Just the Memory of Love

by Peter Rimmer

  “These trains may be first class but the service is kak,” said the Afrikaner, watching him with amusement. “You didn’t bring no food, did you?”

  “No.” This time when the meat came out of the shirt, Will took it gratefully and tore a strip off with his teeth and chewed. Hannes bent down and picked up the piece from the floor, rubbed it on the front of his khaki shirt and carried on eating.

  “We Boers lived off this when we were fighting you Brits. Why you could never catch us. A horse, a rifle, a few sticks of biltong. No blerry great supply wagons. Twenty thousand Boers and half a million Brits. All because of a few sticks of dried meat. Makes you want to laugh.”

  They had passed over the border from Portuguese East Africa into the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the self-governing British state that encompassed Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. As the sun was setting deep in the highveld, silhouetting the msasa trees that covered the fertile plains on either side of the train, Will watched the first houses of Salisbury, the federal capital, break the pattern of trees and elephant grass.

  “You’d better come with me, kerel, or you will get lost,” was all the big man said at Salisbury station.

  Gratefully, Will picked up his bags and followed a man he knew nothing about onto the platform.

  “We can walk to Meikles Hotel. First you can buy me a cold beer and then I’ll buy you a meal, Englishman.”

  Like a puppy dog following its master, Will faithfully followed the hulk along the darkening streets of Salisbury, grateful for the protection, expecting a lion to jump out of the shadows at any moment.

  The main room through the entrance of the hotel was a vast affair with a high domed ceiling from the centre of which hung the largest crystal chandelier Will had ever seen. Strewn through the room were tables and chairs and off to the left an open door led into a bar. Alcoves fed off the main room with more tables and chairs. All but one of the tables were occupied.

  Heads turned to look at Hannes Potgieter, and Will thought it was the sheer size of the man that caused the conversations to falter as he followed him to the empty table on the other side of the room. An old, fat African, wearing a red fez and red sash appeared at the table as they sat down.

  “Guru, bring us two cold beers and my friend is paying.”

  The black man went off and came back in seconds with two bottles of beer and one glass, putting the tray down on the table. Will was handed the slip. One shilling and fourpence for two beers; somewhat cheaper, Will thought, than the Greyhound Hotel at Corfe Castle where his grandfather also drank. Will fumbled in his pocket and came up with one and sixpence which he offered to the smiling black man.

  “English money?” said he, giving it back.

  “Give him an English pound and he will change it for you at the desk.” The enormous hand stretched forward, took up the bottle and within ten seconds the Afrikaner had sucked the bottle dry. Will found a pound note in his money belt, gave it to the waiter and poured out his beer into the glass. The second round was ordered before Will had taken his first sip.

  “I say, that is rather good,” said Will putting down a half-empty glass. Their bags and the gun case were by then behind the reception desk while the manager tried to find them a room.

  The first man to come across to their table was as weatherbeaten as Hannes Potgieter, with a grizzled, grey-streaked beard. The indifference the man showed the big man puzzled Will at first. The second man showed the same manner and by the time the third round arrived and Will had put his change in Rhodesian currency into his money belt, there were seven men at the table, all of whom had been formally introduced to ‘the Englishman’. No one thought it strange to find a young man, a stranger, at the table and Will relaxed. Everyone seemed to know Hannes Potgieter and when the manager of the hotel brought them their room keys with apologies for being so long, Will knew he had struck gold. The only round he was allowed to buy all night was the first one. Large plates of sandwiches were brought to the table, followed by wine and more people.

  When the big man got him up to his room, he opened the door and then let him go. Still giving thanks with slurred, happy words, Will Langton tottered into his room and collapsed on the bed fully clothed, sleeping the night without a snore or a dream.

  The harsh glare of the African sun through the open window woke him in the morning. For the first few moments of consciousness he could not remember where he was and then he panicked, clutching at his money belt, frantically unzipping it to find the blessed money he thought would have been stolen from a drunken boy lying face down on a bed. Then he saw his bags, neatly together on a low trestle waiting to be opened.

  Turning over and sitting up he blinked in the sunlight and got up to draw the curtain across the slanting ray of sun. His mouth felt like the bottom of a parrot’s cage. The gods had looked after him. It was half-past six in the morning. A door from his bedroom led into a small bathroom, something he had not seen for weeks. Both taps worked, spewing out fresh, clean water, filling his bath in less than a minute. Removing the clothes of his journey, he sank into the warm water and sighed with pleasure, soaping himself clean from head to toe.

  With clean teeth and fresh clothes, Will ventured into the new strange world to find himself some breakfast, his sun-bleached hair slicked back behind his ears. The soft warmth of the bath had taken away his headache. A long landing led him to the carpeted stairs, with wooden banisters to guide him down to the ground floor where he found the reception desk.

  “Mr Potgieter is waiting for you in the dining room, sir. I understand you will be staying another night.”

  “I will?”

  “Your train leaves for Bulawayo and Livingstone tomorrow.”

  “It does?”

  “I personally made the reservations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure. The dining room is through the doors over there.”

  Will followed the instructions and the big man waved him to a seat.

  “I think I would like to apologise…” Will began.

  “For a lad of eighteen, just, you did well last night, kerel.”

  “I told you my age?”

  “That one on the train. She must have been very beautiful.” Will looked at him quizzically. “From Livingstone you can come upriver on my boat. You can either join the priest or work for me without pay and learn about the bush… You asked for a job last night, if you remember?”

  “After the sandwiches, I have something of a blank.”

  “You said you could shoot straight.”

  “That I can.”

  “Ride a horse?”

  Will nodded.

  “Which Missionary Society is this sort of brother of yours? Capuchin Fathers, Paris Missionary Society?”

  “London Missionary Society, I think I told you in the train.”

  “Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t… Kerel… There are more do-gooders in Africa than is good for Africa. No matter. Every man thinks he is different… You see, I lost my wife last year. Bad thing for a man to be lonely. You can mark my word… Went down to Cape Town to see her folks. Came up the coast to Beira by Bloemfontein Castle.”

  Will let the silence drift away.

  “Why does everyone know you?” he said at length.

  “Done a bit of hunting. The Americans, Germans, British, they all come to my camp to hunt. I’ve been hunting thirty-five years. Chief Mwene Kandala’s grandfather gave me permission. I’m the only white hunter in Barotseland, all sixty-five thousand square miles. I shoot and trade the skins and take out the rich from New York and London. Why my English is good for an Afrikaner… How long this brother been out of England?”

  “Six months.”

  “How long I’ve been away… Have some breakfast… We’ve a day to wait.”

  “They told me at the desk. They seem to have booked my seat on the train, Mr Potgieter.”

  “Call me Hannes, it’s short for Johannes.”

  The
mosquitoes were as thick as fleas on a camel. The rain had been continuous for a week. The small hill with the tin-roofed schoolroom was surrounded by floodwater and the mission was empty of children. A small troop of vervet monkeys had taken refuge on the high ground and chattered miserably in the acacia tree that overhung Hilary’s hut. Inside, Hilary had been delirious for three days and the old African was sure the white man was going to die. Every four hours he forced quinine into the young man’s mouth but most of it spilt on the sodden pillow and dripped onto the cow-dung floor. The old man prayed to his new God and waited for death with the stoicism of his race. He had seen four of them come and die in the hut above the big river. They were strange people, these men of the new God, and he wondered what his ancestors thought of them, the ancestors he secretly spoke to in his dreams. Most of his people had left after the first rains for the chief’s summer place at Namushakende where the ground was high above the floodwater of the great Zambezi River. The foolish white man did not understand the ways of Africa.

  On the fourth day, as if God himself had come into the hut, Hilary woke from his fever and took the black man’s hand.

  “Thank you… God has been good to us… Will you pray with me?” Obedient to the miracle, the black man knelt on the dung floor at the bedside and both of them gave thanks to God.

  On the fourth day of Will’s journey through Central Africa, the train rumbled over the steel bridge high above the Zambezi River gorge. On the corridor side of the train where Will was standing enthralled, the sun was shining through the billowing mist of water flung a hundred metres into the air by the plunge of the river over the Victoria Falls, eighty metres of cascading green water hurtling down into the gorge. A perfect rainbow beckoned to Will.

  Five minutes later they disembarked at Livingstone station, Will having not said a word. The greatest waterfall on earth had been awesome to behold, his young mind unable to comprehend the power of the river.

  “Is it the priest or me, kerel?” asked Hannes when their bags and the gun case were in the taxi that would take them upriver of the Falls to the flat-bottomed boat that would ferry them into Barotseland.

  “If you will teach me, Hannes, I would like to learn the ways of the bush. Hilary will have his friends in the Church and find me a nuisance. I didn’t really know what I was going to do on the mission station now I am so close. From England, just going to Africa was enough.”

  “Good, we have many supplies to take on board and then we face the rapids and in three weeks’ time four Americans will be flying into the aerodrome at Mongu. We pick them up in two Land Rovers… Can you drive, kerel?”

  “Yes, I can drive.”

  “From Mongu, you visit this Hilary Bains whose parents died in the war.”

  The boat consisted of two steel pods, ten metres long and welded airtight, the front ends of the pods coming to a point. A steel structure held the pods parallel to each other and what looked to Will like a hut had been built across the pods. At the back were two powerful outboard motors and Will guessed the draught of the boat at less than half a metre. It took them a day and the following morning to buy and stow the stores.

  The journey began when the sun was high overhead and even the roar of the main outboard engine could not drown out the thunder of the Falls a kilometre downriver. On the first island they passed, crowded with phoenix palms, a crocodile eight metres long slithered into the water and for an hour followed them upstream. Will saw elephants on both sides of the river behind the tall reeds and elephant grass. Waterfowl he had never seen before were everywhere around the slow-flowing river that pushed dead trees and clumps of grass endlessly downstream, ever questing the unknown sea. It was a magical first experience he would never forget, wellbeing enveloping his mind and body.

  For two days they beat upriver and with great respect, Will watched the skill and strength of the big man as Hannes navigated the rushing rapids studded with black-wet rocks, the flotsam of whole trees stuck in the rush of water waiting to twist and drown their pontoon boat. The big man roared with laughter at the challenge, shouting his lungs out above the rage of the rapids until he found the calm water above and switched off the second engine.

  At night they camped on the high ground above the swollen river. The sinking sun shot rays of pink light at the tufted clouds behind the trees, glowing red and fading, the light paling duck-egg blue before the orange glow spread from the sunken sun and silhouetted the palms and fever trees. The sounds of Africa were deafening from all around, grunts from the hippos in the water mingling with the last calls of a hundred birds.

  Hannes made up a great fire, the flickering flame-light searching for the tops of the acacia tree.

  The stars were dominant in the night sky, layer upon layer of the universe crowding the black void of deep space, galaxy upon galaxy, drawing Will’s mind beyond his puny understanding of the meaning of infinity, on forever leaving earth a minute nothing in the great unknown design, the molecules of Will’s own body billions of years old from the spatial dust, the matter of himself never leaving the earth but forming the cells of future life in an endless universe.

  “Africa makes me feel so small,” he said to himself.

  “Ja, kerel,” said Hannes, searching the night sky, “the reason for our own existence is so insignificant. Where we are, I don’t know. Why, I don’t know. No one ever found out… That ‘whoo-oo-hoop’ is a hyena calling for a mate, always calling for a mate. Hitch your mosquito net to the tree if you don’t want the bastards to eat you alive. We keep the fire going all night or the shumba will be calling.”

  “Shumba?”

  “Simba. Shumba. Whatever. The lion. This is lion country, kerel. Keep that rifle ready to fire. You can spend twenty years in the bush without a problem… Never drop your guard. Then you’ll grow to an old man.”

  The big man stood up, and the fire threw his shadow across the river, its surface black and ominous, plopping with night sounds, the surging mass of water pushing at the night and mirroring the stars. “Hell, man, it’s great to be back in the real Africa. Makes a man want to be alive. Makes it all worthwhile.”

  Will went to sleep to the sound of a thousand castanets, river frogs wooing each other in the night, mingling with the screech of tree crickets grinding their back legs, frogs and cicadas eternally calling for a mate to keep the pulse of new life flowing with the river.

  Birdsong, the joy to dawn, woke Will from a dreamless sleep. The fire was burning down and Hannes was nowhere to be seen. Fear and panic gripped his stomach as he pushed out of the mosquito net, the rifle gripped in his right hand. The bright new sun was heaving itself from behind the phoenix palms, and white fleecy clouds mirrored themselves in the flowing water of the river. Nothing had changed. Fear left him with the balm of dawn, the new dawn.

  Ten minutes went by while the sun came up over the trees and the heat rose with the day, the sun burning Will’s unprotected legs and arms. Afraid to call, he waited.

  The big man strode through the trees from the direction of the river.

  “Get out the frying pan, Englishman. We eat like two kings for breakfast. Look at these beauties.” One hand holding out two large fish hooked by the gills, the rifle gripped in the other, he chuckled. “Fresh chessa. River bream. Best fish in the world. We scale, fillet and eat in that order… Where’s my coffee?”

  “Coming, boss.” Will was happier than at any time since being chased off Dancing Ledge by angry parents.

  Hannes Potgieter’s permanent hunting camp was on the banks of the river where the waters bent away between two hills in a wide sweep, leaving calm water down below the camp. Here a jetty trod out into the flow giving them landfall on the morning of the fourth day. Three black men were waiting on the jetty to catch the rope Will threw them as Hannes reversed the engine and bumped the right-hand pod against the strong wood of the jetty. Hannes greeted his trackers in Lozi, and the smiles on their faces would have lit a campfire.

  “Come, Englishman,
I show you your new home… They will empty the boat. Maybe two bottles of whisky will be lost in the river as they unpack but that is good… Every man needs his reward. Maybe they are more pleased to see the whisky than me. Who knows and does it matter? We understand each other. In the bush, hunting, we understand each other very well.”

  Will followed his first employer up the path from the river, up the hill that guarded the bend of calm water, stopping once to look back at the view over the riverine trees to the endless distance of the bush and the mopani forests, silent, pressed down by the heat of the tropical sun. Sweat was dripping inside his shirt but he smiled with pleasure. The top of the hill showed him a plateau giving a view over the mopani forest from the north bank of the river, over the tops of endless trees running into the distant, shimmering heat haze to a distant range of hills. They entered the gate in the fence of thorn thicket overgrown with sisal plants, making the wide enclosure as impregnable as a fort. A massive two-storey house, open on all sides beneath a single, thick new thatch showed Will an upper deck with cane chairs, a cane bar and the trophy heads of all the big game of Africa.

  “For the tourists,” explained Hannes, as they mounted the wooden steps to the upper deck. “They like them, I don’t. But a man has to live. All of us are killing something. Words have killed more happiness than guns.”

  Down below, the enclosure was full of tame wild animals and birds.

  “Just watch that Goliath heron. His beak is sharper than a razor. The small house over there will be yours, next to the trackers’ huts. Now we have a drink to welcome us home, Englishman. You see, I like to drink and I don’t like to drink alone. You like it where I live, kerel? The ice is in the freezer. Works on paraffin. Your job, the ice. First we teach you to drink whisky and then we teach you the bush.”