A Happy Marriage by Peter Fuller

It was Zama who found the diamond.  She had draped her family’s wet clothes over the boulders that lined the river at this point and had returned to wash her hands and face in the refreshing water.  The stone was half submerged in the silted riverbed, but unlike the other smooth and rounded pebbles strewn across the bed this stone was darker in colour and irregular in shape and it caught her eye.  Zama dug her fingers in and around the stone and gently released it from its confines.  She swished it around in the water to clean it and then held it up to the sun.  Along its exposed edges she found that it glistened with many colours.

She ran back to the village and handed it to her husband, Kagiso, who turned it over and over in his hands.  He had not seen anything like it before, but told Zama that it was a sign that their marriage was blessed.  He placed it on the box beside their bed as a sign of their new-found love. “It shall be our love stone”, he said, and they lay together and made love through the afternoon.

Hunter and game warden, Jan van Riebeek, drove hard over rough terrain from the tribal village to his spartan bungalow in one of the more dilapidated suburbs of Johannesburg.  He dropped everything he was carrying in the hall and immediately picked up the telephone. He dialled an international number.

“Gerald, it’s Jan.  I don’t know what time it is in New York, but I had to ‘phone you straight away”.

“It’s 2.45am actually, but I don’t sleep much so it’s Ok.  What do you want?”

“It’s like this, at the end of my last hunting trip I called at a small village in Mpumalanga province called Mursi.  Whilst there the Chief of the Village insisted that I meet a couple who were just married and to see the house that the other villagers had built them. That was the last thing I wanted to do, but I am pleased that I did, for in their tiny hut I found the biggest diamond I have ever seen.  It was just lying around on a bedside table and none of the natives had any idea of its value”.

“How valuable do you think it is?”

“Well, I’d put its weight at around one-and-a-half pounds”.

Gerald Goldblatt sat bolt upright. “That’s not possible!”

“Yes – POSSIBLE.  I saw it with my own eyes.  I held it in my hands”.

Goldblatt was now pacing the room. “But the famous Cullinan Diamond weighed one-and-a-quarter pounds and that sold for almost a hundred million dollars!”

“Yes, we are talking big, big money, and that’s just my commission!”  Jan let that comment register and added, “Get over here a.s.a.p.”

Gerald Goldblatt flew to Johannesburg the next day and the two men drove the five hours to the village.  After much haggling, with the Chief of the Village having the final say, the diamond was sold for exactly five cows, ten goats and a comfortable mattress for the couple to sleep on.  Later, Kagiso exchanged one of the cows for a bullock and then sold five of the goats and bought an arable strip of farmland. 

The story of how Goldblatt secured ownership of the Mursi Diamond for practically nothing became a thing of legend.  He was famed and feted, and his picture appeared on the cover of Time Magazine more often than any other celebrity.  And a celebrity he became, and rich, for he was said to be the third richest man in the United States.  For the next twenty years Goldblatt remained wedded to his fame, his considerable wealth, and the power that these things brought him.

Some years later Goldblatt received another confidential call, this one concerning a large diamond that had been found at the Minas mine of Brazil.  This was not as big as the Mursi Diamond, but Goldblatt’s pride insisted that he secure it before anybody else.  He flew out the next day to Brazil, but suffered a heart attack mid-flight and was dead by the time the plane touched down in Salvador.  He was fifty-three years of age.

Kagiso and Zama, now both nearing their ninetieth birthdays, sit together in the shade of a sweet-scented Corrib tree.  Two of their grandchildren bring them bowls of water that they have just drawn from the family’s well.  Kagiso and Zama sip the cold and refreshing water as they watch their other grandchildren tend their herd of cows and their flocks of sheep and goats.

Zama reaches out to Kagiso and closes her fingers around his hand.  Kagiso looks at her and speaks solemnly, “God has kept watch over us these many years my dear wife and has chosen to provide for all  our needs.”