1972 - A Story Like the Wind (26 page)

Even more emphatically, he repeated, ‘Never you mind, Uncle. I think I know what to do to stop Ouwa from dying. I shall give those doctors in the cities one more chance. If they can still give no name to Ouwa’s illness when both you and I sitting here know he is dying, I shall think of something to do myself.’

‘But what on earth can you do, Little Cousin? Tell me and I’ll do what I can to help.’ Old Mopani was touched by what he took as a resolve doomed to failure.

‘Please, Uncle. Just let’s wait and see what the new doctors say,’ François countered evasively. ‘I promise I’ll come to you when I feel I need help.’

Mopani was far too wise and too fond of François to force an answer out of him when he was so obviously reluctant to give him one. So he wisely left it at that, thinking of one of his own favourite hunting maxims, ‘Never try to go ahead of your spoor. Many a man has died because he has not observed the discipline of the spoor to the end.’

It was, perhaps, just as well that he did so, because had he continued to press François, he would have been unable to resist telling him. Firstly, he was aware that his response to Mopani’s question was prompted partly by his new secretive self, born on the day of Xhabbo’s strange coming into his life. Secondly, he knew that if any European could understand what prompted his reticence, Mopani surely was that person.

In fact, during all the three days Mopani stayed at Hunter’s Drift François was harassed by a sense of guilt over his refusal to take Mopani into his confidence. There were times when he was on the verge of discussing with Mopani the plan forming in his imagination, but always the pagan Matabele and Bushman aspects of his character rose up to throw a shadow of warning over the impulse and he would think over and over again of the Sindabele saying, ‘The partridge hatches the egg in secret alone.’

The most difficult moments of all came at night, after dinner, when Mopani, sitting in Ouwa’s chair at the head of the table, would produce the large leather-bound family Bible, its great brass clasps flashing, and just inside the cover that sprawling illustration of a green and yellow family tree. There, before the Genesis of man was inscribed the Genesis of the Joubert family in Africa, with all the names of the descendants of the original Pierre-Paul Joubert, who had fled with his family some three hundred years before from La Rochelle.

Mopani always read as he spoke, slowly and deliberately, since he was barely literate. He seemea to follow the words in François’s observant senses as he followed the spoor of an animal through the bush, with the result that there was little rhythm but great certainty in his reading.

For some reason, Mopani’s favourite parts of the Bible were the books of the prophecies, particularly the Book of Daniel. Indeed the very first night he was there, he insisted on reading from beginning to end, almost more François felt for his own benefit than François’s, Daniel’s account of his ordeal in the Babylonian lions’ den. With the sound of lions roaring beyond the river just then, it was remarkable how immediate that ancient story became. It was at moments like that, to the sound of sacred words read by a man so without falseness, that François’s conscience worried him most. There was something so utterly humble, simple and innocent about Mopani then that keeping anything from him, however good the reasons, seemed utterly wrong. All the many dear associations he had with Mopani would pour into his imagination like troops going into battle, to try and break down the entrenched resistance of his instincts against revealing himself there and then.

He would think, for instance, how patiently Mopani had taught him to read what no man could read in books; the hieroglyphic spoor, the writing in the Bible of nature as Mopani called it, of all the animals of the great bushveld into which Hunter’s Drift was carved. He remembered how first thing every morning after a night in camp with Mopani, the hunter would take him by the hand and they would walk all round the camp to see exactly what animals had been near them at night; how here, for example, a hyena had come limping along to try and steal some of their meat; how there a lion had crouched low, only some seven yards away behind a bush, observing the camp to see what they were about; or how a leopard had advanced and retreated, gone round to another flank of the bush, advanced and retreated again as it sought in vain for an opening through which it could pounce to snatch first Nandi or !#grave;Swayo and later Hintza as well. In this way at first light, as if he were a teacher in the kindergarten, Mopani had patiently taught Fran-fois all the marks that animals could possibly make on the earth; more, the significance of their timing, the meaning of their spoor and on many occasions the warning implicit in, them of danger in the day ahead.

He remembered Mopani teaching him how to shoot and telling him that shooting was not a matter of the will but a kind of two-way traffic between target and rifleman and that if one wanted to shoot accurately without hurt or unnecessary pain to animals, one must never force one’s shot by pulling at the trigger with one’s finger. Instead one had to keep the gun aimed truly on the target, until the target filled not only all one’s eyes but activated one’s imagination, until one’s finger gradually tightened on the trigger, releasing the shot only when target and rifleman were one. Mopani would talk almost as if shooting for him were allegorical, and the rifle the contemporary version of the symbol the sword once was in the mind of medieval man; the image of the spirit in its everlasting battle against falseness and unreality in life.

‘Remember, Little Cousin,’ he had often said, ‘a good hunter does not force so much as grow his shots.’

All this was sanctified for François in recollection of Mopani’s intense dislike of unnecessary killing and the scorn with which he spoke of the people from the cities who used their money to buy the right to shoot animals out of that strange, secretive lust for killing in civilized man which he once described as the ‘eighth deadly sin’. That, Mopani had often emphasized to him, was the reason why he himself had turned to preserving the life of the wild and to creating his immense sanctuary for game and plants in the bush.

It is not difficult, therefore, to imagine how uneasy François felt in such a presence which in many ways meant as much to him as Ouwa or Lammie. On top of it all he was bothered that he, who knew so much less about life than Mopani, should feel just a little superior when he heard him reading from the Bible, because he himself could have done it very much more easily and fluently.

He remembered, in particular, an occasion when Ouwa and Lammie had taken advantage of one of Mopani’s visits to ask him if he would witness their signatures to some legal document.

Mopani had taken up Ouwa’s pen as if it were some highly complex and advanced technological instrument, dipped it with a kind of fearful care into the inkwell, cleared his throat nervously several times as he aimed the pen almost like a spear about to give some wounded animal a
coup de grace
and, even after that, hesitated so much that Lammie had whispered to François, who was starting to fidget and, in the irreverent way of the very young boy he was at the time, finding it all so comical that he was in danger of sniggering, ‘Quiet Coiske, quiet. Can’t you see that Uncle Mopani is about to sign his name?’

François, abashed, of course obeyed and in a silence so great that one could hear the pen scratching the paper as if the nib were tearing holes in it, Mopani signed himself, ‘H. H. Theron’.

There then was the moment, still illuminated in his memory as by the light of the great oil lamp of the dining-room, when François first realized that Mopani was not the old hunter’s only name. He had others. And what could they be?

Even Lammie was unaware of what they were because when Mopani left the house, as he always did every night of his life whether in his own main camp, in a tent out in the blue or at Hunter’s Drift, to have a walk around in the dark to look at the sky and the night as if he knew that the whole of the world out there would Want him to wish it goodnight, as it obviously would bid him one in return, he heard Lammie whispering to Ouwa, ‘Look, he’s signed himself ‘H. H. Theron’. What on earth does the H.H. stand for?’

Ouwa had looked round at first to make certain that no one was listening. Luckily François knew from experience how quickly grownups could go silent on children. Everybody, including !#grave;Bamuthi and Ousie-Johanna was only too often reminding one another in his hearing that ‘little pitchers have big ears’, which in his view was one of the most humiliating proverbs ever invented by insensitive adults. So he had instinctively looked away with an expression of almost histrionic indifference, but with his ears bigger than they had ever been.

Listening obliquely but intently, he heard Ouwa say, ‘I will tell you but you must promise never to speak of it to a living soul. I only discovered it in the war in Ethiopia when as you know I was one of the scouts under his command. We’d been lying in our shelters for some days. We couldn’t move because the rain was pouring down on us so heavily and the misery and inaction of it all had thrown us all back deep into ourselves. Mopani was lying beside me and we were sharing our blankets because it was so cold at that height in the middle of the night, and he suddenly said to me, ‘Pierre-Paul, you are an educated man. I wonder if you can help me if I ask you something that has bothered me for years. Only you must promise you will never tell a soul what I am about to ask. I have two names. They are names that have always been given to the eldest sons of my family. I have some idea what the first name is about but the second one has always puzzled me. I have no idea where it comes from, I have always been happy to let people call me nothing but Mopani. I should be happy to die as Mopani but you know, those two damned names nibble like field mice at my mind in the night, and perhaps you can help me get rid of the nuisance for good.’ Of course I promised, and I give you two guesses as to what the names are.’

Lammie had thought and thought and guessed and guessed, her large brown eyes lovelier than ever with wonder and curiosity, and her abundant hair shining like strands of the soft light itself of that old oil lamp hanging from the ceiling. She had tried all sorts of combinations of names but in the end had had to admit defeat.

‘Well,’ Ouwa had said, ‘believe it or not, but he was christened Hercules Hyppolyte Theron. The Hercules, Mopani admitted to me, he might just be able to take but when I told him who and what the original Hyppolyte was in Greek legends, he groaned with embarrassment. In the end he told me with a fierceness you wouldn’t have thought him capable of, ‘Much as I like you Pierre-Paul, I warn you I’ll murder you if ever you tell a soul I’ve been called after such a fellow, or my name is not Mopani.’ And several times before falling asleep I heard him muttering to himself, ‘What a terrible thing to do to a defence less child, giving it names like those. Thank God for Mopani!’’

François, sensitive as he himself was on the subject of names as one has observed, felt immediate sympathy for Mopani, but not so Lammie and Ouwa’. They had not laughed outright, it is true, because they were far too fond of the old hunter but they had stood there silent, a kind of Mona Lisa smile on their faces—the sort of all-knowing, all-foreseeing expression which came to them when they shared not just a secret source of amusement but were at one in the esotericism of-an entire age. It was something François found rather maddening because it shut him out so subtly from the inner world of his parents.

Yet even that was not the end of the matter for Lammie. She soon asked the inevitable, ‘But how come the ‘Mopani’?’

Ouwa had given the appropriate explanation by telling Lammie at some length the story of Mopani’s father, the prototype of the great hunter who figures so largely in the stories of John Buchan. Mopani’s father had earned his name up and down the length of the great Hunter’s Road and along its many branches right into the heart of Africa. Apparently he was called Mopani because, for all Africans, the mopani tree stood for all that was indestructible if not immortal in life. Once the mopani tree was fully grown it seemed never to grow older. Above all it was always green. Ouwa emphasized, that in all the many droughts he had lived through, he had never seen the butterfly-shaped leaves of the mopani tree wither or die.

He himself remembered the most terrible of all droughts when the earth had gone bald and black because all the grass and shrub appeared to have been burnt up by the sun. At midday, for months, one had seen under a sky of the most ruthless blue and completely without compassion of cloud, nothing but wave upon wave of the flames of heat breaking over it like the swell of some Ancient Mariner’s quick-silver sea. Yet even then Ouwa could remember arriving on the edge of some bush and seeing, as something reflected in a distorting mirror, the mopani trees standing and holding their parasols of trembling green leaves on barley-sugar stems over the parched and dying earth. It was not surprising therefore that in the imagination of Africans the mopani tree was a striking testimony of the invincibility of the processes of growth in nature. Mopani’s father was so called because he personified all these things, for Africans everywhere.

Ouwa had known him as a little boy. He clearly recollected how when he died he seemed no older than when he had first, appeared in Ouwa’s life. He still remembered the unbelief everywhere in Africa when the news of the first Mopani’s death started being whispered around in the bush. By that time he was known as Great Mopani because on the death of his wife way down south, he had reappeared in the interior with a son aged only fourteen. The son already showed so many qualities of the father that he had immediately become Little Mopani. When Great Mopani died the ‘little’ was dropped from the son’s name and he become just Mopani, which Ouwa thought implied an even greater stature than that of the father, as if he were the only one of his kind left in the world. As Lammie had probably noticed, Mopani had the same striking capacity of his father for looking ageless, so that no one knew exactly how old he was.