He vacates the Wendy house for the Whale Caller. He is going to book into a bed-and-breakfast place in the less damaged inner suburbs of the town until his house has been rebuilt. He is confident that he’ll be able to get a place since there are very few tourists in town because it is not the whale-watching season. The gales have at least chosen the right time to destroy the town. The reconstruction of Hermanus starts tomorrow. The insurance companies are pissing their pants. Assessors and investigators are already sniffing around, trying very hard to find any excuse not to pay.
When Saluni finally arrives he is busy sweeping out the sea lice that are crawling all over the place. It was the town’s main problem today, the widower had said. The houses of Hermanus are infested with sea lice.
Saluni and the Whale Caller do not exchange a single word. She just stands there with a mournful look. Then she sits on the bed on the new blankets that have been left there by the widower.
They have not exchanged a word for a week, since their big quarrel where he declared that she was ugly.
They were on their way down the Hottentot Holland Mountains where they had spent several months of idyllic picnicking and dancing. They had been driven down by winter rains and flurries of snow. They were trudging along the road between the towns of Genadendal and Grabouw when night caught up with them. They decided to camp on the roadside near a clump of bushes. He constructed a shelter for them with branches and leaves. He lit the candle and snuffed the flame out as soon as he thought Saluni was fast asleep. As usual she fidgeted, her body quailing in the darkness it had recognised, but she tried to convince herself that it was all in her imagination since he kept assuring her that the candle was still burning.
It was a pitch-black night because of dark clouds that hid the stars. Saluni was more twitchy than usual and had nightmares. She could see the shepherd reading her verses from the Songs of Solomon. He was quite different from the way she had imagined him when they were at his hovel so many months ago. He was very handsome, but seemed to be made of transparent wax. He was naked, except for a woollen cap on his head. The Whale Caller took out a cigarette lighter from his rucksack and set the cap on fire. The flame transformed it into a wick and it burned slowly as the shepherd began to melt like a candle. Yet he just sat there like a confounded Buddha and continued to read the wonderful passages. Molten wax covered the floor until it drowned the wick and his voice. Darkness fell. With it a hollow silence. The Whale Caller then broke into rude laughter which made her sit up. She reached out for the Whale Caller, felt him there beside her. He was not laughing.
He knew she had woken up from a nightmare and wanted to light the candle quickly, pretending that it had gone out accidentally, but decided against it. He hoped she would soon fall asleep again.
There is light on the horizon; the headlights of an approaching car. “There is a car coming,” whispered Saluni. The Whale Caller wondered how she knew because the sound of the engine had not reached them yet. Vibrations. Blind people are said to be sensitive to the slightest vibrations. But Saluni’s eyes seemed to follow the movement of the light as it kept on flashing across the horizon and then disappeared only to paint the skies again as the road followed by the vehicle twisted and turned.
“Do you see something, Saluni?” he asked.
“I can see the light,” she said, trying very hard to be calm. “But the sky is dark. Where have the stars gone?”
After some time they could hear the sound of the engine. An old truck drove by and soon the light and the sound were lost on the winding mountain roads. There was silence for some time, as both were taking in what had just happened. The Whale Caller jumped up and danced in celebration: “You can see, Saluni. Your sight is back.”
“It is no cause for celebration,” said Saluni. “If it is true that my sight has returned, then I should mourn.”
It had indeed returned. She could see his vague outline in the dark. She could see the darkness too, so she was shaking and breathing with difficulty.
“You should be happy, Saluni. You are free from the bondage of blindness. You can walk without being guided by the rope. You can walk without your goggles.”
“You lied to me,” she said.
He remembered the candle and struck a match. He explained that he had been fearful that wild animals would be attracted by the light, but she did not believe his story. For the first time after many months of peace and harmony and sickness she raised her voice at him: “I trusted you and you lied to me. How do you think I feel to discover that the man I trusted with my life is a liar?”
“It was for our safety, Saluni,” he protested.
“What else have you lied to me about?”
“Nothing, Saluni, nothing.”
Saluni insisted that there must be many other things he had lied about. Obviously, she charged, he must have been lying when he vowed on those mountains that he loved her more than any whale that ever lived and that he dreamt about her.
“Did you or did you not dream about me?” she asked.
When he jibbed she demanded an answer at once. He was unable to lie about it and confessed that he did not dream about her. That was the end of that discussion. Of any discussion.
From there on they walked the road silently. No more Saluni’s song on the kelp horn. No more declarations of love. No more dancing or picnicking on so much prickly pear that it clogged their bowels. No more biblical verses on the delights of physical love. No more breathless days and nights. Just the rhythm of their feet as they pounded the road. He walked in front with the rope tied around his waist snaking its way behind him on the ground. She walked a few metres behind him, determined not to utter a word to him. When a rabbit crossed her path she addressed it with all the terms of endearment that would otherwise have been lavished on him.
Rain failed to break their silence. It pelted them with fat drops as they walked towards the coastal village of Kleinmond. They did not stop to take cover anywhere. They were completely drenched by the time they passed the village, taking the easterly direction along the coast. In her tattered fur coat she looked like a malnourished half-drowned mouse in dark glasses. He was not a better sight in his threadbare dungarees.
They had caught the tail end of the storm, but the winds were still strong enough to sweep them off their feet from time to time, only to drop them on the muddy earth again where, after struggling to find their balance, they resumed the long walk. People everywhere were talking of the gale-force winds that had hit Hermanus.
It dawned on Saluni that they were walking back to Hermanus. They had gone full circle without realising it. Or at least without Saluni realising it. She suspected that the Whale Caller knew all along that he was leading her back to Hermanus. A man who had spent half his life walking from one coastal town and village to another right up to Windhoek could not claim to have lost all sense of direction all of a sudden.
She broke the silence: “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?”