The Waterman cometh
More excerpts from In Search of rain & Harvest (a novel, unpublished)
From the Deathwatch Journal
Entry: 31/12/99
10:30 p.m.
Here we stand at the gates of the new millennium. I don’t see what it is exactly that we, as humanity, have done to deserve this renewal. Perhaps the prophets of doom are right to predict Armageddon. Nothing like a bit of fire and brimstone for thorough and effective cleansing.
My own part in this great tragedy of life is coming to an end. At the cost of being melodramatic, I have to announce right from the start that I am dying. As I write these words, I lie languishing on my sick- bed.
The irony is that there was once I time that I seriously considered dying young as a fashionable thing to do. It probably has its merits, of course, but it comes too soon.
The sick- bed only had its allure in accursed boarding school. The joy of missing classes and the missionary school chores of cutting grass with sickles and slashers, or cleaning our own puke and piss in the toilets. They made the latter seem like a dignified form of work by calling it “cleaning of ablution blocks. “ For a form one student, who abhorred the very the thought of doing any form manual work at all, those tasked with “cleaning of the ablution blocks “ seemed to have been favoured with the most heavenly of chores, until, of course, we got to know what the term really meant, and remembered some of the disasters we left there.
But I digress. I am dying. In another place, another time, I would be enjoying the prime of my life. But this is not another place nor is it another age, it is now, and I am in the winter of my life. Autumn is nigh. Dying young has none of its romantic mystique now. In the haze of all these pills, roots, herbs, leaves, twigs and soiled pants, the desire to live forever is all too consuming.
ENTRY: 11: 30
Insomnia is my bane. But, for a while there, I had drifted into the realm of restless sleep. The only thing that is stopping me from taking a cocktail of death comprising of all my numerous pills is that I want to write this before I embark on that fabled journey to the great beyond. I want to chronicle it all through these my mortal eyes. I vehemently refuse to see all that I ever was going the way of my flesh.
Ah, “but come the Faustian midnight/ terror of the tomb returns in ghoulish night,” so writes my favourite writer of all time, Dambudzo Marechera. The waterman cometh and Isaiah echoes, “therefore the grave enlarges its appetite and opens its mouth without limit“(5:14).
No, I have not suddenly found religion as I lay here dying. That would be a little too convenient, bowing in to fear of the unknown. I have veered through atheism, agnosticism and “I’m- ambivalent- about- it- all” to suddenly betray my own sense of confusion about matters metaphysical.
It just so happens that lately, I have found myself with more time on my hands than ever before, enabling me to get to intimate terms with the holy book.
ENTRY: 01/01/ 00
12: 30
So this is how it begins, not with a bang, but a whimper!I tire easily. Sleep fitfully. My waking hours are filled with reminiscences. Everything is filtered through these tiring mortal eyes. But is it all in perspective now? I doubt it. Nostalgia runs deep through all the memories. Any regrets? Plenty. There are times when the pain is so acute; I wish I had done things differently.
ENTRY: 02: 33
Maiwe-e! The ways of the flesh! It always lets us down. Old St Peter knows this best, of course. So too does, Chaucer’s old merchant who lusted for youthful flesh, arguing that tender veal is always better.
A’ level literature, ages ago, so it seems now. The whole class bursting into gleeful and wishful laughter the moment Damian goon pullen up her smock/ And in he throng. The fact that Damian and the tender girl were both up a tree, while the old man languished in blindness below, gave the whole thing an extra thrill.
Our aging Kenyan teacher did not think so, naturally.
“How khan you huh- ve sex in uh tree like a bard,” he fumed. Perhaps he saw Damian’s lascivious streak in all of us. Ah, the irresistible pleasures of licentious youth!
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