Embrace (74 page)

Very little game. Almost two hours of slow driving and nothing more than a couple of impala, a steenbok and a bataleur, high against the blue, adrift on thermals.

‘When we come this way again, maybe we could do St Lucia,’ he says. I answer that it would be nice. I tell him about the time when Mumdeman was in charge of us and we took Camelot down onto the beach, when Lena was dragged along the shore and almost run over by the Bedford. I tell him how she clung, like a dog holding onto a sack, wouldn’t let go, even when she was hopping along on the road’s gravel surface. Bok is in stitches, saying he’s never seen a kid, boy or girl, as tough as Lena. I think no, neither have I. Lena reminds me of Bennie, I say. Yes, she’s quite a tomboy, he muses. ‘Mumdeman never said a word, to me, anyway,’ Bok speaks as we drive up the winding pass to Hilltop, where Dad and Mumdeman were briefly stationed before going to Charters. Then along the white road that snakes south-west, up and down hillsides, through drifts, through the corridor towards Umfolozi’s entrance. Passing through the corridor between the reserves, he speaks about the continued struggle to get the two reserves connected. At the sight of dust from an approachingvehicle, our hands go automatically to the window handles. Allow the car to pass, wait for the dust to settle and then wind down again, letting the breeze spill in. Where will these people from the corridor be resettled, I ask. No one ever lived here, he says. I remember huts in the corridor, definitely, I counter, from the days Bokkie and I drove along here to collect the girls from school, huts, kraals, women balancing inkathas on their heads, I’m sure. No, he answers, no record of people ever having habitated this area. So, it’s not the same struggle here as it was to proclaim most of the other game reserves. There people had to be moved from their ancestral lands. To be resettled somewhere in what’s left of their Zululand, he says. Shakes his head and sighs. Through Nyalazi Gate and up towards Masinda camp. I wait for the sight of the Black Umfolozi, but he says no, don’t I remember it lies between Masinda and Mpila? No, I say, I’m sure it’s just around this corner, down this dip. I’m sure . . . Until we head up onto Masinda Hill and see the river, thick, brown, a python coiling its way southward to near Chaka’s Hunting Pits. Then were crossing the low-lying bridge with its little concrete towers. No more than blocks. Here Bok once let me stand to pose for coloured slides he took of me. I wish they had told me before I left the Berg that this was to be my birthday surprise. I would have brought my Kodak Instamatic. The riverbanks are lined with heavy green sycamore figs, deep swaying reeds. He stops on the middle of the concrete structure. The water hisses beneath us, white foamy whirlpools where it exits beneath my arm. The cry of a fish eagle, recalled, our eyes on the riverbank, the sky, no sign of them. A breeze sends a ripple through the reeds. Bok speaks about the floods, when he and a group were stranded in a cave for two days. I recall how, months after the flood, he had taken me to shoot with his revolver. He says he can’t remember it. I don’t believe him.

The river behind us, he turns left ignoring the No Entry sign at the junction to the rhino bomas. The place is deserted. He hoots, but no one emerges from the huts or from the little house where Len

Sawyer once lived. We get out and walk to the pens where the white rhino are kept. Here Shetani and the other two were tamed before he took them to America. He shows me which were their pens. The rhinos look up as we approach. One snorts, tosses her head from side to side. Len Sawyer kept two rhino calves in his house. They slept on his double bed with him before he got married and his wife put a stop to it. On this stretch of hard red soil, Lena, Bernice and I rode around on the back of the baby rhinoceroses, laughing, showing off to tourists and grown-ups, never imagining childhood could ever end.

At Mpila we go into the office. The receptionist tells us Willy Hancox is off for the weekend up at the wardens house but he asked her to phone the moment we arrived because Reynolds from Mkuzi called to say Bok was coming. When Willy arrives, he and Bok shake hands, calling each other by their Zulu names. ‘Ubejane!’ ‘Shaya Kabi!’ And then I recall that Jonas had a Zulu name for me, one I could not, even at that return, remember. They stand outside Willy’s van, smoking. I ask whether I may go down to the house. Willy says of course — the ranger who lives there is on patrol at Sontuli but his wife should be in. Bok says he’ll join me there in a minute. I leave them at the Parks Board truck.

Downhill, past Mr Watts’s shop, the path I must have walked a thousand times. Through the trees the beige water of the White Umfolozi becomes visible. Now the Watts’s house is no less than forty metres from ours, which I recognise only by the water tank close to my old bedroom. It seems as if everything beneath the endless ceiling of the sky has been compressed. A miniature of memory. Everything seems to shrink when you get older. Nothing is as big as when you were small. Mumdeman is getting smaller, not only because I m getting taller, but because she’s actually shrinking. The marula tree has been chopped down and the fence looks dilapidated. Bokkie’s old vegetable garden is there. More trees, bigger than I recall, more birdsounds. Wood-hoopoes and bulbuls. Dull brown warblers and pipits, families so closely resembling each other I never quite got to distinguish.

Hesitantly, wishing Bok were here to do it, I go and knock. A woman in a loose-fitting cotton dress opens the door.

‘Hello,’ she says, clearly surprised. And then with a smile: ‘Are you lost? The camp’s up there,’ and she points up the path I’ve come. The path I made with Chaka and Suz. Where once I lost a pot-handle. Where hornbills followed me.

‘No,’ I answer. ‘My name is Karl De Man and my father was a game ranger here. We were the first people who lived in this house.’

‘Oh, really? Well, come in, I suppose you’d like to look around.’ ‘Well, I just wanted to look at my mother’s garden, if you don’t mind.’

‘No, not at all, go ahead.’ She follows me out. Now I see that she’s pregnant. Her heavy belly moves from side to side. It looks as though she could split open at any moment.

‘I’ll just leave you to it, okay?’

‘That’s fine, thank you very much.’

‘Tell me, did you say De Man?’

‘Yes, my father is Ralph De Man. He was stationed here.’

‘Is he
the
Ralph De Man?’

‘What do you mean?’ I ask, smiling.

‘Quite a reputation,’ she says and walks back to the house. Suddenly I hate her.

I move around the side of the house. Sand-pit gone. Look down to the arm of the White Umfolozi, now just down the hill from the house: it had been so far, then. The hills hazed in the distance. The river’s water is a deep blue, reflecting the sky from here, again becoming the brown, beige and dull white where it bends, south and west. Right below me now, its green banks of figs and reeds were places I would never have been able to reach on my own before. Bokkie and I went there for picnics, sometimes taking our cousins and Aunt Siobhainand Uncle Michael. Bok’s hair short, and wet, like a waterbuck emerging from a pool. From my right, a lourie, crimson wings spread out as it swoops out of the branches and I stand still, watching its flight as it glides down the hill, disappearing up the hill, its call almost like a grinding. My eyes follow along the path I walked with Chaka and Suz to get down to the office and the donkey’s pen. And the krans where Lena and I saw the leopard. How had I almost forgotten? Now, since we’ve been back and I told Bok, the memory has come to seem important. A telephone pole, down the hillside, where I don’t recall one before. My eyes run from the pole along the wire to the house. There’s a phone inside. Hours upon hours in this veld, around this house, on these footpaths, the aloes and the rocks. The rock where I hammered in nails, building an infrastructure of game pens, bomas. I walk there, it is closer to the house. A milkweed’s hairy fruit — Bok-se-balle we called them — sway like Christmas decorations in the breeze. I don’t pop them now, not wanting the sticky latex on my hands, instead take the balls into my hand, feel the sensation of the hairs on my palms, the inflated skin like a gallbladder give slightly when I squeeze. Jacques.
Gompbocarpus
something or other. Above the rock the two aloes I remember, both with dry flower-pods. Must recently have flowered.

The crunch of Bok’s footsteps through the grass behind me.

,‘Lyk dit soos jy onthou?’
i <
A lot,’ I say. ‘Just the telephone pole wasn’t there. And these aloes have grown.’

I m going down to the office, are you coming along?’

‘No, I’ll stay.’

‘Willy Hancox invited us for a braai tonight.’

I look at the hill where the warden’s thatched house stands. ‘At the house?’

He answers yes as he makes his way down the footpath.

Did he say anything about Jonas?’ I call after him.

‘He’s way over at Okhuko. We won’t be able to see him. Maybe next time.’

‘Jonas called me by a Zulu name, Bok, can you remember what it was?’

‘Magangane . . . The naughty one.’ And suddenly it comes back, as though I’ve always been able to hear Jonas laugh as he speaks something to Boy and all I can understand is the name Magangane. ‘Magangane, ey!’ and the man’s head shaking out his laughter.

I want to tell Bok what the woman in the house said. Then decide not to, knowing that he will be somehow thrilled by something that nothing but angers me. He disappears behind shrubbery where I remember some warthog holes. I go down there. They have not been abandoned. Instead of following him down to the office where I used to meet him and the boys coming back from trail with the tourists, I head back up towards the house, cast my eyes at the garden. No more shrubs, not the yellow and purple alamandas Bokkie planted, no more kannas. How would O’Keeffe paint the view from here? One day I will. Title it simply. Something like:
View From Our House at Umfolozi.
Or:
Umfolozi View, October.
Or just:
Umfolozi.
And I sit on the rock beneath the aloes, my shadow tucked firmly beneath me where the heat of the stone burns through the cotton of my shorts. The hills above the river, smoky, growing fainter and fainter in the distance. One could do that by dabbing a half-dry white paintbrush across the detail. Closer to the river, the shrubbery of thorn trees and acacia looks like a thick layer of fresh green peppercorns, here and there becoming sparser, showing up the pink sand and yellow grass over which they grow. In the distance, where Black and White Umfolozi come together, Chaka’s Hunting Pits. A place of terror, slaughter, laughter and blood sport. Ivory for the English at Port Natal. Not an elephant left in this wilderness. And there’s Momfu, where they found an ancient wall and tools at the back of the cliffs, and behind the wall the skeleton of a young boy who had been walled up. The boy’s head was smashed in and then the wall was erected. Why had they killed him? What did he know that they wanted him not to tell? What did he have that they had to kill him to take it fromhim? Dry riverbanks with patches of grass and reeds. Zebra crossing the sand, even from here I can see their tails flicking. Is that a giraffe, there, behind that ochre and green spot, yes . . . The Umfolozi Valley swims before me as tears well in my eyes. I place my face into my arms, watch as tears drop to the rock beneath me, the blotches shrinking as they evaporate in the heat. I hear the birds, hundreds of them, sounds I have forgotten. I knew. I sit with a stick, drawing in the earth amongst the green patches on the rock.

Bok asks whether I’ve been crying. I say no. It’s the heat. Sweat in my eyes.

From Mpila we drive westward. See more rhino. Still no lion. The numbers have grown since we lived here. North-west. Bok says it’s a good time for me to start learning to drive. He stops the Alcamino. I ge,t out as he slides across. I walk around the front and get in behind the wheel.

‘Do you need the seat forward?’

‘I think I’m fine, Bok.’

The vehicle moves well, I’m doing well, battle occasionally to coordinate clutch, steering, gears.

‘Where did you learn to drive?’

‘Just from watching you and Bokkie.’

‘When I was your age I was already driving into Arusha.’

The road dips, declines south-westerly. The sun is in my eyes as I head for the Mphafa water-hole. Ahead in the road are three giraffe. I gear down and the motor idles while we watch. Then the bull at the back makes an odd jump, lifts his front legs and mounts the one with lighter markings in front of him. Also a bull. Younger. The back bull’s penis, long and thin and pink moves around as if searching. Now Bok snorts and leans over and honks the horn and says: ‘Stupid randy things.’ The animals move off the road and I look after them, wondering whether—

‘Let’s go,’ he says.

I slip the Alcamino into first gear and move off. Speed up, gear into second, third.

‘Were you with me that time we saw the lions mating near here?’ he asks. ‘You know, they carry on mating for weeks, with neither the male nor female hunting or eating . . .’ Again the road drops and I struggle to find the brake, tug at the gear lever. ‘You’re going to burn out the clutch. Brake, Karl. You’re ripping the gearbox apart, dammit!’ I stall the engine and the truck comes to a halt. I say I’ve had enough, I want to look out for game.

‘Het jy nou jou gat gewip?’

‘No, Bok. Of course not.’

Near sunset we leave the vehicle and walk towards the water-hole. Why Reynolds in Mkuzi had insisted we take a rifle to the sight of Mbanyana, I don’t know. Here, amidst the favourite terrain of lion, my father and I — without Chaka and Suz — are walking along a path. We step into a grassy knoll and then the water-hole is below us. Suddenly — my heart in my throat — impala jump in all directions — I relax — gracefully, ballerinas splitting, high, over bushes, in mid-air. Ahead of me Bok turns, smiles and nods at me. Zebra, bubbling somewhere downstream. The sandstone krans over which water sometimes runs, not now, boulders perched on top. When will they fall? Now, or a hundred thousand years from now? And what does it matter in the scheme of eternity? Eternity like a bird that comes once in a thousand years to rub its beak against these rocks. And when at last there is a little hollow, the depth of a one-cent coin in the ridge of the boulder, then eternity would only have begun. So the boulders at Mphafa, when they fall in a hundred thousand years time, would have been sitting here for no more than a fraction of a second in the history of the world, but still for a fraction longer than humankind roamed earth. An infinity longer than the time in which the little yellow brushes with pink stems of
Acacia burkei
were named that, or swartapiesdoring, or black monkey thorn or — Bok, what did