The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘Look at the dewlaps!’ Philip whispered—certain of the bucks showed massive appendages to their chests that swayed gently as they walked.

  For perhaps ten minutes the two men stood motionless, watching these noble beasts, dark glowing in sunlight, symbols of the Africa that had always mystified both strangers and those who knew it well. In every respect these were notable animals, for they were not of gigantic size like huge elephants, nor threatening like the rhinoceros, nor ethereal like the flamingos, nor utilitarian like the horse, nor repellent like the black mamba snake. They were among the regal beasts of the world.

  ‘Jesus, they are beautiful,’ Philip said, and then for reasons he could not have explained he started running toward them, shouting and waving his arms as if to dissolve this vision. At first only those at the rear were aware of him, but when they started leisurely to move on up the banks of the Krokodilspruit, the others realized that something untoward was occurring, and they, too, began moving off, until at last the entire herd was in motion, not frantically and not in leaping bounds, but with a dignity befitting their exalted place in the animal kingdom.

  When Philip continued his running, they disdainfully acknowledged that something must be done to protect themselves from whatever danger he represented, so they ambled easily away from the spruit and into a sparse collection of low trees, where mysteriously their brown colors and white patches blended so perfectly with the shadows that they became invisible.

  ‘They’ve disappeared!’ Philip said, but when Nxumalo joined him the black could see colors which the white could not, and he pointed out the various large bucks who trailed behind protecting the herd, and when Nxumalo affirmed that they were still there, Philip could see them. It required the eyes of Africa to see Africa.

  Daniel was so favorably impressed by Saltwood’s enthusiastic response to the eland that when their exploration of the Krokodilspruit was completed, he studied the white man as if judging whether he could be trusted, then said abruptly, ‘Saltwood, there’s something I’d like to share with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something exceedingly precious. A surprise,’ and he directed Philip to drive along narrow, unpaved roads. On the long ride the two talked seriously of matters to which they had merely alluded in previous sessions. Nxumalo was thirty that summer, Saltwood a year older, and he spoke first.

  ‘When you court a girl in a strange land, seriously, I mean …’

  ‘I know what you mean. I could see.’

  ‘Well, it jolts you down to hard-rock common sense. Seeing those eland hiding off in a valley had the same effect. Christ, Nxumalo, what’s going to happen to this land?’

  ‘It has its own force, you know. The great revolving of the earth. The inescapable numbers of people. There are limits beyond which we can’t go. And there are directions in which we must go.’

  ‘Are you a fatalist?’

  ‘No, a determinist.’

  ‘A Marxist?’

  ‘No, but in certain analyses Marx does make sense. Just as Frantz Fanon does. Or Thomas Jefferson.’

  ‘What do you see happening?’

  ‘Would I share my vision with a white man?’ When Philip looked at him in astonishment, Nxumalo said prophetically, ‘Must I not take into account the possibility that I will be arrested one of these days and that you will be required under oath to report what I said to you one summer morning as we rode to see the rhinoceros?’

  Philip sat silent, acknowledging the heavy truth of what this man was saying: with a black, everything of day and night, of work and relaxation was subject to interrogation, with death and life hanging in the arbitrary balance. He was under no such constraints, not in his own country or in any other he visited, and that was the terrible, inescapable difference between being a white man in America and a black man in South Africa.

  ‘Can you not imagine the prosecutor hammering at you: “Why in the world, Mr. Saltwood, were you going with this suspect black to see a rhinoceros?” except that he would call it renoster. And what could you say?’

  Philip did not try to answer; instead he asked, ‘What will be the future of the Coloureds?’

  ‘Why do you ask such a question?’

  ‘Because Frikkie and Jopie warned that once you blacks took control, the Coloureds were finished.’

  ‘Frikkie and Jopie are right. There’ll be no place for them. They had their chance to work with us, but stupidly they clung to the hope that one day the whites would accept them. They wanted to move up to catch the whites rather than down to work with us, and their decision was fatal.’

  ‘Could it be corrected?’

  ‘I think not, but maybe they will be given another chance to save themselves.’

  ‘The Indians?’

  ‘Who in Africa has ever solved the problem of the Indians? In Malawi, in Uganda, in Burundi—out! They’ve tossed them out. I could see something like Viet …’ He stopped. He was confiding too much. Recently he had visualized crowded boats leaving the Natal coast burdened with Indians expelled from the country. England would no longer have them. No African nation would permit them entrance. Madagascar would fire upon the ships if they attempted to land there. And certainly homeland India would refuse them, for it already contained three bodies for each available space.

  ‘How’s your brother in Moçambique?’

  That was another question that had better not be answered.

  ‘Do you see any permanent place for the white man?’

  ‘For the true Afrikaner, yes. He belongs to Africa and can learn to live with us. For the others, I’m afraid not. They’ll never commit themselves to our soil.’

  ‘What language will you be using?’

  ‘Now, there we are.’ He rapped his knuckles against the car door and blew out a heavy breath. ‘It ought to be Afrikaans, really. That’s a splendid, functional language. Most of my friends speak it, even though they don’t like it. I’ll tell you what Afrikaans is. Do you know Fanakalo, the made-up language of the mines? Afrikaans is the gentleman’s Fanakalo.’

  ‘Then you’ll drop English?’

  Nxumalo abruptly changed the subject: ‘Did you follow the case of Mrs. Saltwood down in Johannesburg? She must be a distant relative of yours.’

  ‘She is. Afrikaners who despise her behavior keep reminding me of it.’

  ‘Accept her, Philip. Embrace her. She’s one of God’s rare women.’

  Fleetingly, Philip thought of Craig Saltwood’s request, and felt a twinge of guilt. ‘But she’s banned, isn’t she?’

  ‘She’s sitting in silence at the foot of God.’ He bowed his head for a moment, then said briskly, ‘When our student group met the other day in Bloemfontein, black students, that is, we spoke nine different languages. Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Sotho, Tswana, Fingo, Pondo, Venda and Tonga. In self-defense we had to use English as the functional language.’

  ‘Why didn’t you use Afrikaans?’

  ‘Could anyone use Afrikaans to discuss freedom?’

  ‘Afrikaners do. They would die to preserve their freedom.’

  ‘Isn’t it curious?’ Nxumalo cried. ‘From the first day the Dutch landed at the Cape they struggled for freedom. Their whole history, as they teach it to us, was a ceaseless battle to be free. Yet when we say, “As major inhabitants of this land, we blacks would like to be free,” they look at us with horror, call us Communists, and grab their guns to shoot us down.’

  For some minutes they drove in silence over the veld, where tiny flowers in myriad colors looked like magical gems shining in the dust. ‘Philip,’ Nxumalo repeated, ‘have you looked into the Laura Saltwood banning? Do you know why the government pounced on her?’

  ‘No. All I saw was a formal announcement, then nothing.’

  ‘That’s what banning is—“then nothing.” She advised blacks to cling to English and not permit the government to force Afrikaans upon us.’ He paused, then laughed. ‘You see, that’s where the dilemma stands. Afrikaans could be a useful langua
ge for us. You know, I suppose, that it’s the basic language for the Coloured, too? They helped invent it, and most of them speak it.’

  ‘Sounds confused.’

  ‘It is, philologically, historically, socially and politically.’

  ‘Which will win, Afrikaans or English?’

  ‘Contests between languages are always settled by poets. Most Coloured poets write in Afrikaans, and very movingly. But what black poet would care to do so?’

  They now rode along a ridge from which vistas were immense, and to the south Philip saw a small conical mountain, and it was to this that Nxumalo directed him: ‘There’s only a small path. If many people knew of this, the place might have to be cordoned off. This is treasure, you know.’

  After a brief climb the men came to a small flat area, bounded on one side by a large overhanging rock. At first Philip assumed he was being taken to a rude cave with some archaeological significance, but he found no signs of a dig, nor any potsherds to indicate that one had ever taken place. Then, gradually, he saw on the sloping wall the distinct outline of a rhinoceros, very large, with flecks of color still marking its hide fifteen thousand years after its completion. Aridity and remoteness had protected this masterpiece, so that it looked not significantly different from what it had been originally.

  Philip leaned against a rock and studied the amazing work. As one familiar with engineering, he could appreciate the exquisite manner in which the long-dead artist, Gao of the Bushmen, had used so few lines to accomplish so much: ‘Look at that! One unbroken line from mouth to tail! Look how he does the whole rear ham with one sweep! This was worth the trip.’

  Pushing some rocks together, he formed a kind of chair on which he could sit and view this wonderful rhinoceros, and once or twice he broke into laughter. ‘Hey! Hey! Rhino! Look at him gallop!’ But then, after nearly an hour of looking, he covered his face with his hands, as if he wished to see the wall afresh, with no preconceptions.

  ‘This is amazing, Daniel. I mean …’

  In awe he studied this other vision of Africa: the timeless beauty galloping out of dark caves, the unknown wonders of the dark human soul, the sweep of line that captivated the senses, the overpowering sensation of being in the presence of vanished people who had come this way.

  ‘Run, you sonofabitch—run, or they’ll get you!’ He bowed his head again and thought of Sannie, and the placid lakes at Vrymeer, and of Daniel Nxumalo’s terrifying words: ‘Must I not take into account the possibility … that you will be required under oath to report what I said one summer morning …’ Africa was rather a bigger bite than one could chew.

  When they left the rhinoceros still galloping across his timeless veld, Philip wandered around the side of the rise and saw to his astonishment that just a little distance to the west lay the buildings and lakes of the Van Doorn farm at Vrymeer. Nxumalo chuckled. ‘That’s why I brought you by the little roads. Yes, we’re on one of Sannie’s Tits.’

  ‘Why didn’t they tell me?’

  ‘We Zulu keep it to ourselves. It’s our rhinoceros. The Van Doorns are in Africa, but they aren’t of it.’

  Nxumalo’s high praise for Laura Saltwood created in Philip a burning desire to visit the woman he had only glimpsed at the airport, and whose son had asked that he ‘watch over’ her. He had been remiss, but nothing he could have done would have altered what happened to her. He suspected that she might be something of a rhinoceros herself.

  He sought permission from Pretoria to travel to Johannesburg on what he claimed was personal business, South Africa having infected him to the extent that he deemed it prudent not to confide that he intended speaking with a banned person.

  When he reached her house he saw that it had been recently damaged by fire, for the façade was scarred; when he knocked, he heard a scurry of feet. Looking this way and that, he saw that he was being followed by a policeman, who was taking notes from across the street, and then the door opened.

  Pointing to the scarred area, the white-haired woman said, simply, ‘Bomb. This time they set the house afire. I’m sure they hoped it would burn me out, but as Louis Bromfield said in his good novel about India, “The rains came.” ’

  ‘You mean this was a bomb?’

  ‘Third in a row. Once you’re banned, hoodlum patriots feel it’s their obligation to bomb you or shoot you, or whatnot. Government encourages them.’

  ‘Surely not!’

  Mrs. Saltwood had made no move toward inviting him to come into the house, and he supposed this was because of the damage it had suffered, but she disabused him: ‘Actually, they do little harm, the bombs. Scare hell out of one, but that’s secondary to the greater indignity of banning.’ She coughed and said, ‘I’m going to meet with you out here, Philip, because the policeman over there must be assured that I’m meeting with only one person. That’s my allocation, you know.’

  She led him to a small lawn with a table and two chairs. ‘We used to have four. Tea in the better afternoons. But we’ll not have four again.’ For the first time her voice trembled. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me for just a moment.’

  When she went back into the house, Philip felt an overpowering urge to confuse the watching policeman, so he rose as if in deep thought, walked to where the most recent bomb had struck, and took out a piece of paper. To his disgust he could find no pencil or pen, so he made believe he was taking copious notes on the damage, stepping back now and then to assess it. From the corner of his eye he could see that the policeman was becoming agitated, so he tucked away the paper and pretended to take out a camera, as though he were about to photograph the fire damage. This brought the policeman running.

  ‘You can’t do that, sir!’ he cried in heavily accented English.

  ‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ Philip said, showing his empty hands.

  ‘You was taking a picture. That’s forbidden, you know, at a banned site.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Philip said with great deference. ‘I’m an architect. I was just taking proportions,’ and he framed a box with his thumbs and fingers.

  ‘That’s permitted,’ the policeman said.

  ‘What’s going on out here?’ Laura asked as she appeared in the doorway with a silver tray containing tea things.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ Philip apologized, more to the policeman than to Laura. ‘I was stupid. This good man feared I had a camera. I am sorry, sir.’ To Laura he whispered, ‘I did it on purpose to throw him a scare.’

  ‘I say, that’s jolly! But we mustn’t appear to be laughing. He has the power to be very unpleasant if he wishes.’

  ‘Why the furor about the photograph?’

  ‘When I’m banned, my house is banned. The evidence that it’s being bombed is banned.’ Abruptly she halted that chain of complaints and invited Philip to sit with her, and when he saw the exquisite silver service—tray, teapot, creamer, sugar, small tray for biscuits, little receptacle for marmalade, butter tray, spoons, little forks for the lemon—he almost burst into tears. It bespoke the long heritage of his people, and for the first time in his life he felt like an Englishman.

  ‘Now tell me,’ she said brightly, ‘how did a decent Saltwood ever get to an outlaw place like America?’ She laughed.

  ‘As far as I can tell, there was a renegade brother far back. You English are wonderful in producing renegade brothers.’

  ‘Woods are full of them.’

  ‘So about the time your branch came out here, our branch, and a very lowly one it must have been, came to America. Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. If you can visualize the map, they’re stations west. My family was always on the move.’

  ‘The sheriff?’

  ‘I think so. I continued the tradition. Colorado, Texas.’

  ‘You’re a real American. Tell me, have you ever visited Salisbury? The old cathedral town west of London? No? Well, you must. The Saltwoods have a very ancient house there, with the tiles upside down or something. Quite wonderful, you know, with a river at the doorstep
and a cathedral across the meadow.’

  ‘This silverware …’

  ‘A wedding gift in Salisbury, many years ago. My husband and I named this house New Sarum after the little hill where the members of Parliament used to be elected. Do you know about that? Well, we’ll talk about that later. We liked to entertain and had plenty of servants. In the old days white people in this country always seemed to have plenty of servants. And my vanity was to have five complete tea services in silver.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because in the morning we liked to serve our guests tea in bed. At seven o’clock sharp, bare feet came down the hall. Five servants, five tea services. Knock on the door, “Tea, Baas,” and there was your tea.’ Delicately she ticked off the silver pieces: ‘Tea in this, hot water in this, toast in its silver rack, sugar, cream, lemon, one sweet biscuit.’ Suddenly she rose and went inside the house, returning after a brief moment with four silver teapots, which she added to the tray.

  ‘These were my only vanity. I wanted to remember Salisbury and tea in the shadow of the cathedral, and these enabled me to do so. But I also wanted to put away childish things and engage myself in Africa. So I helped found the Black Sash, and I spoke as I did, and now I’m banned. For life, I judge.’

  Philip dared not speak. Staring at the five glistening teapots, he felt a chaos of thoughts rush through his brain, but there were none he cared to verbalize. Finally he asked, ‘How do you keep these damned things so highly polished?’

  She answered in a curious way: ‘Do you know what I miss most? Not the meetings, where people say the same things over and over. And not the friendships, really, for people like you come by often. But I do miss the bowls. That’s a wonderful game for relaxation—the proper uniform, you know, the lovely green grass. I miss that.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘I can’t bowl any more, of course, so whenever the urge strikes me, I polish my silver. Again and again I polish it. Everyone who comes here gets a cup of tea. It’s compulsive, really, because I want to use a different pot each day. This one, then this one, then this one.’