Zakes Mda - The Whale Caller

She shouted: “You and that ugly fish! I hope it goes away… forever! Maybe we’ll have some peace when it’s gone.”

Without another word, the Whale Caller dressed up in his tuxedo, took his horn and left Saluni in bed nursing her precious hangover.

This time he went to his peninsula where he knew the curious could only watch from a distance. He blew his kelp horn, praying that Sharisha had not migrated yet. Her head emerged from the water, only fifty metres away. She rose out of the water and then crashed down with a loud splash. Refreshing droplets sprayed him. She rose again, turned in the air above the water, and then, with her back arched, fell backwards on the water, with a yet louder splash. Seagulls flocked to pick up from the surface of the water pieces of skin that she had shed as she breached. There would be some lice to pick up too, now that she had been infested. Sharisha breached like that repeatedly, increasing the pace as the Whale Caller got more excited.

The rising sun found him sitting on a rock and blowing his kelp horn. Sharisha responded with her own love calls. She rocked in the water in a mating dance. The Whale Caller stood up and rocked on the rocks. He raised his left leg, turned and twisted on one spot, then stamped the foot down. He did the same with the right leg. He repeated this dance in rapid succession for a long time, whilst blowing the sounds of the whining wind. People gathered on the shore and watched. Even those who had regularly watched the Whale Caller at his antics with the whales had never seen anything like this before. He did not seem to tire. He just went on and on raising his legs, spinning his sturdy body in the air, and then stamping his feet on the rocks. Sharisha did not seem to tire either. She was creating a whirlwind on the water by making a complicated combination of rocking, breaching and lobtailing. The rocking part — moving from side to side, and then forwards and backwards — fascinated the onlookers most for they had never seen a whale do anything like that.

By midday Saluni was getting very worried about him. She could hear the horn from the Wendy house. There was a particular timbre of sadness in it that she could not stand. The very thought that he was with Sharisha infuriated her. At first she wanted to go down there and drag him out of his foolish trance. But her pride would not let her do that. Instead she went to the mansion. Even as she was playing and singing with the Bored Twins, picking the tulips that grew like wild flowers among the shrubs, her mind was at the rocky peninsula, wondering what the Whale Caller and Sharisha were up to at that moment. She was confident that when she returned to the Wendy house in the late afternoon, the Whale Caller would be over his madness. He would be waiting for her with a bowl of macaroni and cheese, as he always did.

But Saluni had not reckoned with the power of the whirlwind that Sharisha was generating in the sea, locking the Whale Caller tightly in her embrace. The sun was about to set and the Whale Caller had not returned. Saluni swallowed her pride and went down to the shore. The biggest crowd she had ever seen at his whale-calling events had gathered. People were clapping their hands in accompaniment to the kelp horn. And to Sharisha’s grunts and groans. It reminded Saluni of the charismatic church services that were sometimes held in circus-like tents by visiting superstar pastors. People babbling things whose meaning no one could fathom, then falling on the ground shouting the name of the Lord and foaming at the mouth. When they woke up they were saved and their road to Heaven was guaranteed. Only here the things they were babbling had nothing to do with the Lord. While some were egging the Whale Caller on, others were directing their encouragement to the whale. There were those who were just screaming and whimpering, as if they shared the ecstasy of the man and his whale.

Saluni decided to stop the whole circus once and for all. She tried to walk across the precarious rocks to the tip of the peninsula where the Whale Caller continued his dance oblivious of the world around him.

“Hey, what is she trying to do? She will fall into the water,” said a breathless spectator.

“It’s Saluni the village drunk,” observed another. “She must be zonked as usual.”

“Where do you think you are going, Saluni?” the people asked.

“To stop this whole nonsense,” said Saluni, trying to keep her balance by stretching her arms out and stepping delicately on the sharp rocks.

“She’s gone bonkers,” someone said. “She is going to kill herself in her madness.”

It was obvious that she would not make it, especially in her state of inebriation. She walked back to the shore and stood there in front of everyone. She shouted at the Whale Caller: “Come on, man, stop your rubbish with that fish and come back home!”

But the Whale Caller did not come home that evening. He did not come home that night either. The spectators went to their homes and to their hotels to sleep. Sharisha and the Whale Caller continued their dance unabated. Deep in the night the wails of his horn could be heard, sometimes sounding like a muted cornet and at others like a “last post” bugle, and then picking up again in the fast-paced scatting of a demented jazz singer. In the cool breeze of the night, and with the absence of spectators, the dance became even more frenzied. His horn penetrated deep into every aperture of the whale’s body, as if in search of a soul in the midst of all the blubber.

The next morning the dance continued. Spectators returned and found the Whale Caller drenched in sweat. Both his horn and Sharisha were groaning deeply like out-of-tune tubas. Both were breathless as the dance seemed to be slowly fizzling out.

It was almost midday when Sharisha sailed away waving her flipper and the Whale Caller found his steps back to the shore. The crowd was going crazy, screaming, making catcalls and applauding. As soon as he reached the shore he fell on the ground in utter exhaustion. He was drenched in sweat and other secretions of the body The front and the seat of his tuxedo pants were wet and sticky from the seed of life.

He opened his eyes and smiled at the wide eyes that were looking at him from above. The people went even wilder with applause. Saluni was among them. But she was not participating in all the excitement. She just stood there, arms akimbo, shouting at him: “You have shamed yourself… and me!”

“The people of Hermanuspietersfontein don’t seem to think so,” he said softly, and promptly fell asleep right there on the ground. The crowd gathered around them and some wondered who the people of Hermanuspietersfontein were.

“He means us,” one of them offered helpfully. “It is what this town used to be called… after the shepherd and teacher who came down the mountain past the Hemel-en-Aarde valley and set up camp here almost two hundred years ago… before the land was stolen from the Khoikhoi.”

“It is a foolish name. It belongs to an old world. Does he miss the past?”

“He does not care about the origins of the name,” said Saluni defensively. “He just likes the old name. He says it rolls nicely on the tongue.”

“He may think he hasn’t got a political agenda by insisting on a name that no one uses anymore. Everything in South Africa is political.”

“What has that got to do with his dance? I ask.”

The people were arguing about the merits of the name as they left. They had forgotten all about the satisfaction he had given them with his dance. Saluni remained there, sitting on the ground guarding him. If she had had the strength she would have carried him back to the Wendy house.

It was after this experience that Saluni decided to go along with his mad suggestion that they should welcome the dawn of a new day with a waltz on the beach. She felt that perhaps if she indulged him, and sometimes even pampered him — within reasonable limits, of course, for a man can easily get spoilt if he is too pampered — he would forget about Sharisha. So, that first morning she reluctantly went to the beach, and to her surprise found that she actually enjoyed it. She caught on very fast, and soon enough she was floating as well as the Whale Caller.