Rage - Smith Wilbur (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗
When he finished speaking at last, they all sat in silence for a long time and then one of the young men turned to the girl and said, 'Amelia --' that was the first time ever that Raleigh heard her name, 'Amelia, will you sing for us?" She did not simper or hang her head or make modest protestations.
She simply opened her mouth, and sound poured out of her, glorious sound that made the skin on Raleigh's forearms and at the back of his neck tingle.
He watched her mouth while she sang. Her lips were soft and broad, shaped like two leaves of the wild peach tree, with a dark iridescence that shaded to soft pink on the inside of her mouth, and when she reached for an impossibly sweet high note, he saw that her teeth were perfect white as bone that had lain for a season in the veld, polished by the wind and bleached by the African sun.
The words of the song were strange to him, but like the voice that sang them, they thrilled Raleigh: 'When the roll of heroes is called, Will my name be on it?
I dream of that day when ! will Sit with Moses Gama, And we will talk of the passing of the Boers." She went away with the young men who had brought her, and that night Raleigh dreamed of her. She stood beside the pool in the great Fish river in which he had washed away the white clay paint of his childhood and she wore the short beaded kilt and her breasts and her legs were bare. Her legs were long and her breasts were round and hard as black marble and she smiled at him with those even white teeth, and when Raleigh awoke his seed was splashed upon the blanket which covered him.
Three days later she came to the bakery to buy bread and Raleigh saw her through the peephole above his desk through which he could watch all that was happening in the ant of the store and he went through to the counter and greeted her gravely. 'I see you, Amelia." She smiled at him and replied, 'I see you also, Raleigh Tabaka,' and it seemed that she sang his name, for she gave it a music that he had never heard in it before.
She purchased two loaves of white bread, but Raleigh lingered over the sale, wrapping each loaf carefully and counting the pennies of her change as though they were gold sovereigns.
'What is your full name?" he asked her.
'I am called Amelia Sigela." 'Where is your father's kraal, Amelia Sigela?" 'My father is dead, and I live with my father's sister." She was a teacher at the Sharpeville primary school and she was twenty years old. When she left with her bread wrapped in newspaper and her buttocks swinging and jostling each other beneath the yellow European-style skirt, Raleigh returned to his desk in the cubicle of his office and sat for a long time staring at the wall.
On Friday Amelia Sigela came again to the meeting in the back room of the bakery and at the end she sang for them once more.
This time Raleigh knew the words and he sang with her. He had a good deep baritone but she gilded it and wreathed it in the glory of her startling soprano and when the meeting broke up, Raleigh walked back with her through the dark streets to her aunt's house in the avenue beyond the school.
They lingered at the door and he touched her arm. It was warm and silky beneath his fingers. On the Sunday when he took the train back to Drake's Farm to make his weekly report to his father, he told his mother about Amelia Sigela and the two of them went through to the sacred room where his mother kept the family gods.
His mother sacrificed a black chicken and spoke to the carved idols, particularly ro the totem of Raleigh's maternal great-grandfather, and he replied in a voice that only Raleigh's mother could hear. She listened gravely, nodding at what he said, and later while they ate the sacrificial chicken with rice and herbs, she promised, 'I will speak to your father on your behalf." The following Friday after the meeting, Raleigh walked home with Amelia again, but this time as they passed the school where she taught, he drew her into the shadow of the buildings and they stood against the wall very close together. She made no attempt to pull away when he stroked her cheek, so he told her: 'My father is sending an emissary to your aunt to agree a marriage price." Amelia was silent and he went on, 'However, I will ask him not to do so, if you do not wish it." 'I wish it very much,' she whispered, and slowly and voluptuously she rubbed herself against him like a cat.
The lobola, the marriage price, was twenty head of cattle, worth a great deal of money, and Hendrick Tabaka told his son, 'You must work for it, just like other young men are forced to do." It would take Raleigh three years to accumulate enough to buy the cattle, but when he told Amelia, she smiled and told him, 'Each day will make me want you more. Think then how great will be my want after three years, and think how sweet will be that moment when the wanting is assuaged." Every afternoon, when school was out, Amelia came to the bakery and quite naturally she took to working behind the counter selling the bread and the round brown buns. Then when Raleigh closed the shop, she cooked his evening meal for him and when he had eaten, they walked back to her aunt's house together.
Amelia slept in a tiny room hardly bigger than a closet, across the passage from her aunt. They left the interleading doors open and Raleigh lay on Amelia's bed with her and under the blanket they played the sweet games that custom and tribal law sanctioned all engaged couples to play. Raleigh was allowed to explore delicately and with his fingertips hunt for the little pink bud of flesh hidden between soft furry lips that old Ndlame had told him about at initiation camp. The Xhosa girls are not circumcised like the women of some of the other tribes, but they are taught the arts of pleasing men, and when he could stand it no longer, she took him and held him between her crossed thighs, avoiding only the final penetration that was reserved by tribal lore for their wedding night, and skilfully she milked him of his seed.
Strangely, it seemed that every time she did this, rather than depleting him, she replenished the well of his love for her until it was overflowing.
Then the time came when Raleigh judged it expedient to begin infiltrating the Buffaloes into the township. With Hendrick Tabaka's blessing and under Raleigh's supervision, they opened their first shebeen in a cottage at the far end of the township, hard up against the boundary fence.
The shebeen was run by two of the Buffaloes from Drake's Farm who had done this type of work for Hendrick Tabaka before. They knew all the little tricks like adulterating the liquor to make it go further and having one or two girls in the back room for the men that liquor had made amorous.
However, Raleigh warned them about the local police force who had an ugly reputation, and about one of the white officers in particular, a man with pale predatory eyes that had given him his nickname 'Ngwi' the leopard. He was a hard cruel man who had shot to death four men in the time he had been in Sharpeville, two of them members of the Buffaloes who had been supplying the township with dagga.
At first they were cautious and wary, vetting their customers carefully and placing lookouts on all approaches to the shebeen, but then as the weeks passed, with business improving each night, they relaxed a little. There was very little competition. Other shebeens had been closed down swiftly, and the customers were so thirsty that the Buffaloes could charge three and four times the usual rate.
Raleigh brought the liquor stocks into the township in his little blue Ford pick-up, the crates hidden beneath sacks of flour and sheep carcasses. He spent as little time as possible at the shebeen, for every minute was dangerous. He would drop off the supplies, collect the empty bottles and the cash and be gone within a half an hour. He never drove the pick-up directly to the front door of the cottage, but parked it in the dark veld beyond the boundary fence and the two Buffaloes would come through the hole in the wire mesh and help him carry the crates of cheap brandy.
