1972 - A Story Like the Wind (23 page)

‘You see,’ Xhabbo exclaimed in a taut whisper. ‘You see, Mantis answers yes.’

But that was not enough for François. ‘Ask him please, will all be well with Xhabbo on the journey?’ he whispered.

Mantis’s eyes flashed fiercely, as if the question implied doubt in his power to speak and know there, in a place which the questioner must know was peculiarly Mantis’s own. All the same the legs went up and down again, not once but three times, for emphasis.

François had many other questions he would have liked Xhabbo to ask but something about the mantis’s attitude, above all the last look of fire in his eyes, warned him that he had already presumed enough. Xhabbo obviously had come to the same conclusion because he took François by the arm, gently pulled him up and silently led him well away to the centre of the cave. The mantis, meanwhile, went on sitting there motionless, in the most contemplative of attitudes, his head turned sideways as if the faint sound of the afternoon breeze coming through the holes in the cave, to murmur as the memory of the sea murmurs low in a mother-of-pearl shell at one’s ear, was bringing him news of a future beyond sun and stars.

François had spent a great deal of the night thinking about Xhabbo’s best way back to the desert. He was also concerned about all those lion traps set in the game tracks around Hunter’s Drift. He had made a point of finding out from !#grave;Bamuthi exactly where they were all to be concealed in the night to come. So straight away he started by describing at great length to Xhabbo exactly where the traps were to be located.

That done, he helped Xhabbo to pack the haversack with the supplies he had brought, lifted it and adjusted the straps to Xhabbo’s shoulders, made him walk with it around the cave for some minutes until he was quite certain Xhabbo would be able to carry it in such a way that the tough webbing equipment would not rub and blister his shoulders. Xhabbo seemed delighted with the haversack. But what pleased him most, just then, were the leggings which François, after a final dressing of the wounded leg, strapped round both his calves. With those on, François explained, Xhabbo could go through thorn and scrub without fear of reopening the wound. So indifferent had Xhabbo shown himself to be to physical pain that François could not be certain whether he appreciated the leggings more for decorative than protective reasons. However, in the end, François was happy to feel that no Bushman had ever been better equipped for a long journey into the desert than Xhabbo. All the omens, despite all his own personal fears, seemed to indicate that Xhabbo would accomplish his journey safely. But by the minute he was becoming more and more aware of another and greater concern. Were he and Xhabbo ever to meet again?

Of such overwhelming importance was the question to him that he was almost afraid to ask it, and when the last practical details between them had been arranged there came a period of awkward silence so that they were both sitting, staring at each other as if hypnotized into speechlessness.

Suddenly Xhabbo broke the silence. ‘Xhabbo’s eyes are so full of Foot of the Day that Xhabbo does not know whether Foot of the Day is not utterly inside him rather than outside as he appears to be.’

François, strangely enough, had been experiencing something of the same feeling. Indeed he had the strange notion that there had never been a moment in his life when he had not known Xhabbo. He said, therefore, something to this effect to Xhabbo.

Xhabbo nodded his head and replied with the utmost seriousness, ‘Perhaps there was a time when Xhabbo and Foot of the Day were clouds together as they will be clouds together when the wind comes to remove the last prints of Foot of the Day, and Heel of the Night, and Xhabbo the hunter from the sand.’

Again old Koba’s teaching came to François’s rescue. She had always taught him that clouds and the spirit of human beings were interchangeable and went into one another’s making, before birth, during life and after death.

With this reassurance he felt free to ask the dread question, ‘Xhabbo, you will come back again one day, won’t you? You are not going for ever?’

Xhabbo answered emphatically: ‘Foot of the Day, Xhabbo will come back always to see you. It is not possible for Xhabbo to say how many moons will grow and die, how many leaves will fall and how much grass will grow green and utterly fade away again before he comes. But he knows from another tapping that came to him in the night, that he will come back to see you in this place of Mantis again.’

‘But Xhabbo!’ François exclaimed, as a new anxiety gripped him. ‘You’ll remember always about the danger of the traps, won’t you? And there’ll always be Matabele and others here, who won’t find your coming pleasant. You’ll have to come with such care that even I won’t know you have come unless you give me a sign. How can you give me a sign that the others won’t know, but that I’ll recognize at once?’

‘The tapping in the night told me of such a sign,’ said Xhabbo instantly. The tapping, now that you have met it, will tell you of Xhabbo’s coming. But also with the tapping Xhabbo will give you another sign. By day it will be the sign of the night plover calling. And to make certain that it is Xhabbo who is calling and not a real plover, he will call long and clearly, three times. But if it is night, Xhabbo will call once like a night plover, and then immediately bark like a jackal. Then he will call like a night plover again and bark like a jackal immediately afterwards, and do the same thing three times. By these sounds you will know that Xhabbo is on his way to Mantis’s place to wait for you.’

For once Xhabbo refused to stay behind when François was leaving and insisted on going out of the cave with him. François, who had never experienced such a tumult of emotion in his life before could not find it in his heart to say no. All the more so as, in that mood of recklessness with which he had started the day he had stayed in the cave until the last traces of sunlight had vanished from it and he knew that the light outside would be so dim that the chances of their being seen were slim. Indeed, they emerged from the cave to look west at a light of brilliant ruby, sparkling against the tall upstanding Brahmin dusk, the sunset like a sign of its high priestly caste, upon a darkening brow.

For François it was as if even the sunset was conspiring to make the parting as awful as it could be for him by producing one of its most beautiful valedictory images. Full to overflowing with emotion he gave Xhabbo the farewell that Koba had taught him, ‘Go in peace Xhabbo, go in peace.’

‘Stay in peace, Foot of the Day,’ Xhabbo answered, raising his hand, palm wide open to his shoulder, and added, trying to make both himself and François lighter at heart: ‘Stay in peace, while Xhabbo starts on the road back this night until our meeting here again in Mantis’s place.’

François quickly turned to go down the hill as fast as he could. But it was not fast enough to prevent him from realizing that he was not followed by Hintza, who, at that moment of bereavement so intense that it felt like an amputation, was more precious to him than ever. He looked back. Hintza, who must have recognized the meaning of François’s Bushman goodbye, was sitting down of his own accord in front of Xhabbo, holding out his paw and Xhabbo was taking it in both his hands and fondling it. Although the light was fading rapidly and François could not be certain that he was seeing accurately, he believed that Xhabbo, in the manner of all Bushmen who are perhaps the most natural people the world has ever seen, and so without inhibitions of any kind, was near to tears himself.

Too upset by the sight, François looked away and saw, right on the top of the cave, rigid as a glowing bronze statue of itself, the little klipspringer. It was taking no notice of any of them but was just looking steadily with infinite calm into the heart of the dying day. At that very moment, from the bush on the other side of the river, the great titian-haired old lion who ruled over a valley of its own over there, let out one of its most imperative roars, just to show the night his contempt of it. Yet the little klipspringer took no notice of the sound, as if it wanted to indicate to François by his pose that he knew that all possible manner of things, no matter how dark the coming night, would be well for them all. And that, François somehow knew, was sign enough and that he no longer had cause to delay his going.

Fast as they went, it was quite dark when he arrived at the kitchen door. He found Ousie-Johanna, !#grave;Bamuthi and five of the herdsmen armed with shields and assegai, consulting whether they should set out to look for him. Indeed, !#grave;Bamuthi must have been just about as worried as he had ever been because seldom had he spoken to François with such anger. ‘Little Feather,’ he observed with dignified scorn, ‘for days now your friends on the river bank have called you to join in the washing of the horns with them as you have always done. You have not come. For days now, it has come to this that we have had to leave undone the things that we should have been doing in order to be ready to go out into the dark and look for you. It is not right. You are not a dog of the wind [the Sindabele way of describing someone who is homeless]. You are not…’

He got no further. Suddenly it was all too much for François and despite all his desire to hold himself like a grown-up and not appear weak in front of people who admire stoicism as much as these people did, he could only murmur, ‘How do you expect me not to feel a dog of the wind when my father and mother have left me?’

He knew that the answer was prompted in part by his new, cunning self born out of the need to deceive. Yet there was enough truth in it to make him sit down there and then on the edge of the kitchen step and burst into tears.

!#grave;Bamuthi and the others, like all Matabele, had a horror of making young people cry. Indeed they felt guilty even if they saw a small child in tears and had accordingly developed care of children to such a fine art that François had hardly ever heard a Matabele baby cry. He at once felt guilty of having failed in a fundamental of the traditions which he, !#grave;Bamuthi, was especially charged to uphold as the head of his people at Hunter’s Drift.

Distressed and contrite, he immediately went up to François and took his hand in his own. In a voice unusually moved, because it was deep and heavy and sure with tenderness, not light and trembling and soft as a woman’s would have been in the same predicament, he said, ‘Little Feather, I spoke as I did only because I feared for you and because I have been left to be a father to you. Look, come back with me to my kraal and eat with me and play games with your brothers who have been calling for you in vain all these long days.’

Ousie-Johanna, whose tender heart was as upset as !#grave;Bamuthi’s and from which all desire to scold had vanished at the first sign of François’s tears, was about to protest because she had already cooked François one of her best meals, but the quick, observant !#grave;Bamuthi forestalled her to plead, ‘And you, Old Mother, will you not please come as well and tell the children some of those stories that only you can tell and that they have hungered for all these months?’

François warmed to the prospect, again with that odd sort of duplicity which the secret and special needs of Xhabbo had inflicted on him, since he knew that not only would a meal and conversation at the Matabele kraals help him as much as anything to enjoy himself on such a sad night; but also that the celebration would ensure that nobody in the kraals would be prowling in the night to notice any signs that might betray Xhabbo’s departure from the cave and his movements through the bush.

As a result François spent a less distressing evening than he would have thought possible during the day, particularly as besides the story-telling, at which Ousie-Johanna excelled, they played a game of riddle-di-mee that forced François’s mind out of itself. It mattered less than ever to him that the Matabele boys and girls of his own age were far better at the game than he was. All he cared about was that they should go on playing and make so much noise that no one could hear the sounds of the night outside.

In fact the whole evening was so important to him that he never forgot the riddles put to them all that night. There was, for instance, !#grave;Bamuthi’s: ‘What is it that always stands and never sits down?’

François could not think for the life of him what !#grave;Bamuthi was after but one of !#grave;Bamuthi’s smallest young daughters immediately screamed in a voice of silver: ‘Old Father, what a stupid riddle! Of course it’s a tree!’

And !#grave;Bamuthi had to join in the laughter raised by the whole hut against him, since he was old enough after all to have known of something more intelligent. Now a far more difficult one followed immediately from his eldest son whose voice was just breaking, and who seemed to speak on two different levels of sound simultaneously, causing his sisters to snigger slyly behind their hands. ‘Riddle-di, Riddle-di-mee, I give you a billy goat who grazes with a herd of white goats. Although the goats move about a great deal they manage to munch in the same place.’

That caused a long silence. By the light of the fire in the centre of the hut, François could see one pair of large, glittering black eyes look in vain to another for guidance and in the end !#grave;Bamuthi had to supply the answer, restoring some of his lost honour by saying, ‘Surely it can only be the tongue and the teeth.’

Another riddle which caused a great deal of mind searching was, ‘There are things in the world that fall from the tops qf mountains without breaking themselves. What can they be?’

The answer, of course, was waterfalls, as they all should have known, since they lived so near to the greatest waterfall on earth, The Smoke that Thunders.

One that François liked best came from !#grave;Bamuthi’s eldest daughter, who asked shyly, ‘What is it that no one can see but goes in and out, round and about, hither and thither, all over the earth, making the dead alive and the living awake?’ The answer, of course, was the wind.

Even Ousie-Johanna was to show a surprising inventiveness and produce a riddle which certainly could not have come out of any Bantu tradition and was as
avant-garde
as any riddle in the bush could be. ‘Can any of you tell me who is that quiet, patient, lovable little fellow who dresses so warmly during the day but is left bare during the coldest of nights?’