The Dust Diaries (18 page)

The word ignites the crowd like a flame to touch paper. The men begin herding the women and children into the two tents, fathers picking up sons and daughters under each arm. Others drop their drinks and their food in the dust and sprint to meet the man running from the town. A large Boer farmer shouts at his boy, his booming Afrikaans voice laying itself down over the panicked chatter like a slab of granite over ants, ‘My gun! Get my bloody gun!
Kurmidza! Kuru-midza!
Quick now!’ The boy runs off, his pale soles flicking up behind him, puffs of dust touching off the ground with each sprinting step. The army officer is struggling with his horse, hanging off its bridle with both hands as it wheels around showing the whites of its eyes, panicked by the rush of people into the tents and the men into the town.

Arthur reaches the edge of the town shortly after Cullen, who he follows down the side of a house and through a gap between two stores where a group of men are already standing on one of the stoeps. They are all staring at the far end of the high street. Arthur joins them and follows the line of their pointing fingers.

At the other end of the town, no more than 300 yards away, a lioness is padding down the empty high street, golden against the dun road, her head slung low between her powerful shoulders. She is thin and Arthur can see her angular hip-joints protruding, working mechanically under her skin as she prowls down the street and circles to face the post office. She stops and Arthur feels the group of men hold their breaths. McGregor, the police chief, whispers ‘Stay calm everyone, Charlie’s bringing a gun now, just stay still.’ As he speaks the lioness turns her head to face them. Her movement is fluid, slow, careful. Their smell of sweat, cloth and urine has reached her on the breeze and her impassive face breaks into a snarl, her upper lip retreating to bare her white teeth and the fleshy black skin of her gums.

Arthur hears footsteps behind him, someone running towards them, and someone else say, ‘Here he is, here he is now, clear a space.’ But Arthur doesn’t turn to look at Charlie. He is transfixed by the lioness, by the dreadful ease of her body, the amber of her eyes and the way she moves, pneumatically, sliding under her own spine. She should look so strange, there in the street which is normally bustling with people. But to Arthur it is the buildings around her that suddenly look strange, out of place. He watches her move a little further down the street, and however unfamiliar the sight is, unnatural, disjointed, he cannot bring himself to see her as an impostor. She is of the veld, and she is reclaiming her territory, moving between the clumsy buildings of brick and wood, marking them ephemeral with every print of her paw in the dust.

As she gets nearer, he can see that her coat is shabby and flea-bitten and she is short on one hind leg, as if she has injured her hip. More than likely, he thinks, another victim of the drought, forced to hunt for food in a town emptied of people for the day. She turns towards the knot of men standing on the stoep once more, her ribcage expanding and contracting as she breathes, then she looks away again, moving her head with the same slow deliberation. Movement behind Arthur indicates the arrival of Charlie. He can hear his heavy, panting breath and the sound of a gun breaking open.

But now the lioness is moving again too, stalking towards the veranda of the post office. And it is then, as he watches her slouch nearer the post office steps, that Arthur sees the dog. A bull terrier, tied by its lead to a pole on the stoep. Until now it has been quiet, crouched back in the shadow of the awning, but as the lioness approaches, her shoulders hunched high in hunting position, it begins to bark, pulling its lead taut and letting out explosive yelps of fear.

‘OK, stand back, give him room.’ McGregor again. Arthur feels someone push him to one side.

‘Shoot, go on, shoot!’ someone else says, and then Charlie’s voice, clenched, quiet, ‘I’m waiting for a clean shot, you idiot. I want that skin.’

But now the terrier’s yelps have become whines, and its lead has slackened as it retreats from the edge of the stoep. It’s what the lioness has been waiting for and with one sudden push of her hind legs she lunges forward onto the squealing terrier, crashing her heavy front paws, black claws extended, down on the dog’s body. In the same movement she clamps her jaw about the back of its neck and with one sharp tug breaks the lead from the pole. Spinning on her hindquarters she runs off the stoep and up the high street, the terrier in her mouth, its legs still kicking, and the broken end of the lead trailing in the dust behind her.

As she turns a rifle cracks from behind Arthur and one of the post office windows blossoms into shattered glass. ‘Shit.’ Charlie’s clenched voice again. Then another man’s voice: ‘The second barrel, the bloody shot!’

The lioness keeps running as Charlie fires the second barrel of the combination hunting rifle, firing a twelve-bore cartridge instead of the first .303 bullet. The lioness, at full gallop with the terrier limp in her mouth, corners around the last building in the street as the gun explodes again. A second later the rush and crackle of pepper shot streams through the branches of a tree like a plague of locusts. But the lioness has gone.

And then there is silence. Just the echo of the gunshot reverberating between the wooden buildings, and the dust, blowing up in eddies of wind in the empty street. And on the stoep of the post office, a splash of blood and a broken lead tied to nothing but air.

That evening, as Arthur prepares for his evensong in the Dutch Reformed Church, he hears the men of the town outside making their own preparations, organising and setting off on a hunting party to track down the lioness. A rogue lion will not be tolerated, and he listens from his vestry to the yapping of the dogs, the clutter of ammunition belts being strapped on and rifles being shouldered. They are going to war with the veld, an invasion party to revenge the invasion of their own bolt-hole of civilisation.

Later, he preaches to a small congregation of women, children and old men only. He tells the parable of Daniel and the lion, and Pastor Liebenberg bangs out the hymns on the old piano. The singing is not as lively or joyous as his services in Wreningham. None of the women here shut their eyes when they sing, sway, break from the pews and shuffle a dance. But it still lifts his spirits to hear the hymns sung, each note marking out a territory of his own.

The men return with the lioness as Arthur is shutting up the church and padlocking the door to the vestry. The light has almost faded from the day and a streak of sunset lies across the horizon, setting off the trees and thorn bushes in sharp silhouettes. They return triumphant, the dogs barking at their heels and the body of the lioness slung across an old Scotch cart which they pull themselves, four at the front holding the shafts and two on either side, like a royal procession. Except in this procession, the queen is dead, shot through the heart, the stomach and the hip, dried blood caked on her golden coat. Her eyes are still open and her tongue hangs from the side of her jaw, a slab of pink flesh, shaking with the movement of the cart.

As the men pile into Vic’s Tavern taking the body of the lioness with them, Arthur can’t help feeling that he is witnessing a defeat, not a victory. He shoulders his satchel, and begins his walk out of town back to Wreningham. Walking down the street he passes through the gold bars of light cast across the road from the windows of the hotel. From inside he hears the chatter of happy men, the clinking of glasses, a tune winding up on a gramophone, and, as he walks on into the darkness, the faint click and heartbeat of billiard balls connecting and rebounding off the soft baize of the table.

Wreningham Mission, Mashonaland, Southern Rhodesia

Although he is only eleven years old, Tendai has been waiting outside Baba Cripps’ rondavel all night, ever since the
n’anga
appeared out of the thick bush behind the schoolhouse and announced he had come to see the white
mufundsi
. Tendai’s mother told the
n’anga
that Baba Cripps was in Enkeldoorn, but the
n’anga
said he would wait, striding over to Baba Cripps’ hut and crouching on his haunches at the side of the compound where the beaten earth became bush.

Tendai had seen the
n’anga
before at his aunt’s village. He’d once watched from outside a group of older men as he divined with bones and on another occasion he’d sat outside a hut where the
n’anga
was talking to a spirit that had possessed his uncle. The spirit had asked for goat’s blood and the
n’anga
had sent for a he-goat. Tendai remembered the white of its hair in the dim early morning and the sound of the blood gulping from a slash in its throat into a calabash bowl. Despite these occasions, he still couldn’t stop himself staring at the
n’anga
now: at the silver-grey baboon skin slung over his shoulders, the beads about his neck and the bangles round his ankles, his walking staff adorned with ostrich feathers and the skin pouches tied around his waist that jiggled on his hips when he walked.

His mother had told him not to stare, and giving him a gentle tap around the ear she’d taken him inside their rondavel to wash. But later, when she pushed him out again to go to bed, Tendai saw the
n’anga
was still there, sitting motionless beside Baba Cripps’ rondavel. So he did not go to bed, as his mother had told him to, but crept over to Baba Cripps’ rondavel and sat against its wall, just on the other side where the
n’anga
couldn’t see him. He would wait there for Baba Cripps to come back, and when he did, he would tell him the
n’anga
was there to see him.

Tendai and his mother had been living at Wreningham for nearly as long as he could remember. In fact, there was only one clear memory Tendai had that was not of his life at Wreningham. It was his first and it was of his father dying.

He must have been just three years old. It was after the uprising and he and his mother were hiding with other mothers and children in a cave in the kopje near their village. He remembers the dark, wet smell of the rock that had never seen sun. The flapping and screeching of the bats above them. And then hearing the explosion. No, feeling the explosion in the cave next to them. Like a giant hand through the rock, pushing them away from the wall. The explosion in the cave next to them, in the cave where his father was hiding with the other men.

But that is not really where Tendai’s memory begins. That is just where he thinks it does. Really it was his mother who told him about the dark, wet rock, the bats and the giant hand of the explosion. His own memory begins afterwards, outside the cave, in the searing midday sun, when he feels his mother’s scream through her chest. Then looking out from behind her arms to see his father, crawling out of the other cave with his hands clawing at the ground and the red, red blood, like the blood of the goat, gushing where his legs should have been.

His father was a proud man. He made brass in their village, melting the spitting, sparking metal in his furnace. He was the only father who knew how to make brass and that is why he was a proud man. But in Tendai’s only memory of him he is a begging man. Begging the white men who stood over him to shoot him with their rifles. But they would not, so Tendai watched him die slowly instead, his mother holding his head in her hands and crying, screaming along with the other women who held their own husbands in their arms, already dead or dying.

Since then Tendai has lived with his mother at Wreningham, sleeping in her rondavel, helping her with her farming and going to Baba Cripps’ school. But now he is not allowed to sleep in his mother’s rondavel anymore. The elders have told her he is too old and he must sleep with his cousins in another rondavel instead. And that is really why Tendai has not gone to bed tonight. Not because he wants to wait for Baba Cripps, but because he doesn’t like sleeping with his cousins. They are older than him and roll on top of him in the night, or kick him out of the way, or claw him with their toenails. He misses sleeping with his mother. The warmth of her body, the smell of peanut-butter oil on her skin, the way she sings him to sleep, quietly, so only he can hear. But even she says he must sleep with his cousins now. That he is too old to sleep with his mother, that he must become a man.

So instead of going to bed Tendai has decided to wait for Baba Cripps and tell him the
n’anga
is here to see him. He waits there, outside the rondavel, as the sun sinks and the light drains from the day. Every now and then he creeps to the edge of its wall to look at the
n’anga
and he is always there, in the same position, motionless. Crouched on his haunches, his elbows inside his knees, staring across the mission compound at the sky through the trees. Even in the dim light Tendai can see the black empty sockets of the baboon’s head, and the sharp teeth of its upper jaw, crowning the
n’anga
’s stern face. The baboon skin terrifies him, but there is something pleasurable in the fear and he finds himself looking at the blank eyes, the sharp teeth, again and again.

It is dark by the time Baba Cripps returns and Tendai, who has been falling asleep against the rondavel wall, his chin dropping to his chest, again and again, only sees him when he is very near. Rubbing his eyes he watches the shadowy figure approaching. He looks hard, checking it is indeed Baba Cripps, then gets up and jogs towards him, saying softly, ‘Baba, Baba, the
n’anga
is here to see you.’

Arthur is surprised when Tendai comes running out of the darkness towards him, but he is tired after his walk and he says nothing as the boy tugs at his jacket, pulling him towards his rondavel. Once there, however, he understands the child’s excitement. Gufa the
n’anga
is sitting on the ground waiting for him. He has never spoken to Gufa before, but he has seen him and he has heard about him from the villagers around Wreningham: a diviner and a chemist, a herbalist who, for the right price, will cure most ills.

Arthur pulls his stool out of his rondavel and places it before Gufa. He sits down, feeling exhaustion wash through him like a swelling tide, and tells Tendai to go to bed. Then, turning to Gufa, he asks how he can help.