There was the camp of “The Hyena’s Disappointment”, because it was where Hintza intercepted a hyena scrambling up a tree at midnight to get at their biltong, and bit it so smartly in the heel that it went off roaring like a lion with pain. There was, “Foot of the Day’s Stupidity”, where François failed to resolve a simple Bushman riddle, usually tried out on only the smallest boy. And there was a place with a name of the gravest impact called, “Xhabbo’s Reprieve”, because they had waited there for seven days in despair for Xhabbo, who had gone out on a journey of reconnaissance. For once he had been unable to find either melons or cucumbers or tubers for his return journey and had arrived back almost dead in their midst.
There was “The Giant Bustard’s Delight”, where on one shocking pink dawn they were woken by the impassioned, volcanic outpouring of a male bustard’s love and, just as the sun rose, seen him tumble his woman for his delight. There was another camp called “Our Grandfather the Elephant”. There, an enormous old bull elephant had mysteriously appeared without a swish of footfall or vibration of sand to announce his coming, and, having come, stood all night long just on the far rim of the spread-out cloth of their firelight, quietly watching them out of half-closed eyes.
François had wanted to move away, thinking the great elephant too close for comfort. But Xhabbo had been almost angry with him, saying that the elephant was there to see if the desert were treating them well and would not go until he was certain that this was so. On no account must he be given offence, but welcomed with joy and courtesy.
And as one final example from the journey behind there was the camp on a moonless night when the sky was not black so much as a bright midnight blue and the stars were clear and not glittering but steadily bright like drops of newly fallen dew, so that Xhabbo remarked, “Those are stars feeling themselves to be the eyes of the herds of springbok the Dawn’s Heart hunts for food for his utterly beloved lynx on earth.” He had gone on to beg that when they next could look close into the eyes of the springbok to notice how at the back of the night shadow cast by their long, dark lashes, François and Nonnie would see how the eyes were feeling themselves to be part of the star glow above. This camp was called, “The Night of Springbok Eyes”. And so on to “The Place where Laughter came back”.
From there their march became more exacting than it had ever been. It was immediately clear that most animals had followed Old Black Lightning. Only a few birds and desert hares were left and more and more they had to live on what the earth of the desert could produce. So long had those fertile sands been without rain that food from them became increasingly scarce and even melons hard to get. And yet, despite the harsher conditions of their life, their camps had never been livelier or happier; places of lively conversation, endless Bushman story-telling, and singing. There was perhaps only one grave and solemn evening, and that was at the camp where Nonnie out of her new self, insisted on François telling her every detail of what had happened to him in those desperate periods when he left her in the cave, ending with that day when Hintza had been wounded.
He told her everything and it was only at the end that she could confess to him how grateful and proud she had felt, despite the fact that her mind told her it was a sin to feel as she was feeling, when he told her that he was glad he could kill the soldier before Hintza and he himself could be killed. She wanted to know if he was absolutely certain now that all that killing, the blowing up of his home and the cremation of a helicopter and its crew, did not haunt him with a feeling of having done wrong, because she wanted him to know that however awful these deeds might appear, she in her heart had nothing but gratitude that she had a person like him to take on the cruel burden of protecting them injust such a way.
He thought for a long time before answering, “I know, Nonnie, it must sound awful but I really don’t regret that first killing at all. I didn’t feel so relieved over the helicopter business because the danger was not quite so visible and it was awful to think of those men being burned alive. I wish it could have been different, but what else could I do? I’ve no doubt they would have killed us all and as a result I have made my peace with it. My home had to go because I told you how they wanted to make a death-trap of it and it hurt me more than it hurt them, I’m sure. But there’s another killing in my life I’ve never told you for which I’ve never been able to forgive myself. It’s strange . . .”
“Oh, you mean Uprooter of Great Trees?” Nonnie interrupted, “You’ve told me about him already, and I do understand, I promise.”
“No, it’s not even that, though I was very sorry for old Uprooter of Great Trees. No, it’s something you might find quite ridiculous. It all happened when I was very small and something, I’ve forgotten what, had put me in a bad temper. I walked out into the garden at home and came to the edge of one of our water furrows. A worm was crawling along it. Suddenly, I don’t know to this day exactly why, I pushed it with my foot into the water and watched it lying at the bottom of the furrow, wriggling; tiny bubbles of air coming from its nose. Then it stopped wriggling and the bubbles ceased. D’you know, at once the singing of the birds, always shattering in the garden, became a terrible kind of song of accusation, and I’ve never, never been able to get rid of the memory of it.
“I think I know why now, because it was a killing that was utterly unnecessary. I think unnecessary killing is the only real killing there is, because we kill others then out of something in us we hate and don’t understand—at least that’s what Mopani says. He insists that killing which is forced on one as killing on behalf of life, is not really a thing for which one can be blamed at all. And do you know, the strangest thing about that poor little worm I murdered is the fact that on that very night after doing it, I went to sit with ’Bamuthi in his kraal and I heard him tell his children, in one of his wonderful fireside chats, that ‘the knowledge of the unspoken evil a man has done is a worm eating his heart away’. That worm has been my conscience ever since and I only wish I could let it know that even as a worm it has not lived in vain, because it changed the whole of my attitude to life. I have never, never once since then, killed anything that I didn’t have to.”
“Oh François,” Nonnie said, taking his hand and pressing it to her cheek, “you must really stop being such an old Huguenot with such a fanatical conscience! You must really go in more for the confession you Protestants denounce. I’m sorry there’s not some saintly Father here to tell you now that with this first confession of the killing of your worm, the worm is forever out of your life. As a good Catholic, I’ll just have to be your Father-confessor and pronounce absolution, total and complete, from your crime. For our good Mother in Heaven knows that you have more than earned it and done penance enough for my sins as well. But oh, I do understand because even here in the desert, whenever I’ve watched you shooting, though I know it’s necessary, I’ve wished there was a way of life without death.”
“If there were such a way,” François declared confidently, for here he was on well-travelled ground, “it would miss the point of life.”
“But how?” Nonnie asked.
“Because Mopani says,” François went on, “that birth and death are the only way to something greater. They are only a part, he says, of something greater even than their own full sum. He says death is as much life, as life is birth, and will even tell you, with one of his wriest smiles, that life is a deadly business.”
“You love Mopani very much, don’t you?” Nonnie broke in with apparent irrelevance.
“Love” was a big word for François. Considering the cool upbringing behind one who was always “another person” in his home, he was half afraid of the vision of fire and warmth it evoked, and said, taken aback and shy, “I expect I do. But why?”
“Because you’re always quoting him. He seems as full of quotations as Shakespeare and I tell you, master Joubert, that if you piled together all the quotations from Mopani I’ve heard from you, they would sink a ship.”
And she wanted t
o go on and ask if he did not think he overdid it, and should not consider seriously whether Mopani did not stand in the way of his being himself and should he not try to speak more for himself?
But such a rare, exposed, far-away look had appeared on François’s face, that she instantly rebuked herself, just in time to hear him say, as if to himself, “All the time, from the moment I first left the cave, I have felt Mopani near me, almost as if he were just behind me, whispering in my ear what to do, helping and protecting me. I know I couldn’t have done all this without him. So clear, so sure has this feeling been that I’ve often looked over my shoulder, expecting to find him there. But . . .”
His thought faltered to an end as it was translated into a searing vision of Mopani as he first remembered him; a horse called Noble, two great ridge-back hounds racing ahead, Mopani’s neat, tall and dapper figure upon it, his shadow becoming a Daumier imprint in sunset crayons on the scarlet dust of the silhouette of the elongated knight of La Mancha starting out on his quest.
Seeing the look, all the quotations immediately became Quixotic flesh and blood for Nonnie too. With a rush of inspiration she announced with certainty, “He must be alive then. Don’t you see François, it can’t be any other way.”
To her amazement François only remarked, solemnly, “Perhaps”, because, though he would not tell her, ’Bamuthi and Ouwa, who were both dead, at times also felt reassuringly and disconcertingly near. How could one so young, however resourceful, deal with so great a paradox?
“There’s no perhaps about it.” Nonnie, who had all the confidence of one who after all had never known what it could be like to have been “another person,” even before one was born, hid her feeling of absolute anti-climax in a show of vehemence. “Just you wait, François Joubert, just you blooming-well wait!” And there, all that there was of solemnity between them for the moment, ended.
Many days later there was a camp where one of Xhabbo’s finest stories was interrupted by the loud sound of jet engines in the night. They all jumped up in alarm to see, unusually low, a great passenger aeroplane flashing its lights stacked in two neat rows upon each other, and flying almost straight above them. It was their first intimation since they had left their enemies behind that somewhere beyond the desert there was another world still going its impersonal, twentieth-century way. Nonnie was almost overpowered by the comparison it evoked in her imagination between her own plight now and that of the Nonnie who had often travelled in planes just like that.
She could not help talking to François about it, and he became so interested that he begged her to tell Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo about it. She started obediently but diffidently to give her account, but in the telling soon became so involved, that she could not leave out a single detail of what the inside of an aeroplane looked like; how scores of people sat comfortably in it; how tables were opened in front of each of them; linen, knives, forks and plates laid out glittering, and so on right down to the courses of a first-class dinner menu, complete with a description of the films and music that followed. At moments she was afraid that she might be boring Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, but their eyes were so great with wonder, like children in a nursery hearing their first fairy-tale that she was encouraged into giving more detail. François himself, who had never been in an aeroplane, was utterly absorbed in her account and she had to finish to a disconcertingly long silence.
Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo went on looking at her until at last the fact that the story was really ended penetrated. Xhabbo took up a knife and cut the air between him and Nonnie as if he had been tied to her eyes by an invisible chain. He gasped like a diver coming up for air, shook his head from side to side and said, “Nonnie, you are a wonderful liar.”
Nonnie, getting over her astonishment that for the first time in her life her honesty had been in question, protested and declared that she was grossly insulted, and would never tell them anything again. At that both Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo rushed to her and took her hands. Dismayed, they begged her never to threaten them like that again, saying it was the most wonderful story they had ever heard and would she please tell them more like it.
“But what’s the use if you don’t believe me?” Nonnie exclaimed, half-laughing with perplexity.
“Well, can’t you see, Nonnie?” Xhabbo told her, “the stories like the story I have just told you of how Mantis made an eland out of a shoe discarded by his son, are just true stories. Everyone knows that they are just ordinary stories of ordinary things that happened, but your story is a great story because it is a story that no one could possibly ever believe. Only the greatest stories are stories men cannot believe.”
And Nonnie, defeated, was compelled to leave it at that, though they could not. And thereafter she found herself compelled to tell them night after night, about the outside world, things like underground trains and smoke and fog in cities so great that they made the sky like night in the middle of the day, all things that a European child knows are everyday facts of life in the great technological world beyond the desert. On each occasion she found herself rewarded with the dubious compliment of being “the most wonderful liar there had ever been”.
Of this part of their march only two more camps deserve special attention. There was the camp at which François, Nonnie and Hintza were woken by the unusual behaviour of Xhabbo. Nonnie had become so attuned to her new life that it had become impossible for François and Hintza to sit up straight out of their sleep at intervals as they had always done, and listen to the noises of the night in case anything abnormal was coming their way, without Nonnie doing so too. On this occasion all three came out of their sleep upright side by side, to see Xhabbo take a burning piece of wood from their fire, walk some ten paces into the night and build a new fire there. He sat there by this fire until it was completely burned out before coming back to his place by Nuin-Tara’s side, apparently without noticing that the three of them were watching. Twice more they woke up for the same reason, and saw Xhabbo follow exactly the same procedure. It was too much for Nonnie. She had to ask François in a whisper, “What d’you think he’s doing? Is there anything wrong?”
“I don’t know,” François answered gravely, “it depends on the dream.”
“The dream?” Nonnie exclaimed, “What have dreams got to do with what’s going on?”
“Everything,” François replied. “They only do this when they’ve had a great dream.”
And he went on to explain how old Koba had told him that always when a great dream came to speak to a Bushman at night he would take a burning stick from their fire as Xhabbo had done, in order to show the dream that came out of the darkness within, the way through the darkness without, to where it could be warmed and brought alive by a fire of its own, and so become clear to the eyes of whoever dreamt it.
At their dawn breakfast, Xhabbo was unusually sombre. It looked for a while as if he was not going to speak to any of them that day. This was something so unusual that François was increasingly perturbed. But just before they shouldered their haversacks to set out on another long march, Xhabbo shook his head, begged them to wait, saying he ought to tell them all of a dream he had had three times in the night. Although he had done all that he could do to bring the dream out of the dark and the cold and make it warm and alive by a fire of its own, the dream was still cold and dark within. He could not understand it all, as he should have been able to do by now. The dream had come first when he had hardly fallen asleep. It began with his hearing a voice of a woman singing, as Nonnie had sung to the lion, but singing as if she felt herself, unlike Nonnie, in a place without friends. He had gone towards the voice, recognising it to be the voice of a woman of the people who had come out of the sea. He had come to see her bound with ox-hide thongs to a tree whose top was high in the sky and branches spread far and wide. He had tried to go and cut her free but could suddenly not move nearer because there was water full of crocodiles and hippopotamuses in between. Full of horror over his helplessness he woke, to perform the prescr
ibed ritual without effect.
This had happened not just once, but three times. When a dream came to one three times and was still not understood, he declared, distressed, the time for all was bad indeed.
Nuin-Tara, François and Nonnie all tried to comfort Xhabbo but he was not so much in need of comfort as enlightenment. He told them this with a flash of his upright spirit, and added that all that was necessary now was for all three of them, and Hintza too, to use their eyes for him because he was afraid that his own eyes would be full of the dream and would not have room to be as full of the way they were going as they ought to be.
Accordingly, François, Hintza and Nonnie took the lead, and while marching along Nonnie questioned François closely about Bushman dreams and their meaning. All he could tell her was that for a person like Xhabbo, whose name was the Bushman word for dream, dreaming would have been more important than for most. That was saying a great deal because Old Koba had told him all Bushmen believed that there was a dream dreaming them. Often as a child when he had woken up with a dream that troubled him she had taken him out into the garden at Hunter’s Drift and made him a little fire just as Xhabbo had done in order to bring light out of the darkness of his dream or, as Nonnie he thought might have put it, interpreting it. It was extraordinary how that had helped him as a child and demolished all the unpleasantness left behind by the dream.
A Far Off Place Page 37