The Circus and the Atom
[Excerpt from the novel]
written by Joseph Howse
Book II: Through the Snake Hole
Chapter 4: On a Salt Pan, 1971
Out there, an ostrich was swanning around, restless on her two-toed feet as her leather soles crushed the voronoi pattern of the parched lakebed. Chum, chum, chum, was the sound of a barefoot trek on a salt pan. At least, the locals at Etosha mimicked the sound that way.
A dust devil, too, was disturbing the great blankness which shimmered to the horizon. The ostrich gave not the slightest thought to this wandering chimney of salt and arid air. She bowed to peck at an appetizing clod of minerals.
Each time the hen walked, her chicks stood—baking for a second in the sun—and then scurried to get back inside her shadow.
By the shore of the pan, Annika had climbed an umbrella thorn tree. Perched in the crotch, shaded by the canopy of Nature’s own barbed wire, she watched her father pace across the white expanse, an open book. To pass the time, she recited from memory her favourite scenes in The Little Prince. The library at Ongwediva had it in many languages. One of the Finnish missionaries, a linguist, believed that Annika was specially meant to learn, learn, learn.
Last night, Annika and her father and his comrades had camped amid a colony of baobab trees. She did not share the Little Prince’s anxiety about their root systems. No matter how big the baobabs grew or how much they looked like elephant-men, they seemed in no position to contain, much less conquer, the dust of the basin in its fifth dry month, September.
Where was the rest of the flock? Was this hen a widow? Was she a runaway? Even with her monthling chicks in tow, she could have crossed the salty horizon in five minutes’ dash. What need had she of wings, save to swoosh them defiantly in the direction of this weaker biped, the oncoming man?
He had faced worse things than an angry, giant hen. Had she fathomed how much worse, she might have chum-chummed a retreat; instead, oh, but instead, when he came within a kilometre, she charged.
He pulled down the safety lever on his AK-47 assault rifle and raised the gunstock to his shoulder. The bird, intent on kicking him senseless, was within ten seconds of him—a quarter of a kilometre—when he squeezed the trigger and blew her head and neck to pieces. Her mighty stride carried her body onwards another five metres before tripping into the salt. Her chicks, still chasing shade, arrived at the new, red shore. The hunter caught up and tried in vain to shoo them away as he knelt to butcher the kill. His voice was breaking with every shout he threw at the baby birds. A week ago, he had been giving impassioned speeches about solidarity, sobriety, a general strike and a revolutionary struggle, the burning of passbooks, nationalization of the gold and diamonds and newfound uranium, electrification, collectivization, urbanization, progressive education, vaccination, water and light in apartments, not darkness in solitary and swill in shebeens, acceptance of a fight for the future instead of a baton up the backside, and now, now? Matters had deteriorated yet again.
He was a miner and a talker, not much of a killer till lately. The comrades had deserted him before dawn. The last mission—the “liberation” of his ten-year-old daughter from her aunt in town—had convinced them that he was not far from a fool.
Annika leapt down from the thorn tree and raced towards her father. She wanted to call out to him but he seemed somehow nameless. The comrades had addressed him as Mels. Till his last exile, he had been John. Years later, Annika would reflect that neither name really suited him.
By the time his breathless daughter came to his side, Mels/John had managed to detach half a wing. He rested his bloodied hands, looked at her, and braved a smile. Dust and sweat had invaded his eyes and matted his moustache and goatee. “Take this back to the shade,” he told her, “and you pluck it, hey? Don’t run.”
She accepted the tangle of sinews and feathers. The shade now moved with her and, in it, the monthlings followed. Chum, chum, chum. The pitiless sun picked at her, digging beneath her skin and forcing the moisture out. The walk back was dizzying and slow. Near the shore, swarms of flies came out to drink her sweat as well as the ostrich blood. She did run, just a little, but it only took more out of her.
Panting, she led the chicks and the flies to the wide shadow of the umbrella thorn tree and she sat plucking feathers, which soon formed a semicircle around her. Quills in her hands, avian toilette of oils and grit, furrowed bark against her back, and beneath her the dirt, hard and dry as concrete—these were the best distractions from the waves of flies.
The wind picked up. Out on the flat, the dust devil crawled closer to her father. At Annika’s tree, the flies scattered high amidst the thorns and low around the roots. The ostrich’s floss feathers, as never before, became airborne. Her chicks’ fledgling coats, fine like daisies, also caught the current. Little toes scooted about inside the shivering shadow; little beaks pecked at flies.
Annika decided to lay a fire to cook the meat and to keep any hungry scavengers away from the charnel smell which travelled on the wind. The tree’s lowest branch, leafless and cracked, seemed a likely piece of firewood. She set the meat down atop the big feathers and scrambled back up the twisty trunk. For a few moments, she just lay belly-down on the dead branch and studied the chicks from above. This, she supposed, was how a pilot or indeed a baobab viewed the littleness of a man on foot.
On the crystalline plain, windblown salt had begun to coat the ostrich and the man. He trudged shorewards, his shoulders bent beneath the choicest cuts of the butchered bird.
To Mels/John, the sun had no monopoly over blood, toil, salt, and sweat. A black miner in Namibia worked sixty hours a week underground, sometimes at depths of three kilometres where the heat was fifty Celcius. He breathed rock dust laced with heavy metals. Median life expectancy on the job was seven years. His safety gear amounted to a miner’s hat and a pair of long knee pads, which might as well have been shackles for all the good fortune they brought him. He could not protest if his pay failed to come or came only in the form of bad booze. He could not leave, lest he face prison for breaking the terms of his work visa. The law defined him as a foreigner everywhere but on a reservation and, for each head and each hut on that hardscrabble reservation, the law imposed a tax which drove him to work in the mines and live in the miners’ barracks, eleven months at a time, far from the huts and the heads of home.
Under Annika, the fissured branch flexed and splintered; she rode this sinking lever to the ground. A few sharp tugs separated it finally from the tree and, as the jagged end landed, she saw that it was riddled with mabungu grubs, some of them fatter and longer than a man’s thumb. She fetched a mess tin from her father’s pack, which lay in the dust nearby, and she filled it with a mass of wriggling grubs while the chicks competed to gobble up all they could. She shook the branch to scare more grubs from their tunnels and then she split it again further along. A creamy carpet of frass (excremental sawdust) choked the broken roads where so many mouths had fed. Exposed to the sky, it soon oxidized to beige.
Tomorrow? The next day? Next week? Whenever this paternal reunion was over, Annika planned to continue her education and raise ostriches. Her Aunt Constance would know what to do, capable Aunt Constance—she who was once the shopkeeper’s beautiful wife, now a busy shopkeeping widow. Her sundries store, New Things Under the Sun, purported to foster an influx of everything new, from new dress designs to new cures for dehydration and cholera to new translations of the Bible, so why not new ostriches too?
Would they like it there, along the arid highway margin that defined the town, the stretch where sandy fields of millet and fences of burnt debris gave way to the concrete shebangs and shebeens, heaps of smashed bottles, the funeral parlours, book traders, and modestly aspiring houses of commerce and worship and learning? Goats seemed to adapt—and folks too, glassy-eyed up to the cracking point.
Aunt Constance had screamed bloody murder—a true, unaffected episode of xisclant shrieks, hasty orisons, frantic pleas—the night when John and his band robbed the pharmacy shelf and carried Annika away.
To add to the terror—hers and everyone else’s—Annika had been sleepwalking when the kidnap began. Several days on, she half imagined that she still was sleepwalking and that every night might bring the chance to wake up. To the contrary, the walk was real and she was fading away.
Her father came and helped her pick a spot for the fire, back from the tree, in a limestone barren dotted with Russian thistle. He stacked a ring of rocks to shelter it from the wind and then, with a flick of his lighter, he set the scrubby kindling ablaze. He lectured her on the arts of grilling meat (for, in his travels, he had seen Russians and Algerians do it differently than her mother did) and then, with an eye on the dust devil—no, no, two devils now—he went back to the flat to retrieve more meat—salt, also.
The afternoon burnt itself out. Through the stirred-up haze, the sun assumed the aspect of a Kavango orange in a sky of bruises, purple and yellow and brown. Hard to crack, Kavango oranges were, and a sore elbow was often the price of the sweet-and-sour pulp which clung in golden dollops to the strychnine-laden seeds.
The devils dropped dead as the air cooled off.
Last night, on the hulking roots of the baobabs, there had been moonlit frost. She had woken up so thirsty that she licked it off.
Now, her father was salting meat and hanging it to dry. He must have supposed she could live on that if the next ostrich bolted or something worse than an ostrich caught up with him. He suspended the meat from the umbrella tree using a camouflage net, which twisted in the wind.
The chicks had bedded down in the feathers.
As Annika grilled the long wing-sticks, she collected drippings in the lid of the mess tin. She poured this oil over the squirming grubs, fried them, and called her father over while the surprise was at its hottest.
He praised her and stroked her brow without knowing how much her head hurt. He did know she was hungry, footsore, anxious.
(“Take her back, man,” was the insubordinate advice Mels had received at his band’s last supper. “What the fuck do you think Boer police will do when they capture her with you?”)
Yet without him, who did she have to protect her, this little sleepwalker of his? Her brothers were dead and so much for Constance’s God.
They tore into the succulent ostrich wings and crispy, peanut-flavoured grubs. For once, she could eat her fill. Last night’s supper—a can of sprats from faraway Estonia—was exotic but did not go far when divided among the comrades. “Too bad they took the radio,” she said. The comrades had taken the radio, the canned goods, the cash, gold, gems, and her father’s pride. They had left him a gun and a grill and a portion of medicine for the kid’s sake.
“You liked the radio?” he asked. “... and how Moscow sent that message just for me?”
She nodded. Really, the music programmes were what she had liked. A new song called “Imagine” was crackling across Southern Africa courtesy of LM Radio, a pirate station in Mozambique. The name John Lennon (both parts of it) stuck in Annika’s mind and, later, she would discover that missionaries disliked this man just as much as the censors in Johannesburg did.
“Are we together?” asked Mels/John. He meant, had she understood?
She shook her head and tried harder to focus on what her father was saying. She knew it was important to him, what Moscow had put in the message.
The shortwave broadcast, bouncing southwards around the globe, had alluded to events in Namibia: a downing of tools by socialist workers; a convoy of Apartheid police, scattered by a land mine. This groundswell, they said, owed much to the heroics of an ordinary man, now an internationalist and top operative. Then they played a recording of Mels giving a speech. This operative (so they said) was on his way back to Moscow to prepare for an even bigger mission, all in furtherance of the global Revolution.
Of course, Moscow was a little bit out of sync. That land mine had been laid months ago and that strike was yet to happen. The recording was a practice speech which Mels had given when he had been in Russia a year ago for his political education. No matter, such news had an extremely edifying effect on the audience and Moscow wanted him back. This time, perhaps Brezhnev would spare him a medal off his own chest.
Yes, she supposed, her father’s exploits may well have been the talk of Heaven and Earth. Everything was, was it not? At the turn of the dials, the skywaves spake to them in changing tongues, of Jesus and of Marx, under the signs of the Southern Cross, the Jewel Box, and Omega Centauri. Along with a Kalashnikov rifle, the revolutionary’s kit included a pair of 6x24 wide-field KOMZ binoculars, which made for marvellous stargazing.
“We must put this out,” Mels/John whispered. His thoughts of Promethean fire had turned to the possibility of night patrols. Be they soldiers, police, or park rangers, they would finish him slowly or fast. He pulled the grill aside with the butt of his rifle and kicked dust over the embers.
Annika shivered.
He cajoled her: “Back to your tree, hey, monkey?”
She nodded and followed.
The Moon was rising over the thorns. He dug out his bedroll and tucked Annika in with the chicks, to oblige her. He hoped not to have a bag full of baby ostrich shit by morning.
“Where are you going?” she asked him.
He had been going off to clean his rifle. He had more than enough practice to do so by moonlight.
“Nowhere,” he answered. “I’m pretty sure nowhere. See?” He sat by the tree, close enough to stroke the knots in her hair even as she patted an ostrich. “These little chickies, what do you plan to do with them, hey?”
“Raise them. Sell them. Maybe I’ll keep this one.”
“To ride?”
“To ride.”
“To ride in Red Square,” he suggested.
This was not the most lucid dream of a future, nor perhaps the least.
She asked him about the Sahara and told him about the Prince and the snake. She recited a bit in French and in Finnish.
“Ah,” he replied, “I don’t care how you say it, I wouldn’t let any snake bite me! I say your Little Prince is a Little Crazy.”
“Crazy?”
“Yeah, I can spot the signs. You go to sleep now.”
“I’ll try.”
Moscow was pleased. Moscow, proud.
For now, the Revolution could fare no worse without him. He would go back into exile, returning east along the narrow and heavily patrolled Caprivi Strip before escaping north across the Zambezi. The way had been perilous enough under the cover of midsummer rain and with intelligence from a radio and a whole band of men. Now, it was a blind tunnel. He knew, rationally, that before he took that journey, he would have to give up his daughter.
Through the haze and the silhouettes of barbed boughs, the first spring rain began to fall, pattering on the parched earth and releasing that smell, petrichor, like fresh beets, like another year. This spatter was far too little, yet when it petered out in the night and Annika and her chicks were asleep, he heard a great murmur of thirst, a universal search for a watering hole, and the lead soloist was a rhinoceros, squealing and bellowing at the Moon.
[end of the chapter and the excerpt]