Rumours of Rain Read online

  I felt a growing panic to get out. Oppressed by the heavy physical warmth of the room I made my way to the window to breathe in the cool, dusty night air. But after a few minutes I moved away again, not wanting to be spotted from the street by a roving police van.

  At long last Charlie rose and announced: “Well, boys, see you. Got to go now.”

  I followed him hastily.

  “Now listen, Charlie, this is enough.”

  “We’re just beginning to loosen up, man.”

  “I’m not taking any more nonsense from you. I want to go home.”

  “We’re going to a shebeen first.”

  “For God’s sake!”

  Laughing in his boisterous way, he turned the ignition key.

  “Give me the keys,” I ordered. “It’s my car. I’ll drive.”

  Much to my surprise he complied without any objection, leaving the car idling as he got out on his side so that we could change places. But of course: we hadn’t been going for five minutes before I was hopelessly lost. Apparently unconcerned, he sat humming happily, drumming on the roof with his fingers to keep time.

  “Now stop that, Charlie and tell me how to get out of here.”

  “O.K., man, don’t get sore.” He began to give me elaborate instructions, which I followed warily, not sure I could trust him. Suddenly he shouted: “Stop!”

  I slammed on the brakes. “What’s the matter?”

  “We’re here.” He got out.

  “Charlie, come back!”

  “We’re first looking in here.”

  “Go to hell! I’ll drive home on my own.”

  “See you then.”

  I pulled away with screeching tyres, but stopped within a few yards as soon as it hit me that without him I’d be in an even more hopeless position than with him. Not to speak of the very real danger of being attacked by a gang of tsotsis in the dark. And how would I be able to explain my presence if a police patrol were to stop me?

  Furious and frustrated, I got out of the car and locked it.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect. But the shebeen turned out to be a house like any other, with a gathering of men and women inside, drinking in the front room, served by an unbelievably fat woman, Auntie Mame. After Charlie had introduced me, I was more or less ignored. And it was quite a shock when he ordered me a whisky as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  We went to other shebeens too, afterwards. At least one of them was a luxurious place by any standards, a double-storeyed house with soft carpets and modern furniture; here conversation was hushed, limited to small groups. Doctors, businessmen, journalists, according to Charlie’s nonchalant introduction.

  “But how can you bring me to a place like this?” I asked. “Suppose one of your journalists recognises me —”

  “Calm down. They’re all off duty.”

  And then there was another place, a dingy little den, reverberating with sound, one dark whorl of bodies writhing and dancing to the rhythm of earsplitting music; one could hardly see for the smoke; and mixed with it was the bitter-sweet smell of hash. By that time I had no defences left and abandoned myself to whatever Charlie wanted us to do, too exhausted even to be angry. God alone knows what he gave me to drink. Probably skokiaan. Everything was pervaded with the sour, pungent smell of beer. Mqombothi, Charlie spelled it out for me, relishing every syllable.

  It must have been nearly dawn when we stumbled out into the dangerous night, my eyes and temples throbbing with a headache worse than anything I’d ever experienced before. I couldn’t see straight; unable to grasp what was happening I had to hold on to the car while Charlie unlocked the doors. Suddenly I began to vomit. Steadying me with his hands, he quietly went on talking and laughing, comforting me in the way Welcome Nyaluza had helped me once, many years before. It was the lowest I’d ever sunk in Charlie’s presence, retching helplessly like that, my trousers and shoes covered in vomit, while he gently held on to me, unperturbed by it all.

  Slumped in my seat I sat beside him, my head lolling against the half-opened window, barely conscious of what was going on around us. One thing did strike me, though: however dark it was, surely no later than four in the morning, the streets were already swarming with people, an endless throng of them on their way to the stations and to work. To iGoli.

  “Well,” Charlie laughed. “Not a bad party, hey?” His voice didn’t even sound tired. I made no attempt to answer. All my anger and resentment and disapproval had been broken down; he’d shattered the last remains of my dignity and self-respect; the more miserable I’d become during the night the more it had seemed to stimulate him.

  He stopped in front of my apartment block in Joubert Park. I didn’t even know that he’d been aware of the existence of the place; I’d certainly never mentioned it to him before. But I was too tired to ask. With his arm around me he supported me, a few steps at a time, to the lift. In the apartment he ran a bath for me. He would probably have undressed me as well if I hadn’t stopped him. Afterwards he helped me into my bed. He probably caught some sleep too; but when I stumbled, dazed, from my bedroom just after nine o’clock, he was already waiting on one of the deep chairs in the lounge, as fresh as any proverbial daisy.

  It hadn’t been the first time I’d stayed out for a night, so I knew Elise wouldn’t be worried; but I phoned her from the office anyway. Women like these small attentions. In the course of the day Charlie saw to it that the suit I’d worn the night before was cleaned, so I could go home in the clothes I’d been wearing the previous day. Neither by word nor gesture did he ever refer to that night again. And I didn’t either.

  But I wish I could find an explanation for it. Did he really try to be hospitable and generous showing me “his place”, or was it all part of a giant insult? Did he want to entertain me, or play cat-and-mouse with me? All I know is that it was entirely different from my friendship with Welcome in London. In many ways they were similar: I’ve said so before. But there was one major difference. Welcome and I had been friends. But with Charlie I always felt constrained to either defend or prove something. And it was the same with him. (For Bernard’s sake?) So we could never go beyond a certain point. Except for that one inexplicable night.

  Or can it all be reduced to the fact that I’d grown older since I’d known Welcome? Somewhere between the two of them something had happened to me: I’d lost something. Perhaps. Perhaps not. One should be careful not to dramatise it too much.

  Putting down the newspaper, I looked at Louis sleeping with his back to me. There was something terribly familiar about the situation: his bed against the opposite wall, mine here, the well-worn green carpet between us, the wash-table, the gauze in front of the window. Bernard’s room in the outbuilding. Our long nocturnal conversations. Seeing Louis’s blonde crown above the blankets was like a blow in the solar plexus. Not because he reminded me of Bernard but because, in that fleeting instant, he was Bernard. A new Bernard. The inescapable Bernard.

  Hurriedly I got up. As I put the paper on the small bed-table, my wrist-watch tinkled against the opaque glass shade of the lamp. The sound was so familiar it made me freeze for a moment, yet I had to search my thoughts before it came back to me. Of course: the sound of the flower-shaped shade on the wall the night I’d groped for the glass of water, during that illness in my childhood. By that time, the doctor had said, I had already survived the crisis.

  7

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS five past four already, the house was still quiet. Only from the kitchen came subdued sounds. Ma’s door was closed. For a moment I stopped in front of Dad’s gun-rack in the passage, stroking one of the polished butts with my palm. Perhaps I could try to find a duiker or a bushbuck in the veld.

  But not without glasses! Thwarted, I left the house with empty hands, closing the gauze-door gently behind me. Outside the winter sun was growing watery.

  Without any aim or inclination I strolled through the yard and past the wild-fig. High up on the slope I could still hear the steady rh
ythm of the picks, digging the grave.

  “Goduka kwedini!”

  I didn’t feel like going up there again. Almost mechanically I sauntered past the dairy and Dad’s study and the stone wall of the small graveyard towards the dry bed of the valley below. On either side of the footpath the fields lay scorched into the earth, blackened by the sun. The lower dam was quite empty, the mud cracked in an intricate web. The dam in which I’d nearly drowned.

  Like a sleepwalker I went on, unable to choose or change direction or to stop myself; cursing, again, those expensive Italian shoes with their smooth soles which caused me to slip or stumble every few yards. I should have brought my old hunting boots with me. But of course, I hadn’t really planned to go for any long walks over the weekend.

  Hunting is the only relic of my Early Romantic Period which I still allow myself. Nowadays it is restricted to one trip a year, obviously in winter when the season is open; either in the Northern Transvaal Bushveld or in South-West Africa, where I can link it with a business trip to some of my mining concerns. Those few days every year, in the company of a small group of close friends, I can escape from the pressures of the world more completely than in any other way I know of. (Except for that week in Moçambique with Bea.) Nothing else is of importance on a hunt; the world is irrelevant and remote. All that matters is that daily excursion into the bush, three or four of us in our oldest clothes, with boots and khaki hats, each with his trusted ·308. Crawling from the tent at the first sign of dawn when the frost lies white on the ground; scalding coffee on the fire kindled from last night’s still-glowing coals; the gnashing of boots on the hard grass. Everything reduced to watchfulness, eyes and ears prepared for the slightest movement or sound in the bush. The sun rising. Beetles in the white grass. Cobwebs shimmering in the early light. Hornbills in the thorn-trees. If you’re unfortunate, a babbler following you from tree to tree, scaring off the game. Quails whirring up from right under your boots. By lunch-time, if all goes well, you already have your impala or kudu or oryx. Liver roasted on the coals: a somewhat overestimated dish, too savage and too rich to my taste, but part of the ritual.

  The moment you see the buck jerking up his head. Taking aim. The final jump. Sometimes, as you come up to him, the death-struggle is not yet completed, the surprisingly slender neck swaying and beating in the grass; the large black eyes clouding up under a bluish film; the thin trickle of blood from the nostrils.

  On a few occasions I hunted bigger game; once a lion. Then the experience is even more intense because one’s own death becomes a factor in the game. Danger; fear. In a situation without any hope of gain: risking your life in exchange for the possibility of killing an animal. No more. Perhaps it is the simplicity of the game which lends it its savage charm. Neither life nor death can be represented or superseded by anything else. One is driven back to the most elementary beginnings.

  It isn’t always neat or nice. Like the day I shot the oryx: I’d aimed dead on the shoulder; I’d heard the thud of the bullet – but all twenty or thirty antelopes in the herd thundered off through the yellow grass, behind red antheaps and dull green thorn-trees. There wasn’t even a blood spoor. And yet I knew I’d struck him, and we spent hours trying to find him in the grass; but when it became too dark I had to give up and go back to the camp amid the good-natured jeering of the others. Towards noon the next day we saw the vultures circling and we found him where he’d fallen, less than a hundred yards from where I’d shot him. Right in the heart. It often happens like that with a heart-shot: the animal racing off at full speed and dropping, unnoticed, in its tracks. By that time the oryx had been torn to pieces, everything covered in blood and slime and dung. Only the graceful horns, more than a yard long, still testified to what he’d been. But it was senseless to hack them off. And I was left with a strange ambiguous feeling: satisfaction for having proved to my friends that I’d shot him after all; disgust about the loss. More than disgust. A peculiar aching sadness about something beautiful that had gone to waste so stupidly.

  But even that is part of the game when you go hunting. You can never be sure of what you’ll bring back with you, or whether you’ll find anything at all. Death remains unpredictable. Everything lies exposed to its simplicity.

  And then the nights in the camp, the meat strung up in the trees and the heavy leadwood logs burning as high as a house. Food and liquor and good male company. And later, the macabre laughter of the jackals or the chilling whoop of a hyena. There you’re back in a primitive world reduced to your proper dimensions. Day and night death hovers in the air, and you learn to live with it. After a few days you can return home and resume your work, retaining what has happened to you: deep within you it lives on, beyond all dreams, bedded in your blood and bones. Africa is a basic and terrifying truth.

  On the other side of the barren valley the bushes became more dense. Thorny shrubs, pale-blue plumbago, euphorbias. It was the beginning of the stream running between the two rows of hills. Somewhere thereabouts Grandpa had hidden the illicit still in which he’d brewed his infernal white lightning. The stream itself was dry, but there must have been a subterranean course left, because after the outer layers of dried grey tangle-wood the bushes became greener and more luxuriant, more massive. I was having problems with my shoes and without my glasses it was almost impossible to find my way. At the same time there was something exhilarating about this penetration of brushwood and bush, and the mere consciousness of subterranean water. Suddenly it became easier to understand the deeper passions of the old water diviner, his communication with those submerged forces which had caused the stick to twist and turn so violently in his fat hands.

  As I progressed slowly into the narrow kloof, the bush grew steadily more dense. The trees were taller, with lithe vines suspended from the high branches. Bracken and wild-fern. Even palms. It was the beginning of the virgin forest, with the musty smell of rotting vegetation, a resilient mass of decayed leaves and branches so thick I couldn’t hear the sound of my own feet; only from time to time the sharp crackling of a breaking twig. There was an awareness of life all around me: rustlings in the grass, a whispering in the foliage, branches swaying suddenly without wind, small hooves pattering off. Bushbuck, monkeys, lizards, louries. These were the very entrails of the farm. I could feel it and smell it and hear it, taste it on my tongue, while overhead the trees broke like a great green wave, a silence hissing in my ears.

  Fighting my criss-cross way through the strip of forest I finally reached the stream again. Here in the shade there were long shallow pools left, muddy and covered with green slime; dragonflies and large mosquitoes and other insects hovering above. A half-rotten log lay partly submerged in the thick water, like the carcass of a dead animal. Perhaps, if one stepped into this mud, it would get hold of one and start swallowing one like a big wet mouth, gulping one down into a slithery throat, down, down, through layers of loam and clay, to the rich fertile courses feeding the earth.

  Clutching at monkey-ropes and lianas I found it easier to make my way along the stream-bed, jumping from rock to rock. Once my slippery soles gave way, but a hairy vine saved me from falling. I stood still for a while, regaining my breath, uncertain of where to go next.

  He was sitting so utterly still on his rock that, with my myopic eyes, I first thought it was a broken trunk. But then he moved. Thank God I hadn’t brought the gun with me, otherwise I might have shot at him. Who would have expected to find a human being in that tangled wood?

  It was an old Black man, I noticed as I drew nearer, so old that the wool on his head looked like grey fungus; wrinkled and humped like a monkey, with a long-stemmed pipe in his sunken mouth. He sat watching me in silence, unmoving on his haunches. But his small black eyes never left me for an instant.

  “Molo,” I said.

  “Molo.” He still didn’t move.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He looked at me placidly.

  Hesitant, I repeated my question in Xhosa.
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br />   Taking his time, he removed the pipe from his mouth. There was no single tooth inside, only bare pink gums.

  “I came for the child that was sick,” he said. “But now the mother has died.”

  “Who told you she was dead?”

  “No one told me. I know it.”

  “You can’t know it just like that.”

  “I know it.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Far away.” He made a wide, vague gesture with one of his stick-like arms. As his kaross swung open I could see his breasts, mere loose folds of skin, like the dugs of an old woman. “I go my way, here, there, like the wind.”

  “You must go away.”

  “Who are you?” he asked. There was nothing discourteous in his manner, just plain curiosity.

  “I’m the baas of this farm.”

  “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “I don’t live here. I only come from time to time.”

  “I see.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Nowhere.”

  Unable to think of anything more to say, I turned to walk on. He made no move to call me back. But just after I’d passed him, something made me turn round. He was still watching me, his toothless mouth wrinkled in a grin.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “Nothing.”

  Having nothing better to do I returned to him and sat down on a rock on the opposite side of the dry stream-bed. In other circumstances I wouldn’t have spoken to him, but in that forest, with nothing and no one nearby, I felt a strange urge to talk. Perhaps the same curiosity that had stirred in him.