Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  Their visitor had been delighted to discover, on arriving at the clearing, that his quarries were engaged in a pre-mating ritual that was likely to keep their senses fully occupied. Their total vulnerability had inspired him to dally, staring at the fire. He was mesmerized by fire. When lightning struck a dry Mopani tree, as happened almost every time there was a storm, he would climb to the top of the valley, a journey by no means easy for him any longer, simply to sit, back straight, and stare at the flames below. The intensity of the coals enslaved him. He entirely missed the signs that one of the hairless apes had become aware of his presence, and was annoyed to find them both staring at him when he took his eyes from the bright red coals. He would not have made this kind of error even two years ago.

  “Close your eyes,” said Ntsina to Luvo. “I will squeeze your hand when you must open them again. Keep in time with me.”

  Ntsina took Luvo’s hand. Luvo closed his eyes. It was the most terrifying thing he had ever done. Ntsina’s palm pressed into his. Luvo was reminded with alarm that his erection had been by no means entirely anaesthetized by fright. He opened his eyes slowly, as instructed, then closed them when Ntsina pressed again. Nosakhe had always said: “Keep going. Do not stop. Force them to recognize that you speak to them in their own language. You are saying ‘I see you. Go well.’ ” She had taught Ntsina the rhythm, the slow blinking that is to all the large cats the sacred greeting of their kind. It is a greeting that cannot lead to bloodshed, at once a truce and a welcome. There is friendliness in it and respect, an acceptance of the order of things.

  When the two hairless apes spoke to him in the way of his own kind, the leopard was shocked. He had been having vivid dreams lately, in which nothing was as it should be. Was this one of them? He did not acknowledge the apes. He had never blinked to any creature who did not have a tail and four strong, swift legs. He had a glimpse of the many leopardesses he had mounted over the years, and a pang of regret for the fact that he would never mount one again. Here were two young hairless apes, mating. There was a sentimentality in his nature that the tough life of a pack leader had repressed. He advanced.

  “Keep calm. Do as I say,” murmured Ntsina. There was iron assurance in his tone, the focus of a man whose wisdom is being strenuously tested. Luvo was so afraid he forgot even to pray.

  The leopard skirted the fire and went to the box that was still half full of oozy, fatty biltong. With a click of his powerful jaws, he lifted the package with his teeth, turned, blinked, and bounded off into the night.

  —

  PIET WOKE the next morning, feeling light-headed and thirsty. His bones were stiff and he was very cold. Dawn was just breaking and his companions were fast asleep on the other side of the still-smoking fire. He made his way through the forest towards the river. The beauty of a stream in an African forest as dawn breaks is a powerful beauty. Piet sat by the stream, shivering and gathering the courage to wash in the clear, cold waters. There were trees to be had here in any quantity, but none of them would do for the furniture he had in mind. They were too tall and too thin; too focused on reaching the canopy in time to fill a gap left by the death of an ancient. He washed and roused the others. “Tell him I want to see the trees he has told me of,” said Piet to Luvo. And when the two young men had conversed in isiXhosa for a few moments, Luvo said: “Then you must keep walking.”

  The tree Ntsina Zini intended to show Piet Barol was a tree of which the Gwadanans were very fond: called, in that part of the world, the Furniture Tree, though Strange Ones referred to it as Forest Mahogany. Its wood was strong and capable of a gorgeous sheen when polished. Mahoganies grew in solitary splendour in several places in the forest. There was one close by, but Ntsina wished the Strange One to employ many young men of his village to transport the wood to the city, and resolved to show him another, on the far side of a steep gorge. He was surprised when Piet, strapping his pack tighter, set off without a murmur of complaint.

  The mist was still heavy. As they went they descended into cloud, and Luvo, who had not yet recovered from his encounter with the leopard, began to feel afraid. He did not like making his way into a valley he could not see. Nor did he enjoy the thought of lumbering up the other side with his pack. He could think of no reason to delay or change their route, and did his best to keep up, focusing his gaze on the rounded splendour of Ntsina’s arse.

  The heavy tread of three hairless apes caused a consternation among the creatures who were used to unchallenged possession of the gorge. The snakes were not yet out to bask, but thousands of spiders felt the impact of their treads as their webs shivered; and a hundred and nineteen lost the work of weeks as Piet, Ntsina and Luvo walked through them.

  Between two trees, about halfway down, angled slightly to catch the larger flying insects, the golden web of a spider with a livery of yellow and black held its own against the morning breeze and the approaching humans. At its centre, a large female was replenishing her life force from eleven fat, juicy moths that had flown through her clearing in the night. From the edge of her web a much-smaller male eyed her, his thoughts on mating. He had not yet mated, and had begun to know that he would not many more times see a moon.

  He spun a small web of golden silk and ejaculated onto it. The lady whose eggs he so earnestly desired to fertilise was a capricious lover, and had eaten several unsuccessful suitors—and once, three days before, very nearly himself. It was wiser to be prepared. He sucked the sticky ball of his sperm between two strong pedipalps and advanced.

  The web’s creator was having a pleasant morning—a reward for the panic of her first few moments of life. It had been a cumbersome process, hauling her heavy body over an eternity of rough ground to reach the edge of the gorge, the siblings who had shared her egg sac in hot, cannibalistic pursuit. She had moved blindly, in terrified haste—for she was not the largest of her sisters, and did not relish their proximity. The Universe had rewarded her with a web spot ideally placed to intercept insects as they descended to the still pools at the gorge’s bottom.

  The night’s yield had been generous, the moths flavoursome. She knew of the presence of males at the outer edges of her web, and tentative tremors this morning told her that one of them had taken his courage in both pedipalps. She was surfeited and had no idea to eat him. She had not yet reproduced, and her carapace tingled with readiness to take her own step in the magnificent currents of creation. She awaited his approach. He stopped. She did not move, and neither did he. She was conscious of his fear, and a part of her thought less of him. She started on another moth, so that he might feel that her attention was elsewhere engaged; and indeed this did set the web trembling again, as he came nearer.

  As they passed the web, Ntsina, in the mood for a joke, took Luvo by both shoulders and hurled him towards it. To a human eye, used to the comforts of the town, a golden orb spider presents a terrifying aspect. Ntsina caught Luvo when his nose was six inches from the spider, but the sound Luvo made ricocheted off the walls of the gorge. The terror in it stopped Piet dead, but Ntsina only laughed at them both.

  Luvo’s fear faded and was replaced by shame; and then anger. He looked at the huge, evil spider, and a desire to take out his feelings on a lower order of being was strong. A little spider was making its way towards the large one. Luvo picked up a stick to smash the web, but as he did so the little spider dashed over the last few inches of golden silk and put his claws into the abdomen of the larger one. The intimacy of the gesture arrested Luvo’s violence. He had been raised on the sanctity of all life, and had a flash of the many spider lives he would terminate if he killed this mating pair.

  “I am sorry,” said Ntsina. “I won’t play such games.”

  “I wouldn’t play them on you,” said Luvo, stiffly.

  The last of the mist disintegrated. They were closer to the stream than he had feared. All three went more quickly, eager for the water; and once they had found it they drank deeply of it. Piet’s many walks up Table Mountain from his shop to hi
s home had prepared him for forest exertions. The others were impressed when he stood first and pressed on. Ntsina followed, thinking that Piet was an unusual mlungu after all—for the mlungus he had seen were not much blessed with athletic gifts.

  —

  THEY FOUND THE MAHOGANY as the sun reached the midpoint of its journey to the meridian. Its canopy was broad and dense, the shade it offered very sweet on this day that was unusually hot for the depths of winter. Luvo threw himself on the ground beneath it, in a bad temper with the others, but Piet was well pleased. He stripped away the smooth, grey bark revealing tender pink wood beneath. It was even-grained, quite suitable for carving.

  Ntsina, watching him, was well pleased too. It would require many men to get this wood to the main road.

  As if reading his thoughts, Piet said: “It’s a handsome tree. But how on earth can we get it out of this forest?”

  Piet and Ntsina began to talk enthusiastically. Translating for them, Luvo grew tired. He was a perfectionist, and strained to achieve perfect subtlety—a challenging feat in languages as different as isiXhosa and English. Frau Doktor Ranke, who was a great believer in effort, had found that in Luvo’s case his challenge was often to try less hard—because she knew his perfectionism to be a burden, having carried a similar one herself. The incident of the spider had embarrassed him, and while he translated, another part of Luvo’s brain was developing a narrative of self-pity and irritation.

  Here he was, risking his life to make a Strange One rich. He would make a few pennies for every pound the Strange One made—hardly enough to assist his own family, let alone to contribute to the sending of a delegation to England. This thought began to fill his head, crowding his linguistic efforts towards less conscious realms; and as the others spoke, laying plans to transport the wood, he retreated. Even the man who had proposed the Natives Land Bill had not voted for it when the moment came! The cowardice and injustice of it was galling. A Commission had been promised, to “look into” the fairness of the legislation—but the law had been implemented, in midwinter, before any Commission could report; before even a date was set for that report. He was aware of the English expression “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” and knew that white farmers now in possession of the livestock and land that had once belonged to their black neighbours would be most unwilling to relinquish it. He became more and more convinced of the necessity of appealing to the King of England. The Rankes were passionate Anglophiles, and Luvo had been raised in the strictest traditions of Empire. He believed without question that the King-Emperor across the seas would protect the property rights of his dark subjects. So intense was this conviction that when Piet said “We’ll hire strong men, and you can translate,” Luvo said: “I would only do such a thing for a hundred pounds.”

  Few black men in the country had ever asked a white man for a hundred pounds. Piet thought immediately of the warnings about grasping Africans he had heard at the bar of the Mount Nelson Hotel, and was angry that Luvo should exploit their isolation, and the usefulness of his skill, in this manner. “Let’s see about that when the time comes,” he said, resolving to find another translator at the first opportunity and send this impudent young man back to Cradock.

  It was the only imperfection in a mood otherwise unsullied. He resolved to put it aside and lay back under the shade of the tree. The scene was idyllic, but the idyll wasn’t comfortable. Sharp grasses poked his back, insects alighted on his skin, drawn by the intoxicating scent of salt and sweat. From every side, creatures slithered or crawled or wriggled on their daily paths, navigating his body as they would any other obstacle, with the result that after a few minutes he stood up again and said: “Let’s press on.”

  They did, in silence; and in that silence Piet made his calculations. The mahogany was of fine quality. He did not see that it could rightly be said to belong to anybody. He would pay for the felling and transport, perhaps even set up a workshop in a convenient town and sit out the European War making beautiful things—and a great deal of money. He had begun to worry in Cape Town that Fortune, which had always favoured him, had grown tired of him. Now he knew he had won her attention again, and congratulated himself on the pluck he had shown in coming all this way to find his own wood.

  They made camp that night in dense forest, and Piet sought escape from the encroaching cold in the oblivion of sleep. Luvo was wary of closing his eyes, and of being alone with the creatures of the wood.

  “Why was the Strange One angry with you?” asked Ntsina.

  “Because I asked for more money,” said Luvo. “And you should too.”

  They fell to discussing Strange Ones. Ntsina had learned from his grandmother that they were conceived under the waves, sons of a great living flower that grows in the deepest stretches of the sea. He shared this with Luvo, who wondered what hope there was for the Bantu while such superstitions occupied the place that should belong to Scientific Fact. With an unconscious echo of his grandmother’s certainty, Ntsina told Luvo that the Strange Ones with yellow hair are half human, half plant. “Do you not see,” he asked, “that they look like the maize that grows in the field? I am glad this one is human.”

  “Oh, he is human alright,” said Luvo.

  He looked at his friend. They had both eaten well and were beginning to feel pleasantly sleepy. It was the tender hour that follows exertions and the satisfaction of physical wants. Perhaps it was the moment, thought Luvo, to talk about God.

  “Do you know, brother,” he said, “I think you are a clever man.” He said so because he was about to demolish Ntsina’s conception of the Universe, and did not wish him to feel patronized. “You know many things about this forest, and you are brave.”

  No one had ever called Ntsina a clever man. Nosakhe had known, and shown, that repeated iteration could carve deep paths in Ntsina’s brain, but he had left quick wit to others and did not step forward in the kraal, to tell outrageous stories, even after his initiation into manhood. He felt proud, and then sorry for the fun he had made of his friend’s fears.

  “It is you who are clever,” he said. “And you are also brave. To go beyond the seas to the country called England, to meet their Great King, that is a feat that most would shun through fear.” He promised himself never to frighten Luvo with a spider again.

  “Man was made by God,” said Luvo, “in His own image.” As he spoke, though he believed what he said, he was also conscious of a second, contradictory story in the book of Genesis, which said that God made Man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of Life. And that in the first version Man and Woman were created at the same time, and in the second Woman was created after Man, from a rib bone taken from his side. He did not share these contradictions, because he did not wish to confuse a new convert. But Luvo was a biblical literalist, and it caused him much pain.

  “Oh no, my friend,” said Ntsina, who was sure of what he said. “The Universe was created when Time and Nothingness had a child, a spark of Fire, and Fire devoured Nothingness, his mother. Everyone knows that. And Man is the offspring of the Tree of Life, which is a special sort of tree, and terrifying to behold.”

  “You are wrong,” said Luvo. “God made the Universe when His spirit was moving over the face of the waters and He said ‘Let there be light’ and separated the light from the darkness.”

  “Do not let us argue,” said Ntsina. “It all happened long ago.”

  On this they could agree, and Luvo tried to silence his fear that Ntsina would not know salvation unless he came to believe what was right, and reminded himself that his friend was young, and so was their friendship, and that miracles might be accomplished with all the time that lay ahead.

  —

  WHILE NTSINA SLEPT, though he could not know it, negotiations that concerned him intimately were nearing their close.

  They were being conducted by his father, Sukude Zini, whose name meant One Who Makes Clothes From Skins—though behind his back, Sukude’s neighbour
s called him Nukude, which means He Stinks From a Very Far Distance. Sukude was short and immensely strong; in his youth he had wrestled wild boars for sport. Such displays had won him the hand of Ntsina’s mother, a direct descendant of the village’s Great Founder, and the taking of her family name. These achievements naturally inspired resentment in less fortunate men, but it was not for this reason that Sukude was disliked. It was for something else, a flaw that indeed could only be smelled and not described. It had something to do with the fact that he possessed the only metal lock in Gwadana, and his hut the only steel door.

  Eyeing him across the fire, Litha Jaxa was troubled by the thought of consigning his daughter to the care of the Zinis. Litha was the head of the Jaxa clan, one of Gwadana’s most prominent families. His daughter Thembela, whom all called Bela, was known to be the best brought up and most beautiful girl between the great forest and King William’s Town. “Her bride price is one hundred cows,” he said. “And six bulls.”

  Litha set this astonishing sum half hoping he would be refused. But Sukude said: “Very well. My son must have the best wife in the village. Are we settled?”

  Litha said yes. He had not the strength to turn down an offer so extravagant—especially in such troubled times. As the negotiators drank in celebration, he soothed his conscience with the contemplation of future riches. Sukude was charming, and went home to tell his mother-in-law what he had accomplished on his son’s behalf.

  Ntsina’s grandmother, Nosakhe, had been chosen as a Keeper of the Knowledge by her grandfather Thembinkosi, the village’s Great Founder, who had a cool head and an argumentative turn of mind. When, three generations before, a prophecy had spread that the amaXhosa had only to sacrifice their cattles and burn their crops to ensure the destruction of the hated English, he had refused to bow to convention and struck out for himself. Thembinkosi was a charismatic man of great sexual stamina and had six devoted wives. These ladies trekked off with him, their children driving his cattle herds. As he passed through village after village, those who also doubted, deep within, that killing their livestock was the best way to defeat the Strange Ones were inspired to follow him. Perhaps five hundred made it as far as the forest of Gwadana, but when it became plain that their leader intended to enter it, only a hundred and eighty-seven followed him, of which one hundred and eighty-three made it as far as the idyllic bay he found for them on the far side of the forest’s narrowest point.