Читать книгу The Land God Made in Anger - John Davis Gordon - Страница 8

On these harsh shores it hardly ever rains. The sun beats down onto the desert coast, blinding white and yellow and brown and apricot and pink on the sand dunes that stretch on and on to the east. To the west the cold Atlantic seethes and crashes, stretching for thousands of miles to the Americas; this land is called the Skeleton Coast, for so many ships have wrecked themselves on its treacherous expanse, and so many shipwrecked men have perished. If they survived the savage sea, they died of thirst and starvation after they came crawling ashore. Here nobody lives. The only people who sometimes pass through this land are the strandlopers, hardy people from the hot hard hinterland of Namibia, who journey out of the vast desert to catch seals and shellfish.

This blinding day in June, 1945, two Damara strandlopers sat on the hot shore, resting. Before them, the vast Atlantic ocean was empty. Suddenly, something extraordinary happened.

Less than a thousand metres away, a man came out of the sea, like a demon. One moment there was nothing but the seething sea; the next there was a man, his arms thrashing. He started swimming frantically towards them. The two Damaras stared; then, to their further astonishment, another man erupted out. The two Damaras scrambled up and ran over the sand dune. They peered over the top.

The two demons were rearing up in the swells, disappearing in the white crashing thunder of the breakers. The man in front was the slower. He looked frantically behind him. He came labouring and gasping closer, then suddenly his feet found the bottom. He staggered upright and then collapsed as another wave hit him. He staggered up again, then came stumbling up onto the beach, the waves crashing about his exhausted legs. He looked back, his chest heaving, clutching a small package to his chest. Then he pulled a pistol out of his pocket. He pointed it wildly at the other man, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He turned and staggered off down the beach, trying to run, his legs buckling.

The second man came floundering towards the beach, wild-eyed. The two Damaras could see that blood was flowing from his head, flooding red into the crashing sea. He wrenched off a life-jacket; then he started trying to run after the other man.

The first man was fifty yards ahead, but he was slower. He staggered along, looking back wildly; then he could run no more. He reeled to face his adversary, and pointed the gun at him again. Again nothing happened. Then he hurled the gun. It hit the man a savage blow in the face, which caused him to lurch; and the first man pulled out a knife, and came at him. The second man recovered, and then went into a circle, crouched, his bare hands bunched, the blood streaming down his face. The first man circled after him, his face contorted, the knife in front, his other hand clutching his package; then suddenly he dropped it, picked up a handful of sand, and threw it. The second man staggered backwards, clawing the sand off his bloody face, blinded, and the first man lunged at him.

He came wildly, his killer knife on high, and plunged it deep into the man’s breast. He lurched backwards, one arm up to ward off another stab, but the knife flashed again, and sank into his shoulder. He sprawled onto his back, blood spurting, and tried to scramble up, and the first man crashed on top of him, and the knife lunged down again. He pulled it out, and stabbed and stabbed the man four more times, whimpering. Then he toppled off and clambered to his feet.

He staggered, blood-spattered, and stared at his victim. The man was a mass of blood, welling from his chest. Then he tried to get up. He tried to roll over and heave himself up onto his hands and knees, and the first man gave a cry and lurched back at him. The second man tried to raise his arm to defend himself, but he collapsed. The first man dropped to his knees beside him, and sawed the blade across the man’s gullet.

Then he clambered to his feet, red sand sticking to him. He looked at his victim; then he turned and picked up his package. He looked for the gun, picked it up, then wiped the sand off it. He sat down with a thump, chest heaving, getting his breath back; then he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out an oilcloth bag. He cut it open with trembling fingers, and pulled out a cardboard box. It contained bullets. He opened the magazine of the gun. He pulled out the shells, and reloaded. He scooped up the empty shells, and threw them into the sea. Then he turned to his package.

It was also an oilcloth bag. He cut the stitching. Inside were two smaller bags. He stood up unsteadily, and buried one in a trouser pocket. In his other pocket was a bulky leather wallet. He pulled it out and put the other bag in its place. He then tried to stuff the wallet into the pocket beside the bag. It was too much, so he stuffed it into his breast pocket. Then he turned back to the corpse.

He took hold of the dead man’s ankles and dragged him above the high-water line: then he began to scoop out a shallow grave.

He rolled the body into it. He scooped the sand back over it, then clambered to his feet. His mouth was parched. He walked unsteadily back to the sea. He washed the bloody sand off his arms and face. Then he started plodding down the burning shore. He only knew that he had to head south. That was where civilization lay. How far, he did not know.

He only got about a mile before he had to rest. It was blazing hot and he was frantic with thirst. There was a promontory of rocks. He clambered over them. On the other side, he crept into the shade of a big boulder, and sat down, the gun dangling between his knees. That is how he was when the two Damara strandlopers came creeping over the rocks, following him.

The white man jerked and swung the gun on them. The two Damaras stopped, frightened.

The white man scrambled to his feet, the gun trained on them shakily. Then both Damaras turned to flee, and in a flash the man fired. Both men froze, cowered, terrified. The white man stood there, wild-eyed; then he motioned with the gun, ordering them to drop their weapons.

The Damaras laid down their bows and their slingbags. The terrifying white man held out his trembling hand. ‘Wasser!’ He made a drinking motion.

Carefully one Damara opened his bag. Inside was an assortment of old bottles with wooden stoppers. He lifted one out.

The white man snatched it. He drank feverishly, his eyes never leaving them. He swallowed and swallowed, and the two men watched him fearfully. He drank the bottle dry, then threw it down. He held out his hand for another. It was given to him. He drank half of it. Then he said:

‘Swakopmund!’

The Damaras understood. Neither of them had ever been to the white man’s town faraway to the south, but they had heard about the extraordinary place at the mouth of the river which is almost always dry. The Damara who was called Jakob pointed down the hostile coast.

The white man picked up their bows and motioned them to start leading the way.

In less than an hour he knew it was hopeless: he had to struggle to keep up, and tonight, when he fell asleep, the two men would disappear. He could not afford to leave witnesses, and when the sun began to get low he decided to kill them so that he could throw himself down and sleep. First, however, he wanted them to make a fire.

There was plenty of driftwood. He called a halt, and motioned them to put their slingbags at his feet, before indicating that he wanted a fire. The Damaras set to work. The white man collapsed in the sand. He opened one of the slingbags and found dried meat, which he began to chew ravenously.

The two Damaras made the fire. Jakob took a straight stick, the size of a pencil, out of his bag, and a piece of flat wood. He put a pinch of sand on the very edge of the wood, and some kindling underneath. Then, holding the straight stick vertical, he rubbed it between his palms onto the sandy wood, very hard, until the friction caused smoke. A tiny glow fell off the wood into the kindling below. The other Damara, called Petrus, blew on it, whilst Jakob ground the stick, and the kindling blossomed into a little flame. They scuttled about on their haunches, getting more kindling, crouching to blow. Then Petrus suddenly gave a gasp and pointed down the beach; the white man turned to look, and Jakob hit him.

Jakob seized a piece of jagged wood and swung it with all his might and the white man flung up an arm. The wood crashed against his wrist and gashed it to the bone, and he sprawled. His wallet jerked out of his pocket and the gun went flying. Jakob bounded and swiped the man’s mouth, and his lips split and his front teeth smashed off at the roots. Jakob raised his club again and the man cried out, trying to cover his head. Jakob threw down the stick and snatched up his slingbag, and Petrus snatched up the bows and the man’s wallet. They ran away into the dunes, leaving one slingbag behind in their panic.

A thousand miles down the Skeleton Coast is the Cape of Good Hope, ‘The Tavern of the Seas’ on the route from Europe to the East, with its oaks and its vineyards and its fruit – the Fairest Cape of All, it is said. Further to the east are the mighty Tsitsikama forests, and then come the rolling hills of the Ciskei and the Transkei, the homelands of the Xhosa people beneath the mountain stronghold of Lesotho, the kingdom of the Basuto people; then come the lush green hills of Natal where the sugar cane grows, the home of the Zulu people, who were a mighty warrior nation. Then across the magnificent towering Drakensberg mountains lie the farmlands of the Orange Free State, the vast highveld and the bushveld of the Transvaal, the land of rich goldfields, the strongholds of the hard people of Dutch descent, who are called Afrikaners. They live surrounded by many tribes: the Swazis in their mountain kingdom, the Tswanas, the Vendas, the Matabele. To the west of this country is the Kalahari desert and beyond that lies the vast desert country called South West Africa-Namibia, with its Skeleton Coast, where live the Ovambo people, and the Himba and the Herero, the Damaras and the Bushmen, to name but some, as well as Germans and Afrikaners. There are many different countries in this dramatic land of southern Africa, with many different climates, and many different peoples, and many languages and many different customs, but the most dramatic country of all is the one known as The Land God Made in Anger, the desert land called South West Africa-Namibia, or more commonly simply Namibia, where this story began.

Legally, Namibia is not part of the Republic of South Africa. It is a former German colony which was handed to South Africa by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War under a mandate to govern in the best interests of the natives until such time as it was appropriate to grant the colony independence. Halfway up is the little enclave of Walvis Bay, the only deep-water harbour in the whole vast coast, which is legally part of South Africa. It was to this unusual part of the world that James McQuade came back forty years after Jakob and Petrus saw the two men erupt out of the sea and fight to the death on the burning shore.

James van Niekerk McQuade once served twelve months in prison for contravening the Immorality Act, but do not be too alarmed by that because it happened like this: in those days, when he was starting a trawler-fishing company in Cape Town, he sailed to the Antarctic every year on the whaling fleets to make extra money, and down at the Ice he fell madly in love with the ship’s nurse, a South African girl who happened to have some Malaysian blood. She was only one-sixteenth Malay, but that was enough to make her a Coloured under South Africa’s laws in those days. When they got back from the Ice she was pregnant and he unlawfully married her. When they were charged for breaching the racial laws, he packed her off secretly to England to have her baby. The magistrate sentenced him to twelve months imprisonment with hard labour, and he never saw his wife again. She wrote to him in prison saying that she had miscarried, that she had ruined his life and that he should forget about her. There was no address. When he came out of prison he moved his fishing company to Walvis Bay to get away from his wicked past, put a skipper in charge and hurried to England to look for his wife. After six months he had given up and emigrated to Australia to start life again, an embittered man. No way was he going to go back to goddam South Africa.

Nor did he, for twelve years. He hated the place. Not the country – for it is a wonderful country – but the government with its Apartheid laws. But he still had connections with South Africa. There was his house, which returned a reasonable rent, mortgaged to pay for his trawler, and there was his fishing company, which most years showed a reasonable profit. While in Australia, he had formed Sausmarine, a small, one-freighter shipping line that plied between Australia, South Africa and Ghana, a route that became profitable when the Australian Dockworkers’ Union refused to off-load South African cargo. Australian businessmen document their cargo as bound for Ghana, and your understanding Sausmarine off-loads it in Cape Town. And vice versa. You’d never believe the mistakes these shipping clerks make: South African exports get misloaded into crates bearing Ghanaian labels. (Sausmarine never went near Ghana – her ship was called Rocket because she did the putative trip so fast.) And to make confusion more confounded, Sausmarine was registered in Panama. But, during all those years, McQuade did not sail to South Africa: Kid Childe, Tucker and L. C. Brooks ran the ship, and McQuade ran the company from a one-roomed office above a Greek café on the Adelaide waterfront. It was not bad business until sanctions against South Africa heated up and the competition with other sanction-busters became too sharp. McQuade had not the slightest compunction about beating the Dockworkers’ Union at their own commie game, but he drew the line at more prison. Finally he decided to sell up Sausmarine, go back to South Africa and work the fishing company hard with a skeleton crew, then sell it and put the money into a small passenger ship to ply down the Great Barrier Reef, from Cairns to Sydney. That’s a lovely part of the world, and there was a crying need for that service.

There was another good reason for getting his investments out: called 435. United Nations’ Resolution 435 ordered South Africa, the polecat nation of the world, to grant independence to South West Africa-Namibia. For years South Africa had been fighting a war with SWAPO, the South West African Peoples Organization, a terrorist Marxist movement, and had no intention of handing the country over to them: but now SWAPO had thirty thousand Cuban soldiers to help, and McQuade saw the writing on the wall. The same writing that had spelled out the collapse of Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies and the Congo and the rest of British Africa: you win every battle but lose the war. God knows McQuade had no love for the South African Government but he had much less love for communists, and certainly no desire to fish in their territorial waters. So – sell up whilst the going was still good, and wash his hands of goddam Africa forever.

That is how James McQuade was feeling when he walked off the tarmac into Jan Smuts Airport in Johannesburg and heard South African accents again. Ivor Nathan was there to meet him, looking as much like Groucho Marx as ever. They had been at university together. Nathan gave him a bed for the night and tried to cheer him up: South Africa wasn’t as bad as it used to be, Nathan said, Apartheid was unenforced almost everywhere now, except in the rural districts where the Hairybacks still thought the world was flat. ‘But it’s all still on the bloody statute book,’ McQuade said.

‘The Sex Laws have been repealed,’ Nathan said. ‘The Immorality Act and the Mixed Marriages Act. The government is trying to reform but it daren’t repeal them all at once, for fear of a backlash, but give them time, my boy, my life.’

‘Just another decade or two?’

‘Well, we’ve got a Coloured House of Representatives now, and an Indian House of Delegates. I tell you, things are changing.’

‘But no Black House. It’s all too little too late. And what about this right-wing AWB mob, stomping around with their bloody swastikas and armbands?’

‘Lunatic fringe,’ Nathan said.

‘They don’t sound so fringe in the overseas press! It sounds as if the whole country’s turned Nazi.’

‘Lunatic fringe,’ Nathan insisted.

McQuade sighed. ‘Anyway, what about the war on the border – that’s my problem. What about 435? Is South Africa going to grant independence to Namibia? That’s the question. If so, the fishing industry goes down the communist drain and I’m bankrupt.’

‘No way is South Africa going to implement 435 as long as the Cubans are there, and no way is Castro going to withdraw them because he wants to go down in history as the Scourge of the Afrikaner. Independence is a hell of a long way off, so your fishing’s safe for a long time.’

‘Is it, hell. The fleets of the world are out there raping the Benguela current because South Africa daren’t enforce Namibia’s two hundred-mile maritime belt because of goddam 435.’

Nathan sighed. ‘What’s Australia like?’

‘Australia’s great,’ McQuade said, ‘and it’s got no Black Problem.’

‘Because the Aussies shot most of them. At least we were Christians.’

‘We? You’re a closet Goy, Nathan.’

‘Once a South African, always a South African.’ Nathan sighed. ‘You can’t expect too much of us.’

The next day McQuade flew to Cape Town. Even beautiful Table Mountain rising up seemed to be only a monument to Afrikanerdom, and God he was glad he was washing his hands of the lot of them. He was an Australian now. He checked his house. He felt no pangs when he saw the nice old place, and he was glad he was getting rid of it. He visited half a dozen estate agents. Then he bought an old Landrover. That afternoon he set off, driving north, out of the beautiful vineyard country with its grand old Dutch architecture, heading for the Orange River and South West Africa-Namibia beyond, the Land God Made in Anger.

You probably don’t know that bridge over the Orange River. The road curves down out of the dry, stony hills at Vioolsdrift where there is a general dealer’s store, a gas station and a police post. Then suddenly there is the river, the water muddy orange, a belt of green, then the flinty desert rising up beyond: hot, hard, dry as hell. McQuade saw nothing beautiful in that desolate vista, but when he was halfway over that river he felt his depression lift. Man, this was dramatic country, he had forgotten how magnificently dramatic it was. And the Republic of South Africa was officially behind him and there was a feeling of youthfulness on this side of the river, a frontier feeling of wide open spaces, as if the long arm of Pretoria had to pull its punches here because of 435, and everybody knew it. He stopped at Noordoewer, which is a little hotel on the other side. There were a score of Coloureds squatting around, doing nothing. He filled up with diesel and drank a row of cold beers, and the Afrikaans words he had not used for twelve years came flooding back to his tongue without thinking: and, by God, it was a strange but nice feeling. These were people he just naturally knew and understood, and he almost felt like an African again.

He bought a six-pack of beers and set off north again. And there was nothing beautiful in that flat, hard, grey-brown desert stretching on and on, blistering hot, and maybe it was the beer he was drinking as he drove, but he found himself almost happy, and it almost felt as if he was coming home. At Keetmanshoop he turned west, towards Lüderitz on the faraway Atlantic, and now he was driving through thorn-tree country with sparse yellow grass, and he saw wild horses and ostriches. Near Aus he turned north again, through the vast cattle country, ranches thousands of square kilometres in size. That night he slept beside his Landrover, under the stars, near the oasis called Sesriem, where the creeping sand dunes are three hundred feet high and change colour from pink to mauve to apricot to gold in the shifting light. Maybe it was because of all the beer, but it seemed there is no feeling like an African night, no stars so bright, no night sounds so intimate and significant, no smell and light of fire so true to life. And even the next afternoon, when he came grinding down out of the hot hard hills of the Namib desert onto the vast sand-duned plains, and then the distant hostile Atlantic began to show through the shimmering haze, until finally, the flat white smudge of Walvis Bay, one of the drabbest ports in this world, began to coagulate in the distance – even then he still felt better about coming back. As Nathan had said: ‘Once a South African, always a South African – you cannot expect too much of us.’