Chapter 31
Her name was there with the poem, branded into the marble like a trademark. The giant man was there on his knees; the moon smiled behind his face, a benign globe to soften the father’s lament. He glanced toward Rane. There was no recognition. His eyes returned to the grave and Rane passed on, through swirls of forgetfulness to a strange room where the face of the gladiator was moist in a glaring light. A sense of siege had permeated the cold clanky avenues of concrete pillars. Frozen in the glare were silhouettes of police.
Rane closed his eyes and opened them again. He was acheing. The window was cool to the touch and the carpet smelled of roses. Outside, the day had become hazy with the smoke of rioting, a panoramic video of violence. Redness glowed on several horizons as anger and savagery dominoed across the landscape.
The cave was a long way away, almost in another night’s dream. He was helpless and hating himself. He did not know how to answer her. He kept seeing the gladiator ... what was his name? Oh, the face was so familiar!
Insects thumped against the windscreen. The confusion ... insects, muck from their broken bodies stuck against the glass, the moon shining into the insect-filled garden, ambers from the river fires drifting into a cloudless sky of diminished stars. Cycads poked their spiky wings at the moon and Juno was biting her lip, corncob style. Where was she? She was not the woman with two children!
*
An incense lantern burned fitfully on the floor. A dust-frosted dome of glass covered an indistinct light bulb. A pale frugal glow barely reached the walls of the back room. One pencil-beam of dirty light escaped through a passage once cleared by a forgotten finger scraping over the dusty glass and illuminated Juno among the shadowy figures. Above her jacarandas bloomed purple and matted the grounds with a dusty carpet of colour. Some blossoms hung in the air, frozen artefacts of spring caught in the gossamers of a massive spider web. Then ugly brutes with eyes that ate the air and shrivelled petals with their stare crawled eight hairy legs across his vision.
‘I know the disastrous effects of jumping ahead of your own civilisation, Juno,’ their host was saying, ‘each of our civilisations is caused by centuries of trial and error and change. Some things we hold onto, and some we throw out with the dust.
‘But we don’t suddenly clear our houses of the things we have possessed all our lives. We would suffer immense anguish and our lives would never be the same again.’
Rane shut his eyes against the smoky room and tried to listen to his host, but the blade had gone in too easily, like a hot knife through butter, and he had not refrained from the pleasure of the sinking weapon. The power of rage and revenge, the tackiness of sawing a body into pieces. Gore and shit inside, wiping it up with a towel and putting the lot into garbage bags.
And the man with the hands in the reserve. Did he exist? The flies!
It was the absence of guilt that had triggered his unusual mood earlier in the day. For hours he had drifted with a mind littered with innuendo and paradox, absently kicking at the debris of the past months, the unconnected flotsam of tragedy.
It was the absence of guilt that made the arena strange, the spectators new, the grass different underfoot, the game something else. Without the attachment of responsibility Rane had given way to an incessant desire, an overwhelming need to set sail, to thrust out from the precipice, to dare the fatal fall. He had been composing a poem with his fight to get away. But now guilt was back; perhaps a mite awkward at first, shy of re-emerging because of the pimple on its face.
Rane opened his eyes again to a purple haze. He was on a couch, opposite Juno and a pale painting of jacarandas. The incense lamp fumed with an impossible warmth on a chill evening. The door of the little room stretched away from them and Rane occasionally sent his gaze that way, seeing into the space beyond and expecting strangers to call.
A carved wooden pipe moved through the air like a steam train in the night, leaving behind in its wake a smooth pattern of smoke and a blurred line of fire across their retinas. They gazed fixedly at the pipe, watching as their host sucked slowly at the mouthpiece, eyes ablaze, chest expanding, evening still.
White planets shook in his face as he blinked his eyes and a misty breath escaped his mouth.
‘Hello Heaven!’ remarked Juno as she accepted the pipe. A big tug and smoke stayed in her lungs for a long time and spirited its will to her brain. A euphoric numbness began to drop through her body, a moment’s weightlessness before the calm of the drug.
Their host gently took the pipe from her fingers and tapped an ash into a bowl. He cleaned the bowl and refilled it. There was a look of laughter behind his eyes as he offered the pipe to Rane.
‘Prepare to meet thy doom!’ warned Juno as her body lost its shape on the floor.
‘Ok!’ replied Rane, his face a honeyed backdrop to his brilliant blue eyes. He sucked slowly at the peppery fumes, feeling the itchy scrape in his throat. He too forgot to let go of the pipe as he thrilled to the waves of warmth in his body.
Their host’s eyes were slightly squint and his nose twisted to the right with a suggestion of a thumbprint above the nostrils. He was speaking very slowly, coarsely, his vowels discordant to the stranger’s ear. Each word was a different wind through the reeds, a jumble of chords, sounds of a different age where people in boats splashed with oars and the shining things in nets wriggled as a catch was lifted from the sea.
Rane was together with the crew at the prow of the bark canoe. He was dragging on the net when he felt the chill of a disappearing sun. What followed was an awful mess of mist, filth and despair of the night; a night which brought the terror and the screams as the four-legged ones came and dragged the people away, out from the cave, into the black death, the escape in canoes, over the water, water that was covering the world. The man with the squint and thumbprint was yelling for the others to follow and then he was gone, swallowed by an awful growing dark.
It was over; a brief interlude beyond comprehension, an experience which cannot be translated. Rane had transcended another’s dream. He had caught up with another soul and had returned with it. He looked at his host from a new perspective and wondered, ‘Is this the same bloke?’
Juno suddenly straightened and touched her host as she spoke, ‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course I’m serious!’ the host declared and gave her a glare from each of his eyes. ‘But you’ve got the wrong revolution, sister,’
‘What other type of revolution is there?’
‘You are a victim of the media, woman.’ He pinched his forehead into knots of tiny patterns of brow print. ‘It is a racist world which assumes all men of colour think the same.’
‘And you are a sexist!’
‘Plee-ease!’
‘You men require your stipulations to be heeded while you ignore those of others, especially women. It is nothing if not sexist. And what is the difference between racism and sexism, if not degree?’
The mist returned and the man with the squint and the thumbprint was hobbling along on a bent stick. He was with three women who were bleeding terribly. One of the women turned to Rane and beckoned to him. He was about to respond when the man with the squint restrained him with a hairy and bony arm that had tentacle suckers sprouting from its palm.
‘Hello! You are back, brother,’ said the host with a knowing look, ‘I am being enlightened by your friend to a cultural post mortem.’
A fog remained over his mind. The particular face had not changed yet it was not the same. Rane felt he was confusing his worlds.
The ash lay cold as the host swirled the cupped blade inside the bowl. ‘Those bastards,’ he continued, ‘as you call them, are the frontline against an anarchist uprising. They know our frustrations. They are waiting for us, just as they did last century, and the century before that. They’d build an edifice for one only reason, and that was to lure the blackfella in, and once the poor bloke was in, ... you know the story.’
‘There you go again! ‘ Juno pouted abruptly, ‘assumptions. Your argument is a series of unrelated assumptions and ... ’
‘There were women invaders as well, you know!’
‘So?’ Juno accepted the pipe.
The host gave light and the marijuana caught in one vibrant fizzing explosion and was sucked back into the pipe and into the bulging eyes of Juno. He leant across and took the pipe from frozen fingers. ‘Good?’
Juno gaped from the balloon of her mind. Her eyes bounced above a mouth that was changing shape. She tried to speak but ...
‘Yes, I thought it might be good.’ grinned the host as he packed the bowl again.
Time passed quietly. Background people came and went, said hello, drank beer and talked and left again, a continuum of contact. Some voices were loud while others were whispers that were shy of these newcomers and some who were curious of Rane.
‘Aah!’ the host was saying, ‘your logic assumes an incompatibility between smoking an ancient herb and being realistic. Because the criminal smokes marijuana, as I do, it does not necessarily follow that I am a criminal!’
‘But you’re relegating a political revolution to the status of a footbrawl.’ protested Juno with dissolving conviction.
‘Political revolution! Hah! I live here. I am a black person. I am not white! Therefore I am not shielded from reality as whites are.’
‘You get along with them without rancour, don’t you?’ she protested lamely.
‘I’ve never called upon rancour for any help in the past.’
Juno thought she detected an irony beyond that intended. Then she lost track of it, and smiled. It was humour that was corny but with a bite to it. She let him know she caught the joke and he smiled in return.
‘Yes, I smile, Juno,’ their host continued, ‘because I am used to buckets of shit being poured over my people.
‘You all forget, you who live beyond the walls, that this is our country, and we do have a view of what is happening to us. And we don’t like it very much! We don’t want to be absorbed into the white state. Very few of us would wish for that. We don’t want to be victims. We’re sick of it!’
‘I need a cave!’
Juno and their host looked sharply at Rane. He was not asleep, for his eyes had opened, but he was very still, braced, as it were, by an unseen discipline. It had been his voice that had startled them, as if he had acquired another tongue.
‘You’ve been away, Rane.’ Juno said quietly as his returning soul refreshed his eyes. He smiled at her, shook his head as if to say something, and returned to the world in his mind.
The sounds were like a strange dog in the neighbourhood; loud, aggressive and menacing, yet fearful. Whereas before, when the sounds of his cave were comforting and close and made him feel welcome, he had ventured into strangeness and had made it familiar. This time, in this land of convolution, nothing made sense. He was caught in the static of a violent psychic storm. Battered from above, he couldn’t get off the ground. He grasped at the sky he yearned to travel, stretching his hungry soul toward the infinite zone. But the voices raged incoherently, out of reach of his need for succour.
‘Where are the caves?’
‘Caves?’ Their host’s face had melted into another shape; he had been soliloquising when the interruption came. ‘Why?’
Rane felt the pressure of the man’s stare. He was somehow being offered a glimpse of someone awash and in need of another to balance against the swell of life. But somehow it was as if the comrades of many centuries had retreated and he had become alone. The ether was no longer his alone to travel; it belonged to the psyches of warrior strangers. Bereft of contact with the Old One, he was dysfunctional within the metaphysical rift. His memory was denied access to his own thoughts, as it were.
‘Doesn’t matter.’ sighed Rane and the images retreated beyond the void.
*
Curry was dinner. Their host was wearing a benign face of saintliness when he brought the steaming pot of beef, lamb and rice to the centre of the room. On his feet were soft leather sandals. A white flowing robe covered him from neck to ankles.
‘My father was an Indian!’ he suddenly announced, ‘I have his culinary skills.’
Rane studied his host with new attention. The skin was dark yet not in the way of most black people. His face was a gallimaufried mould of ethnic confusion; no one could accurately assess the genetic heritage of the man.
‘And my mother was a Bundjalung woman,’ Rane heard him say, ‘who had been removed from her family and placed into an Indian home because they thought she could pass for Indian. That’s what I meant when I said that it was racist to assume that all black people think the same. It’s racist to think that all black people are compatible with one another. My mum was taught to think of herself as Indian and when she was old enough she was married to an Indian. And I was born. But I’m not Indian. I’m Aboriginal!’
‘What about your mum?’ Juno asked.
Their host held the ladle with his right while his left tipped the stew toward it. He dipped the ladle and gave Juno a juicy selection of curry. ‘I loved her.’ was all he said in reply.
Then to Rane only, ‘Only when you experience the struggle, feel the pain, cry the anguish, will you be able to evaluate properly what we Aboriginals have tolerated for two centuries of white colonial rule. I can talk and talk and you can listen till the cows come home, but you won’t know, you won’t know the pain that we feel. Maybe tonight you might see, and understand.’
And it was a prophecy he spoke as the front window of the house imploded with a barrage of bricks and smoking missiles.
*
They stood in the light of the cheap neon, five of them, maniacs with bars of iron in their hands. They stood beyond the burglar grid, beyond the triangles of broken glass, waiting hopefully for the Molotovs to ignite. They were five drab figures in brown and grey who, intrigued by their impotence, waited for the success that had to be. A rush of panic lit their eyes. While one was fumbling with a box of matches, the others faced along the street, spellbound by what they saw.
The host had thrown open the inner door and immediately was assailed by petrol fumes. Glass was everywhere. A forty watt globe in its jacket of grime swung on its long lead from the ceiling, its coolie-shade flicking shadows around the room. A hand was pushing a flaming cloth through the jagged window while its owner’s face was pressed hard against the grid. Behind in the street, the others had begun to shout and fluster; they were alternating their attention between the house and what they saw along the street.
The cloth dropped in front of a thick trail of black smoke and settled on the linoleum floor. It burned sporadically before it petered out and signalled its distress with a single puff of smoke. The hand had not withdrawn fully when the head against the grid burst open.
Rane joined his host in the doorway and caught sight of a red mess sliding down the broken glass. An arm poked through the grid and held the corpse pinned to the front of the house. Through a shadowy montage of blood and broken skin, uncertain furniture and sullen trinkets in glass casing, through the shattered window and grid, through to where the neon spluttered, Rane discovered a pinprick in the canvas that suffocated his dreams. The spectral howl of beasts rained down upon him as he watched the attackers being surrounded by armed men in blue uniforms. For a fraction of time it takes a heart to beat, he passed through the canvas and witnessed that which had to be seen. A Boschian drama unfolded before him and he was repulsed by it.
Rane had not heard the sound of arrest, or the keys in the lock, nor the inner door opening. Nor did he hear the bone snap in the forearm as the corpse was wrenched from the grid. The men in blue were opening their mouths, but the sound was a cry from behind the canvas, and he was looking out from within, back through the canvas at himself and Juno and their host, talking with the men in blue and the faces through the wire in the back of the police van.
‘And you say that the young one came and knocked at your door in the afternoon?’
‘That’s right, sergeant.’
‘And these four?’ the police sergeant wrote answers quickly before he lifted his eyes for another answer, ‘You say you saw them breaking your house windows?’
‘That’s correct, sergeant!’
‘Then that should be all for the moment, sir. Can I ask you to call at the station so that we can prepare a statement for court?’
‘I wouldn’t miss the opportunity, sergeant.’
‘Good night, sir.’
The police drove away with four faces at the wire; four faces with eyes soaked in misery as they peered at their past. The van turned the corner and suddenly the street lit up. Those who had espied the drama from behind darkened curtains now had their lights on. Radios blared and babies screamed for mother.
‘Who switched on the all-clear?’ Juno snorted derisively.
‘Yes, when it comes down to it, Juno,’ said their host with disdain, ‘we are always alone when we are alone.’
‘That’s a hard sentence to fault, mate!’ surmised Juno as she and Rane followed their host back into the house. Another pane of glass, coated thickly with the dead boy’s brains, fell to the linoleum floor. The host closed the grid and the doors and the house was left with its fly open and its private parts exposed to the street.
*
Beyond the curtains, beyond the painted glass and the hastily placed plank of plywood across the window, the night had deepened. Footsteps in the lane, people shouting, the clatter of things left behind. The shop door opened with a creak. Dark was the street without lights except for strips that flecked white plastic bags scattered like vanquished banshees before the streaky winds. It had become a time when no one was around. At the end of the street, beneath the changing lights of red, amber and green dogs had gathered.
‘You can’t walk by yourselves in these streets.’ the host warned. His coat was on and he had a stick. ‘Anyway, you two are so stoned the gunjabel could mistake your eyes for parking lights. You could be booked for illegal use of the footpath.’
There were six of them. Bullying, biting, froth-at-the-mouth dogs, glued to the meat in their jaws. They were a green image of Hades which, seconds ago, had glowed red and amber. One bitch twisted her hindquarters away from the approaching humans and snarled a desperate warning.
The host moved quickly. He ripped a lid off a metal garbage can and frisbeed it into the dogs. Two smaller mongrels yelped and fled. The bitch and her companions held their ground, alternately dipping their snouts into the carrion on the footpath, and tearing flesh from the open stomach then rearing their heads in exalted cry.
‘That’s a bloke!’ Rane cried in severe alarm.
‘Don’t worry! He’ll be gone by morning. Those dogs will finish most of it now and cart the rest off for souvenirs. People here breed dogs to clean up the streets!’
‘Which people?’ Rane asked with increasing alarm. An arm was being carried in the jaws of an Alsatian. The bitch was dragging the corpse away from the other dogs. They were following with teeth snapping at the trailing strips of flesh.
‘People who fear.’
‘You’re kidding!’
A car sped past and was gone, soaked by the gloom. Behind the buildings, blocks away to the west, a clock chimed.
‘I have seen fresh graves opened for the starving to jump down and dig their bony fingers into the flesh of the dead. I have watched people leave and never come back. And they never get anywhere either. They just cease. I understand waste. I understand that violence comes from waste. People can’t just watch as other waste. What is here is something you cannot understand. I cannot understand it. The dogs cannot leave meat to waste. Nature has no time for waste. I think it’s better the dogs than the flies and the rats and the disease. Someone goes out and puts a bit of water and later it’s alright. The horizons have changed and people don’t know where to look anymore. That’s all, brother. That bloke came to the city when he should have stayed at home. He didn’t belong. Simple as that! He did not know that you must have protection from the dogs. He didn’t know. He shouldn’t have come here.’
‘No one should die like that.’ said Rane with horror clamped to his heart.
‘No? Oh, shit! I need you to tell me that? Hey?’ the host’s humour had detached itself for a while and he was clumsy without it. ‘People from communities suffer from cultural conflict when they hit the city. Shit! They become paranoid because they don’t belong.’
They had reached the edge of the block where the park takes over. The tubular building on the hill twinkled in the falling mist. Their apartment was a square shadow on the forty-seventh floor, a lonely little pigeonhole awaiting the return of its birds.
Their host had departed. During the walk the night had soured his cheer and when he turned to go back his face had closed for the night.
*
The people in the street were behaving horribly! A woman was limping and smoke trailed her, like exhaust. In one arm was a wrapped baby, in the other a tiny hand of a toddler being dragged. His wails of protest were nothing but an open mouth and anguished eyes in a frightened little face.
‘Shit! What’s going on?’
They travelled south behind an extended beam of light. Signs and signals and backs of houses were brightened as they passed another town. This time they didn’t stop. Soon the lights bore on into the countryside and caught the occasional clump of trees growing close to the line. Elsewhere it was black and an ethereal patina reflected mosaics of sedentary people on the move; stationary and inside the travelling spheres.
Rane’s eyes were out of focus, spinning with the winds he felt in his mind. The woman was speaking a lullaby of her son’s life, of her time in the brick house when her husband worked on the mines, of the streets where the rivers of fallen rain washed away her garden, of the lantern above the doorway when her husband came home and the children came in from their games. She was inviting Rane into her memory and he was following helplessly. The intrigue, impressions and smells and noises and music of the streets of Harare, the grittiness of the earth between his toes as he roamed the districts she had known very long ago.
Then Rane was there as her son got off the train and wandered in company as the passengers walked home. Slowly the crowd dwindled then her son was alone, through the darkness and smoke, nervously touching the brown envelope in his pocket, wishing to be safe in his room.
Rane saw them come from behind. Figures in a silent movie. Her son knew they were there. He closed his eyes and continued, mechanically, toward his certain death. The tsotsis were quick and Rane sensed her son was dead from the first wound because the eyes showed defeat before the body fell to the ground.
Her son was cut to ribbons by men who enjoyed butchery. The envelope was taken before they left, before they urinated on their victim, before they cut out the heart.
*
Rane was dissolving in the magical brew of the mist when the woman stood. When she walked away Rane stood to follow. He couldn’t. The dream had disturbed him. The chaos was no longer. He had found a gateway into the place he had lost.
Rane suddenly fumbled with his face, pulling the skin until his eyes were starved of sanity.
The images were clearer now but were restricted to bits of information, such as the death of the man whose head exploded and wet his friends in the crowd. Then sounds became audible and they were sounds of people fleeing, of people being stripped of their lives. Some had given up their flight and were kneeling before their gods while others were shot as they tried to break through the cordon of death. Then there was nothing but a pungent whiteness and a burning in his face then again the bodies torn in two.
A woman’s hand hung by a thread of obstinate tissue. The ring finger was missing and a splintered bone cast a faint protest through the burnt skin. Then, like bloated melon pips, her eyes popped out of her face and she was gone, and tarnished men in tarnished uniforms were lighting cigarettes; a silent smoko for the deceased!
The old woman’s eyes narrowed to a point of pain; she was extending her withered fingers toward Rane. The words had no sound that he knew. But he knew their meaning: ‘Are you married?’ she was asking and then she cackled harshly. Then, as if she were watching something awful, she answered, ‘No!’ with a dreadful noise from her throat, ‘nor can mothers join the war!’
The stretched dry skin of her face crumbled as she frowned, ‘Those who die must leave no grief!’
The pffft pffft of the silencer and the thudsuck noise of flesh being torn; the brown man’s neck wound was moist and he was trying to stifle the groan coming from his neck in bubbles ‘... splutter squelch...!’ Rane heard him say in that avenue of dream language, and a torrent of liquid spurted when he moved. Blood was flowing quickly, rivulets of crimson mapping contours down his shirt and forming a lake of curious gravy on the car floor.
A flash bulb whitened Rane’s face. He struck out blindly at the silver haze. He felt a warm moist pain in his hand. He had smudged the wall with knuckle blood and he was now shaking with fright.
‘Shit! Where is this?’ he blurted. His head hurt. His mouth stank of dead mice and he was biting at the air in a bout of dementia. Coloured pain was travelling through his head, into capillaries and secret dens and his brain came alive in his eyes and limestone cavities which flowed like blood vessels; and he knew for a long time the tiny people had lived in the earth. They were slender people who had run from the giants.
*
Rane sat vacantly through the night. He was watching a reflection of himself. His eyes were the luminescent eyes of a burnt-out man who’d been crying. Suddenly his face was difficult to see. Across a stumpy field of white ornamental tombs, he saw his brother’s name. The giant who was his father had buried McLuhan alongside Dali beneath a frosted forest of flowers. He whispered some words to his father as cockatoos argued in the eucalypts. He saw his father look back at him through his dream, as though perplexed by a sense of déjà vu. Then his father vanished and ...
Frank and Hans were amid chaos as they filtered through his vision and they were kneeling with his father as the crowd gathered and ...
Rane’s nerves settled and he was calm. There was no furtiveness to his face now. His eyes were allowed to relax and to shut out the light. He no longer strained to see through the black of his mind. He was numb when another summer arrived and an enervating breeze carried its nectar and nature through his soul. Blossoms had become fruit and the cloying humidity reminded him ... he was reluctantly admitting the pain into his dream ... reluctant to feel the awful ache of amputation. Dali and McLuhan had been close but he had nudged them into their graves.
Down by the river, among the trees where the pollen fell like winter snow, he wandered, following her perfume, listening to her familiar song until he knew it off by heart ... a word of her smile would attach itself to him before dropping off somewhere he could not trace. There was no wind, just the heavy music of summer.
‘Stop the noise!’ he shouted again.
There was a shocked silence around the table. Then, like an image fading, they began their gamblers’ babble and Rane was quickly forgotten. He had gathered the courage to halt the sound but in retrospect it must have seemed petty. Even Juno wrapped her arms in encouragement around his waist.
‘Are ya gunna stand like that all fuckin’ night or what?’ McLuhan demanded with an oafish grin.
‘Shit!’
Rane composed himself as the music softened and went from his mind. The perfume tantalised him and he urgently welcomed her to his side.
‘Come on, mate!’ Lamont dug him gently in the ribs, ‘they don’t seem to like us here. We’re leaving! You are coming, aren’t you, Rane?’
Rane said nothing. He stood and stared at the roulette for a few minutes more before joining them outside.
‘Did ya win anything?’
It was Dali with a laugh on her face.
‘I’m not sure.’
Rane stared at his sister strangely.
‘Take it from me, mate!’ said McLuhan brightly, ‘anythin’ can happen on the right night. Ya comin?’’
It was Rane who followed the others down the hill to the black and grey van gathering bat’s piss in the park.
End
