CHARLES MUNGOSHI

Mungoshi was born in 1947 near Chivhu, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), to a Shona-speaking family. An acclaimed writer in both English and Shona, he has worked as a bookstore clerk, an editor at the Literature Bureau, literary director at Zimbabwe Publishing House, and writer-in-residence at the University of Zimbabwe. Many of his stories illustrate the tension within families as their members wrestle with maintaining loyalty to traditional, rural values that are in conflict with their desire to be successful in modern cities and a Western European educational system. His work has both won government prizes and been banned; his most prominent novel, Waiting for the Rain (1972), is now required reading at many Zimbabwean schools. Mungoshi is also a poet, and the author of the memoirs Stories from a Shona Childhood (1989), One Day Long Ago: More Stories from a Shona Childhood (1991), and Walking Still (1997). Among his many awards are the Commonwealth Literature Prize for Africa and two Rhodesian PEN awards.

Who Will Stop the Dark?

(1980)

The boy began to believe what the other boys at school said about his mother. In secret he began to watch her—her face, words and actions. He would also watch his father’s bare arched back as he toiled at his basket-weaving from day to day. His mother could go wherever she wanted to go. His father could not. Every morning he would drag his useless lower limbs out of the hut and sit under the muonde tree. He would not leave the tree till late in the evening when he would drag himself again back into the hut for his evening meal and bed. And always the boy felt a stab of pain when he looked at the front of his father’s wet urine-stiffened trousers.

The boy knew that his mother had something to do with this condition of his father. The tight lines round her mouth and her long silences that would sometimes erupt into unexpected bursts of red violence said so. The story was that his father had fallen off the roof he had been thatching and broken his back. But the boy didn’t believe it. It worried him. He couldn’t imagine it. One day his father had just been like any other boy’s father in their village, and the next day he wasn’t. It made him wonder about his mother. He felt that it wasn’t safe in their house. So he began to spend most of his time with the old man, his grandfather.

“I want you in the house,” his mother said, when she could afford words, but the boy knew she was saying it all the time by the way she tightened her mouth and lowered her looking-away-from-people eyes.

The boy remembered that his grandfather had lived under the same roof with them for a long time. He couldn’t remember how he had then come to live alone in his own hut half a mile from their place.

“He is so childish,” he heard his mother say one day.

“He is old,” his father said, without raising his head from his work.

“And how old do you think my mother is?” The lines round his mother’s mouth drew tighter and tauter.

“Women do not grow as weak as men in their old age,” his father persisted.

“Because it’s the men who have to bear the children—so they grow weak from the strain!” His mother’s eyes flashed once—so that the boy held his breath—and then she looked away, her mouth wrinkled tightly into an obscene little hole that reminded the boy of a cow’s behind just after dropping its dung. He thought now his father would keep quiet, He was surprised to hear him say, “A man’s back is the man. Once his back is broken—” Another flash of his mother’s eye silenced him and the boy couldn’t stand it. He stood up to go out.

“And where are you going?” his mother shouted after him.

“To see Grandfather.”

“What do you want there with him?”

The boy turned back and stayed round the yard until his mother disappeared into the house. Then he quietly slid off for his grandfather’s place through the bush. His father pretended not to see him go.

The old man had a way of looking at the boy: like someone looking into a mirror to see how badly his face had been burned.

“A, Zakeo,” the old man said when the boy entered the yard. He was sitting against the wall of his hut, smoking his pipe quietly, looking into the distance. He hadn’t even looked in Zakeo’s direction.

“Did you see me this time?” Zakeo asked, laughing. He never stopped being surprised by the way his grandfather seemed to know everyone by their footfalls and would greet them by their names without even looking at them.

“I don’t have to look to know it’s you,” the old man said.

“But today I have changed my feet to those of a bird,” the boy teased him.

“No.” The old man shook his head. “You are still the cat in my ears.”

The boy laughed over that and although the old man smoked on without changing his expression, the boy knew that he was laughing too.

“Father said to ask you how you have spent the day,” the boy said, knowing that the old man would know that it was a lie. The boy knew he would be forgiven this lie because the old man knew that the boy always wished his father would send him with such a message to his own father.

“You don’t have to always protect him like that,” the old man growled, almost to himself.

“Sekuru?” The boy didn’t always understand most of the grown-up things the old man said.

“I said get on with the work. Nothing ever came out of a muscular mouth and snail-slime hands.”

The boy disappeared into the hut while the old man sat on, smoking.

Zakeo loved doing the household chores for his grandfather: sweeping out the room and lighting the fire, collecting firewood from the bush and fetching water from the well and cooking. The old man would just look on, not saying anything much, just smoking his pipe. When he worked the boy didn’t talk. Don’t use your mouth and hands at the same time, the old man had told him once, and whenever he forgot the old man reminded him by not answering his questions. It was a different silence they practiced in the old man’s house, the boy felt. Here, it was always as if his grandfather was about to tell him a secret. And when he left his parents’ place he felt he must get back to the old man at the earliest opportunity to hear the secret.

“Have you ever gone hunting for rabbits, boy?” his grandfather asked him one day.

“No, Sekuru. Have you?”

The old man didn’t answer. He looked away at the darkening landscape, puffing at his pipe.

“Did you like it?” the boy asked.

“Like it? We lived for nothing else, boy. We were born hunters, stayed hunters all our life and most of us died hunters.”

“What happened to those who weren’t hunters?”

“They became tillers of the land, and some, weavers of bamboo baskets.”

“You mean Father?”

“I am talking of friends I used to know.”

“But didn’t you ever teach Father to hunt, Sekuru?” The boy’s voice was strained, anxious, pained. The old man looked at him briefly and then quickly away.

“I taught him everything a man ought to know,” he said distantly.

“Basket-weaving too?”

“That was his mother,” the old man said and then silently went on, his mother, your grandmother, my wife, taught your father basket-weaving. She also had been taught by a neighbor who later gave me the lumbago.

“You like basket-weaving?” he asked the boy.

“I hate it!” The old man suddenly turned, surprised at the boy’s vehemence. He took the pipe out of his mouth for a minute, looking intently at the boy, then he looked away, returning the pipe to his mouth.

“Do you think we could go hunting together, Sekuru?” the boy asked.

The old man laughed.

“Sekuru?” The boy was puzzled.

The old man looked at him.

“Please?”

The old man stroked the boy’s head. “Talk of fishing,” he said. “Or mouse-trapping. Ever trapped for mice?”

“No.”

“Of course, you wouldn’t have.” He looked away. “You go to school these days.”

“I don’t like school!” Again, the old man was taken by surprise at the boy’s violence. He looked at his grandson. The first son of his first son and only child. The boy’s thirteen-year-old fists were clenched tightly and little tears danced in his eyes. Could he believe in a little snotty-arse boy’s voice? He looks earnest enough. But who doesn’t, at the I-shall-never-die age of thirteen? The old man looked away as if from the sight of the boy’s death.

“I tell you I hate school!” the boy hissed.

“I hear you,” the old man said quietly but didn’t look at him. He was aware of the boy looking at him, begging him to believe him, clenching tighter his puny fists, his big ignorant eyes daring him to try him out on whatever milk-scented dream of heroics the boy might be losing sleep over at this difficult time of his life. The old man felt desolate.

“You don’t believe me, do you, Sekuru?”

“Of course. I do!”

The boy suddenly uncoiled, ashamed and began to wring his hands, looking down at the ground.

That was unnecessarily harsh, the old man felt. So he stroked the boy’s head again. Thank you, ancestors, for our physical language that will serve our sons and daughters till we are dust. He wished he could say something in words, something that the boy would clearly remember without it creating echoes in his head. He didn’t want to give the boy an echo which he would later on mistake for the genuine thing.

“Is mouse-trapping very hard, Sekuru?” the boy asked, after some time.

“Nothing is ever easy, boy. But then, nothing is ever really hard for one who wants to learn.”

“I would like to try it. Will you teach me?”

Physically, the old man didn’t show anything, but he recoiled inwardly, the warmth in the center of him turned cold. Boys’ pranks, like the honey-bird luring you to a snake’s nest. If only it were not this world, if only it were some other place where what we did today weren’t our future, to be always there, held against us, to always see ourselves in . . .

“And school?” he asked, as if he needed the boy to remind him again.

It was the boy’s turn to look away, silent, unforgiving, betrayed.

As if stepping on newly-laid eggs, the old man learned a new language: not to touch the boy’s head any more.

“There is your mother,” he said, looking away, the better to make his grandson realize the seriousness of what he was talking about. From the corner of his eye he watched his grandson struggling with it, and saw her dismissed—not quite in the old way—but in a way that filled him with regrets for opportunities lost and a hopeless future.

“And if she doesn’t mind?” the boy asked mischievously.

“You mean you will run away from school?” The old man restrained from stroking the boy’s head.

“Maneto ran away from school and home two weeks ago. They don’t know where he is right now.”

Echoes, the old man repeated to himself. “But your mother is your mother,” he said. After all is said and done, basket-weaving never killed anyone. What kills is the rain and the hailstorms and the cold and the hunger when you are like this, when the echoes come.

“I want to learn mouse-trapping, Sekuru,” the boy said. “At school they don’t teach us that. It’s always figures and numbers and I don’t know what they mean and they all laugh at me.”

The grandfather carefully pinched, with right forefinger and thumb, the ridge of flesh just above the bridge of his nose, closed his eyes and sighed. The boy looked at him eagerly, excited, and when he saw his grandfather settle back comfortably against the wall, he clapped his hands, rising up. The old man looked at him and was touched by the boy’s excitement and not for the first time, he wondered at the mystery that is called life.

“Good night, Sekuru,” the boy said.

“Sleep well, Zakeo. Tell her that I delayed you if she asks where you have been.” But the boy had already gone. The old man shook his head and prepared himself for another night of battle with those things that his own parents never told him exist.

 

* * *

They left the old man’s hut well before sunrise the following day.

The boy had just come in and dumped his books in a corner of the room and they had left without any questions from the old man.

The grandfather trailed slowly behind the boy who ran ahead of him, talking and gesticulating excitedly. The old man just listened to him and laughed with him.

It was already uncomfortably warm at this hour before sunrise. It was October. The white cowtracks spread out straight and flat before them, through and under the new thick flaming musasa leaves, so still in the morning air. Through patches in the dense foliage the sky was rusty-metal blue, October-opaque; the end of the long dry season, towards the gukurahundi, the very first heavy rains that would cleanse the air and clean the cowdung threshing floors of chaff, change and harden the crimson and bright-yellow leaves into hard green flat blades and bring back the stork, the millipede and the centipede, the fresh water crickets and the frogs, and the tiny yellow bird—jesa—that builds its nest on the river-reeds with the mouth of the nest facing down.

The air was harsh and still, and the old man thought, with renewed pleasure, of how he had almost forgotten the piercing whistle of that October-thirst bird, the nonono, and the shrill jarring ring of the cicada.

The cowtracks fell toward the river. They left the bush and came out into the open where the earth, bare and black from the chirimo fires, was crisscrossed with thousands of cattle-tracks which focused on the water-holes. The old man smelt wet river clay.

“It’s hot,” the boy said.

“It’s October, Gumiguru, the tenth and hottest month of the year.” The old man couldn’t resist telling the boy a bit of what he must be going through.

The boy took off his school shirt and wound it round his waist.

“With a dog worth the name of dog—when dogs were still dogs—a rabbit goes nowhere in this kind of terrain,” the old man said, seeing how naturally the boy responded to—blended in with—the surroundings.

“Is that why people burn the grass?”

“Aa, so you know that, too?”

“Maneto told me.”

“Well, it’s partly why we burn the grass but mainly we burn it so that new grass grows for our animals.”

Finally, the river, burnt down now by the long rainless months to a thin trickle of blood, running in the shallow, sandy bottom of a vlei. But there were still some fairly deep water holes and ponds where fish could be found.

“These ponds are great for muramba,” the old man said. “You need fairly clean flowing water for magwaya—the flat short-spear-blade fish.”

They dug for worms in the wet clay on the river banks. The old man taught the boy how to break the soft earth with a digging stick for the worms.

“Worms are much easier to find,” the old man said. “They stay longer on the hook. But a maggot takes a fish faster.” Here the old man broke off, suddenly assailed with a very vivid smell of three-day-old cowdung, its soft cool feel and the entangled wriggling yellow mass of maggots packed in it.

“Locusts and hoppers are good too, but in bigger rivers, like Munyati where the fish are so big they would take another fish for a meal. Here the fish are smaller and cleverer. They don’t like hoppers.”

The old man looked into the coffee tin into which they were putting the worms and said, “Should be enough for me one day. There is always some other place we can get some more when these are finished. No need to use more than we should.”

“But if they should get finished, Sekuru? Look, the tin isn’t full yet.” Zakeo looked intently at his grandfather. He wanted to fit in all the fishing that he would ever do before his mother discovered that he was playing truant from school. The old man looked at him. He understood. But he knew the greed of thirteen-year-olds and the retribution of the land and the soil when well-known laws were not obeyed.

“There will always be something when we get where these worms run out.”

They walked downstream along the bank, their feet kicking up clouds of black and white ash.

The sun came up harsh and red-eyed upstream. They followed a tall straight shadow and a short stooped one along the stream until they came to a dark pool where the water, though opaque, wasn’t really dirty.

“Here we are. I will get us some reeds for fishing rods while you prepare the lines. The hooks are already on the lines.”

The old man produced from a plastic bag a mess of tangled lines and metal blue-painted hooks.

“Here you are. Straighten these out.”

He then proceeded to cut some tall reeds on the river bank with a pocket knife the boy had seen him poking tobacco out of his pipe with.

“Excellent rods, look.” He bent one of the reeds till the boy thought it was going to break, and when he let go, the rod shot back like a whip!

“See?” the old man said.

The boy smiled and the old man couldn’t resist slapping him on the back.

The boy then watched the old man fasten the lines to the rods.

“In my day,” the old man said, “there were woman knots and men knots. A woman knot is the kind that comes apart when you tug the line. A knot worth the name of whoever makes it shouldn’t fall apart. Let the rod break, the line snap, but a knot, a real man’s knot, should stay there.”

They fished from a rock by a pool.

“Why do you spit on the bait before you throw the line into the pool, Sekuru?”

The old man grinned. “For luck, boy, there is nothing you do that fate has no hand in. Having a good hook, a good line, a good rod, good bait or a good pool is no guarantee that you will have good fishing. So little is knowledge, boy. The rest is just mere luck.”

Zakeo caught a very small fish by the belly.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“A very good example of what I call luck! They aren’t usually caught by the belly. You need several all-way facing hooks in very clear water even without bait—for you to catch them like that!”

The boy laughed brightly and the old man suddenly heard the splash of a kingfisher as it flew away, fish in beak, and this mixed with the smell of damp-rotting leaves and moisty river clay made the old man think: nothing is changed since our time. Then, a little later: except me. Self-consciously, with a sly look at the boy to make sure he wasn’t seeing him, the old man straightened his shoulders.

The boy’s grandfather hooked a frog and dashed it against a rock.

“What’s that?” the boy asked.

“Know why I killed that—that—criminal?” he asked the boy.

“No, Sekuru.”

“Bad luck. Throw it back into the pool and it’s going to report to the fish.”

“But what is it?”

“Uncle Frog.”

“A frog!” The boy was surprised.

“Shhh,” the old man said. “Not a frog. Uncle Frog. You hear?”

“But why Uncle Frog, Sekuru?”

“Just the way it is, boy. Like the rain. It comes on its own.”

Once again, the boy didn’t understand the old man’s grown-up talk. The old man saw it and said, “That kind of criminal is only good for dashing against the rock. You don’t eat frogs, do you?”

The boy saw that the old man was joking with him. “No,” he said.

“So why should we catch him on our hook when we don’t eat him or need him?”

“I don’t know, Sekuru.” The boy was clearly puzzled.

“He is the spy of the fish,” the old man said in such a way that the boy sincerely believed him.

“But won’t the fish notice his absence and wonder where he has gone to?”

“They won’t miss him much. When they begin to do we will be gone. And when we come back here, they will have forgotten. Fish are just like people. They forget too easily.”

It was grown-up talk again but the boy thought he would better not ask the man what he meant because he knew he wouldn’t be answered.

They fished downriver till they came to where the Chambara met the Suka River.

“From here they go into Munyati,” the old man said to himself, talking about his old hunting grounds; and to the boy, talking about the rivers.

“Where the big fish are,” the boy said.

“You know that too?” the old man said, surprised.

“Maneto and his father spent days and days fishing the Munyati and they caught fish as big as men,” the boy said seriously.

“Did Maneto tell you that?”

“Yes. And he said his father told him that you, Sekuru, were the only hunter who ever got to where the Munyati gets into the big water, the sea. Is that true?”

The old man pulled out his pipe and packed it. They were sitting on a rock. He took a long time packing and lighting the pipe.

“Is it true?” the boy asked.

“I was lost once,” the old man said. “The Munyati goes into just another small water—but bigger than itself—and more powerful.”

The boy would have liked to ask the man some more questions on this one but he felt that the old man wouldn’t talk about it.

“You aren’t angry, Sekuru?” the boy asked, looking up earnestly at his grandfather.

The old man looked at him, surprised again. How do these milk-nosed ones know what we feel about all this?

“Let’s get back home,” he said.

Something was bothering the old man, the boy realized, but what it was he couldn’t say. All he wanted him to tell him was the stories he had heard from Maneto—whether they were true or not.

They had caught a few fish, enough for their supper, the boy knew, but the old man seemed angry. And that, the boy couldn’t understand.

When they got back home the boy lit the fire, and with directions from the old man helped him to gut and salt the fish. After a very silent supper of sadza and salted fish the boy said he was going.

“Be sure to come back tomorrow,” the old man said.

And the boy knew that whatever wrong he had done the old man, he would be told the following day.

Very early the following morning the boy’s mother paid her father-in-law a visit. She stood in front of the closed door for a long time before she knocked. She had to collect herself.

“Who is there?” the old man answered from within the hut. He had heard the footsteps approaching but he did not leave his blankets to open up for her.

“I would like to talk to you,” she said, swallowing hard to contain her anger.

“Ah, it’s Zakeo’s mother?”

“Yes.”

“And what bad winds blow you this way this early, muroora?”

“I want to talk to you about my son.”

“Your son?”

She caught her breath quickly. There was a short silence. The old man wouldn’t open the door.

“I want to talk about Zakeo,” she called.

“What about him?”

“Please leave him alone.”

“You are telling me that?”

“He must go to school.”

“And so?”

She was quiet for a minute; then she said, “Please.”

“What have I done to him?”

“He won’t eat, he won’t listen to me, and he doesn’t want to go to school.”

“And he won’t listen to his father?” the old man asked.

“He listens to you.”

“And you have come here this early to beat me up?”

She swallowed hard. “He is the only one I have. Don’t let him destroy his future.”

“He does what he wants.”

“At his age? What does he know?”

“Quite a lot.”

She was very angry, he could feel it through the closed door.

She said, “He will only listen to you. Please, help us.”

Through the door the old man could feel her tears coming. He said, “He won’t even listen to his father?”

“His father?” he heard her snort.

“Children belong to the man, you know that,” the old man warned her.

And he heard her angry feet as she went away.

Zakeo came an hour after his mother had left the old man’s place. His grandfather didn’t say anything to him. He watched the boy throw his school bag in the usual corner of the hut; then after the usual greetings, he went out to bring in the firewood.

“Leave the fire alone,” the old man said. “I am not cold.”

“Sekuru?” The boy looked up, hurt.

“Today we go mouse-trapping in the fields.”

“Are we going right now?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll make the fire if you like. We can go later.”

“No. Now.” The old man was quiet for some time, looking away from the boy.

“Are you all right, Sekuru?”

“Yes.”

“We will go later when it’s warm if you like.”

The old man didn’t answer him.

And as they came into the open fields with the last season’s corn crop stubble, the boy felt that the old man wasn’t quite well.

“We can do it some other day, Sekuru.”

His grandfather didn’t answer.

They looked for the smooth mouse-tracks in the corn stubble and the dry grass. Zakeo carried the flat stones that the old man pointed out to him to the places where he wanted to set up the traps. He watched his grandfather setting the traps with the stone and two sticks. The sticks were about seven inches long each. One of them was the male and the other the female stick. The female was in the shape of a Y and the male straight.

The old man would place the female stick upright in the ground with the forked end facing up. The male would be placed in the fork parallel to the ground to hold up one end of the stone across the mousepath. The near end of the male would have a string attached to it and at the other end of the string would be the “trigger”—a matchstick-sized bit of straw that would hold the bait-stick against the male stick. The stone would be kept one end up by the delicate tension in the string and if a mouse took the bait the trigger would fly and the whole thing fall across the path onto the unfortunate victim.

The boy learned all this without words from the old man, simply by carefully watching him set about ten traps all over the field that morning. Once he tried to ask a question and he was given a curt, “Mouths are for women.” Then he too set up six traps and around noon the old man said, “Now we will wait.”

They went to the edge of the field where they sat under the shade of a mutsamwi tree. The old man carefully, tiredly, rested his back against the trunk of the tree, stretched himself out, sighed, and closing his eyes, took out his pipe and tobacco pouch and began to load. The boy sat beside him, looking on. He sensed a tension he had never felt in his grandfather. Suddenly it wasn’t fun any more. He looked away at the distant hills in the west. Somewhere behind those hills the Munyati went on to the sea, or the other bigger river which the old man hadn’t told him about.

“Tell me a story, Sekuru,” Zakeo said, unable to sit in his grandfather’s silence.

“Stories are for the night,” the old man said without opening his mouth or taking out the pipe. “The day is for watching and listening and learning.”

Zakeo stood up and went a little way into the bush at the edge of the field. Tears stung his eyes but he would not let himself cry. He came back a little later and lay down beside the old man. He had hardly closed his eyes in sleep, just at that moment when the voices of sleep were beginning to talk, when he felt the old man shaking him up.

“The day is not for sleeping,” the old man said quietly but firmly. He still wasn’t looking at Zakeo. The boy rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and blinked.

“Is that what they teach you at school?”

“Sekuru?”

The old man groaned in a way that told Zakeo what he thought of school.

The boy felt ashamed that he had hurt his grandfather. “I am sorry.”

The grandfather didn’t answer or look at him. Some time later he said, “Why don’t you go and play with the other boys of your own age?”

“Where?”

“At school. Anywhere. Teach them what you have learned.”

The boy looked away for some time. He felt deserted, the old man didn’t want him around any more. Things began to blur in his eyes. He bit his lip and kept his head stiffly turned away from his grandfather.

“You can teach them all I have taught you. Huh?”

“I don’t think they would listen to me,” the boy answered, still looking away, trying to control his voice.

“Why?”

“They never listen to me.”

“Why?”

“They—they—just don’t.” He bit his lower lip harder but a big tear plopped down on his hand. He quickly wiped away the tear and then for a terrible second they wouldn’t stop coming. He was ashamed in front of his grandfather. The old man, who had never seen any harm in boys crying, let him be.

When the boy had stopped crying he said, “Forget them.”

“Who?”

“Your friends.”

“They are not my friends. They are always laughing at me.”

“What about?”

“O, all sorts of silly things.”

“That doesn’t tell me what sort of things.”

“O, O, lots of things!” The boy’s face was contorted in an effort to contain himself. Then he couldn’t stop himself, “They are always at me saying your father is your mother’s horse. Your mother rides hyenas at night. Your mother is a witch. Your mother killed so-and-so’s child. Your mother digs up graves at night and you all eat human flesh which she hunts for you.” He stopped. “O, lots of things I don’t know!” The boy’s whole body was tensed with violent hatred. The old man looked at him, amused.

“Do they really say that, now?”

“Yes and I know I could beat them all in a fight but the headmaster said we shouldn’t fight and Father doesn’t want me to fight either. But I know I can lick them all in a fight.”

The old man looked at the boy intensely for some time, his pipe in his hand; then he looked away to the side and spat out brown spittle. He returned the pipe to his mouth and said, “Forget them. They don’t know a thing.” He then sighed and closed his eyes once more and settled a little deeper against the tree.

The boy looked at him for a long time and said, “I don’t want to go to school, Sekuru.”

“Because of your friends?”

“They are not my friends!” He glared blackly at his grandfather, eyes flashing brilliantly and then, ashamed, confused, rose and walked a short distance away.

The old man looked at him from the corner of his eyes and saw him standing, looking away, body tensed, stiff and stubborn. He called out to him quietly, with gentleness, “Come back, Zakeo. Come and sit here by me.”

Later on the boy woke up from a deep sleep and asked the old man whether it was time yet for the traps. He had come out of sleep with a sudden startled movement as if he were a little strange animal that had been scared by hunting dogs.

“That must have been a very bad dream,” the old man said.

Zakeo rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and blinked. He stared at the old man, then the sun which was very low in the west, painting everything with that ripe mango hue that always made him feel sad. Tall dark shadows were creeping eastward. He had that strange feeling that he had overslept into the next day. In his dream his mother had been shouting at him that he was late for school. A rather chilly wind was blowing across the desolate fields.

“Sit down here beside me and relax,” the old man said. “We will give the mice one more hour to return home from visiting their friends. Or to fool themselves that it’s already night and begin hunting.”

Zakeo sat beside his grandfather and then he felt very relaxed.

“You see?” the old man said. “Sleep does you good when you are tired or worried. But otherwise don’t trust sleeping during the day. When you get to my age you will learn to sleep without sleeping.”

“How is that?”

“Never mind. It just happens.”

Suddenly, sitting in silence with the old man didn’t bother him any more.

“You can watch the shadows or the setting sun or the movement of the leaves in the wind—or the sudden agitation in the grass that tells you some little animal is moving in there. The day is for watching and listening and learning.”

He had got lost somewhere in his thoughts when the old man said, “Time for the traps.”

That evening the old man taught him how to gut the mice, burn off the fur in a low-burning flame, boil them till they were cooked and then arrange them in a flat open pan close to the fire to dry them so that they retained as little moisture as possible which made them firm but solidly pleasant on eating.

After supper the old man told him a story in which the hero seemed to be always falling into one misfortune after another, but always getting out through his own resourcefulness only to fall into a much bigger misfortune—on and on without the possibility of a happily ever after. It seemed as if the old man could go on and on inventing more and more terrible situations for his hero and improvising solutions as he went on till the boy thought he would never hear the end of the story.

“The story had no ending,” the old man told him when he asked. He was feeling sleepy and he was afraid his mother would put a definite stop to his visits to the old man’s place, even if it meant sending him out to some distant relative.

“Carry her these mice,” the old man said when Zakeo said good night and stood up to go. “I don’t think she will beat you tonight. She loves mice,” he said with a little laugh.

But when he got home his mother threw the mice to the dog.

“What did I tell you?” she demanded of him, holding the oxhide strop.

Zakeo didn’t answer. He was looking at his mother without blinking, ready to take the strop like Ndatofa, the hero in the old man’s story. In the corner of his eye he saw his father working at his baskets, his eyes watering from the guttering smoking lamp he used to give him light. The crow’s-feet round his eyes made him appear as if he were wincing from some invisible pain.

“Don’t you answer when I am talking to you?” his mother said.

The boy kept quiet, sitting erect, looking at his mother. Then she made a sound which he couldn’t understand, a sound which she always uttered from some unliving part of her when she was mad. She was blind with rage but the boy held in his screams right down there where he knew screams and sobs came from. He gritted his teeth and felt the scalding lashes cutting deep into his back, right down to where they met the screams, where they couldn’t go any farther. And each time the strop cut into him and he didn’t scream his mother seemed to get madder and madder. His father tried to intervene but he quickly returned to his basket-weaving when the strop cracked into his back twice in quick merciless succession. It was then that Zakeo almost let out a deafening howl. He closed his eyes so tightly that veins stood out in his face. He felt on fire.

“I could kill you—you—you!” He heard his mother scream and he waited, tensed, for the strop and then suddenly as if someone had told him, he knew it wasn’t coming. He opened his eyes and saw that his mother had dropped the strop and was crying herself. She rushed at him and began to hug him.

“My Zakeo! My own son. What are you doing this to me for? Tell me. What wrong have I done to you, ha? O, I know! I know very well who is doing this to you. He never wanted your father to marry me!”

He let her hug him without moving but he didn’t let her hugging and crying get as far as the strop lashes. That was his own place. He just stopped her hugs and tears before they got there. And when he had had enough, he removed her arms from round him and stood up. His mother looked at him, surprised, empty hands that should have contained his body becoming emptier with the expression on her face.

“Where are you going, Zakeo?” It was as if he had slapped her.

“Do you care?”

“Zakeo! I am your mother! Do you know that? No one here cares for you more than I do! Not him!” pointing at his father. “And not even him!”—indicating in the direction of his grandfather’s hut.

“You don’t know anything,” Zakeo said, without understanding what he meant by that but using it because he had heard it used of his classmates by the old man.

“You don’t know anything.” He repeated it, becoming more and more convinced of its magical effect on his mother who gaped at him as if she was about to sneeze.

As he walked out he caught sight of his father who was working furiously at his baskets, his head almost touching his knees and his back bent double.

The old man was awake when Zakeo walked in.

“Put another log on the fire,” the old man said.

Zakeo quietly did so. His back ached but the heat had gone. He felt a little relaxedly cool.

“You didn’t cry today.”

The boy didn’t answer.

“But you will cry one day.”

The boy stopped raking the coals and looked at the old man, confused.

“You will cry one day and you will think your mother was right.”

“But—” The boy stopped, lost. The night had turned suddenly chilly, freaky weather for October. He had been too involved with something else to notice it when he walked the half mile between their place and the old man’s. Now he felt it at his back and he shivered.

“Get into the blankets, you will catch a cold,” the old man said.

Zakeo took off his shirt and left the shorts on. He got into the blankets beside the old man, on the side away from the fire.

“One day you will want to cry but you won’t be able to,” the old man said.

“Sekuru?”

“I said get into the blankets.”

The boy lay down on his left side, facing the wall, away from the old man and drew up his knees with his hands between them. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep on his back that night.

“Thirteen,” the old man said, shaking his head.

“Sekuru?”

“Sleep now. I must have been dreaming.”

Zakeo pulled the smoke-and-tobacco-smelling ancient blankets over his head.

“Who doesn’t want to cry a good cry once in a while but there are just not enough tears to go round all of us?”

“Sekuru?”

“You still awake?”

“Yes.”

“You want to go to school?”

“No.”

“Go to sleep then.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I just can’t.”

“Try. It’s good for you. Think of fishing.”

“Yes, Sekuru.”

“Or mouse-trapping.”

“And hunting?”

“Yes. Think all you like of hunting.”

“You will take me hunting some day, won’t you, Sekuru?”

“Yes,” the old man said and then after some time, “When the moon becomes your mother’s necklace.”

“You spoke, Sekuru?”

“I said yes.”

“Thank you, Sekuru. Thank you very much.”

“Thank you, Sekuru, thank you very much.” The old man mimicked the boy, shook his head sadly—knowing that the following day the boy would be going to school. Soon, he too was fast asleep, dreaming of that mountain which he had never been able to climb since he was a boy.