Just the Memory of Love

by Peter Rimmer

  When the small girl with big brown eyes had gone off on some errand she no longer wished to complete, Will walked away from the scattering of mission buildings towards the few trees left standing in the rapidly arriving desert. Remembering the girl’s words for people to ‘mind their own business’, he was not sure of the right thing to do. He had just arrived back in Africa and was it his business to interfere in the life of a family? Then he thought of the girl in an old print frock that had come out from England in the charity bundle. The girl, who had only just turned nineteen, had not even been wearing shoes. For better or for worse, he made up his mind and went looking for Hilary Bains.

  “When did you and Mary last go home on leave?” he said to Hilary.

  “Oh, we don’t have time for that.”

  “Given a few months to work out what’s going on, I can run the mission. Or rather, the secular side of it. The Missionary Society must allocate you leave.”

  “They do, I take leave pay and passage money and spend it on the mission.”

  “Is that fair to your family?”

  “Oh, Mary doesn’t mind. It was her idea the first time home leave came round. What would we do in England, anyway? This is our house.”

  “Do the London people visit you?”

  “They never have yet. I send them an annual report which is all they want. I gave up asking them for money and since then they are quite happy the way I do things. We are on their map as an operating mission and that’s what really counts. You know, you’ll have to ask them before you spend all this money you talk about.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, yes. It’s their mission. It belongs to them. They’ll want to know if your money can be spent better elsewhere.”

  A cold premonition went through Will’s mind. There was obviously more than one way to wrap Africa up in red tape.

  “How can they tell me how to spend my money?”

  “You want to spend it on their mission. There are rules, you know. My goodness gracious me, if everyone ran around putting up buildings left, right and centre it would all get quite out of control.”

  “Doesn’t look as though too many people have been running around here recently putting up buildings.”

  Hilary Bains ignored the jibe. “And I can’t possibly leave you in charge of the mission. You’re not a missionary. Maybe you should think of doing something else with your money.”

  “Maybe I should… Do you ever think about your daughter?”

  “Of course I do. What on earth has this got to do with Penny?”

  “She just asked me how she could get herself a British passport.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell her.”

  “Of course I did. What did you expect me to say to her? I don’t know how to get a passport?”

  “Nothing. You should have said nothing. She’s still a child.”

  “Not anymore. But I agree, Hilary. She’s your child, and it’s none of my business. I’m sorry. I’ll just have to get used to the rules. Do you think the good fathers in London will object if I privately import a consignment of medicine for the sick?”

  “You won’t find that so easy.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “You will require an import permit.”

  “For emergency medicine?”

  “Oh yes. Anything coming in or out of African countries requires a permit. You have to pay the government to import or export anything. They don’t like businessmen making money out of the people without the government receiving a tax. How else are they going to pay for the civil service? There has been import duty in England since the year dot. All those brandy smugglers from France. Granda used to tell me stories. Your Granda. Now, Will, I’m sorry. You’ve taken up enough of my time. There is always so much to do.”

  “How do I go about applying for an import permit?” Will said to the back of Hilary’s cassock.

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  “Shit,” said Will so Hilary was unable to hear. “You can’t even give the bloody stuff away without some bureaucrat or NGO getting a cut. The world stinks.”

  Soon after the somewhat bilious discussion with Hilary Bains, Will realised that if he was going to make any sense out of what he was trying to do he needed viable transport between Barotseland and the rest of the world. After visiting the old airstrip at Mongu, the one for which Laurie Hall had worked so long ago as airport manager, Will saw the only cultivation was at the edge of the old airfield and the only real change was scraggy cattle grazing, or attempting to graze, the barren land instead of the buffalo. Even Will’s untrained eye could see there were far too many cows for the available land and that any slaughtered cattle would dress out as skin and bones. Chasing off cows to land an aircraft would be no different to chasing off the game in the days gone by.

  The only answer to his problem, he told himself, was to buy an aircraft and learn how to fly. Remembering some of the early conversations with Laurie Hall, he knew the aircraft would have to be twin-engined and the pilot’s licence he required would have to give him instrument rating and the ability to fly at night. With the vision of coming down in the bush, even on grass veld, he made a mental note to take an extensive course in aircraft maintenance. How he was to go about the exercise was beyond his immediate comprehension. Will could hear one of his mother’s favourite expressions echoing in his ears: ‘If you are going to do a job, do it properly’, followed by a second of Adelaide Langton’s homilies: ‘If you want to do a job properly, do it yourself’. He often wondered how many generations in his family had passed down such truths. Having made up his mind to overcome the first obstacle, he found a second hurdle equally a problem. Getting up from the Victoria Falls with his old partner, Horst Kannberg, had been one thing. Getting out of the mission without transport or a workable telephone to call for help, the locals having found a better use for copper telephone wire, was insurmountable. The walk from the old jetty on the Zambezi River, where Horst had left him in a hurry to beat the falling river six weeks ago, had taken a day and he knew the way. There was no chance of him walking to the Zambian capital, Lusaka, or the Victoria Falls without dying on the road, even with all his experience. There were too many starving people who would find his small possessions, particularly his gun and ammunition, riches beyond compare. He began to empathise with young Penny Bains whose big, brown, sad eyes haunted even his dreams.

  With the patience of having lived in Africa for so many years, Will waited for the trader to visit Barotseland with his overlander truck that could travel through the bush in the dry season without need of a road, a slow, hot, tsetse-bitten journey that Will at forty-four years of age had hopefully discounted as the option to solve his own problem of moving around. To add to Will’s problems, the young Bains girl was looking at Will with eyes that asked for more than a way out of the bush. Or so it seemed, and he hoped he was wrong.

  The sporadic rainy season had petered out soon after Will’s arrival without a sign of the main rains that swept in with the cyclones from the Mozambique channel. Just before leaving England, Will had first heard of the weather pattern that the scientists were calling El Niño, which was caused by the Pacific Ocean either warming up or cooling down, Will had not paid enough attention to remember which. What he did remember was the forecast that for the next several years the world’s weather pattern would change and there would be terrible floods where floods would least be expected and terrible drought in Africa. ‘Global warming’ was a phrase he had also heard for the first time, and like everyone else on earth burrowing away at his own particular life, he had taken little notice. In England the weather was always bloody awful so what was the difference?

  That year the inland waterholes dried up in August, forcing the game to trek to the Zambezi for water and back again for food. For ten miles from the big rivers, there was not a blade of grass or a leaf within reach of an elephant’s trunk or the delicate lips of a giraffe. To compound the problem, any tree that
was not strong enough to stand up to the weight of a fully grown elephant had been pushed over for the prize of the top green leaves: the tree had been killed. Everyone was waiting for the rains to start building up but day after day the sky was dust blue with the occasional puff of cloud. Nature was preparing a final, dreadful blow to the chaos of post-colonial Africa.

  Hymie Goldblatt, the current holder of the trading concession once held by Octavio Goncalves, had been recruited into the South African Communist Party when he was a law student at the University of Cape Town. He had fled South Africa three years earlier, just ahead of the state security police who were fighting the ‘total onslaught’ of communism that beset apartheid South Africa. One of his fellow advocates had been murdered by the security police the day before and Hymie had been smuggled out of Cape Town into Botswana before arriving in Lusaka where the African National Congress of Nelson Mandela conducted their struggle against apartheid. With no use for his services as a working advocate in Zambia, he sat around in the Zambian capital for months doing nothing. He had never had an intention of going into politics, his membership of the SACP having come about through the persecution of his own people, the Jews. Through defending four members of the ANC in separate cases, he was one of the few whites in South Africa who understood the depth of persecution brought down on anyone who disagreed with apartheid. He was not even safe in Lusaka from the South African Bureau of State Security and when UNIP, the party that controlled Zambia, told the ANC they were looking for a trader to operate Barotseland, Hymie Goldblatt was offered the concession. Being a man of quick humour, the idea amused Hymie as he knew his great-grandfather, who had fled the Tsar’s pogroms in Russia, had made his living in South Africa as an itinerant pedlar, better known in those days as a smous. The old man had toiled from Cape Town to the Transvaal with his two horses and cart, selling anything and everything to the isolated farmers, the Boers of South Africa. The horse and cart had eventually given way to the trading company Goldblatt and Sons, which presently generated billions in trade between the outside world and South Africa, everything from steel to maize to sugar, anything in fact that had a buy price slightly less than the sale price. Hymie’s younger brother was training under their father to take over the family trading house with its overseas offices in Australia, Hong Kong, Teheran and Israel. And here was Hymie, the heir to the family throne that he had first forsaken for the law, going back to being a smous. The only difference in the lifestyle of Hymie and his great-grandfather was the five-ton truck, with the big high wheels, and the horse and cart. Inside, the merchandise was much the same. To complete the irony, most of the goods he sold were bought in South Africa as goods from America and Europe were far too expensive. Hymie was convinced that a government of the people, by the people in South Africa was the cornerstone that would solve some of the problems of sub-Saharan Africa.

  By the time he met Will Langton for the first time he was thirty-three years old. By then, to Hymie, whether the future South African government was communist or democratic, it mattered not, so long as the nationalists were removed from power and replaced by a government of all the people. In some ways he was an idealist rather like Will Langton who not only sought his help to get to Lusaka but to bring up the medicines Will wished to buy for the mission. They had all been entertained to dinner by Mary Bains when Hymie had shattered the practicality of Will becoming a qualified pilot.

  “First you will be spending more money on transport than medicine and secondly the time and energy you will have to spend to qualify as a pilot could be better spent helping the poor. Believe me, I know. What you need is a reliable transport company that can bring in your precious cargo without them worrying about the condition of the roads. For a price, of course, but a price far less than the drastic scheme you have in mind… Mrs Bains,” Hymie had said, “your cooking is superb even if it is not strictly according to my religion. At least, Reverend Bains, we have what you would call the Old Testament in common.”

  “Do you know of such a transport company in South Africa?” Will had asked.

  “Of course. Goldblatt and Sons Transport, a division of Goldblatt and Sons.”

  “They wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with your family?” Will asked with a quiet smile.

  “Oh, yes. I can get you a very good price.”

  “And on the medicines?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “I think God has reached out to you, Will,” said Hilary and, looking at the trouble in his adopted-brother’s eyes, Will was not sure whether Hilary was being serious.

  “Can you give me a lift to Lusaka and an introduction to your family?” said Will.

  “Can I come too?” said Penny Bains, who right through dinner had not taken her eyes off Hymie Goldblatt.

  In the silence that had followed Penny Bains’s request, Will had excused himself from the table. They were drinking tea grown on the mission, the bushes guarded from the goats by a thorn-thicket fence that had proved impregnable. Through the big veranda window protected by a gauze screen, he could see the four of them seated at the table, the two paraffin lamps smoking in the still of the night.

  The night was cloudless and stars held every point in the pitch-black sky, layer upon layer of unknown light speaking from eternity. Automatically Will took the line from the Southern Cross to the pointer stars and found the true south. Cicadas screeched in the night. The smell of wood-ash was heavy in the air, the elephant-destroyed trees having found their way to the mission. Some way behind the crumbling bungalow that Hilary called his house, an owl was calling to its mate and Will listened for the answering call. When it came, he smiled to himself and walked further away from the house.

  Nature was calling to the girl, the most primal call, more powerful than parents’ words, and Will had no wish to enter the argument: without that primitive call to reproduce, he surmised, man would long ago have left the planet which set Will to wondering. Did all the talk of life’s meaning have anything else to say, he thought? Did God and goodness, the struggle to live a better life, have anything more important to say than the preservation of the species? Was that the only reason for man’s pursuit through life: to live, love, reproduce and die? Did man make up the rest and confuse himself? Was it not just that simple? What was one man amid all those stars if he did not reproduce?

  Looking back to the earth, Will retraced his steps towards the sophistication of the dining room table. Then he opened the insect-proof frame, covered with gauze that guarded the door.

  “Everything’s in its place in heaven,” said Will. “The night sky is beautiful. Mary, please excuse me for breaking up the evening but my new friend is leaving early in the morning and the long road is rough. For a moment out there in the dark, life was heavy on my shoulders and it has made me tired. The older I get, the less I understand. Rather sad. Once upon a time, I thought I would find out the answers. Goodnight, Mary, Hilary, Penny, Mr Goldblatt.”

  “Call me Hymie.”

  “Goodnight, Hymie. I will see you in the morning.”

  The row began at breakfast. The lamps had been removed from the table to the sideboard and the dead insects, drawn to the fatal light the previous evening, had been swept away: even the glass shades had been cleaned of soot. Mary Bains believed godliness and cleanliness went hand in hand. The first rays of sunshine sweeping across the brown compound of the mission caught a wall picture of Christ hanging from his cross. Outside the bungalow, between the house and the schoolroom, long-legged chickens had begun their desperate forage for survival, eternally searching the layer of fine, dry soil that covered the surface of the mission compound. With a cluck of delight an old hen found the scattered dead insects from the paraffin lamp swept over the steps of the veranda, and frantically pecked up the incinerated remains ahead of the seven other mission fowls that half-flew to the meagre source of food. The day was going to be hot with the powder-blue sky almost cloudless.

  Will had packed a small bag and was ready t
o face the heat and dust. The six hundred-kilometre trek through the bush would take them through the Kafue National Park. They would camp out next to the truck four times before reaching Lusaka.

  Penny Bains marched in to breakfast with a small bag hanging from her shoulder that had been made for her by the children in the school, the children bringing the reeds to the school from the Zambezi River. The bag was remarkably strong. The sun had been up for ten minutes when she took her usual seat.

  “Hymie, please, may I have a lift to Lusaka?”

  “What are you going to do in Lusaka?” snapped her father.

  “Obtain a British passport and go to England.”

  “Don’t be silly, you don’t have any money.”

  “But I do have my birth certificate, both your birth certificates and your certificate of marriage which I took from the bureau. The British High Commission will provide me with the form to fill in and then I will wait.”

  “And what are you going to do for money?” laughed Hilary. Mary had stopped eating her breakfast and was staring at her daughter. “Did you have something to do with this, Will? You obviously told her how to obtain a passport. Have you lent my daughter money?”

  “No, I have not.”

  “Will you swear that on the Bible?”

  “Of course. But…”

  “There are no ‘buts’ about it. Either you did or you didn’t.”

  “Your daughter never asked me for money but had she done so and with your permission I would have given her passage to England. Mother would happily receive her at Langton Manor, which is your home after all. The girl is English and has a right to see her heritage.”