Acacia - Secrets of an African Painting

by Paul Bondsfield

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE - FEVER

  It made sense that we spend a bit of time in town before we moved on to ask around and try to get an idea of the hazards we may face in the area we were heading for. So after a hearty breakfast at the small and basic motel we stayed in for the night, we took a walk through the town to see what we might find.

  Tara was getting back to normal now, but there was an intensity there that still worried me even though I had no idea what I could do about it. It occurred to me that she was suffering from the same sort of fever that prospectors of old were used to. I remembered seeing footage of old men, sitting out in the middle of nowhere for years, just searching and scraping away at the earth, forever holding the forlorn hope that they would find the rich seam or strike the pot of gold and renewing that hope each and every day they woke up. Each day became the day that the search would be over, every night they went to sleep dreaming about the next day. This sort of behaviour was surely a sickness as much as any other and it affected people’s entire lives, condemning them to years of solitude and misery. Even now, there were emerald prospectors in the centre of Australia, living in the desert hoping to find the big haul that would elevate them to the realms of the super rich, but instead, finding just enough to keep them ticking over, day after day, year after year.

  This was the worry I had about Tara then, that whatever happened in the next few days, she would not be able to give up the hunt. That she would destroy her life looking for the family treasure, which for all we knew may not even exist anymore, if it even had in the first place. I kept a careful eye on her for this reason, checking that her “condition” didn’t get any more severe, but this new intensity clouded things, making it hard for me to get close to her at all.

  The town looked to be what I imagined a fairly typical country town would be like out here although it seemed to be very industrial too. The motel receptionist informed us that Kwekwe was one of the biggest steel producing towns in the country, and there were also gold mines near here. There were wide streets flanked by shops and warehouses selling everything you could need for the successful country life, from tractors to seeds, from groceries to clothing.

  The pavements were shaded by overhanging corrugated roofs, all the way along the street, allowing people to walk in comfort even in the fierce heat of the midday sun and it all looked very colonial to me, just as it should be.

  We came across a bookshop at one point and Tara dragged me inside.

  ‘I want to see if they have any books on trees in here,’ She explained, see if there’s anything about acacias that might help us.’

  It seemed like a good idea, so in we went. After a quick browse, we soon found what we were looking for, “Common Trees of the Highveld”, so we purchased it and left the shop.

  Halfway along the main street, there was a side alley, narrow and dark, but with an intriguing sign at its entrance that led us to explore further. The sign advertised the services of a “witchdoctor” who would, for a small consideration, tell you your fortune or misfortune as was appropriate. It was an opportunity too great to miss, so after a brief discussion, we walked up the narrow passage until we reached a door, set into the wall and with a similar sign to the one on the street, hanging from a hook in its centre.

  I pushed the door open and walked inside, to be greeted not by a room of any sort, but instead by an open yard, long from front to back, but only as wide as the one building to which, I assumed, it belonged. Hanging from the wooden fencing on both sides were all manner of tribal artefacts from sculptures, feathers, skins, and weapons, giving the place a fairly authentic look I thought.

  There was not immediately any sign of anyone there, so we started to walk toward the back of the yard, away from the building. The very end was partially hidden by a rough fence of bent sticks, twigs and grasses woven around a frame of stout looking branches. I called out for attention and thought for a moment that there was no one around. Then there appeared a figure from behind the screen, tall and strong looking, dressed in a traditional costume of furs. I say figure because it was difficult to determine the sex of the individual due to the large mask worn on its head, which stretched down to the person’s midriff. When he spoke, though, it was unmistakeably a man’s voice: deep and sonorous, which seemed to vibrate the very air around us and that I could feel in the pit of my stomach.

  ‘My friends, you have come seeking truth and the future. You are from a land far from here and are new to our customs, but have no fear, as I will help you in your quest. Please come with me and we will look together for what you seek.’

  The way he said all this and what he actually said made us both stare at him and then each other, sensing that he knew something about the reasons for us being here. I felt again like I had in Harare in the presence of the street seller who also seemed to know more about me than he could possibly have found out from the little I had said. It was a little eerie and we held each other’s hand as we walked round the screen.

  I expected something more than I found when he followed us into the shadow of his little private room. In fact, it was just the same this side as it was the other. There were two mats on the ground though, upon one of which the witchdoctor indicated we should seat ourselves, and the other where he seated himself. As he sat, he removed the mask and I was surprised to see a fairly youthful face looking at me. He was probably not much older than me, and nothing like the wrinkled old man I had expected, but his eyes were bright, the whites matching the intensity of colour of his teeth, which showed when he smiled. He was also very fit looking; his arms were muscle bound and his stomach flat with abs protruding like a second set of thick ribs.

  ‘You look very young to be a witchdoctor.’ I said to him, making my voice lighter than the mood indicated.

  ‘I am indeed a scholar in the arts of the spirit world,’ he admitted, ‘but if you find my service less than adequate, then I will refund your money.’

  He coughed discretely at that point and nodded to a sign on the fence, setting out the fee he was expecting. I nodded and dug in my wallet for the appropriate sum and handed it to him. Somehow the act of payment made me feel a whole lot less nervous, making me merely the buyer of this strange man’s services. That feeling dissipated, however, as soon as he started his performance. He was silent for a while, shaking small bones from a leather cup onto the dusty ground between us and poking at them with a stick. Then he dripped what looked suspiciously like blood onto the bones and again agitated them with the point of his stick while at the same time, quietly muttering something under his breath, of which I caught the odd word, but still understood nothing.

  At last he finished his prodding and he slowly looked up at us, gazing first at me and then Tara before speaking.

  ‘There is danger in what you seek here. You seek something old, something that is yours but not yours, something from the earth but like rain from the skies. You will find what you seek, but it will not be what you expect it to be, I think. However, I must warn you again, there is death here: yes, someone will die a violent death.’

  At that point, he simply stopped talking and there was silence as Tara and I took in what he had said and he merely waited. To say I was shocked is an understatement. I was shaken to the core, not just at the fact that he knew why we were here, but by his vision of death and a violent one at that. It seemed that there had been enough death already mixed up with these diamonds, right back from Frederick’s time, to Nellie and Tara’s parents’ mysterious trip. There was no way I wanted either of us to die for the treasure, no matter how valuable it might be and so this man’s words made me feel like running for the hills, getting on the next flight back to England, and forgetting all about the whole thing.

  As soon as I looked at Tara’s face, I knew that we were not going anywhere in the near future. She stared at the man in front of us, that intensity I had seen earlier pouring from her in almost visible waves.

  ‘Who is going to die?’ She asked so bluntly, without emotio
n of any sort that it seemed like a perfectly reasonable question to ask. It didn’t occur to me to say at that point that it really didn’t matter who died, because even one death was too many.

  The witchdoctor simply looked at her and was silent for a moment. Then in a gentle voice, almost too quiet for me to hear, he replied, ‘It is not clear, I do not know.’

  Tara hadn’t finished though. ‘When?’ she asked, ‘when will this person die?’

  ‘That is not clear either,’ he said as gently as before, although I thought the look in his eyes had hardened just a little, probably feeling a bit uncomfortable under the famous Tara glare.

  ‘I have told you all there is to know. You must discover whatever more there is for yourselves; if that is the road you choose to take. It is for you to decide.’

  With that he rose and it seemed as if our consultation was over. I didn’t think it was prudent to ask for our money back even though I was thoroughly disturbed by what he had said and he had failed to answer Tara’s questions. We left the yard and walked back out onto the sunny street, the bright sun made what had just happened all the more unreal.

  Before I even had a chance to say a thing, Tara spoke.

  ‘We will still go on James. We can’t take any notice of a silly witchdoctor spouting superstitious nonsense. You do agree don’t you?’

  She had that look in her eyes again and before I even knew what I was saying, I had agreed with her. She was probably right anyway, the stuff he had come out with could have been construed in a number of different ways, he probably said the same to every tourist who wandered down the narrow alley and came knocking at his gate.

  Looking back now I am not sure if I really believed that at the time or whether I was just under a spell from Tara or the witchdoctor or maybe just Africa herself. However, the truth was that I was keen to go on and if Tara was able to shrug these warnings off as easily as that then so was I.

  We carried on down the street, looking in the shop windows, but not finding anything more to help us. We bought a large-scale map of the area though and some extra strong mosquito repellent before we turned to walk back to the motel where the car was parked. Strangely, when we came to the alley again, the sign had gone and there was nothing to suggest that anything was happening in its dark shadows.

  It was nearly midday by the time we drove from Kwekwe along the minor road towards Silobela and Nkayi. The bush, which before had been exciting and beautiful, now seemed to be dull and forbidding as we drove. Miles of nothingness, covered with tall yellow grass in places and short stubby mopane trees in others. In the distance we could see a range of purple hills, “marching across the landscape” as they say and there was something about them that stirred something within me, but it was more of an unconscious thought than anything else and whatever it was, couldn’t break through the atmosphere in the car.

  Tara was now fully focused, the brooding intensity of earlier had been replaced by an almost hyperactive concentration on the task of finding this one little spot in the vastness that is the African bush. She read and reread the diary and all the notes we had made and pored over the maps as we drove, silently working toward some conclusion of which I was not sure I was going to be made aware.

  ‘Have you worked it out yet?’ I asked her partly just to break the deafening silence and partly to elicit any information from her that I could.

  ‘No, just drive, would you.’ Her reply was curt to say the least and I stared out the front of the car in a huff.

  A short time after that, I noticed that Tara was gazing fixedly at the view, or more accurately, at the hills in the distance. She suddenly reached round behind her where the painting was sitting on the back seat and grabbed it, looking first at the view and then the painting and back again.

  ‘Stop the car!’ She suddenly screamed, scaring me half witless in the process. ‘Just stop the car, would you?’ She was insistent, so I did as I was told. She jumped out and ran to the roadside, holding the painting aloft, lining it up with the view in the background.

  ‘Look, James, come and look. Those are the hills in the painting, I’m sure of it.’

  I jumped out and walked over to where she was standing and looked at the picture and the landscape behind it, trying hard to find a match.

  ‘I can’t see it myself. I mean, there are similarities, but the shapes are all wrong.’ I said, still trying to make a comparison between the two.

  ‘You’re wrong; they are the same, look again.’ She was more insistent, but as much as I looked, I could see no real comparison.

  ‘Sorry, but I just can’t see it at the moment.’ I looked into her face apologetically, but she merely glared back at me accusingly.

  ‘You can see it, I know you can, it’s just so obvious. You’re just trying to be awkward.’ She almost spat the words at me. ‘Why would you try and block me? We will find it you know. Those are the hills in the picture; we just have to find the right angle, that’s all.’ She stalked back to the car, and after one last look at the distant hills, I followed her.

  ‘Look Tara, we are on the same team here you know. I’m not trying to block you, and you know that. I don’t know what’s got into you, but I wish you would calm down a little. We will find it if we can, but it will be harder if you’re constantly fighting me like this.’ I held her stare this time, not letting her escape with a blink or a word.

  The returning gaze was intense for a moment before her shoulders seemed to drop, just slightly, and the lids of her eyes flickered. ‘I’m sorry James; I don’t know what got into me. You’re right; it will be easier if we’re working together so I’ll try to calm down a bit.’ She smiled at me and reached out, placing her hand on me arm reassuringly, which for some reason I found only slightly reassuring. That was too easy; she hadn’t fought anywhere near as much as I had expected, but for now, I would take any victory, no matter how hollow it might seem.

  ‘Right, let’s have another look at that painting then.’ I held out my hand and she passed it over, her smile a little broader at this act of submission. I made pretence of comparing scenery with painting again and actually found myself thinking that there could be a resemblance, although it occurred to me I would be able to see the same level of similarity in almost any range of low hills in southern Africa. ‘You’re right,’ I acquiesced, ‘we just need to find the angle, so let’s drive on and see what we can see.’

  I pulled the car back onto the tarmac strip and Tara sat smiling to herself, once again examining all the clues we had collected. She opened the book on trees we had bought previously and leafed through until she found the page on acacias. There were three types listed, but the flat-topped variety was most like the one in the picture.

  “‘Known in Ndebele as umohlo”,’ she read out loud, “‘this subspecies is widespread in tropical Africa. Most frequent in wooded grassland and on alluvial soils in river valleys”.’ Then she mumbled the next bit to herself, skipping over the stuff she was not interested in. “‘The wood burns well, but the thorns make it very difficult to handle, which is a drawback in its use as a fuel”.’ She snapped the book shut and looked at me triumphantly.

  ‘There you go, that just proves it, doesn’t it?’

  I was at a loss to know quite what it proved, but I waited for her to expand on this new theory.

  ‘It grows in river valleys and we’re on the way to a river for one thing,’ she said it like I had missed an extremely obvious point, ‘and it’s unsuitable as a fuel, meaning Frederick chose an acacia as he knew there would be a better chance of it not being chopped down by the villagers, so there would always be a marker to show him where he had buried the treasure.’ She finished with a flourish and a little self-satisfied giggle.

  It was nice to see her smile again, but the continuous ups and downs in her emotions were getting harder to predict and worse, to understand.

  I drove on, convinced of nothing except that there was trouble up ahead, and with the feeling that there was n
othing I could do to stop it.