by Owen Sheers
♦
The evening was on the cusp of night, but he wanted to remain outside, on the beach. Ahead of him, further up the shore, he had spotted a cluster of men dragging something from the sea. It was hard to tell in the half-light, but they looked like fishermen, and he assumed the weight they were pulling in was a net of fish. But as he got nearer he saw he was wrong. The shooting had lingered not just in his mind alone, but also in that of the sea itself, and now it was remembering, recalling a body onto the shore and delivering it into the hands of these fishermen, who were tugging its dead weight up the sand away from the blink and shovel of her waves. As he neared them he could make out the corpse they carried. There were four of them, one at each limb, and the body was a man, ingested and swollen with sea water. It was one of the Somalis from the Hertzog. The whites of his open eyes were the brightest part of the scene.
As Arthur got nearer still he watched as the men struggled with the body’s wet skin. The left arm suddenly slipped free from its bearer’s grip, and the body tilted, slipped again in their grasp, then fell onto the sand, face down. The men turned it onto its back, tenderly, and one of them went to the head, passing his hand across the dead man’s face, wiping his eyes shut. Another folded his arms across his chest, dusted now in a fine coating of sand. Then they simply stood and looked down at their strange catch. Arthur looked too, from outside their tight circle. Nobody spoke. Everyone was looking at the same thing. A rose of proud flesh, pink and lurid, blossoming above the man’s left nipple. The exit wound of a bullet shot from behind and at close range. Shot as the man was running away.
♦
The darkness was almost complete when one of the fishermen eventually left to fetch a policeman. Shortly afterwards Arthur left too, and made his way back to his billet on the edge of town, which now shone from its lit windows in the night, transformed by darkness from a scramble of tin shacks and people into a yellow constellation, grounded. He walked up the beach, towards these lights, and towards sleep, trying to expunge the image of that opening flower of flesh from his mind. His journey was not over yet. Tomorrow it would continue, and he would need his sleep for it, he told himself. For tomorrow, when he and the Bishop would ride the train out of Mozambique to Umtali, and then on into central Mashonaland. For tomorrow, when he would travel deeper into the strange country that was to be his home for the next two years.
∨ The Dust Diaries ∧
1 AUGUST 1952
Maronda Mashanu, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia
He is awake. How long has he been awake? Certainly for longer than he has known. He can’t be sure. It is more and more often this way, his dreams spilling over into wakefulness, his night bleeding into his day. Though what do those words mean to him now? So much less than they used to, that’s for sure; no more than variances of light through the darkness of his blindness. Certainly his left eye is always night. Or rather, as he still has to remind himself in the first minutes of waking, the empty socket where his left eye was is always night. Because they took it out. Sometimes he forgets this. They took it out.
Light seeking light, doth light of light beguile
Yes. And this is why he stays in the dreams, or rather, why the dreams stay with him, floating on in the night that swills in his eyes, even when awake.
But he is awake now, he’s sure of that. He can hear the grasshoppers and cicadas in the tall grass a few feet from his rondavel. So it must almost be morning. What else does he know? That he is lying on his back in his rondavel. That he is eighty-three years old. That above him there must be a star of early light shining through the hole in the thatched roof where the wooden poles intersect at the top. That over the next hour the same morning light will begin to wash grey over the little kopje that overlooks the mission. That it will ripen into a deep red before diluting in the full heat of the day into a winter light, harsh and hard-edged. A heat light. That he is dying.
He can hear something else as well as the cicadas. It’s the earth. Spadefuls of earth falling. No, it is footsteps. Footfalls echo in the memory. The distant bare footsteps of a woman walking outside. She is walking up from the river and now he can hear the slap and wash of the water in the bucket she carries on her head. Why so early? Maybe she has been dreaming herself awake as well.
Over these past years, as his sight has failed him, so his hearing, or at least his use of hearing, has improved and with it his imagination.
He has found a new chamber of his mind—a chamber for the imagination of sound. For years he fed his stories, poems and daydreams with the visual. With the light seeking light. And he still has his archive of images, but now he is learning the language of sound again. Because this is where he lives now: in a sound world. It is how the world meets him, with its tongue, palate and breath first. He concentrates on the sound of this woman’s footsteps and slowly, carefully, forms the image of her walking feet in his mind. Yes, he can see them now: pale soles coated with the red dust, her toenails hardened to claws in the heat and dry air. A scar on the left heel where she fell from a tree as a child.
There is little else to listen to. Something scratches at the base of the wall outside his hut, probably a chicken, but it is hard to tell. Maybe it is a bold rat. No, he prefers to think it is a chicken. The only other sound this early is his own breath. Long, shallow and dry. It sounds alien to him, not like his breath, not the breath he knows. Like so much of his body now it is unfamiliar to him. He has listened to his own breath for years—for hours across the veld, then at night, as he lay to sleep under the sky. Just his own breath and his own thoughts. But this is not his breath. This is the breath of an old man, a man with beaten lungs. This is the breath of a man who is dying. But he will not believe he is dying. Not yet, because there are things he has to do. Even with this unfamiliar body and this empty eye socket, there are things he has to do.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still be moving.
Tomorrow he would travel deeper into the strange country that was to behis home…
Tomorrow. How careless he had been with that word then, how casual. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Not like now, when each tomorrow reaches him like a gift from the gods, precious and rare. His daily reprieve. But still he won’t believe it, that he is going, leaving all this. And he feels again the shot of fear that pushes him past what he knows in his heart and on through panic to denial. The fear in him. He is eighty-three years old, he should have no fear. He has his God, he should have no fear. But he does. With every thought of the tomorrows gone, and the tomorrows that will never be, he has fear. Primal, heart-beating, sweat-inducing fear. Is this how he thought it would be when he was a younger man? Probably not. The young expect the old to approach death with grace, with acceptance, expectant and resigned. Well, it hasn’t been like that, not for him. The life lust, however old, does not ebb. Yes, his eyes have failed, his legs, arms and bowels long past his control, and he is an old man, thin with long-living. But inside he is young, and burning for every breath, sight and sound he can experience. And, if he is honest with himself, still burning for her too. Still. For her and her daughter.
♦
But he won’t think of her, not now, not after the weight of time that has passed: wait without thought. So he turns his blind eyes to the low, narrow doorway of the rondavel instead and senses the light of the day growing there, petals of it unfurling onto the smooth floor of caked cattle dung, and he thinks again of the half-waking dream of his arrival in Africa fifty years before. But he knows it is not a dream. It all happened, this, his life, and now it is passing before his eyes. Not flashing as it is meant to, but passing, deliberately, in sharp focus. So, what sort of a man was he then? How old, to start? Thirty? Thirty-one? Yes, just thirty-one and not long out of college. Seven years at the most. An innocent. And yet not an innocent. But certainly adrift, washed up on the shores of Africa, the ‘Dark Continent’ which he had read ab
out, heard about, spoken about so often. A continent of dreams and nightmares depending on who you spoke to. Of opportunities and destinies. But that, Beira Bay, had been just the edge of her, the outskirts of her, where her temperament was washed cool by the ocean. It was where he would start but not where he was destined to be. Where he was heading, into Southern Rhodesia, there was no calming influence of the sea. It was a landlocked country of heat and veld and thorn trees, a ridge of mountains bulking out its eastern flank, the torrent of the Zambesi running along its northern border. A country only years young, and still healing from its forming, the blood of the ‘96 chimurenga still seeping into her soil. An ancient country with a history that was no history, living in the minds and memories of the people, not on paper. An unknown history. Above all, then, in 1901, it was a country stunned by the influx of white men rifling her pockets for gold and diamonds, digging in her earth, sifting in her river-veins and herding her people like cattle into reservations. But then, waiting for the train to take him through Portuguese Mozambique to Umtali, he knew almost nothing of this.
He had read about Africa: in Olive Schreiner’s book, in Living-stone’s diaries, and even in the novels of Rider Haggard, and he had looked at her on maps. Frequently on the voyage down he had unfolded his Philips’ Authentic Imperial Map of Southern and Northern Rhodesia with British East Africa and studied the names he found there, strange on his ear. Bulawayo, Matobo, Lomagundi. The rivers of Bubye, Nyadazidza and Buma. And then the more familiar names of the settlements and townships: Daisy field,Hartley and the impressively large and bold Salisbury. But still, as he realised now, he knew nothing of Africa. For him then, a thirty-one-year-old Anglican missionary standing on the shores of Beira, it was a vast country which he had filled in his absence from it with ideas and expectations. A physical landscape on which he hoped to practise the ideals that Bishop Gore had inspired him with in Oxford. The African native had no preconceptions of Christianity, no awareness of its history of divisions and institutions. He would be approaching them as untainted individuals. He wanted to immerse his religion, his beliefs and his life in the soil of the country. To discover its rhythms and tides and to fit them to his understanding of the gospel. Above all though, he wanted to prove himself worthy. He remembers some lines from a poem he wrote around that time, ‘The Death of St Francis’:
I seemed in one great stab of eager pain
To feel his heart beating within my heart…
It seemed he lent his Sacred Heart to me:
One moment did I know his wish, his work,
As if mine own they were, and knew with them
The worm-like weakness of my wasted life,
My service worthless to win back his world…
I knew in blissful anguish what it means
To be a part of Christ, and feel as mine
The dark distress of my brother limbs,
To feel it bodily and simply true,
To feel as mine the starving of his poor…
‘To feel as mine the starving of his poor…’ That is what he had wanted as he waited for the train to take him into Rhodesia. To feel. To feel God, not on the tables of the English rich, but in the hunger of the starving poor, who, being close to the earth, were already so much closer to Him.
♦
Is that how he felt, or how he thinks he felt? It is hard to tell now, fifty years later, how much of his life he really remembers and how much he has recast in memory. Even that train journey, his first voyage into Africa, into her heart, comes to him down the years as a montage of images, reflections, snatches of conversation. He and the Bishop had sat alone in the carriage, he is sure of that. Near the front of the train, so he felt every jolt and kinetic tug of its halting movement. There never seemed to be any reason for the stopping and starting. Other than the heat, which he does remember, and which maybe affected the train as it would a human or an animal: slowing it down, getting under its skin. The heat. He remembers he found it hard to think under its flat, oppressive pressure. A clear sky and a white sun shining at them through the window, burning on the right side of his face.
The country had passed them erratically. He remembers squinting out at it, through the glare, watching it pass, sometimes at a crawl, then shooting off behind them in a sudden burst of energy like a badly scrolled roll of film. Then it would slow to a crawl again, and then stop altogether, paused in the frame of the window. He thought it was a harsh land, he remembers that. Malarial lowlands, then stony veld covered in tall blond grass and low bushes. The odd swampy area above which huge clouds of flies hovered and twitched. He remembers watching those clouds and thinking of Keats’ gnats, bourne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies. But there had been beauty too, and all the more beautiful to his unaccustomed eye. Shoals of gazelles and impalas, shying away from the train, bounding over the long grass, performing sudden voltes. Or an eagle, ci rcling a solitary tour of the sky. Or the hills, purple in the distance.
The unadulterated country made him aware of the mechanisation of the train, the clumsy weight of its engineering and metal. He remembers one image clearly. Looking back as it took a long bend in its stride, seeing the other carriages curving away behind them, the sun flashing on and off in their windows. He had thought, as he looked at the train sweeping through the veld, of Bishop Knight Bruce who had trekked this way just a few years earlier. It had taken him and his three English nurses three months to reach Umtali then. Bishop Gaul and he would do the same journey in a day. Bishop Knight Bruce had fallen ill as soon as he arrived, as if it had been the journey that was his mission, not the destination. He was shipped home to England where he died not long after his arrival, blackwater fever spreading like a stain of ink through his kidneys. He was forty-four years old.
♦
What else did he remember? Talking with the Bishop, asking him where were the native settlements. And the Bishop telling him they had been cleared to make way for the railway. What else had the Bishop said that day? Words of advice, opinions. He had talked a lot, but he could only remember two moments now. In the first the Bishop is looking out at the passing veld, and he keeps looking out as he speaks.
‘You ask a native where they live,’ he says, ‘and they won’t say Southern Rhodesia. Doesn’t mean a thing to them.’ Then he’d stopped, rubbed his nose and said in a quieter voice, ‘Mind you they haven’t heard of Africa either.’
In the second he is more animated. He’s talking about the mission work he can expect.
‘You’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. It’s education most of them want, give them that and they’ll be happy. They can be pretty unforgiving Christians though, some of them. If the white God doesn’t bring the rains, the crops or the children they want, they’ll soon abandon him for their own again. They’re practical like that.’
He’d paused, cleared his throat, then carried on.
‘Anyway, it’s not them you should worry about, so much as the Europeans. They’re the ones whose souls need saving.’ He’d leant forward, looked him in the eye. ‘They can be a pretty rough lot. Think you can manage?’
♦
He can’t remember what he’d said in reply, just the sensations he’d felt, then, fifty years ago. The hardness of the bench he sat on. The train stopping, jerking him forward, juddering then going still. Looking out of the window as its engine thrummed through the carriage. The sun burning in the sky and the tall blond grass, stretching away over the veld, unmoving in the windless air.
♦
But he doesn’t want to remember anymore. And he doesn’t want to listen to his breath, weak and dry in his throat. So he thinks of Noel Brettell instead, the young teacher who will visit him today. Because there is, after all, something else that he knows, another foothold for his mind. That it is Thursday. The names of the days may not have much sense out where he is in the middle of the rural lands, especially to a blind man, but he needs to know them. He needs to know it is Thursday: the day Noel will visit h
im, bringing with him his books and his clear voice, that still bears the accent of a Black Country childhood. It’s an interesting lilt, and one he enjoys listening to. It was not often he had listened to poetry and heard the word ‘bronze’ rhyme with ‘sons’. Today Noel would read Keats and Tennyson. Last week it was Eliot, whose writing he’d found intriguing. The Waste Land, Four Quartets and others. To hear poems he had not heard before, even if Noel told him they had actually been written thirty years earlier, fascinated him.
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’ clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
He sighs, bringing his broken breath back to his hearing. That is how he feels. Burnt out. Burnt out under an African sun. And his eyes too (look those were pearls that were his eyes), those burnt out as well, by the sun during the day and by the quick-burning candles at night. He turns his thoughts back to Noel Brettell, who will ride to him this afternoon down the long dust trail from Wrcningham to read him poetry. (Here I am, an old man in a dry month, ⁄ Beingread to by a boy, waiting for rain.) He remembers their first meeting well, when Noel approached him in Enkeldoorn. He had stayed over after his weekly service at the hospital. It was early morning and he and his boy, Thomas, were preparing to leave once more for Maronda Mashanu, when Brettell approached them. This was over three years ago, but his eyes were already almost useless, the darkness seeping in from the edges, the patches knitting together across his cornea. So the first he knew of Brettell was his voice, that accent from so far away, a Black Country childhood, tempered by an adult life in Africa.