A World of Strangers (32 page)

We sat drinking until late. Wine brought out an innocence, a schoolboy crudity, in Hughie. His swaying, bobbing face, .smeared with the grease of chop-bones, hung above his
mug in the licking light; he told old, long dirty jokes that one could listen to with the pleasant sense of recognition with which one follows the progression of a folk tale. He boasted about his dog; ‘If he was here and you touched me, like that – just touched me – he'd go for you. He's not more than a year old yet, I reckon, but boy there's nothing he's not wise to. He never lets my kid out of his sight, I tell you, a Heinz fifty-seven varieties, and more sense than all your pedigrees.'

‘Poor old Grade, she enjoyed herself this afternoon.'

‘Well, give me pointers any day. I wanted to get a pointer, but then my kid wanted a pup and we bought this pooch. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't train him to be a gun-dog. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. That dog's so damned clever. And what a watchdog! You won't see a kaffir pass our gate without crossing the road first.'

While Hughie discoursed on the superiority of pointers over setters, Patterson and I dragged an ant-eaten trunk four or five feet long, on to the fire, and as the flame delicately explored it, and the heat of the fire penetrated it, the life to which it was still host abandoned it in panic. First came long refugee-columns of ants, and hurrying woodlice; and then that creature out of the zodiac, a scorpion. Eilertsen suddenly got giggling drunk, like a woman, and kept pouring himself more wine with an air of recklessness. ‘First damn time I've got like this since V.E. day,' he tittered. ‘Reckon it's time I had a few again.' Hughie went off on a long disquisition on the habits of stomach ulcers, which were the cause of Eilertsen's long sobriety. Hughie knew so many half-truths and fallacies about so many things that the self-sufficiency of his ignorance was awesome; it was impossible to be bored by him. To people who prided themselves on their sensibility, he would seem to be a person completely without imagination, yet the truth of it was that he lived in a fantasy, was possessed by the new witchcraft, the new darkness of the mind made up out of the garbled misconceptions of scientific, technological, and psychological discoveries he did not understand.

Before he went off to bed, John called the servants to give them some wine. ‘Not too much, we don't want them half-dead in the morning.'

‘Ach, give them brandy, man,' said Hughie. ‘They don't like wine. Give them each a tot of brandy. Kaffirs don't really like wine.'

A little way from our hollowed-out interior in the dark, the three men sat round a small fire of their own. They had eaten; they talked so low among themselves that in our row-diness, we had not been aware of this anteroom. It was true, they were pleased with the brandy. Each stood, watching it being poured into his mug; on the face of the elder Nyasa, Tanwell, a smile, sudden and soft as the flame that lit it, showed incongruously on the fierce squat blackness of his closed face. The Basuto clowned for his, while Hughie growled appreciatively and threatened to kick his backside. They went back to their fire with their consolation; it was plain that they didn't enjoy this atavistic game of sleeping out. We had elaborate protective clothing, ground sheets, rubber mattresses, and sleeping bags, they had the blankets they slept in at home in the town. There was the unexpressed suggestion that they were naturally closer to nature, to put them back in the veld was like loosing wild things. But the Nyasas were close enough to a state of nature to know that, for man, the state of nature is the nest; the musky closeness there must be in the grass and mud huts of the tribe. The Basuto was a bleary-faced town-sharp man of about my age; I supposed that he would rather be gone to ground in Alexandra township or the tin and hessian of Orlando shelters.

But in my blankets, dressed up for bed in all the clothing I could muster, I felt the comfort of the voices about me, the cosy, confident sound of voices that held no tone of doubt; voices for whom God was in his church, justice was in a court, and all the other questions of existence had equally glib answers. The warmth of the wine in my body and the cold of the night on my cheek gave me that sudden, intense sense of my own existence that is all I have ever known of a state of grace; and that, exaltation of self that it is,
must be the very antithesis of what such a state really is.

Patterson was pulling a woman's stocking on to his head.

‘What's that, a trophy?'

He grinned at me. ‘My dear boy, it's the best way in the world to keep your head warm. But you've got plenty of hair.'

The others continued to stumble about the camp. ‘First damn time I've been drunk since V.E. Day, I'm telling you. . . .' Giggles. ‘Look out there, you silly bastard, you'll have the whole thing over.' ‘Here, girlie, good Grade, good girl.…'

I woke up to feel someone looking at me. It was the moon, staring straight down from a sky full of her great light without warmth, that weird contradiction of the associations of light. I pulled the blankets up over my head but I felt it, the eye that has no benison. The bundles of sleeping men were pale shrouds, the fire was silenced. Rolling out over the stillness there came a yowl from the entrails of desolation, the echo of a pack of nightmares. It stopped, and came again, and I did not think I heard it outside my own head. Suddenly, beside me, Eilertsen sat up whimpering in his blankets and fired three shots straight past my ear. The dead rose. ‘Good Christ, what's the matter?' ‘What the hell's he doing.' ‘I could see their red eyes in the dark,' said Eilertsen, caught in the moonlight, ‘Just over there, in the bush.' ‘Nonsense.' When John was woken in the middle of the night he was not another self, like most people, but simply himself. ‘Jackal wouldn't come that near.' But after that, there was silence.

In the mornings, the birds were frozen stiff where we left them on the roofs of the cars, and the bottles of beer that John put out specially were opaque with cold. Patterson lay helplessly in his blankets, waiting for coffee to come, but
Hughie, with his gingerish bristles sparkling on his chin and his hair fiercely tousled, stumped about in impatience.' Let's go out and murder the bastards!'

And with hands aching with the hard cold of the gun, we would follow him through a morning wet and fresh and strange as something torn from a womb. A rent caul of webs glistened on the thorns and the grasses swagged together in wet brushes. We heard guinea-fowl. We did not hear the doves or the starlings or the plover or the quail; only the guinea-fowl, like the words of a language one recognizes in a close murmur of foreign tongues. It seemed that they knew we were coming for them; there was the compulsion of an appointment between us; the birds were there and the men had come, and they must meet. When we rested in the camp, we heard them, were aware of them and felt strongly that they were aware of us. The flux and tension of the pursuit were completely absorbing, so that, in the heat of the day, when there was time to read, we did not read. The old fear, that had been bred into me, of finding myself with nothing to read (what would one do, caught somewhere, someday, without a book) was suddenly made harmless. I did not need to read. The books lay stuffed down in the duffle-bag.

That was a wonderful hour of the day. The morning shoot ended at about half past ten, when we came back to camp after tramping through the bush and the mealies for nearly four hours. We had the sour, dissipated look of unshaven men who have not breakfasted, the look that is permanent with tramps. First we drank the beer which, carefully kept in the shade, held still the cold of the night. Then we cooked a meal without the customary limitations of meals; so long as you were hungry, John would produce another chop, more bacon, more kidneys. Then we took turns to use the tin basin for washing and shaving. Only Hughie did not shave; he went to lie in his tent – he was also the only one who slept in a tent, an inflatable thing that he put up with a bicycle pump.

A noon silence fell. The sun was a power in the bush; nothing moved; the thorns glittered; Patterson took his shirt off and put it over his face to keep off the flies. My blankets
were under a thorn-tree, but the shade was nothing more than a net between me and the sun. The doves sounded regularly as breathing.

At some point when we were all asleep or seemingly asleep, Hughie would come quietly out of his tent with his gun and go off into the bush. Once he brought back a hare, a poor thing with ears full of bloated black ticks. ‘The boys'll eat it,' he said. ‘Here! Samuel!' Bleary-eyed and sweating he would wait for us to make ready for the afternoon shoot, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand after a long drink of water, and keeping his head cocked, listening. ‘That crowd that feeds in the ground-nut field, they're there already. S'tru'as God. They're not resting in any bush.' He watched us resentfully. And mostly, after the first day, when we were all out together he would leave us after the first few minutes, and disappear, with or without Eilertsen, for hours. We would find him at the car or back at the camp, counting his bag. He out-walked and out-shot everybody. ‘Let's go and murder the bastards!'

John said, troubled, ‘Kidd takes it all too seriously. You know what I mean? He doesn't get a kick out of just walking through the bush.'

‘It's his way of talking.' Patterson was amused, as he might have been amused by an almost-human chimpanzee. He said to me later,' That chap's the most inarticulate blighter I've ever met. South Africans are a pretty inarticulate lot, anyway, don't you think?'

‘He's got plenty to say for himself about everything under the sun.'

‘Oh he'd chat to Einstein about relativity. But he's only got a few words to get along with; they have to fit every conceivable situation. Makes him sound like a savage.'

‘That's what
he
calls the two Nyasas.'

‘Those two gentlemen. I must say, they're not more than one jump out of the trees; John really is unbelievably patient with them. I felt like giving that one careless little bastard a kick in the pants this morning – if he'd been my own boy. The way he gutted those birds, simply hacked them to bits.'

‘Well, it's all relative, I suppose, this savage business.'

He looked at me with curiosity for a moment, as if he had just remembered something. ‘D'you believe these black chaps could ever be the same as us, Hood?'

I heard Steven's voice, mimicking him perfectly. Yet Steven was not Patterson, was not even me; was not Tanwell and the other Nyasa, chopping wood ten yards away as if all tasks were one.

‘Never. The French are not the same, or the Germans or the Italians. They'll do all the things we do, but they'll be themselves.'

He laughed, from that private vantage point on which I sometimes felt he was caught, unable to get down. He waved me away, as if I had offered him an evasion. ‘Run their own show? I'd like to see it. I just don't think the poor chaps have got the brain. They're limited. It's just not there.' He put down the rag with which he had been cleaning his gun. ‘Come on, let's get some of those papiermâché things from the whisky bottles and stick 'em up on the mealies. See if I can hit a target, if nothing else, today.' Big, handsome ruin, paunched, pouched and veined; sauntering heavily over the clods he reminded me of one of those splendid houses, thrown open to the public at half-a-crown a time, that seem to regard the trippers amusedly, and are seen by the trippers amusedly, as something over-blown and gone to pot.

In the bush I usually walked with John. The eager face of the dog, turning suddenly, beckoned us; the tip of her tail bled from the thorns and her ears held the seeds of khaki-weed like a magnet that has trailed through a box of pins; at night she was too exhausted to eat, and lay looking at us over the weight of the death growing in her belly, but in the bush during the day she seemed to outrun it. ‘I don't think she can be as ill as you think,' I said to John. ‘No, ‘he said,' she's finished. Like a good race-horse, she'll go on till she drops.'

These were the clichés of the Alexanders' world, the curiously dated world of the rich, with its Edwardian-sounding pleasures. They thought of courage in terms of gallantry, spirit in terms of gameness; in the long run, I supposed my mother's and my father's definitions were my own, I could
really only think of these things in terms of political imprisonment and the revolt of the intellect.

But beneath John's social sophistication, his equipment for Johannesburg, there was a strongly appealing quality. He reduced life to the narrative; we trekked through the thorns and the grass and all our faculties were taken up with what we were doing and where we were going. His thin brown face, alert above a bobbing adam's apple, was a commonplace reassurance, like the image of some simple, not very powerful, household god who serves to hold back the impact of mystery from ordinary life.

On Monday evening, I lost the others and found myself alone in the darkening bush. I walked about a bit, but was defeated by the silent sameness and thought it more sensible to stay still awhile, and listen; I had discovered that if you forced your hearing capacity, you could very often part the silence of the bush and make out, far away, the sounds – like feeble bird-sounds muffled in the nest – of men talking. I smoked and listened; the ground was pink as warm stone and the thorn trees were wrought iron. Presently I separated from the furtive rustle of the bush, the faint panting of the dog. It seemed to reach me along the ground, on a rill of air. I called, and though there was no answer, in a little while, the dog, held on the leash by the younger Nyasa, appeared. Sometimes, when the dog saw a lot of guinea-fowl moving in a field, she lost her head and wanted to give chase. It was then that if the Africans had been taken along as beaters, John would give her to one of them to hold.