Читать книгу Red Dog - Willem Anker - Страница 6

Come and see! The lizard on the rock, white ant in its beak. Its jaws start churning. It surveys its surroundings, all along the kloof. Its chomping subsides, its eyeballs roll. The colour of its head and forepaws proclaims its readiness to mate. It displays its red-brown back and ruff. It looks up, swivels its neck to the right. The blue skin of its neck strains and stretches.

See, behind the crag lizard I arise from the rock. I dust my hat, light my pipe. Behold me: I am the legend Coenraad de Buys. Come, let me contaminate you, my reader of tainted stock. If you read this, you see what I see. And I see everything. I am of all time, I am immortal. Do not call me soul. I have a multitude of names. Call me rather Coenraad, or Coen if you are my mother or sister. Pen me down as De Buijs, De Buys, Buys or Buis, just as you see fit. Call me King of the Bastards, Khula, Kadisha, Moro, Diphafa or Kgowe. I am all of them. I am omnipresent. I am Omni-Buys. You will find me in many embodiments. You will come across me as itinerant farmer and anthropologist, rebel and historian. I am a vagabond, a book-bibber, a smuggler, lover and naturalist. I manifest as hunter, bigamist, orator, pillager, patriot, stone-shagger. I am a warrior and a liar; I am a scoundrel and a teller of my own tale. I am going to blind you and bewilder you with my incarnations, with my omnipotent gaze. I am a bird of passage, I am the wind beneath your wings. Stroke the small of my back and you will know I am no angel. I know you well. I know you can’t look away.

May I bewhisper you further? The little hairs in your ear vibrate as my breath comes closer. Migrate with me through human memory, over the unmarked dusty wastes as far as the primal footprint, the first built fire, the troop of ape-like creatures heaving erect in the grasslands. Hear the feet stamping in the caves. See the half-human animals scratching and painting on rock faces, how they trace the trajectories from animal to human, voyages between hand and paw, snout and nose, transitions to the other side.

How far are you prepared to follow in my footsteps? Have you taken fright already? Behold the scars of my passage, the marks of my skin on mother earth. Note well: My hide is this dust and sand. Hear me in every footfall, every hoof-fall. See me reflected in every eye gazing into a fire: I am both mark and mirror. I am of this land, bred from stone.

See, the crag lizard swallows the termite, minutely adjusts its foot, scarcely skims the soil. Listen, history is starting to quake, the dust of forgotten battles and unrecorded deaths is shaken up, quivering under the seething surface.

Rush headlong with me in the frantic flight of time to where the hunters and diggers of roots are shouldered aside by herdsmen and tillers of the land. Onward, through eras of wandering and settlement. Hurry past seafarers planting crosses in their wake. Skim past shipwrecks named for saints, smashed to smithereens on the rude rock of Good Hope. Come wade with me through the rivers of blood: pulsing from noses during dances, spurting from bodies, pouring down hafts and blades of wood and iron, later from bullet wounds, primordially from the wombs of mothers, from hymens and umbilical cords; all the blood always slurped back into the soil.

As through the spiral in the barrel of a gun, more rapidly with every rotation: Streak over hills and dales and Company’s Gardens, over the land, this dumping ground for northern brigands and heretics. Skim along over the cries and sighs of animals and humans. Fly over the importation of slaves and then the importation of horses, over the bones of the Strandloper and the remains of Van Riebeeck’s midday meal, over forts called castles here, over the first Dutch Reformed sermons, the first sugar, the first brandy, over the blood, over riot and revolution, over drawn-and-quartered rebels and black holes of incarceration. Flash over wars and Christians and Hottentots and Caffres and Huguenots and Dutch courage and chicanery and pox and Groot Constantia and the Great Fish, over rivers that erode and borders that overgrow. What are you looking for here? Do you know why you’re looking for me? What are you going to do when you find me? Go on, go kneel by any carcase and see the flies cluster like a cosmos opening into bloom; see! This here ground obliterates and digests. It slurps up history and boils it down to nothing.

Listen, the songs of the land resound over it all. Hear the songs of men, the songs of the veldt, the skirling and screaming. Just listen to the beat on metal and sticks and stones and oxhide, on bellies and hoofs, on stoneware from the earth. All over this wretched earth the roaring and bellowing, the yowling and yelping. The claps and the cracks. So loud, so quiet. So delicately the salamander places its foot, I could swear it can smell the blood in the soil.

Perhaps you feel safer in the back rooms of museums? I am the feeler of the fish moth in every archive. I have access to every page. I feed as I read. So let us riffle through the names on maps of new rivers and new mountains and lines of longitude and lines of latitude and missionaries and old gods and a new nailed-down god and churches and caves and the cradle of mankind. Speed-read through murder and mayhem and scouts and pioneers and rebels and vagabonds and clashes and punitive expeditions and slave rebellions and cattle rustlers and colonisers and corpses, all the corpses. Verily, even at this distance the echoing blows and gunshots, yes, even from the pages of blushing historians. I have seen it all, read every word. I forget nothing and forgive mighty little.

Come and see! calls my voice in this semi-wilderness. Come see the land break open its seals for you. Here where the shepherds shall have no way to flee, nor the principal of the flock to escape. Here where the Milky Way is spread out like the spine of a half-dead dun horse deliriously holding up the heavens over De Lange Cloof. Plains with flakes of rock and sand sometimes as red as old blood and sometimes as white as bone. In the north and the south serried mountains lie like petrified elephants heaving themselves out of the earth and then slumping back halfway and over centuries are once again buried under bush and stone. You can still see the wrinkles of their shoulders, the old necks and flaccid trunks, stretched out, spent, for miles across the landscape, but when you think you can hear them sigh, it’s only the wind. The mountain slopes are lush, the kloofs wet and overgrown with ferns. The rock ridges gash open out of the green hide of the hills. The people build their houses near the rivers and name their farms after the rivers. The farms lie in a row, cattle territory at the far end of the kloof, a world of sitting and contemplation. If you get up and look around you, you can see your whole farm and from afar you can espy your damn neighbour approaching.

If you look carefully, you’ll see the little house of stacked stone and bulrushes. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the people in the house bustling around the dying body of a father. The lizard you will not see again. It was rapt at sunset by the hawk.

See, I’m standing in the doorway. I am eight years old. I look like my mother. My father is lying on the narrow cot. His back arches like a Bushman bow, then he sinks back again. Maybe some creature bit him in the veldt. Perhaps he chewed the wrong leaf. A few days ago he came home and complained and nobody took any notice. My mother scolded him for a laggard and lazybones. He went and lay down and never again spoke a straight sentence and never again got up. In the kloofs jackals and hungry dogs are calling. Shreds of candlelight bob up and down in the washbasin. My sister sits down next to me, her fingers form shadow figures against the wall. My father’s hands scrabble at his stomach. A bellowing, then the drawing up of the legs.

Oh God! My Lord God.

My mother Christina rebukes her husband; he falls silent, mutters something inaudible. Mother instructs us to carry him out of the bedroom cot and all and place him by the hearth. She oversees our doing, walks out. I go and stand by her side; she pays me no heed. My eldest brother comes into the house with a headless chicken, slits open the belly and presses the spread-eagled fowl onto his stepfather’s chest to draw out the fever. Father once again calls to our God born in deserts and wars and thrusts the fowl from him. Mother commands another flayed-open hen. This time the bleeding warmth is tolerated for longer. I sit in the corner and peep from under a heap of hides how through the night chicken after chicken is pressed to the cropped-up chest. With the first glimmering of dawn I help Mother to plaster his chest with cow dung. I spread the steaming dung, feel the tremors under the skin.

Don’t touch me! Father bellows.

I step back.

Stop your nonsense, says Mother.

Father is silent.

They slaughter a goat and drape the guts over the body. My sister brings water. Mother goes to stand in the yard. My brothers and I rinse the blood from the dung floor, massacre chickens and stoke the fire in the hearth. Father’s convulsions drive our little lot like a troop of sleepwalkers until with a sudden starting up and last spasm as if the limbs wanted to tear themselves free of his innards, he sighs and dies. I hunker by the fire and regard my father: Jan de Buys, Jean du Buis the Third, grandson of a Huguenot, son of a rich Boland farmer. His death, like his life, small and meek.

Come, let us dig up my parents’ remains from the archives: At age twenty-two father marries Christina Scheepers, twice-widowed, eight years older than he. Grandfather de Buys, the old scoundrel, sends Father packing with a wagon and a few over-the-hill oxen. The couple – and Mother’s five children by her previous husbands – hit the road. They drive their little cluster of cattle until they pitch their tent on a deserted piece of land next to a random stream. Husband and wife and children and Hottentots build a house of reeds and grass and clay, and live there while Christina bears two daughters who hardly show their little wet heads between her legs before dying and are buried without names in holes that are covered up and not marked and leave absolutely no scar on the face of the earth. Father and Mother do not know the territory and the cattle die of the poisonous grass and bulbs and a drought claims the rest of the herd. They wander through De Lange Cloof and by Mother’s account I am born in the year 1761 on Wagenboomsrivier, the farm of one Scheepers. We roam further afield. Thorn trees and ferns grow in the kloofs and leopards dwell on the slopes and we squat with family and acquaintances. A year later Father signs for the quitrent farm Ezeljacht in the Upper Lange Cloof, where the pasturage is more abundant. Father and the older sons and the Hottentots build a house. A reed partition divides the interior into two rooms. The bulrush roof trails on the ground. Christina bears more children of whom two sons and two daughters survive.

When the rest of the house is stunned to sleep by shock, I stay sitting and looking at my father while the fire in the hearth slowly fades. That morning I am eight and overwhelmed; every now and again I get up and feel him getting colder. Today, in my all-seeing, I look back. I see my beloved father lying there in his house like the houses of other migrant farmers. Habitations of which purse-lipped English travellers will one day write that they look more like the lairs of animals than the homes of human beings. At the time of his death he’s long since been totally routed by the woman and her ten children. A poor man, his estate barely seven hundred rix-dollars. A lifelong, very gradual and inexorable surrender. A fatal politeness and compliancy that would have rendered even the feeblest resistance to the poison from the veldt too self-assertive for him.

By late morning Mother is assigning tasks like every blessed day. The bustling runs its course around the body, displayed on the cot. On the floor lies a little posy of heather that somebody placed on the body and that fell down and that nobody picked up again.

I try playing with my brothers and sisters. My brother with the long arms carries me around on his shoulders. My sisters want to hold me and cry. The younger brothers and sisters seek comfort from me. I don’t know how to comfort. I slap my youngest brother when he starts crying and then he bawls more loudly. I go and hide against the house, underneath the window. Mother is standing by the body with her arms folded. She sees me, walks to the window and looks straight through me and pushes the wooden shutter back into the window opening. I walk around the house and enter by the door. Mother is standing next to the body again. I press my head into the dark and soft pleats of her dress. She places a hand on my shoulder. The hand moves over my back and rubs up and down and presses me close and then drops to her side. I look up at her and she says something that I forget instantly and I walk to the river and strip shreds of bark from the trees and watch them floating away on the water and throw stones in their wake. By afternoon two of my sisters come looking for me and press me to them and start wailing again. The sun shifts; I wander around the yard. My brothers are all busy and grumpy and nobody has a job for me and nobody wants to play. I inspan my knucklebone oxen on the dung floor.

Get out from under my feet, she says.

I’ll be good, Mother.

Go and play outside. You can’t be a nuisance in the veldt.

I’ll sit still, Mother.

Outside! There’s nothing there for you to break.

The sun sets. The moon rises. I lie between my brothers and sisters in the front room and listen to our mother snoring in the bedroom. I hold the sister closest to me as tight as I can. Until she wakes up and knees me away and turns over.

At the funeral I watch them weeping. Something barks me awake in the night. I get up from the heap of over-familiar bodies slumped on top of one another like a litter of backyard kittens. I walk away, I stand still. The house is a dull smudge against the stars. I turn away, walk on, turn around and look at the house again to see if anybody is coming to look for me. If anybody should rush out of the house now, I’ll run away, but not as fast as I can. One of my older brothers will catch up with me and plough me into the dust and drag me home and flay me.

I walk to the house of my half-sister Geertruy, my godmother Geertruy and her new husband, David Senekal, at the far end of the farm, and I don’t look back again. The moon is hanging too heavily; the treetops can barely hold it up. The farm is big, more than three thousand morgen, and on this night much bigger. It is cold.

I stand still, look around me. Geertruy is not far away. If I go and knock there in the middle of the night, she’ll carry on about it. Mother is not far. If I go back there, my sisters will wake up and comfort me.

I sit down against a red rock that looms up from the scrub like a gravid hippopotamus. I dig next to the rock. The soil soon becomes friable; I dig further. I curl up in my hole against the rock lying hard behind me and of which I cannot imagine the nether end. I scrabble soil all over me. I press it hard against me like the back of my sister. Everywhere herds and flocks and swarms are calling to one another; they warn and threaten and lure. Once I see steam rising out of a pair of nostrils against the pale moon and then the eyes glittering in the bush and then nothing except wings breaking branches. The moon glides past and reflects against the rock above me and spills out onto the ground in front of me. The little I can see in the meagre reflection of the distant light tells me I am safe, and beyond that, I tell myself, everything I hear is only the wind in the brushwood.

I wait by the side of the yard until the people start stirring. I knock at the door. Geertruy opens and takes me inside and spreads a straw mat in front of the fire in the living room.

A few months later Mother marries Jacob Senekal, the young gallows-bait brother of Geertruy’s David. Mother is forty-eight and Jacob twenty-eight, but Mother is a pretty woman with a good many teeth for her age. By candlelight she looks younger than Geertruy. Two years later our grieving mother buries Li’l Jacob as well. The clods have hardly covered the coffin when a next Jacob arises, one Helbeck, who comes to share her bed and brood at Ezeljacht.

I’ve not been away from home for long. I have trouble sleeping in the strange house. I cuddle up to the kaross, think back to the bodies of my brothers and sisters who kept me snug on such nights. I steal into the other room where the family sleeps and crawl in next to Geertruy and David and their child. Dumb-dick David chases me out of the house. The next morning after we’ve consumed our daily eggs and griddlecake in silence, Geertruy takes me aside and explains the sleeping arrangements here. She presses me to her and holds me like that and I don’t let go and then she takes my arms from her. She goes into the house and gives the baby breast and when that dog-dick David catches me peeping, he gives me a thrashing and the next day the piece of putrid pig’s pizzle wallops me once more.

Geertruy is sitting with me under the tree, so old and gnarled nobody knows any more what kind of a tree it is. It is so tall, I’ve never managed to climb more than halfway up it. On Tuesday mornings she teaches me to write in Dutch. It is hot, but I draw the kaross closer around me. Last night I dreamt. I was against the red rock again, I covered myself with soil again. Then I sank away, the soil covered my face, poured into my nose and mouth. In the dream I suffocated. I woke up cold and wet and hurt. I opened the door, coaxed one of the yard dogs inside. The dog settled on my kaross; I snuggled up against him.

The dog is called Ore, for his large flapping ears. He is sitting next to me under the tree. I am still cold. Geertruy is teaching me about zijn and hebben, being and having.

Ik ben, zij is, het is, jullie zijn, she says, I am, she is, it is, you are. Wij zijn. Zij zijn. We are. They are.

She waits for me to recite the list. I look at the white sunlight beyond the shade of the tree. The soil is quaking with heat.

Ik heb, u heeft, jij hebt, zij heeft, hij heeft, het heeft, jullie hebben, she says, I have, you have, thou hast, she has, he has. Wij hebben, zij hebben. We have, they have.

I repeat after her, make a few mistakes so that the lesson can carry on as long as possible. Only she and I. We have each other and are of each other. Hebben and zijn, to have and to be. The house and the other people are over there. I shuffle closer to her, try wriggling myself in under her armpit.

When do I zijn, when do I hebben? I ask.

You use zijn if you are talking of something that is on its way, to somewhere else, but a particular somewhere else. From here to there. In a direction. Verbs that speak of something that is moving, changing.

Oh, I say, and understand not a whit of it.

Coming, beginning, dying, shrinking, seeming, preventing, staying, looking, appearing, touching. And becoming, she says.

Becoming?

Yes, everything that becomes.

What does not become? I ask.

She is silent, looks up into the body of the tree, the branches above us as thick as crocodiles.

Zijn for departing, she says. Zijn for jumping in, for walking past, climbing up.

My teeth are chattering. I fiddle with the kaross, put my arm around the dog.

Coen, she says, note well. We say verbs are words of working, because words can work hard if you yoke them properly like willing oxen. Words are tools. You must learn to use them like a saw or a hammer. Come, think of more words that take a zijn.

Falling? I ask. Sinking?

Yes, she says. Always zijn.

She presses me against her, strokes the kaross.

Remember, Coen, what you are must be more than what you have. Most verbs need a hebben, but don’t forget the zijn. Zijn is how you grow from the inside. One day when you are old, you’ll see how your zijn, your being, has grown, big and strong like this tree. As long as you’ve given it enough water. Hebben is what you can count, everything you’ve accumulated.

What do you mean, Geertruy?

She pretends to be hearing something near the house.

I hear the baby crying, she says.

Wij hebben elkaar; wij zijn van elkaar. We have each other; we are of each other.

Damnation David flattens me with a blow one evening when I correct the head of the household’s pronunciation of the Dutch God’s High Dutch Word, and he thrashes me half to death when I drive the cattle into the kraal too late, and he beats the shit out of me when I sit too still in the house and look at him and smile.

I don’t want to bore you. A year after I ran off, I walk over to Mother’s homestead. Ore follows me at a trot. Mother is still pretty and the first Jacob is still alive behind his milky gaze. Mother is yelling at the Hottentots. She kicks a suckling pig that’s forever under her feet. She sees me coming, goes into the house and comes out with her hair under a bonnet. She awaits me at the door.

And to what do we owe this honour?

Good day, Mother.

Yes, good day. You’re thin. Don’t they feed you?

We stand and talk at the door and she doesn’t ask me why I ran away and I don’t ask her if she misses my father. While we talk, she directs the affairs of the farm with hand gestures and biting commands. I start to say good bye; she tells me to wait. She goes indoors and returns with the clothes that I left there and that are now too small. She says if they don’t fit me any more, I can pass them on to Geertruy’s offspring.

It’s a girl-child, Mother.

What is that to me.

I walk back to David Dunderhead’s house. On the way I chuck the clothes into the rhinoceros bush. A cloud of thistle seeds puffs up. I watch the sun setting. See the mountains grimacing with golden teeth. The kloof turns into a flared-open snout. If you live here, you wait for the clamping shut of these jaws you call home, you wait for the gnashing to commence.

Not far from the homestead Ore comes to a standstill. He listens to the distant barking of other dogs somewhere in the veldt behind us. The barking sounds different to that of the yard dogs. His tail creeps up between his legs. He comes to stand against me, he sniffs the air. Yowls and growls stick in his throat. The barking dies away. Ore trots on ahead, anxious to reach his own yard.

Sometimes I go back and talk to Mother. Sometimes she rubs my shoulders and says I’m going to grow tall, tall as my father, one day perhaps taller. Sometimes I touch her cheek and then I feel a little muscle contract when she clenches her jaw. She and Helbeck will move away shortly after my fourteenth birthday and I’ll never see her again.

With my father’s inheritance I buy two cows and a dozen sheep. David Dimwit lets them graze on his part of the farm and they multiply. At eleven I am taller than my brother-in-law; at thirteen I’ll be more than six feet tall. During the day I herd cattle with Saterdag, a Bushman child, perhaps a year or so older than I, but younger of body, named, for no particular reason, for the sixth day of the week.

David Donkey-dick caught Saterdag’s mother before his birth. Fortified with brandy and the singing of a few hymns, Demon David and the surrounding farmers ventured into the veldt that day to hunt Bushmen. Saterdag’s mother told him about that day’s hunt: the Hottentots lure the Bushmen out into the open and the Christians await them with flintlock muskets. The farmers’ lead runs out and they pour stones into the barrels and carry on shooting. They round up the surviving men and cut their throats, since they’ve run out of ammunition. The creatures don’t know this. The empty rifles pointed at them make them submit completely. They stand awaiting death with their eyes already fixed on some other destination. The women with babies and children younger than six are divided up between the farmers and taken to the farm and made to live among the Hottentots. The women are given to Hottentot men and the children to Hottentot women to raise, so that their savagery can be tamed. When another Bushman tribe is noticed in the district, Saterdag’s mother disappears one night, leaving him on the farm, her child who no longer was her child, but from an early age had taken after the farm hands among whom she was held captive.

I play with the Hottentot and Bushman children, we throw claystick and stones, we fish and steal eggs and fight. I play with the children but I don’t befriend them. It’s only Saterdag who keeps following me around. The Christianised children call us David and Goliath. When they pelt us with stones, David hides behind Goliath, the biggest and smallest whippersnappers on the farm. No stone is going to make this Goliath fall upon his kisser. I’m not the goddam farmer’s godforsaken son. I’m more at home among the huts than near the homestead. The children don’t treat me like a Christian. I don’t anger easily and I put up with the teasing, but sometimes something cracks and then for weeks only Saterdag dares come close to me. My clothes are forever either too small or too big. When in one year I outgrow three pairs of shoes, Geertruy gives up trying to shoe me. At the homestead I am on my own. Saterdag doesn’t venture into the yard. He remembers what his mother told him about the Christians and their guns and how a horse shod with iron can trample a Bushman to shreds.

One fine day in my twelfth year David Deathshead wallops me a last time. I hit back. He picks up his tooth from the ground and the next day he breaks a Hottentot’s collarbone with his fist.

That afternoon I spy on him to see how one skins a leopard. Geertruy comes walking up. My swine-syphilis godfather’s arms are dripping blood and fat up to the elbows.

I can’t chase him away, David.

You must do what you have to do. I’ll pay him a wage, but that savage is no child of mine.

He is a child.

Did you see how he hit me? Have you seen how he looks at me? How he laughs at me.

He’s not laughing at you.

He laughs.

One of the farm workers knocks me awake where like every night I am still lying under a kaross in the living room. Ore grumbles in his sleep. There were wild animals in the sheep kraal, says the herdsman. Three ewes have been bitten to death. I’m the man of the house. The braggart-boss of this poxy farm is on his way to the Cape with a wagonload of butter and hides. I run to the kraal, Ore enjoying the game, snapping at my heels. The toothmarks are all over the bodies, the innards have been lugged out and have caked dry, the blood a crust on the dry grass. I am twelve years old and have been herding cattle for years and know that their lives are my life. My mouth gushes gob and I retch. Ore licks up the vomit. I go to fetch gun and ammunition from the house. I clamber up a chair, grab the muzzle-loader lying above the door over the plastered-in kudu horns and for the whole goddam day I follow the tracks. The yard dog sniffs at every bush we walk past. The further we walk, the more uneasy he becomes. By late afternoon I find two abandoned Hottentot huts next to a third that was burnt down years ago.

The ground around the huts was once cleared, the stones of the fireplace are still arranged in a circle, but today everything is overgrown. Grasses tendril in between smashed earthenware bowls. The bones of the erstwhile inhabitants lie scattered and half-sunk into the ground. I pick up a long thighbone and examine the toothmarks. I step on a half-buried skull. Ore yelps, leaves a puddle and skedaddles into the bushes. I call after him, but he’s gone. In the biggest hut I find two little skulls. I pick up one. A lead pellet rattles in the echoing cupula.

I look around me: they are everywhere.

A pack of dogs surrounds me. Ruddy-brown hair in ridges on the back, like jackals with longer legs, the younger ones born after the skulls had long been empty, the whole lot of them gone feral years ago. One of the oldest gasping in between the growling. The ancient dog’s fur is mostly scuffed bare, a thong with a few beads still around the neck. Did the gnawn thighbone lying over there belong to the person who plaited the thong? They encircle me on nimble paws. I’m twelve and I’m pissing my pants. The young dogs are strong and lithe and beautiful. Just when I think I can track their circles, one ricochets hither and thither on some freakish impulse in defiance of all pattern. The foremost dog’s muzzle swivels close to the ground, a hairy fin across his back. He is redder than the others, larger. His teeth are bared, his eyes are alert and his growl is soft, so soft. It’s the bitch behind him, the one I can’t see, that lunges for my throat. I throw her off me. She hits the ground. I stamp with my foot until the ribs break. A male with a gash across his snout is on top of me already and the butt of the gun slams into its head just in time. I pull the trigger, the next dog’s lower jaw disappears in a spray of blood and bone. The thunderous crack, the dogs berserk, snap at each other, retreat into the bushes foaming at the mouth, strong streams of piss. I am out of breath, I have been shouting without being aware of it. I have time to reload before they approach once again from the bushes. After every shot they retreat, then attack again. I shoot three dogs, one after the other, before the red dog stands his ground and the others fall back. The dog leaps the gun out of my hand. We are on the ground and at each other’s throat. He bites me in the arm, the blood spurts out instantly and blinds him. I grab hold of him and kick him to one side and pick up the impossibly heavy gun. The red devil is on top of me again, the even redder butt connects him in a soft spot. I get to my feet, the other dogs are on top of me. There are bite wounds all over my body and the blood is flowing freely. I ram the barrel down the gullet of the nearest dog and pull the trigger and the creature explodes from the inside out, all over the others. The gang disappears into the thickets. I sink back into the sand, crawl into the nearest hut. In front of me stands the red dog; in the dusk he growls contentedly. The gun is not loaded. The only bullet is rattling somewhere inside the skull of a child. The teeth are bared, slaver drips onto the ground, dust puffs up from the trampling paws. I am on all fours in the entrance. The dog is standing under the hole in the centre of the roof, as if trapped in a pillar of sunlight. I am on my knees, grab hold of the branches around the entrance and drag them down to the ground. One side of the hut collapses. There is no way out any more. I crawl towards the dog. He growls and barks and snaps at the air. He is young but fully grown. On my hands and knees we are of a height. I carry on crawling. I can feel his breath on my cheeks. The beast starts backing off. It snaps. The jaws smack in the air, echoing under the domed roof. I creep forward. The dog retreats until it stands cornered against the grass wall. I glower at him, the dark eyes in which I am reflected. For a moment we are deathly silent. Then I bark. I bark as loudly as I can, till my throat is raw. Just listen to the yells and barks and everything in me exploding out of my belly and lungs, out through my teeth. Somewhere amidst the racket the dog is upon me and I bite and tear and bark till my voice and teeth and jaws give in. I open my eyes. The dog is lying against me, on its back, tail folded up over its pizzle in a pool of foaming piss that drains away into the soil. See: Coenraad de Buys gets to his feet and spits out the ear of the dog.

The dog is motionless, except for the waves of breath rippling through its body. I am dizzy, my shirt and trousers heavy with blood. I walk backwards, lift the reeds, and carry on walking backwards into the full sunlight. Only when I reach the bushes do I turn my back on the hut and the dog inside. I walk back to the farm, my legs and arms covered in bruises and bite marks. The blood prickles and pumps in every lesion, separately and simultaneously. The sun grows cold and small behind the mountains, but I am still far away from the homestead. I make a fire in the clearing before the moonless dark prevails. I scrabble the soil loose so that I can lie softer, scatter sand over myself. The sand scratches my wounds, but it is warm. I hear a rustling outside the firmament of firelight. I see the glowing eyes of a dog in the bushes. Ore? I murmur. I want to get up but can’t. The red dog comes closer, sits down just outside the circle of fire. I lie back and then I see nothing more behind the thousand eyes of the flames.

By milking time I’m back in the yard and collapse and the maid rinsing bowls by the house screams and a Hottentot runs out of the kraal and carries me into the house and I hear Geertruy exclaiming and I only wake up the next day. For days on end my godmother follows me around, watching for signs of rabies. I see her looking. I don’t tell a soul about me and the dog in the hut. I am not rabid, but note well, I now move differently. The stronger I grow, the lighter my step. Do you see how I sniff the morning air, my noise raised like a snout? How I perk up before anybody else hears anything? At night I no longer open the door to that yard dog. The wounds do not fester, but blood is blood and blood has mingled. Listen to Geertruy talking to the house maid:

The child’s been bitten badly. He’s caught something from the animals, but what, Mientjie, that I couldn’t say.

Two weeks later I’m in the veldt again with the cattle. The cattle look around uneasily; then I notice the red dog with one ear. He doesn’t come any closer, but makes sure that he is seen. This time the rest of the pack are with him, in the underbrush behind the red one. The one-eared male ventures out of the trees on his own and stands in the long grass and gazes at me before once again slinking into the dusk.

I grow bigger and stronger. The house also grows. The more the Senekals realise they’re not going anywhere, the more cramped the little house feels with its four-foot walls and its reed roof. Pasturage is not bad here, they say, water not scarce. A new, bigger baking oven is in due course added to the house. A room is built on and yet another later on.

At the age of fourteen I move out of the Senekal homestead. I build a hut on the edge of the yard. I steal a few planks from Duffer David. Reeds and clay from the river. Rocks that I go and hew out when I feel the urge to beat up somebody. Geertruy is starting to show again with a second child. Klein Christina, named for her grandmother the runaway bitch, has turned six and is all over the house, already with the Buys bloody-mindedness. My hut is full of bulges and eruptions like the pimples on my face. The rocks and planks form straight lines; intersected by the arches of reed and tumid clay. A house it is not. Geertruy says I haven’t grown into my long fingers yet. Dim David says I’m a carpenter’s arse. He’s right: I can shoot and climb mountains, but hammers and nails are dumb and dangerous in my paws. I am ill at ease in the homestead; ill at ease in my body. On horseback I have a good seat, but even in my own hut I am antsy. As soon as I’m inside, I want out, and as soon as I’m out, I miss my den. Every few weeks I demolish part of the hut, build a new section and another bit collapses. I can never decide where the window should go. Every day or two I bash another window hole into the reed-and-branch wall facing onto the rocky hills. After three months I break out the whole wall and plant a thick wagon-tree trunk to take over the load-bearing function of the wall. Now I can see what I want to see. In the hut is a low table of leftover planks at which I can sit cross-legged on the ground. I dig a hollow in one corner in which I cover myself with hides at night.

I’m forever fiddling with the framework of the hut. The roof sinks ever lower. A cracking sound at night, a few thin branches snap. An almighty crash, the whole lot shudders, and a portion of roof settles on the ground. Geertruy replaces the hide blinds in front of the homestead windows with wooden shutters – unglazed, but more in keeping with the standards of the neighbours. Before the onset of winter I plaster the outside of the hut with clay to keep the heat inside and the rain outside. At the homestead the door opening makes way for the chimney shaft of stone. The door moves to the side of the house. Inside the hut I’m forever digging away at the hollows to make them deeper. Dipshit David builds his walls higher, plasters them, whitewashes them. I visit the homestead less often; it turns into more of a permanent residence by the day. Officials journey past and they inspect and record and approve.

The Senekals’ house arises in the course of months, inconspicuously and prudently the thing burgeons and bulges like a whitewashed anthill. The walls whiter by the day, until one morning you could swear that there were two suns rising, one on each side of me; my hut sinks ever deeper to the level of a jackal lair.

I crawl into my hut, curl myself up and look at the stars. Orion looms overhead. I grow fast and go to sleep quickly. When I’m not too tired I measure my shaft. One of these days an ell! Believe me, I can squirt up to six feet already. The Hottentots give me dagga. At times I miss company, but as soon as I find it, I want to get away as fast as possible. I take long walks till far into the night. On my way back I usually loiter past the extinguished dung-and-bush fires next to the Hottentot huts. The grass is showing yellow already one early morning when I crawl in among Saterdag and his people where they’re all lying in a heap snoring and fighting for the few hides on the floor. The next morning they go their way as usual, as if I’d always been sleeping there. Three weeks later it just seems simpler to go and lie among them again when my jackal hole feels too big.

When I’m not hunting, I’m in the veldt with the cattle, and often there is no light in my hut for nights on end. Geertruy asks me now and again where I sleep, but gets no reply out of me. In the morning before daybreak I sometimes walk down to the stream and drill a hole in the river clay and take off my clothes and poke my prick into the hole and stretch myself out flat on the earth with arms and legs spread and when I shoot my load, I push my face into the soil. So there, you wanted to know it all, didn’t you. I wash myself in the river. After a particularly energetic clay-bashing there is a strange rash that leaves me feeling feverish and I pray all night for forgiveness and healing and the next day I’m even more feverish and I’m shitting water and I go back to the river and I bash my bride with conviction till I see visions and fall asleep on the clay body of the riverbank and when I wake up I can remember the dream and my fever is broken.

I’m sitting in the sun against the stone wall of Geertruy’s kitchen, oiling my rifle. Nowadays Geertruy has to invite me formally to a meal. I seldom turn down these invitations, but I never just turn up out of the blue. When I’m invited, I always arrive at the homestead early. Then I settle down outside and find something to occupy my hands while I watch the Senekal children playing with their minder. Maria, with the Malay eyes and the Hottentot hair. She’s younger than me, but her body is ripe and ready. I chiselled out the star of Diana on the butt of the rifle myself and set a copper star into it. As soon as I touch a gun, my hands get clever, smaller, slimmer. I oil the wood of the baboon-butt. I follow the grain of the stock, my nose pressed to the wood. I coat the barrel with a different oil and a different cloth. The trick is not to manhandle the barrel. Take your time. For a while just see how slowly you can do it. The cloth mustn’t press on the metal, it should just touch. And then again a vigorous polishing till the metal grows burning hot. I never speak to her. I clean the rifle or cure a hide or smoke. Especially when David Devil-cramp is in the offing, I smoke furiously and wait for him to say something. At table he will then slap at an invisible flea or make some comment about my clothes smelling like a Hotnot’s.

There are fleas all over, David, Geertruy will then say.

But at least we try to smoke the creatures out. Once in a while. We try … He doesn’t try.

I want to brag to Maria. I want to tell her that I’m one of the best-known hunters in the area. I’m one of the big shots. For weeks on end I’m away with the men of the district who come to fetch me for the hunt. They always bring me a horse. There’s only one here at the Senekals’ and I’m not allowed near him. Sometimes they invite his excellency Sad-sack Senekal along, but mainly not. The two of us don’t ride in the same commando. As soon as Geertruy loses sight of us behind the first ridge, we’re at each other’s throats. When it’s a punitive expedition, we both of us have to go along, but for hunting they choose one of us at a time. And I’m the one who never misses a shot. I smoke my pipe and make showy smoke rings within smoke rings, but find no word to say to Maria.

While we’re eating, Maria sits cross-legged in the corner with the children. She teases Stienie and waggles a ragdoll in front of her face till the little one starts crowing and rolls face down on the kaross. Maria’s dress strains over her buttocks, oh her buttocks, and shifts up to where an inch of thigh shows above the knee.

At age fifteen I shoot my first elephant. Because I’m not of age I’m dependent on the big-dicks to dispose of the hides and tusks. I get a fraction of the payment for my own pocket. The other hunters soon cotton on to the fact that I don’t have much truck with money. I’ll swop tusks and hides with them for a better gun. Sometimes I keep some of the hides for my hut. The hunt itself is enough for me. Mostly I go hunting on my own. After I’ve spent a few days in the veldt on my own, horseless and shoeless, everyone says I’m easier to get along with. Geertruy tries to get me to give up blundering into the bushes on my own, but without much conviction. She knows it’s better for everybody’s peace of mind. If they keep me in the yard for too long hauling butter barrels or thatching roofs, then everyone gets to know about it. Even Saterdag is given it good and hard if he nags at me on such days. Back from a hunting trip, I’m usually invited to supper straightaway, because apparently I’m then well behaved at table. Of course on such days there is also for a change enough meat to share. My first lion? A mangy male, an aged loner, kicked out of the pride. Was almost as if the beast wanted to be shot.

Geertruy dishes some more meat for David the Dreck and asks if I’ve had my fill. No, Sister, on the contrary.

On the hunt on my own my circles around the yard become ever wider. If my duties on the farm permit, I nowadays stay away for a week or more. In the hunting ground my ears prick up at every branch that snaps. Every drop on a blade of grass is perilously suspended. My sweat and the sweat of the quarry. The twittering in the trees. The piss against the trunks and all the thresholds of demarcated territories in which loud-mouthed males rule. I criss-cross it all with my gun. I know the rules of the veldt. The better I get to understand the rules, the freer I become. In the veldt I can mark, bark, fight and piss out the limits of my own life among the other creatures. In a Christian home you are coddled while you are small and stupid, but you gradually become ever less free the better you get to learn what is expected of you. In a whitewashed house every little copper jug must be polished and every little carpet must be beaten every morning, but all around you as far as the eye can see and further it’s just dust and stone and bush. In the veldt nothing is dirty. A grey stone does not need polishing. A thorn tree does not need dusting.

I excuse myself from the table, go and sit on the kaross with the children and the minder with the skin smelling of fat and herbs. I unpack the wooden blocks on the dung floor. Geertruy and her Appointed Master pretend not to see me at their feet. They talk more loudly and chew with more conviction. The conversation stumbles and bumbles, they struggle to stuff my springbok meat down their gullets. I pick up the little one, who starts bawling. Geertruy sends out the children and their minder to the back room. I take my seat at table again. My godparents eat in silence. The thighbone in the dish still has quite a bit of meat on it. I start carving off the meat; then I take the bone and push my chair back. I put my crossed legs on the table, my clodhoppers under my godfather’s nose. I tear a bit of meat off the bone, smile. The father of the house jumps up, slams the door behind him. Geertruy shakes her head, follows her husband out of the room. My springbok is delicious.

Saterdag and I are sitting and smoking near the herd of cattle in a stretch of gnawn-bare pasturage. It’s too hot to talk. We’re sitting under a large protea bush, our eyes swollen from the previous night that turned into morning and the sun that rose more blindingly than ever.

At night we steal karrie, the honey beer of the Hottentots. We make a fire and nobody misses us. We squat on our haunches and sometimes the one-eared dog comes to sit with us before the hordes of eyes like stars in the undergrowth recall the dog to the pack and they fade into the brushwood. There are evenings when we lose fist fights and start them, evenings when the beer emboldens us to walk across to gaggles of giggling Hottentot girls.

I scratch at my first growth of beard. Clumsily and showily I clean my pipe with a long thorn. The headache throbs behind my eyes. Snot-slime Senekal’s shepherd dog, goddam good-for-nothing Ore, is lying in the grass. The only sign of life the tail that flicks at a fly now and again.

Among the leaves of the protea above us a spider is spinning in a bee. The legs of the red-bellied spider move fast and featously. It spins threads around the bee’s wings, avoiding the sting. The bee’s abdomen aims its useless poison dart at the spider. Every movement enmeshes it further. The eight-footed attack is launched simultaneously from all quarters and on all fronts. The wings vibrate faster and faster the more restricted their space becomes. The humming of the bee becomes ever more frantic, ever more furious, until the quarry’s last counter-attack comes to nothing and the bee subsides. The sting is no longer trying to sting. The wings go still. It can’t move any more. It’s not that the bee gives up. The bee never gives up. It fights and weakens until there is nothing left of it. Saterdag leans forward, puts out a hand to release the bee from life. I push a hand to his chest.

Let be.

Saterdag looks at me, then looks away, straight in front of him. Intently I watch the slow and purposeful cruelty until the spider is satisfied that the bee will never escape and, after a last caress over the cocoon of the quiet quarry, hoists itself up a thread of its own creation. I start loading the rifle, pour in the gunpowder and, instead of a lead pellet, a stone. I get up, stretch myself and look down at Saterdag.

Run.

What?

Run.

Saterdag jumps up, runs. I fire a shot into the air. The sheep scatter in all directions, the herd all of a sudden hundreds of individual sheep. Saterdag does not look around, runs faster. I carefully put down the gun, race after him. Saterdag swerves left and right through the undergrowth. I storm straight through the slangbos and cat thorn, my leather pants soon full of snags. Sodomite Senekal’s Ore charges along, an imbecile frenzy over the sudden excitement. Just before the tree line I plough the Bushman into the ground. I catch up with him at a run and without slowing down I run into him from behind and end up on top of him. Saterdag starts struggling free. I push his hands against the ground until our breaths stop racing. The farm dog comes closer inquisitively to make sure the game is over. The tail is wagging and the tongue is hanging out. The slavering fool tripples around us. I sit up straight and smack the brute across the snout so that it retreats yowling.

Let the dog be, Buys. What’s he done to you?

It’s no dog.

He’s the best sheepdog we have.

That’s because it’s more sheep than dog.

Ore is a good dog.

A dog with a name is no goddam dog any more.

Saterdag shakes his head and walks behind me. We start herding the sheep.

What’s eating you?

We can’t sit around on our butts all day.

Like every year, the Senekals attend the cattle auctions. Apart from Communion it’s the biggest agglomeration of the year: three days of chitter-chatter with everybody from all over, three days of grubbing and boozing and swopping and cheating and here and there a smidgeon of adultery. I’m foreman and have to go along to see to the cattle. David Dumbwit and I steer clear of each other, speak only when necessary. His blatherskite buddies are there; I have my affairs to see to. It’s good to get out among other people, people you don’t feel you want to murder.

At the auction grounds there’s a fellow in the saddle fresh from France who does things with a horse I’ve never seen before. Look, it seems as if the horse isn’t even conscious of the rider, so liquid its movements and so subtle the rider’s commands. Man and horse merge into one new and strange animal. The hoofs are lifted high, are put down firmly, as if the horse wanted to expend all its power and passion in the lightest footfall, as if its whole being depended on each step, as if all movement were display and all movement were totally subjected to an invisible force that brooked no blemish. The rider is without past or future. He is sheer arms and legs, stirrups and saddle and reins, everything attuned to the tiniest tremor in the horse’s body.

Just see how cockily he stands there, the young Buys, the stuff-strutter with the feather in his hat and his hand in his side. Just see them standing there talking to each other, the horseman in French and broken High Dutch and Buys in the ever-mutating Dutch of the Cape Christians. See how hand gestures take over when words fall short. How young Buys interrogates him until the man manages, after a few unsuccessful attempts, to excuse himself.

The first morning back on the farm I saddle Sweat-stain Senekal’s horse. One of the farm women goes and tells the boss, who bears down upon me all shouting and swearing. Who the devil do I think I am to mount his horse? I bring the horse to a standstill, then take it through a few of the dance steps that the Frenchman showed me. David Dogshit falls silent. He stands for a while watching me. Before walking away, he mutters that I may borrow his horse once I’ve completed my day’s tasks.

Every late afternoon I’m in the saddle and the moon is high before I walk the horse to cool it down. I’m informed that Soup-socks Senekal tells the whole world except me how surprised he is that he and this strange pipsqueak share an interest in horses. I can see how it pisses him off when the horse is more responsive to this uncouth hooligan than to him. I make sure that he’s present when with great fanfare I rechristen the horse as Horse. I make sure that he sees I’m watching when the beast no longer responds when he calls it by its old name. After a few weeks he’s inclined to forbid me once again to get near to Horse, but Geertruy says his word is his bond. I’ve practised and perfected a smile that I keep at hand just for moments like these, a smile specially crafted for my beloved godfather.

During that year and the following you can come and look for me among the huts of the farm folk. On such a summer’s evening I’m sixteen and loitering among the fires. Children hang about me and I lift them up on my shoulders. They crow with pleasure and their parents call them in. I walk past the hut where I know she lives, a few times, and ask nobody about her and she doesn’t appear. I go and sit with a group of young Hottentots and we talk about the cow and her udder that started festering that afternoon. One of the Hottentots has a birthmark on his face and vomits on the fire and the others laugh and I see her nowhere.

On a later, cooler evening you can find me next to a fire drinking beer with two old cattle-herds who talk of drought. Now and again they peek at me. I sit and drink what they have and promise to give them back the next morning what I’ve drunk and they laugh because they must and say I’m welcome and I don’t ask them about her and much later I get up and walk to another fire.

In winter the wood is wet and the fires smoke and the old men are older and when they see me they slip into the nearest hut with their calabashes. I fight when I’m drunk and sometimes I pretend to be drunk so that I can lash out more savagely and on none of these evenings does she appear and on every one of these evenings I look up too quickly when her name is mentioned. Piccanins who should be in bed by now taunt me with her name when they see me approach. The young Hottentots laugh but not out loud. Early one morning the karrie makes me vomit and I take a young half-caste girl to my hut. I lie with a woman for the first time. I remember what she smelt like and how bony she was and that she didn’t want it and how quickly it was done. In the following weeks I jump two more and sit around with Saterdag who never talks about her.

Towards the end of winter the fires are small and the people keep indoors. I still now and again sneak up to where I can see the shadows of her and her family moving around in their hut, but I don’t come out of the bushes. One night the sky is open and the stars shower down all around me when I get up from the fire where a few souls have elected to brave the cold. It’s freezing out here, but my jackal hole is too stuffy. The men around the fire all have their reasons not to be with their wives in their huts. They sit still, the only dance being the shadows in the smoky flames. I walk into the veldt with a calabash. There’s someone walking behind me. I stop a few times, listen. The footsteps are light, but not accustomed to prowling in the dark. The figure stands still as soon as I sit down. The dark outline stands watching me for a while and then walks back in the direction of the fire. I drain the calabash. Snivel-snot Senekal’s brandy scorches my throat. I go home. As I walk I look behind me to see whether I don’t recognise one of the shadows. In front of my hut she’s waiting for me.

My father is scared of you.

Whatever for?

He sees you walking up and down in front of our hut. He says you’re wearing a trench with your feet between your place and ours.

I walk in many places.

So I hear, yes. But nowadays you only walk in one path. Father says he’s going to beat me to death if he catches me with you. He says you can’t look after a woman. He says you can’t look after yourself.

I look after myself. I built this house.

My father says this thing is no house, he says ostriches build better nests.

So let your father come and build me a house.

If you tell him to, he’ll have to do it.

What are you doing here?

Why don’t you talk to me at the Master’s house?

I talk.

You never talk.

What do you want to talk about?

We sit out the night in my ostrich nest and she tells me about her life and her parents and her little sister who died the previous year and her father who paces muttering up and down in the hut and hits them if the pacing doesn’t help and the children of Geertruy whom she looks after and knows better than I do and I tell her nothing but I listen to everything she says and I don’t forget any of it. It is morning by the time she starts talking more slowly. The most important things that had to be said have been said. She allows me to touch her. The dress she starts taking off was my mother’s and was Geertruy’s. We kiss until she has to go and skim the milk for goddam David’s goddam butter. My prick isn’t having any. When she’s gone, I work up a hard-on by hand and harrow a plot of ground where I’m lying and wipe myself on the kaross. I walk past the dairy and see her there, fishing out the spoon that has fallen into the vat. Her arms are dripping cream. I turn away, walk in the direction of the veldt, stand still and turn around again and check behind me again. See, she’s coming towards me.

She’s barely four feet tall. I lie on top of her, it’s as if she disappears into the ground under me. When she bends over me, I’m a child between her breasts. She is soft as no other body is soft and she smells of animal fat and buchu and the stuff she uses to starch Geertruy’s bonnets. The following few months we search each other out in the veldt and behind the homestead and there are toothmarks on our bodies and our crotches are raw and sore.

Regard us well, spy on us if you can, because after two centuries I can still not capture our lovemaking in words. Words like passion and all-consuming create no pictures of her nipples. Geertruy taught me to read and write properly; I know what it’s worth. Rather unbutton the front of your pants or slip a hand in under your dress and see her back straining.

See, I look much older than twenty that day when I walk far into the veldt. The thunderclouds are massing low and full. The black clouds make the plain seem brighter, the greens and yellows sharper. I pick tracks at random. I home in on an oribi spoor, then foot by foot I follow the tracks of a mountain tortoise. I follow a footfall as long as the pace pleases me, until an alluring track crosses the previous one. I follow a klipspringer in the direction of the river; I trot and run along the bank with the speed of a rhebok. The stream winds its shallow course through the poort. Then the spoor that piques my notice is above me in the air: the whistlings of swifts flashing over and past one another, as if knotting and unknotting invisible loops. On their way northwards. I wonder how far Ezeljacht is from France and my ancestors. Dancing and chirking they stretch their sable wings, the wings wapping like hands clapping all around me. They break their circles and fly high into the sky. One of the swallows skims down low over my head and disappears into the ridge across the river. For a moment it seems as if the bird flies into the rocks without breaking its speed. Then another one sweeps down, a wide curve, and it, too, flies into the rocky ridge. Two crows hover in the sky, cawing, high above the swallows. The birds funnel down, one after the other they fly themselves to smithereens against the rocks and then shoot out again reborn.

When I get closer, I see the cave on the other side of the stream. An overhanging rock in the ridge into which the swallows disappear. The place into which the swallows evanesce is more than an overhang but not yet quite a cave. In sunlight you’ll carry on past it without glancing up; in a thunderstorm it will be like a mountain stronghold to you, a palace hewn out of the earth. It’s not much of a hiding place, but it is a womb or fort for somebody searching for one or the other and not finding anything else in the vicinity.

In the middle of the stream I step into a hole, am suddenly up to my waist under water. Then I reach the reeds and a few paces up take me to the cave. I struggle through the umbrella thorn. I walk in under the overhang where the birds flew straight into the earth or should be lying smashed in front of the rock. I find them chattering in the cracks, hidden in mud nests under the overhang. The rocky roof is soot-blackened. The walls are covered in paintings.

Great vague figures in charcoal extend across the rock walls, to the left many pictures in ochre. The soil is tramped solid; generations of feet have danced here. A long, narrow gash extends a foot or so above the surface. It is dark in there and smells of dassie shit and nobody will ever know how far back it goes. Among the painted beasts are figures that are human and no longer human: dancers with the forked tails of fishes or water maidens or swifts.

I turn around to the chattering behind me. The swallows fly to and fro past the overhang. They are scarcely a few arms’ lengths away, but however close they are, they still look like far-off falcons. Believe me, the sun reflects in their right eye, the moon in their left.

The sky is emptied of their noise, my eyes on the rock face again. Neither-fish-nor-fowl people in a ring. Rust-brown figures with swallowtails bent forward, leaning on walking sticks. This drawing is small, all the figures fit easily under my hand. I jerk away my hand, wipe my damp palm on my trousers. A few figures in the centre of the scene, more prominent, with delicate fingers clenched around dancing sticks, convulsed with the power boiling inside them, and under it, next to a line tracing an upside-down arch and disappearing into the rock to the left, a school of winged creatures that, arms stretched back, swim-fly along the line, until they melt into the rock.

It seems as if the figures enter and leave the outcrops and cracks in the rock. At times the figures seem to start up from smears of paint. I can see that the drawings have been spread out against the wall since whenever, but it’s not the sheer age of it that keeps me here. Age is nothing to be proud of. I can’t get my mind round the pictures, but I keep gazing. All that I’m sure of is that the guy who painted this stuff was not confused. I walk home. The lighter clouds have been burnt away before the sun. The overhang and its swallows and picture put behind me. The moon like a faded stain of last night’s shining, still in the sky.

Months later Geertruy is making soap. She asks the children in the yard to fetch her some ganna bush for the lye. The children tell tales of a leopard lurking in the kloofs of late. She asks me to go with them to keep an eye. I drag Saterdag along for company. We find a leopard track and walk up the kloof with the children’s voices echoing behind us. At the far end of the kloof we come upon more pictures. Nothing as delicate and clear as the swallow people: faded eland and elephants against a rock without overhang where the sun and rain efface the traces of human beings.

Saterdag goes quiet and runs his hand over the drawings. I tell him about the swallow people in the poort. Saterdag remembers what he was told as a child. Stories about his mother and the old folk who once hunted in the mountains before they were brought down to sit and fatten the Senekal cattle. He tells me about the rock that is the veil between this world and another. He tells how worlds melt into one another in the caves where magicians ape nature and where people turn into birds to fly to the other side and how the drawings keep these voyages in motion. He tells it all to me as he remembers the old folk told it to him and in this way he mimics and parrots them without ever having danced like that.

I don’t pay him much attention. Saterdag drones on. Now and again the children come and listen to a fragment of story before scrambling into the ganna bush again.

Those swallows, Coenraad, they know when to move on, they know when the bad weather with its lightning comes. Nobody can catch those swallows. They fly so fast because they’re little more than wind. Those wind birds. Windvogelen.

We make ourselves small, Windvogel, I say. Like a light breeze. Then, one day, from out of the blue sky we let loose a goddam storm on them.

Windvogel, says Windvogel, deep in thought. Windbird. Yes, he says, Windvogel gets me together more than Saterdag.

I come of age and I sue Scrotum Senekal because he’s not paying me my share of the butter profits. He promised to pay me for my labour on the farm. Every blessed time we walk past the four butter-churners, it’s the same story. Swears high and low that half the proceeds of the butter will be mine as soon as I turn twenty-one. But for the last few years the wet blood-fart has been too much of a spineless slacker for the month-long journey to the Cape markets. One evening I ask him again about the butter. He grumbles in his greyer-by-the-day beard about the low prices. How the butter has started stinking by the time they get to the Cape. He whinges about the Bushmen and the foot-and-mouth and the ravening creatures lying in wait next to the road for an ox wagon. I sit back and listen with my smile. Geertruy jumps up and starts mewling and snarls something at me. She says my heart has gone cold. I say it’s because I no longer lie by their hearth like their damn dog. The case is turned down and I appeal and the magistrate rules that Snail-trail Senekal must inspan his oxen and get his hindquarters to the Cape and give me the money. So there, thank God for the powers that be. Hardly two years later the magistrate gets to hear about us again when I batter Snake-slime Senekal half to death.

With the money that I at last get out of David Doddle-dick, I sign a leasehold on a piece of fallow land near the Kammanassie Mountains, to the north and inland through the poort. It’s not quite far enough from my family, but I don’t expect very many visits. My brother Johannes abandoned the land recently when he packed up for the eastern frontier. I called there from time to time and liked the black soil, the grey underbrush, the sudden spaces opening out from the ever-stifling Cloof. I don’t tell anybody; why should I? Of my being a father I don’t say much either. What can one say? It makes Maria happy. The baby’s hair is red like my beard.

I wake Maria one morning and tell her to start packing. I fetch Windvogel and we go and herd my cattle and sheep.

Go fetch your bundle, I say. Tie it up good and fast.

The rain is on its way. I saw it the previous evening by the meagre light of the crescent moon and by morning the mist from the sea is pouring over the southern mountains, all along the Cloof like milk boiling over. Surging cold churns over the mountain until the grey mountainside disappears. The shimmering mist settles behind the trees at the foot of the mountain like a second mountain, a solid spectre. The buttermilk clouds join heaven and earth and undo both.

I fetch my saddle in the house and cart the thing on my back over the fields to David Deathwatch. I tell him that Windvogel is coming along. Bumcrack-boil Senekal is not impressed. The Bushman who grew up among his Hotnots and guzzled his food and nowadays calls himself Windvogel Whatever can’t just bugger off at will, he says. The sooner I clear out from under his feet, the better, is his decision. But if I trek, I trek alone. I smile. I have my own land. Scurvy Senekal is no longer my boss. He prattles on about how he raised me and how he fed me and that he deserves better than being dragged in front of the magistrate for a few barrels of butter. I look down at my godfather, then up and into the distance.

Windvogel wants to come along.

He can want what he wants, he’s my Hotnot or Bushman or Godknowswhat and I decide where he puts his flat feet, I don’t care what the creature calls himself nowadays.

I smile.

So what’s so bloody funny now?

I’m just thinking what you’re going to look like soon.

I was like a father to you.

I was your tame Hotnot, I was never your child.

David Damnation loses his temper and then two of his teeth when my fist meets his face. He staggers, stoops to pick up his hat, then comes upright again. On his head here below my chin I see the sunburnt bald patch.

I’m done with you. Take your stuff. Hotnot-humper.

I’m not done with you, I say.

The smile again. Then the fists again until he’s lying flat and doesn’t get up again. I chuck his saddle off Horse’s back and cinch my own. Li’l Senekal mumbles something on the ground.

I ride to the homestead and take my leave of Geertruy.

Did you say good bye to David?

After our fashion.

Go well, Little Brother.

Go well, Sis.

She doesn’t press me to her and doesn’t cry and watches me riding away on her husband’s horse in my makeshift wagon with my common-law wife and my bastard child and my Bushman friend till she can no longer see me and then, I know, she stays watching the wagon trail. I ride on and look back.

What was to follow in my wake on that yard is all too predictable: The maid who screams as Shit-shanks Senekal walks into the kitchen. Geertruy whose eyes narrow when she hears the screams. My sister who turns around in the gravel, back to her husband’s house, to face the wrath awaiting her there.

A red dog with one ear and the hair bristling on its back comes walking out of the brush into the wagon trail, sniffs the air and watches us moving past. It puts out its tongue to taste the first few drops. It trots behind the wagon. Something rustles in the bushes on the road ahead. Maria points at two more dogs trotting along in the grass. The rain sets in. Further along in the bushes another ten or so of them, spread out in front of and next to and behind the wagon in the veldt; a whole pack.

The farm has a name already, and I don’t mess with it. De Brakkerivier, The Brackish River, lies over the first ridge behind Ezeljacht, but here the soil is already of a different kind, harder, barer. It’s a part of the world that changes its nature like day and night every half-hour’s ride on horseback. The coastal forests are not far behind me; beyond the Kammanassie Mountains in front of me a semi-desert lies far and wide. Look: slangbos, thorn trees low to the ground, slate and a few ostriches pecking at the stones. We outspan and instantly form part of the background.

The wattle-and-daub hut that we devise with frames of lathing covered with clay merges with the ridge. It’s a stronger and bigger construction than the nest in which Maria and I have been living for the past few years. Windvogel and Maria help and scold and eventually take over the building when I start nesting again instead of building. I stand watching them, how nimbly their hands work, how they can plait reeds and plaster clay. I rub my hands, scratch at the calluses, but the fingers remain blunt and stupid.

A month or so later a few runaway Hottentots arrive who beg for work and they also build huts for themselves and herd my cattle and slaughter a sheep as needed. I sit and smoke and contemplate the limits of my world and do absolutely nothing.

In summer I’m thirsty all the time. I wander into the veldt and return with a skin pouch full of honeycomb, some larvae still in the comb, and a body swollen and red from bee stings. I chuck the lot into a dish and go and sweet-talk Maria to make karrie. She puts water on the fire, pours lukewarm water on the honey. She comes to sit outside with me against our reed house like an upside-down basket. She takes the clay pipe from my hand and smokes. I try to smile with my swollen face. She takes a strong puff before returning the pipe.

You must build us some walls, she says.

What for, come winter we’ll be gone again.

For what do we have to trek along with the sheep? Can’t we just send the shepherds? Settle down here good and proper?

You come and sit here. I can’t stare at those accursed kopjes year after year.

I press her to me and we kiss and I let her go and I scratch at the bee stings on my cheek. Her skin is tight over her belly again. I stroke the oiled stomach. Look how those forearms squeeze out the honey into the bowl. Look how the point of her tongue sticks out while she’s straining the karrie must through a gauze cloth into a flask.

Do you want to go for a walk? My feet need to get out.

I scratch at the blisters.

I’m waiting for the karrie.

The stuff has to ferment for days, Buys.

I’ll wait.

She walks into the veldt and disappears over the ridge, buttocks tight with umbrage. The naked child comes out of the hut. My daughter is two years old and has her mother’s mouth and her mother’s rare slave name: Elizabeth. She never cries, hasn’t really started talking yet. I try to pick her up, but she struggles free. She sits down in the dust and looks at me. Later she moves closer into the shadow of the house. Now and again she looks round and smiles; as soon as I get up and come closer, she runs into the house.

When the karrie is ready at the end of the week, Windvogel and I start drinking in the morning and by the afternoon we are racing around on two wild ostriches until Maria comes to harangue us.

But good God, Buys! Get down from there! You look like you’re sitting on a chicken! You’re going to break the bird’s back!

I jump down and chase her around a bit, then I launch an attack on the child. I fall down in the dust. She comes to stand over me and laughs with a little hand over her little mouth. I pick her up and she wriggles free. Then I’m after her again with a roar. She makes for her mother, cackling. I throw Maria over my shoulder and drop her on our bed of hides. After a while we become aware of Elizabeth peering at the two tussling, groaning bodies. Then she sees a gecko by the door.

By dusk I’m coming to my senses on the bench in front of the door. Against the waves of golden fire on the horizon the silhouette appears of an ox wagon without a canvas hood. Five withered mangy oxen trudge on, the front one without a yoke, hitched up with leather thongs like a draught horse. Two Hottentots, one in front of the oxen, the other on the wagon chest. A raggle-taggle preacher in what remains of a top hat and tails is standing on the back of the wagon loudly lamenting his depraved soul. He plucks off the last of his buttons to show me his breast, roasted red. The vagabond missionary clings to the flaps of the dilapidated wagon and shouts imprecations in German and High Dutch about rivers that will run with blood and dark men in dark nights with long knives and the spattering spit seems to dry instantly to the raw blisters on the God-crazed fool’s mouth. The Hottentots gesture feebly in my direction with flaccid arms while lashing the oxen listlessly and driving them along the road. The man scratches at his breast and becomes quite spirited when Maria appears from the reed door. The wagon is still halfway down the road when the stinker starts performing elaborate curtseys. He wishes me a prosperous harvest. He introduces himself under some or other Germanic surname. He enquires after the way to Swellendam, while the oxen plod on to Couga, further and further away from Swellendam. I smile at the man and proclaim that they are following the strait and narrow road, that it’s long and hard and overgrown with thistles, but that it is indeed the right way. The man, already bereft of his senses and now also of his destination, gesticulates grandly in my direction. He bows again before starting to curse the Hottentots for their laxity and warning them that the laggard will never attain the Joyous Jerusalem. The wagon creaks to a halt. The emaciated emissary of God jumps downs; his knees buckle under him. The flies feast undisturbed on the blisters of the babbling salvager of souls, nor are they swatted away from the cheeks of the Hottentots. He gathers a fistful of sand, kisses it and proclaims his love of this prospect and the quality of the soil and asks in a highly convoluted manner if he can help me with the harvest in exchange for a blanket and a sweet potato twice a day.

Does it look as if I plant anything?

He looks around him and sees the arid bushes and the aloes and low kopjes and the cattle way over there and the few Hottentot huts hardly distinguishable from the veldt or from my hovel. I splutter at his confusion.

You can harvest just what you like, my dear fellow.

The preacher starts orating about how the Lord nourishes each one of his creatures and how for weeks he’s been preparing meals from the Garden of God. I have an elephant rifle in my hand and I march towards the man. He grabs the whip from a Hottentot and lashes out clumsily at the oxen.

I am going, good Sir! I am on my way, the narrow way, as indicated by you! he shouts at me.

I take aim and riddle the back of the wagon with the gravel with which I’ve loaded the gun. The oxen trudge on. While reloading, I bethink myself, put the gun down, run after the wagon, jump on. In a great voice I start preaching at the dumbfounded missionary and his Hottentots. I proclaim long stretches of fever dreams from Revelations that Geertruy taught me to recite. I shout:

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast! And it said, Come and see! And I looked! and behold! A pale horse! And his name that sat on him was Death! And Hell followed with him! And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth! To kill with sword! And with hunger! And with death! And with the beasts of the earth!

I carry on harrowing the little congregation hearkening to me gobsmacked. I caution them against the forest paths leading off the strait and narrow, the black women lurking in pools in this country ready to leap upon you and the cannibals and the extirpation of the Christian by the Heathen and monsters and the beasts straight from the clefts of Hell. I castigate them in advance about the dagga and the liquor that will rot their souls and the buttocks of the women and the breasts upon which they will perish. The leader of the bedraggled little team forgets about the oxen and the ramshackle outfit limps to a halt in the middle of the road where my voice starts resounding among the kopjes. I spread my arms and square my chest and once again resort to High Dutch:

And the kings of the earth! And the great men! And the rich men! And the chief captains! And the mighty men! And every bondsman and every free man! Hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains! And said to the mountains and rocks: Fall on us! And hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb!

I fall silent. Only the cicadas and the last sentence respond in the kopjes. Then the last blast of the trump:

For the great day of his wrath is come! And who shall be able to stand?

The four men look at one another. The wagon groans into motion. I sit down flat on my arse in the wagon and laugh. The Hottentots look at me. The top hat and tails realises the peroration is over and starts mumbling to himself about blasphemy and the dissolution of the soul. I remain sitting, snorting, drunk all over again, on my way along with them in the wrong direction deeper into the wilderness, until they’ve rounded the bend at the drift. Then I jump down and go and pick up the gun and fire a last shot low over their heads and trot home. Geertruy was right: The right words and a loud voice are stronger than a whole team of oxen and pack more of a punch than an elephant gun. Maria comes walking towards me. I can barely hear what she’s shouting, but I can guess that she’s not happy with my way of receiving the men of God. I rush at her, push my head between her legs, lift her backwards over my shoulders and run straight to the conjugal bed.

If your name appears on the official list for commando service, you have to attend the annual military manoeuvres at the nearest landdrost’s offices. The business drags on for a whole week. For someone from De Lange Cloof like myself that means being away from home for more than a fortnight; to Swellendam and back is more than a week on horseback. If you have a decent horse. You have to ride your own horse half to death on the way there and take your own gun and go and blast away your own lead at a bunch of targets and consort companionably with the burghers of the district and try not to beat anybody up. Only illness or incapacity serves as an excuse – sad souls like Jacob Senekal whose poor old eyes could never see all the way to the targets.

I’m very happy sitting on De Brakkerivier. Nobody bothers me, I bother nobody and around me everything perishes and flourishes. Days dawdle like seasons. I don’t wander far from the house. Every thorn tree looks like the next one. I do, though, find it impossible to pass an anthill without churning it up with a stick.

I have no desire to ride to Swellendam to establish who’s got the prize pizzle or who can shoot straightest. Brandy is scarce and I prefer to have mine on my own. I have no desire to horsewhip old Horse, unshod and cantankerous, all the way to Swellendam. Maria’s hardly washed the blood from the new baby and I have to be on my way again. The gun I leave with Maria; if they want me to shoot, they can lend me a Company musket and melt the candlesticks on their groaning drostdy tables to provide me with bullets. I slip a dagger into my belt in case somebody decides to stalk me at night. Horse is old and crotchety but he can outrun any creature, Bushman or lion. The Buys men turn up regularly for these manoeuvres, perhaps I’ll bump into one or more of my brothers there. But I’m not going to go looking for them.

When I ride into the straggle of buildings they call Swellendam, there’s a brawl in front of the taphouse. The two farmers have both had their fill of fighting, both of them are on their knees in the street. They trade blows with long and heavy arms. Not a single blow misses its target, they’re both too tired to duck. A few churls of the civilian militia loiter around till both of them are flat on their backs and then drag them off to the cells. I go and report for the manoeuvres. The clerk charged with filling in forms realises I have no weapons with me apart from the rusty dagger. I’m fined twelve rix-dollars and this far and no further will they push me. I get onto my elderly horse and ride out of the miserable little whitewashed outpost. Only after my mortal demise and my rebirth as Omni-Buys will I read in the moth-eaten minutes what I missed. For instance that Petrus Ferreira of De Lange Cloof that year at the manoeuvres won a brand-new tobacco casket as second prize in target shooting. May the plague rot his bones.

Back among the grey bushes of De Brakkerivier I tell Maria to bundle up and tie together our domestic effects once more. I go to fetch Windvogel from under a willing and able young woman and tell him to inspan our oxen. The Hottentots see that I’m preparing to clear out. They also start gathering their few belongings. Most of them will wander further to neighbouring farms for work, but a few young ones without ties of women or children opt to take their chances with us. I fling a torch on the roof and watch the reed house go up in flames. Elizabeth dances around the house and is transfigured to a shimmer in the flames. Maria settles the baby securely in the wagon. She takes up position on the wagon chest and cracks the whip. In the year 1785 I leave behind everything I know and trek to the eastern frontier.