While the family outing straggles along the paths to the waterfall you can hear but not see: in the susurration, I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.
(The children chasing about each other or the butterflies butt against adult thighs as if these were tree trunks.)
That's all that comes out of that state of existence, and why not; so definitive as it was at the time. And it did not happen, the leaving. Mate for life. The affair is over. Case closed; it has not been reopened for long years. And now quite differently – no, come on, admit it – the same, has been reopened. I am sixty-five I never imagined this could happen it's happened to Hilde and me. The child chosen as black, defiled, infected, nameless – something else that has happened. One of the states of existence. Paul is taking up each child in turn to be swung round him as he walks; the son has come out of quarantine and seems to be in possession of a new state.
They arrive suddenly at the sight of a swag of silver down the dark of rock-face. The children did not appear to find it so striking, perhaps to them it was the bath water gushing from a giant tap. As they all drew nearer the cliff, rifted steeply in a narrow jagged cut beside the waterfall, rose to block the sky: go no farther. There was a grass plateau between bush-shaggy hills on either side, before the pool where the water fell and quietened. Now the plunge was white and in swift heavy strands, some leapt thinly to drop independently, chiffon of mist strayed, the water-voice volume turned up to an obliterating ringing in the ears. Klara danced with her hands over hers. Well it's not Niagara but it's pretty impressive. Benni appreciative, to Paul as if it was a spectacle he had created.
He must find the eagle. Flights of small birds scattered the sky above the cliff. He scanned the cliff again and again and discovered the two nests, if the haphazard collection of dry black twigs on ledges were nests. Benni had waited her turn at the telescope provided for visitors and reported the people around her confirmed these were the nests. While he was narrowing his focus on what seemed no more than garden detritus, his gaze was suddenly swivelled up and round by something that blocked out peripheral vision on the left. The eagle, not hunched way back in despair, the sail of a huge black wing glancing. He called out to the others, the mother, the wife, and in the stance of braced legs, head making an arc of his back, followed the flight, powerful enough to challenge the sky, of a scale to match it. The eagle, now a black cloak unfurled, now an immense black paper kite soaring, was in an arabesque with another, they were dipping and rising in great circles around the air up there, for a moment one of the spread wings actually blinded the sun as a man's hand across his eyes can do. There was a flash of white when the underside of this missile was revealed, but the plumaged body, like the hook of the head, hardly made out, was of no significance, the wings were the being of the creature's mastery. Lyndsay was the one who noticed leafy twigs, as the leaflet had described, on the mess of the nest on the right – from the viewer's not the bird's point of view. The wings of night against sun-paled sky continued to plane and dip; and then there was a descent, the transforming mastery that was the eagle's was gone, collapsed in a bird. As it readied to land on the nest that surely couldn't contain it, it seemed to gather itself together, almost fold up, only head and beak erect. The head had not mattered, in the air. Only the wings. They had appeared to be directed only by the intelligence of their own velocities, power over air and space. He inveigled himself near the front of the small gathering at the telescope. A head faced straight at him, drawn close by the glass. A flat dark head holding the great black polished orbs that are eyes, ringed with gold. These orbs separated by a broad white scimitar ending in a black hook. A nose a beak – it's impossible to take in the features of any face as a total vision – if this creature has what could be called a face at all, it is received as a certain feature of a face. (A woman's mouth, that's what he always sees.) This being named eagle turns the head; in profile the head hardly demarcated from the neck and the wide shoulders of the wings confirms the definition: the statement of the curve of the nose-beak, sense-organ and weapon. How is it that the high curved nose of Semitic people, the Jews and Arabs, is despised as unaesthetic by other peoples, when it has kinship across the species, with the magnificent eagle? Now the folded, self-domesticated creation somehow settles itself on its Procrustes' bed of twigs, some of them falling as the claws (noticed for the first time) extend and retract for a hold, and they, across species, are like the knobble-boned crenellated skin of very old human hands, although these retain powers which the hands never had.
Lyndsay has taken the children down to the low wooden barrier on the verge of the pool. Is the susurration louder or muffled by the overhang of the cliff and awareness of the crowding hills; it encloses her along with the imperceptible mist rather than comes through the ears. There was a dinner at the house of a judge whose colleague she is about to be, she was placed at table as unattached guests are beside another apparently unattached guest, in the male-female protocol. He is a retired judge from some other region of the country – she would hardly be partnered with somebody younger. The talk is of politics, the last elections and the President's appointment of a woman as Minister of Justice. If the man assumes that his neighbour welcomes the appointment because she is herself a woman, he is in for what no doubt will be a surprise. Her contribution to the comments in chorus above the plates and flower-piece: I'm celebrating the Minister not because she is a woman and so am I, but because she is exceptionally well qualified for the portfolio. If it had been a man with the same credentials, I'd be raising my glass to him. There was laughter and bravos from several of the men, and a glance-shaft of disapproval from a woman. But no-one could question the judge-elect's position on human rights.
Klara and Nicholas are shaking the slats of the barrier and have to be stopped. Klara's angry: Swim! Swim! A new word acquired along with the swimming lessons she was having in company with Nickie. There are two small boys flashing darkly agile skinny legs, paddling at the edge of the water although there is a sign indicating that this is forbidden, a rule ignored by the trio of women, two wearing the hijab, to whom they belong. Hopeless to explain, even to Paul's son, that nothing must disturb this habitat. Klara's begun to collect leaves and throw them at the pool, but always safely misses.
Probably it was the remark about the appointment of the woman Minister that made him more interested in his dinner partner with whom he had engaged in casual exchange before the subject animated the guests. Must have been told she was about to go to the Bench – a hostly precaution against the embarrassment of asking, And what do you do? He'd also picked up something, one of those useful scraps that start a conversation. And you're interested in archaeology, we all need a break when on the Bench, I know too well. No, that was her husband; and since the spouse wasn't in the place occupied by the retired judge, there was the casual explanation, He's visiting sites in Mexico. The liveliness of the continuing political discussion put an end to the subject.
It emerged easily that they held views of a judiciary in their transformed country in common, with the intriguing circumstance that he was viewing participation from his past on the Bench under apartheid segregation law and she was about to enter her appointment in a democracy. Seventy or a year or two older, then; no attempt to draw remaining strands of blond-grey hair across the bald head above a cliff forehead, tall and upright, looked still to have his own teeth. He sat across other tables in the restaurants where there followed invitations to dinner with him. Why not. He is a colleague with interests in the theatre and art exhibitions apart from his successfully concluded profession, no avocation, just the pastime pleasures of a life. He speaks of his wife who died two years ago. She has found it honest in the openness that excludes familiarity, with someone her own kind, a colleague in law, to tell him that she is parted from Adrian Bannerman. He does not intrude any questions.