Wilma Stockenstrom - The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

Wholly different my relation with the tame serval of the house. How often did I not wish I could scrape together the courage to blandly slip the catch on the door of the parrot’s cage so that he could fly out, the idiot, so that the serval should suddenly jump up from behind a bush somewhere and slap him unconscious in the air and grab him. Then he would carry him off in his mouth and grindingly eat him up, grindingly, till there was nothing left but one grey feather and one red. End of parrot.

Down below in the courtyard walked the speckled cat. He scraped his cheek against a plane bush and a scattering of scarlet, jasper-green and black blossoms sifted down on to him and grey-white tatters of bark stuck to his snout. He snorted in surprise. Then he trotted off, taking a shortcut across the paving, with decidedly and certainly a most important objective in mind. He paid no attention to my call. He had pinned a gecko with his forepaw, I saw, and was considering what to do next; first he looked up at me, then with cat-specific dissimulation at his prey. I stared at him. I could stare for long into his changeable eyes and imagine we were one of spirit. He yawned hugely with tongue curled back and as he yawned looked terrifyingly cruel. Yet this illusion was enough to make me understand that we were not playmates and that there was a distance to be maintained between us, which I would keep, I promised him, and stroked his fur and scratched behind his ears. Black-snout-sweet-face, your self-sufficiency amused me. Perhaps we had more in common than you would think.

As a kitten he was made a present to my owner’s youngest son, who as a young boy had apparently collected wild animals as a hobby. In the time of which I speak the son’s interest was concentrated mainly on fishing and one barely saw him at home, for from early till late he was aboard his extremely expensive proa. But when he was here I enjoyed his wonderfully healthy roughness and his boyishness, and enjoyed all his pranks. Young frolicsome man, most attractive, and so serious and laughably touchy when it came to his hobby. I consciously call it his hobby because I did not believe his father would allow him to choose fishing as a career, unless perhaps, unless it could be administered as a subdivision of the family’s business and the boy could then, as befitted a scion of the wealthy, do business and not haul in the nets like a poor simple fisherman.

Now I knew why I felt depressed. I had seen the procession. Well, I knew they were to be expected. Knew they had to turn up some time or other, and therefore went up to the root every blessed day to keep watch, to keep an eye out to see what I had promised myself I would not look at. The terrible procession, nerve-rackingly slow. I saw them coming from afar from my look-out post and beheld, fascinated despite myself, the signs of brokenness that rent me, crushed my spirit, made me stare despairingly, made me note their fate helplessly every time and keep my sympathies in check, force myself to joke about them so that I could forget and repress. My eyes followed them from where they appeared out of the bushes and bulrushes at the seam of the unraveling residential quarters and wove through the harsh planes of shadow and sunlight on the streets, sometimes disappearing from my field of vision, but I knew the route too well and settled my unwilling gaze in advance on the point where they must reappear; at the head of a few of the men in service, armed but on foot like their human prey, followed by a primitive sedan chair on which the slave hunter sat at rest, rocking on the shoulders of two of his captives, the big boss no longer half-asleep as on the immeasurably long bush path that they had all covered, but wide-awake now that the moment, the most important moment was about to dawn, followed by those in chains, some with packs of leopard skins, elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns and provisions on their heads, their faces twisted as the neck irons chafed them, followed by the young women and tender little girls shackled to each other with lighter chains. So they trod reluctantly on to the place of destination. At the tail a rearguard of more armed men.

I followed them. I knew where. I took a shortcut through side streets and alleys and across open unbuilt spaces and arrived at the square near the beach before them, and hid behind the tattered dusty castor-oil trees there and the scanty undergrowth around. The arrival of a fresh consignment of slaves was proceeding normally and attracted no one’s attention. Only I was all unwilling eyes.

Clinking, my fellows in fate arrived. The untouched girls, my little sisters. The young eunuchs, no longer men, no longer human beings, the survivors of a raid deep into the interior, my own people half-people may not be people, the compelled, the pitifully strong healthy products. They stood still. They were allowed to sit.

The sedan chair was set down. The slave hunter stood up stiffly and stretched, a pleasant long stretch, before he got off his chair and turned his steps towards the city to discuss business over a bowl of fig wine and a pipe of hashish. He was an old man, I saw. He had grey patches of beard at the point of his chin, but he strode quickly as if refreshed by the sea air and cheered up by a sense of relief that the difficult undertaking had gone off successfully as far as the coast. The guards stayed at their post. I wondered if they had been here before. I wondered if the complement of the slaves was full and how many had grown so weak from exhaustion along the road that they had been left behind as unserviceable, and how many of them had perished of marsh fever, and how many had grown rebellious and been killed. Those who were left now lay in silence on the ground. Even some of the guards had sat down.

On the beach a group of urchins were kicking sand at a dead hammerhead shark. They rushed about and barked and growled, pretending to be dogs, and laughed and jumped with exuberance over the shark. They laughed their joy out. They lost interest in the leathery carcass and careered further up the beach looking for fun, picked switches and chased each other further along the foamline of the waves, splashing in the shallows. Brief happiness disappeared from the air. The sultry stillness again closed in.

A few days ago I had seen the hammerhead shark leaping in spasms there on the beach where fish-drying racks cast their grid shadows. It was trying to lift its whole body up from the sand as if wanting to swim upwards into the sky. Sometimes one eye was buried in the sand, sometimes the other; one saw doom, the other spied hope, and in uncertainty the poor thing struggled. Spasmodic jerks, fanatical till death, eyes that till death bisected the world. Would he, even in death, have to reconcile one half with the other half to find his way in that haze? Deeper and deeper he steered himself on into death with twisting movements of the head. To the left hung death as a grey apparition, to the right hung death as a grey apparition, no choice for him, but perhaps he fabricated his own death and chose the total nothing of seeing nothing more, and nothing has neither tinge nor grain nor substance.

I was not permitted to offer refreshments to the new arrivals. I had already tried that in the past and been chased away. Nevertheless I went closer. In my worker’s language I softly welcomed them and expressed my commiseration; but it seemed that no one heard or understood me. Nevertheless I talked to them because I knew of nothing else, and most of all of nothing more effective, to do.

I told them all I knew about my origins. Humbly I offered them the scanty history. My facts I patched together as they occurred to me, my memory of a journey with fear the starting point and fear the end point. I was well grounded in the knowledge of fear. I had felt him in my blood vessels, for he had come to live in me and I had begun to smell like him, and with his eyes I had seen forests and plains shift by poisonous and distorted; with his ears I had listened, and there was a growling, and even the stillness rumbled, and there was bitterness in my cheeks. Oh, fear is by no means whatsoever a connoisseur of events. He gobbles up everything. He crushes everything. He leaves no bloody trail behind because he stands still. Everything comes to him, feels drawn to him, and he knows it.