The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  These preparations were important to him, and for more than just their practical reasons. They helped him to focus, to take a mental deep breath, like a diver filling his lungs before he tips off the cliff into the sea. In this way he would expel the thoughts that had occupied him for the last few hours—the stolen candlesticks from the church, the late mail from England, the worries and agitations of the farmers—and fill his mind instead with the space it required for the long run over the dustland of the veld. Or was it an emptying of the mind? To inhabit instead that place of no thought needed for the wide horizons that are never reached, for the distance between him and his endpoint and for the simple hugeness of the brooding sky above him. He needed this space, this mental clear sky so he could enter the landscape as part of it, and not as an irritation panting over its dry surface. It was only as a part of it that he could face such long runs at the speed he did.

  ♦

  It was growing dark. Not getting dark, but growing, the dark expanding, filling out, a living, corporal darkness. Veld darkness. The clouds that had been burning on their undersides were now bruising into night, and the evening light of long shadows had fallen through to grey. The sky was deepening, disclosing its first stars, and a cool evening breeze was discovering itself in the thick air.

  He was worried he would be too late. Three children had already died in the village, and several others had been struck down by the fever when he was there a couple of days ago. It was then that he had promised to return with medicine, European medicine. He knew this would be unpopular with the local n’anga, but the people of the village were willing to accept his help, they had seen the children waste away and die, and each feared for their own family. But now it was a race against the darkness. Soon it would be no use carrying on, he would get lost, and would have to camp out for the night. But worrying wouldn’t help. Thoughts of where he was going would only hinder him. ‘Travel with nowhere to go’ is what a Shona elder had told him last year, and it was good advice. Travel for the movement only, not the conclusion, that way you will be part of your journey, and not a victim of it.

  So he concentrated instead on the minutiae of his sensations: on the wind that cooled the triangle of skin exposed beneath his neck by his open shirt, on the rhythm of his legs, on the tight beads of sweat that formed and evaporated on his forehead, leaving their residue of salt. He watched the orange and gold shimmer of the trees, their water-starved leaves flicking in this new wind, and he drew deeply on the lightness of his skin, which felt transparent, stretched to opaqueness by his fatigue. Listening to his blood tapping at his temple, he felt alive, painfully so, on the edge of existence. And above that there was the sound of his own breath, ticking in his throat in time with his steps. His metronome, keeping him in time with the sound of the veld, enormous, unapproachable, all around him; full with its own music of the ground shifting with unseen life, waiting for the rains. Full with its own song, a song he was still learning to follow, adjusting, fitting his life to the country. Slowly, he felt he was succeeding, absorbing the country and absorbing into it. On some of the shorter treks he had even gone barefoot when the heat made his boots unbearable. He had once arrived in Enkeldoorn like this, barefooted, skin caked in a fine covering of dust through which his sweat traced veins of dampness. A visiting dignitary had been there, a Bishop from England, and there had been words.

  ♦

  He was too late. He knew this before he even reached Umvuma, when he was still picking his way down the slope of the kopje before the village. Although it was nearly dark, the old light of the sun just a sliver of grey across the back of the land, he could still make out a cluster of bodies around one of the rondavels, shuffling and moving like an ungainly animal, unsteady on its feet. As he got nearer, he heard the wailing of the women. Long cries of grief from inside the thatched hut, three or four voices in a harmony of distress, weaving a song for the dead. The men remained outside, stern and serious. One of them leant on what looked like a hunting spear, the others held farming tools. They were waiting for the women to cry their grief dry, to empty their wells of sadness, so they could get on with the business of starting over again.

  Arthur approached the rondavel, his skin cooling, the cotton of his shirt sticking to his flesh. His breath was coming back under control, drawing back into him, but his heart kept up its wild beating, banging out its pulse within his ribs which felt fragile against its rhythm. The group outside parted in silence to let him through. There was no greeting. Nothing needed to be said. He felt sick with fatigue and thirst, and there was an irritation of doubt working at his mind. Should he have abandoned the service, left earlier? Had he arrived sooner might he have been able to help this boy lying on the floor of the hut, his cheeks hollow with the thumbprint of fever? No, he didn’t think so. A few hours would have been of little consequence, the fever had too strong a hold already. There were others that would be helped. Not that this mattered to the boy’s mother, who knelt over him now, holding his head in her hands, her fingernails digging into the skin of his skull as she rocked back and forth, her eyes screwed shut but with tears still finding their way through as she cried out, ‘Tovigwa naniko? Tovigwa naniko?’ Arthur went no nearer the boy, staying where he was, unwilling to break her flow of grief. So he stood there, stooped in the doorway of the rondavel, light-headed with exhaustion, his skin prickling in his sweat-drenched clothes, listening to the mother’s repeated question. ‘Tovigwa naniko?’ she asked the night. ‘Who will bury us?’

  That night the sky listened, and the rains came, so in the morning they were able to bury the boy in newly wet earth, with the scent of new rain and honeysuckle in the air. Both of these smells reminded Arthur vividly of England, and particularly his boyhood in Kent, when the smell of rain on the dry, hot gravel of the driveway would entice him outside to play. These sudden memories of England were still frequent, ambushing him with no warning, arriving in an instant of recognition before falling through with a pang of homesickness in his chest. They disturbed him, these sudden memories. He had left England. There was nothing there for him anymore.

  Despite the night’s rain the men of the village still had to start early to dig the grave. The ground under the wet layer of topsoil was hard and stubborn, and did not give easily to their tools. They worked in pairs, outside the periphery of the village, cutting, digging and sweating, the growing heat like a slow-pressing palm on their backs. Arthur watched them work. The boy’s father was a Christian, and had asked him to perform the burial service, and he had agreed, although he knew that others in the village would want to fulfil the traditional Shona customs of the dead as well. From his experience this was only to be expected, and he didn’t mind. He watched the men finish digging the grave then gather together at its side. A woman came out from the village, naked but for a skin about her waist and a delicate black tattoo across her stomach. She carried a clay pot and a longhandled cup, which she handed to the man who had started the grave now gaping from the red earth before them. The man, who was young, not much older than the boy who had died, took the swollen-bellied cup by its long handle and dipped it into the pot, which was filled with beer, brewed from rapoko. He lifted the cup and began pouring the dark, pungent liquid over his legs and arms. The others waited patiently. The beer would protect him from the misfortunes he might suffer from burying the boy, from the scent of the grave. The scent of death. It ran over his body sluggishly, drawing itself out in long trails which snaked down his legs, over the bulge of his calf and down to the ground where it was absorbed by the soil. When he had finished he handed the cup to the next man who did the same.

  Arthur watched them in silence, from a distance. They tolerated his eyes as they tolerated his presence. It was these traditional beliefs that wouldn’t be submerged beneath Christian ritual, and again he didn’t mind. Some of these ceremonies had already taken on a significance for himself, and if anythmg he felt they made him and his God a more acceptable intrusion. Part of the landscap
e. A new chapter in the myth of the country.

  When the cup had been passed around full circle, and all the men had dowsed their limbs in beer, Arthur turned and began to walk back towards the village, its rondavels clustered together beneath the granite-strewn kopje. He walked to the one where he had stayed the night, a kitchen hut, its uneven shelves moulded from the wall and polished to a black that managed to gleam in the darkness. Here he put on his cassock and fastened the stiff dog collar about his neck before picking up his Shona prayer book, kneeling onto the hard floor and preparing himself for his own rituals for burying the dead.

  He gave the service and last rites in Shona. He wasn’t yet fluent in the language but had learnt enough to perform his duties, memorising the necessary passages. The language fitted him well, he enjoyed the sensation of its vowels and sounds on his tongue. The alien intonation gave the words A music he had never found before, freeing them from immediate meaning, lending a rhythm and a metre he had failed to achieve with the broken syllables of English. As he spoke the sun rose behind the grey clouds, and the heat grew, expanded around them, closing them in a humid grip. The boy, who could have been any age between fifteen and twenty-five, the fever having drained him of his true appearance, had been lain out with care, his thin arms folded across his chest, and his body wrapped in pieces of white cloth. His skin had been oiled with groundnut oil, his hair washed with wild apple juice and his eyes cleaned. His mother stood beside the body, quiet and unmoving, her grief wrung from her throughout the night, leaving her hollow with mourning.

  Arthur listened to the sound of his own voice shrink into the veld air and watched the shifting bare feet of the little crowd around the grave. When he finished he stood back to let the body be lifted into the newly dug hole, where the boy’s ritual friend, the sahwira, was waiting to receive it. But then he saw something was missing. The blanket. The blanket beneath the deceased’s head. There wasn’t one. Dropping his prayer book, he slipped his cassock over his head and began folding it into a neat bundle. As the heavy cloth slipped off him he felt a welcome rush of cool air against his skin, an escape of trapped heat. Kneeling to the ground, he placed the improvised blanket under the boy’s head, gently lifting him with his hand around the base of his skull, then lowering him again onto the white cloth. His head felt fragile, hollow, the bone beneath the skin as thin as a bird’s egg. The people remained quiet, and the boy’s mother looked straight ahead, out towards the mountains in the east. How many children had she lost in this way? How many more would she lose? No one could tell her, least of all him. He felt useless. He stood again and stepped back from the body. The men closed in and lowered it into the grave. Arthur looked at the mother. She was still, her face set, one tear that had outgrown the lip of her eyelid settling on her cheek instead.

  The sky listened again, and as the sahwira arranged a few paltry belongings around the body—a cup, a catapult and a carved wooden necklace—and the boy’s father and cousins scattered the first handfuls of soil into the grave, the rain began once more. Large drops, that hit the ground heavily, leaving wet dents in the earth and turning the red dust dark. Arthur watched as the men began to shovel the earth back over the body, the loose soil filling in the shape of the boy: the crease between his upper arm and his torso, the shallow basket of his crossed arms, the spaces between his toes, the sunken sockets of his eyes. Soon there was no boy, just a pregnant swelling of disturbed soil, and eventually Arthur turned away, finding it hard to breathe under the restriction of his collar. As he walked back towards the rondavels and smoking fires of the village the last spadefuls of earth padded into the grave behind him, following him like footsteps.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  PART TWO

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  20 OCTOBER 1998

  Rhodes House Library, Oxford, England

  I have come looking for you again. This time in the underground stacks of the Bodleian Library where I am hoping to find a seam of your life, a trace of you, running like an ore through the layers of books, documents, journals and letters buried beneath the streets of Oxford.

  Making my way up Parks Road from the confusion of undergraduates and tourists on Broad Street, I pass the tall blue iron gates of Trinity College. I stop and look through their bars at the pristine lawns, symmetrical and level as the baize of a snooker table. An Asian couple are sitting on a bench at the edge of one of them. They have asked a passer-by, another tourist, to take their photograph. He sizes them up in the viewfmder, brings the camera down from his face, takes a step back, and tries again. The boy has his arm around the girl and both of them are wrapped in scarves. They smile, stiffen and wait for the click that will tell them this is caught forever, the moment confirmed. The passer-by hands the camera back and the couple thank him, then move on, cradling the camera and the frame of film inside it which holds the image in grains of silver, in fragile negative, that will, in years to come, be today: their memories of this town, of each other and maybe even of the passer-by who captured it for them. I stay at the gates for a while, feeling their cold iron against my cheek, looking at the implacable passivity of the college buildings, stately at the end of the lawns. Trinity was your college and I suppose these are the buildings that you must have walked through when you were a student here: writing, boxing, rowing, acting, playing out the gentleman’s life and preparing for a career in the law like your father and your brother before you. A half-blue, a runner, a member of OUDS, a poet who published his first pamphlet at the age of fifteen and then another here with Laurence Binyon. These are just some of the facts that I know about you, part of the scaffolding of names and dates that supports my idea of your life. But at the moment that is all I have, facts and the opinions of a few historians and theologians. But I want more than this, I want more than facts. I want to know you, who you were, and that is why I am here.

  Turning away from the iron gates, I walk on up the street towards the library, the leaves of the trees turning above me, a few of them falling to the pavement, a slow burnt rain. The gothic Pitt Rivers Museum rises to my right, collections of skelet ons and other treasures housed within its patterned Victorian walls, turn into South Parks Road and walk up to the green brass dome that sits above the entrance to Rhodes House Library. Pushing the heavy door open, I walk in, my shoes squeaking on the polished white and black marble flooring. Busts of thinkers and academics look back at me from the far wall and the whole place bears a weight of study about it. A weight of history and lives kept.

  Walking into the atrium I feel a thrill of anticipation at the thought of being so near you, of meeting you outside the pages of Steere’s biography, one to one. This sensation though, is also the excitement of investigation. Because I have not just been drawn here by the desire for more than facts. I have been sent here too, by a couple of lines in Steere’s book about your decision to leave for Africa that caught my eye and snagged on my mind:

  There is an undocumented but persistent rumour of a love affair with a girl which might have changed Cripps’ earlier drawing towards the celibate life. This was apparently terminated by the decision to leave for Africa.

  The statement is so cursory, so fleeting, that I can’t help but think it hides an undisclosed weight, like the tip of an iceberg that gives no sign of the bulk it carries beneath the water’s surface. This may of course be an illusion, a self-inflicted intuition, because in a way this is what I have been looking for. Evidence of your life beyond your actions, something that will give me a handle on the man behind the history. These lines seem to offer a chink of light onto such a man, suggesting as they do, a capacity for individual and romantic as well as philanthropic or Platonic love. But they cast a shadow as well as light. At times your life has seemed almost penitential in nature, as if governed by a duty of atonement, and I can’t help thinking that these two possibilities, an aborted love affair and the philosophy of your living, may be related in some way. That you had reasons to leave England as well as to
go to Africa.

  I walk up the dark wooden staircase to the right of the entrance hall and into a long narrow reading room, the walls floor-to-ceiling with books. Coats and bags hang in the corner to my left and there is a quiet hum of work. Down-turned heads, the click of fingers on a keyboard, the odd dry cough.

  I type your name into the library’s computer system and it turns out you are not so hard to find. The words conjure up a list of your publications: poetry collections, novels, political tracts. But these aren’t what I’m looking for. What I want comes later: ‘X106: Correspondence, manuscripts, misc. photographs. 7 boxes.’ I fill out the reader’s request form, and hand it in to the librarian at the front desk. She tells me I’ll have to wait for a couple of hours; apparently you don’t come so easy after all.

  I pass the time outside, walking through the buildings of the University that draw the eye upwards, as they were built to do, their yellow Cotswold stone contrasting against the bright blue of a clear autumn sky. Carved grotesques crouch and leer from under the modern guttering alongside yawning gargoyles, their mouths full with dripping lead pipes. It is lunchtime and the pubs are packed close with students after lectures and tutors in armchairs, shielding themselves against the day behind their papers. I think about joining them, going in for a drink in the smoke and the talk, but I keep on walking instead, the city flowing around me, restless with thinking about what those boxes will reveal of you.

  When I return the library’s warmth is welcome after the cold of the day outside, an embrace of books and heating. I find a table alone, then go up to the desk and request your boxes. The librarian asks me which ones I want. She won’t let me have you all in one piece, I can only have you two at a time. So I take the first two. Begin at the beginning.