He could not smash it with a rock and he could not shoot it. He put it down again upside down but he knew he could not leave it for it was able to right itself and run off. It might somehow escape and if it did he would probably die in the night.
He selected a strong straight thorn branch and cleaned it with his knife, taking off the thorns and minor branches. He sharpened the thin end of it. A miniature spear.
He went to the turtle and bent over it. This is how one murders, he told himself. Now I have done all things … I have killed men in the war with no feeling but this is truly murder. Or am I mad now from the sun and the guilt and the yearning? I cannot shoot you, Turtle, I cannot waste a bullet on something as slow and helpless. I will not crush you… .
He drove the sharpened stake into the wrinkled folds of the neck, felt it penetrate deep inside. He groaned and looked away, then ran from it as it writhed and flopped and bled to death. He ran across the sun-baked land and stopped at last and found that he was crying, shouting wildly. He slumped down and rested, telling himself that he was sick and half-mad from hunger, that he must eat and find some shade and sleep until the sun went away. He could make the mountains now.
After a time he got up and gathered an armload of sticks and went back to the turtle. It was dead and flies crawled on the bloody spear that protruded from its neck.
Another night. Another fire against the wall of the cave. They huddled close to it, watching the progress of a flame on a gray stick, anticipating the crumbling of an ember, the slow disintegration of a favorite piece of wood.
“I think story telling began this way,” Jefferson Smith said. “In front of a fire. A fire is alive; things happen in it if you watch for them.”
“The television of the Stone Age,” O’Brien said.
“It soothes and relaxes,” Grace added. “Your imagination takes over.” O’Brien was close to her; she could smell him; she brushed against him. She’d never been alone with him yet.
“Yes,” Grimmelmann said. “A fire is good. It brings people together, all of them seeking something basic such as food or warmth or companionship. There is too little companionship left in the world. We all live too much alone, afraid to draw close to others.”
“I keep thinking about the Bushmen who lived here,” Bain said. “I see the fire and I look over and see the rock paintings and I go back in time and see some little guy standing in the sand with his paint pots.”
“They carried the paint in the hollow ends of little horns,” Grimmelmann said. “I saw a set of them once, eight or ten woven together in a sort of apron, with wax plugs to keep the paint covered.”
“I read somewhere that they don’t paint any more,” Smith said. “Another lost art gone to hell.”
“Tell me,” Bain said. “Where did they come from? Were they always here in Africa? What’s the story on them?” He turned from Grimmelmann to Smith and back again.
Grimmelmann smiled and Smith let his hands fall into a gesture of hopeless ignorance. “Who can say?” Smith said. “When you start talking about the origin of Bushmen you get into the origin of mankind. Some claim that Bushmen came from the north, from the Mediterranean, that they were pushed down here to the only place nobody else wanted.
“There is another theory that appeals to me,” he went on. “We know that until recent times the Chinese were great seafaring people, greater than is supposed. In the sixteenth century I believe a junk turned up in England, an amazing event, to my mind. We know that the culture base of Madagascar is not African, not Negro, not Bantu, but Malayan. There must have been considerable intercourse between the Far East and South Africa. Chinese objects have been found in some of the old gold mining spots, at Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Perhaps the yellow Bushman type is an offshoot of the Chinese and the pre-Bantu types. It would explain the Mongoloid look of the Hottentot, too, and the curious pointed hat one sees him wearing in the old prints and the way he rides cattle. Something happened to the Chinese settlements on the east coast when the contacts with home were broken off. I think they were absorbed by the pre-Bantu stock and merged into what we now call the Hottentot and Bushman.”
“I keep hearing Hottentot and Bushmen,” Bain said. “What’s the difference?”
“A great difference,” Grimmelmann explained. “The Hottentot are pastoral people; they raise crops, keep cattle. The Bushman is a primitive man, wild, a hunter. People confuse them because they are both small and because they live in overlapping areas. They are quite different in skin color and speech and all other ways.”
“How big are these characters?” O’Brien asked.
“Under five feet,” Grimmelmann said. “They might average four feet ten. The women smaller. Once, long ago, I saw a woman who was four feet two inches. An adult.”
“There’s another theory about the origin of the Bushmen,” Smith said. “An idea that they came from somewhere in Asia, say India, and spread both ways. There are tiny neolithic people everywhere, people more or less like the Bushmen. In the Andaman Islands, in the interior of the Philippines and Malaya. They might have all come from some original stock and changed a bit over the tens of thousands of years. The early people in Ceylon and India were supposed to be a small Negrito type. It’s not difficult to imagine that they came to Africa and were pushed into the desert by waves of dominant races.”
‘I think the man or the men who painted those pictures on the wall were part of a hunting party,” Grimmelmann said.
“Perhaps they came here to seek game and then moved on.”
“Did they fight among themselves much?” O’Brien asked. “Wars? That sort of thing? Maybe they wore themselves out.”
“They had nothing to steal from their own people,” Smith said.
Grimmelmann nodded. “They raided other people on the edge of the Kalahari, all around them. Cattle raids. They would go off, a party of them, and the women would follow behind with water carried in ostrich eggs. The shells would be buried at various spots along the way for the men and cattle to drink on their way into the waterless desert. The raiders would come upon a herd, slaughter the watchmen and run off with the cattle. The alarm would be given and the pursuit would start. The Bushmen would poison the wells and pits if there were any and subsist with the cattle on the water the women had left for them. If the pursuers got too close the raiders would shoot the beasts with their poison arrows and melt into the landscape. Or they might wait and ambush the owners of the cattle.”
“And the cattle would be butchered and eaten in any case,” Bain said.
Grimmelmann nodded. “Nobody could follow them across a hundred miles of sand. There would be a great feast which might last for days and days until the last cow was gone.”
“So they never settled down to raise cattle and plant crops and live in houses,” Bain put in.
“People never do,” Smith said. “No group of hunters has ever, in all of history, given up the chase, the hunting life, for the farm. People turned to farming out of sheer necessity; it was either that or perish.”
“Why is that?” Grace asked.
“Hunting is too much fun,” Smith said. “It’s one of the basic urges, I think. The stalking, the matching of wits and skill, the killing. Farming is hard, unromantic work. Until very recently it was done by serfs and slaves. Men never turned to it because they loved it.”
“War is hunting,” Grimmelmann said.
“Which explains why people like it,” Bain said.
They sat for a time, quiet. Grace threw a new piece on the fire and the sparks swirled upward to die in the blackness above. They could feel the cold outside now; a cold that had suddenly replaced the heat of the day.
“Why did you come back?” O’Brien asked.
Grimmelmann looked up from the fire.
“To escape,” he said. “I came back to find my brother. He has a place here, a great farm. I had planned to stay there with him and his family, his five sons. I wanted to die there.”
“What did
you escape from?” Grace asked.
“From Europe,” the old man said. “Europe is sick. It has been sick since 1914.”
“Why did you wait?” Bain asked.
The old man turned to him. “I will tell you. I was caught up in the first war like everyone else. It was terrible, more terrible in many ways than your war. There were no ideas, only blood blood blood… . All through it I dreamed of coming back to Africa, to the peace, the great spaces, the freedom. But the war ended and South-West Africa was taken from us at Versailles. Then came the bad times for us in Germany. My brother and I worked when we could and tried to keep ourselves and the family alive. It was impossible to save. Money was worthless. The years went by. The old people died. We managed to save a little and one night we decided that one of us would leave. We tossed a coin and my brother won. He managed to find a boat to Swakopmund. It was the last I saw of him. This was in 1928.”
Bain reached for a piece of firewood, a deformed and half-rotten branch that he remembered picking up a few days ago. It was strange to remember, to recognize small bits of wood, but they were important now.
“And the next year was ’29,” Smith said.
“Yes,” Grimmelmann said, staring into the flames. “Germany went to pieces. There were no jobs, no money. I couldn’t leave. I went to Bremerhaven and somehow got a job. I started to study English at night. Do not ask me why; perhaps I thought it would be useful in South Africa. I met a girl in my classes. I am in my forties now but suddenly we are married and life seems wonderful again to me as it was before the war. We are very happy and a baby comes. I hear from my brother and he tells us he has managed to get land in Africa; he convinced the authorities somehow that he was Dutch and they gave him some great tract of barren land. I start to think of going there and joining him but first we nee3 more money and the baby must grow a little.”
“And then Hitler comes along,” Smith said.
“Yes,” Grimmelmann said. “Adi comes and we do not make it to Africa; we do not try to flee from Germany. He sets us on fire, that man, and before we know it the gates have closed on us. Oh, I will not tell lies here, my friends. I was with him from the start; my hand was the highest. I was in the SA until the murders began and then I saw things and gradually worked my way out. I cultivated an imaginary ailment and in time they forgot about me. So I became an air raid warden and survived while the others went on and became Waffen SS heroes and occupation officials. Somehow I live through it.” He was silent for a long minute. The others waited.
“But my wife and child do not. They are killed in one of the big air raids. My little girl …”
Bain cleared his throat.
“That is the price we pay,” Grimmelmann said. “The terrible price. I think I went bad for a while, I do not know. I left the city and wandered about working on farms, trying to forget. It got worse after that. The Russians began pushing us back and suddenly there are Americans in Europe and planes over Germany day and night. I am rounded up and forced into the Volkssturm. Old men and boys. It is no longer war now; it is national suicide. We are sent to hold back the Americans and when the regular army leaves us to defend a village in the Rhineland I manage to gain control of the situation and surrender. There is no more killing. The Americans are just. They laughed at us but it did not matter. And we were glad to be prisoners for a time. The food was very good, that I remember.”
“Don’t mention it,” Smith said.
Grimmelmann smiled. “The war ends. I am an old man now and I am tired. I can speak some English, however, and I get a good job working with the Americans. The years of occupation go by and suddenly I get a letter from my brother. It is three years old and has been passed from hand to hand by those who knew me in Bremerhaven. I decide to leave Germany for good. It takes two years to arrange even that. And now I am here with you.”
“Your brother will be surprised,” Grace said.
“Yes,” said the old man. “He will be surprised.”
Bain yawned. “Another day.” He was feeling better.
Smith looked at him. “Is that good or bad?”
“Bad,” O’Brien said.
“Good,” Grace said. “We are a day closer to being saved. A plane will come soon …”
Smith nodded to himself. It would be such a waste to die here, starve to death waiting for help that would never come. And he couldn’t die: he was too young and had too much to do. And he was a rare bird too, a Negro professor in a great university, a scholar, a symbol. He was needed.
He held his hands out, palms facing the flames. Hope. It was the drug that kept them all going. Condemned criminals carried hope with them to the steps of the gallows and beyond. Life was so uncertain that people invented all sorts of myths to bolster their fears. And he was guilty of it too, thinking of himself as more important than the others because he was a success symbol, a needed person.
Perhaps he was important but if he was it had nothing to do with being a Negro. Being a Negro had not mattered much in his life; he had never been seriously harmed by prejudice and hate. During his boyhood there had been embarrassments and experiences that had left him shaken but they had been uncommon.
He had been born into a family of substance. His father was wealthy and respected, a physician on the staff of Lincoln Hospital. His mother was genteel and bookish; she had been a teacher in a southern school and had drifted into magazine work in New York. He had grown up in a busy and stimulating home, filled with books and alive with music and conversation.
He went first to a small private school in the city and then to Stony Brook on Long Island. There had been no shock or pains connected with his moving into an almost-white school. His background was equal to that of most of the other boys; he was witty and gracious and good at sports, especially tennis. He was accepted. There were other Negro boys at the school, upper-class and refined, and in the free society of adolescence there were few distinctions or penalties.
It was a good time in a life of good times. He spent most of his weekends in the city with his parents and as he grew older he drifted into another world of party-goers and play-seers. He grew tall and lithe and opened an account at Brooks Brothers. He wore glasses now and read constantly.
They had a water-front home farther out on Long Island where he spent the summer with his mother while his father came on weekends. He played tennis and swam and dug clams. He made new friends among the white neighbors and read late into the night. His father bought him a secondhand car and he learned to drive on the endless back roads of Suffolk County.
He graduated from Stony Brook and went to Cornell. Then the Korean War came; he registered for the draft but he wasn’t taken. For a time he was a premedical student; everyone had assumed that he would follow his father’s profession. But medicine did not excite him. He had been too close to it. Or perhaps he associated it with death and dying and chemical smells and frantic calls in the night. And he was not driven by the vision of wealth and security. He switched his major to history with a vague idea of going to law school or into foreign service, finished Cornell and went on to Harvard for graduate work. Everything was easy and comfortable. The world was good. The fact of his race rarely entered his head; he didn’t think of himself as a Negro and it bothered him, made him feel guilty at times. He felt that he owed something to his race, that he should become a spokesman, a fighter against all that was wrong, a political leader. But he remained in the academic world, staying on at Harvard as an instructor, then as assistant professor.
When they left the fire and went to their beds, Grace Monckton lay for a long time watching the fire. She wanted to go to O’Brien; she was empty and alone and she wanted him.
She had waited for him to return in the late afternoon. He was always gone from the cave before she awoke and the days seemed endless now without him, waiting for him. And then he came striding down the canyon, big and yet graceful, naked except for the old tennis shorts he wore. She watched the muscles ripple across his chest,
his hard stomach. He was so different from the boys she had known a few years ago in her girlhood, so different from her husband who was her ex-husband now, the good and gentle Andrew Monckton, journalist and mama’s boy.
O’Brien had come and stood before her, showed her the lizards he had found and killed, the meat that would be their supper. But there was a greater hunger in her. She moved close, brushed him with her bare shoulder, pretended to examine the dead lizards.
He leaned close to her and she no longer knew or cared what he was saying; she wanted him to reach out and hold her, kiss her, tell her that he loved her… .
Unlike most men he looked better with a beard than without one, looked better half naked than fully clothed. He reminded her of something out of antiquity: a victorious gladiator, a corsair, a wild Celt.
Then he was gone, moving away into the cave, and she stood trembling, aching with her great need.
Now, in her bed, watching the fire, she knew that she wanted O’Brien more than anything else she had ever wanted or dreamed of wanting. She was a delicate creature in a relentless world of rock and sand. She could not be alone any more; she had to have a mate. O’Brien was alive and hard and vital; she wanted him physically as she had never wanted her husband. There was a ruthlessness in him that she both feared and hungered for, a violence that she knew in her dreams, that left her shaking and sweat-covered in the darkness.
She couldn’t go on much longer without him.
There was an eagle’s cave on the outside of the peak, facing the desert, the north. O’Brien discovered it one day searching for baboons. It was just visible from a spur on the short ridge, the one he sometimes thought of as the Thumb Ridge. He saw the big bird glide down from the cloudless sky and vanish into the great cliff face; he went farther out on the spur and studied the cliff, saw nothing. Then he noticed a whiteness on the black stone, bird droppings. He aimed the rifle at it and saw through the telescopic sight a break in the stop above the whiteness. It was a cave, a wide slit, and he could see movement inside. Later the eagle appeared, thrust itself into the air and flew away over the desert. O’Brien moved and found a spot where he could rest the rifle and observe the eyrie. It fascinated him; the idea of an inaccessible place, perhaps a deep cave, which no man had ever seen. How long had it been the home of eagles? How many lived there, were able to find carrion in the empty world on all sides?
The Sands of Kalahari Page 8