“You did hit the radio man who was being rude to me.”
“And I have regretted it ever since.”
Saluni turns to the puny man once more and says: “Don’t be deceived by his mild manner. You should see him when he is aroused. He is a tiger.”
Saluni strips to her petticoat and gets into the bedding on the floor. In no time she is snoring. The Whale Caller takes the paraffin lamp outside and extinguishes the flame so that the smell of the wick does not alert Saluni to that fact. Back in the room he takes off his overalls and sleeps next to her. But she suddenly sits up and seems to have difficulty breathing.
“He switched the light off, didn’t he?” she asks.
“I don’t switch things off, ma’am,” says the puny man. “Unlike rich folk like you who live in better houses, I don’t have electricity here.”
“I can feel the darkness in my body.”
“It is just your imagination, Saluni,” the Whale Caller assures her. “The lamp is still on. I think you are just having a nightmare.”
“Are you sure, man? Are you sure there is light?”
In the cracks between corrugated iron and plastic sheets left by shoddy workmanship on the shack he can see the stars winking at him. There must be a moon somewhere out of his line of sight, even if it is a small piece floating in the sky. There is some light… out there.
“There is light,” he says quite bravely. “Let’s sleep now, Saluni. We have a long way to go tomorrow.”
His voice has the ring of truth. But Saluni cannot understand why sleep doesn’t come, however hard she tries to summon it. She fidgets and tosses and turns, making it impossible for the Whale Caller to sleep as well.
She wants them to move further away from the coastal pathways lest some rude whales appear and distract his attention from the demands of the road. They almost did early in the morning. He spotted two Bryde’s whales and a group of the smaller triangular-headed minke whales off Pearly Beach and almost lost his head with excitement. That’s when she decreed that instead of following the coastline — which is in any event too rugged to negotiate safely even for a woman who is determined to punish their bodies — they should make their way inland.
The Whale Caller has tied a rope — a gift from their gracious host, who was all too pleased to see them go — around Saluni’s waist and leads her with it. The paths meander back to a well-maintained gravel road. For a while they are followed by a group of mischievous baboons who seem bent on teasing them. They ignore the primates and walk on. The baboons scatter into the bushes when a donkey cart approaches and stops next to the walking couple. A toothless old man under a straw hat gives them a ride up to the village of Elim, almost twenty kilometres away.
They walk among the expertly thatched cottages, past the church with a German-made clock that is reputed to have been ticking since 1764, past the village shopping centre and into the post office. The Whale Caller insists that he must write to the widower who lets him the Wendy house, and explain that he had to leave town unexpectedly and that the kindly landlord should rest assured that when he returns, whenever that will be, he will pay every cent of the outstanding rent. He is already gearing himself for months on the road since he does not know when Saluni will get tired and demand to be led on her leash back to peaceful Hermanus.
After writing the letter and mailing it he suggests that they should have a nice meal at one of the cosy restaurants in the village. He reminds her of her yearning for civilised living. But she is not interested in any of that. All she wants is the road. They buy a loaf of bread and fish and chips at a café as provisions. The Whale Caller remembers to purchase a packet of candles as well as a box of matches. Just as they are walking out he sees a display of sunglasses.
“I am buying you sunglasses, Saluni,” he says.
“Why?”
“So that people will not have expectations from you that cannot be fulfilled.”
“Yeah. So that they can raise their voices when they speak to me.”
He buys the glasses and she wears them. Once more they face the challenges of the road. They take a north-easterly direction, choosing a combination of well-paved roads and then looping off to overgrown pathways that are obviously rarely used by humans. They walk through a medley of green pastures and rocky terrain and apple orchards and deep gorges. They are like stars that have lost their way in the sky. Sometimes only echoes accompany their footsteps, and at other times flocks of sheep and a solitary shepherd break the rhythm. It is, in fact, in the hovel of a toothless young shepherd in brown South African Railways and Harbours overalls — the whole region abounds with toothless men and women — that they find refuge for the night, a few kilometres past the small town of Bredasdorp.
The shepherd proves to be, according to Saluni’s declamations the following day, a man of boundless wisdom and home-grown philosophies. He, for instance, admires them for the courage of embarking on a journey without destination. If everyone in the world engaged in such journeys the world would know peace. He commends Saluni for opting for blindness in a world that would be better off with everyone in it walking in perpetual blindness. All the problems of the world emanate from the arrogance of sight. In blindness one is able to reach into a dimension buried in the very depths of one’s soul and recover the beautiful things that one has known in previous existences. Now that he has met Saluni he is considering blindness for himself because he believes that will give him two or three other parallel consciousnesses. He may not only stop with his own blindness. He may blind his sheep and goats as well. They have become his companions and he cannot leave them behind on his way to nirvana. He crowns his wisdom by allowing his guests to light their candle throughout the night.
He takes advantage of the candlelight to read them passages from the Song of Solomon until Saluni is lulled into the deep sleep of content babies. It becomes obvious to the Whale Caller that these passages are directed at Saluni, and all of a sudden he finds the shepherd’s voice quite irritating. The shepherd is not aware that Saluni is fast asleep and continues reading: Behold, you are fair, my love! Behold you are fair! You have dove’s eyes behind your veil. Tour hair is like a flock of goats, going down from Mount Gilead. Tour teeth are like a flock of shorn sheep which have come up from the washing, every one of which bears twins, and none is barren among them.
“You are wasting your breath,” says the Whale Caller. “She is asleep.”
“She can hear my voice in her dreams,” says the shepherd, putting his tattered Bible next to his pillow. Soon he is competing with Saluni in snoring. The Whale Caller notes a self-satisfied smile on the shepherd’s face. He spends the whole night nursing an anger he never knew existed in him. What a brazen young upstart: making advances to his Saluni in his presence and not even hiding it!
The Whale Caller wakes Saluni at the crack of dawn and says that they must leave right away. She protests that it is still early for the road, but he threatens to leave without her.
“If he leaves you here I will take care of you,” says the yawning shepherd.
“I take care of her all right,” says the Whale Caller.
“And so you should. We don’t commend the eagle for flying.”
Saluni wakes up and puts on her clothes.
“You say you take care of her but you want her to go without even washing herself… without even brushing her teeth,” says the shepherd.
Saluni does not comment. She is pleased to let the men fight it out.
“What business is it of this young man whether you are clean or not?” the Whale Caller asks, tying the rope around Saluni’s waist. “We must leave at once. Imagine, comparing you to his sheep and goats!”