Peter Fungabera excused himself and went up the trench to the command post at the hilltop. A few minutes later an electric generator started running and Craig could hear Peter on the radio talking in rapid Shana which he could not follow. He came down again half-an-hour later.
"It will be dark in an hour. We will go down and watch the detainees being given the evening meal." The detainees lined up in utter silence, shuffling forward to be fed. There were no smiles nor horseplay. They did A N not show even the slightest curiosity in the white visitors and the general.
I -meal porridge
"Simple fare, Peter pointed out. "Maize and greens." Each man had a dollop of the fluffy stiff cake spooned into his bowl, and topped by another of stewed vegetable.
"Meat once a week. Tobacco once a week both can be withheld for bad behaviour." Peter was telling it exactly as it was. The men were lean, ribs racked out from under hard-worked muscle, no trace of fat on any of them. They wolfed the food immediately, still standing, using their fingers to wipe the bowl clean. Lean, but not emaciated, finely drawn but not starved, Craig judged, and then his eyes narrowed.
"That man is injured." The purple bruising showed even over his sun-darkened skin.
"You may speak to him," Peter invited, and when Craig questioned him in Sindebele, the man responded immediately.
"Your back what happened?"
"I was beaten."
"Why?) "Fighting with another man." Peter called over one of the guards and spoke quietly to him in Shana, then explained. "He stabbed another prisoner with a weapon made of sharpened fencing wire.
Deprived of meat and tobcco for two months and fifteen strokes with a heavy one. This is precisely the type of anti-social behaviour we are trying to prevent." As they walked back across the parade ground past the whitewashed wall, Peter went on, "Tomorrow you have the run of the camp. We will leave the following morning early." They ate with the Shana officers in the mess, and the fare was the same as that served to the detainees with the addition of a stew of stringy meat of indeterminate origin and dubious freshness. Immediately they finished eating, Peter Fungabera excused himself and led his officers out of the dugout leaving Craig and Sally-Anne alone together.
Before Craig could think of anything to say, Sally-Anne stood without a word and left the dugout. Craig had reached the limit of his forbearance and was suddenly angry with her. He jumped up and followed her out. He found her on the firing platform of the main trench, perched up on the sandbag parapet, hugging her knees and staring down on the encampment. The moon was just past full and already well clear of the hills on the horizon. She did not look round as Craig stepped up beside her, and Craig's anger evaporated as suddenly as it had arisen.
"I acted likea pig," he said.
She hugged her knees a little tighter and said nothing.
"When we first met I was going through a bad time," he went on doggedly. "I won't bore you with the details, but the book I was trying to write was blocked and I had lost my way. I took it out on you." Still she showed no sign of having heard him. Down in the forest beyond the double fence there was a sudden hideous outcry, shrieks of mirthless laughter rising and falling, sobbing and wailing, taken up and repeated at a dozen points around the camp perimeter, dying away at last in a descending series of chuckles and grunts and agonized moans.
Hyena," said Craig, and Sally-Anne shivered slightly and straightened up as if to rise.
"Please." Craig heard the desperate note in his own voice. "Just a minute more. I have been searching' for a chance to apologize."
"That isn't necessary," she said. "It was presumptuous of me to expect you to like my work." Her tone was not in the least conciliatory. "I guess I asked for it and did you ever let me have it! "Your work your photographs-" his voice dropped they frightened me. That was why my reaction was so spiteful, so childish Now she turned to look at him for the first time and the moon silvered the planes of her face. "Frightened you?" she asked.
"Terrified me. You see, I wasn't able to work. I was ing to believe that it had been only a one-off thing, beg inn that the book was a fluke, and there was no real talent left in me. I kept going back to the cupboard and each time it was bare--2 she was staring at him now, her lips slightly parted and her eyes mysterious cups of darkness and then you hit me with those damned photographs, and dared me to match them." She shook her head slowly.
"You might not have meant that, but that's what it was a challenge. A challenge I didn't have the courage to accept. I was afraid, I lashed out at you, and I have been regretting it ever since." "You liked them? "she asked.
"They shook my little world. They showed me Africa again, and filled me with longing. When I saw them, I knew what was missing in me. I was struck with homesickness likea little boy on his first lonely night at boarding school He felt a choking in his throat, and was unashamed of it. "It was those phQjographs of yours that made me come back here."
"I didn't understand," she said, and they were both silent. Craig knew that if he spoke ago , in, it might come out as a sob, for the tears of self-pity were prickling the rims of his eyelids.
Down in the encampment below them someone began to sing. It was a fine African tenor voice that carried faint but clear to the hilltop, so that Craig could recognize the words. It was an ancient Matabele regimental fighting
_.(7 chant, but now it was sung as a lament, seeming to capture all the suffering and tragedy of a continent; and not even the hyena cried while the voice sang: "The Moles are beneath the earth, "Are they dead?" asked the daughters of Mashobane.
Listen, pretty maids, do you not hear Something stirring, in the darkness?" The singer's voice died away at last, and Craig imagined all the hundreds of other young men lying in wakeful silence on their sleeping-mats, haunted and saddened by the song as he was.
Then Sally-Anne spoke again. "Thank you for telling me," she said. J know what it must have cost you." She touched his bare upper arm, a light brush of her fingertips which thrilled along his nerve ends and made his heart trip.
Then she uncurled her legs and dropped lightly off the parapet and slipped away down the communication trench.
He heard the sacking flap fall over the entrance to her dugout and the flare of a match as she lit a candle.
He knew he would be unable to sleep, so he stayed on alone listening to the African night and watching the moon. Slowly he felt the words rising up in him like water in a well that has been pumped down to the mud. His sadness fell away, and was replaced by excitement.
He went down to his own dugout and lit one of the candles, stuck it in a niche of the wall and from his holdall took his notebook and ballpoint pen. The words were bubbling and frothing in his brain, like boiling milk. He put the point of the pen to the lined white paper and it sped away across the page likea living thing. Words came spurting out of him in a joyous, long, pent-up orgasm and All spilled untidily over the paper. He stopped only to relight fresh candles from the guttering stump.
In the morning his eyes were red and burning from the strain. He felt weak and shaky as though he had run too far and too fast, but the notebook was three, quarters filled and he was strangely elated.