1972 - A Story Like the Wind (65 page)

François had always been astonished how well !#grave;Bamuthi and the other Matabele could determine what was quintessential in the character of the Europeans who came to Hunter’s Drift, although they did not understand a word of their languages. Yet he had never been so impressed as he was an hour or two later. They stood watching the three priests climb into their trucks, safely hauled by oxen to firm ground, and !#grave;Bamuthi, shaking his monumental head, announced from the pit of his stomach, ‘
Auck!
I do not like it, Little Feather. I do not like it. There they go, three black crows, and three black crows together, our ancestors warned us, means a killing somewhere, some time.’

Even Ousie-Johanna had something to say about the visitation. She understood a few key words of English and lost no time in taking François by the arm to lead him aside. In a voice
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of total bewilderment she asked, ‘I wonder what those three men are up to? You know, I think they tried to tell me that I must not think that all Europeans are like you and Lammie, as if I didn’t wish they were! They had the blerrie cheek to tell me the world was full of people who were sorry for me and would soon come to my help. Help for what? Do they think then I did not cook well enough for them, to need more help? I tell you I didn’t trust them, although they were dressed like men of God. Do you know, they offered me a sixpence each and I told them straight what they blerrie-well could do with their money and asked them if they thought we were a boarding house to make travellers pay for a few crumbs of bread?’

The scorn with which Ousie-Johanna uttered ‘sixpence’ nearly made François smile. He knew how their attitude must have hurt such a generous soul, who resolutely rejected all tips, some even amounting to pounds. But he controlled himself with an effort as she concluded, ‘But they’re so badly brought up they didn’t understand a word I said.’

All this time François had three sources of real comfort. Two have already been mentioned: his active role in supervising the building of Nonnie’s future home, and equipping the secret cave in which he hoped that one day Xhabbo, Nonnie and he could all meet. The third was that Nonnie kept her promise and wrote to him. For the first time in his life, he had someone of his own age to write to. The correspondence, although irregular, was maintained and showed no decline in interest on either side.

More tangible than the letters were two parcels which arrived for François some time after Sir James’s departure. One contained a dog collar made of very soft leather. It was obviously designed with considerable imagination. The top was closely studded with brass spikes that shone like gold. Underneath, where the brass spikes were riveted into the leather, another band of soft leather had been sewn over it, to prevent the metal from rubbing against the skin. Inserted in the centre of the studs was a neat, flat little bronze plate with the inscription, ‘For darling Hin from his loving Nonnie’.

The weather quickly removed their lustre imposing a greenish patina upon them which relieved François of the necessity of removing the collar when out hunting.

The gift, of course, explained the episode with the handkerchief which had lingered vividly in François’s mind. Moreover it was accompanied by a letter. In it Nonnie wrote how she knew that François detested dog collars, but she hoped he would please accept this one, since it was no ordinary dog collar. It was not meant as ‘a slave collar’, an outrage to Hintza’s dignity. Nor was it just a token of her love for Hintza. It was mostly a product of her concern that Hintza should be protected by the collar in what everybody told her was the most vulnerable part of a dog’s body and the place for which all its enemies, like leopards, lions and even snakes, would strike first. She had designed this collar, she wrote, especially for Hintza, to make him immune against such perils.

François was not at all certain how Hintza would take to such an encumbrance. As far as he was concerned, the fact that the collar was an expression of imaginative concern more than reconciled him to the teasing he had to endure from Lammie, Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi, all of whom had for years been trying to persuade him to fit Hintza with a proper dog collar like all the other dogs in the land.

When he produced the collar to show it to Hintza, he was utterly astonished. Perhaps some of Nonnie’s scent when she handled and packed the collar must still have clung to the leather. At first Hintza sniffed it ardently, almost as if he could not believe his own nose. Then he started to wag his tail and look round about him. After that, he took to the collar itself without reservation. Indeed François burst out laughing when, a day or so later, he came upon Hintza actually standing looking at himself in the mirror of his room. Unlike other dogs, Hintza appeared to have understood the mystery of reflection, whether in the waters of the Amanzim-tetse or in François’s mirror.

The second present was for François himself. It was considerably larger than Hintza’s and when unwrapped proved to be a painting. It was a French colour reproduction of a Flemish
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primitive picture. François thought he knew something about painting because Ouwa’s study was full of books containing numerous coloured illustrations. But this particular painting was new to him. He quickened to it immediately, for it seemed as if painted by some extraordinarily gifted young person while the sense of wonder was still intact and his feeling for the mystery in all the ordinary things of life had not yet been educated out of him. In the most sensitive and loving detail were flowers, stones, trees, leaves and birds, everything in background and foreground painted as if each were infinite in its own right. All led tenderly up to the central theme which was that of a man in medieval hunting clothes, arrested on the edge of this embroidered forest. He stood there, spear in hand, staring motionless with wonder at a great stag some short distance away in a little clearing. The large, dark eyes of the stag were without fear or reproach and between its antlers, it carried a model of the crucifixion.

François had no clear idea what this strange encounter signified until he read Nonnie’s letter. He would remember, she wrote, how much she had wished that he had a patron saint to protect him. Therefore she and Amelia had searched through the calendar of saints. By some extraordinary coincidence she had found that François’s birthday was on the day devoted to Saint Hubert; the patron saint of all hunters. This picture was depicting how Saint Hubert, who had been an inveterate hunter, had seen one day, between the horns of a stag he was about to kill, the vision depicted in the painting. From that day on he became not only patron saint of hunters but also of the hunted. Would François therefore please keep it in his room?

For once François’s Huguenot prejudices appeared inactive. He loved the painting and was strengthened in his love of it by Mopani. Though Mopani had never heard of Saint Hubert either, he seemed even more impressed, if that were possible, than François, for he remarked, after considerable thought, ‘Yes-no Coiske, this is
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a wonderful thing. You remember some months ago when we talked about what Ouwa told you of that remark in the Dead Sea Scrolls, that men only had to follow the birds and beasts and the fishes to find the way to Heaven? Look…here’s the same thought in this picture. A man shown the way by a European buck centuries ago. It is
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remarkable, you know. I have always thought us hunters a bit like Paul in the Bible. You remember that he came to Christianity by persecuting Christians. It seems to me a lot of us come to it through killing the animals we one day learn to protect and, in protecting them, save ourselves.’

Grateful as he was, François ignored Nonnie’s suggestion that he should hang the painting in his room. He thought about it for days but the painting somehow did not belong there. And then, on one of his visits to the cave, he discovered why. It seemed made for Mantis’s cave, which felt like a kind of hunter’s temple to him. So with a vain, becollared Hintza to observe him, he built a little ‘altar’ of white river pebbles against the part of the honey-coloured walls of the cave where there was a cross painted in red by some long-forgotten Stone Age hand. He stood the painting on the stones and in time he smuggled some packets of their best, long table candles into the cave and saw to it that two always stood sentinel-wise on either side of the painting. On each visit he would light them, each flame as clear and clean as the blade of a spear in that still air. His sense of the cave being some special sacred place was now complete.

And here one might, perhaps, cite as an example of how much of ‘the other little person’ he was in Lammie’s life, that the absence of the painting from the walls of his own room, where it might have been expected to hang, was neither noticed nor commented upon.

In comparison with these gifts and the effect they had on François and Hintza, his own presents to Nonnie appeared to him rather feeble. All he could do was to enlist the help of !#grave;Bamuthi’s oldest daughter, who was the greatest expert not only at Hunter’s Drift but at Osebeni, in the making of colourful necklets of beads. Like the girls of her clan, she made a different one at each turn of the moon, as if in obedience to the same instinct which makes Europeans give each month its own precious stone. These beads were dedicated to their ideal of man and were the most precious form of jewellery in their culture. They contained, not in words but in the symbolism of the design itself, different nuances of the love and admiration natural between young men and women. For this reason, cruder forms of the art were sold in the cities of the land under the name of Bantu ‘love letters’. Not only François, but everybody else at Hunter’s Drift would have scorned so crude and simple a label, for the patterns were far older than any letter of any alphabet or Chinese character, issuing sheer and immediate from the depths of life where dreams and their meaning are fashioned.

François would have had to be in Europe, in the convent in which Nonnie was being educated while Sir James was engaged on affairs of state, to see the expression on her face in order to know that he could not have sent her anything more to her liking. That being impossible, he could never believe altogether that her profuse words of gratitude in the letters that followed the gift could be more than an over-generous acknowledgement of such humble offerings.

Yet through these contacts with Nonnie, and an increasingly precise feeling that Xhabbo would at any moment now reappear in his life, François somehow got through the long months, until some weeks after the arrival and departure of the ‘crows of God’ (as the priests had now become in Ousie-Johanna’s vocabulary), there came a letter from Nonnie announcing that Sir James’s mission was accomplished. Within a week or two they would all be on their way back to Hunter’s Drift and Silverton-Hill ‘at the double’.

The twenty-four hours before their arrival at Hunter’s Drift, almost eighteen months to the day after that early-morning warning from Hintza which had taken François out on his perilous journey to the lion trap, were some of the most unpleasant he had ever experienced. If only he could have put a mental finger on the cause for the unpleasantness and found some name, sentence or even paragraph to describe it, he would have felt more able to cope. But it was nothing tangible, just an incredibly sullen, depressive atmosphere, a kind of cosmic unease. It not only affected everyone like the coming of a thunderstorm, but, of course, the birds down by the gleaming, remorselessly onflowing Amanzim-tetse that, according to the Matabele, were always the first to know, now sang as if a prelude to a play in the sombre cycle of the Eumenides. It was this period of twenty-four hours which produced perhaps the most singular omen of all.

Mtunywa (Messenger) had a daughter called Langazana (Miss Earnest-Longing), who was regarded by everyone as simple-minded and, as such, possessed close bonds with natural things, particularly the birds of the bush. She appeared at the milking sheds, in the evening which began this last twenty-four hours, screaming and so distressed that all the men stopped milking and crowded round her in case they were compelled, as they were when people’s souls threatened to leave their bodies, to enclose her in a healing circle, pressing tightly against her to dance her fleeing spirit back into her body. But it soon became clear that this girl was not concerned about herself. She was screaming because she had a message of urgent impact for them all.

Sobbing, she said that all afternoon, wherever she had gone in the bush to gather dry wood for the evening fires, a black crow (which everyone knew was an omen of sorrow) had pursued her. It had insisted on sitting on a branch of a tree directly in her path, looking at her, and whenever she tried to ignore it, it had screamed at her, ‘
Mamah-Weh!
’. (My mother, oh!). She had ordered the crow over and over again to go away but it had refused and pursued her with this sound until just twenty minutes before sunset. The crow then had suddenly started to upbraid her in an almost human voice, screaming, ‘It’s not me, it’s you who should go away. All, all go away for if you stay in this place much longer you will all be killed.’

There were many sources of natural intelligence which even the omen-minded men at Hunter’s Drift doubted. But they knew this girl to be too simple-minded ever to say or do anything which she did not absolutely believe. Indeed, such a state to them was in some sort a gift of grace, and so altogether they took Langazana so seriously that !#grave;Bamuthi himself set about calming her. He thanked her and promised her that he would call a council the next day to choose someone to go to uLangalibalela himself to interpret the omen for them. By that time, of course, it was so dark that even so portentous a crow would be in its nest and not there to suggest (as it may well have done, considering the urgency of the message), that when a messenger came back with uLangalibalela’s interpretation of its intelligence, it could well be too late.

This omen alone was the nearest thing to a fact in François’s possession to help him account for the extraordinary night of apprehension through which he slept fitfully, with Hintza whimpering as if in a succession of nightmares by his side. Again it was the only fact available to explain the feeling of unease and the brooding silence which descended on the little community the next day and which affected everybody from Ousie-Johanna and Lammie to the young boys making cattle of clay by the irrigation ditch at the far end of the garden.