The child’s experience, long before its mind, knows how the clown is rehearsing a role all are contracted to play and that in his willingness to be tumbled and humiliated again and again, the clown, armed only with his fooling, is out-laughing fate and asserting a braver and more subtle form of courage than that of any professional hero armed and schooled for the role.
She could just rescue herself from a display that she knew would undo such esteem as she had laboriously acquired in the eyes of Nuin-Tara, by pretending to a brisk and practical version that she did not feel. Tugging at François’s hand she urged with a surprisingly commanding tone, “Now come on, Master Joubert! You’re already much too late for your supper. You can’t go on standing there all night. Let me get some water and wipe that dirt off your face and hands.”
François hardly heard her, moving obediently after her towards the hearth. The disguise of the tenderness that Nonnie was feeling for him, was transparent as glass to François, but his reaction to it was overlaid by an emotion of his own too full for him to give her an immediate answer. Seeing Hintza, Nuin-Tara, Xhabbo and Nonnie reunited there in profound shelter by a fire of their own and food and drink ready to be eaten and drunk, the irony of the reality concealed in the innocence of the appearance was almost too much for him. Appearances were calling on him to exult and cry out, “You’ve come home François. You’re back again with all that there is left for you in life to love and you can now rest and relax, and be at one in your love.”
It needed only a glimpse of those haversacks and piles of water flasks near to them, to expose the illusion of appearances. He knew more clearly even than Xhabbo and Xhabbo’s tapping, that this beloved cave and temple was neither home nor anything now except the briefest of shelters. They could just use it quickly for refreshment and re-provisioning as at a wayside hospice lost in the bush of Africa. And then as soon as possible, return to the dark outside and continue on a way that was without foreseeable destination or end. In the midst of this turmoil of feelings he noticed on the far perimeter of the light, the picture of St. Hubert, his little altar of stones underneath and above it on the yellow sandstone the red cross painted those thousands of years ago by a Bushman hand.
At once the scene was transformed into a setting of which he had never had any experience himself except the vicarious one of having encountered it in many readings from the Bible by lamplight. It was a Passover scene; a microscopic version of the great Passover in the Pentateuch so beloved by both Ouwa and Mopani and particularly relevant now. There the chosen people stood fearful in their homes, ready for their exodus from persecution and bondage into the unknown, knowing that as they were waiting there afraid, all that protected them from destruction was a cross marked above their doors outside, so that the angel of death who was visiting everyone in the city that night would see it and seeing it pass them by.
The impact of the recollection and the comparison evoked a feeling that they too were on an authentic journey not without protection. Despite all the conditioning of history in his Huguenot self against such a response, he found his one free hand involuntarily going through the “Papist” movements of describing the sign of a cross. Nonnie, knowing the hard Protestant core in him, was startled and moved, and was nearly trapped into commenting on it.
Just in time she took refuge in an expression of her father, which she had never properly understood but knew was intended to overcome the inhibitions of over tentative guests.
“Now come on, François,” she spoke up, imitating as best she could her father’s tone of command, “No heel taps please. I gather from Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara that we’ve no time to lose.”
She pronounced the name “Nuin-Tara” without any accent. She even reproduced the very difficult click in Xhabbo’s name so precisely that a real glow of pride joined the tumultuous variety of François’s feelings. Even more, to his joy, she had said it so easily and well that the same pleasure he was feeling himself appeared on Xhabbo’s face, strained and preoccupied as he was with the tensions of his awareness of imminent danger, the extreme need for haste and doubt whether there was even time for François to eat and drink.
And then he was by the hearth, with Nonnie urging him to sit while she fetched some water to wipe his face and hands so that he could eat without delay. But quickly he stopped her. His sense of the need for extreme economy in the use of supplies imposed on them by their plight, had already been disturbed by the display of candles which had greeted him and he would immediately have put them all out, had he not suspected that it was something of Nonnie’s contriving to celebrate his return. In any case they could do without candles if necessary but never without water.
“Please Nonnie, please!” he answered as gently as he could. “You must just let me go dirty for the time being. We can’t waste any of our water. We might still be forced to come back here and need all the water that’s left. Besides, as Mopani says, a little honest dirt is good roughage for the system and gives us despised bush-dwellers immunities against infections that no citizen of the hygien-made world outside possesses.”
His tone was light, trying to follow her example to lift their minds above the many negations evoked by their plight. Nonnie, who could have been abashed by this defeat of her impulse to take special care of François and to do something that would have made her feel less ineffective than she had been feeling all day, responded to the tone particularly as for the first time since this dark new era began, a smile came to François’s tired face. She smiled back at him, hearing him add, “Come and sit beside me here and have something to eat yourself and . . .”
Nonnie interrupted. She could tell him happily that she and Nuin-Tara had already eaten and drank as much as they could, so that they would not delay him and Xhabbo on their return. Indeed already she was so full of food and hot chocolate herself that she was certain she would have the severest indigestion before long. She clutched her stomach and conveyed in a parody of words and actions an over-full state that brought a look of amusement to Nuin-Tara’s and Xhabbo’s faces, for what they had failed to follow in words was plain to them in the artless pantomime that accompanied them.
“Well done, Nonnie! How wise and thoughtful of you,” François exclaimed with a warmth that uplifted her. “I’ll tell you what you can do then. Give Hin lots of hot chocolate as well and please fetch a couple of those tins of condensed milk in our store and give him one to himself. It’s his idea of Heaven, and Heaven knows, he’s deserved it, because without him we would not be here alive today.”
Nonnie, over happy to have something to do, rushed to the back of the cave, returned with the two halves of their last dixie, half-filled them with steaming hot chocolate, opened two tins of condensed milk, divided the contents of one between the two halves as François had directed, and kept the other for him.
Hintza, of course, had no doubt that it was all for his special benefit. François always saw to Hintza’s wants before he took care of his own. As a result Hintza was already on his stomach, stretched out in a dog’s attitude of ardent supplication in front of Nonnie, his tongue extended, and his mouth dribbling shamelessly at the corners, while he was beginning to pant with an uprush of thirst and hunger.
But Nonnie held him firmly back with her hand, reproving, “Not so fast, darling Hin, not so fast, or you’ll burn that lovely long pink tongue of yours. Gosh, you’d better be careful or it will come unstuck at the back!”
She held him thus, stirring the chocolate and condensed milk round quickly so that the heat could evaporate while she tested the dark steaming liquid with her finger from time to time until it was cool enough for Hintza to drink. She then pushed both the halves towards him. Her hands had hardly come back folded in her lap, or so it seemed to her, when all the chocolate vanished, and the dixies were empty and clean as if polished by a conscientious servant’s hand.
“Dear Mother in Heaven, Hin,” she exclaimed, “you’re an even greater genius at gulping than your master. Is it a cas
e of like master like dog, or like dog like master? Which of the two of you, you irresistible beggar, started so outrageous a habit? Be careful or you’ll hiccup yourself to death one day. Yes, to death you greedy creature. D’you know, and I hope your master is listening too, there was an infallible Pope once, protected by all the blessed angels in Heaven, who hiccupped himself to death in spite of the prayers of a Convocation of cardinals. And all because he would not stop gulping his food so that he could get on with his praying. But I don’t expect you know about Popes, being such a keen young Huguenot dog yourself!”
But Hintza for once failed to detect the affection wrapped in the teasing. How could even a human, expert at inhumanity as only human beings can be, be so lacking in the little humanity they possess to find so desperate a matter a subject for joking, particularly such a beloved human as Nonnie.
Once certain that he had licked the last drop of liquid out of the dixies, Hintza looked into Nonnie’s eyes with an expression as devastating as no doubt it was intended to be, so that she broke off her teasing. It was a look of infinite tragedy, as if with that last drop of liquid life had lost all its meaning, chaos and old night were about to descend upon him for ever, and there was nothing left under the visiting moon he loved so well.
“Oh Coiske,” Nonnie called out, convinced that two tears like two great Pacific pearls were forming at the corners of Hintza’s purple eyes. “Can’t I make him some more chocolate? I can’t bear to see him looking so hurt.”
François, who had suffered under that eloquent look of Hintza’s ever since his puppy days and had long since come to terms with it, was, Nonnie thought, rather heartless. For he just said firmly, “No Nonnie, no. The little skelm knows he’s got enough of that sickly sweet stuff in him to last for days. He’s not had such a feast since last Christmas. He’s just an artful and greedy little dodger. But I’ll tell you what you can do. Please get some more biltong from our store. Here—take my knife and slice it up and feed him with as much of it as he can eat, so that he has something solid in him as well. But please be as quick as you can, we leave in minutes now.”
Meanwhile François himself had got Niun-Tara and Xhabbo seated by his side. He divided the food in front of him between Xhabbo and himself in the proportion of one third for himself and two thirds for Xhabbo. Even that third was more than he could manage. The chocolate with which they began had been so warming and satisfying that it felt a full meal in itself. In any case, he lacked appetite, both from exhaustion and the ache deep at heart that ran swollen and full like a great river in the underground of his being. He felt almost too tired to chew anything at all. Indeed it is doubtful whether he chewed the mixture of corned beef and tinned beans which Nonnie had prepared. In between gulps, he questioned Nonnie about the supplies she had packed in their haversacks. She had done it so well that he congratulated her warmly and could think of only a few refinements of his own to add which she could not possibly have known about. The moment he had finished his food, only slightly ahead of Xhabbo, he got up to see to them, explaining to Xhabbo that he was almost ready to leave.
The relief on Xhabbo’s strained face at this announcement was obvious. He was on his feet at once and telling François that he was just going outside for a moment to look around. When he came back he counted on them being ready to leave. He was at the entrance and out of the cave with astonishing speed.
One of the most important of François’s refinements was changing the gun he had carried with him all day. It was his favourite rifle: a large ·375 express. The cartridges for it were so long and heavy that he could not carry as many rounds on him as he had now concluded were necessary. On the way back, hard as he ran, he had been thinking how disastrously their situation had deteriorated since all chance of help from Mopani’s camp was destroyed. Instead of counting on relief as he had done in a matter of weeks or at the most months, he had now to face the possibility that it might be a year or more before they could find a way across the desert or the bush to safety. For there was no other way left for them to go that was not now swarming with enemies. And either through bush or desert the nearest places of safety were a thousand or more miles away.
Fortunately he had, in the reserve he had built up over the months, not only that lovely old muzzle-loader with which he had begun his life as a young hunter but a lighter, high velocity all-purpose gun. That of course would not be so effective a weapon if they were ever charged by elephant, lion, leopard or rhinocerous but none of those figured on François’s black-list of enemies. Their main enemies from now on would be the men outside, and hunger and thirst. More, he knew that this rifle, accurately used, was powerful enough to kill men as well as the buck and birds they would need for food without shattering the smallest of them. Above all, for every one of those long heavy cartridges of his ·375 rifle, he could carry several rounds of ammunition for the lighter gun.
The exchange of rifle and ammunition took no time at all and instead of the fifty rounds he carried in his cartridge belt, he now had two hundred rounds divided in two satchels, one for himself to carry and one for Xhabbo, enough to last them for two or three years and, unless they were extremely unlucky, even longer, considering that they had so great a bow-and-arrow hunter and trapper as Xhabbo with them. Indeed, he would have taken less ammunition had it not been for the fact that he had to be prepared at any moment for something he had not yet experienced: fighting off an attack by human beings. And that was something he had gathered from Ouwa’s and Mopani’s accounts of their experiences in war, which used up ammunition at a devastating rate, particularly by the inexperienced.
That done, he called Nonnie over to him, made her unbutton the flaps of the four pockets on her bush shirt and stuff them full of dried fruit he had surreptitiously extracted over the long months from Ousie-Johanna’s store. At the same time he filled the spare spaces in his own shirt with more biltong and the last of Ousie-Johanna’s rusks. He was tempted to add just a few tins of delicacies but their weight made him reject the temptation as soon as it was born. He did, however, take a bottle of the oldest brandy he had stolen from Ouwa’s store for medicinal purposes, filled one field flask with it and found he had still a third of a bottle of the rich amber liquid left.
At that point Nonnie interrupted him with a sudden plea which however lightly uttered was deep in earnest. “François, d’you think that you could do something for me that you may not like, and even hate?”
François stared at her in amazement. “But, of course, Nonnie, provided it doesn’t take long.”
Without a word then, she drew him a few yards to the left of the store to face the picture of St. Hubert and the cross on the wall. Would he, she asked with a certain embarrassed determination, please kneel in front of that place with her? In the act of doing this she did not speak again. She could not even get herself to put all she meant by the act in silent words to herself. She just somehow wanted to affirm in the deed of their kneeling before the power of which the painting and the cross on the wall were such clear evidence to her, that though they were kneeling before it as two, they were there as one. She felt this so deeply that instinctively she took François’s hand in her own and for once without hesitation he clasped it so firmly that it hurt. Utterly silent, she just let feelings beyond measure or knowing plead for her. If the one she felt them to be had to be divided into two again, would the reality that was represented by the signs in front of them, her heart was asking, protect the part that was François as greater than the part that was herself? Yet if it could, oh yes, out of mercy and in recognition of what they had lost and were learning through suffering, could it, would it protect both so that one day they could come together again and forever be the one they were before it now?
Her heart had barely run the full course of this unutterable longing and cry for help when there was a rush through the entrance of the cave and there was Xhabbo calling, “Foot of the Day, we must altogether go now and utterly at once. The danger is near and could
be greater than Xhabbo feels.”
Xhabbo’s entry was so abrupt and his call so urgent that François and Nonnie jumped to their feet and turned about to face him.
“Yes Xhabbo, we’re ready, and we come,” François answered firmly, striding towards him, half a bottle of brandy still in his hand, “But come to me first quickly with Nuin-Tara. I have some magic water here for the journey that we must take.”
He turned to Nonnie, whose pulse was racing with the shock of Xhabbo’s intervention and all it forbode. She tried to rally herself while he continued, “Now now, no heel-taps in your turn. Have a great swig at this. Quickly, please!”
In spite of the fact that drink was one of her great dislikes, Nonnie obediently grasped the bottle and swallowed a draught of brandy that left her gasping. François took a much bigger and longer draught from it, knowing how much more his exhausted self needed a boost than anyone else’s.
Then he handed it to Xhabbo, saying, “Xhabbo, divide that between Nuin-Tara and yourself, knowing that you are drinking the water of the spirit of your father Mantis and that it will give you warmth against the cold of morning and power against our enemies outside.”
To his amazement the name of Mantis made Xhabbo briefly hold the bottle towards the light as if instinctively preparing a toast to a king. The glass and its dark liquid were gold with candle fire before Xhabbo raised the bottle high for a long swallow. Then he handed the bottle to Nuin-Tara to empty.
The shock of the brandy on the palates of the two of them, who had never tasted anything like it before, was even greater than it had been to Nonnie. But it was followed by immediate warmth and exhilaration. On the arrival of the spirit in their stomachs, both faces were transfigured with wonder and François was certain that at any other time they would have danced a little dance in gratitude that the Bushman prefer to dance out rather than express in vain words.
A Far Off Place Page 20