Waiting for the rain, p.7
Waiting for the Rain, page 7
Tongoona nods: ‘Lucifer’s mother found me sitting down in the field.’
‘They are jealous of you, my son,’ Old Japi’s voice is very low.
Old Mandisa spits into the fire and says: ‘All they can do is kill him. What of his can they take?’
Raina stands up, goes out, comes back with a wash-basin into which she pours some water and gives it to Lucifer to wash his hands. She then puts before him the pumpkin porridge which she has been warming up on the fire.
‘Where is Betty?’ Lucifer asks, beginning to eat.
‘Who knows,’ Raina answers and she drops a plate.
‘Your sisters,’ Old Japi says, shaking her head.
Old Mandisa looks at a nut she is about to crack open, cracks it, drops it into the basket.
Tongoona shifts his stool nearer to Old Mandisa, dips his hand into the basket, takes a handful of unshelled nuts and begins to crack them into his mouth. He doesn’t say anything. Lucifer knows he is angry.
Old Japi remarks: ‘She should get married, I have always said.’
Everyone turns to look at her, only for a second, and then they look away. Lucifer notices that his father’s toes are gripping hard—almost claw-like—the floor they are resting upon, and he quickly changes the subject: ‘And Sekuru Mandengu—I don’t hear any sound. Is he here?’
‘Your grandfather was here all morning,’ Old Mandisa says. ‘He has probably gone out to cut down a tree for one of his drums.’ She shakes her head: ‘He doesn’t rest, your grandfather.’
‘He is mad,’ Tongoona says. ‘He has cut nearly every big tree he can find here and the shed is full to the brim with logs, half-finished drums, mortars and what-not, and he still has to cut down some more trees despite orders from the Land Development Officers not to cut any more trees. He is going to get us arrested one of these days.’
‘He says he wants to make Garabha five big skin drums that he can only play standing high up on a pedestal,’ Old Japi titters.
Tongoona’s toes dig deeper into the floor as he almost shouts: ‘Garabha is already mad with what he’s got without the old goat making him five more skin drums played in whatever way!’
‘Let him be,’ Old Mandisa says quietly.
Raina is careful not to say anything disagreeable about her husband’s father in her husband’s presence, so she says: ‘At least his mortars and drums sell. If Garabha would learn to make mortars like his grandfather he would at least make his own living. As it is—’ She throws her hands in the air. They all know what she is talking about.
‘It is still the drum with him, is it?’ Lucifer asks, glad to talk of someone else: at least attention is drawn away from him.
‘And what else doesn’t he follow? Beer, women, medicine-roots, what-not-else,’ Tongoona says and throws a handful of nuts into his mouth to stay the anger he feels welling up in him.
‘Don’t be hard on the boy,’ Old Mandisa says.
Raina glares at her and shouts: ‘But let him fritter his time and life away the way he is doing? How you talk! How many men of his age are not yet married the way he is?’
‘Enough of that,’ Tongoona says softly to his wife, seeing the way she looks at her own mother.
Old Japi says: ‘If my husband were dead I would say his spirit sits in that boy. In his young days he would go for days on end without eating anything, playing drums and singing—and the women who followed him—’
‘I think Garabha knows what he is doing,’ Old Mandisa says almost to herself, subtly inclining her head towards Lucifer as if to imply: Who I don’t understand is you! Lucifer’s parents look at the old woman as if she has gone out of her head. Raina opens her mouth, but, catching the warning look in her husband’s eyes, closes it again.
‘Yes,’ Old Japi says. ‘If he were dead I would say Mandengu lives again in Garabha.’
Silence.
Lucifer eats quietly, not looking at anyone because he doesn’t know what to say to anyone should his eyes meet theirs. The silence makes him uneasy. He feels they are expecting him to say something, but what it is, he doesn’t know.
He finishes the pumpkin porridge he is eating, remembering to wipe the plate clean with his fingers because Old Mandisa and his mother disapprove of what they call ‘chicken eating’.
‘That’s how I met him,’ Old Japi says, remembering. ‘Following him and his drums.’
Lucifer hands the plate to his mother saying: ‘I will go change.’ All eyes turn to him in pained surprise, but he avoids them, picks up his suitcase and goes out.
It is hot outside but the atmosphere here is a bit relaxed.
Chapter Seventeen
There is a knock. Lucifer looks up from the book he is reading. It is almost sunset. Again the knock.
‘Come in,’ Lucifer calls out, unnecessarily loud.
The door opens a crack and Betty peers in and says timidly: ‘Can I come in?’
She always behaves as if she expects to find me in some disgraceful act, Lucifer thinks. There is something of the petty thief’s defiance in his sister that irritates Lucifer. Her eyes seem to focus short of their object, a deliberate myopia that seems to say: ‘You can’t frighten me, I know what you are and I don’t care.’ Lucifer feels blackmailed. She has got something against him which she won’t reveal.
‘Can I really come in? I am not disturbing you?’ He looks at her. Now she is smiling in a superior, lazy way. Her myopia has vanished and she is looking directly into—and apparently beyond—him and he is forced to defend himself against what, he doesn’t know.
‘I don’t bite!’ he barks.
She looks at him, then down. Now she seems amused. She just moves forward a little, then sits down on the floor by the door.
Lucifer looks at his book, pretending to read. Betty drags on the silence till the print begins to jump all over the page Lucifer is reading. He looks up: ‘Well?’
‘How are you, brother?’
‘Oh, fine… and you?’
‘Fine.’
And now if she can leave me alone… But Betty stays, silent, looking at him till he can’t bear it any longer. He blurts out: ‘Where were you when I came?’ He doesn’t mean to sound like his father exactly, but that’s the impression he gives and it irritates him. All the more so because he can’t stand or return Betty’s keen look as she says: ‘Out.’ Just like that.
‘Out where?’ Am I screaming? he wonders.
‘“Out where?”’ Betty asks her own question.
‘That’s what I am asking you, isn’t it? A simple question. I came. You were not here. Isn’t it natural that one should ask where you have been?’ Do I sound natural? My God, two years I haven’t seen her and this is the way to greet your sister!
‘Where have I been? I said out, didn’t I?’
‘I heard you—but the yard is also “out”.’
‘Out in the bush, that’s where.’
And the implied obscenity condemns him: guilty of incest.
He says weakly: ‘Oh—I see.’ He is actually blind with shame. He returns to his book.
Betty clears her throat and he reads a line over three times. She says: ‘Father and mother would like to talk to you.’
‘What about?’
‘I don’t know.’ And she stands up, casts a pitying glance, goes out, and reappears—her head only this time: ‘And Rudo too. She said she is coming to see you this evening or tomorrow morning.’
His hoarse ‘What about?’ bounces off the frozen air where her head has been to return to him with a doubled force of his guilt and despair. He closes the book slowly, staring at the open door. She can’t even shut the door she found closed, the bitch! But he doesn’t stand up to follow his sister or close the door.
The smell of fresh dung laid over a stale smell of dust and chicken manure pricks his nostrils. He wonders whether he is going to have any sleep tonight with the chicken-lice—because this room becomes the chicken-coop when he is away. His young brothers use the kitchen, it’s nearer the parents’ bedroom. And Garabha sleeps with the Old Man in his hut or in the workshed, depending on either’s mood.
Only those two seem to have any freedom in the choice of where they would like to sleep.
A sudden fear grabs Lucifer. His bedroom is the one set farthest from the rest of the other buildings. If he screams no one will hear him…
And he wonders whether he will have any nightmares tonight. It always happens when he comes home: dreams of witches. It’s silly and childish of course, but then, he can never seem to completely dig up and cut the roots that plant him in the earth of this dark arid country. In spite of the books. In spite of his knowledge of modern psychology which he has taken to reading so avidly these days. In spite of… in spite of…
Blindly, his fingers claw for a pencil in his pocket. He picks up the book he has been reading and begins to write on the fly-leaf. He has got lots of these notes—and drawings—done on the spur of the moment, scattered all over his books, on any scrap of paper handy, all over where he has been, a trail of ink like ox-urine, droppings of words and doodles like dung. He writes:
Home…
Aftermath of an invisible war
A heap of dust and rubble
White immobile heat on the sweltering land
Home…
The sharp-nosed vulture
already smells carrion—
the ancient woman’s skirts
give off an odour of trapped time
Home…
Return science to its owners
The witch demands a ransom for your soul
Your roots claim their rightful pound of clay
Home…?
Home sweet home?
muffled thuds
of soft earth
on dead wood
on the nailed
despair within
Home…
Eternal creak-crack of oxcart wheels against gravel
along the shortest road of the village
—a road that goes nowhere—
The Earth takes back its gift.
Underneath this he draws a string of people in different postures of wailing, following a huge-wheeled cart drawn by emaciated oxen, and encompassing them all—but beyond them—the blood-red setting sun with a dark monster’s-mouth centre.
He stares at his drawing for some time, then out at the darkening land, then he throws the book down and goes out to where they are all waiting for him: the kitchen-living-room.
Chapter Eighteen
‘How can you lock yourself up in your room like this on your first day at home?’ Old Japi asks as soon as Lucifer enters.
Lucifer doesn’t answer. All eyes are on him. Even his little brothers, after the excitement of seeing him, are now quiet. They know it is the elders’ time. They are all here: the Old Man, his two grandmothers, his parents, his three young brothers and Betty who sits with her head in her hands.
Raina turns to Betty and says: ‘And who is dead that you sit with your head in your hands like that?’
‘Leave her alone. She has had enough for one day,’ Old Mandisa says.
Old Japi says: ‘I told you long ago that she should get married. No good will come of her here.’
Tongoona turns round on his mother: ‘And why don’t you marry her?’
Old Japi looks up at her son and says bitterly: ‘You don’t want me to say anything about your children, do you?’
The Old Man makes an irritated noise in his throat and asks Lucifer: ‘And how are you, boy?’
Lucifer answers: ‘I ask you, Sekuru?’
‘Couldn’t be healthier if I tried.’
Silence. The Old Man closes his eyes but doesn’t go to sleep.
Raina opens the conversation after a long pause: ‘We thought you would come at Easter. Then we looked for you at Rhodes and Founders. But you didn’t come, nor would you answer our letters. What happened?’
They know he hasn’t got an answer. There is a painful short silence, then his mother continues: ‘Your father nearly left us then.’
‘Blind sick for two months he was,’ Old Japi says. ‘We thought we would never see him again,’ her voice trembles.
Raina says: ‘Sekai, too. She nearly lost her right hand.’
‘How?’ Lucifer asks for something to say. Sekai got disappointed with him once, lost faith in him, told him that she would never write him again, that she didn’t care much to be called his sister. Sekai is strong-willed and she has kept her word.
‘Doesn’t she write you?’ Raina asks, then quickly answers her own question: ‘Of course you wouldn’t reply even if she wrote a hundred letters.’
‘And we wrote too,’ the eldest of his young brothers, Gumbo, says. ‘Didn’t you see our letters?’ The elders let him talk. ‘We once thought maybe we were using the wrong address. We wrote and wrote but you never replied and we only stopped because Mother said that maybe you would think we were asking for money.’
‘Shut up, Gumbo!’ Tongoona bellows. Raina shifts uneasily and Lucifer looks down. He has heard everything. A terrible silence.
Then Old Mandisa says: ‘Why don’t you tell him straight what has happened? From whom do you think he is going to hear these things? He is grown up and he ought to know these things. All this of letters that were not answered is over. Now you tell him exactly what you wanted to tell him in your letters.’
Old Japi begins: ‘And Betty—’
But the Old Man interrupts her: ‘Why don’t you shut up and let those who know how to talk tell him?’
Old Japi looks at her husband, surprised, then closes her mouth determinedly.
Old Mandisa clears her throat and says: ‘What it’s all about, son of my daughter, is that their neighbours are jealous of your parents. Kutsvaka—and don’t you repeat this name to anyone, do you hear? Early in the year, your sister Sekai and your mother went down on the same day: Sekai with a paralysed hand, and your mother with this headache that hasn’t left her since. We went to see Matandangoma—the medicine-woman—and she said it was Kutsvaka—’
‘There was a snake. Sekai saw it first, in the well—’ Raina stops, looks at her mother to ask for permission to tell what happened herself. Old Mandisa nods her on but Old Japi can’t resist putting in her own word: ‘Your mother and your sister nearly left us, son.’
The Old Man says quietly: ‘And why don’t you wait till you are asked?’
‘Shouldn’t I say what I saw with my own eyes?’
‘If you had any eyes you would have seen much more than that. Go on, Garabha’s mother.’
‘The snake was meant for me,’ Raina continues, ‘but Sekai went ahead of me. I saw her look into the well, then she jumped back, screaming. “What is it?” I asked. “There is a snake in the well,” she answered. “A snake?” “Yes. A very big snake—I haven’t seen its likes before. It was looking up at me.”
‘I hurried to look. By the time I got there only its tail was still above the water. Then it too quickly disappeared. That was the beginning of my headache—right there at the well. I felt a splitting pain start from my scalp down to the right eye. And Sekai couldn’t move her hand either.’
‘And her head hasn’t left her since,’ Old Japi puts in, furtively glancing at the Old Man.
‘What was the snake for?’ Lucifer asks. All of them, with the exception of the Old Man, look at him and Betty pulls a face at him as if he were a baby with a runny nose.
Old Mandisa tells him: ‘The snake was meant to take your mother away with it.’
‘But the Earth fought,’ Old Japi offers, but Old Mandisa ignores her: ‘If your mother, instead of Sekai, had seen that snake first, it would have bitten her—killed her—right there by the well. But Sekai saw it first thus saving your mother. But that was only the beginning. After your mother and sister went down, your father’s feet began to swell. Each time he went to the fields they got so hot that he had to be carried home, unable to stand.’
‘Crying,’ Old Japi remembers, and from her voice everyone knows that she is going to cry in a moment. The young boys giggle but stop immediately when their father bursts out: ‘Who cried?’
‘Didn’t you cry?’ Old Japi’s voice is a trifle too high.
‘You cried, not I!’ Tongoona’s toes claw the earth harder.
‘Now, now,’ the Old Man says, pacifyingly.
‘Does it matter if you cried? Anyone would cry,’ Raina says to her husband, wishing that for once he would forget his pride and face the truth.
‘I did not cry, do you hear me?’
‘That’s right, Tongoona,’ the Old Man says. ‘You did not cry. How could a big boy like you cry? Go on, Mandisa.’
But you cried, Raina insists silently because he is trying to give the wrong impression to the boy. You cried, and what was wrong with the front of your trousers when they brought you in that last time when you had to stay in bed for five weeks?
‘Go on, Mother,’ Raina says, sighing.
‘We went to see Matandangoma. She said that Kutsvaka wanted your parents out of the way so that you would marry his daughter.’ Lucifer opens his mouth but the old woman goes on: ‘He is also jealous of your parents because they get more crops than he does and they have sent you to school—which he has been unable to do with his daughter.’
Lucifer half-whispers: ‘Me—to marry his daughter?’ He senses invisible traps springing up everywhere for him. He repeats slowly: ‘Marry his daughter?’
Betty looks at him accusingly. Naked contempt.
Raina says: ‘Haven’t I always told you to be careful with Rudo—that daughter of his?’
‘We saw her when we were coming from school and she asked us whether you had come,’ Gumbo says, looking at his mother to see whether it is all right for him to speak.
Raina says: ‘And what did you tell her?’
‘We told her that—’
But Shad, the youngest child, interrupts: ‘It wasn’t you, Gumbo. It was Kizito who—’
‘Shut up, now!’ Tongoona orders, but Raina ignores him to ask her youngest son: ‘Tell me—what did you tell her?’
‘Kizito said he was coming today—Brother Lucifer— he said, was coming from Salisbury today. And then Gumbo said no, Mother said we were not to tell anyone—so Kizito gave Gumbo his marbles and said don’t tell Mother that—’
