Thokozani S.B. Maseko - Like a Lily on a Mountain, Love Grows on Rocky Terrains

She ended the call with her thumb and held the handset to her chest for almost a minute. Deep hatred for Ron Shabalala ripped her insides; and the same went for most fathers. Every brainless last one of them, placing what they desired before what they had to know was important for their babies.

When she stepped out of the phone booth, the retailer was waiting for her. He looked at her, and he gave her a cold tin of Coke.

“Kept cold in the cellar,” he said.

She grinned her thanks. “Do most people drive out here? I’m searching for a young boy and his dad.”

“Little boys and their fathers pass here, I see plenty. Is the baby yours?”

His eyes were caught on her blouse. She glanced down and noticed the soaking that her tears had marked on her navy jacket. For a second, she thought of playing on his sympathies, but her conscience wouldn’t let her do it, no matter how much she would have enjoyed claiming any of the children she sought, as her own. She swabbed her cheeks. She took out a picture of Musa from her pocket and gave it to the man.

“I’m trying to find him for his mother, who is deeply sunk into apprehension and worry over him. If you did see him, it could be helpful.”

The man looked intensely at the picture. What he saw was a lad of twelve months or so, almost throttling a downy dog in a sweet cuddle. The man gnawed the inside of his cheek.

“He’s with his pa, you say?”

Hannah nodded and motioned to take the picture back. The man seemed hesitant to give it back.

“Whatever you can remember,” she said.

He transferred his weight, massaged his chin, and mopped his hand over his denim trousers.

“The other day,” he said, “a group of guys walked in here, nomads perhaps. I recall a gun casing on one of them. He mentioned something about waiting for a man with a child; he had a photo and asked if I’d seen them. Perhaps it was this one.” He shrugged and gave back the photo; the boy’s brown eyes grinning at them.

“Do you have any idea where they were going?”

“There is definitely one place where the hunters would be from around here,” he said, taking steps around the counter to the cash register and tapping Hannah’s drink with his finger.

“Do you have a map? The mountains of Big Bend-Lavumisa are kind of tricky.”

***

After thirty minutes of suggestions first one way then another, Hannah received a pencil sketch of the journey. Waving goodbye, she went into her car. She drove straight through St Philips. The place had tourist shops here and there that tried futilely to conceal the view. She then drove away from civilisation for the hills once again. There, she rumbled along behind a deep green Jeep full of holidaymakers cheering at the awesome sight of shrubs around Jozini. She, too, had cheered, until she realised that she was desperately lost. It was nearly an hour since she’d last seen a green Jeep; and since then, she had not seen even one person.

She took the sketch map and parked on the edge of the thin road. Turning the map and studying it, she realised that she was nearly there. Regrettably though, she was about ten kilometres laterally side-tracked from her supposed destination, with no perceptible way of reaching the place she sought. But still somewhere in the jungle there were men waiting for Musa and his father to show up, and she was absolutely determined to be there when Musa and Ron Shabalala arrived.

In the car, she flipped her bush of curly hair up on her head, paying little attention to the fact that she might look like a mop, and pulled the hair off her neck. She then engaged the car into first gear and slowly returned to the road, searching for a route to the eastern mountains. When she finally noticed a fairly indistinct track heading to the east, she swerved off the gravel road and went after it. After less than a five hundred metres drive it was apparent that the car could go no further. She got out of the car to have a look. Almost thirty metres ahead, the track ended unexpectedly at a slim natural stone bridge that protruded over a small winding river, the consequence of thousands, perhaps millions, of years of speeding water, on an arch that reached nowhere.

Wondering what she ought to do, she took a few steps towards the bridge just to try and see where she was. As she walked through the scrub, she lost her footing and muffled a curse at her boots. Considering what the girls in the office had said about scorpions and snakes, she’d set aside her Pierre-Cardin shoes and donned leather boots and wondered how the nomads had ever escaped the bad guys in slick-soled boots that didn’t even give at the ankles.

With one foot on the bridge, she peeked carefully over the edge. Underneath her, hundreds of metres below, was a desiccated riverbed. Stones, boulders and pebbles, in every tint of copper, orange and red, lay piled into heaps and heaps over each other. Doubtlessly, the river once extended over hundreds of metres. But as far as she could see, the landscape didn’t change. So, this was it. The mystical Lowveld people talked about so often. This is what they meant. In spite of being cynical at heart, she could feel the force around her.

Folks who were fascinated by these metaphysical forces argued that the place had some kind of electromagnetic force. The Dlamini tribe and the Maziya group had walked around and around this place unwittingly, until new groups formed and couldn’t find each other, tricked by forces they later agreed were supernatural. Even the man who had made her the map in the dilapidated little shop had warned her about the confusing forests there.

A pebble loosened under her foot, and she stepped back, hastily, away from the ridge. It descended, rolling over and over, and she listened for the eventual clicking sound when it struck the rocks below. When none came, she leaned over carefully to look over the edge. The boulder beneath her moved, and her hands waved in the air like a buffoon on a diving board who had changed his mind at the last minute. She tried to turn and propel herself to safety, but her body betrayed her. She yanked in a futile scrabble of arms and legs, trying to drive herself towards a safer spot against the cliff, but failed to obtain a firmer foothold – then it happened!

Her screech reverberated against the high banks of the river, a screaming that simply carried on and on, tossing her from pebble to boulder, boulder to boulder, one wail after another, as she dropped in freefall down to the river. She struggled for breath, but none was available, as if she drifted down an empty passage, with no air. Her drift became sluggish until she felt buoyant, descending like a leaf falling off a tree in a cool breeze. However, there was no gentle wind, no breeze at all, not even air to inhale; No resonance either. As if in some nightmarish movie, her lips were parted, but nothing escaped through them. Nothing seemed to move, except for Hannah. She drifted in slow motion, like the special effect on television, and she started to accept the fact that death was imminent, waiting edgily for her life to splash abruptly in front of her, so she could lament her faults and be penitent before splattering to her death on the jumble of rocks below.

Abruptly, air filled her lungs, and she screeched again, immediately as her body struck the water with a monstrous splatter. She descended tenderly until her body hit the base, and she then ascended, struggling for air, to the surface.

***

Somewhere in the bushes near the river was Welcome. He hid lying on his abdomen, mingling with the shrubs and the rocks among which he hid, keeping an eye on the river. He was sure that the Dlamini boys were somewhere on the distant side, along with Thandi and the baby, all holed up in that hovel, relaxing and safe in the belief that he was a carcass, decomposing underground.