Afterwards he had to survive the ordeal of keen but happily sympathetic questioning, which would have gone on far into the evening and possibly the night, had not Mopani had the wisdom to specify the flagship as the place of meeting. For it was soon interrupted by the impressive Captain of Operations himself who, after precisely one hour, appeared and announced in a manner that ruled out protest, “I’m afraid gentlemen, for reasons that you will well understand, that this young man has really had a packet. This for the moment must be it. Besides, dinner is served.”
That night, the various communication rooms in the ships of the fleet had all to be called into service. Long dispatches of what had happened went out in morse-code, tapped on the keyboards of some dozen ships, as if they were an exteriorised version of Xhabbo’s inward tapping. All over the world the story became immediately one of the great human sensations of the year. Its impact was profound. The human aspect of it dominated people’s imagination, but for a few exceptions. Consciously or unconsciously we are part of our time and whether we like it or not live not just our own lives but also the life of our time. Our own enigmatic ration of days is limited with a negation peculiar to our time. There is implicit in all a strange envy for what is true and noble, an element of what François’s ancestors so aptly called a nostalgie de la boue, so that despite the story’s obvious humanity, there were men who refused to see it for what it was, and out of their own one-sided and slanted selves, tried to prove that it was something less.
For instance, questions were asked almost immediately in the British House of Commons. There was a member from a constituency in the Midlands who wanted to know from the Secretary of State how he could possibly justify the immense expenditure of an over-taxed country’s money, which was implied in all they had heard of the melodramatic rescue of what after all were little more than two children. Could not the whole thing have been done in a more simple and less expensive manner?
The Secretary of State thought not and from the volume of cheering, the negative reply in this regard complied with what is known as the wishes of the House. But another member from a constituency in Scotland immediately jumped up to ask whether it would not be true to assume that if the young lady of whom they had heard so much had not been the daughter of a titled governor who had served an imperialist establishment well, but the daughter of a simple working-class family, the help given would not have been so eager and lavish, and the publicity not so great?
The Secretary of State thought that this kind of question was unworthy of the dignity of the House, and deserved no answer, and the applause indicated once more that he had the House with him.
Another member wanted a Royal Commission appointed to investigate such extravagance and such departure from the norms of the Admiralty. This too, clearly, was against the will of the House, who thought, to quote the Secretary, that the admiral had behaved in accordance with traditions of a service that was always as ready to answer a call of common humanity in peace as it was to respond to the needs of the nation in war.
Yet another metropolitan member put a question which implied the certainty of that member, though obviously not that of the House, that the whole story had been grossly exaggerated. He suggested that it was part of a neo-Imperialist plot to bring the whole movement for the emancipation of the sorely oppressed black masses of Africa into disrepute and to disguise the fact that the real villians of the piece who deserved the censure of every right thinking human being in the world, were the European establishments which oppressed the black workers of Africa and by their intolerance had provoked them into a reaction which should surprise no one. He would always be the first to deplore any unnecessary loss of human life, but the behaviour of the European establishment in Africa made the taking of human life essential so that a vicious racial despotism could be overthrown, and the common man there could be made free. Besides, young people were notoriously inaccurate and given to fantasy these days, so what objective proof did the Secretary of State have that what was perhaps only a molehill of truth had not been made into a mountain of fiction by an over-excited and dubiously encouraged imagination of the young son of a white settler?
The Secretary of State was happy to relieve the questioner of his anxieties and help his search for the truth. Only that morning his department had received remarkable evidence that the story as presented to the House was if anything an understatement. A great Scottish newspaper had telephoned the permanent head of his department to say that they had been approached by a gentleman in Glasgow who wanted for obvious reasons to remain anonymous but had volunteered to testify that the real story was even more sinister than apparent from the facts correctly revealed by the Admiralty. For instance, there was the episode of the “Singing Tree” which had puzzled the House to such an extent that the Leader of the Opposition had dismissed it as pure Rider Haggard and not something that should be paraded as fact before an over-worked House. According to this evidence, the Maria Henrietta d’Alveira mentioned, had been captured on the borders of Angola and Zambia in the company of her mother and father, a distinguished public servant from Portugal, on an urgent mission of enquiry of high international import. She was promised, according to this testimony, that her parents would be well-treated, and after two years of benevolent custody set free, provided she accompanied her captors and did wholeheartedly what was asked of her. This was to sing every night at this mysterious place of the tree mentioned in the Joubert account. There were reasons for harbouring the gravest fears about the fate of the d’Alveira couple but details had to wait on proper examination of the informant, who claimed to be the Scottish officer mentioned in the Joubert account. This officer had refused to go on serving with the invading forces, had narrowly missed being executed himself by the invaders and had escaped and made his way to safety after a long journey, the after-effects of which were still confining him to hospital. The Secretary of State had already dispatched an experienced law officer to interview him and would, if so desired, lay his testimony before the House.
The reaction in America, if more emotional and vociferous, was simpler and unashamedly human. No dissenting voices were heard in Congress or anywhere else. There was a unanimous voice to the effect that Vice-Admiral Digery G. Winflow Jun., Second-in-command to the combined South Atlantic Fleet, had in his support of the British Commander-in-Chief done all that the great American public expected of an officer of the United States Navy. Moreover he had been informed that if he should think it expedient and desirable to invite the four gallant young people, irrespective of their race, creed or colour, to come to America at the expense of the United States Government, he should not hesitate to do so, so that the American people could have a chance of showing that it still honoured the qualities of courage, self-sacrifice and unselfishness, above all others, no matter from which quarter they came. This statement made the sour voices heard in Westminster more sour and more convinced that they were right in suspecting all along that sooner or later the C.I.A. would be shown to be involved in so flagrant a conspiracy to discredit the “freedom fighters” of Africa.
That meeting in the ward-room of the flagship, however, was the end of what Mopani regarded as François’s duty towards the press in general. There was just one section of the press however with which Mopani wanted him to deal a few days later. Mopani brought five famous newspaper men to see them on the dune behind the camp. One was from a distinguished American magazine, one from the most authoritative newspaper in Britain, one each from their German, French and Italian counterparts. He asked François to tell these men the whole story as he, Mopani, had come to know it. François, and for a while Nonnie, spent a whole day talking to these men. He told them most of what happened, though obviously still without intimate personal matters and shades of thought and feeling too delicate for public discussion. Late in the afternoon, one photographer representing all five was allowed to come into the camp and photograph Nonnie, Hintza and François, but again not Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara, for
the reasons already stated.
When François returned to the top of the dune with the photograher to say goodbye, he was puzzled when the American, shaking him by the hand said, “Great! Just great sir, perhaps the greatest human story ever, certainly the greatest one that’s come the way of your humble servant here, and I’m not at all surprised that my magazine has agreed to pay more for such a story than they did even for the memoirs of Winston S. Churchill. You deserve every cent of it and more.”
It had been so long since François had thought of or heard mention of money that the exclamation broke from him, “And so you people still use money then?”
When asked why he had arranged this special meeting, Mopani explained that it was all due to a friend of his in the newspaper world who had done a great deal over the years to help him in preserving the wild life and natural environment of Africa. This friend had warned him from the start that such a story was extremely valuable in terms of money. At Mopani’s request he had taken care of the financial aspects of the newspaper, magazine and in particular film interests of the affair, which were immense. As a result, François and Nonnie would be well provided for in the future and have money to spare for any cause dear to them. But more of that later, when Mopani could discuss the future in detail with them.
And so there came a moment when the Admiral himself asked for permission to call on them. Nonnie had recovered so much that she insisted on changing out of her European clothes and putting on the dress which François and Nuin-Tara had made for her nearly a year ago in the desert. She did this because she felt that Nuin-Tara’s profoundly feminine self might feel uncomfortable if she did not. As a result, when the Admiral in his dazzling white uniform and shining gold epaulettes which made Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara clap their hands at such a glitter of sheer beauty, appeared in their midst, he had difficulty just for a moment in telling Nonnie and Nuin-Tara apart. Only when he came near enough to see Nonnie’s features, dusky with sun as well as shade of their camp, and observed the long, shining, fine hair falling out from underneath a dazzling ivory tiara of ostrich beads, which had been washed and scrubbed in the sacred water that morning, was he certain.
He immediately went over, took her hand in both of his and said in his most chivalrous manner, “There you are at last, young lady. So you are Jamie Monckton’s daughter. I knew your father well, and when this is all over you must both come and stay with us in Devon.”
In saying this, he made it all sound so normal and casual that soon they were all at their ease. All four were genuinely sad when he announced that he had come to say goodbye and that in the morning his fleet would up-anchor and in the way of ships vanish over the rim of the ocean. But if it were at all possible, and he begged François and Jamie Monckton’s daughter to try to make it so, would they all please be in a place at dawn when they could see his ships put out to sea, because he promised that it would be a fine and, although he said it himself, a sight worth seeing.
The following morning then, Nonnie, François and Hintza, with Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara and Mopani, somehow managed to be on the top of the dune. On their left, a large pompous penguin pontiff, robed in the black and white of the uniform of the ultimate in dogma, assisted by two penguin evêques, three archdeacons, four canons and innumerable priests, as well as oecumenical delegations of monks and nuns from all the far-flung Antarctic island retreats of this devout species, performed matins for the seals and walruses, unaware that one old walrus, grey at the temples and with a long white moustache, snored loudly throughout the service, and one immense white albatross on archangelic wings, hovered overhead at the centre of a Pentecostal flame of resurrected sun.
On the right, in the wide open bay, the fleet, as the Admiral had put it, was upping anchor. They watched that great assembly of ships, flashing so circumspect in the early morning light, form up in warlike formation; the escort vessels moving into station ahead, abeam and abaft, the two aircraft carriers in between, followed by the heavy communications cruiser, the marine-commando ship, the submarine tender and finally again the rear escort ships, all in one glittering, swinging procession. But to their amazement, the line did not immediately make for the open sea. It swung round on a new course almost as if the ships were determined to beach themselves, but at the last moment they came smartly about towards the south, until they were close and parallel to the shore. They saw then that all the ships were “dressed over-all” with flags and pennants from bow to stern, all streaming in the wind of morning; the wind that had been their way.
Underneath the flags and pennants straining in flame of sun and wind of day, the sides were lined with sailors all as if for a royal occasion and as each ship passed the dune on which they stood, it dipped its ensign, and the watchers heard, across the blue water and over the yellow sands in between, three long and loud hurrahs. But the greatest surprise of all came when the flagship sailed by them, the sea unfolding on either side of the razor bows like a fleece of gold, so fast and deep did it cut through its swell. It not only added its quota of cheers to the others but followed them up with a salute of twenty-one guns; a salute which made the admiral turn to the Operations Captain by his side and say, “That’s one thing you will not enter in the log book. We’ve had enough questions to answer in Parliament already. But I trust this is something towards the award you’ve been pestering me to get for those young people.”
François and Nonnie were so absorbed that they did not notice how, long before this moment came, Mopani had quietly retreated. Installed on a flat piece of sand behind the dune, he took out his pipe, filled and lit it, as he thought, “It’s purely their occasion and theirs alone, no one has the right to intrude.”
That night by their fire in camp, Xhabbo shook his head and for the last time the male equivalent of a Mona-Lisa smile appeared on his antique features. He looked provocatively at Nonnie to declare that he was not feeling at all certain that he, Xhabbo, that day had really been seeing the things which brought Nonnie’s people out of the sea taking them gliding back into the sea, but just things that were part of another of Nonnie’s many great stories.
Nonnie fell into the trap, and asked, “But why, Xhabbo?”
“Because you are such a wonderful liar,” he replied, and fell over backwards on the sand with merriment.
And then a morning came when Nonnie and Xhabbo were pronounced completely cured. In spite of an experience and love that bound them to one another, they all knew that the moment to go their different ways had come. The time was upon them when, as Ouwa had so often said, if a page had to be turned, it was best to turn it firmly. François, Nonnie and even Hintza, who knew as always when great changes were imminent, though he might not know their precise nature, were heart-broken; Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo not any the less. They would not have been capable of breaking such bonds even then, had they not known instinctively that in its apparent breaking, they would create another living bond, binding them more securely to one another, and that if they tried merely to preserve that particular end of their journey, something would go rotten on them and the continuation presupposed in the journey they had just accomplished, rendered impossible.
So one morning at dawn they had to say goodbye. The words of farewell were extremely simple, and the looks in their eyes and the few gestures exchanged had to convey more than words or gestures had perhaps ever had to convey. Xhabbo could just repeat three times, which was his idea of a magical way of preserving the truth of a statement, that even when his “Foot of the Day” became the “Heel of the Night” and the wind of the desert that had shown them their way had blowing removed from the sands all the signs of the footprints of the four of them, who on their heels upright walking had travelled together for so long, the heart of him and the heart of that utterly woman of his, Nuin-Tara, would be full of Foot of the Day and Nonnie, and that somewhere, some time, the wind which had removed all signs of their feet from the sand would join the wind from their bodies and form clouds out of the hair of all four of them,
making them one high up in the blue as they had walked over the desert as one so that new rain would fall on account of it.
François and Nonnie could only respond in kind and thank him again and again, and say that if it had not been for them they would not have had any life to live at all, and that Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara were not only brother and sister to them but father and mother of what they might become.
And then Xhabbo declared simply, with a voice like the deepest note on a violin, that if he and Nuin-Tara, in going, did not look back, they must please not think that their eyes were not full of Foot of the Day and Nonnie. It would only be because if they looked back, it would be as if they did not trust what their own eyes were full of, and that in looking back they might not be able to go forward with what their eyes felt themselves full of on account of it. Yes, they would have to go on looking forward, never glancing backwards, so that the look in the eyes of Nonnie and Foot of the Day going forward with them, would detach itself from the bodies standing there and free itself to lead them like starlight into the unknown beyond. So please would Foot of the Day and Nonnie stand there by the fire, watching until they had gone over the dune in the East, never taking their eyes from them but always letting their eyes be full of Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara so that they themselves would not lose heart but go forward, looking ahead with them all the way.
François could only bow his head in agreement and stammer that Xhabbo must please know that he and Nonnie would come back to see them again and again. Then Nonnie cried out, “Oh yes, we shall, but Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara, how shall we ever know how to find you?”
Xhabbo answered for them both: “Just come, and, feeling that you know us utterly just ask for us because in this desert through which we have walking come, there is nothing that does not know Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara as Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara know them and all know one another as they feel themselves to be known and all you have to do is to feel yourselves asking, and Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara will know, and feeling it, running will come!”
A Far Off Place Page 45