Slow Birds: And Other Stories Read online

  ‘Did you see all that glitter on the bridal bed?’ sighed Helen. (For all the guests had been invited upstairs to inspect the scene of the forthcoming defloration.) ‘It was the same glassy grit they stick on Christmas cards to make them sparkle. Have you ever caught a speck under your fingernail? Imagine that sprinkled all over the sheets on our wedding night!’

  ‘It all comes from weighing the Aga Khan in diamonds,’ said Harry. ‘Ismailis have a thing about glitter – and sweet stuff. What intrigued me was the bowl of chocolate and fudge by the bedside to give them strength.’

  ‘The walls were only plywood, thin as can be. Gulzar was as white as a sheet, poor girl.’

  ‘Except for her hands!’

  True enough. Curly tattoo-like chocolate coloured patterns had been painted on the bride’s hands for good luck, so that she had looked as though she was suffering from some skin disease. Etiquette forbade Gulzar to raise those decorated hands to her mouth. Consequently all the old women of her own family and her husband’s in turn had forcefed her with chunks of wedding cake; crumbs had dribbled down Gulzar’s white bridal dress. And as they passed by, one by one, the old fat women had each pressed a banknote into Gulzar’s lucky hands till, by the end of it all, the bride had seemed to be clutching a huge crumpled napkin which she wasn’t allowed to use to clear the crumbs away.

  ‘Did you notice how silent the whole thing was?’ asked Harry. ‘No music or speeches. Blank faces, silence. I wonder how much Gulzar knew about sex?’

  They both smiled with complicity.

  The windows of the VW were wound down to ventilate the car, in the heat. Already they had covered a hundred miles of paved road, which was bound to end soon. The blacktop strip stretched ahead in an almost unwavering straight line through the bush, merely rising and falling with the lie of the land. Branching euphorbias rose as high as medium-sized trees. An occasional lone baobab was a giant white squid standing to attention. Other trees dangled long phallic gourds from their fingertips. Here and there narrow foot-tracks cross-hatched the wild bush, signs of hidden smallholdings – or a black-shrouded woman might be standing in shade balancing a great bundle of wood on her head; or else some baskets of charcoal might be placed by the roadside for collection. Otherwise at first glance who lived here; or could live here? By contrast with the tame green coastal wilderness, here was a vast barrenness. There seemed to be no human presence; though there was. It simply took a while to register it.

  The road itself carried many oil trucks, some of which were old and rickety, stacked high with drums; others were new Italian models with fat rubber slugs of oil squatting on their backs. Already on their journey the VW had smoothly overhauled ten or twelve such, not to mention several wrecks, one completely upside-down and still leaking from burst drums. For the truckers of the oil-run continued driving all night long.

  Presently mountains heaved into the sky, to the southwest.

  ‘The Ulugurus,’ said Helen.

  A few weeks earlier they had gone to the cinema in town. In the bar over beers, with a fan clacking slowly overhead, they had talked to a Maltese prospector while they waited for the show to start. Helen had told him how she and Harry were planning a one-night safari to the Mikumi game reserve; every journey, no matter how slight or modest, was a ‘safari’. He in turn had confided sourly that the mountains they would pass en route were full of lithium, solid walls of lithium; but since a South African company held the mining rights and no profits could be sent to South Africa, those mountains couldn’t be mined.

  ‘Uluguru: like the sound of the wind moaning through the peaks,’ she added.

  Foothills, sweeping gently down towards the road, were clad in sisal: an estate cutting a swathe through the bush. The monotonous rows of green spikes, in red earth, were serviced by a rusty narrow-gauge railway line.

  Soon they passed a rest-halt for oil truckers: a lone mud hut, the thatch waterproofed with rusty drum lids. A few trucks were pulled up outside. The drivers stood around drinking beer out of old jam tins fitted with wooden handles.

  A few miles further on, they overhauled a raggy man running along the road. He ran frantically, leaping and jerking, heading along the tarmac from nowhere to nowhere. He didn’t appear to hear the car engine till the VW was passing him; then as they did pass he leapt into the ditch, and back out again, waving crazily after them, his arms semaphoring.

  What did the man want? Was his child dying? Should they stop? They’d been advised not to stop, by the prospector. They had felt strong liberal qualms about such advice, but now that the situation presented itself, they heeded him. However, Harry and Helen said nothing to each other about the man; not at the time. Instead they carried on discussing the Ismaili wedding with a bitter humour. In any case, they couldn’t have asked the man what he wanted; their Kiswahili wasn’t adequate. And an oil truck would be along soon, driven by one of his own people.

  Then the tarmac ended; quite suddenly, as though funds had run out unexpectedly. Or as though here was an invisible frontier, between dry wilderness with a few people dwelling in it, and the same with only wild animals present. Ahead the road ran straight as ever, but now it was red and rutted. Red dust was billowing up from an oil truck further on, blotting out the road in a sandstorm of grit.

  Another oil truck barrelled through the clouds of dirt, going their way, its headlamps full on even in the middle of the afternoon. That vehicle also dragged a storm of sand and pebbles behind it. Harry slowed down. He couldn’t see ahead now. Hastily they wound the windows up, and stifled.

  ‘That fellow back there …’ He spoke as though their loss of momentum had put them within reach of some form of retribution. ‘What do you suppose he wanted?’

  ‘Which fellow?’

  ‘That strange fellow running along the road like a madman, kicking his legs in the air, waving his arms about …’

  ‘He wanted a lift, I suppose.’

  ‘I mean, was it something serious? People don’t just run, not in this heat.’

  ‘Well he was just running.’

  ‘He did wave at us, didn’t he?’

  ‘No, I don’t really think so. He was taken by surprise. Remember how he jumped off the road? He was waving his arms like that to keep his balance.’

  ‘I watched him in the mirror. He carried on running.’

  ‘Ooh this dust … Can’t you get past?’

  ‘Too risky.’ Harry had to squirt and sweep the windshield with the wipers every minute or so; he wondered how long the water would hold out.

  Dry grass by the road was red. Trees were dusted with red powder: the storm-drift from countless trucks. And a red giraffe flickered among the trees, twitching its hairy ears.

  ‘Giraffe, see!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You’ve missed it.’

  ‘You’ve imagined it.’

  ‘No, it was there among those trees. It ran off.’

  But not all wild animals were dismayed by the rattle and stink of trucks. Soon the oil slug ahead pulled up. Harry coasted the VW past, and there were elephants on the road a hundred yards further on. He braked. In the mirror he noticed the African truck driver high in his cab sit back and light a cigarette. He didn’t intend to bully this elephant family with his heavy vehicle. Easy to see why. Some other driver had done so in the past, and the baby of the group was hobbling with one of its hind legs bent double and the bare bone shafting through the hide. Mindful of the cause, the bull lashed the road with his trunk, scooping up spouts of dust and stones, squinting at the vehicles malevolently. Harry engaged reverse and backed up a few yards.

  ‘Don’t switch off.’

  ‘No.’

  On the far side of the group another oil slug halted and doused its lights. And the road stretched off into the distance, visibly at peace, with only a crippled baby elephant and the moody bull and a dusty black slug on wheels watching it silently …

  ‘Still, I’d rather be an Ismaili than a Hindu when it comes to dyi
ng,’ said Harry, eyeing the bull elephant nervously. ‘That grisly barbecue of a crematorium by the beach! The iron bars black with smoke, that greasy pile of ashes underneath …’

  ‘I like Ismailis. They’re adaptable.’

  ‘They’re soft,’ he said. ‘Soft as marshmallows. It’s too easy to bully them.’

  While they were waiting, they wound the windows down. Hardly had they done so, than fierce flies were clustering at their feet like a cloud of devils or Furies. The flies bit right through their socks. They had to tear them loose one by one. However, the bull soon moved off the road and they were able to drive on, this time ahead of the oil truck. Once the VW was in motion, with air whipping through, all the flies fled back to pester animals instead.

  Mikumi camp was a half mile away from the main road, and once they were there the noise of the oil trucks using the route was reduced to an insect hum. Far from acting as an irritant to spoil the sense of peace, the occasional passage of trucks only seemed to exaggerate the stillness out in the real raw bush, where the camp was. Otherwise after a while this stillness might have gone unnoticed. By being punctuated, it became a rapt presence, of silence.

  The camp’s Land Rover was out in the park spotting game, which was easier to find at dusk and dawn, when the animals used the few waterholes. A couple of Peugeots, another VW and a Mercedes were parked beneath leafless barren trees outside of widely separated green tents – to which a white-aproned Boy, perhaps thirty years of age, was ferrying canvas buckets of water over the beaten brown earth.

  There was no boundary line between camp and park. For that matter there was no sign of a ‘park’. There was only a level plain of beaten earth with some tiny black dots moving about in the distance, and beyond those a long low belt of trees, and behind the trees, hills where sickles of fire were burning off dead straw. Smoke clouds hung over several areas, though from the look of the ground it was a wonder what there was to burn. Out of that barren emptiness flowed the silence, the everlasting lull, within which presumably secret little acts of violence occurred: the bites of flies, the breaking of gazelle necks by clawed paws …

  The hunter’s wife was German: an ample middle-aged Frau in a ballooning cotton dress. She was sitting in the largest marquee writing out a grocery list.

  She offered Harry and Helen chilled imported German beer, though the white-aproned Boy had to be summoned to take the bottles from the paraffin refrigerator beside her, and uncap them.

  For a few minutes the German woman talked about Lushoto, two hundred miles to the north, where it was just like the Austrian Tyrol with cows wearing clanking bells around their necks amid grassy meadows and cool fir-clad slopes, and where some of the old Africans only spoke Kiswahili and German, no English. She reminisced sadly about German East Africa, though she couldn’t have known that time personally, and about cowbells in the misty mornings, gazing round her as she did so at the flat beaten plain, the desiccated trees, the burning hills. Then, having adequately hosted Harry and Helen in her opinion, she busied herself in her grocery list again.

  ‘Maybe Gulzar went to Lushoto for her honeymoon,’ speculated Helen.

  ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘And maybe they spent the whole time in that plywood cell amidst the glitter eating candy bars!’

  A middle-aged Asian in shorts walked into the marquee and wanted a beer too; they had heard another car arrive a while before.

  ‘Ech, back again, Mr Desai?’ sighed the German Frau.

  ‘As you say,’ he replied affably, sitting himself in a canvas seat across from Harry. As he settled, a grey testicle bulged out of his shorts, lolling in shadow against the top of a brown leg. Somehow it looked a tired testicle.

  ‘Every weekend I come here,’ he told Harry and Helen, ‘for photography.’ His eyes gleamed and moved rapidly. He had large hands with prominent veins; a swollen vein also ran across his forehead, from which the hair was thinning away. ‘Most of all I want to photograph leopard. I have all the others. Elephant and rhino and buffalo. Lions: I have lions making love. I’d like to show you those pictures. But leopard is what I want most. You see leopard in your headlights at night but he runs away so fast you don’t have time to take a picture. Have a beer with me, will you? It’s a long time yet till your dinner. Go on – go on! I come here so often, it’s my second home. Isn’t that right, Mrs Boll?’

  At the sound of her name the German woman looked up from her list and stared vaguely at the Asian as though she didn’t recognize him in the fast-failing light.

  ‘I said I come here so often it’s my second home, Mrs Boll.’

  ‘Mr Desai is very enthusiastic about wild life,’ said Mrs Boll in a bored voice.

  Since a half-litre bottle of German beer out here in the bush cost five shillings fifty, Harry accepted the offer.

  With the rapid onset of dusk, Desai’s errant testicle had retired into darkness. Paraffin lamps were lit by the Boy, and hung up hissing. However, the world hadn’t yet closed in to the circle of light in the camp. The fires on the hill slopes grew brighter. A half-moon hung hazily in the smoke pall raised by the bush fires, cupped like a crude yellow bowl, its flat rim parallel with the hilltops.

  ‘I bring all my family with me,’ said Desai. ‘My wife and my children, and this time my uncle and his wife too. We bring our own food with us and heat it up in the tent. I don’t like German meals. Have you seen any game yet?’

  ‘Only a crippled baby elephant, and a bull,’ said Helen.

  ‘And a giraffe,’ Harry added.

  ‘A camouflaged giraffe. How many children have you, Mr Desai?’

  ‘Four children. Ages six, seven, eight and ten. One boy and three girls,’ he reeled off. ‘You must see them. They are pretty children. My wife would like you to see them.’

  They chatted. Harry said that he worked for the Ministry of Finance, then joked – since Desai responded that he was an importer – that probably Mr Desai knew more about finance.

  And how did Mr and Mrs Sharp like Africa? enquired the Asian. To this, the answer just had to be enthusiastic – though maybe Desai himself despised Africans, the wild life excluded …

  When Desai invited Harry and Helen to share curry with him and family, Harry didn’t refuse. Harry wanted to see those pictures of lions making love. Helen wanted to see Desai’s pretty children, and to meet his wife. Besides, in the interests of economy they hadn’t been planning to eat the Frau’s dinner at ten shillings per head; they had brought sandwiches and boiled eggs.

  What struck Harry immediately about Desai’s tent was the smell. It wasn’t a smelly smell, a stink, oh no. This was a heady, sense-assaulting odour compounded of curry and what Harry presumed must be recently burnt joss sticks.

  ‘Do you burn incense?’ Harry asked.

  Desai flashed a quick smile. ‘Later, I’ll tell you later.’

  The four children stared at their visitors with large round black eyes, and were silent. The girls were wearing thin cotton slips, which no doubt they would soon be going to bed in. Their mahogany legs were as thin as sticks; dingy ribbons tied their long black pigtails. The boy, who was the eldest, wore white shorts. He had the same thin brown legs and greasy black hair as the girls.

  The two women in the tent greeted Harry and Helen with smiles, which soon faded away. Desai’s wife looked surprisingly young, small and slender. Desai’s aunt, on the other hand, was a fat severe-looking woman of about fifty. Her tall thin husband asked Harry a few questions, then simply sat looking. As soon as the women began dishing out the rice and curry, the children started to chatter to each other in Kutchi.

  When Desai sat on the bed opposite Harry and Helen to eat his curry, his wayward testicle squeezed to the fore again.

  After the meal the four children were packed off to bed unceremoniously in the rear portion of the tent. Desai fetched a box of colour slides, which he handed to Harry. The only way to view the slides was to hold them up to the paraffin lamp; thus the pictures were little
more than confusing blotches. Harry felt light-headed, besides, and dropped several plastic images of what might have been copulating lions. Whilst he and Helen were doing their best to make these out, Desai and his Uncle popped large triangular folds of dull green leaf into their mouths, wads of leaf about as large as could be popped into a mouth and still leave space to chew.

  ‘Pan,’ explained Desai. ‘You want some? Ha ha, very hot! Only we Indians can eat it.’ But he didn’t offer any, to test their courage. ‘How do you like my exposures, eh? Yes, they’re not bad, but I need leopard now. Tonight, I’ll take the Peugeot out and look for him. I’ll dazzle him in my headlights and take pictures of him with big frightful eyes … No, you can’t eat Pan, my friends, but I’ll tell you what: you can smoke some bhang with us.’

  So it was Indian hemp, marijuana, not Indian incense which accounted for the smell pervading the tent …

  Desai unscrewed a film cassette and offered round the dry home-made cigarettes packed inside.

  * * *

  After a while Desai switched on a portable radio. The nine o’clock news was just beginning, but Harry found the announcer’s sentences hard to follow. Each separate word triggered a cartoon picture for him: an image caricaturing what the word suggested, with a speech bubble above containing the word itself written out. This parody vision was superimposed on the wall of the tent as on a screen. Cartoon images succeeded each other so swiftly that he couldn’t seize hold of a single one of them.

  So this, he thought, is the true quality of my imagination. It’s a strip cartoon, a farcical helter skelter. For a while this seemed to be a profound and unsettling discovery.

  It was as though he was hypnotized not to understand the whole message – yet in another part of his head he could follow the news perfectly well. A question of attention, therefore! He was finding it hard to pay attention. The paraffin lamp was hissing brightly. He had an erection from seeing Desai’s daughters lying in their flimsy slips on top of those camp beds crowded at the rear; lying on, not in, because it was so hot. A forest of brown matchstick legs and arms teased his eyes, though he tried not to look.