by Zakes Mda
Still Sharisha does not move. Her defiant stare is unflinching. It is clearly a standoff that Saluni cannot win. She is devastated. She runs up the cliff path weeping, back to the Wendy house.
The Whale Caller remains confused for a while. Sharisha continues with her deep bellowing. The Whale Caller becomes frantic. He should have brought his kelp horn. Somehow he needs to calm Sharisha, to comfort her, to assure her that everything is fine. There is kelp all around him. But it is wet and even soggy. It cannot produce any music. He locks the fingers of both his hands together and shapes his hands into a roundish sound box. He blows into the hole created by his thumbs and produces deep bellows similar to Sharisha’s. It works! Sharisha seems to calm down. Her anger gradually melts as he continues to bellow. She bellows back. They exchange bellows for a long time. The child finds this game thrilling and joins with its own weak bellows. These feeble attempts leave the Whale Caller chuckling to himself. He is having such a wonderful time that he does not notice that darkness is gradually creeping in.
He had almost forgotten about the eclipse. He blows the final bellow to say goodbye and runs up the cliff path. When he gets home he is shocked to find Saluni standing outside looking at the eclipse with her naked eyes.
“You are in a warlike mood today, Saluni,” he says. “First you pick on Sharisha and now you are challenging the sun.”
“You would take her side, wouldn’t you?”
“You started the whole fight, Saluni. She was minding her own business and you came and started the fight,” he says as he reaches for her, trying to save her from her own foolishness.
“Don’t touch me.”
She opens her eyes even wider and defiantly fixes her glare on the sun, outbraving it into darkness. The Whale Caller panics.
“You will go blind, Saluni.”
She turns and looks in his direction and breaks into laughter. She laughs for a long time, jumping about in a jig of victory and joyfully shouting: “I am blind … I am already blind!”
Saluni. She lives in a world of darkness. Her eyes are wide open, yet her world remains black long after the eclipse is gone. The Whale Caller keeps on asking: “Why did you do it, Saluni, why?” She calmly responds that she went blind because there was nothing worth seeing in the world anymore. After all, she has lost Hollywood. And she has lost him to Sharisha.
“You have not lost me,” he says. “I am here with you.”
It does not escape the Whale Caller that she seems to enjoy her blindness. She has a permanent smile. There is a look of peace about her. She hopes that for the first time in her life she has banished her fear of the dark. Darkness exists as antinomy to light. If she can’t see any light, she can’t see any darkness either. This thought gives her a sense of freedom. Now she can travel the world without fear. She keeps repeating as if to convince herself: “In blindness I see no light, and without light there is no darkness.”
Two days after the eclipse she wakes up early in the morning and announces that she is leaving. She wants to get away from the town that has nothing but ugly memories for her—ranging from the insults she has suffered from whales to the pain of being banished from the Bored Twins by a heartless parent. Even the good memories are now mangled by blindness. Hermanus holds nothing for her but ugliness.
She packs her clothes in a paper bag and then dresses in her green corduroy pants, black pencil-heel boots and a red polo-neck shirt. She also wears her trusty fur coat. She sprays perfume on everything she is wearing, covering, but not quite, her sweet and mouldy smell for a while. All this time the Whale Caller thinks she can’t be serious. She wouldn’t dare go out there alone walking sightlessly and without any destination.
“It is hot, Saluni,” he says. “Your taffeta dress will be better.”
“It will ultimately get cold. I will be on the road for many seasons. I must be prepared.”
She takes her paper bag and leaves. She walks out of the gate. She is serious. The Whale Caller runs after her, calling her back. She stumbles on, almost falling. He reaches her and pleads with her to come back home. But she is adamant that she needs to put great distance between the town and herself. The Whale Caller then offers to walk the road with her, to look after her.
“No, you stay here,” she says. “I’ll find my way around the world.”
“I can’t let you go alone, Saluni. You are blind. You will get lost. Just wait here and I’ll get a few of my things. I’ll join you on the road. After all, I have walked the road before. I know a thing or two about the road.”
As he rushes back to the Wendy house she calls after him: “Don’t forget to bring the fish money from the scoff tin under the bed!” and then she mutters to herself: “I will enslave him with my blindness.”
They walk down Main Road in the easterly direction until Main Road becomes Seventh Street. They walk past the rows of beautiful houses on both sides of the street, many of them in Cape Dutch style. Some have B&B signs outside. Everyone wants to cash in on the tourism frenzy, observes the Whale Caller to himself. He holds Saluni’s hand so as to guide her safely With the other hand he holds his kelp horn. He carries a rucksack on his back containing canned fish, biscuits, his underwear and other small items. He wears his denim dungarees and hasn’t brought any change of clothes. He hopes Saluni’s road-madness will wear off and soon they will be walking back to the Wendy house.
On Saluni’s instructions they branch off from the tarred road onto a dirt road. There are thick bushes growing on both sides of the road, filling the air with mentholated scents. They walk on for a few hours on the fine gravel until they reach a green-roofed white house on the shoreline. The Whale Caller knocks but there is no response. He looks through the curtainless windows. All the rooms are empty. Saluni wonders why they should be wasting time when they have such a long way to go. He tries the door. It is not locked. He suggests that they should spend the night there. It is only midday and they are just a few kilometres from town. He hopes that common sense will prevail and she will demand to be guided back to the Wendy house. Stopping at this deserted house will buy him time. He leads her to the veranda that juts into the sea on stilts. They sit on a bench and enjoy the breeze from the sea.
“We could stay here for ever,” he says. “It is such a beautiful place.”
“It must belong to someone,” she says.
“Well, there is no one here. No furniture either. Just this bench on the veranda. Perhaps we should stay here for some days whilst we consider our next move.”
“We don’t need to consider our next move, man. We just walk. We don’t need to get to any particular place either. We just walk. That’s what we’ll do. Walk.”
“Poor house,” says the Whale Caller resignedly. “What a waste!”
“Think, man, think. Why would a house like this be unoccupied when there is homelessness all over the district? There is something wrong with it, man. We wouldn’t stay here even if we didn’t need to walk the road.”
He must think of another trick. Somehow there must be something back in Hermanus that would tempt her to return. He remembers Mr. Yodd. Saluni and Mr. Yodd have become quite cosy recently, even though he was not amused at his failure to make her bleed with his laughter. The Whale Caller suggests that it is a shame to leave Hermanus without saying goodbye to Mr. Yodd.
“He can look after himself,” says Saluni.
“He will miss you though.”
“I have nothing to do with him. He’s not my problem. He will miss you. He has always missed you. And you are free to go back to him.”
“You took him over, Saluni. He is now yours. You bribed him with oblations to the extent that he had no time for me.”
“You can have him back for all I care. I don’t need him. I have my blindness now.”
He curses the blindness under his breath. They sit quietly for a while. He wonders what Sharisha could be doing at that very moment. Perhaps teaching the young one new tricks. Breaching gloriously to the skies, and then
splashing down in thunderous abandon. Playing spyhopping tricks in the blue depths. Sooner or later she will miss him. He takes out his kelp horn and blows softly. Not Sharisha’s song. Just meaningless notes as if he is testing the horn.
“You had to bring that accursed horn!” screeches Saluni.
“Just to keep myself busy on the road, Saluni.”
“You might as well throw it away. It is useless without your big fish.”
“I can see it now… you planned it all, Saluni… the blindness … so that you could take me away from Sharisha into the wilderness.”
“I didn’t invite you, did I? I wanted to be on my own. I didn’t ask you to join me on the road. You can go back to your big fish for all I care.”
The next morning they are on the road again, trudging along the shoreline. For some reason Saluni wants them to take the most difficult paths: those that meander over rocky ledges and cross bridgeless streams that hide deep in the gorges. It is as if she is bent on punishing him—and herself in the process. On making him fry in his own guilty sweat. He has to hold her hand all the time lest she tumbles down some cliff and breaks her neck. In the village of Gansbaai they take a rest on a limestone cliff. From here Saluni smells the ocean and the Whale Caller sees it down below extending for kilometres into the horizon. Not even a speckle of a whale. Only a small boat of divers close to the shoreline. And the feverish antics of bottlenose dolphins and hovering gannets as they follow shoals. On the first level of limestone cliffs just above the green shallows Cape fur seals are basking in the sun.
From this promontory known as Danger Point the Whale Caller can see the rocky islet that is famous for the shipwrecks of a bygone era. In the silence that exists between him and the blind woman he resuscitates an old habit: that of ambling in the mists of the past. It is 1852 and he is one of the sailors on HMS Birkenhead. He is a glorious soldier in Her Majesty’s conquering army sailing westwards to the navy base of Stellenbosch in the troopship. Great storms rise and toss HMS Birkenhead against the rocks and wreck it. There are only three lifeboats, which are all sacrificed for the civilian passengers. After helping Saluni to a lifeboat, he joins the other brave soldiers of Her Majesty’s brave army, and stands to attention with a salute and an anthem that appeals to God to save the glorious queen as the ship sinks. He is one of the four hundred and forty-five people, most of them soldiers, who perish in the shipwreck. He dies a happy man, knowing that Saluni has been saved.
“Where are we here?” Saluni asks, bringing him back to the present.
He is amused at the fact that he—a man who dreads killing the fish he catches for his very survival—has just been a soldier. And of all soldiers a soldier of the colonising British!
“We are in Gansbaai,” he says, without betraying the fact that he left her for a while.
“We have been walking for hours and we are still in Hermanus?”
“We are in Gansbaai, not Hermanus.”
“Don’t be daft, man; Gansbaai was merged with Hermanus and Stanford and Kleinmond in the last municipal elections. How come we are still in Hermanus? We left yesterday, man. Are you trying to trick me or something?”
“We move slowly, Saluni, because of your blindness and your insistence that we stay off the good roads.”
After considering the matter for some time she says it does not really matter where they are as long as they keep on walking. In any event they do not have a destination. It should not trouble them at all if they take a hundred years to reach nowhere. The Whale Caller opens a tin of sardines and they eat the fish with biscuits. After the meal she flings the can away, and as he goes to retrieve it he reprimands her for making the shoreline dirty.
“Do we have dustbins here?” she asks.
“We don’t. We’ll take the can with us and throw it into a dustbin when we find one,” says the Whale Caller, picking it up.
“That’s going to be your problem,” she says. “I am not carrying any smelly tins.”
He stumbles across something hidden among the rocks. He moves a boulder and lifts up a sisal sack. From the smell he knows immediately what it is: abalone—or perlemoen, as it is called here. He puts his hand in the sack and it comes out with a purplish brown sea snail whose muscular foot is as broad as his open hand. Never has he seen such big abalone before. The bag is full of perlemoen of varying sizes and colours, ranging from grey to deep purple. He takes the bag to Saluni.
“Look what I found, Saluni,” he says.
“I can’t look, man. I am blind. But whatever it is it stinks like dead fish.”
Before the Whale Caller can tell her what his discovery is a puny man in faded jeans, tattered T-shirt, filthy baseball cap and sneakers that long ago lost their colours, emerges from the fynbos behind them and approaches the Whale Caller cautiously. They size each other up, as if gearing for a fight. Then the man breaks into a smile.
“Give it to me,” he says. “It’s mine.”
“Who is this?” asks Saluni.
“It is a poacher, Saluni,” says the Whale Caller. “A perlemoen poacher.”
“I am not a poacher. That perlemoen is for the pot. I don’t sell it,” says the man, moving backwards as if ready to escape.
“It can’t be for the pot,” says the Whale Caller. “The law allows you only four perlemoens a day for the pot. You are a poacher.”
“Are you an undercover cop or what? Are you from the Scorpions?”
“Just give him his damn things, man,” says Saluni. “You don’t want to mess with poachers.”
She knows them from the taverns. Stories are told of how poachers can be deadly when they are cornered. The man gains courage from Saluni’s support. He concludes that the two cannot be Scorpions after all. But the Whale Caller is big and the puny man has no intention of tackling him for his bag of stolen goods. He’d better be friendly. He smiles once more and asks the Whale Caller please to give a poor man a break.
“Come on, man,” says Saluni sharply. “Give the man his things.”
The Whale Caller hands the bag to the puny man, muttering as much to himself as to anyone else: “But this is wrong. It is all wrong. Do you know how long it takes for those perlemoens to mature? Eight years. Eight years, I tell you.”
“What do you care if it takes twenty years, man?” asks Saluni. “It is none of your business.”
“We have got to eat, sir,” says the puny man. “We have got to feed our children. Big companies are making money out of these perlemoens. The government gives them quotas. What about us, sir? Do you think if I apply for quotas I will get them? How are we expected to survive?”
He tells them of the woes of the village where the whole economy depends on poaching. Well-known poachers have become rich, building double-storey houses in dusty townships. Why must he be the only one who remains poor for the rest of his life? He invites them to spend the night at his shack so that they can see what he is talking about. After some persuasion from the Whale Caller Saluni agrees that they accept his invitation—not to see what he is talking about, but because they have to sleep somewhere.
He lives in what he refers to as the coloured township of Blompark. And indeed double-storey buildings rise above the shacks and the small state-subsidised houses that dot the township. The puny man still lives in a shack, but he hopes that one day he too will have a double-storey house. He tells them how he started harvesting the rocks on the kelp beds for the precious creatures. It was for the pot. But the temptation was too great. Soon he was harvesting to sell. Now his ambition is to have direct access to the white middlemen who in turn sell to the Chinese syndicate bosses. There are established racial hierarchies in the illegal abalone trade. Coloured folk sell their harvest to white men who pay about two hundred rands a kilogram. The white men sell to the Chinese men for about a thousand rands a kilogram. The Chinese ship the abalone to the Far East where they get about two thousand five hundred rands a kilogram for it. And these are the old prices. The puny man has heard that prices
have gone up, although he has not yet benefited from that. He is at the very bottom of the food chain. He sells to better-established coloured poachers who only pay him fifty rands a kilogram. He now wants to deal directly with the white men who pay two hundred rands per kilogram. That would make all the difference to his life. But the rich coloured poachers are not eager to increase the circle of people who have direct access.
As the puny man tells them of his woes a brand-new van stops outside. It is the man who has come to collect the abalone. He weighs it on a basket fish scale and pays the puny man his money. He drives away to collect from other puny men. He used to be a poacher himself. Now he is the middleman between the puny men and the white men. And he has become so rich that he is now a law unto himself. He is respected by the Gansbaai community because he is one of those who keeps the economy of the village going. When the Scorpions tighten the screws, the puny man tells his guests, the whole village suffers. Business in pubs, furniture shops and even video shops falls to the extent that some have to close down only to reopen when poaching activity resumes with the departure of the police, who are obviously unable to tighten the screws indefinitely.
The puny man regales them with poaching stories as he prepares them a meal of rice and fried abalone. As they eat Saluni says to the Whale Caller: “You must eat more of this perlemoen. God knows you need it. You have not touched me since we left Hermanus.”
“I don’t have any more, unfortunately,” says the puny man. “I sell almost all of it. I leave just a little for the pot.”
“Don’t worry,” says the Whale Caller. “I don’t need any more perlemoen.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know why perlemoen is so popular in the Far East,” says Saluni.
“Of course I know; it is an aphrodisiac,” says the puny man.
“Everyone knows that,” says the Whale Caller, rather embarrassed. “You don’t have to sing about it.”
“So now you know why you must eat more of the perlemoen as long as we are here surrounded by it,” she says.
