The Whale Caller (2 page)

He stands up and attempts to walk up the crag. He has plodded only a few steps when he slips and falls on his knees. He is too tired to stand up again. Or perhaps too despondent. His confession to Mr. Yodd has failed to perform its intended function of lifting his spirits. He touches his left knee. His fingers are wet with warm blood. He hopes the lacerations are not too deep. In the sunshine of the day these rocks are beautiful in their bright yellow, grey, metallic brown and white. But they are sharp and at night, in the emaciated light of the half-moon, they can easily be
deadly. He thanks his stars that he was not wearing his new tuxedo today. It would have been torn at the knees like the blue dungarees he is wearing. He is pleased with himself that he does not feel any pain. But he is even happier that he was able to save his horn. His options were clear: to fall on his hands and save the rest of his body, or to fall on his knees and save the horn. In the first option the horn would surely have broken into pieces since he was holding it. He sacrificed his knees for his horn. He chuckles at the silliness of it all. He can always get a new horn by making it. He cannot get new knees. But perhaps it is not silly at all. He has a sentimental attachment to this horn among all others that he owns. He has used this particular horn for the last three years. It has a special timbre that strikes a tingling chord for Sharisha. No two horns can sound exactly the same.

He decides to spend the night in the company of the stars. He holds his horn close to his heart. He dare not press it too hard against his chest, lest it break. He remembers how he created it out of the fronds of the kelp that grows among the rocks of the sea. Storms brought it to the shoreline. He took the wet fronds from the water and placed them on the roof of his house in the crooked and twisted shapes suited to producing the deep and hollow sounds of the whales. The seaweed dried up to become pipes. He has fashioned a number of horns this way.

The little waves break with a monotonous rhythm on the rocks, bringing with them more kelp. He remembers his first kelp horn.

It was forty years ago. He was a strapping young man in his early twenties. He loved the Church—as it was officially known—and looked forward to the Sundays when he and the other congregants would be dancing to the beat of the drums and the music of the harps and tambourines. For him the most heavenly part of the
service, besides the snow white robes of the worshippers, was the kelp horn that an old man blew to accompany the hymns. He was so fascinated by the deep and hollow sounds of the horn that he asked the old man to teach him how to play it. He became so adept at it that His Eminence the Bishop made him official horn player after age had stolen the old man’s breath. Fíe inherited the old man’s horn. That was his very first kelp horn. And he played it so celestially that His Eminence decided to do away with harps and tambourines, for they seemed to dilute the innocence of the horn. This caused an argument whose proportions had never been seen before at the Church. The Elders of the Church said that harps were by nature heavenly. Angels sang to harps and tambourines. To do away with them was playing into the hands of the Prince of Darkness. But His Eminence stood his ground. A kelp horn, he said, was a natural musical instrument that took the congregation back to its roots. It was an instrument that celebrated the essence of creation. God would lend a sharper ear to the prayers of those who praised Him to the accompaniment of an instrument that was shaped by His own hand through the agency of the seas. This led to a schism in the Church. The Elders appointed a new bishop among themselves, and His Eminence led his followers to a new church that would worship God in its own creative way. It became known as the Church of the Sacred Kelp Horn, and the Whale Caller—who had not learnt to call whales then—was anointed Chief Horn Player.

The Church of the Sacred Kelp Horn met every Sunday at Hoy’s Koppie, a conical hill in the middle of the village. The flock and its shepherd sang and danced for the Lord among the fynbos that grew in front of the Klipgat Cave, which used to be the home, variously, of the Khoikhoi and the San peoples long before the village came into being. In their white robes—with blue sashes to distinguish themselves from the members of the
Church—the worshippers waltzed and tangoed among the trees. When the winter rains came the service was conducted in the cave, which was too small for ballroom dance. The congregants itched for the foxtrots and rumbas of sunny Sundays.

Like His Eminence, the Chief Horn Player felt that the new church brought the worshippers closer to nature, and in greater communion with the spirits of the forebears that were hovering above the tall cliffs and in the cave. He blew the horn, sometimes to accompany the hymns, or just to arouse the spirits and to stir the members of the congregation into a climactic frenzy until they spoke in tongues.

The most exciting times for the Chief Horn Player were the Sundays when the sea became a baptistery. The worshippers stood on the white sands and sang their praises to the Lord. His Eminence led those who were to be christened further into the sea. The Chief Horn Player followed, blowing the sacred sounds of baptism. His Eminence then immersed each one into the water and out again three times, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Chief Horn Player accompanied each immersion with bellows that caused tremors on the land under the water. It was on one such occasion that a whale surfaced about a hundred metres from the baptism. It swam closer to take a curious look. It seemed to be attracted by the sound of the horn. The whale stole the attention of the congregation from the baptism. The Chief Horn Player himself was fascinated by this big creature of the sea, which he had never seen at such close quarters. It might have been a humpback or even a killer whale. In those days he did not know the difference. A whale was a whale was a whale. What intrigued him most was the notion that it was his horn that had drawn it to the baptism.

It submerged and waved its tail above the water. It began to lobtail—slapping the water repeatedly with its tail. The congregation
cheered. The Chief Horn Player blew the horn to the rhythm of the splashing water. His Eminence was struck by a brilliant idea for an instant sermon on Jonah and the whale.

“We are being sent to Nineveh, my children,” he boomed above the din. “Like Jonah of the Bible, God is sending us to Nineveh.”

He asked for a Bible from those who were standing on the beach. A saved woman waded in the water, raising her robe above the knees with one hand, and lifting the Bible to the sky with the other hand. She gave it to His Eminence and waded back. He turned the pages to the Book of Jonah. He raised his hand, demanding silence. And there was silence. Even the whale stopped lobtailing. He read from the Book of Books: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me.’ God is speaking through this whale, my children, sending us to cry for Nineveh! Are we going to heed the call or are we going to flee to Tarshish?”

“But where is Nineveh, Your Eminence?” asked one of the worshippers.

“Out there in the sinful world,” responded His Eminence. “In this very village. Wickedness is everywhere and God demands that we cry against it.”

The congregation broke into moans and wails and screams, crying against Nineveh’s wickedness. The whale began to sail away.

“I think Nineveh is in Cape Town,” suggested the Chief Horn Player, remembering the trip to Cape Town that the congregation had been planning and postponing for the past three years. When the Church of the Sacred Kelp Horn broke away from the Church, the carrot His Eminence dangled to attract more followers—in addition to the introduction of ballroom dance as an integral part of the rites of worship—was a bus trip to Cape Town, to evangelise the multitudes that gathered on the beaches indulging in
worldly joys and that wasted the summer nights away in nightclubs and strip joints.

“If we flee to Tarshish,” continued His Eminence, “God will send His whales to swallow us, for it is written, ‘Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.’ Of course today we know what the writers of the Bible did not know; that a whale is not a fish. After all those days and nights living inside a whale, it vomited him out on dry land, and he ran straight to Nineveh to preach to the glory of the Lord! We must not be like Jonah; whales must not first swallow us before we can work for God. The sceptics among you will ask, how is it possible to survive in the stomach of a whale without being digested? But I ask you, my children, if Jesus himself believed in the story of Jonah and the whale, who are we to question it? In Matthew 12 verse 40 Jesus says, ‘For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.’ What more proof do we need that the story of Jonah is true?”

It was obvious to all that the spirit of Jonah had taken over the baptism. The whale had hijacked the whole ceremony, even though the creature’s tail could now be seen sailing a distance away.

“It is sailing away!” screeched the Chief Horn Player.

He blew his horn with great vigour and the whale stopped. Once more it lobtailed. He was convinced that through his kelp horn he had the power to communicate with it. This discovery excited him no end, and he remained at the beach blowing his horn long after the rest of the congregation had gone home.

He gradually drifted from the Church of the Sacred Kelp Horn and spent most of his days at the beach, holding conversations with the whales through his horn. He was determined to refine his skill, and spent many years walking westwards along the coast
of the Indian Ocean, until he reached the point where the two oceans met, and then proceeded northwards along the Atlantic Ocean coast right up to Walvis Bay in South West Africa, as Namibia was then called. He survived on fish, some of which he bartered to non-fishing folks for grain and other necessities. He stopped for months at a time in fishermen’s villages that dotted the coastline. In hamlets where women were buxom and welcoming he stopped for a few years. Sometimes he hired himself out as a hand to the trawlers that caught pilchards off the west coast of southern Africa. But he spent every second when he was not sleeping or eking out a living talking to the whales. He was listening to the songs of the southern right, the humpback and the Bryde’s whales, and learning to reproduce them with his horn. He also learnt to fashion different kinds of kelp horns: big horns with deep and rounded tone colours and small horns that sounded like muted trumpets.

After thirty-five years he returned to his home village of Hermanus and with his meagre pension rented a two-roomed Wendy house in the backyard of a kindly widower. The village had grown into a beautiful holiday resort. But it had not lost the soul of the village of his youth. Many landmarks were as he remembered them—such as the Hoy’s Koppie of his devout days. The village still nestled comfortably between the Kleinriver Mountains and the sea. The mountains still wore their crown of mist on special days. Many things had changed though. Along the coastline there were more houses, mostly white cottages and bungalows, roofed with black or red tiles while others were thatched with grass that had blackened with age, and there were some double-and triple-storey buildings. Many of these, he heard, belonged to rich people from as far away as Johannesburg, who spent part of the year enjoying the spoils of their wealth in the laid-back ambience of the village. Other houses belonged to retired millionaires who had decided
to live here permanently. It had now become impossible for an ordinary person to buy property at his childhood paradise.

Another change was that the village had become popular with tourists. A new fashion had developed, that of watching whales. They seemed to have multiplied tenfold since the days of his youth. September and October were peak whale months, and thousands of tourists from many countries of the world gathered on the cliffs and the beaches every day to watch whales frolicking in the water and performing their antics to the cheers of the spectators. On a good day there would be as many as twenty whales leaping out of the water and falling back in resounding splashes.

He saw all these things and felt like an intruder both in the lives of the whale watchers and of the local citizens. No one knew him anymore. People wondered who the tall and brawny stranger in blue dungarees was. They marvelled at his big bald head and craggy face, half of which hid in a rich silvery beard. They looked at him curiously as he stood on the cliffs, blowing his horn for the whales, sometimes fully donned in black tie. He did not seem to be friendly towards human beings, so they kept their distance from him. They were strangers to him. Almost all the people he used to know had either left this world altogether or had left the village in search of a better life in the cities of South Africa. Even His Eminence the Bishop of the Church of the Sacred Kelp Horn had long departed Nineveh for celestial shores.

He saw the official whale crier, who was employed by the tourist office. A gracious gentleman from Zwelihle Township a few kilometres away, he was dubbed the world’s only whale crier. The Whale Caller did not begrudge the whale crier his world title. The Whale Caller was not in competition with the whale crier. The Whale Caller was not a whale crier but a whale caller!

He saw how popular the whale crier was, both with the tourists and the locals. He watched the whale crier, resplendent in
his beautiful black and white costume and strange hat, blowing his kelp horn to alert whale watchers to the presence and location of the whales. Sometimes whales surfaced at the Grotto or the Voelklip beaches. At other times they might surface at Kwaaiwater or Siever’s Punt. The whale crier blew his kelp horn in a particular code that was interpreted on the sandwich board that he wore, and whale watchers knew exactly where to go to see the whales, and how many there were. Sometimes the whale crier acted like a tourist guide, showing the visitors sites of interest in the village.