Benni lifts and drops her shoulders, which stirs her breasts; kill-joy, not everyone can have the freedom of the wilderness and anyway he retreats into silence, some other place, when (again) she offers one of the clients' game parks, no cages there, foreigners fly thousands of miles to find marvellous. She has again suggested a stay, his mother and Klara included, this time, at one of the weekend breaks away from the city, Agency-featured, these beautiful half-wildernesses. All he says absently is that the children are too young to spend hours being driven around in a four-by-four. You need Japanese stamina for that. And so makes Benni laugh. Thank – what are their gods? – for the Japanese, they're the staples of our tourist industry!
There is a place where the eagle he has not forgotten, its species, is free. That's a nearby outing for the children, the family, owed by this father who too often is absent; in his wilderness.
The Black Eagle, Aquila verreauxii, has been breeding at this cliff above a waterfall since 1940. These highly territorial birds, with a weight of approximately five kilogrammes and a wingspan of up to 2.3 metres are one of Africa 's largest and most majestic eagles. The Black Eagle pair in the Roodekrans territory can be seen all year round. They spend their days hunting, soaring, displaying, or perching on their favourite roosting spots, where they rest and preen. They live on the Rock Hyrax, hares, and guinea fowl. The breeding cycle commences in March/April, when one of the two nesting sites will be used in a specific breeding year. Sticks are placed to form a nest cup that will be completed with leafy twigs. This creates a soft lining in the cup prior to egg laying which normally occurs in May. The male performs spectacular courtship displays during the refurbishment. The pair mate for life and take a new mate only if one should die.
Paul read out from a leaflet picked up at the entrance to the park space, half botanical garden for indigenous African species, half wildlife protection habitat. The two small children neither listen nor understand, the information is for himself, Lyndsay and Benni, Nicholas and Klara are simply excited at the beginning of any excursion. Do they know what an eagle is? You're going to see a ve-ery big bird. Lyndsay attempted to make the excitement specific but the focus of the two for whom the world of nature is new was wide and low, there were gaudy butterflies to chase and Nickie spied a caterpillar articulated like the coaches of a toy train. Paul carefully lifted it from a leaf, opened the boy's hand and placed it gently in the palm, to protests from Berenice. But he addressed Benni, the boy's mother. He mustn't be taught to be afraid of everything that isn't human or domesticated. And if it happened to be a scorpion? That's part of the knowledge: learning to recognise what's harmful and what's not.
Life-skills – that's the term she would understand. And he doesn't expect – or want – anyone to understand that what he's been able to say simply, without his kind of jargon is – simply – the principle of what he does, it's called ecology.
Lyndsay turns out to know more about the strange sculptural plants than he. It used to be said of such growths that they're like something from the moon, but now it's known there is no growth on the moon, there's no comparison with nothingness. She is able to name substitutes for leaves like buttocks; an elephantine lump of grey as a desert species from Namibia which stores water in its bulk for nourishment during the long dry years. In the period when Namibian independence was being negotiated she had been there as part of a legal team and Sam Nujoma himself had arranged for her to be taken into the desert – not that Paul or his wife would know or is likely to remember who the first president of the country's sovereignty was.
From every experience, professional or otherwise, there's always some aspect detached from the whole. The negotiating process subsumed by the history-that-is-memory; the identity of some weird growth is there, available, named.
While the family outing straggles along the paths to the waterfall you can hear but not see: in the susurration, I thought you were going to tell me you were leaving.
(The children chasing about each other or the butterflies butt against adult thighs as if these were tree trunks.)
That's all that comes out of that state of existence, and why not; so definitive as it was at the time. And it did not happen, the leaving. Mate for life. The affair is over. Case closed; it has not been reopened for long years. And now quite differently – no, come on, admit it – the same, has been reopened. I am sixty-five I never imagined this could happen it's happened to Hilde and me. The child chosen as black, defiled, infected, nameless – something else that has happened. One of the states of existence. Paul is taking up each child in turn to be swung round him as he walks; the son has come out of quarantine and seems to be in possession of a new state.
They arrive suddenly at the sight of a swag of silver down the dark of rock-face. The children did not appear to find it so striking, perhaps to them it was the bath water gushing from a giant tap. As they all drew nearer the cliff, rifted steeply in a narrow jagged cut beside the waterfall, rose to block the sky: go no farther. There was a grass plateau between bush-shaggy hills on either side, before the pool where the water fell and quietened. Now the plunge was white and in swift heavy strands, some leapt thinly to drop independently, chiffon of mist strayed, the water-voice volume turned up to an obliterating ringing in the ears. Klara danced with her hands over hers. Well it's not Niagara but it's pretty impressive. Benni appreciative, to Paul as if it was a spectacle he had created.
He must find the eagle. Flights of small birds scattered the sky above the cliff. He scanned the cliff again and again and discovered the two nests, if the haphazard collection of dry black twigs on ledges were nests. Benni had waited her turn at the telescope provided for visitors and reported the people around her confirmed these were the nests. While he was narrowing his focus on what seemed no more than garden detritus, his gaze was suddenly swivelled up and round by something that blocked out peripheral vision on the left. The eagle, not hunched way back in despair, the sail of a huge black wing glancing. He called out to the others, the mother, the wife, and in the stance of braced legs, head making an arc of his back, followed the flight, powerful enough to challenge the sky, of a scale to match it. The eagle, now a black cloak unfurled, now an immense black paper kite soaring, was in an arabesque with another, they were dipping and rising in great circles around the air up there, for a moment one of the spread wings actually blinded the sun as a man's hand across his eyes can do. There was a flash of white when the underside of this missile was revealed, but the plumaged body, like the hook of the head, hardly made out, was of no significance, the wings were the being of the creature's mastery. Lyndsay was the one who noticed leafy twigs, as the leaflet had described, on the mess of the nest on the right – from the viewer's not the bird's point of view. The wings of night against sun-paled sky continued to plane and dip; and then there was a descent, the transforming mastery that was the eagle's was gone, collapsed in a bird. As it readied to land on the nest that surely couldn't contain it, it seemed to gather itself together, almost fold up, only head and beak erect. The head had not mattered, in the air. Only the wings. They had appeared to be directed only by the intelligence of their own velocities, power over air and space. He inveigled himself near the front of the small gathering at the telescope. A head faced straight at him, drawn close by the glass. A flat dark head holding the great black polished orbs that are eyes, ringed with gold. These orbs separated by a broad white scimitar ending in a black hook. A nose a beak – it's impossible to take in the features of any face as a total vision – if this creature has what could be called a face at all, it is received as a certain feature of a face. (A woman's mouth, that's what he always sees.) This being named eagle turns the head; in profile the head hardly demarcated from the neck and the wide shoulders of the wings confirms the definition: the statement of the curve of the nose-beak, sense-organ and weapon. How is it that the high curved nose of Semitic people, the Jews and Arabs, is despised as unaesthetic by other peoples, when it has kinship across the species, with the magnificent eagle? Now the folded, self-domesticated creation somehow settles itself on its Procrustes' bed of twigs, some of them falling as the claws (noticed for the first time) extend and retract for a hold, and they, across species, are like the knobble-boned crenellated skin of very old human hands, although these retain powers which the hands never had.