The Dust Diaries

by Owen Sheers

  Cripps is sitting on an old wooden box, wearing a threadbare pale jacket and a battered panama, his long legs crossed and his elbow on his knee, smoking his pipe. His pockets are full with notepaper, books, a handkerchief. A clean white dog collar hangs loose from his neck, where once, Noel supposes, it was held firm by the fuller flesh of his youth. He is almost completely still. Noel cannot see his eyes, which are obscured behind a pair of large round medical sunglasses with thick, dark lenses. Perched there on his stool, his features sharp with age, he makes Noel think of a hawk, motionless above its prey: an old, frail hawk, who is still hunting, though he can no longer see or hear.

  Noel bends to one knee and takes the camera out of the case. All these years and he has no photo of Cripps. For some reason the old man didn’t like cameras any more. He brings the camera to his eye and frames him there. Although the smell of the pipe is strong, he can smell Cripps himself under its odour. The smell of illness, of death. Old skin, tired breath.

  He presses the release button and takes the photograph, then waits, expecting Cripps to turn on hearing the click of the shutter. But he doesn’t move. He heard nothing, and Noel knows that today will be a loud day. Today he will have to declaim the poetry as if on a stage if the old man is to hear the words at all.

  ♦

  ‘I said I have brought the Tennyson and the Keats, Father, as you asked!’

  Noel leans over from his chair and speaks loudly into the old man’s ear, a half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich in his hand.

  Arthur nods. ‘Ah, yes, thank you, Mr Brettell, that’s very kind of you, I’m glad Thomas got the note to you.’

  Noel picks the two books out of his bag. They are from the same series, faded leather and peeling gold leaf on the edges of the pages. ‘What would you like me to read for you? I mean, which poems?’ he asks.

  A cowbell is hesitant in the distance, and somewhere, not too far away, someone is plucking the metallic harpings of a marimba. Arthur looks down for a moment, or at least moves his head in the manner of a man looking down, the darkness swilling in his eyes.

  ‘I would like to hear ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.’ He speaks quietly, not like a deaf man. Quietly and deliberately.

  Noel smiles to himself. ‘Yes, Father, but which one? They both wrote poems with that title.’

  And now it is Arthur’s turn to smile. He turns to face Noel. ‘I know. I should like to hear both of them please, both poems.’

  Noel takes up the Keats and thumbs through it, looking for ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, but Arthur has not finished, and he stops turning the pages as the old man continues speaking.

  ‘I knew them both by heart once. Especially Keats’. I thought on it a good deal and even thought, once, that it might come true for me. But that was not to be. So I have tried to live by Tennyson’s version instead. I think his, at least, has come true, in some way.’

  It was the most the priest had ever offered of himself, but Noel didn’t think he was inviting comment or conversation. He felt he was only addressing him as a bystander, that he had really been speaking to himself.

  A couple of crowned plovers land in the clearing and begin picking their way through the patches of dust and scrub grass. Noel watches them for a moment, their halos of white feathers about their heads, their earth-coloured plumage and their bright red legs. Then he lifts the Keats, clears his throat and begins to read the first verse, the Tennyson ready and open across his knee.

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  PART FIVE

  Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

  Even while the dust moves

  There rises the hidden laughter

  Of children in the foliage

  —T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’

  ∨ The Dust Diaries ∧

  8 DECEMBER 1999

  Chimanimani, Eastern Highlands, Zimbabwe

  ‘Ja, they gave us these Land Rovers isn’t it? Converted to carry two AK47s on either side. If you were ambushed, you hit the red button’—he makes a stabbing gesture with his forefinger—‘and they’d start shooting. Really effective, I’m telling you, and better than what we were doing at the start of the bloody war—just getting out and running at the terrs yelling our bloody heads off and firing.’ Jonathan laughs, shaking his head. He is a white Zimbabwean, in his forties, with large, farming hands and a heavy body, muscle turned to fat. His jowls shake when he laughs, but then, as if remembering a grave matter, he stops and says, ‘You must fire low with those AKs, y’know? Because of the kick, isn’t it?’ He holds an imaginary rifle before him, his forefinger hooked on an imaginary trigger, and demonstrates the kick of an AK47, his right arm vibrating as the imaginary bullets spit from the barrel. The action makes his jowls wobble again, but this time he looks deadly serious.

  I am at Heaven Lodge in Chimanimani in the foothills of the Eastern Highlands, waiting to be taken up into the mountains themselves. It is early in the morning and their peaks are still clearing of mist in the distance. Jonathan is staying here too while he oversees the building of his own backpacker lodge down the road. He’s going to call it Paradise.

  ‘It’ll be a tough choice for you lot, hey?’ he jokes. ‘Between Heaven and Paradise.’ Then he drops his voice to a whisper. ‘But I’m telling you, Paradise will be better.’

  For the last half hour he’s been telling me and a group of Americans on an overland tour about the last time he was in this area. It was during the war, when the guerrillas of ZANLA were heavily active throughout the eastern region.

  ‘They’d come over the border, lay some mines, piggy-back some of them too, the bastards, maybe take out a farm, then bugger off back into Mozambique.’

  Jonathan has been telling us he was a member of the Rhodesian SAS, fighting back against the ‘terrs’, but I’m not sure if I believe him.

  His stories sound true enough but he retells them with too much eagerness for a man who has really lived through them.

  I have come to the Eastern Highlands because this is the area you used to trek to, once a year, for an annual week’s camping with your friend Edgar Lloyd. I read a letter in Rhodes House Library in Oxford in which you referred to that week’s camping as your time to ‘meditate’. In another letter Edgar Lloyd describes how you would arrive for a week in the hills with little more than your blanket, your tin mug and a tin of mealie meal.

  I suppose, like you, I have come here to meditate: to think over the story that Canon Holderness told me two days ago, about you, Ada and your child. And that is why I am going up to the Highlands on my own this morning. Some other travellers I’ve met will join me tomorrow, but I want one day up there alone. With you and your story. One day to think it through, to work it out.

  Unlike you, however, I am not going into the Highlands so sparsely equipped, even though I’ll be in the hills for just three days. I spent all of yesterday afternoon buying supplies: a paraffin stove and a saucepan, packets of noodles, bread, cheese, some apples, cutlery, a waterproof and a sleeping mat. I also took the opportunity of being in the town to have my hair cut at a barber’s, although the hairdresser there didn’t know how to use scissors on my hair. She said she’d only ever cut African hair, and for that she used clippers. She tried the scissors but we could both tell it wasn’t going to work, so I had my hair cut with the clippers instead.

  ♦

  The Chimanimani range of the Eastern Highlands is a ridge of mountains peaking at over 2,000 metres, running north to south over a distance of 35 kilometres, with a plateau and a flat-bottomed valley in the middle of them. The climb up onto the plateau is steep—a scramble over rocks up a slope thickly covered with ycllowwood trees, protea bushes and ferns. The path is unclear in places and more than once I find myself retracing my steps to find where I have gone off course. My rucksack is heavy with my supplies and I have soon emptied my water bottle. When I reach the top, an hour and a half after I was dropped off at the base camp by the driver from Heaven Lodge, my shirt is drenched and the sweat is stin
ging in my eyes.

  The ground begins to level off. Flat slabs of rock are layered on either side of me, embedded in the slope at the same obtuse angle like the body of a great stone ship, sinking into the mountain. I pick up a path, a narrow red earth track that meanders through acres of bright green, sharp-bladed grass and sparsely spread bushes punctuated with the domes of brown-red termite mounds. I walk through this landscape for about half an hour, the peaks of the mountains on the Mozambique border steep-sided in the distance, sharp-edged against a brilliant blue sky.

  Then, coming through a gap between two huge boulders that lean and touch above me as if they are kissing, I am in a sculpture park. The path carries on meandering before me but the bright grass and the bushes have been replaced by a field of granite standing stones, contorted and sculpted by erosion into individual pieces of natural art, standing apart from each other on the sandy, scrub-grass soil. The larger ones look like half-finished Henry Moores (I think of the sculptures on the streets of Harare), while the clusters of smaller ones remind me of the ranked armies of miniature clay soldiers buried with the ancient Chinese emperors. I walk on through these rocks alone, feeling as if I am trespassing, a child in the giant’s garden.

  Eventually the alien landscape of stone gives to a more familiar view. For the first time all morning the ground begins to fall away again, and I find myself emerging into the side of a long green valley, flanked with rolling hills that could be in the Brecon Beacons back home. The floor of the valley, though, is African. Blond savannah grass cut through by a thin river, flecked white over patches of rapids. Above the low hills on the other side, the earth gives to stone again; a ragged line of high peaks, cradling the blue sky between them, marking the border with Mozambique.

  I stop to make and eat a sandwich at a ranger’s hut a little further down the valley’s side. The ranger is there, a wiry Zimbabwean in the dark green uniform of the national park: safari shirt with sleeves rolled to above his elbows, shorts, walking boots, a bush hat and a rectangular plastic name badge on his chest, with his name, MOSES, printed on it in clear white capitals.

  Moses tells me the rangers live up here for up to a month at a time, alone, except for the walkers who come and stay in the park. I ask him how many walkers are in the park today. He says there is an overland tour group due to arrive soon, but they’ll be going back down later.

  ‘You will be the only person in the park tonight,’ he tells me matter-of-factly.

  I ask him if there is anything I should watch out for.

  ‘Not really,’ he says, whittling at a stick with his sheath knife. ‘Just be careful for the gaboon viper, they are sometimes here, and if they bite you, that is very bad news.’

  He is smiling, but I can tell he is serious. I ask him what to do if I do get bitten. He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Wait for me to find you. Do not try and walk, that will just spread the venom around your body more quickly. Stay still, and wait for me to find you.’ He doesn’t say if he means find me alive or just find me.

  Voices behind us signal the arrival of the overland group. Moses stands and looks up at them through his binoculars and I go to fill up my water bottle at a tap inside the hut. When I come out Moses still has the binoculars held up to his face. I ask him if he is counting them. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘I am looking for the pretty girls.’ He brings the binoculars down and turns to face me, a broad smile opening over his white teeth, shaking his head. ‘But no luck, there are none in this group today.’

  I shoulder my rucksack and set off before the group arrive. As I have said, I want to be alone today. I haven’t brought a tent so I head off looking for a suitable cave in which to set up camp and spend the night. Moses pointed one out to me at the northern end of the flat plain in the middle of the valley. He said it was called the Red Cave, and looking through his binoculars I could just make out its dark fissure in the rock, like a blinded eye looking out from the grey stone beneath a that of grassy hair.

  The walk through the valley floor to the cave is an easy one. The heat of the sun is already softening, the tall grass that stretches away on either side of the path is alive with insects and the sky is clear above me. I reach the end of the valley where the ground begins to rise and the grass gives way to rocks again, strewn and tumbled at first, then solid cliff faces, a waterfall gushing from a narrow gap in their granite wall.

  The Red Cave has obviously seen recent habitation. There is still dried grass matting the floor, the charred pock-mark of an old fire surrounded by some stones, and even stubs of candles melted onto the rocks against the back wall. But it hasn’t been just people who have been here before me. I notice what look like leopard prints in the dust around the old fire, a concentric pattern of them, closing in on its scorched patch as if its flames have been hunted, not extinguished.

  I lay out my sleeping mat, hang up some damp clothes, leave my rucksack in the back of the cave and go out to gather some firewood. By the time I return the light is already draining from the sky. I build a fire over the ashes of the old one and set a match to the dry grass at its centre. The wood takes easily, crackling into flame. Using the fire to cook some noodles, I sit by its heat, watching the sky bleach, then darken to evening, then night. I am sat back from the lip of the cave which is set in a shelf of rock about three metres off the ground. There is an overhang above the mouth and the cliff closes in on it to the right, leaving a jagged portal a few metres across and several metres high through which I watch the view: rocky outcrops against a backdrop of the bare valley wall. Eventually, when the sky is deepening to an indigo blue, a few stars come out, low and bright above the black silhouettes of the hills. There is a steady dripping at the back of the cave, and just once the dark spark of a bat signs itself off through the space of air in front of me. The silence is heavy, thick and black.

  I sit there, in the live light of the fire and think of the story Canon Holderness told me, wondering if it is a product of the mirror-man again. Betty Finn, stranded in her house, saw you through your loneliness. Ray Brown, the literature academic, saw you through your poetry, and Canon Holderness, who lives with the love of a woman at the centre of his life, has placed such a love at the centre of yours. All three of them reflecting your story through the prisms of their own experiences. But increasingly, as I sit there at the cave mouth, testing what I know of your life against this new element, it does seem to make sense.

  There are several poems which backlit by this love affair gain a new resonance. ‘Eurydice’, based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, is one. In the last verse the myth’s heroine addresses her lover:

  Can you ever lose me out of your song?

  Can I ever lose you out of my love?

  Must we put our passion back to school?

  Must we two to lock hands wear the body’s glove?

  For my sake turn from this world beneath!

  For you I turn from that world above!

  Eurydice and Orpheus. The mythic touchstone of parted lovers, turning away from each other because of the presence, not the absence, of love.

  ♦

  Another poem, ‘Found’, also sounds a new note in the light of Holderness’ story. It appears early in the book of poetry you published just before you left for Africa, and now I can’t help but see the characters of you and Ada imbricated in its lines:

  Yes, I have found thee, and no longer now

  Seems song a mirage, or romance a dream;

  And I will sing, altho’ I am not he

  Whom thou hast deemed best worthy of thy grace –

  Heart of thy heart and all in all to thee.

  Thanks be to God that I have seen thy face!

  A goal of bliss before my song is set,

  Altho’ its consummation comes not yet!

  And of course there is your will in the archives:

  ‘I the Reverend Arthur Shearly Cripps, do hereby give and bequeath to Mrs Ada Neeves of Icklesham. Rye, Sussex’.

  There, it would seem is th
e final proof of the veracity of Holderness’ story. Your last testament.

  And already, sitting in the Red Cave, the impulse to explain, to remember in story, is overtaking me. Already I am colonising your life with my imagination, re-casting you as another of the remittance men of Rhodesia: in Africa not because of what didn’t exist for you at home, but because of what did. Is that how this love affair informs your life? When you left Ada and Theresa you were obeying the majority’s moral code, bending to society’s will. And then, in Mashonaland, you lived by the knowledge formed in the crucible of that loss and for the rest of your life you never followed society or the word of authority again. And you never left anyone again. Is that how the story goes? Is that how it all fits in place? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  The truth is that I do not know, cannot know exactly what happened or why. I can have the facts—your letters, photographs, people’s memories, the Last Will and Testament—and from these I can know the punctuation points of your life. But between those punctuation points is everything I do not know, everything that does not last, and it is only that which will ever really tell me what happened between you and Ada Sargent. Why you left her and her daughter. Why she married another man. Why you never returned and why you only wrote her name in your will years later, when you were blind and dying in your hut at Maronda Mashanu. It is these intimate diaries of our lives that tell the true history. The emotions that pass in a moment like light passing over skin, the seams of thought layered deep in our minds at every instant, the impulses, observations, nuances. The daily epiphanies, the tone and timbre of a voice, the fleeting expression of a face, the few breaths alone, head craned back studying the stars in a black sky. But these diaries of our lives are written in dust; they are not what remain. History scatters them and leaves only the stories, the writing, the punctuation points and the narratives imagined by those in our future as they try to understand their past, as they try to fill the gaps left by the dust dairies of our intimate selves.