Читать книгу The Camp Whore - Francois Smith - Страница 9

If I sit up, I can see out of the cave. Not for long, though, because something starts pressing against my temples with such force that my head wants to burst. I lie down again, even though it’s easier to keep my thoughts at bay when I’m looking out at something, or at least if I can see the sun shining. At night it’s different. It takes a long time to fall asleep, and I just lie there with my eyes open, staring into darkness. I hear birds, the jackal. At times, people calling. From afar. It is then that I am especially fearful that someone will find this cave. It’s as if the actual thing I fear is somewhere out there, and not inside this cave. I don’t know why I feel this, but there is something out there.

Underneath the cloth wrapped around my head is a hard, husk-like thing. I feel the tautness against my scalp. But I have to keep my head very still, as it hurts when I move. There is also something between my legs. Stuff. I’ve been able to wiggle my fingers downwards, to feel around. Something grassy has been pushed in there, fastened to my hips with some kind of cloth or bandage. I’m too scared to touch it. I’m actually too scared to think what it might be or why it is there at all. My legs I keep straight and still. I just lie like this with my head on the sack and look up at the paintings above me, and when I close my eyes I can still see the animals overlayed with one another, apparently moving.

I still cannot recall clearly how I came to be here, or what happened to me. My head hurts too much from thinking.

I can remember everything up to the camp; my thoughts can only go back that far. Then my memories hang like dust between the tents, between the coughing and keening and moaning. Then they blow away again. Like breath. Away. I also remember the slaughter of the sheep. That’s all I can think of, but I don’t remember whether it was in the camp or not. It’s that thought that frightens me most. There is also a man’s face.

That is why I am sometimes happy to see Tiisetso, even though I still don’t know what he wants to do with me. There is also a woman present. I don’t know if it is his wife, she is much older than him, pitch-black with age. But she is the one who looks after me. She feeds me motôho. It wasn’t even necessary for me to see what it was in order to recognise it. I know that sour, floury taste. She also gives me cold water that she scoops with a tin mug from a clay pot. The water with the bitter taste of leaves.

She is dressed decently, the woman that is here with Tiisetso. With a long whitish dress that buttons to the collar, and a headscarf. Mamello is her name. She speaks Afrikaans, and she talks to me even though I’m still unable to speak. And the bit of Sotho I know won’t help much. She keeps telling me that if I need to pass water I must call her. The stuff against my skull and between my legs is medicine that Tiisetso makes, he is a ngaka, a herbalist. That is what she says. Yes, he wears those bracelets around his wrists, I’ve seen those before. Copper and colourful beads and animal skins.

Mamello talks more than Tiisetso. I want to ask her what they’re going to do to me. They don’t have guns, that I can see.

She makes a fire, packs kindling and dung cakes, keeping her head away from the smoke.

When he greets, Tiisetso says kgotso. Peace. Good for him, greeting like that in the middle of this war. At least he is not part of Olof Bergh’s Scouts, burning down farms and killing chickens. Pestilential scum. Also, Tiisetso doesn’t have a hat like the ones that the Scouts wear. Neither a gun nor a hat. If only he’d tell me what happened, why I am lying here.

Perhaps I don’t want to know everything. I don’t want him to tell me what happened here between my legs. But Tiisetso also won’t tell me everything. I know he won’t, they’re like that, these people. Don’t look you in the eye, always talking in circles.

I will not move, Tiisetso, I don’t feel well, but you must talk. I want to know. I know it is very bad, because it’s not only pain that I feel, not only that, there is something very seriously wrong with me.

Tiisetso can probably see what I want, because he is talking to me. He says he can only tell me what he sees, but what does that mean? Shortly afterwards he tells me that he found me like this, but how this came about only I can know. That is what he says. He says I must say myself what happened. He found me like this, and it seems that that is all he wants to say. He says if we could find out what happened to me, we could get medicine for the whole country. The whole country is dying of this disease, he says.

I don’t know what he is talking about. It makes me very tired. How did he find me? He must talk straight, not in a roundabout way. I don’t know if I understand what he is saying.

He says I, who was dead, was there. He found me there. I was there but I was also not there. I had gone to the other side. As he says that, he gestures with his hand towards the hill. He said I came back and then he found me there in the veld, in the grass. He said I was broken. Shattered. He says it is a great pity, but it’s true. That is how this creature speaks. I don’t have the strength for it. Rather let Mamello come, she’ll be able to explain this nonsense to me.

But I know what he means with his gestures towards the hill. I know. And I also know why I constantly see the sheep being slaughtered. But that face next to the sheep, that is the worst.

Fortunately, Mamello is also here now. She blows on the fire, gently and evenly. When she breathes out, it is like wind moving over the fire. Smoke blows over me. When she speaks, like now, it feels as if her voice comes with the smoke, because her voice comes and goes. She says it’s true that I lay there. On the flat earth, halfway between the tents and the stream where they wash the laundry, that is where I lay. The wagon that carried the dead into town each morning dropped me there. She said I was broken. Very badly broken. She says that they, the people of the camp, sent me away with the dead because I was so broken.

Now I know. Tiisetso is one of those who walk around the tents every day. Sometimes he gets fresh milk, and sometimes meat. Or potatoes. Flour can be obtained if you know the people in the camp who distribute the food. That is what Mamello says. And she says I was very badly broken.

As she spoke, I went and lay on my back. Above me, animals and little men with their sticks. She probably thought I’d fallen asleep, but I hadn’t. I was thinking and trying to remember. I can see something of what she described, and it feels as if it’s stirring inside me. Something within, scraping to and fro, like branches in the wind. They think I am sleeping, those two blacks, but I am not sleeping.

Mamello starts to sing. Then Tiisetso too. They do that. Their voices go round and round and up and down. It goes on and on. It’s like smoke billowing over me, their singing. I want to tell them that my name is Ntauleng; that is what our nursemaid called me.