1972 - A Story Like the Wind (38 page)

Mopani showed neither his disappointment nor anxiety that François should have come out of the night still apparently as impervious as ever to his presence. He merely nodded and replied quietly, ‘You do just that, Coiske, but I would try to be back for breakfast if I were you.’

Had François not been so obsessed with the thought of Xhabbo and the need to identify his sorrow with Xhabbo’s, he may have thought Mopani’s ‘Coiske’ at that time somewhat unusual. Except on rare occasions he had always been ‘Little Cousin’, ‘Little old Cousin’ or, in moments of stress when Mopani was instinctively appealing to his most mature young self, just ‘Cousin’. Nor did he notice that the Coiske on this occasion was uttered in a new tone and could not know, as perhaps even Mopani did not just then, that all his old ways of addressing François had been abolished overnight, and that henceforth François would always be Coiske to him as he had always been to Larnmie. It was almost as if by using this most intimate family endearment, Mopani in his own subtle, intuitive way was demonstrating that he would be there always to help fill the new vacancy in François’s life. But François uttered a curt Thank you’ and went straight into the kitchen, where Ousie-Johanna, !#grave;Bamuthi and Messenger were in some kind of consultation.

They greeted François effusively. They too wanted François to join them, eager to prove in their own warm, immediate ways how deeply they felt for him and shared his grief. But whatever their vivid instincts might have brought forth was stillborn. François could hardly find it in him to return their greetings properly, not because he meant to be off-hand but because he shied away from the effect any demonstration of sympathy from people he loved so much might have on his overstrained emotions.

Indeed, so abrupt did his manner appear that Ousie-Johanna, for all her understanding of his plight, was instantly hurt. François heard her saying loudly as he vanished through the outside door: ‘I know he must be much more upset than we are, but why should he treat us, who want to help him, as if we do not exist?’

Just as his feet found the path into the immense orchard, the multitudes of trees almost brought to their knees with the weight of new fruit and their ardent leaves anointed with fresh morning light, glistening and trembling already under the impact of another urgent, blue day, he heard !#grave;Bamuthi’s reply. In a deep, sonorous voice he said, ‘I give you a little fountain choked with mud.’

François was not surprised to hear Ousie-Johanna begin to cry because she knew the answer to this just as well as François did. The answer to the riddle was, of course, ‘The heart of a fatherless child’.

Such understanding from !#grave;Bamuthi filled François with remorse, and he might well have rushed back to make amends, were he not now caught up in the necessity of keeping secret the track to Xhabbo’s cave. That could only be done by going there before the great enterprise of Hunter’s Drift was fully awake, and its many herdsmen and labourers setting out for the duties of the day. This necessity compelled him to press on to the cave as fast as he could. Soon, unobserved, he was inside the cave for the first time since the day after Xhabbo’s departure.

It was extraordinary how it looked as if not even time had stood still for it, but as if the laws of time and change somehow did not and could never apply. It gave the impression of continuity which his senses, reeling under the demonstration they had just received of man’s brief, brittle and insecure lot on earth, clutched at firmly for support.

The imprint of Xhabbo’s hand and arm in the gesture of farewell and the sign of the cross Xhabbo had drawn in the sand, were still there, clear as ever. The paintings on the walls of Mantis, and all the mystic animals which had accompanied the Bushmen on their way from the first light of life on earth, looked down even more vividly than before on him and Hintza. He squatted beside Xhabbo’s sign and looked intently around the cave, illuminated by those yellow shafts of sunlight striking so firmly and precisely at the floor that they stood quivering like the shafts of spears plunged deep into the sand.

The feeling that he was in a naturally sacred place was stronger than ever. As a result, a fact that had eluded him before now struck him with force; the cave seemed to be respected even by the animals, birds and insects of the teeming bush. Except for that one memorable visit by the Praying Mantis, there was no indication that any creatures, not even the ubiquitous bats who disliked the sunlight, or the lynxes who normally loved to lurk in such places, appeared ever to have entered the cave.

All this added greatly to François’s feeling of awe. Yet it was awe in a positive sense, since out of it flowed reassurance to join his mood of bereavement. He had no words for expressing his purpose in being there as Xhabbo most certainly would have had. He had come without any preconceived idea of how he would ‘report’ Ouwa’s death to the cave. All he could do was to sit still, Hintza stretched out beside him, and let the full tide of sadness, as he put it to himself, ‘come at him from all directions’. His feelings, uncensored and raw, had to serve as Ouwa’s end-of-term report in this examination room of time, as the cave and the painted invigilators on its walls were for Xhabbo and his people.

The process of just experiencing his own inner feelings in silence, together with the sense of sharing them with countless generations of vanished men, seemed to lighten him within, until finally he was at one with the place. Indeed in the end the feeling of belonging became so intense that it produced a fixed idea that he was charged in Xhabbo’s absence to be the cave’s custodian. He would visit it regularly in future, not only to commune with it but also to see that it was always tidy and kept ready, so that no matter at what hour of the day or night Xhabbo returned (as he had promised François he would), he would find fresh food and water waiting for him.

This direction of his imagination into the future enabled François to leave the cave in a far less inward-looking mood than the one in which he had entered it. Accordingly he went back to the house sufficiently emancipated from himself to give a thought to what Ousie-Johanna and !#grave;Bamuthi and the others, not to mention Mopani, might be feeling. He was convinced also that he should, without delay, try to set about playing his normal part in the life of Hunter’s Drift.

His first chance came at the milking sheds where !#grave;Bamuthi was just saying good-bye to uLangalibalela’s messengers. Greeting the messengers politely, François asked !#grave;Bamuthi if he could have a word with him alone, and when out of earshot asked, ‘Old Father, you agree don’t you, that it was not uLangalibalela’s fault that my father died? It’s because I went to him too late. Don’t you think, therefore, that we should insist that he should accept Night and Day as a token that we know he did all he could for us? And, Old Father, I’ve not thanked you enough myself for taking me there and for all the trouble you undertook to help me. So I thank you now.’

‘The lent knife will return with three,’

!#grave;Bamuthi placed his hand on François!s shoulder as he spoke, showing how much he approved of what he had said.

He approved so much, indeed, that he would have called for Little Finger to accompany Night and Day, had not François prevented him. This, to François, seemed unfair. It was not !#grave;Bamuthi’s fault that they had not gone to uLangalibalela earlier. Had !#grave;Bamuthi and Ousie-Johanna had their way, François would have gone at least a year earlier. It felt right that the penance for this grave error of omission should be his and his alone.

So within a few moments, Night and Day, bewildered by all this apparently senseless marching to and fro on long winding tracks through the singing bush between one great kraal and another, yet placid in temperament from her happy childhood at Hunter’s Drift, was able to take it all with a young heifer’s equivalent of a shrug of elegant shoulders. She followed uLangalibalela’s messengers into the bush with something languid in her carriage, which seems to be a natural prerogative of the feminine in life that knows itself to be beautiful. She looked round only once as if expecting François and Hintza to be following as before. François thought then that something more than astonishment had come to those large, purple eyes, behind their long Hollywood lashes. Was not there a hint in them that she knew herself to have been finally abandoned? Now, on his way to Mopani at home, he could not help feeling something of a traitor.

He forced himself to eat his breakfast with enough appreciation to bring comfort to Ousie-Johanna. But soon after taking his chair at the table beside the hunter, he found himself ready to ask Mopani, ‘Uncle, how did Ouwa die?’

Mopani did not answer immediately. He had from the, moment Lammie telephoned to him, been assailed by misgivings. These were centred not so much on the obvious impact of Ouwa’s death on François’s life, as the blow that he feared it would give to the boy’s self-confidence. He kept on remembering François’s ringing declaration that he would not allow Ouwa to die. There had been nothing but bright determination and certainty in François’s pronouncement. Mopani knew, therefore, that Ouwa’s death would inflict on François the double burden of a momentous bereavement and also of a sense of intense personal failure. His fears were all the keener when he considered François’s singular upbringing. François was not just an only child, but the role of the father in his life was greater, due to their isolation at Hunter’s Drift than it would have been if their relationship had been contained within those of a larger community. Mopani’s anxieties therefore were acute. His own favourite maxim, ‘Never go ahead of the spoor; always maintain the discipline of the spoor’, was, at the moment, difficult to follow, although he knew how unwise it was of the mind and heart of man to move ahead of their evidence and experience. Watch your spoor, he had often exhorted François, and the horizon will watch itself. And yet, there he was at breakfast wondering whether François would be able to take up the challenge so startlingly thrust at him? But this direct question, uttered completely without evasion, brought him new hope.

His long experience of life had taught him that one had never done with injury, until the moment came when one could put it into words and speak openly about it. That was the only sign in his experience, that a human being had shed the hurt as a snake sheds its dead skin and that his ptrsonality was ready for the future. The emotion produced in him by this simple direct question, therefore, was great. All his faith and love of the boy seemed to be vindicated.

The result was that emotion made him begin rather badly to recite the account of Ouwa’s death that Lammie had given him. on the telephone. He stressed, as Lammie had stressed to him, that Ouwa’s death had come unexpectedly both to her and the doctors. She had repeated to Mopani, as if dazed, still almost unbelieving of the event, that she had left the specialist feeling hopeful. He had assured her that there was nothing organically wrong with Ouwa. He promised her that if Ouwa were brought into his private hospital he would be able to establish to the satisfaction of all that Ouwa was only suffering from physical exhaustion which, with the appropriate tonics he would prescribe and a long change of air and climate on that cool Atlantic coast of the Cape of Good Hope, would soon enough be set right. There was no inkling in what she told Mopani that either she or the specialist had any realization that the kind of change which Ouwa needed, could not be found anywhere in the physical world.

Yet François was convinced that Ouwa had suspected it all along. He remembered the way Ouwa had said goodbye to the sun that last afternoon at Hunter’s Drift. His
Langa valela
had carried within it a tone of the ultimate farewell. Was it so surprising, therefore, that in the night, quite alone, Ouwa’s ignored spirit had decided that it was time ‘to come in out of the open, home’, as uLangalibalela had put it so accurately in his message to François and !#grave;Bamuthi. That morning, when Lammie went to call him with a glass of hot milk, she found that he had died quietly in his sleep.

Of course, as Mopani said, all men knew that they had to die. Yet, when it struck at anyone in their immediate vicinity of heart and mind, all men and women were none the less unfailingly surprised. It was unnecessary for him to emphasize Lammie’s surprise over her husband’s death, for François was already drawing a certain melancholy comfort from this aspect of her account. It fitted in with what he imagined had happened within the heart and mind of Ouwa. It also seemed to confirm uLangalibalela’s interpretation that the causes of Ouwa’s death had never been physical. This all helped to push the event into the wake of time behind him, and reinforced the resolution with which he had come out of his sleep; to turn his own back on the ‘I world which had turned its back on Ouwa. Also, in the forefront of his mind was concern over what Lammie now would do?

This direct question produced the answer. Mopani said Lammie had given him an elaborate message for François. She had asked Mopani to put three alternatives to him. The first was that François should hasten south to join her. Ouwa had never given up his nationality in the south, so legally his will would have to be proved there and a great many affairs settled there in consequence. As his only executor she would have a great deal of work ahead of her. She would do it as speedily as possible but it would take many weeks. She realized that it would be a great interruption of François’s self-study prescribed by Ouwa, yet he could either carry on his schooling with her, since she was technically qualified to take Ouwa’s place, or perhaps even go to a public school.

The second alternative was that François could stay on at Hunter’s Drift, carry on his studies as laid down for him by Ouwa and in general take his place at Hunter’s Drift, while she completed the settlement of the estate as fast as she could.

Finally, she could herself return to Hunter’s Drift for a while and go south again later to deal with Ouwa’s estate, but that would be both protracted and expensive. She stressed, of course, how much she longed for them to be together. Yet she also felt that Ouwa would have liked them both to behave as steadily and as sensibly about his death as they possibly could. Also it had to be remembered that however soon François came to her, he would not arrive in time for the funeral.