Rage (46 page)

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Authors: Wilbur Smith

BOOK: Rage
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A
week later Tara telephoned Centaine at Rhodes Hill and was surprised by the clarity of the connection. She spoke to each of the children in turn. Sean was monosyllabic and seemed relieved to surrender the telephone to Garry, who was solemn and pedantic, in his first year at business school. It was like talking to a little old man, and Garry's single topic of original news was the fact that his father had at last allowed him to start work part-time, as an office boy at Courtney Mining and Finance. ‘Pater is paying me two pounds ten shillings a day,' he announced proudly. ‘And soon I am to have my own office with my name on the door.'
When his turn came to speak to her, Michael read her a poem of his own, about the sea and the gulls. It was really very good, so her enthusiasm was genuine. ‘I love you so much,' he whispered. ‘Please come home soon.'
Isabella was petulant. ‘What present are you going to bring me?' she demanded. ‘Daddy bought me a gold locket with a real diamond—' and Tara was guiltily relieved when her daughter passed the telephone back to Centaine.
‘Don't worry about Bella,' Centaine soothed her. ‘We've had a little confrontation and mademoiselle's feathers are a wee bit ruffled.'
‘I want to buy a coming-home present for Shasa,' Tara told her. ‘I have found the most gorgeous medieval altar that has been converted into a chest. I thought it would be just perfect for his cabinet office at the House. Won't you measure the length of the wall on the right of his desk, under the Pierneef paintings – I want to be certain it will fit in there?'
Centaine sounded a little puzzled. It was unusual for Tara to show any interest in antique furniture. ‘Of course I will measure it for you,' she agreed dubiously. ‘But remember Shasa has very conservative tastes – I wouldn't choose anything too – ah …' She hesitated delicately, not wanting to denigrate her daughter-in-law's taste. ‘Too obvious or flamboyant.'
‘I'll phone you tomorrow evening.' Tara did not acknowledge the advice. ‘You can read me the measurements then.'
Two days later Moses accompanied her when she returned to the antique dealer in Kensington High Street. Together they made meticulous measurements of both the exterior and interior of the altar. It was truly a splendid piece of work. The lid was inlaid with mosaic of semi-precious stones while effigies of the apostles guarded the four corners. They were carved in ivory and rare woods and decorated with gold leaf. The panels depicted scenes of
Christ's agony, from the scourging to the crucifixion. Only after careful examination did Moses nod with satisfaction.
‘Yes, it will do very well.' Tara gave the dealer a bank draft for six thousand pounds.
‘Price is Shasa's yardstick of artistic value,' she explained to Moses while they waited for his friends to come and collect the piece. ‘At six thousand pounds he won't be able to refuse to have it in his office.'
The dealer was reluctant to hand the chest over to the three young black men who arrived in an old van in response to Moses' summons.
‘It is a very fragile piece of craftsmanship,' he protested. ‘I would feel a lot happier if you entrusted the packing and shipping to a firm of experts. I can recommend—'
‘Please don't worry,' Tara reassured him. ‘I accept full responsibility from now on.'
‘It's such a beautiful thing,' the dealer said. ‘I would simply curl up and die if it were even scratched.' He wrung his hands piteously as they carried it out and loaded it into the back of the van. A week later Tara flew back to Cape Town.
The day after the crate cleared Customs in Cape Town docks, Tara held a small, but select, surprise party in Shasa's cabinet office to present him with her gift. The Prime Minister was unable to attend, but three cabinet ministers came and with Blaine and Centaine and a dozen others crowded into Shasa's suite to drink Bollinger champagne and admire the gift.
Tara had removed the rosewood Georgian sofa table that had previously stood against the panelled wall, and replaced it with the chest. Shasa had some idea of what was in store. Centaine had dropped a discreet hint, and of course the charge had appeared on his latest statement from Lloyds Bank.
‘Six thousand pounds!' Shasa had been appalled. ‘That's the price of a new Rolls.' What on earth was the damned
woman thinking of? It was ridiculous buying him extravagant gifts for which he paid himself; knowing Tara's tastes, he dreaded his first view of it.
It was covered by a Venetian lace cloth when Shasa entered his office, and he eyed it apprehensively as Tara said a few pretty words about how much she owed him, what a fine and generous husband and what a good father he was to her children.
Ceremoniously Tara lifted the lace cloth off the chest and there was an involuntary gasp of admiration from everyone in the room. The ivory figurines had mellowed to a soft buttery yellow and the gold leaf had the royal patina of age upon it. They crowded closer to examine it, and Shasa felt his unreasonable antipathy towards the gift cool swiftly. He would never have guessed that Tara could show such taste. Instead of the garish monstrosity he had expected, this was a truly great work of art, and if his instinct was correct, which it almost always was, it was also a first-class investment..
‘I do hope you like it?' Tara asked him with unusual timidity.
‘It's magnificent,' he told her heartily.
‘You don't think it should be under the window?'
‘I like it very well just where you put it,' he answered her, and then dropped his voice so nobody else could overhear. ‘Sometimes you surprise me, my dear. I'm truly very touched by your thoughtfulness.'
‘You too were kind and thoughtful to let me go to London,' she replied.
‘I could skip the meeting this afternoon and get home early this evening,' he suggested, glancing down at her bosom.
‘Oh, I wouldn't want you to do that,' she answered quickly, surprised by her own physical revulsion at the idea. ‘I am certain to be exhausted by this afternoon. It's such a strain—'
‘So our bargain still stands – to the letter?' he asked.
‘I think that it is wiser that way,' she told him. ‘Don't you?'
M
oses flew from London directly to Delhi, and had a series of friendly meetings with Indira Gandhi, the President of the Indian Congress Party. She gave Moses the warmest encouragement and promises of help and recognition.
At Bombay he went on board a Liberian-registered tramp steamer with a Polish captain. Moses signed on as a deck-hand for the voyage to Lourenço Marques in Portuguese Mozambique. The tramp called in at Victoria in the Seychelles Islands to discharge a cargo of rice and then sailed direct for Africa.
In the harbour of Lourenço Marques Moses said goodbye to the jovial Polish skipper and slipped ashore in the company of five members of the crew who were bound for the notorious red-light area of the seaport. His contact was waiting for him in a dingy night club. The man was a senior member of the underground freedom organization which was just beginning its armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule.
They ate the huge juicy Mozambique prawns for which the club was famous, and drank the tart green wine of Portugal while they discussed the advancement of the struggle and promised each other the support and assistance of comrades.
When they had eaten, the agent nodded to one of the bar girls and she came to the table and after a few minutes of arch conversation took Moses' hand and led him through the rear door of the bar to her room at the end of the yard.
The agent joined them there after a few minutes and while the girl kept watch at the door, to warn them of a
surprise raid by the colonial police, the man handed Moses the travel documents he had prepared for him, a small bundle of second-hand clothing, and sufficient escudos to see him across the border and as far as the Witwatersrand gold-mines.
The next afternoon Moses joined a group of a hundred or more labourers at the railway station. Mozambique was an important source of labour for the gold-mines, and the wages earned by her citizens made a large contribution to the economy. Authentically dressed and in possession of genuine papers, Moses was indistinguishable from any other in the shuffling line of workers and he went aboard the third-class railway coach without even a glance from the uninterested white Portuguese official.
They left the coast in the late afternoon, climbed out of the muggy tropical heat and entered the hilly forests of the lowveld to approach the border post of Komatipoort early the following morning. As the coach rumbled slowly over the low iron bridge, it seemed to Moses that they were crossing not a river but a great ocean. He was filled with a strange blend of dismay and joy, of dread and anticipation. He was coming home – and yet home was a prison for him and his people.
It was strange to hear Afrikaans spoken again, guttural and harsh, but made even more ugly to Moses' ear because it was the language of oppression. The officials here were not the indolent and slovenly Portuguese. Dauntingly brisk and efficient, they examined his papers with sharp eyes, and questioned him brusquely in that hated language. However, Moses had already masked himself in the protective veneer of the African. His face was expressionless and his eyes blank, just a black face among millions of black faces, and they passed him through.
Swart Hendrick did not recognize him when he slouched into the general dealer's, store in Drake's Farm township. He was dressed in ill-fitting hand-me-downs and wore an
old golfing cap pulled down over his eyes. Only when he straightened up to his full height and lifted the cap did Swart Hendrick start and exclaim in amazement, then seized his arm and, casting nervous glances over his shoulder, hustled his brother through into the little cubicle at the back of the store that he used as an office.
‘They are watching this place,' he whispered agitatedly – ‘Is your head full of fever, that you walk in here in plain daylight?' Only when they were safely in the locked office and he had recovered from the shock, did he embrace Moses. ‘A part of my heart has been missing, but is now restored.'
He shouted over the rhino-board partition wall of his office, ‘Raleigh, come here immediately, boy!' and his son came to peer in astonishment at his famous uncle and then kneel before him, lift one of Moses's feet and place it on his own head in the obeisance to a great chief. Smiling, Moses lifted him to his feet and embraced him, questioned him about his schooling and his studies and then let him respond to Swart Hendrick's order.
‘Go to your mother. Tell her to prepare food. A whole chicken and plenty of maize meal porridge, and a gallon of strong tea with plenty of sugar. Your uncle is hungry.'
They stayed locked in Swart Hendrick's office until late that night, for there was much to discuss. Swart Hendrick made a full report of all their business enterprises, the state of the secret mineworkers' union, the organization of their Buffaloes, and then gave him all the news of their family and close friends.
When at last they left the office, and crossed to Swart Hendrick's house, he took Moses' arm and led him to the small bedroom which was always ready for his visits, and as he opened the door, Victoria rose from the low bed on which she had been sitting patiently. She came to him and, as the child had done, prostrated herself in front of him and placed his foot upon her head.
‘You are my sun,' she whispered. ‘Since you went away I have been in darkness.'
‘I sent one of the Buffaloes to fetch her from the hospital,' Swart Hendrick explained.
‘You did the right thing.' Moses stooped and lifted the Zulu girl to her feet, and she hung her head shyly.
‘We will talk again in the morning.' Swart Hendrick closed the door quietly and Moses placed his forefinger under Vicky's chin and lifted it so he could look at her face.
She was even more beautiful than he remembered, an African madonna with a face like a dark moon. For a moment he thought of the woman he had left in London, and his senses cringed as he compared her humid white flesh, soft as putty, to this girl's glossy hide, firm and cool as polished onyx. His nostrils flared to her spicy African musk, so different from the other woman's thin sour odour which she tried to disguise with flowery perfumes. When Vicky looked up at him and smiled, the whites of her eyes and her perfect teeth were luminous and ivory bright in her lovely dark face.
When they had purged their first passion, they lay under the thick kaross of hyrax skins and talked the rest of the night away.
He listened to her boast of her exploits in his absence. She had marched to Pretoria with the other women to deliver a petition to the new Minister of Bantu Affairs, who had replaced Dr Verwoerd when he became Prime Minister.
The march had never reached the Union Buildings. The police had intercepted it, and arrested the organizers. She had spent three days and nights in prison, and she related her humiliations with such humour, giggling as she repeated the
Alice in Wonderland
exchanges between the magistrate and herself, that Moses chuckled with her. In the end, the charges of attending an unlawful assembly and incitement
to public violence had been dropped, and Vicky and the other women had been released.
‘But I am a battle-trained warrior now,' she laughed. ‘I have bloodied my spear, like the Zulus of old King Chaka.'
‘I am proud of you,' he told her. ‘But the true battle is only just beginning—' and he told her a small part of what lay ahead for all them, and in the yellow flickering light of the lantern, she watched his face avidly and her eyes shone.
Before they at last drifted off into sleep the false dawn was framing the single small wjndow, and Vicky murmured with her lips against his naked chest,
‘How long will you stay this time, my lord?'
‘Not as long as I wish I could.'
He stayed on three more days at Drake's Farm, and Vicky was with him every night.
Many visitors came when they heard that Moses Gama had returned and most of them were the fierce younger men of
Umkhonto we Sizwe
, the Spear of the Nation, the warriors eager for action.
Some of the older men of the Congress who came to talk with Moses left disturbed by what they had heard and even Swart Hendrick was worried. His brother had changed. He could not readily tell in what way he had changed, but the difference was there. Moses was more impatient and restless. The mundane details of business, and the day-to-day running of the Buffaloes and the trade union committees no longer seemed to hold his attention.
‘It is as though he has fastened his eyes upon a distant hilltop, and cannot see anything in between. He speaks only of strange men in distant lands and what do they think or say that concerns us here?' he grumbled to the twins' mother, his only real confidante. ‘He is scornful of the money we have made and saved, and says that after the revolution money will have no value. That everything will belong to the people—' Swart Hendrick broke off to think
for a moment of his stores and his shebeens, the bakeries and herds of cattle in the reservations which belonged to him, the money in the Post Office savings book and in the white man's bank, and the cash that he kept hidden in many secret places – some of it even buried under the floor upon which he now sat and drank the good beer brewed by his favourite wife. ‘I am not sure that I wish all things to belong to the people,' he muttered thoughtfully. ‘The people are cattle, lazy and stupid, what have they done to deserve the things for which I have worked so long and hard?'
‘Perhaps it is a fever. Perhaps your great brother has a worm in his bowel,' his favourite wife suggested. ‘I will make a
muti
for him that will clear his guts and his skull.' Swart Hendrick shook his head sadly. He was not at all certain that even one of his wife's devastating laxatives would drive the dark schemes from his brother's head.
Of course, long ago he had talked and dreamed strange and wild things with his brother. Moses had been young and that was the way of young men, but now the frosts of wisdom were upon Hendrick's head, and his belly was round and full, and he had many sons and herds of cattle. He had not truly thought about it before, but he was a man contented. True, he was not free – but then he was not sure what free really meant. He loved and feared his brother very much, but he was not sure that he wanted to risk all he had for a word of uncertain meaning.
‘We must burn down and destroy the whole monstrous system,' his brother said, but it occurred to Swart Hendrick that in the burning down might be included his stores and bakeries.
‘We must goad the land, we must make it wild and ungovernable, like a great stallion, so that the oppressor is hurled to earth from its back,' his brother said, but Hendrick had an uncomfortable image of himself and his cosy existence taking that same painful toss.
‘The rage of the people is a beautiful and sacred thing, we must let it run free,' Moses said, and Hendrick thought of the people running freely through his well-stocked premises. He had also witnessed the rage of the people in Durban during the Zulu rioting, and the very first concern of every man had been to provide himself with a new suit of clothing and a radio from the looted Indian stores.
‘The police are the enemies of the people, they too will perish in the flames,' Moses said, and Hendrick remembered that when the faction fighting between the Zulus and the Xhosas had swept through Drake's Farm the previous November it was the police who had separated them and prevented many more than forty dead. They had also saved his stores from being looted in the uproar. Now Hendrick wondered just who would prevent them killing each other after the police had been burned, and just what day-to-day existence would be like in the townships when each man made his own laws.
However, Swart Hendrick was ashamed of his treacherous relief when three days later Moses left Drake's Farm and moved to the house at Rivonia. Indeed it was Swart Hendrick who had gently pointed out to his brother the danger of remaining when almost everybody in the township knew he had returned, and all day long there was a crowd of idlers in the street hoping for a glimpse of Moses Gama, the beloved leader. It was only a matter of time before the police heard about it through their informers.

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