Rage

by Wilbur Smith

  Like a victor’s laurel they were offering a land and a crown.

  ‘I will go to meet them,’ he agreed softly.

  ‘You will leave in two days’ time. It will take me that long to make the final arrangements. In the meantime keep out of sight, do not attempt to take leave of any friends, do not tell anybody you are going – not even the Courtney woman or your new wife. I will get a message to you through Marcus Archer, and if he is arrested before then, I will contact you at the expedition base at Sundi Caves. Professor Hurst is a sympathizer.’ Joe dropped the butt of his cigarette and while he ground it under his heel, he lit another. ‘Now we will go back to the car.’

  Victoria Gama stood at the top end of the sloping lawns of the Baragwanath nurses’ home. She was still dressed in her uniform with the badges of a nursing sister sparkling on her tunic, but she looked very young and self-conscious as she faced the hundred or so off-duty nurses who were gathered on the lawns below her. The white matron had refused permission for them to meet in the dining-hall, so they were standing’ out under a sky full of towering thunderheads.

  ‘My sisters!’ She held out her hands towards them. ‘We have a duty to our patients – to those in pain, to those suffering and dying, to those who turn to us in trust. However, I believe that we have a higher duty and more sacred commitment to all our people who for three hundred years have suffered under a fierce and unrelenting oppression—’

  Victoria seemed to gather confidence as she spoke, and her sweet young voice had a music and rhythm that caught their attention. She had always been popular with the other nurses, and her winning personality, her capacity for hard work and her unselfish attitude had seen her emerge, not only as one of the most senior nursing staff for her age, but also as an example and a trend-setter amongst the younger nurses. There were women ten and fifteen years older than she was, who listened now to her with attention and who applauded her when she paused for breath. Their applause and approval bolstered Victoria and her voice took on a sharper tone.

  ‘Across the land our leaders, in actions rather than’ pale words, are showing the oppressors that we will no longer remain passive and acquiescent. They are crying to the world for justice and humanity. What kind of women will we be if we stand aside and refuse to join them? How can we ignore the fact that our leaders are being arrested and harassed by the infernal laws—’

  There was a stir in the crowd of uniformed nurses, and the faces which had been lifted towards Victoria turned away and the expressions of rapt concentration changed to consternation. From the edges of the crowd one or two of the nurses broke away and scuttled back up the steps of the nurses’ home.

  Three police vans had driven up to the gates, and the white matron and two of her senior staff had hurried out to confer with the police captain in charge of the contingent as he alighted from the leading vehicle. The matron’s white tunic and skirt contrasted with the blue of the police uniforms, and she was pointing at Victoria and talking animatedly to the captain.

  Victoria’s voice faltered, and despite her resolve, she was afraid. It was an instinctive and corrosive fear. From her earliest remembered childhood the blue police uniforms had been symbols of unquestionable might and authority. To defy them now went against all her instincts and the teaching of her father and all her elders.

  ‘Do not challenge the white man,’ they had taught her. ‘For his wrath is more terrible than the summer fires that consume the veld. None can stand before it.’

  Then she remembered Moses Gama, and her voice firmed; she beat down her fear and cried aloud, ‘Look at yourselves, my sisters. See how you tremble and cast your eyes down at the sight of the oppressor. He has not yet spoken nor raised a hand to you, but you have become little children!’

  The police captain left the group at the gate and came to the edge of the lawn. There he paused and raised a bullhorn to his lips.

  ‘This is an illegal gathering on state-owned property.’ His voice was magnified and distorted. ‘You have five minutes to disperse and return to your quarters.’ He raised his arm and ostentatiously checked his wristwatch. ‘If you have not done so in that time—’

  The nurses were scattering already, scampering away, not waiting for the officer to complete his warning, and Victoria found herself alone on the wide lawn. She wanted to run and hide also, but she thought about Moses Gama and her pride would not let her move.

  The police officer lowered his loud-hailer and turned back to the white matron. They conferred again, and the officer showed her a sheaf of paper which he took from his dispatch case. The matron nodded and they both looked at Victoria again. Alone now, she still stood at the top of the lawn. Pride and fear held her rigid. She stood stiffly, unable to move as the police captain marched across to where she stood.

  ‘Victoria Dinizulu?’ he asked her in a normal conversational voice, so different from the hoarse booming of the loud-hailer.

  Victoria nodded, and then remembered. ‘No,’ she denied. ‘I am Victoria Gama.’ The police officer looked confused. He was very fair-skinned with a fine blond moustache. ‘I was told you were Victoria Dinizulu – there has been a mess-up,’ he muttered, and then he blushed with embarrassment and immediately Victoria felt sorry for him.

  ‘I got married,’ she explained. ‘My maiden name was Victoria Dinizulu, but now I am Victoria Gama.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ The captain looked relieved, and glanced down at the document in his hand. ‘It’s made out to Victoria Dinizulu. I suppose it’s still all right, though.’ He was uncertain again.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Victoria consoled him. ‘The wrong name, I mean. They can’t blame you. You couldn’t have known.’

  ‘No, you’re right.’ The captain perked up visibly. ‘It’s not my fault. I’ll just serve it on you anyway. They can sort it out back at HQ.’

  ‘What is it?’ Victoria asked curiously.

  ‘It’s a banning order,’ the captain explained. He showed it to her. ‘It’s signed by the Minister of Police. I have to read it to you, then you have to sign it,’ he explained and then he looked contrite. ‘I’m sorry, it’s my duty.’

  ‘That is all right.’ Vicky smiled at him. ‘You have to do your duty.’

  He looked down at the document again and began to read aloud:

  TO VICTORIA THANDELA DINIZULU

  Notice in terms of Section 9(i) of the Internal Security Act 1950 (Act 44 of 1950). Whereas I, Manfred De La Rey, Minister of Police, am satisfied that you are engaged in activities which endanger or are calculated to endanger the maintenance of public order –

  The captain stumbled over the more complicated legal phraseology and mispronounced some of the English words. Vicky corrected him helpfully. The banning document was four typewritten pages, and the policeman reached the end of it with patent relief.

  ‘You have to sign here.’ He offered her the document.

  ‘I don’t have a pen.’

  ‘Here, use mine.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Victoria. ‘You are very kind.’

  She signed her name in the space provided and as she handed him back his pen, she had ceased to be a complete person. Her banning order prohibited her from being in the company of more than two other persons at any one time, except in the course of her daily work, of addressing any gathering or preparing any written article for publication. It confined her physically to the magisterial area of Johannesburg and required that she remain under house arrest for twelve hours of the day and also that she report daily to her local police station.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the police captain repeated, as he screwed the top back on his pen. ‘You seem a decent girl.’

  ‘It’s your job,’ Victoria smiled back at him. ‘Don’t feel bad about it.’

  Over the following days Victoria retreated into the strange half-world of isolation. During working hours she found that her peers and superiors avoided her, as though she were a carrier of plague. The matron moved her out of the room that she
shared with two other nursing sisters and she was given a small single room on the unpopular southern side of the hostel which never received the sun in winter. In this room her meals were served to her on a tray as she was prohibited from using the dining-hall when more than two other persons were present. Each evening after coming off shift she made the two-mile walk down to the police station to sign the register, but this soon became a pleasant outing rather than a penance. She was able to smile and greet the people she passed on the street for they did not know she was a non-person and she enjoyed even that fleeting human contact.

  Alone in her room she listened to her portable radio and read the books that Moses had given her, and thought about him. More than once she heard his name on the radio. Apparently a controversial film had been shown on the NABS television channel in the United States which had created a furore across the continent. It seemed that South Africa, which for most Americans was a territory remote as the moon and a thousand times less important, was suddenly a political topic. In the film Moses Gama had figured largely, and such was his presence and stature that he had been accepted abroad as the central figure in the African struggle. In the United Nations debate which had followed the television film, nearly every one of the speakers had referred to Moses Gama. Although the motion in the General Assembly calling for the condemnation of South Africa’s racial discrimination had been vetoed in the Security Council by Great Britain, the debate had sent a ripple across the world and a cold shiver down the spine of the white government in the country.

  South Africa had no television network, but on her portable radio Victoria listened to a pungent edition of Current Affairs on the state-controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation in which the campaign of defiance was described as the action of a radical minority, and Moses Gama was vilified as a Communist-inspired revolutionary criminal who was still at large, although a warrant had been issued for his arrest on a charge of high treason.

  Cut off from all other sympathetic human contact, Victoria found herself pining for him with such desperate longing that she cried herself to sleep in her lonely room each night.

  On the tenth day of her banning she was returning from her daily report to the police station, keeping to the edge of the pavement in that sensual gliding walk that the Nguni woman practises from childhood when she carries every load, from faggots of firewood to five-gallon clay pots of water, balanced upon her head. A light delivery van slowed down as it approached her from behind, and began to keep pace with her.

  Victoria was accustomed to extravagant male attention, for she was the very essence of Nguni female beauty, and when the driver of the vehicle whistled softly, she did not glance in his direction but lifted her chin an inch and assumed a haughty expression.

  The driver whistled again, more demandingly, and from the corner of her eye she saw the van was blue with the sign EXPRESS DRY CLEANERS – six HOUR SERVICE painted on the side. The driver was a big man, and although his cap was pulled low over his eyes, she sensed he was attractive and masterful. Despite herself her hips began to swing as she strode on, and her large perfectly round buttocks oscillated like the cheeks of a chipmunk chewing a nut.

  ‘Victoria!’ Her name was hissed, and the voice was unmistakable. She stopped dead and swung round to face him.

  ‘You!’ she whispered, and then glanced around her frantically.

  For the moment the sidewalk was clear and only light traffic moved down the highway between rows of tall bluegum trees. Her eyes flashed back to his face, almost hungrily, and she whispered, ‘Oh Moses, I didn’t think you’d come.’

  He leaned across the front seat of the van and opened the door nearest her, and she rushed across and threw herself into the moving van.

  ‘Get down,’ he ordered, and she crouched below the dashboard while he slammed the door closed and accelerated away.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it was you. I still don’t – this van, where did you get it? Oh Moses, you’ll never know how much – I heard your name on the radio, many times – so much has happened—’ She found that she was gabbling almost hysterically. It had been so long since she had been able to talk freely, and it was as though the painful abscess of loneliness and longing had burst and all the poison was draining in the rush of words.

  She began to tell him about the nurses’ strike and the banning, and how Albertina Sisulu had contacted her and there was going to be a march by a hundred thousand women, to the government buildings at Pretoria, and she was going to defy her banning order to join the march.

  ‘I want you to be proud of me. I want to be part of the struggle, for that is the only way I can truly be a part of you.’

  Moses Gama drove in silence, smiling a little as he listened to her chatter. He wore blue overalls with the legend ‘Express Dry Cleaners’ embroidered across his back and the rear of the van was filled with racks of clothing that smelled strongly of cleaning solvent. She knew he had borrowed the van from Hendrick Tabaka.

  After a few minutes Moses slowed the van and then turned off sharply on to a spur road which swiftly deteriorated into a rutted track, and then petered out entirely. He bumped the last few yards over tussocks of grass and then parked behind a ruined and roofless building, the windows from which the frames had been ripped out were like the eyes of a skull. Victoria straightened up from under the dashboard.

  ‘I have heard about the nurses’ strike and your banning,’ he said softly as he switched off the engine. ‘And yes, I am proud of you. Very proud. You are a wife fit for a chief.’

  She hung her head shyly, and the pleasure his words gave her was almost unbearable. She had not truly realized how much she loved him while they had been separated, and now the full force of it rushed back upon her.

  ‘And you are a chief,’ she said. ‘No, more than that – you are a king.’

  ‘Victoria, I do not have much time,’ he said. ‘I should not have come here at all—’

  ‘I would have shrivelled up if you had not – my soul was drought-stricken—’ she burst out, but he laid his hand on her arm to still her.

  ‘Listen to me, Victoria. I have come to tell you that I am going away. I have come to charge you to be strong while I am away.’

  ‘Oh, my husband!’ In her agitation she lapsed into Zulu. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I can tell you only that it is to a distant land.’

  ‘Can I not journey by your side?’ she pleaded.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I will send my heart to be your travelling companion, while the husk of me remains here to await your return. When will you come back, my husband ?’

  ‘I do not know, but it will be a long time.’

  ‘For me every minute that you are gone will become a weary day,’ she told him quietly, and he raised his hand and stroked her face gently.

  ‘If there is anything you need you must go to Hendrick Tabaka. He is my brother, and I have placed you in his care.’

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  ‘There is only one thing I can tell you now. When I return I will take the world we know and turn it on its head. Nothing will ever be the same again.’

  ‘I believe you,’ she said simply.

  ‘I must go now,’ he told her. ‘Our time together has come to an end.’

  ‘My husband,’ she murmured, casting down her eyes again. ‘Let me be a wife to you one last time, for the nights are so long and cold when you are not beside me.’

  He took a roll of canvas from the back of the van and spread it on the grass beside the parked van. Her naked body was set off by the white cloth as she lay upon it like a figure cast in dark bronze thrown down upon the snow.

  At the end when he had spent himself and lay weak as a child upon her, she clasped his head tenderly to the soft warm swell of her bosom and she whispered to him, ‘No matter how far and how long you travel, my love will burn away time and distance and I will be beside you, my husband.’

  Tara was waiting for him, with t
he lantern lit, lying awake in the cottage tent when Moses returned to the camp. She sat up as he came through the fly. The blanket fell to her waist and she was naked. Her breasts were big and white and laced with tiny bluish veins around the swollen nipples – so different from those of the woman he had just left.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded.

  He ignored the question as he began to undress.

  ‘You have been to see her, haven’t you? Joe ordered you not to.’

  Now he looked at her scornfully, and then deliberately rebuttoned the front of his overalls as he moved to leave the tent again.

  ‘I’m sorry, Moses,’ she cried, instantly terrified by the thought of his going. ‘I didn’t mean it, please stay. I won’t talk like that again. I swear it, my darling. Please forgive me. I was upset, I have had such a terrible dream—’ She threw aside the blanket and came up on her knees, reaching out both hands towards him. ‘Please!’ she entreated. ‘Please come to me.’

  For long seconds he stared at her and then began once more to unbutton his overalls. She clung to him desperately as he came into the bed.

  ‘Oh, Moses – I had such a dream. I dreamed of Sister Nunziata again. Oh God, the look on their faces as they ate her flesh. They were like wolves, their mouths red and running with her blood. It was the most horrific thing, beyond my imagination. It made me want to despair for all the world.’

  ‘No,’ he said. His voice was low but it reverberated through her body as though she were the sounding box of a violin trembling to the power of the strings. ‘No!’ he said. ‘It was beauty – stark beauty, shorn of all but the truth. What you witnessed was the rage of the people, and it was a holy thing. Before that I merely hoped, but after witnessing that I could truly believe. It was a consecration of our victory. They ate the flesh and drank the blood as you Christians do to seal a pact with history. When you have seen that sacred rage you have to believe in our eventual triumph.’