‘Wait till you see me in it.’ Just the right touch of independence, hostility.
‘That could be arranged.’
This was a sub-exchange, now, under the talk of the others; he was doing the right thing, responding with the innuendo by which men and women acknowledge chemical correspondences stirring between them. And then she said it, was guided to it like a bat, by echolocation or whatever-it-is, something vibrating from the disgusts in him. ‘Would you prefer me to wear a sheepskin one? You eat lamb, I suppose?’
It is easy to lose her in the crisscross of talk and laughter, to enter it at some other level and let fall the one on which she took him up. He is drawn elsewhere—there is refuge, maybe, rock to touch in the ex-political prisoner. The prisoner holds the hand of his pale girl with her big nervously-exposed teeth; no beauty, all love. The last place to look for love is in beauty, beauty is only a skin, the creature’s own or that of another animal, over what decays. Love is found in prison, this no-beauty has loved him while his body was not present; and he has loved his brothers—he’s talking about them, not using the word, but the sense is there so strongly—although they live shut in with their own pails of dirt, he loves even the murderers whose night-long death songs he heard before they were taken to be hanged in the morning.
‘Common criminals? In this country? Under laws like ours?’
‘Oh yes, we politicals were kept apart, but with time (I was there ten months) we managed to communicate. (There are so many ways you don’t think of, outside, when you don’t need to.) One of them—young, my age—he was already declared a habitual criminal, inside for an indeterminate sentence. Detention’s also an indeterminate sentence, in a way, so I could have some idea…’
‘You hadn’t killed, robbed—he must have done that over and over.’
‘Oh he had. But I hadn’t been born the bastard of a kitchen maid who had no home but her room in a white woman’s back yard, I hadn’t been sent to a “homeland” where the woman who was supposed to take care of me was starving and followed her man to a squatter camp in Cape Town to look for work. I hadn’t begged in the streets, stolen what I needed to eat, sniffed glue for comfort. He had his first new clothes, his first real bed when he joined a gang of car thieves. Common lot; common criminal.’
Common sob story.
‘If he had met you outside prison he would have knifed you for your watch.’
‘Possibly! Can you say “That’s mine” to people whose land was taken from them by conquest, a gigantic hold-up at the point of imperial guns?’
And the bombs in the streets, in the cars, in the supermarkets, that kill with a moral, necessary end, not criminal intent (yes, to be criminal is to kill for self-gain)—these don’t confuse him, make carrion of brotherhood. He’s brave enough to swallow it. No gagging.
Voices and laughter are cut off. You don’t come to the bush to talk politics. It is one of the alert silences called for now and then by someone who’s heard, beyond human voices, a cry. Shhhhh … Once it was the mean complaining of jackals, and—nearer—a nasal howl from a hyena, that creature of big nostrils made to scent spilt blood. Then a squeal no one could identify: a hare pounced on by a wheeling owl? A warthog attacked by—whom? What’s going on, among them, that other order, of the beasts, in their night? ‘They live twenty-four hours, we waste the dark.’ ‘Norbert—you used to be such a nightclub bird!’ And the young doctor offers: ‘They hunt for their living in shifts, just like us. Some sleep during the day.’ ‘Oh but they’re designed as different species, in order to use actively all twenty-four hours. We are one species, designed for daylight only. It’s not so many generations since—pre-industrial times, that’s all—we went to bed at nightfall. If the world’s energy supplies should run out, we’d be back to that. No electricity. No night shifts. There isn’t a variety in our species that has night vision.’ The bat expert takes up this new cue. ‘There are experiments with devices that may provide night vision, they’re based on—’
‘Shhhhh…’
Laughter like the small explosion of a glass dropped.
‘Shut up, Claire!’
All listen, with a glisten of eye movements alone, dead still.
It is difficult for them to decide on what it is they are eavesdropping. A straining that barely becomes a grunt. A belching stir; scuffling, scuffling—but it could be a breeze in dead leaves, it is not the straw crepitation of the reeds at the river, it comes from the other direction, behind the lodge. There is a gathering, another gathering somewhere there. There is communication their ears are not tuned to, their comprehension cannot decode; some event outside theirs. Even the ex—political prisoner does not know what he hears; he who has heard through prison walls, he who has comprehended and decoded so much the others have not. His is only human knowledge, after all; he is not a twenty-four-hour creature, either.
Into this subdued hush breaks the black man jangling a tray of glasses he has washed. The host signals: be quiet, go away, stop fussing among dirty plates. He comes over with the smile of one who knows he has something to offer. ‘Lions. They kill one, two maybe. Zebras.’
Everyone bursts the silence like schoolchildren let out of class.
‘Where?’
‘How does he know?’
‘What’s he say?’
He keeps them waiting a moment, his hand is raised, palm up, pink from immersion in the washing-up. He is wiping it on his apron. ‘My wives hear it, there in my house. Zebra, and now they eating. That side, there, behind.’
The black man’s name is too unfamiliar to pronounce. But he is no longer nameless, he is the organizer of an expedition; they pick up a shortened version of the name from their host. Siza has brought the old truck, four-wheel drive, adapted as a large station wagon, from out of its shed next to his house. Everybody is game, this is part of the entertainment the host hoped but certainly could not promise to be lucky enough to provide; all troop by torchlight the hundred yards from the lodge, under the Mopane trees, past the bed of cannas outlined with whitewashed stones (the host never has had the heart to tell Siza this kind of white man’s house does not need a white man’s kind of garden) to Siza’s wives’ pumpkin and tomato patch. Siza is repairing a door-handle of the vehicle with a piece of wire, commanding, in his own language, this and that from his family standing by. A little boy gets underfoot and he lifts and dumps him out of the way. Two women wear traditional turbans but the one has a T-shirt with an advertising logo; girl children hang on their arms, jabbering. Boys are quietly jumping with excitement.
Siza’s status in this situation is clear when the two wives and children do not see the white party off but climb into the vehicle among them, the dry-soled hard little feet of the children nimbly finding space among the guests’ shoes, their knobbly heads with knitted capping of hair unfamiliar to the touch, flesh to flesh, into which all in the vehicle are crowded. Beside the girl with her oiled face and hard slender body perfumed to smell like a lily there is the soft bulk of one of the wives, smelling of woodsmoke. ‘Everybody in? Everybody okay?’ No, no, wait—someone has gone back for a forgotten flash-bulb. Siza has started up the engine; the whole vehicle jerks and shakes.
Wit is not called for, nor flirtation. He does what is expected: runs to the lodge to fetch a sweater, in case his wife gets chilly. There is barely room for him to squeeze by; she attempts to take a black child on her lap, but the child is too shy. He lowers himself somehow into what space there is. The vehicle moves, all bodies, familiar and unfamiliar, are pressed together, swaying, congealed, breathing in contact. She smiles at him, dipping her head sideways, commenting lightly on the human press, as if he were someone else: ‘In for the kill.’
It is not possible to get out.
Everyone will be quite safe if they stay in the car and please roll up the windows, says the host. The headlights of the old vehicle have shown Siza trees like other trees, bushes like other bushes that are, to him, signposts. The blundering of the vehicle t
hrough bush and over tree-stumps, anthills, and dongas has been along his highway; he has stopped suddenly, and there they are, shadow-shapes and sudden phosphorescent slits in the dim arch of trees that the limit of the headlights’ reach only just creates, as a candle, held up, feebly makes a cave of its own aura. Siza drives with slow-motion rocking and heaving of the human load, steadily nearer. Four shapes come forward along the beams; and stop. He stops. Motes of dust, scraps of leaf and bark knocked off the vegetation float blurring the beams surrounding four lionesses who stand, not ten yards away. Their eyes are wide, now, gem-yellow, expanded by the glare they face, and never blink. Their jaws hang open and their heads shake with panting, their bodies are bellows expanding and contracting between stiff-hipped haunches and heavy narrow shoulders that support the heads. Their tongues lie exposed, the edges rucked up on either side, like red cloth, by long white incisors.
They are dirtied with blood and to human eyes de-sexed, their kind of femaleness without femininity, their kind of threat and strength out of place, associated with the male. They have no beauty except in the almighty purpose of their stance. There is nothing else in their gaunt faces: nothing but the fact, behind them, of half-grown and younger cubs in the rib-cage of a zebra, pulling and sucking at bloody scraps.
The legs and head are intact in dandyish dress of black and white. The beast has been, is being eaten out. Its innards are missing; the half-digested grasses that were in its stomach have been emptied on the ground, they can be seen—someone points this out in a whisper. But even the undertone is a transgression. The lionesses don’t give forth the roar that would make their menace recognizable, something to deal with. Utterances are not the medium for this confrontation. Watching. That is all. The breathing mass, the beating hearts in the vehicle—watching the cubs jostling for places within the cadaver; the breathing mass, the beating hearts in the vehicle—being watched by the lionesses. The beasts have no time, it will be measured by their fill. For the others, time suddenly begins again when the young doctor’s girl-friend begins to cry soundlessly and the black children look away from the scene and see the tears shining on her cheeks, and stare at her fear. The young doctor asks to be taken back to the lodge; the compact is broken, people protest, why, oh no, they want to stay and see what happens, one of the lionesses has broken ranks and turns on a greedy cub, cuffing it out of the gouged prey. Quite safe; the car is perfectly safe, don’t open a window to photograph. But the doctor is insistent: ‘This old truck’s chassis is cracked right through, we’re overloaded, we could be stuck here all night.’
‘Unreal.’ Back in the room, the wife comes out with one of the catch-alls that have been emptied of dictionary meaning so that they may fit any experience the speaker won’t take the trouble to define. When he doesn’t respond she stands a moment, in the doorway, her bedclothes in her arms, smiling, gives her head a little shake to show how overwhelming her impression has been.
Oh well. What can she expect. Why come, anyway? Should have stayed at home. So he doesn’t want to sleep in the open, on the deck. Under the stars. All right. No stars, then.
He lies alone and the mosquitoes are waiting for his blood, upside-down on the white board ceiling.
No. Real. Real. Alone, he can keep it intact, exactly that: the stasis, the existence without time and without time there is no connection, the state in which he really need have, has no part, could have no part, there in the eyes of the lionesses. Between the beasts and the human load, the void. It is more desired and awful than could ever be conceived; he does not know whether he is sleeping, or dead.
There is still Sunday. The entertainment is not over. Someone has heard lions round the lodge in the middle of the night. The scepticism with which this claim is greeted is quickly disproved when distinct pugs are found in the dust that surrounds the small swimming-pool which, like amniotic fluid, steeps the guests at their own body temperature. The host is not surprised; it has happened before: the lionesses must have come down to quench the thirst their feasting had given them. And the scent of humans, sleeping so near, up on the deck, the sweat of humans in the humid night, their sighs and sleep-noises? Their pleasure- and anxiety-emanating dreams?
‘As far as the lions are concerned, we didn’t exist.’ From the pretty girl, the remark is a half-question that trails off.
‘When your stomach is full you don’t smell blood.’
The ex-prisoner is perhaps extrapolating into the class war?—the wit puts in, and the ex-prisoner himself is the one who is most appreciatively amused.
After the mosquitoes had had their fill sleep came as indifferently as those other bodily states, hunger and thirst. A good appetite for fresh pawpaw and bacon, boerewors and eggs. Hungry, like everybody else. His wife offers him a second helping, perhaps he needs feeding up, there is a theory that all morbid symptoms are in fact of physical origin. Obsession with injustice—what’s wrong with the world is a disease you, an individual, can’t cure, that’s life. The one who went to prison may be suffering from a lack of something—amino acids, vitamins; or an excess of something, overfeeding when a child or hyperactive thyroid gland. Research is being done.
Siza confirms that the lionesses came to drink. They passed his house; he heard them. He tells this with the dry, knowing smile of one who is aware of a secret to-and-fro between bedrooms. After breakfast he is going to take the party to see in daylight where the kill took place last night.
‘But is there anything to see?’
Siza is patient. ‘They not eat all. Is too much. So they leave some, tonight they come back for eat finish.’
‘No thanks! I don’t think we should disturb them again.’ But nobody wants the young doctor and his girl-friend to come, anyway, and spoil the outing.
‘The lions they sleeping now. They gone away. Come back tonight. Is not there now.’
The wife is watching to see if she and her husband are going along. Yes, he’s climbing, limber, into the old vehicle with the cracked chassis, he’s giving a hand up to the hostess, he’s said something that makes her laugh and purse her mouth.
The black women are thumping washing at an outdoor tub. Neither they nor their children come on this expedition. There is room to breathe without contact, this time. Everything is different in daylight. It is true that the lionesses are absent; the state that he achieved last night is absent in the same way, like them, drugged down by daylight.
Not a lion to be seen. Siza has stopped the vehicle, got out, but waved the passengers to stay put. The scrub forest is quiet, fragile pods that burst and sow their seed by wind-dispersion spiral slowly. Everybody chatters. The stockbroker leaves the vehicle and everybody shouts at him. All right. All right. Taking his time, to show his lack of fear, he climbs aboard. ‘Lions are not bulls and bears, Fred.’ They laugh at this mild jeer which is the kind expected to sustain the wit’s image—all are amused except the stockbroker himself, who knows the remark, in turn, refers to his image of himself as one whom no one would guess to be a stockbroker.
Siza comes back and beckons. The vehicle is quickly quit. And now the emptiness of the scrub forest is untrustworthy, all around, you can’t see what’s behind dead brush, fallen logs and the screens of layered branches that confine vision to ten feet. They talk only softly, in the sense of being stalked. The black man is leading them along what looks almost like a swept path; but it has been swept by a large body being dragged through dust and dead leaves: there is the carcass of the zebra, half-hidden in a thicket.
‘No tyre-tracks, we didn’t drive right into here! This can’t be the place.’
‘They pull him here for when they come back tonight.’
‘What! To keep the meat fresh?’
‘For the birds mustn’t see.’ Siza gives a name in his language.
‘He means vultures. Vultures, eh, Siza.’ A mime of the vultures’ hunched posture.
‘Yes, those big birds. Come look here—’ The tour continues, he takes them a few paces from the c
arcass and stands beside a mound over which earth has been scratched or kicked. Flies whose backs spark tinny green and gold are settled on it. The black man has his audience: taking up a stick, he prods the mound and it stirs under dust like flour-coated meat moved by a fork.
‘Christ, the intestines! Look at the size of that liver or spleen!’
‘You mean lions can do that? Store things covered? How do they do it, just with their paws?’
‘It’s exactly the way my cat covers its business in the garden, scratches up earth. They’re cats, too.’
The young jailbird and his girl and the antique dealer have made a discovery for themselves, having, in the confidence of excitement, retraced for a short distance the way along which the kill was approached. They have found the very pile of the contents of the zebra’s stomach that someone noticed last night.
It is another mound. He has come over from the mound of guts they are marvelling at. There is nothing to watch in dead flesh, it is prodded and it falls back and is still. But this mound of steaming grass that smells sweetly of cud (it has been heated by the sun as it was once heated by the body that contained it) is not dead to human perception. What’s going on here is a visible transformation of an inert mass. It is literally being carried away by distinctly different species of beetles who know how to live by decay, the waste of the digestive tract. The scarabs with their armoured heads burrow right into the base of the mound, and come out backwards, rolling their ball of dung between their strong, tined legs. The tunnels they have mined collapse and spread the mound more thinly on its periphery; smaller beetles are flying in steadily to settle there, where their lighter equipment can function. They fly away carrying their appropriate load in a sac—or between their front legs, he can’t quite make out. A third species, middle-sized but with a noisy buzz, function like helicopters, hovering and scooping off the top of the mound. They are flattening it perfectly evenly, who can say how or why they bother with form? That’s life. If every beetle has its place, how is refusal possible. And if refusal is possible, what place is there. No question mark. These are statements. That is why there is no point in making them to anyone. There is no possible response.
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