluni’s song on the horn she becomes thirsty for him. Their sickness has taken another form. It is not searing as before. It is a mild thumping of the heart that is nevertheless as debilitating as the previous bouts that were violent on the body. It continues unabated, keeping a steady rhythm. Until they do something about it. Under the bridges breathlessness prevails.