-AUTHOR/ MUSICIAN/ TRAVELLER-
LYNDI SCOTT
Lyndi Scott Short Stories
What the tree saw
I have heard the park workers on Signal Hill tell people that we baobabs are Witness Trees. On December 2, 1899, I not only saw bloody fighting where 4000 Bantus were massacred, I also got shot up with bullets. At some point, I stood in the way of a highway through a city and they cut me down. A carpenter, who had paid good money for me, cut me open and was shocked when his crosscut saw hit lead. I made a beautiful mantelpiece around a fireplace.
My wood is dense. I can be split under great amounts of tension, but my body is flexible and won’t give way easily. I am accustomed to the harsh African summers and biting freeze of Lowveld winters. My unhappy fate is that I grow at the entrance of a farmhouse on the outskirts of a small rural town. My country has seen many unkind killings of white farmers and their innocent families. My bark has healing properties as an astringent, but what use would that have been that awful night?
I might be the only tree that has ever wanted to run away. The family in the home I shelter were cruelly murdered, their skins peeled off their hacked-up bodies, the children drowned in boiling water. I tried to protect them, but all I could do was wave my leaves and hope a passing police car would notice my distress.
My wild, willy-nilly spacing of leaves attracted his attention, the painter who lives in the house down the street from where I grow. Four centuries of coastal wind, bone-drying sunlight and summer thunderstorms has given me my twisted shape.
One bright autumn day, he sat at my roots with his easel and watercolours. He patiently began to paint me, smoking his tobacco pipe, humming happily. We were brothers - his fingers were as deformed by arthritis as my branches were from age. He was delighted by the inspiration I gave him, and sold his work of art at a gallery for quite a sum of money. I am glad to have helped the old man, a painter of some fame I am told.
Not my day to Die
‘and I realize all subjugated people share the common experience of bruised bodies, scattered lives and broken families…’
Looking back, I realize a man’s love of freedom is a fire smoldering underneath fresh snow. I am free from the torment of my enemy, but lingering images of horror still haunt me.
I was born under a rainbow. How many times my aunty told me the story of my birth! With a quivering finger, she would trace the arc of the rainbow through the air and describe as she did, how it reached from the ocean to the platteland, with the whole bushveld under its arc.
After my capture, the days passed in a slow, depressing procession of hope and despair, with work the only distraction to keep our minds off the fear of being accused and singled out. The pressure to criticize and accuse each other, to confess to a subtle implication, was relentless. The result was an atmosphere of mutual surveillance. Hundreds of pairs of eyes observed your every gesture. Fear made us submissive and docile, though under the surface, I harboured a bitter loathing of die Rooinekke (the British colonialists) and their petty cruelties.
Once a week, I took my turn to be punished. Mindless. Unexceptional. Unwarranted. The cell leader wound an old, thick rope around my body, pinning my arms to my sides, denying me any movement. He was ordered to begin a ‘thrashing’. I lowered my head. The other prisoners began to punch me, denouncing me one by one. They grabbed my clothes and shook me, unable to bring themselves to hit one so vulnerable. Blow after blow landed on my chest and arms, across my shoulders and ribs. The prisoners knew if they didn’t hit me hard enough, they would themselves be guilty of hesitancy in support of die Broederbond (The Bond of Brothers). Unable to even raise my hands to protect my head, it became an exercise in slow-beating your brother into unconsciousness.
I would have welcomed a quick death. I told the guards to kill me. Angered by my audacity, they replied with a blow to the side of my head and a kick to the ribs. As the beating came to its end, the guards recoiled, panting like dogs. There was a stench of sweat. I lost all sense of myself, a crumpled mess impaled over the smooth mud-floor.
Sometime during my ordeal, yet another prisoner committed suicide. He’d been a broer at a farm near mine. Returning to our cells, he broke out of the orderly line and threw himself beneath a truck that had just come in through the main gate. ‘Even our tears were secrets…’ An hour later, my cousin Himson, stood in front of an officer who announced the Party had decided to take away his right to live. ‘Dankie,’ said Himson – ‘Thank You’. He sounded delighted. I was astonished and so were the officers, but we were even more surprised by what he did next. Himson recited an old Biblical proverb, ‘Dit is goed om 'n lang gelukkige lewe te he, maar selfs beter 'n kort ongelukkige een te he.’ – ‘It is good to have a long happy life but even better to have a short unhappy one.’ Then, with utmost assurance Himson pressed his finger on the ink pad and rolled it firmly on his death certificate.
It was hard to sit and watch Himson - whose story I'd spent a lifetime witnessing - in the moments before his death. I imagined an eagle circling high above us in the cloudless sky. It created the impression it was about to swoop down and scoop me up; carry me away from this place, away from this unbearable heaviness of death. Himson's nonchalance made their cruelty meaningless.
It was then announced that die Rooinekke had decided to deprive us of the right to live. They herded ten men into the back of a truck. The truck drove apathetically past the assembled brigades before coming to a halt at a trench three meters deep, dug by prisoners earlier that day a short way outside the prison gate. The officers climbed onto the prison wall to get a better view of the proceedings. A few kept watch through binoculars.
Forced to kneel at the edge of the trench, the ten men were shot down in rapid succession by a firing squad. The force of the shots toppled the bodies into the trench. Soldiers took aim again and fired at close range at anyone showing signs of life. Silence is more absolute after such disarming gunfire. I gazed out at the leaves fluttering like benighted butterflies on the trees on the boundary of the prison. They were always a shade greener, their energy untainted by the evil inside the zone. The families of the deceased would be informed of the execution by means of itemized invoice on which such expense as the number of bullets fired and the length of jute rope used to bind their loved ones.
It was not my day to die, yet Death became a constant companion: inside me, life no longer flourished nor responded to my coaxing to do the same.
The Kill
It was another sublime day out in the African bush, the wildlife silhouetted against a ruby red sun dipping under the stark Karoo mountain-ridges. Such a rich gathering of animals drinking from the waterhole next to our lookout camp was a spectacular end to our day in the game reserve. October is the best time of year to view game, but soaring temperatures in the high 30s make one feel more than ready by the end of the day, to wash away the dust and sweat; settle down to a relaxing evening around the fire.
In the last light of day, Nathan walked the 40 meters to the tree where he had set up a solar bag for warm water, with a bush screen surrounding the makeshift shower. To make it more private, the make-shift cubicle faced away from the camp where his wife and friends were busy preparing dinner. Nobody saw Nathan alive again.
We heard an agonizing scream, jumped into our vehicles and raced to the ablution area; we parked between a pride of four lions and Nathan, who was already dead from excessive bleeding, a fatal bite to the head. The lions were making no attempt to feed on the body; we had protected our friend by parking our Land-Rovers on either side of what was left of his body.
It became obvious the lions had not killed Nathan out of hunger, but more by accident and curiosity; they didn’t hang around, fighting us for their kill, but wandered off into the darkness.
When you consider that there are no fences around the camps and that the lions often walk right through your camp while you sleep, the lions’ tolerance of humans is quite amazing, as is the fact that something like Nathan’s death had not happened before.
Perhaps the attack happened because of the position of the shower – being 40 meters from our camp, a lack of a shower screen, using the shower after dark with insufficient lighting. It would have been wiser for Nathan to have kept closer to our camp and performed his ablutions in daylight. He should have used a spotlight to light the area, allowing his instinctive awareness of danger to warn him of any dangerous game in his vicinity. He would have been better equipped carrying an air horn and pepper spray to signal for help or repel an approaching predator.
The question of man-eaters invariably comes up when there’s any mention of deaths caused by big cats. Some believe once a lion has tasted human blood, it transforms into a man-eater and must be shot, eliminated. But if you look at stories of leopards, tigers or lions in past attacks, there is always a similar pattern: predators in good health become injured, weak or sick; they lose their territorial pecking order, are ousted from the pride and cannot catch their usual prey preferences; they turn to preying on human beings which are easy meat.
The legendary story of the pair of man-eating male lions of Tsavo - who in 1907 were responsible for the deaths of 135 railway workers working on the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway - is a case in point. These lions were not very discriminating it appears. They took up quarters at a little roadside station called Kimaa, and began developing an extraordinary taste for the members of the railway staff.
Not the most darling brutes, these lions were quite indifferent to whether they carried off the station-master, the signalman, or the pointsman. One of the lions had a deformed jaw and that the pair would initially have hunted together, preying on the easy pickings of the many workers who had succumbed to malaria buried in shallow graves along the rail-route. When the dead bodies ran out, they simply turned to living versions.
Humans are easy prey, easier than killing nimble, clever zebra or impala. Humans are simply stupid when it comes to surviving the wilderness and it bares the question: isn’t it us that have invaded their natural space and isn’t it therefore their right to take whatever prey they can sink their cantankerous canines into?
My touch odyssey
"Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me!"
So spaketh Susan Sarandon in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I second that emotion, although I haven't always felt this way.
In high school, I hugged my friends. I was a Hugger.
Hugging started out a safe pastime - no one needed get too close or under my skin. I kept the rest of me close to my chest, insisting someone must prove themselves for me to feel safe and unthreatened by their intimacy (and ultimately allow them to get close enough to touch me.) But oh, was I lonely! I decided whatever I'd been afraid of, would have to promptly move out of my way - I reached out my hands, and I began to touch... And touch I did. I discovered I was an excellent toucher, my hands listened and easily responded to what they heard.
Touch is a simple skill, most especially if you have one additional arsenal under your belt: the ability to say no. The more I said no to what I didn't want, the more confidence I had to follow what I desired; it was a journey into the joy of womanhood.
Another Big Thing I discovered: touch can be a doorway to different planes of perception. Touch creates layers of energy fields. And soon after that realisation, I began to equate sex to the X-Files.
Like the X-files, so much is unexplained; all that fumbling around in the dark, navigating strange drawers and tunnels, only tantalizes the senses and leads to more complicated questions. The seeker is too often left with a vague sense of greater forces working underneath the surface.
I can picture Mulder posing the question: What does body image have to do with sexuality? Scully barely suppressing her impatience at such a stupid question would recoil: Chemistry is a fact - people are attracted to who nature says is attractive. "Mulder, it's purely innate; survival of the fittest, gene-pool-wise."
Mulder: "But sexuality is life itself! Its essence can't be reduced to simple measurements. Souls meet through sex. How can the magic and wonder of sexuality be held back, be stymied in its infite glory by a few bumps on the thigh? What makes cellulite more powerful than our souls' grand sensual expression?"
Nice words, says Scully, but sex isn't life itself, life is life itself, sex is a pleasant side-benefit, a mechanism for bringing sperm and egg together, nothing more in the most basic sense. Souls may express themselves through sex, but this is not the reason or sex’s underlying nature.
Mulder: "I have to disagree with you, Scully - that is definitely what sex is basically for. Maybe." Mulder is full of maybe's, since he deals with the non-essential facts, the obtuse denials. Sex, he says, is more than we know.
Silence.
If sexuality rises from the soul, if it is life itself, if inner beauty is the core of outer beauty, then it relates that all persons have the option of having some hot sex with someone who turns them on. Every person. Always.
And, if folks with sub-babe bodies were out there having super-babe sex, and people with babe bodies were having sub-babe sex, what conclusion could be reached? Trim waists, then, did not automatically translate into sexual ecstasy, nor did cellulite equal lonely nights. What, then, did body image have to do with sex?
Why, Scully mused out loud, is everyone dieting and working out so blinking hard? Who are they trying to attract? The only answer? Everyone is trying to attract everyone. Everyone wants to have the universally-approved look and be attractive to every person they meet.
You mean, Scully whispered fumbling through drawers in the darkness, "everyone" is trying to meet up with "everyone," in order to see themselves as beautiful through the mirrors of others' eyes? That everyone is narcissistic and ego-driven in their core? Oh, Mulder. Oh god, yes, you've got it, oh yes..."
"Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me!" My touch odyssey's lesson one end'eth here.
The Rondavel Anti-mystery
My name is Charlie. I work for GRU: Ghosts R Us. My unit fight a guerrilla assault against the impudence thrown at earth by an outrageous spiritual-sect who sit and eye us out from across the veil. We purge, we eradicate, we nullify. On the surface, we’re a branch of the department of education trekking the South African desert terrain with information for communities, regarding ghosts and hoaxes. I feast on gods and demi-gods, and Winfrey gobbles ghosts. I wouldn't call it a feeding frenzy, but someone has to protect the world from this Hidden Enemy. Winfrey: well he's been a ghost himself for a hundred years, plus-minus a few, which probably doesn’t ruin his life as much as makes him ironic. (I used to travel with a magician who called Winfrey post-ironic.)
I can't say the Xhosa rondavel is much to speak of from the outside - mud walls and a worn-down thatch roof, curtains drawn. “So?” Winfrey says to me in his soft raspy voice. His gaze flickers from the rondavel to me, waiting. He’s thin, somewhat past frail and the kind of person people want to kidnap and put on a mantelpiece. I have no idea how much of his persona is an act, yet.
“It’s a rondavel, a Xhosa cottage. Mud, thatch, sleep on the floor, throw the bones - stuff like that. It's tradition."
“Oh. Okay, I guess. Don't these tribes believe in spirits - like spirits of their ancestors?”
“Text from Johannesburg was ‘Here is google maps link, go to this place and deal with their problem.’ Which means we have several problems. One, we’re getting assignments via text because HQ is too cheap to use proper email providers and two, since we used google the the X-files unit probably knows more about what is going on here than we do.”
“I don’t think the X-files unit deal with the undead,” he says dryly.
“Phone-tapping, UFO navigation, grave-tapping. It does make sense.” Winfrey rolls his eyes and heads up the driveway. I let him go first, since people have an almost immediate affinity for him.
The rondavel has a short door: it only reaches waist-high. The half-door is opened by a stout woman with white hair, a deeply etched raisin-like skin, wearing a bright red apron with ‘Worlds Best Grandma’ on it. She is smiling modestly, displaying a set of grey teeth, large enough to be mistaken for a small replica of stonehenge. My thinking mind realizes I'm being mean, but I don't know how much longer I can stand living out of that damn VW station-wagon because our budget doesn’t extend to a backpackers, nevermind a hotel.
Winfrey flashes a smile and our credentials, introducing us; she barely looks at the latter and half-drags him inside, telling us her name is Florence - her real name is Nxolamisa which means 'one with the crooked finger', but whities like us find it difficult to pronounce traditional names, so Xhosa folk always have two names - the one they were born with, and the one delinquent Whities can use and not feel embarrassed pronouncing. We walk into her central space while she states emphatically that it’s not a hoax and everyone keeps treating it like a joke and the grandkids haven’t been to visit in two weeks and how all the neighbours are laughing behind their hands and it isn’t funny at all and she isn’t going to do what Father Jacob suggested and he should go rot in hell for his sins and that she is at her wits end. I think she breathes somewhere in that, but I can't be sure. Her breathing is unusually shallow for someone her age and size.
The interior is cluttered and typically ‘homely’. The fridge is almost as old as our vehicle and covered in paper and magnets. It's a wonder it hasn’t fallen over from the sheer weight of it all: picture's of two grandchildren – both boys – a few adults, drawings, phone numbers and even comic strips from the local IsiXhosa paper. The rondavel is well-lit and clean; the lounge area is engulfed by two old couches (covered with a smattering of cat hair,) and a television (that wouldn’t know the meaning of high-definition technology.)
Nothing, at first glance, jumps out at me as unusually strange. I talk a quick peek down the hallway: two bedrooms, one bathroom. One bedroom door is closed with a long six-drawer dresser jamming it shut. Florence grabs my arm as I start out down the hallway: she’s stronger than she looks, but most grandparents' tenacity is unpredictable.
“Please, you mustn’t hurt him!” Emphatic.
Winfrey pries her hand off of mine - careful to be quick and gentle - before I can remove it myself. Teamwork. “You haven’t told us who ‘he’ is,” Winfrey says.
“I haven’t?” She owlishly blinks at us. “Mr. Muffins.”
I want to ask if she has a possessed cake pan, but bite back the urge. “This is your cat?”
She nods. “He has a demon inside him." Her voice is almost a growl, and I notice an unusual flash of steel in her eyes.
I consider how many of her Xhosa clan have made jokes about cats considering she’s had two sangoma's over, and the grandchildren haven’t had their usual visits in two weeks. “Does the demon have a name?”
“Beelzebub."
“Of course.” I head over and shove the dresser aside. Winfrey explains to Florence that I will look into the matter; she need not worry, her cat is in good hands. In the best hands. He asks if she’d like to make tea, his voice bewitching her into reluctantly entering her kitchen.
The bedroom door looks as old as Winfrey's coathangers - cobwebs lean down from the corners - poor cat's been stuck in there for weeks. I hear a faint meow but nothing else. “Beelzebub is one of the names given to the devil,” I murmur.
“I was going to ask.” Winfrey studies the door, not opening it, hands shoved deep into his jeans. “Ghost. Embodied inside a cat. Almost no ghost can possess a human, but they love animals. Never a happy ending for possessor nor possessed. Exorcisms don’t work unless the ghost surrenders to the light."
“How about I just eat the thing?"
KAROO BUS SONDER GRENSE (Bus Without Borders)
One is often struck by the subtle melancholy which lies at the heart of the South African bushveld.The Karoo is the eroded ruins of a world, of a great lake and its giant reptiles gone but for a few bones and ripple marks. The air is dry, distances clear, and scarcely a shrub grows higher than your knees. Quaint mottled and speckled amphibian, warted and primordial, crawl the open spaces and parched sand dunes.
In this vast semi-desert it is difficult to forget your smallness; the colour and size of the shrubs are modest, their growth slow and stubborn; the dinosaurs appear to be saying through the small swift lizard, the camouflaged snake, the armour-plated tortoise: we've learned our lesson, we'll stay small.
Countries resemble people - they have personalities and souls, often loved for their idiosyncrasies and quirks. And herewith begins my story of the BSG endemic to the Karoo town of de Rust. The BSG of fifty years ago, had three compartments known to authorities as a 'tri-compo': the driver and his assistant sat at the front, a posting-box placed near the assistant's door. Letters posted here were transported to the de Rust post office. Three compartments resided in the space behind the driver and his assistant: the first was for white, 1st class passengers and at the back, an open section for small livestock, bags of meal, fertilizer and 3rd class passengers (who arrived at their destination covered in layers of dust.)
The compartment in the middle caused problems: Was it reserved for passengers, other than whites, with 1st or 2nd class tickets? Could it be used as an overflow from the first compartment? Or was it open to any ticket-holder (other than whites, of course) no matter what class of ticket they held? In the years of the Depression (the 1930s) when many white passengers bought 3rd class tickets to save money, the driver's problems compounded: where, on God's green earth, were these hoity-toity whites supposed to sit - a typical South African problem that necessitated use of the BSG driver's wisdom of Solomon?
'Karo' is a Hottentot word meaning dry: 'Denuded as porcupine quills,' said one visitor of the Karoo bushes that covered the plain; 'sapless as a worn-out broom,' panted another, crawling in intolerable heat through a waste of sand and dry twigs. 'This monstrous landscape, this parched and arid plain,' stormed a third. 'Sirs, it would require a good pair of spectacles to see a blade of grass in this world,' proclaimed yet another. This is the land through which the BSG drove, night and day, delivering post and passengers.
Our strange story begins in a lifeless hour, the sun delayed somewhere, missing its scheduled arrival. I had read of this feeling, how, under the ancient sun, the silence and space of Africa grows dense, taking shape in the mind, until even the birds call out with menace, and deadly spirits come out of the trees and rocks.
We had been travelling for half-an-hour or so, the old bus moving warily through the desert sand, when our passing disturbed something old and evil, something dark, big and angry which abruptly appeared, striking at our rear. Its name was Fear. I had been staring out the window into the dark, at groves and entwined trees, picturing the animals that might be lurking there. The bus drove through shallow pools where buck were drinking, my imagination seeing crocodiles rise and drag them by their soft noses into underwater caves, when, without warning, the bus lurched to a stop.
The driver began cursing; said he thought he could hear the sound of wheels. I strained my ears in the silence. True enough, over to our right I heard the crack of a whip, a voice shouting, and the rumble of wheels coming towards us. 'There's a wagon coming,' the driver said. 'I'll pull over, or they'll crash into us.' 'It's off the road,' his assistant said. 'The road goes straight ahead, and the wagon's over here to our right.'
I heard the same; the wagon came along at a furious pace over stones, rocks and bushes, driving where a man could hardly drive forty paces in the daylight without smashing an axle or incurring a puncture. In the next moment, I saw a wooden wagon with a white canopy looming up in the darkness at our right; it looked to be coming straight towards us. The noise it made was sinister and threatening, a thunderclap echoing through the crags.
Peering closer, I could see horses, half a dozen of them tearing along at full gallop, heads arched, mouths frothing. This was most peculiar - in what decade had I last seen a horse-drawn wagon? Now only a hundred paces off, it felt to be coming straight for us. 'Where the hell are you driving to?' shouted our manic bus driver. A loud burst of devilish laughter erupted from the wagon. The sound made my blood run frigid. The bus driver now frantic, revved the engine, trying to move out the way, but the bus's engine stalled, and we sat glued to our seats, trembling and whimpering, the hair on my body standing straight as the bristle on a hyena's back.
On came the leading mares, their heads all but touched the cart
then swerving off, and the whole span, with the wagon leaping after them, shot past us by a hair's breath. As they went by, there came the coldest blast of air causing my teeth to rattle. Riding past us, the driver pushed back his hat and I saw THE FACE: ghastly pale, that of a corpse, his eyes cutting through me like a laser beam. And with the face came yet another screech of devilish laughter; and then there was a sudden, lifeless silence.
I never caught the Karoo Bus Sonder Grense again, nor did I ever travel the Karoo after sundown.
Sex for girls
It's January 1959, and the Hippie revolution is still ten years on the make; I am 16 and it is the night before I marry Wildred. I've always known him to wear a broad mustache under his short, insignificant nose. His large ears frame small clear eyes; his is a healthy and innocent face that carries a certain shrewdness. Tomorrow, we begin our lives as one.
Wilfred is not a talented man, but has ample enough maturity to maintain in his own life (and the lives of those about him) a balance and harmony which cannot easily be shaken. His way of talking is simple in the extreme, his vocabulary as limited as his thoughts. He carries the smugness of a self-made man, forgetting how fortune and sheer luck have helped him. Tomorrow, I will marry Wilfred, and I am afraid.
I ask my mother to explain; she reaches into her 'Safety Drawer' and takes out The Sex Textbook: "My girl, what I am about to read to you is savoury, sound advise - my generation and many women before me, have lived in wedded bliss by following some easy rules." She reads to me in a steady, stern voice, "When retiring to the bedroom, prepare yourself for bed as promptly as possible. Whilst feminine hygiene is of the utmost importance, your tired husband does not want to queue for the bathroom, as he would have to do for his train. But remember to look your best when going to bed.
"Try to achieve a look that is welcoming without being obvious. If you need to apply face cream or hair-rollers, wait until he is asleep as this can be shocking to a man last thing at night.
"When it comes to the possibility of intimate relations with Wilfred, it is important to remember your marriage vows and in particular your commitment to obey him. If he feels that he needs to sleep immediately, then so be it. In all things be led by your husbands wishes; do not pressure him in any way to stimulate intimacy. Should your Wilfred suggest congress then agree humbly all the while being mindful that a man's satisfaction is more important than a woman's. when he reaches his moment of fulfillment, a small moan from yourself is encouraging to him and quite sufficient to indicate any enjoyment that you may have had.
"Should your husband suggest any of the more unusual practices, be obedient and uncomplaining but register any reluctance by remaining silent. It is likely that Wilfred will then fall promptly asleep, so adjust your clothing, freshen up and apply your night-time face and hair care products.
"You may then set the alarm so that you can arise shortly before him in the morning. This will enable you to have his morning cup of tea ready when he awakes."
Is this it then? Sex for girls, for a nice girl like me, a girl hoping her husband will someday learn to love her? I will not hold my breathe. It is time for a revolution.
