Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep

by B3 The Angels Weep(Lit)

  "What did you say?" His own perversity would not let him turn back from the precipice, and he stepped out over it.

  "I asked if you were sleeping with him." "Are you sure you want to know?" "Yes." "All right, the answer is "yes", and it's bloody marvelous. Okay?" "Okay,"he said miserably.

  "Now you can take me home, please." They drove in complete silence except for her terse directions, and when he parked outside the three-storey block of apartments, he noticed that they were called Beau Vallon, the same as the Seychelles beach over which they had fantasized.

  She climbed out of the Land-Rover. "I'm grateful for the lift," she said, and walked up the paved path towards the entrance of the building.

  Before she reached it, she turned and came back. "Do you know that you are a spoilt little boy?" she asked. "And that you give up on everything, just like you did on the tennis court." This time she disappeared into the entrance of the building without looking back.

  When he got back to the yacht, Craig put the charts and books away, then he cleaned the dishes, dried them, and stacked them in their racks. He thought he had left a bottle of gin in one of the cupboards, but he couldn't find it. There wasn't even any of the wine left. He sat in the saloon with the gaslight hissing softly over his head, and he felt numb and empty. There was no point in going to his bunk. He knew he would not sleep.

  He unlaced the kit bag the leather-bound journal that Jonathan had loaned him was on top. He opened it and began to read. It had been written in 1860. The writer was Zouga Ballantyne, Craig's great-great-grandfather.

  After a while, Craig no longer felt numb and empty, for he was on the quarterdeck of a tall ship, running southwards down the green Atlantic towards a savage enchanted continent.

  Samson Kumalo stood in the centre of the dusty track and watched Craig's beaten-up old Land-Rover growl away up the avenue of spathodea trees. When it took the turn past the old cemetery and disappeared, he picked up his bag and opened the garden gate of the staff cottage. He walked around the side of the building, and stopped below the back porch.

  His grandfather, Gideon Kumalo, sat on a straight-backed kitchen chair. The walking-stick, carved like a twisted serpent, was propped between his feet and both his hands rested on the head. He was asleep, sitting upright in the uncomfortable chair in the blaze of the white sunlight.

  "It is the only way I can get warm, "he had told Samson. His hair was white and fluffy as cotton wool, the little goatee beard on the tip of his chin trembled with each gentle snore of his breathing. His skin seemed so thin and delicate, that it might tear like ancient parchment, and it was the same very dark amber colour. The network of wrinkles that covered it was cruelly exposed by the direct glare of the sun.

  Careful not to block the old man's sunlight, Samson climbed the steps, set his bag aside and sat on the half-wall in front of him. He studied his face, and felt again that gentle suffocating feeling of love. it was more than the duty that any Matabele boy was taught to show to his elders, it went beyond the conventions of parental affection, for between the two of them was an almost mystical bond.

  For almost sixty years Gideon Kumalo had been the assistant headmaster at Khami Mission School. Thousands of young Matabele boys and girls had grown up under his guidance, but none had been as special to him as his own grandson.

  Suddenly the old man started and opened his eyes. They were milky-blue and sightless as those of a newborn puppy. He tilted his head at a blind listening angle. Samson held his breath and sat motionless, fearful that Gideon might have at last lost the sense of perception which was almost miraculous. The old man turned his head slowly the other way, and listened again. Samson saw his nostrils flare slightly as he sniffed the air.

  "Is it you?" he asked in a rusty voice, like the squeak of an un oiled hinge. "Yes, it is you, Vundla." The hare has always played a prominent place in African folklore, the original of the legend of Br'er Rabbit that the slaves took to America with them. Gideon had nicknamed Samson after the lively clever little animal. "Yes, it is you, my little Hare!" "Babo!" Samson let his breath out and went down on one knee before him. Gideon groped for his head and caressed it.

  "You have never been away," he said. "For you live always in my heart." Samson thought he might choke if he tried to speak. Silently he reached and took the thin fragile hands and held them to his lips.

  "We should have a little tea," Gideon murmured. "You are the only one who can make it to my taste." The old man had a sweet tooth, and Samson placed six heaped teaspoons of brown sugar into the enamel mug before he poured the brew from the blackened tin kettle into it.

  Gideon cupped his hands around the mug, sipped noisily, and then smiled and nodded.

  "Now tell me, little Hare, what has happened to you? I feel something in you, an uncertainty, like a man who has lost the path and seeks to find it again." He listened while Samson spoke, sipping and nodding. Then when he finished talking, he said. "It is time you came back to the Mission to teach. You told me once that you could not teach the young people about life until you learned yourself. Have you learned yet?" "I do not know, Babo. What can I teach them? That death stalks the land, that life is as cheap as a single bullet?" "Will you always live with doubts, my dear grandson, must you always look for the questions that have no answers! If a man doubts everything, then he will attempt nothing. The strong men of this world are the ones who are always certain of their own rightness." "Then perhaps I wIill never be strong, Grandfather." They finished the pot of tea and Samson brewed another. Even the melancholy of their conversation could not dim their pleasure in each other, and they basked in it until at last Gideon asked. "What time is it?" "Past four o'clock." "Constance will be off duty at five. Will you go down to the hospital to meet her?"

  Samson changed into jeans and a light blue shirt, and left the old man on the porch. He went down the hill. At the gate of the high security fence that enclosed the hospital, he submitted to the body-search by the uniformed guards, and then went up past the post-operative wards, outside which the convalescent patients in blue dressing gowns sat on the lawn in the sunlight. Many of them had limbs missing, for the Khami Hospital received many of the victims of land-mine explosion and other war injuries. All the patients were black. Khami Hospital was graded as African only.

  At the reception desk in the main entrance hall, the two little Matabele nurses recognized him and chittered like sparrows with pleasure. Gently Samson tapped them. for the current gossip of the Mission Station, the marriages and births, the deaths and courtships of this close-knit little community. He was interrupted by a. sharp authoritative voice.

  "Samson, Samson Kumalo!" and he turned to see the hospital superintendent striding purposefully down the wide corridor towards him.

  Doctor Leila St. John wore a white laboratory-coat with a row of ballpoint pens in the top pocket, and a stethoscope dangling from her neck. Under the open coat was a shapeless maroon sweater "and a long skirt of crumpled Indian cotton in a gaudy ethnic design. Her feet were in thick green men's socks, and open sandals which buckled at the side. Her dark hair was stringy and lank, tied with leather thongs into two tails that stuck out on each side of her head above her prominent ears.

  Her skin was unnaturally pale, inherited from her father, Robert St. John. It was pock-marked with the cicatrices of ancient acne. Her horned-rimmed spectacles were square and mannish, and a cigarette dangled from the corner of her wide thin lips. She had a prim, serious old-fashioned face, but the gaze of her green eyes was direct and intense as she stopped in front of Samson and took his hand firmly.

  "So the prodigal returns to run off with one of my best theatre sisters, I have no doubt." "Good evening, Doctor Leila." "Are you still playing "boy" to your white settler?" she demanded. Leila St. John had spent five years in detention in Gwelo political prison at the pleasure of the Rhodesian government. She had been there at the same time as Robert Mugabe who, from exile, now led the ZANU wing of the liberation army.

  "Cr
aig Mellow is a third-generation Rhodesian on both sides of his family. He is also my friend. He is not a settler." "Samson, you are an educated and highly capable man.

  All around you the world is melting in the crucible of change, history is being forged on the anvil of war. Are you content to waste the talents that God gave you and let other lesser men snatch the future from you?" "I do not like war, Doctor Leila. Your father made me a Christian." "Only mad men do, but what other way is there to destroy the insensate violence of the capitalist imperialist system?

  What other way to meet the noble and legitimate aspirations of the poor, the weak and the politically oppressed?" Samson glanced swiftly around the entrance hall, and she smiled.

  "Don't worry, Samson. You are amongst friends here. True friends." Leila St. John glanced at her wristwatch. "I must go. I will tell Constance to bring you to dinner. We will talk again." She turned abruptly away, and the heels of her scuffed brown sandals clacked on the tiled floor as she hurried towards the double swing doors marked "OutPatients."

  Samson found a seat on one of the long benches outside these doors, and waited amongst the sick and lame, the coughing and sniffing, the bandaged and the bleeding. The sharp antiseptic smell of the hospital seemed to permeate his clothes and skin.

  Constance came at last. One of the nurses must have warned her, for her head turned eagerly from side to side "and her dark eyes shone excitedly as she searched for him. He savoured the pleasure of seeing her for a moment or two longer before standing up from his seat on the bench.

  Her uniform was crisply starched and ironed, the white apron stark upon the pink candy stripes, and her cap was perched at a jaunty angle.

  The badges of her grades theatre sister, midwifery, and the others gleamed on her breast. Her hair was pulled up tightly and plaited into intricate patterns over her scalp, an arrangement which took many patient hours to perfect. Her face was round and smooth as a dark moon, the classical Nguni beauty with huge black eyes and sparkling white teeth in her welcoming smile.

  Her back was straight, her shoulders narrow but strong. Her breasts under the white apron were good, her waist narrow and her hips broad and fecund. She moved with that peculiar African grace, as though she danced to music that she alone could hear.

  She stopped in front of him. "I see you, Samson," she murmured.

  Suddenly shy, she dropped her eyes.

  "I see you, my heart," he replied as softly. They did not touch each other, for a display of passion in public was against custom and would have been distasteful to both of them.

  They walked slowly up the hill together towards the cottage.

  Although she was not a blood relative of Gideon Kumalo, Constance had been one of his favourite students before his failing eyesight drove him into retirement. When his wife died, Constance had gone to live with him, to care for him and keep his house. It was there she had met Samson.

  Though she chattered easily enough, relating the small happenings that had taken place in his absence, Samson sensed some reserve in her, and twice she glanced back along the path with something of fear in her eyes.

  "What is it that troubles you?" he asked, as they paused at the garden gate.

  "How did you know-" she began, and then answered herself. "Of course you know. You know everything about me What is it that troubles you?" " "The "boys" are here," Constance said simply, and Samson felt the chill on his skin so that the goose pimples rose upon his forearms.

  The "boys" and the "girls" were the guerrilla fighters of the Zimbabwe revolutionary army.

  "Here?" he asked. "Here at the Mission?" She nodded.

  "They bring danger and the threat of death upon everybody here," he said bitterly.

  "Samson, my heart," she whispered. "I have to tell you. I could shirk my duty no longer. I have-joined them at last. I am one of the "girls" now." They ate the evening meal in the central room of the cottage, which was kitchen, dining-room and sitting-room in one.

  In place of a table-cloth, Constance covered the scrubbed deal table with sheets of the Rhodesian Herald newspaper. The columns of newsprint were interspersed with columns of blank paper, the editor's silent protest against the draconian decrees of the government censors.

  In the centre of it she placed a large pot of maize meal, cooked stiff and fluffy white and beside it a small bowl of tripes and sugar beans.

  Then she filled the old man's bowl, placed it in front of him, and put his spoon in his hand, sitting beside him throughout the meal, she tenderly directed his hand and wiped up his spillage.

  From the wall the small black and white television set gave them a fuzzy image of the newscaster.

  "In four separate contacts in Mashonaland and Matabeleland, twenty-six terrorists have been killed by the security forces in the past twenty-four hours. In addition, sixteen civilians were killed in crossfire and eight others were reported killed in a land-mine explosion on the Mrewa road. Combined Operations Headquarters regret to announce the death in action of two members of the security forces.

  The dead were Sergeant John Sinclair of the Ballantyne Scouts--" Constance stood up and switched off the television set, then sat down again and spooned a little more meat and beans into Gideon's bowl.

  "It is like a soccer match," she said with a bitterness that Samson had never heard in her voice. "Each evening they give us the score. Terrorists 2. security forces 26, we should fill in the coupons for the pools." Samson saw that she was crying, and could think of nothing to say for her comfort.

  "They give us the names and ages of the white soldiers, how many children they leave, but the others are only "terrorists", or 4black civilians". Yet they have mothers and fathers and wives and children also." She sniffed up her tears. "They are Matabele as we are, they are our people. Death has become so easy, so commonplace in this land, but the ones that do not die, those will come to us here our people, with their legs torn from their bodies or their brains damaged so that they become drooling idiots." "War is always crueller when the women and children are in it," Gideon said in his dusty old voice. "We kill their women, they kill ours." There was a soft scratching at the door, and Constance stood up and went quickly to it. She switched out the electric light before she opened it. Outside it was night, but Samson saw the silhouettes of two men in the darkened doorway. They slipped into the room, and there was the sound of the door closing. Then Constance switched on the light.

  Two men stood against the wall. One glance was enough for Samson to know who they were. They were dressed in jeans and denim shirts, but there was an animal alertness about them, in the way they moved, in their quick bright restless eyes.

  The elder of the two nodded at the other, who went quickly into the bedrooms, searched them swiftly and then came back to check the curtains over the windows, to make certain there was no chink between them. Then he nodded at the other man, and slipped out of the door again. The elder man sat down on the bench opposite Gideon Kumalo. He had finely boned features, with an Arab beakiness to his nose, but his skin was almost purple-black and his head was shaven bald.

  "My name is Comrade Tebe," he said quietly. "What is your name, old father?" "My name is Gideon Kumalo. "The blind man looked past his shoulder, his head cocked slightly.

  "That is not the name your mother gave you, that is not how your father knew you." The old man began to tremble, and he tried three times to speak before the words came out.

  "Who are you? "he whispered.

  "That is not important," the man said. "We are trying to find who you are. Tell me, old man, have you ever heard the name Tungata Zebiwe? The Seeker after what has been Stolen, the Seeker after Justice?" Now the old man began to shake so that he knocked the bowl from the table and it rang in narrowing circles on the concrete floor at his feet.

  "How do you know that name?" he whispered. "How do you know these things?" "I know everything, old father. I even know a song. We will sing it together, you and I. And the visitor began to sing in soft, but thrilling ba
ritone. "Like a mole in the earth's gut, Bazo found the secret way-" It was the ancient battle hymn of the "Moles" impi, and the memories came crashing back upon Gideon Kumalo. In the way of very old men, he could remember in crystal detail the days of his childhood while the events of the previous week were already becoming hazy. He remembered a cave in the Matopos Hills and his father's never-forgotten face in the firelight, and the words of the song came back to him. "The moles are beneath the earth.

  "Are they dead?" asked the daughters of Mashobane." Gideon sang in his scratchy old man's voice, and as he sang, the tears welled up out of his milky blind eyes, and ran unheeded down his cheeks.

  "Listen pretty maids, do you not hear Something stirring, in the darkness?" When the song was ended, the visitor sat in silence while Gideon wiped away his tears. Then he said softly, "The spirits of your ancestors call you, Comrade Tungata Zebiwe." "I am an old man, blind and feeble, I cannot respond to them." "Then you must send somebody in your place," said the stranger. "Someone in whose veins runs the blood of Bazo the Axe, and Tanase the witch." Then the stranger turned slowly towards Samson Kumalo who sat at the head of the table, and he looked directly into Samson's eyes.