The Angels Weep

by Wilbur Smith

‘We could wait for Bawu,’ Craig said, as he placed a tape on the machine, instinctively avoiding Beethoven and selecting Debussy for a lighter happier sound. ‘Or we could have a drink right now.’ He grinned to cover his uneasiness and discomfort. ‘And quite frankly I need one right away.’

  Janine did not touch her glass, but sat staring at it.

  ‘Bawu told me you were still working at the museum.’

  She nodded, and Craig felt his chest constricted with helpless pity for her.

  ‘Bawu will be here—’ He searched desperately for something to say to her.

  ‘Craig, I came to tell you something. The family asked me to come to you, they wanted somebody whom you knew to break the news.’ Now she looked up from the glass. ‘Bawu won’t be coming today,’ she said. ‘He won’t be coming ever again.’

  After a long time Craig asked softly, ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Last night, while he was sleeping. It was his heart.’

  ‘Yes,’ Craig murmured. ‘His heart. It was broken – I knew that.’

  ‘The funeral will be tomorrow at King’s Lynn, in the afternoon. They want you to be there. We could go together, if you don’t mind?’

  The weather changed during the night, and the wind went up into the southeast bringing with it the thin cold drizzling guti rain.

  They laid the old man down amongst his wives and children and grandchildren in the little cemetery at the back of the hills. The rain on the freshly turned red earth piled beside the open grave made it seem as though the earth were bleeding from a mortal wound.

  Afterwards, Craig and Janine drove back to Bulawayo in the Land-Rover.

  ‘I’m staying at the same flat,’ Janine said, as they drove through the park. ‘Will you drop me there, please?’

  ‘If I am alone now, I’ll just get sad drunk,’ Craig said. ‘Won’t you come back to the yacht, just for a little while, please?’ Craig heard the pleading in his own voice.

  ‘I’m not very good around people any more,’ she said.

  ‘Nor am I,’ Craig agreed. ‘But you and I aren’t just people, are we?’

  Craig made coffee for both of them, and brought it through from the galley. They sat opposite each other, and he found it difficult not to stare at her.

  ‘I must look a sight,’ she said, abruptly, and he did not know how to answer her.

  ‘You will always be the most beautiful woman I have ever known.’

  ‘Craig, did they tell you what happened to me?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Then you must know that I am not really a woman any more. I will never be able to let a man, any man, touch me again.’

  ‘I can understand that.’

  ‘That’s one of the reasons that I never tried to see you again.’

  ‘What are the other reasons?’ he asked.

  ‘That you would not wish to see me, to have anything to do with me.’

  ‘That I don’t understand.’

  Janine was silent again, huddled on the bench seat, hugging herself with that protective gesture.

  ‘Roly felt that way,’ she blurted. ‘After they were finished with me. When he found me there beside the wreck, when he realized what they had done to me, he could not even bear to touch me, not even to speak to me.’

  ‘Jan—’ Craig started, but she cut him off.

  ‘It’s all right, Craig. I didn’t tell you to hear you deny it for me. I told you so that you would know about me. So that you would know that I have nothing left to offer a man that way.’

  ‘Then I can tell you that, like you, I have nothing to offer a woman – that way.’

  There was quick and real pain in her eyes. ‘Oh Craig, my poor Craig – I didn’t realize – I thought it was just one leg—’

  ‘On the other hand, I can offer someone friendship and caring, and just about everything else.’ He grinned at her. ‘I can even offer a shot of gin.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to get drunk.’ She smiled back at him gently.

  ‘I said sad drunk, but we should give Bawu a little wake. He would have liked that.’

  They sat facing each other across the saloon table, chatting in desultory fashion, both of them beginning to relax as the gin warmed them and gradually they recaptured some of that long-lost camaraderie that they had once enjoyed.

  Janine explained her reasons for not accepting the invitation of Douglas and Valerie to live at Queen’s Lynn. ‘They look at me with such pity, that I start to feel it all over again. It would be like going into a state of perpetual mourning.’

  He told her about St Giles’, and the way he had absconded. ‘They say it’s not my legs, but my head that prevents me from walking. Either they are crazy or I am – I prefer to think that it’s them.’

  He had two steaks in the refrigerator, and he grilled them on the gas while she made a dressing for the salad, and while they worked he explained all the modifications that he had made to the layout of the yacht.

  ‘With the roller boom, I would be able to shorten or make sail without leaving the cockpit,’ he chatted on. ‘I bet that I could manage her single-handed. It’s a pity I’m not ever going to have the chance.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ She stopped with an onion in one hand and a knife in the other.

  ‘My darling is never going to feel the kiss of salt water on her bottom,’ he explained. ‘They have impounded her.’

  ‘Craig, I don’t understand.’

  ‘I applied to the exchange control authorities for a permit to ship her to the coast. You know what they are like, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ve heard they are pretty rough,’ she answered.

  ‘Rough? That’s like calling Attila the Hun unkind. If you try to get out of the country, even as a legal emigrant, they allow you to take out only a thousand dollars’ worth of goods or cash. Well, they sent an inspector round and he valued the yacht at two hundred and fifty thousand. If I want to take it out, I have to make a cash deposit of a quarter of a million dollars, a quarter of a million! I have a little over ten thousand dollars between me and prostitution, so until I come up with another two hundred and forty thousand, here I sit.’

  ‘Craig, that’s cruel. Couldn’t you appeal? I mean in your special circumstances?’ She stopped herself when she saw the little arrowhead of a frown appear between his eyes. Craig brushed over the reference to his disability.

  ‘You can see their point of view, I suppose. Every white man in the country wants to get out before the big black baddies take over. We would strip the country bare if there was no control.’

  ‘But, Craig, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Stay here, I suppose. I don’t have much alternative. I’ll sit here and read Hiscock’s Voyaging Under Sail and Mellor’s Cruising Safe and Simple.’

  ‘I wish there was something I could do to help.’

  ‘There is. You can lay the table and hook a bottle of wine out of the cupboard.’

  Janine left more than half her steak, and drank little of the wine, then she wandered across the saloon to examine his collection of tapes.

  ‘Paganini’s Capricci,’ she murmured, ‘now I know you are a masochist.’ And then her attention was attracted to the neat square pile of the typescript on the shelf beside the tapes.

  ‘What is this?’ She turned the first few sheets, and then looked up at him. Those beautiful blue eyes in the once beautiful face, that was now swollen and distorted with fat and speckled about the chin with angry little blemishes, made his heart plunge. ‘What is it?’ And then, seeing his expression, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’

  ‘No!’ he said, quickly. ‘It’s not that. It’s just that I don’t really know what it is—’ He couldn’t call it a book, and it would be pretentious to call it a novel. ‘It’s just something I have been fiddling with.’

  Janine riffled the edges of the sheets. The pile was over twelve inches deep. ‘It doesn’t look like fiddling,’ she chuckled, the first time he had hear
d her laugh since their reunion. ‘To me it looks like deadly earnest!’

  ‘It’s a story I have been trying to write down.’

  ‘May I read it?’ she asked, and he felt panic rising in him.

  ‘Oh, it wouldn’t interest you.’

  ‘How do you know?’ She lugged the huge typescript to the table. ‘May I read it?’

  He shrugged helplessly. ‘I don’t think you will get far, but if you would like to try—’

  She sat down and read the first page.

  ‘It’s still very rough, you must make allowances,’ he said.

  ‘Craig, you still don’t know when to shut up, do you?’ she said, without looking up. She turned the page.

  He took the plates and glasses through to the galley and washed them, then he made coffee and brought the pot to the saloon table. Janine did not look up. He poured her a mug, and she did not look up from the page.

  After a while he left her and slid through to his cabin. He stretched out on the bunk, and picked up the book he was reading from the bedside table. It was Crawford’s Mariners’ Celestial Navigation, and he began to wrestle distractedly with zenith distances and azimuth angles. He woke with Janine’s hand on his cheek. She jerked her fingers away as he sat up hurriedly.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked groggily.

  ‘It’s morning, I have to go. I didn’t sleep all night. I don’t know how I will get through work today.’

  ‘Will you come back?’ he demanded, coming full awake.

  ‘I have to, I have to finish reading. I would take it with me, but I’d need a camel to carry it, it’s so big.’

  She stood over the bunk looking down at him, with a strange speculation in those slanted dark blue eyes.

  ‘It’s difficult to believe that was written by somebody I thought that I knew,’ she mused softly. ‘I realize that I really knew very little about you at all.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Oh, my gosh! I have to fly!’

  She parked the VW under the mango trees beside the yacht a little after five o’clock that evening.

  ‘I have brought the steaks,’ she called, ‘and the wine.’ She came up the ladder and ducked down into the saloon. Her voice floated up to him in the cockpit, ‘But you’ll have to cook them. I can’t spare the time, I’m afraid.’ By the time he got down into the saloon, she was already seated and completely engrossed in the massive typescript.

  It was long past midnight when she turned the last page. When she had finished it, she sat quietly with her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the pile of paper silently.

  Then when she looked up at him at last, her eyes were bright and wet with tears.

  ‘It’s magnificent,’ she said quietly. ‘It will take me a little time before I can get over it enough to talk about it rationally, and then I will want to read it again.’

  The following evening, she brought a fat Cornish chicken. ‘It’s range-fed,’ she told him. ‘One more steak and you would start growing horns.’

  She made a coq au vin and while they ate, she demanded an explanation of the characters in his typescript.

  ‘Was Mr Rhodes really a homosexual?’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation,’ he defended himself. ‘So many great men are hounded to greatness by their own imperfections.’

  ‘What about Lobengula? Was his first love really a captured white girl? Did he commit suicide? And Robyn Ballantyne – tell me more about her, did she impersonate a man to enrol in medical school? How much of that is true?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Craig laughed at her. ‘It’s just a story, the way it might have been. I was just trying to portray an age, and the mood of that age.’

  ‘Oh, yes, it does matter,’ she said seriously. ‘It matters very much to me. You have made it matter. It is as though I am a part of it – you have made me a part of it all.’

  That night when it grew late, Craig said simply, ‘I made up the bunk in the forward cabin, it seems silly for you to drive all that way home.’

  She stayed, and the following evening she brought a valise which she unpacked into the stowage of the forward cabin, and they settled slowly into a routine. She had first use of the shower and heads in the morning while he made the breakfast. He did the cleaning and made up the bunks while she did the shopping and any other errands for him during her lunchbreak. When she arrived back at the yacht in the evenings, she would change into a tee-shirt and jeans, then help him with the work on the yacht. She was particularly good at sanding and varnishing, she had more patience and dexterity than Craig did.

  At the end of the first week, Craig suggested, ‘It would save you a bundle if you gave up that flat of yours.’

  ‘I’ll pay you rent,’ she agreed, and when he protested, ‘Okay, then, I get the food and liquor – agreed?’

  That night just after she had doused the gaslight in her cabin, she called through the dark saloon to his stern cabin.

  ‘Craig, do you know, this is the first time that I feel safe since—’ She did not finish.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ he assured her.

  ‘Goodnight, Skipper.’

  Yet it was only a few nights later that he came awake to her screams. They were so anguished, so tormented and heartrending, that for seconds he could not move; then he tumbled from his bunk and sprawled on the deck in his haste to get to her. He fumbled and found the switch to the fluorescent tube in the saloon, and then clawed himself down the companionway.

  In the reflected light from the saloon, he saw her crouched in one corner of the cabin. Her bedclothes were hanging in untidy festoons from the bunk, her nightdress was rucked up around her naked thighs and her fingers formed a cage across her terrified contorted face.

  He reached for her. ‘Jan, it’s all right. I’m here!’ He wrapped both arms around her, to try and still those dreadful cries of terror. Immediately she turned into a maddened animal, and she flew at him. Her nails slashed down his forehead, and had he not jerked away, he would have lost his eye; the bloody parallel wounds ended in his eyebrow, and thick dark blood oozed into his eye, half-blinding him. Her strength was out of all proportion to her size, he could not hold her, and the harder he tried, the wilder she became. She sank her teeth into his bare forearm, leaving a crescent-shaped bite-mark deep in his flesh.

  He rolled away from her, and instantly she crawled back into the corner, and crouched there, keening and blubbering to herself, staring at him with glittering unseeing eyes. Craig felt his skin crawl and itch with dread and his own horror. Once again he tried to reach her, but at first advance she bared her teeth like a rabid dog and snarled at him.

  He rolled out of the cabin and dragged himself into the saloon. Frantically he searched through the tapes and found Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’. He pressed it into the slot and turned the volume up to the maximum. The magnificent music swamped the yacht.

  Slowly the sounds from her cabin dwindled into silence, and then hesitantly Janine came into the companionway of the saloon. She held her arms crossed over her chest, but the madness was gone from her eyes.

  ‘I had a dream,’ she whispered, and came to sit at the table.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ he said.

  In the galley he bathed his scratches and bites with cold water, and took the coffee through to her.

  ‘The music—’ she started, and then she saw his torn face. ‘Did I do that?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Craig,’ she whispered. ‘But you must not try to touch me. You see I am a little bit mad also. You mustn’t try to touch me.’

  Comrade Tungata Zebiwe, Minister for Trade, Tourism and Information in the Cabinet of the newly elected government of Zimbabwe, walked briskly along one of the narrow gravel pathways that meandered through the lush gardens of State House. His four bodyguards followed him at a respectful distance. They were all former members of his old ZIPRA cadre, each of them hardened veterans whose loyalty had been tested a hundred time
s. Now, however, they had changed the camouflage dungarees of the bush war for dark business suits and sunglasses, the new uniform of the political élite.

  The daily pilgrimage on which Tungata was intent had become a ritual of his household. As one of the senior Cabinet ministers, he was entitled to luxurious quarters in one of the annexes of State House. It was an easy and congenial walk from there, through the gardens, past State House itself, to the indaba tree.

  State House was a sprawling edifice with white walls and gables, arched in the tradition of the great homes of the Cape of Good Hope. It had been built on the instructions of that arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. His taste for the big and barbaric showed in the design, and his sense of history in his choice of the site for State House. It was built on the spot where Lobengula’s kraal had once stood before it was destroyed by Rhodes’ marauders when they rode in to take possession of this land.

  Beyond the great house, not two hundred paces from its wide verandas, stood a tree, a gnarled old wild plum enclosed and protected by a fence of iron palings. This tree was the object of Tungata’s pilgrimage. He stopped in front of the iron palings, and his bodyguards hung back so as not to intrude on this private moment.

  Tungata stood with his feet apart and his hands clasped lightly behind his back. He was dressed in a navy blue suit with a light chalk stripe. One of a dozen that Gieves and Hawkes of Savile Row had tailored for him during his last visit to London. It fitted his wide rangy shoulders to perfection and subtly emphasized his narrow waist and the length of his legs. He wore a snowy white shirt under it, his tie was maroon with the tiny buckle and bridle logo of Gucci picked out in blue. His shoes were by the same Italian house, and he wore his expensive Western clothes with the same élan as his forefathers had worn the blue heron’s feathers and royal leopard pelts.

  He removed the gold-rimmed aviator-type Polaroid glasses from his face, and as part of his personal ritual, read the inscription on the plaque that was riveted to the palings.

  ‘Beneath this tree Lobengula, the last King

  of the Matabele, held his court and sat in judgement.’

  Then he looked up into the branches, as though in search of his ancestor’s spirit. The tree was dying of old age, some of the central branches were black and dry, but from the rich red soil at its base new shoots were bursting into vibrant life.