The Whale Caller by Zakes Mda Page B

you any wrong,” she shouts, spitting out the last morsel in her mouth.
    He cannot help laughing one more time at the memory of her helpless body being tossed by the waves. This infuriates her and she breaks out into another round of colourful profanity.
    “We are being observed all the time, Saluni,” he says, adoptingsome measure of seriousness. “We must behave appropriately at all times. Garbage must not come from our mouths.”
    “And who is observing us?”
    He is rather vague about this, as if the question has caught him off guard.
    “Perhaps it is your big fish,” suggests Saluni. “You are always dreaming of your big fish.”
    “Whales are not fish!” he moans.
    It is her turn to laugh.
    “The Bible says they are fish so they are fish.”
    “The Bible says no such thing.”
    “It says Jonah was swallowed by a big fish.”
    To steer Saluni away from insulting Sharisha he decides that the person who is watching them is Mr. Yodd.
    “And who is Mr. Yodd? Another one of your whales?”
    “Perhaps it is time I formally introduced you to Mr. Yodd,” says the Whale Caller. “But first we need to get rid of this!”
    He grabs the coat and drags it across the sand. He rolls it into a big ball and throws it into the water. Saluni yells at him as the waves toss it about until it cannot be seen anymore.
    “I want my coat back,” she screams, stamping her feet like a spoilt child. “You go get my coat back!”
    “No, I won’t,” he says, with the firmness of a father talking to a naughty child. “You are more beautiful without that coat. Come with me, I want to show you something.”
    “No, I won’t, not until you give me my coat back.”
    He grabs her arm and drags her along to the Old Harbour and down the crag to Mr. Yodd’s grotto. She is taken by surprise by his firmness, and sulkily she allows herself to be dragged along. He kneels before the grotto, but she refuses to do so. She just stands there and stares at him in defiant mien, her cheeks filled with air like a balloon signalling her anger.

    Hoy, Mr. Yodd. She is Saluni. We are just walking the road together, Mr. Yodd. We do not have a destination. We’ll see how far it takes us. We’ll see where it takes us.

    As they walk up the crag from the grotto he is wondering why Mr. Yodd did not laugh at him this time. He had only listened to his brief confession without any comment. Was it because of the presence of Saluni, who had refused to kneel down? Such confessions are a self-flagellation, and it doesn’t help if Mr. Yodd decided not to humiliate him. He needs his dose of mortification and is disappointed that none was forthcoming from today’s confession.
    Saluni on the other hand is still livid. The water is beginning to evaporate from her clothes and she is shivering from the cold. She wonders why he called her a fellow-traveller without a destination—a slight from the man she regards as the love of her life. What about Sharisha? Does he think he has a destination with Sharisha? She fumes even more when she remembers her coat. She feels naked without her coat.
    This is a new side of him she has not seen before: first the laughter, and then the firmness! There is hope yet. Life will be perfect the day he surprises her with another kind of firmness—where it matters most.
    Strangely she feels as if a burden has been lifted off her shoulders. She feels free. The freedom of the naked!
    Although—ostensibly to get back at him for the coat and the laughter—she ridicules the foolishness of talking to rock rabbitsat a nondescript cave, she is curious about the ritual of confession. She is secretly fascinated by the unseen confessor. The Whale Caller professes to hate the rituals she is trying to introduce in his life, yet in his own way he is a creature of ritual. Often she secretly follows him as he goes to confess. He does not know she is there listening. She stands against the wind for she knows he can smell her. Sometimes she doesn’t