The Drifters (93 page)

‘Then you’ll be joining up at the end of this visit?’

‘No, sir. I’ll be running.’

This confession brought an uneasy silence, broken by Monica, who asked, ‘Couldn’t you take the letter back and make believe it hadn’t been delivered?’ She said it so sweetly that the ranger assumed she was joking, and the pending unpleasantness passed.

Mr. Gridley was the kind of capable man you hope you will meet on your travels but rarely do. He had worked in all of the parks in Rhodesia and knew more about big game than most of the men now operating, for he had learned from the old hunters who had penetrated the jungle at the end of the last century, in addition to which he had an innate sense of what the animal reaction to
most situations would be. He enjoyed instructing young people and appreciated his good fortune in being able to work in Africa.

He spoke with stately charm, derived from his education in England, but although his name and his manner were British, and although as an English partisan he found the extreme ideas of Dr. Vorlanger in South Africa rather comical, he was a convinced supporter of the present Rhodesian government.

‘At seven tomorrow morning the gates to the inner park will open and I’ll have a bush car to show you what we have hiding out there. In the meantime, Mrs. Gridley would be honored if you’d stop by our house after dinner.’

A hot shower and fresh clothes converted the travelers into social beings again, and after a good meal at the mess hall, featuring fresh fruit they wandered across the well-kept grounds till they reached the set of cottages in which the staff lived. Mrs. Gridley was waiting for them, a steel-gray Scottish woman in her early fifties, well known throughout Africa for her habit of bringing to her fenced-in garden all baby animals who had been afflicted or abandoned, so that it was possible to look from her back door, no matter in what park her husband was serving, and see a small Cape buffalo, a baby elephant, some zebras, and even a small hippo soaking himself in the pond she maintained. She felt no discomfort in entertaining Cato, but the girls were her chief pleasure. ‘Is there anything you need?’ she asked them solicitously. ‘I’ve all sorts of medicines and things that one requires in this sort of life.’ She noticed a small abscess on Monica’s left arm and said, ‘I’ve just the thing for that. You shouldn’t let it go, you know, not in this climate,’ and when she applied her salve she noticed, without commenting upon it, the cluster of marks against the fair skin and knew immediately what had caused them.

Joe told me later, ‘I was watching he face, to see what she’d do when she saw the hypodermic marks, and she knew I was watching. What do you suppose she did? After satisfying herself that Monica’s sore was an ulcer which came from popping heroin, she looked carefully at my arm, and I left it extended so that she could see it, and then she looked at Gretchen’s and at Cato’s. Only then did she serve tea.’

The Gridleys were a surprising pair, Rhodesians who
were totally loyal to their government yet willing to discuss its policies with anyone, even an American Negro, whom they told, ‘We believe the white man can hold on without much trouble for at least thirty more years. We possess all the ammunition, all the power. There might be pressures moving down from the north, but we think we can control them. Of course, after these thirty years great changes will probably take place throughout the entire world. Who knows what the relationship between nations and races will be then?’

‘You don’t fear an uprising?’ Cato asked, astonished at their willingness to talk, because these were not young marijuana-experiment people such as he had met in Lourenço Marques. These two were close to the heart of Rhodesia, and what they had to say was significant.

‘Yes, there’s always a fear of insurrection,’ Mrs. Gridley confessed. ‘Just as you face insurrection in the United States. But does anyone doubt that when the crunch comes in America, the white man will be able to hold on … at least for the duration of this century?’

‘Is there any doubt of that?’ Mr. Gridley repeated.

Cato said, ‘Four years ago people like you in America were asking, “Is there any doubt that the great United States can defeat little Vietnam?” A lot of us doubted. We didn’t know how it would happen or what dreadful thing would go wrong, but we honestly doubted that America could win. And do you know why? Because the war was historically wrong, and things which are historically wrong tend to be righted … how, no one can predict.’

Normally, at this point the discussion should have become heated, but it didn’t. With scientific precision the Gridleys considered the views that Cato had presented and countered with arguments of their own. ‘I agree with you,’ Gridley said with real enthusiasm. ‘Things that are historically wrong do not persist. But in this case, Mr. Jackson, I’m afraid you’ve misinterpreted what it is in Africa that is historically wrong. I’m a technologist—an ecologist to be exact—and we look at man as an animal. He has precisely the same problems of survival that the elephant has … or the sable antelope.’ He paused to ask if any of them had ever seen a sable antelope. ‘Ah, it will be my pleasure to show you one of the superb sights of creation. But to get back to my point. It seems to me,
as an ecologist, that man’s supreme problem today is finding a way by which he can live with technical advances. Really, if he doesn’t, he’s lost. And it is the white man who is grappling with this problem. I don’t mean that it was white scientists and a white nation that put a man on the moon. I mean that it is the white man who is struggling with the matter of automation, of air pollution, of urban control, of whatever is significant in the world today.’

‘What about Japan?’ Cato asked.

‘They are allied with us. The blacks are not. And there’s the terrifying difference.’

‘How about India?’

Historically they’re whites. Actually they’re blacks.’ He then spoke with the deep distrust that Rhodesians seemed to hold for the Indians: it was as if the Rhodesian reserved his harshest feelings not for the black, whom he understood, but for the Indian, whom he would never understand. Gridley said, India is a potentially powerful nation that could direct its energies to the problems I’m talking about, but for the rest of this century and no doubt throughout the next, they’ll be preoccupied with religious struggles and a crushing overpopulation. They can’t even decide on a common language. And the failure is primarily a matter of religion. So I think we can dismiss India as of no consequence.’

‘That’s a fairly large dismissal,’ Gretchen said. Like most girls who have gone to good colleges in the United States, she had been indoctrinated with the idea that India owned a culture that was at least equal to America’s and probably superior, and now she was astonished to hear a man of wide knowledge dismissing the whole subcontinent as not worthy of serious discussion where the ultimates of contemporary life were concerned.

‘I don’t dismiss it because of spite,’ Gridley said. ‘It’s just that the nation is incapable of organizing itself and therefore of making any serious contribution.’

‘But what about her moral leadership?’ Gretchen persisted.

Gridley smiled indulgently. ‘Ask the Portuguese about that. Ask them about the rape of Goa.’

‘The important point,’ Mrs. Gridley said, addressing herself to Cato, “is that the white nations are concerned with the future. The black nations are absorbed in arranging
the present, and until they catch up, the drift of history has to be with us.’

Cato laughed. ‘On the long drive north to Moçambique Island, I came to the same conclusion. I told my white friends that Rhodesia could hold out for the rest of this century. History was on your side. So then the problem becomes—how can we change history?’ The room grew quiet, and he said, ‘Tanzania is doing it by throwing in her lot with China. Suppose that Russia occupies the Middle East countries like Jordan and Israel …’

‘Do you think Israel is going under?’ Gridley asked.

‘The Muslims are determined,’ Cato said, expressing for the first time in public his newly acquired conviction. ‘Even the Muslims in Moçambique are talking about a holy war.’

‘Muslims everywhere have been talking about a holy war for the last thousand years. I understand that many blacks in America have turned Muslim. Watch. Within ten years Muslims all over the world will be talking about a holy war to rescue their brothers in America.’

Cato almost grew angry, but instead returned to his main argument: ‘So let’s suppose that Russia, having absorbed the Middle East, decides to drop down into Africa. Let’s suppose that Communist China applies pressure on Moçambique via Tanzania, and Communist Russia applies pressure on Rhodesia from the Congo. Then what?’

‘Within a year they’d be fighting each other, and we’d be down here consolidating our position,’ Gridley said.

‘You don’t believe that the drift of the future is black pressure from the north?’

‘Oh yes! Pressure, agitation, threats. We shall have to live with them for the rest of our lives. But my point is that there isn’t a damned thing the blacks can do about it. Not for this century at least.’

‘You sound just like an American general discussing Vietnam … four years ago.’ The group laughed, and Gretchen asked, ‘What does a sable antelope look like?’ and the Gridleys searched their books until they found a color photograph, but before they showed it, Mr. Gridley said, ‘You still haven’t allowed me to make my point. I think that for the rest of this century the white man can hold on, and in that time he’ll have established certain big principles. And by then the black nations will have produced many citizens as able and as well educated as
Mr. Jackson here. Then there may be a totally different symbiosis between the races in which Rhodesia’s addiction to her present solution may be of little importance, because larger solutions will be afoot. However, I feel sure that Rhodesia will be a partner in the larger solutions. But of course, I’m speaking as a man interested in how elephants solve their problems. They do so within the determinations of water, forage, security and a mysterious something called life force, that is, the will to survive. Among the whites in Rhodesia today, the life force is extremely strong.’

‘Show them the antelope,’ Mrs. Gridley said, but before her husband could do so, Cato placed his hand on the cover of the book and said, ‘The life force of the black is also terribly strong,’ to which Mr. Gridley replied, ‘Good! Self-respect demands it. But the difference is that for the rest of this century the white man has not only life force but the guns and the airplanes.’

‘Like in Vietnam,’ Cato said.

For some months I had been intending to review our investments in Lourenço Marques, with an eye to extending them into Swaziland, a nearby Negro kingdom, and the presence of the four young people in Moçambique gave me an added incentive to make the trip now. It was an easy jet trip from the capital to Beira, where the government offered me a small plane for the flight to the game preserve.

It was always hazardous to land at Zambela, for although the sanctuary maintained a sizeable airstrip, well mowed, the grass there was so clean and fresh that wild animals could not be prevented from breaking through the fences to browse, and as we approached I saw with apprehension that it was populated with seventeen Cape buffalo, each weighing nearly a ton, a couple of dozen blue hartebeest a substantial herd of zebra, numerous giraffe and three elephants. I raised my hands in a gesture of futility, but the pilot showed no worry. He simply buzzed the field three times and drove the animals away, but by the time we had taxied to the administrative buildings, the zebras and buffalo were again grazing.

The young people had been notified by Lourenço Marques
that I was arriving and were on the field waiting, profuse in their gratitude for my having suggested Moçambique, and they spent the first hour talking about their letters from Britta and Yigal and telling me what they had been doing with Mr. Gridley. I judged that he had given them a solid introduction to Africa, and even though he was Rhodesian, Cato spoke of him with respect. Next day’s plans called for an expedition far into the bush to see if they could spot a fugitive herd of sable antelope, which had so far eluded them, and I was invited to go along … ‘if you can get up at six,’ Gretchen added.

When I retired to my rondavel to unpack, I was visited by the three Americans, in turn. Joe showed me a letter which the American consul in Lourenço Marques had sent him. It was from his draft board in California and was a coldly stated announcement that Joe was now considered a draft evader, that his passport was to be confiscated by any American official, and that he could be sentenced to a long term in jail if he did not immediately return to the jurisdiction of the board. Attached was a legal opinion from a government solicitor stating that Joe, for his own good, had better return promptly to California.

‘What should I do?’ he asked.

‘What else? Go back.’

‘But if the war is illegal and therefore indefensible?’

‘No individual is big enough to make this judgment.’

‘Who else?’

We kicked this around for some time, then Joe said, ‘I’d better get to Marrakech. I have the name of a guy there who handles these things.’

‘I’d stay clear of Marrakech. I’d head for California.’

‘For you California would be right. For me it would be reverse gear. Absolutely wrong.’ And he tore up the letter from his draft board.

A short time after he left, Gretchen dropped in, a girl who had obviously discovered in her life a spaciousness she had not known before. When she spoke of Zambela, her face was radiant: ‘You were so right that day in Pamplona when you told us to reestablish contact with nature. I had never dreamed that places like this existed. We spent all yesterday afternoon just looking at the lions as they stalked a zebra.’ Then the look of contentment vanished and she said, ‘Mr. Fairbanks, it’s Monica. I’m dreadfully worried about her. She’s started taking heroin. Sniffing
it at first. Now she’s popping it under her skin and has developed a lovely abscess. I suppose she’ll be mainlining next, and I really don’t know what’s going to happen to her.’