I thought the Cape Doctor a glorious
wind, bursting with power, defiant, indiscriminate, throwing the
ocean into a bubbling turmoil and sucking up every scrap of cloud
forgotten in the corners of the blue stretched sky. It swept away
the old and left behind a fresh canvas upon which my life could
continue to unfold. After it had gone the air was so still you could
hear the ocean whispering above the distant call of the gulls.
It was one of those still hot African
days with only the faintest of breezes. Even the insects seemed
weary with the effort of movement. My father decided we should go
for a picnic so we set off in our lumbering old Plymouth towards
the vast spaces that trembled on the distant horizon. As we snaked
along a ribbon of dusty road grown weary with an ancient silence,
we threaded our way through a low-growing tapestry of purple heathers
and sun lit proteas. Our destination was the pine forest that etched
the distant skyline.
The sky whispered continuously to me
of my smallness. I pressed my face up against the cool glass of
the car window, offering my grudging respect to the wild grasses
that clung to the roadside's battered edge. They whipped and twisted
with our passing, then sprung back into gently rippling fringes
behind us.
"Look, Look! A Dassie!" my
mother called out, her finger drawing my eyes to a small mound of
golden rocks. I saw a flash of grey brown fur, two small eyes like
litchi pips. There was a quick scrabble across the rock surface
then the little creature was swallowed up in the rock’s shadow,
taking with it its incomprehension and fear.
At last we reached the pine forest.
Slipping from sunlight into the thick darkness of the trees it seemed
we lost no heat. I felt the small muscles around my eyes relax as
the glare faded and the shadows gathered us in.
The power of life was electric here,
tangible, a blue force that whispered and sang among the regimented
tree trunks and skipped along the woven pine needle carpet below.
As we stopped I pushed the heavy car
door open and jumped out onto the forest floor, my young legs restless
from inactivity. Here I could drink in the sweet perfume of life.
Here was my beginning and my coming home, here was my sustenance,
mother-father-comforter, this sweet earth and great sky, this my
Africa. I must love her though she turn from me, burn me, starve
me, for she was the soil in which I grew. I knew it then as I know
it now, and will always know it. It is both my tragedy and my benediction.
I stood in that mighty forest, wearing
all of my eight years and as yet untested courage, upon ground that
had touched the beginning of time and I knew myself to be both everything
and nothing. The song of the ancients sang in my ears and my senses
were multiplied by the scent of the pines. I knew what it was in
that moment to be truly happy.
"Come along, Fi!" My mother
called, growing impatient and aware of the tenuous link between
us and my father and brother who were already disappearing between
the distant gathering of trees. We followed, with me stopping sometimes
to examine a wild flower, or a mushroom erupting through a roof
of thick golden pine needles. I noticed a blob of honeyed gum oozing
from a tree trunk. It smelt like sweet strong pepper. I pushed my
finger in to it, and when I pulled it away the imprint of my finger
remained. It had felt soft and warm, but after touching it everything
else I touched with my gum finger felt sticky. When I tried to suck
it clean the taste was so bitter I stopped.
I hurried after my mother.
"Mummy, why did that tree bleed?"
She turned and smiled down at me. "I
suppose because something cut it, just like you would bleed if you
were cut."
I thought it strange that trees should
bleed, having no voice for their pain.
We came out suddenly into the light.
Spread before me was a great circle of silver, a bowl of sparkling
liquid swaying gently, spattered with light where it rose to the
sun pinned high above us. We had reached the lake.
"Let’s sit over here in
the shade." My mother had spread our tattered grey picnic blanket
beneath a thick stemmed pine. I fell upon it, grateful for the shade.
The blanket felt warm and smelt of home. The pine needles crackled
as I moved, some managing to pierce the thick felt with their narrow
golden blades, pricking my soft skin.
My father had already vanished. He
always did. His affair with nature was intimate and private. There
were times when he would share with us some fragment of botanical
folklore, or return with evidence of a rare example of the local
vegetation, but most often he went off alone.
I did not notice the figure until it
moved. The man’s skin was of the same deep rich colour as
the wood of the tree trunk and as his darkness split away from it,
he stumbled toward me. His eyes were filled with terror and confusion.
He reached out a pink-bellied hand to me, dumb and infinitely afraid.
"Mum!" I shouted in panic
as I watched him sink in slow motion onto the porcupine floor. His
eyes reminded me of the Dassie, but he did not scamper away.
My mother hurried over to where the
man lay. She examined him carefully, feeling his pulse and looking
into his eyes. His breathing sounded like the South East wind slipping
through a hole in our garage roof, a heavy whistle that kept repeating
in a steady rhythm.
Suddenly my mother drew in her breath,
as he slid forward on to his face.
"Mum, what is it?" I tugged
at her skirt. Something felt wrong. Fear and curiosity bubbled inside
me.
Then I saw the knife. The blade was buried deep within him and the
black plastic handle was an obscene protuberance in the small of
his back. Like a halo about the wound a darker circle spread out
across the faded blue shirt he wore.
"Go and call your brother"
said my mother sharply, turning me away. “Tell him to find
your father quickly!”
We gathered our things together as
we waited, she constantly watching the slow breathing man as he
lay unmoving on the pine needle carpet.
"Shouldn't we take out the knife,
Mummy?"
"No, darling. At the moment the
knife is acting like a plug. It is far better to leave it there."
In the wide nothingness of the African veldt, the man has stumbled
by chance into a qualified nurse – and a woman of infinite
compassion.
She bent over the man once more and
felt his pulse. "Give me the blanket, Fi" she called out.
Taking it again from the bag in which we had packed it, I handed
it to her. She opened it out and gently laid it across his back,
tender as a mother with a sleeping infant.
At last my brother returned with my
father, and between them they half-walked half-carried the wounded
man to our car. The stain on his shirt had grown larger. They laid
him across the back seat and mother covered him once more with the
blanket. Getting behind the steering wheel, she said, "You
two will have to sit in front with Daddy." Mother always did
the driving.
We scrambled in on top of our father,
and the car lurched forward. We passed from the darkness of the
forest back into the sharp glare of an African noon. "We can't
take him to the General,” my mother said with a frown. “They
won't take a black man there, even if he is dying! We’ll have
to take him to Langa"
"Bloody insanity!" my father
spoke with impotent passion.
Entering the hospital doors I felt
a strange coldness spread through me, an unnamed fear asking for
admittance at the places from which I had shut it out in the ancient
wisdom of my infancy. I began to know for the first time then my
true inheritance, a sentient being aware of its own mortality, haunted
with the knowledge of a moral account that must be settled at the
moment of our death. "Our father, pray for us sinners, now,
and at the hour of our death".
My mother rustled down the wide corridor,
comfortable in the confidence of knowing her environment. "Sister!"
they called out to her in their surprise. "But it is Sunday!"
My mother indicated the wounded man behind her, monklike in our
grey blanket, supported by my father's strength. The nurses came
forward, dark and eager, took him gently and looked about for a
trolley.
"There is a knife in his back,
so lay him on his stomach" my mother ordered briskly, watching
the nurses as they manoeuvred him on to the trolley.
We were on the same level now, the
dark man and I. His white eyes were fixed on mine and I sensed the
fear in him, like a dog at his throat. I put my hand forward to
touch his where it lay on the cold green canvas of the trolley.
His fingers closed about mine. I thought of the forest, seeing his
brown hand, the green canvas, my skin like pale honeyed sunlight.
I was reminded again of the Dassie on the warm stone, terrified
at the approach of the unknown. There in the veldt danger was expected,
accepted, life was recycled without regret. Here there were many
questions, some without answers, some answers too awful to be spoken.
I felt the gentle pressure of my mother's
hand on my neck. "Come along, sweetheart, we can go now."
"Will he be alright?" I thought
the question without asking it although I desperately wanted to
know. I wanted everything to be alright again. I wanted my mother
to reproduce the conventional assurances but this new learning in
me made me suspect the answer. It might be another of the word screens
grown ups used to hide the great darkness
Instead I said, "What about the
blanket?"
"We'll let him keep that, shall
we?"
I looked again at the man. His eyes
had closed and his grasp on my hand had loosened. I looked around
me at the bare walls mirrored with thick enamel paint like sour
cream and at the silver hardness of the trolleys ranged along the
corridor edges as if washed up by some receding tide. I had been
in hospitals before. They were not like this. There were dark people
everywhere, sitting on the cold floor, lying on the trolleys, leaning
up against the walls. The thick salt smell was strong in my nostrils.
I could not see a blanket anywhere except for ours. It was dark
red in patches where the man's blood had seeped from the knife wound
in his back.
I knew then with some primeval instinct
that an invisible line had been drawn between myself and the place
in which I stood. I could neither see it nor understand why it should
exist, but I knew as I breathed in that sea of dark faces, my white
skin glowing like a cloak of frozen tears, that I was of another
world.
Understanding began many years later,
but the sadness began then, and the guilt. They both began on that
day, the day we gave away the old grey blanket.  |
