by Peter Rimmer
“So you think he’s a fraud?”
“We’re all frauds, Solly… One of those photographs is going on the front page of my book. The best photograph. The best one.”
“Are you going to call him a fraud in your book?”
“Don’t be silly. I want to sell thousands of copies. I’m going to tell my readers what they want to hear. Like the politicians. We scribes carry the burden of our own sins. Our selfish pursuits, however, we dress them up for the public.”
“Then you are a fraud.”
“Didn’t I just say that? Think of your politician. Have any of them said the truth?”
“So you want to make the Preacher famous?”
“I want to make myself famous, Solly Goldman. Fool the people but never fool yourself. Now I’m going back to sleep.”
“Do you think the world will ever get better?”
Simon had closed his eyes. He ignored the question. It was oppressively hot in the carriage even with the window down. The air blowing in through the window came from the furnace of the sun. There was a place in South Africa someone had named ‘Hot as Hell’. Simon understood why… He was thinking of the pretty girl who had stood close to him on the platform at Mafeking station. When he finally fell asleep in the heat, he had an erotic dream. When he woke with a start, his penis was rigid within his trouser pants. The woman who thought the Preacher wonderful was looking across with awe. Simon crossed his legs, but it made no difference. He closed his eyes again. It was too hot to worry. The girl was back again in his thoughts.
Like Tina Pringle, courtesy of her brother, Barend Oosthuizen, courtesy of the Rhodesia Herald, had a compartment to himself. Unlike Tina, who was dreaming of her unborn child, Barend was fighting the devil. What he wanted more than anything on earth was a pint and a half of whisky followed by a brawl, followed by a whore. The need for alcohol was screaming through his body. Only the thought of ridicule and the police stopped him going down the corridor to the bar in the dining car. He had killed a man. Only when he was buried beneath the earth was it the least of his worries. The people would turn on him as quickly as they had come to his protection. They would tear a fraud apart. A people duped was worse than a woman scorned. How could he keep up the pretence? It was all he thought about as the train ran on towards his own destruction. Madge would see it in his eyes. Madge would forgive him as she had always forgiven him before. His children, so young, would have no idea of life’s reality. His mother would hide her eyes. The dogs would run away. God, whom he called to in his agony, would never forgive the sin of using Him to protect his mortal skin. God, quite rightly, would forsake him. He was the devil’s work. Not God’s. The devil would take him where he belonged in hell. This time there would be no escape. He would burn forever… The need for alcohol flooded his body again and made him shake. He had the tremors worse than ever before.
“God? Please help me. Please help me.”
Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. The smell of smoke. The heat pushing in through the window. Outside the bush in all its silence. Nothing moved in the noonday sun.
Tina hugged herself with excitement. Whether the morning sickness had been in her mind or body, she had run down the corridor twice to the toilet. She hoped Harry was going to meet her train in Salisbury. Harry was going to be a father. They were going to be happy together. Forever. She looked outside at the Africa that was going to be her home. Her child’s home. The home of her family. She could not wait to reach her destination. The following afternoon. First Bulawayo. Then Salisbury. Then Harry Brigandshaw.
While Tina was being sick with child and excitement for the third time, Harry was standing with Tembo overlooking the gorge with the Mazoe River flowing swiftly through the hills and into the Mazoe Valley. Elephant Walk was to the north of the valley. They had been talking about the farm all morning as Tembo brought Harry up to date with the business of Elephant Walk. They spoke in Shona, the language of Tembo’s tribe, the tribe that had been decimated by decades of Matabele war parties from the south road. The Matabele had come up to Mashonaland from South Africa in the early part of the nineteenth century and flourished by stealing the Shona cattle and crops. Each year until the British chased King Lobengula out of Bulawayo, the Matabele impi took a different path of destruction. They waited for the Shona to fatten their cattle and reap their crops before cutting the Shona men to pieces with the short Zulu stabbing spears. Mzilikazi, Lobengula’s father, had been a general of King Shaka of the Zulus before he became a renegade and fled Zululand with his army.
The British were the second power in a century to subjugate the Shona. Tembo liked and respected Harry as a man while hating the English for conquering his land. Like many other people, Tembo dreamed of a Chimurenga, a war of liberation. With the power of the Matabele broken by the British, a successful Chimurenga would return the rule of the Shona tribes to the Shona people. It was their birthright. It was their land.
Tembo was forty years old and strong as an ox. The gun he carried over his shoulder was a Lee-Enfield .303 that had been made for the war in France and only found its way to Africa when the war finished. Tembo could shoot the eye of a sitting bird from fifty yards. The hunter, Sebastian Brigandshaw, the father of the man he now called baas, had taught him well.
With two thousand Lee-Enfield rifles, Tembo’s dream was to chase the British out of the country they dared to call Rhodesia. He would then take revenge on the Matabele. One day he would have to kill Harry and his family. There was sadness in any war. In any liberation. Inwardly he smiled, knowing Harry knew nothing of his thoughts. It was a matter of tribe. There was nothing man to man.
The only problem so far with his plan was a lack of guns and ammunition. The only gun he had was the one he carried over his shoulder. He never had more than ten rounds of ammunition. Even as he listened to Harry talking of the great wall that would block the small gorge down in front of them, and flood the valley on the west side of the hills towards the town they called Salisbury after the British prime minister at the time, it dawned on him that Baas Harry was not so naïve after all. The British, they told him, had conquered a quarter of the world.
Grimly, he brought his mind back to the current conversation. Maybe the Chimurenga would be for his children or his children’s children. Maybe they would all have to get on with each other. Share the country. Shona, Matabele and British.
“A great dam full of fresh water,” Harry was saying, now speaking in English as Harry dreamed his own dreams, “would enable us to irrigate every inch of our valley. Every inch of Elephant Walk. No more looking up at the sky for the start of the rains. No more drought-stricken crops. No more periodic starvation for your people. One crop during the rains supplemented by irrigation if the rain stops. One crop in the winter months when the rain doesn’t fall, watered from last year’s rains. Every drop of rain that falls on Rhodesia to be used for the people instead of running out down the Zambezi to the sea.”
“What is irrigation?” Tembo had no idea what Harry was talking about.
“Pipes and pumps and sprinklers putting water on the land at will. Whenever we want, Tembo my friend.”
“That is impossible.”
“Tell that to the engineers in Manchester who make our machinery… Soon I’m going to fly an aeroplane from Cape Town to the farm.”
“What is an aeroplane?”
“A big bird as big as a car that flies through the sky. The same engine that turns the wheels of your car, turns the propeller of the aeroplane and drags it off the ground into the sky. You and I will fly in the sky, Tembo.”
“What’s a propeller, baas?”
Harry just looked at him and smiled.
“When you want the car tomorrow?” said Tembo, changing the subject he did not understand.
“Twelve o’clock. Train comes at four. Baas Barend is coming home… And a girl.”
“Your girl, baas?”
“My girl… We are going to kill a cow. For everyone on Elephant W
alk. Two days’ holiday. Beer for everyone. Brown beer from Salisbury. Strong brown beer we call Castle beer. One big party to welcome Baas Barend and my girl.”
Tembo was thinking how he could stay drunk for two days without bringing the wrath of his four wives down on his head. The Chimurenga would have to wait.
Back at the farm homestead, Philip Neville was sitting at a small table in the rondavel happily vacated by Colonel Voss. Philip wisely had not mentioned Colonel Voss to Justine. One minute the man she said was her father was in front of them. The next minute he was gone. He had not looked anything like a father to Philip. Not of a beautiful, rich girl from London. Maybe the old man had murdered someone and fled England. Philip had heard of such things happening. Englishmen hiding away in remote parts of the world avoiding the law. Self-exile. It had happened down the centuries. Good men. Bad men.
Ever since the gnarled old man had left with his horses and the wagon, Justine and her mother had been mostly alone. The well-bred English at the meal table never mentioned a word. The subject was taboo. ‘Please pass the salt’… Philip was glad. The last thing he wanted was a father probing the state of his finances which were about to reach rock bottom. However much he wanted to, he was never going to be a writer.
Soon after the old man had left the rondavel vacant, Philip had moved in a desk. He had cleaned the one large room from floor to ceiling. He had polished the surface of the table until it shone. With great pomp and expectation, he had placed ten sheets of clean white paper, one on top of the other, on the polished table. He had adjusted the high-backed chair many times before finding the right position. He had taken up his fountain pen. Checked twice that it was full of blue ink. Pulled out the cuffs of his shirt, a long-sleeved white silk shirt he had kept for the sole purpose of writing his one great book. He had written down the three perfect paragraphs that had been in his mind so long. Read them through and through to be sure they were so perfect. And waited… And waited.
Nothing happened in his head. He thought of his great-aunt. Thought of their so many talks. Played them through and through his head. Still nothing happened. He had absolutely no idea how to write the next paragraph let alone the full-length book.
After an hour of frustrated staring at the sheet of paper with its three small paragraphs, Philip sneaked out of the room and walked down to the river. All three children followed. All three were strangely silent until they reached the water’s edge.
“Daddy’s coming home tomorrow,” said Paula.
The three children were grinning up at him. It made him feel worse. The three dogs joined the children, wagging their tails. They all had a life, a future. When he turned thirty, his income would stop. His prospects would stop.
Philip Neville standing on the bank of the Mazoe River in the middle of Africa had no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life. He even thought of jumping in the water and ending it all. The heavy rains had made the calm waters of the river a raging torrent.
The children and the dogs wandered off downriver. Even killing himself was something he was unable to do.
For a long time alone Philip watched the flotsam of trees and islands of grass flowing fast down the middle of the river. The water was the colour of red mud. A fish eagle called to him from the opposite bank of the river. Three plaintive calls, one after the other. For some reason the sound of the bird made him cry, gently, softly all to himself.
“Why can’t I write a book?” he called to the bird in the depths of his despair.
The fish eagle looked back with large, predatory eyes, its hooked beak pointing at Philip as if demanding who dared to speak. Then the bird flew away leaving Philip alone with his life in ruins.
All the way back to the houses Philip was deep in thought, looking for a way to make a living when his thousand pounds a year from his great-aunt’s estate finished on his thirtieth birthday. He had no idea. He had never done a day’s work in his life and he was now twenty-seven. The thought of poverty gave him cold shivers even in the heat. There was nothing wrong with being born an Englishman. Provided you had money.
With the soaking rains having fallen on the ploughed lands of maize and tobacco, the farm was a hive of industry. Pips of corn were pushed into the ground in straight lines a foot apart. String had been laid out and pulled taut by wooden pegs to keep the lines perfectly straight. The long markers themselves were three feet apart. With more good rain the stands of maize would grow above a man’s head with three full cobs of white corn. Into the tobacco lands were going the seedlings grown in Sir Henry Manderville’s seedbeds that he had watched his men water for six weeks with handheld watering cans made in Birmingham. The small plants were lying wilted in the hot sun on top of the ridges that had been heaped up by hoes. Behind the planters came the men with buckets of water. At each plant, they patted the red soil around the seedlings to make a round bed and slopped on a cup of water. In the cool of the night, the roots of the plant would take hold.
Every able-bodied person was working in the lands. It was hot, back-breaking work which no one seemed to mind. They all depended on the success of the farm’s crops. If the crops failed, there was nowhere else to look for food. Last year’s maize had been a disaster, the drought reducing the yield to two bags of maize kernels an acre. Two hundred pounds of food an acre. The previous year’s surplus, stored in silos off the ground to keep the rats at bay, was almost finished.
The labourers did not know Harry had brought bags of wheat up from South Africa and had them stored in a Salisbury warehouse in case the food on the farm ran out. The wheat had been paid for from the profit made by the tobacco crop, the hogsheads of tobacco exported and sold in England. Harry’s mind had thought through the problem before people went hungry.
They left at twelve o’clock in the Austin, the children kept quiet with toffees stuffed in their mouths. Having insisted on making the journey, Madge was serenely silent in the back seat surrounded by her children. Alison, Barend’s mother, had come across from New Kleinfontein, on a rare visit and was sitting nearer the window with four-year-old Doris on her knees. The grandchildren barely knew their reclusive grandmother.
In the front, Tembo was driving the car. Next to him was the .303 Lee-Enfield rifle which lay on the seat with its butt under the dashboard. Next to the gun, with one hand on the gun’s stock to stop it jumping around on the badly rutted road after the heavy rains, sat Harry. The Webley pistol was in a leather holder on his right hip. Both guns were loaded with a bullet each in the chambers. Both guns had their safety catches pushed on.
Harry felt like he was going on his first date and could not keep the grin off his face. This time they would have the privacy to really get to know each other. Tina. Tina. Tina. Her name kept sounding in his head.
“The road is not as bad as I thought,” he said, turning in his seat to look at his sister. “How are you feeling, Madge?”
“Excited,” she said. “And you, brother dear?”
“Like a kid. You’ll like Tina. Do you remember her visit in ’15?”
“I’ve answered that question a dozen times. I barely remember the girl. We were at New Kleinfontein, I think. All I ever thought of then was Barend.”
“Not long now.”
“Is he really going to be changed?”
“The paper says so.”
“They say a lot of things they don’t mean.”
By the time they pulled into Salisbury Station, there was pandemonium on the platform. Simon Haller with his head out of the window could barely believe his luck. Never before had so many people met the train from South Africa. They were of all races. Rich and poor. Pushing. Shouting above the noise of the train. Craning their necks to get a first sight of the Preacher.
“Told you, Solly, come and have a look. The front of the train isn’t even into the station and there’s nearly a riot. The Rhodesia Herald must have sold out every day since I broke the Preacher’s story. What a book, Solly. What a book I’m going to have
. I’m going to be famous. People will remember Simon Haller when he’s dead. Did you know that’s the only true way to be immortal?”
“Flash in the pan,” said Solly, not sure if Simon was pulling his leg. He rather thought so.
“Don’t you believe it. Just put your head out of this window. Seeing’s believing. They’re going mad. Men going to war and preachers coming to preach. Only way to get a crowd like that on a railway station. Grab your bags. I want to be off the train the moment it stops. If not before.”
“You’ll break your neck.”
“There’s too much at stake to break my neck.”
Solly put his head out the window to have a look for himself. He could feel the excitement.
“That pretty girl we saw at Mafeking is also looking out of her window,” he said without looking back into the compartment. “She seems to be looking for someone in the crowd… She’s seen them. She’s waving… You know something, Simon. This time you are right. She really is something to look at.”
“Is the Preacher looking out?”
“Not yet… That girl is pretty. Don’t see them that good-looking very often… Never seen so many people in Salisbury… They must have had plenty of rain. It’s humid. Really humid. Hot and sticky.”
“It always hot and sticky this time of year… Out of the way, Solly. I want another look.”
A roar had gone up from the crowd milling on the station platform.
“It’s the Preacher,” said Simon, his head back out of the window. “I told you. He has the door of his compartment open and is standing on the step. He looks magnificent. No doubt to anyone who he is. An old woman has got to her knees, believe it or not. Right down there on the front of the platform. Get a picture, Solly.”
“I can’t with the train still moving.”
