Читать книгу Red Dog - Willem Anker - Страница 8

And it comes to pass in these days that there is strife in the royal houses of the Caffres like unto the strife in the royal houses of Europe. While the French start honing guillotines for royal gullets, the Caffres also wipe out one another for new kings and new orders of things, and the horizon in Africa, like that in Europe, is full of smoke and empty of everything else.

If I’d known the saga of the eastern border before moving there, I’d never have set foot there. If you want to relocate to the eastern frontier, be sure to bring more munitions than books. You can survive in the here and now if you can shoot straight, but history is going to snap your spine and kick you while you’re down.

I understand that you want to get to the story; the murk of history surrounding me makes things hazy. But I was part of that bedlam, the bushes and the blood and the young Caffre girls, but also the dates. So let’s keep it short and sweet: Paramount Chief Phalo rejoins his ancestors in 1775. For his sons Rharhabe and Gcaleka, too, life is a thing full of sound and fury that has to rage itself out so that they can depart from it. Gcaleka follows his father three years later. Rharhabe, like so many fathers then and still now, has to see his son and heir, Mlawu, choke on his own blood and die rucking with a spear in his chest. He arises from the corpse of his son and fights on against the Tambookies until he also dies on the same plot of ground and the year is 1782.

Mlawu’s son is Ngqika and he still sometimes rides piggyback on his mother and plays in the dust and runs around with scuffed knees and cannot yet rule. Mlawu’s younger brother, the great general Ndlambe, assumes a seat on the adorned ox skull before the Great Hut and keeps it warm for the little prince. Ndlambe is a warrior and his people love him for it. He is big and strong and not four years old. He understands war and carries on waging war. He immediately resumes his father’s campaign against the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe, because sons wage war for their fathers. His discourse is muscular and supple like his limbs and drenched in ideas about the never-ending struggle for self-preservation and suchlike crud that in all times has fouled the lips of men who have to rule, but know only how to fight.

The Caffres have no central authority with whom the Company can negotiate. When the Company in a state of mild confusion declares a river a border and a farmhouse a drostdy and sends a retired Stellenboscher and a handful of mounted constables to guard this border, the Caffres only see a river where the border is supposed to be and they stream across it. On the eastern bank of the Fish River a drought decimates the cattle and the game, and a regent decimates the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe. The Mbalu and Gqunukhwebe and their cattle move in among the Christians and their cattle on the near side of the river. They roam across quitrent farms in quest of pasturage and game and survival, trapped between the belligerent farmers and the battle-ready Rharhabe warriors. The Christians and the Caffres both farm with cattle and both regard their cattle as their wealth. Both dwell in reed-and-wattle huts, have dominion over their wives and pray to their gods who demand similar sacrifices of flesh and fire. The Caffres have the numbers and the Christians have the fancy script of loan contracts and Bible verses. The numbers produce no algebra and the script no pretty poems, nothing but blood. The Christian tribe of Europe gets annoyed and the Mbalu tribe of Langa gets annoyed and the Gqunukhwebe tribe of Chaka melts away into the impenetrable maws of the kloofs.

Chief Langa is the brother of Gcaleka and Rharhabe and like them also a man with a temper. As tradition dictates, he leaves the stormy environs of the home of his father, the House of Phalo, as a young man and establishes his own captaincy. Langa is a hunter of elephant and rhinoceros. The House of Mbalu, renowned for its bellicosity and bravery, this most warlike tribe on the border, is named after Langa’s favourite ox and in this year of our Lord 1788 Langa at eighty-three still has all his teeth.

Farmers no longer dare leave their farms. When Cornelis van Rooijen sends his labourers to drag up thorn branches for his cattle kraal not half a mile from his house, a horde of Caffres come rampaging out of the bushes with shields and assegai and chase the wretched Hottentots back to the homestead. He says the farm is no longer his. He says they set fires, they come and ask for food with weapons in hand, they pilfer, they overgraze the veldt, they murder the tame Hottentots and they trample the wheat.

When Ndlambe and Langa combine to take up arms against the Gqunukhwebe, Chaka’s followers suffer huge losses of man and beast. They trek westward into the Colony and settle down. Langa takes almost all Chaka’s cattle; his Caffres are impoverished, therefore they hire themselves out to the farmers for food and cattle. In the late eighties of the eighteenth century there are thousands of defeated hungry people swarming into the Colony and starting to steal the farmers’ cattle. A godawful mess. Here endeth the history lesson.

At twenty-six I’m in my prime of life and all the world knows my name. My Hottentot shoots one of Langa’s warriors and the old goat dictates the letter to me that Uncle Petrus refers to. Later in 1788 I am summonsed for three schellings’ overdue tax.

The pen-pusher, with his clothes that don’t take kindly to dust, brings me the summons and stares unabashedly at the brazen Hottentot woman and the bare-bummed little bastard bustling about my knees.

Mijnheer, there is also the matter of Chief Langa who charges you with assaulting one of his Caffres? he says.

I went to retrieve my cattle. The Caffre with the cattle resisted, yes. So I chastised him. Mijnheer.

Mijnheer Buys, it is the exclusive privilege of the authorities to administer punishment.

I smile:

You have no authority over the Caffres.

I ignore the summons. It comes to nothing. Shortly after this I forge the signatures on a petition against the Company.

The surrounding farmers get to hear of my shooting skills and my lightning-fast horse. They are told that I can read and write better than any of them. They hear me talking and some of them grumble that I swear something dreadful, but they can see everybody listening to me. They come and drink Maria’s coffee and they blarney and blandish me until I agree to attend their meetings. At one such meeting of aggrieved farmers I say just enough to allow them to think that they were the ones who decided that I should draft a petition to the authorities. I record the farmers’ complaints about the Caffres and ask the authorities to investigate the matter. Five people sign their names to this: yours truly, Lowies Steyn, Johannes Hendrikus Oosthuyse, Pieter Viljee and Hendrikus Vredrikus Wilkus.

Then I write a second letter. I correct one or two spelling errors and slip in a sentence that wasn’t there before. The farmers are fed up to their back teeth, pissed off, says the sentence. If the authorities are going to do nothing we’ll go and claim back our cattle and drive the Caffres back over the Fish River ourselves. I must confess, below this second petition (dated 11 August 1788) I myself sign the names of nine people: the original signatories, excluding my name, and then also the names of Pieter de Buys, Gerhert Scholtz, Cornelis van Rooijen, Vredrik Jacobus Stresoo and Andries van Tondere. I create a distinctive signature for each of them and, even though mine is missing, every signature is sullied with the flourishes and curlicues of my own name.

Go and look by all means, the tracks have been covered up. These petitions, original or otherwise, went missing even at the time in the self-perpetuating and proliferating labyrinth of colonial red tape. The letters may have got lost, but the all-seeing VOC finds out that they are forged and they vomit accusations and judgements all over me and my good name. Any orator will tell you that the truth is the best sparring partner. At the next meeting I get to my feet and smile my smile and address the Christian soldiers.

I stand before the men, solitary amongst the accusing eyes in the front room of a crushed farmer. They look up at me, even the ones standing. I’m the tallest, the biggest man here. I open my trap and believe me, neither my wife nor my friend nor my child, neither my labourer nor my horse, has ever heard me talk like that. My voice is a honeyed bass, not the normal growl. I am voluble and fluent. My voice adapts its pace to the secret rhythms that inflame and enchant people, that persuade them that what they are hearing are lucid and logical arguments, especially where the head and the tail are wrenched as far as possible apart in my serpentine sentences, so that they convince themselves that somewhere some sense must be lurking and that in my euphonious outpouring I’m connecting up things that they have never before considered in conjunction, possibly because I end each sentence on a platitude, but one hailing from a totally different sphere to the rest of the sentence, a tail to the sentence like that of a scorpion with a sudden sharp sting at the end, the right words in the right places when they most want to hear them and then a sudden about-turn that leaves them gaping and that then inspires me all the more to new heights and clichés and makes me rampage on at ever-increasing volume while my eyes never release theirs, eyes that gullibly and hazily plead for more, eyes that cannot let me go but don’t see me at all, an audience at my feet gobbling up their own shit – which I merely dish up to them in appetising form – for sweetmeats, and never for a moment wonder about the smile that at times, during pauses in the ever-waxing sentences, fleetingly and involuntarily plays around the corners of my mouth and vanishes, and I can see that not one amongst them considers that one can smile and smile, and be a goddam villain.

I persuade the burghers that I, before the only and most supreme God, was assured that what I wrote was the truth that indeed has already taken root in the heart of everyone there present. I signed their names in the firm conviction that, had time permitted, and had I had the privilege of their presence, they would have dipped the quill and would have inked in their names themselves under my words, which if the truth be known were also their words.

The burghers gape at me. I feel bigger than my seven feet, I am kindled by my own voice. My words trickle over them like gum from a thorn tree and render the world viscous and glossy until they’re persuaded that the forgery was a forgery in form but not in spirit. Later I am informed that my audience told the pen-lickers that even though their names were forged they wholeheartedly agree with the contents and that they would at any time upon request come and furnish their names under any such document. I excuse myself as soon as I can and go and pull my pizzle under a tree.

The VOC is a company on the verge of bankruptcy with a kicked-open anthill for headquarters, and the charge of forgery, as well as the complaints contained in the offending document, leads, as in the case of my overdue rental and tax, absolutely nowhere.

In September 1789, without cancelling the lease on Brandwacht, I register in my name also the quitrent farm De Driefonteinen on the Bushman’s River, and six months later also Boschfontein, near the Sundays River Mouth.

Brandwacht has for a long time been trampled by Caffres who come here to hunt and to graze their fat cattle. In 1790 I get a licence to hunt elephants and I pack my stuff to leave. I’ll take my family to Boschfontein, where the grazing is still good and the Caffres are not so much of a nuisance. Then I’ll venture into the bundu on the track of elephants. We are busy throwing the last of the furniture onto the wagon when a cocky little man in a preposterous hat and a ruffled shirt comes riding up. With him are a few Hottentots clutching their flintlocks and their reins. This little whippersnapper introduces himself as Captain Ruiter.

I’ve heard of this gentleman. The half-Hottentot-half-Bushman deserter servant who went and squatted on the Fish River with a gang of thugs from both the races boiling in his blood. Ruiter’s gang of freebooters plundered the Caffres, until the yellow-arsed gang deserted and left him there to make peace. Not too long or he’s Chaka’s pet poodle. Now Ruiter and his Gonna Hottentots have also, like the Caffres, come and wormed themselves in among the Christians.

Captain Ruiter with a great show of formality requests permission to stay on on my property. I’ve had it with this botheration.

You stay here, what’s it to me, I say. I’m clearing out in any case, this land has been trampled to dust.

Later I will hear what a terrible nuisance the Gonnas were, how the Caffres and the commandos both apparently came to look for Ruiter on my land, and then I will laugh.

I walk into the empty house; outside, the pregnant Maria cracks the whip and the wagon jolts into life. I stand in the centre of the front room, look up at the rafters, the swallow’s nest empty and crumbling, tap my foot on the anthill floor. I built this house and lived here for almost five years and it was home and now it’s an empty shell of reeds and stone and brittle and cracked clay. I kick a chunk of slate until it gives way and a section of the wall caves in. I tap the floor again lightly, then walk out fast. I think of the earth under the house, the immeasurably heavy weight just under the thin layer of loose anthill soil. I feel something pre-human and stupendous. I ride after the wagon.

On Boschfontein there is a homestead already, a largish house that doesn’t need much work. The previous farmer left not long ago. Probably back to De Lange Cloof because the Heathens were beginning to graze too close by. Windvogel and I fix the roof and stamp the floor solid and at night I dream of dark waters under the house, stagnant black water without ripples, the smooth surface that is not disturbed, the measureless depth without end.

Houses on the frontier plain are not rooted in cellars or foundations, these huts of Christian and Heathen alike barely graze the dust, do not penetrate the earth. The hut is deposited on the soil like a nest in the veldt.

I don’t stay on Boschfontein for long. I see to it that my people are settled, and then I go to see what the sea looks like. I’ve never seen the sea. In De Lange Cloof people sometimes ventured over the treacherous rock faces of Duivelskop to go and fish, but the Buyses and the soft-bellied Senekals never developed a taste for shell snails or fish scales. For my people it was always the bush that beckoned. I stand on a dune and gaze over the water. Thought the sea would be bigger. The water is saltier than I thought. The Hottentots are minding the cattle, Maria is minding the house, I gaze into the distance.

Maria says she’s tired of forever cleaning up after everybody. She scolds me vigorously when one morning I wrap all the food in the house in a cloth and throw it onto the wagon and try to kiss her and walk away to where my human herd is waiting for me. She looks them up and down: my shadow Windvogel, Coenraad Bezuidenhout, his windbag brother Hannes and Van Rooijen who’s forever whingeing.

We venture into the kloofs to go and goad elephants. If an elephant is angry enough, you feel pins and needles all over your body and the hair on your neck stands up straight and your whole skin comes alive. Then you shoot. At home you stare into corners. Curl yourself up like an animal in its hole.

News from Europe is slow coming to the Cape. The fashions at the Castle are apparently almost a decade out of date, but the seditious ideas from France make landfall here faster than any new dress patterns. The words liberté, égalité and fraternité are insubstantial and vague enough to fly over here at speed. In Paris the citizens storm the Bastille in the name of liberty and on the eastern frontier there’s nothing left but liberty. Indeed, as is always the case with messages that have to travel too far, the French slogans have a totally different look when they arrive scurvy ridden and scuffed in Graaffe Rijnet.

After 1789 the farmers no longer even pretend to heed the Company’s death rattles or the drunken musings emanating from the drostdy. The Caffres, the Bushmen, the Christians – every last one of them more frantic and more violent by the day. Farming families flee to Graaffe Rijnet to devour the last supplies. Landdrost Woeke shilly-shallies and swills. Secretary Wagenaar resigns and the Company appoints Honoratus Christiaan Maynier in his place. Let them all muck up together!

Alliances are struck and severed; now Ndamble wants to take up arms against the Mbalu and the Gqunukhwebe with the Christians, then he combines with Langa to hunt down Chaka and Chungwa. The Gqunukhwebe disappear ever deeper into the bush of the river valleys, all along the coast as far as the Gamtoos. See, the Gqunukhwebe and Mbalu are crushed like mealies in a stamping block, like so many other people in so many other places where overripe and overblown powers press up against one another.

The Caffres soon get the message that a horse and a gun don’t make a Christian immortal. Before long they also notice that the scraps of copper and iron and the strings of beads that the Christians offer for their cattle are a swindle. The destitute leave their kraals and come to work on the farms. If the farmer neglects to pay such a Caffre, or thrashes him too often or straps him to a wagon wheel and takes a few turns with him and then horsewhips him, the Caffre goes to complain to his chief and the farmer is plundered and his house burnt to the ground. At this time many Hottentots in their turn abscond from the farms and go to stay with the Caffres because the farmers mistreat them. When the farmers come to look for their stray Hotnots in the Caffre kraals, sometimes on their own farms, the Caffres chase them away. In 1789 more than sixteen thousand Caffre cattle and a few thousand Caffres are tallied on one quitrent farm. The Christians are spoiling for a fight, but the Caffres cluster together in hordes, not one by one like the Christians who can’t tolerate their neighbours. They no longer beg for food; they now take it.

I oil my gun. I apply the wood oil liberally. Then I start polishing it slowly. Only two fingers, till both fingers are numb. Elizabeth plays around my feet in the front room. Maria is outside, jabbering with Windvogel. The window is narrow, a strip of sunlight shatters in shards over the rough-hewn table.

A bureaucracy understands maps, not land. A Company does not understand war, it flourishes in meetings. If you have the patience, come and rummage with me in the archives of the bureaucratic Colony: Woeke, ever leaner and drunker, is told to negotiate with the Caffres. The plan is to buy out all Heathen claims to land to the west of the Fish River. Negotiation follows upon meeting follows upon deliberation. Chaka and Chungwa go nowhere. They allegedly bought the land between the Fish and Kowie Rivers from one Captain Ruiter for fifty head of cattle. Nobody knows from whom Ruiter bought the land. Oh, bugger off! The other Caffre captains say they’ll clear off out of the Zuurveld – if everybody clears off, Heathen as well as Christian. Woeke trots home and writes more letters to the Political Council and the Council says Let the Caffres be for the time being, just keep the Christians within our jurisdiction. The Council whispers: We have no paperwork for the other side of the Fish. The Company does what it does best and appoints a commission, consisting of Woeke, the retired secretary Wagenaar and new secretary Maynier, to go and talk to the Heathens. The commission does not succeed in persuading the Caffres of the principle of private property of land. We find your culture charming, says the commission. We’d love to be friends, but please just stay on your side of the river. Once again gifts are exchanged and the pen-lickers sit with slavering mouths and tongues lolling from wet lips and make notes about the physique of the Heathens and the condition of their teeth and the size of the bulges under their loincloths. The retired and reappointed Wagenaar is left on the border on his own, without a single soldier, to maintain the dignity of the authorities and to intimidate all of the Caffre Kingdom with his wig and his stockings.

Caffres wade through the river and come to collect my cattle; they’re hardly back in their kraals when I go and collect my cattle and a few more. Few places on earth are as busy as the banks of the Fish. Every hunting expedition becomes longer, every elephant scarcer and older and more enraged, every punitive commando more brutal. Around us families congregate in laagers. The authorities don’t send the munitions they promised. I’m quite happy staying where I am. Maria no longer misses me when I’m not at home.

I lie with my wife and she rubs my head. I look up through the roof beams. I miss the swallow’s nest in the rafters at Brandwacht. My sons Philip and Coenraad are born to me. Just spit and clay, I think. I turn on my side and look at Maria. She’s carrying low, the next one is going to be a son again. There is a new hair growing out of the mole on her ear.

Graaffe Rijnet at last acquires its first minister, Jan-Hendrik Manger. On Sundays he preaches twice in High Dutch in the school that used to be a stable. When Woeke fails to turn up for a meeting in the Cape, the Company sends Captain Bernard Cornelius van Baalen as acting landdrost. He writes a wordy report about the disorder and corruption, which nobody, with the exception of course of yours truly, Omni-Buys, ever reads. Most people who don’t have to stay in Graaffe Rijnet, he writes, have long since cleared out.

I and Christoffel Botha with the rotten teeth, and the Bezuidenhout clan and a few Prinsloos smell blood and riches.

Smell! I tell them.

What do we smell, oh great Buys? they ask.

They call me their friend; I call them whatever I have to call them to keep them trotting along in my dust. We persuade all that is a veldwagtmeester to launch a punitive commando. I tell Officer Barend Lindeque and Veldwagtmeester Thomas Dreyer that it’s all the fair weather that causes deserts and that drought can be broken only by storms. I tell them how I caught a thief red-handed. The Caffre was slaughtering one of Botha’s cattle, but when I dragged him to the chief by the scruff of his scrawny neck, the Caffres sent me packing and the pestilence stood there laughing at me. Our cattle are now disappearing every day, but if you go on commando with me, you always return with more cattle than were stolen. They say that on punitive expeditions my gang and I shoot a bit too freely among the Heathens. And apparently we shoot the Caffres who hunt on our farms. But we are big men and strong and what we aim at we hit. We are indispensable on every commando.

If you mess with us, we mess with you: Langa, whose kraal is now situated on burgher Scheepers’ farm, goes hunting with his warriors. When they get to Campher’s homestead, he locks Langa up in his house. They say the old warrior hasn’t slept for years on account of the pain in his back. Campher takes Langa’s shield and assegais and knife and knobkerrie from him and holds him hostage until the old chicken thief has to buy his liberty with cattle. Hannes Bezuidenhout keeps the sons of two Caffre captains captive on his farm until the captains pay him a ransom of four oxen. Then there’s Hannes’ brother, the scoundrel Coenraad. His brothers I call by their first names, but he is plain Bezuidenhout – he’s the one responsible for the stories about the Barbarous Bezuidenhouts. If you know him as I know him, you know he’s the Bezuidenhout; he is the legend. And besides, there’s only one Coenraad around here. The very Bezuidenhout who farms a different farm every month. He who, when the mood takes him, threatens that he’ll thrash to death every goddam wretch next to the Swartkops River; he who that year locks up Chungwa in his mill and hitches him up like a mule and teaches him with a horsewhip how one makes the thing go around.

The sky is pressing down when in 1792 after an exchange of cattle I ride home with the cattle and the woman I took from Langa. I am thirty-one and have three farms, a wife and four children, a whole bunch of Hottentots working for me, a multitude of cattle and now also a Caffre princess, barely sixteen with a skin stretched tight and glossy like stinkwood. She says her name is Nombini. She sits up proudly on the wagon as if she’s laced and corseted. Her two offspring can’t let go of the big nipples. The pack of ridged dogs run up and down next to the wagon. They chase one another, snap at each other in play, and drive the oxen mad. In the clouds the first thunder is crackling. When we crest the ridge and see my farm on the plain, the Sundays River shines like a Milky Way and my house with the candlelight in the window and the fires of the Hottentots working on my farm and the fires of the Caffres who graze their cattle on my farm are scattered like smouldering stars in the dark grass. When we get closer and ride in among the fires, the constellation disintegrates into mere points of disconnected light.

There’s no end to the rain. The thatched roof at first keeps out the water and then no longer. Whoever used to live in the house before knew how to build a decent chimney. Maria is sitting with the new-born Johannes at her breast, Elizabeth with little Philip and Coenraad Wilhelm on her lap in her usual place next to the fire. Coenraad Wilhelm is sucking at her thumb. Then also Nombini and her children.

I chase the chickens up into the rafters and scrabble a place open for myself between the cat and the other cat and the pig that nobody can keep out of the house any more. Maria and Elizabeth are scared of the thunder. Elizabeth is sobbing. Maria busies herself placing the few basins under the leaks, so that her hands shouldn’t tremble. Nombini and her brood are dead quiet, look around them at the mealies and the biltong and tobacco and pots and pans hanging from the purlins. The animals make only the most essential movements, so as not to lose warmth. Nombini gets up and looks at me and Maria and picks up a porcelain bowl from the table and sits down again and holds the bowl in both hands and rotates it slowly between her fingertips. Maria lets go of the basin and grabs the bowl from Nombini’s hands and puts it back on the table. Nombini comes to sit with me where I’m trying to file down an ingrown toenail with a wood file. The children look at one another and look at the adults and are quiet and then they all start howling in unison. Maria trips over the cat. The cat yowls and the children get a fright and break the rhythm of their crying and then carry on howling.

Goddammit, Buys, there isn’t room for everybody here.

I press Nombini to me and say something in her ear and she goes to sit with her children. Maria cooks meat, throws sweet potatoes into the pot. The few tin plates I haven’t yet melted down to harden my bullets are set out on the table. My wife and children and I seat ourselves. My new wife and her children go to sit in the corner. I tell them to come and take a seat. We eat. Nombini licks her fingers clean and her mouth is anointed with fat. Maria watches me watching this stranger wrapped in her kaross, the long legs. I speak to her in Xhosa and she doesn’t say much. I speak to my children in Dutch and now and again I peep at Maria.

I take the Bible from the shelf.

Come let us worship.

I undo the copper clasp and open the great book, dust puffs up into the air. Some pages are missing. Things get left behind if you carry on moving. I read solemnly. I watch Maria closely, knowing how with each holy word I try to soothe and placate her, and seeing how the damn words don’t achieve a thing.

Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah, I read out.

Nombini’s fingers once again grope for the cold porcelain. She takes a red bead from the folds in her kaross, drops it into the bowl and watches the bead spinning around on the base. Is she wondering who is rubbing the hurt out of Langa’s back tonight? She turns the bowl round and round, looks at the fine blue patterns in the porcelain without beginning or end. I understand only too well, with the coming of evening people feel sorry for themselves, but she’s got to stop this bullshit. I see that little lower lip tremble. Should I feel sorry for her? The Caffre woman has never in her life seen a plate of food such as the one she’s just devoured. Poor thing, does she see in her Heathenish mind’s eye the Christians cantering into her kraal on their great horses, the hooves kicking dust into the calabashes of water that she and the other young women fetched from the river?

And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and Ishbak, and Shuah.

The girl is strong, her lip is no longer trembling. Still, while I read, I wonder about my new wife’s faraway eyes. Whose little bead is she rattling like that in the bowl? I know what you’re thinking: She’s scared, she’s a child and she’s far from home. Rubbish! You haven’t spent days on end with her on a wagon. You don’t know what’s swirling around in that pretty little head. I read, but all I see is how she rubs old Langa’s shoulders, how his back relaxes under her hands, how she lies listening to him snore. All the nights she spends lying against that skin that death has already started picking from the bones. Does she see stars when he spurts in her? Was she proud of her husband when he came forth from his hut and stood up straight and took off his kaross and pushed out his old chest and walked towards us, the Christians?

And Jokshan begat Sheba, and Dedan. And the sons of Dedan were Asshurim, and Letushim, and Leummim.

The little red bead keeps spinning in the empty bowl, deafeningly, I can’t hear myself read.

And the sons of Midian; Ephah, and Epher, and Hanoch, and Abidah, and Eldaah. All these were the children of Keturah.

Maria shifts around on her chair and sighs exaggeratedly.

Was Nombini worried when the Christians and Langa and his captains congregated in a close circle, the talking growing softer, more urgent? Did she see how I towered over them all, my beard, my mane? I remember she screamed when one of the Caffres staggered back. He was big, that Caffre, one of Langa’s strongest captains. Had he talked to her and gone for long walks with her before Langa took her to wife? Do you think she did things with him as well? How far can a little Caffre girl go with a man if she still wants to marry intact? Was his rod in her mouth? Did she allow him access to her hindquarters? His brow was bleeding. Had she seen what happened, heard the blow? I know she saw when I strode towards him, stood astride him, pulled him up and threw him to the ground. The other Caffres stood still. I let the Caffre go, spat on him and entered the circle again. I’m not proud of it, but what does she know of bartering cattle and taking back stolen cattle? You have to make yourself felt in the first minutes. What does she know? I said something to Langa and shoved him. Where was she then? Did she see and what does she see in the little red bead that is rotating ever more furiously in the bowl?

And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac.

Could the little girl see how her Caffres fought back, how blows from fists fell and whips cracked and the blade of an assegai flashed? How we Christians, dammit, also took blows and lost blood, until somebody cocked a rifle? Does the little creature here at my table know that they were our cattle, Christian cattle, that we drove out of the kraal? Well, most of them. Quite a few of them seemed familiar. In any case, I went to talk to her husband again and then the old bugger wasn’t laughing any more. Did he, there with me, seem older to her than that morning in bed?

But unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country.

I pointed at her. She looked down. I see once more how I and two Hottentots walk towards her. She looks prettier the closer I get to her. A few of her husband’s young men follow us, hands clenched around assegais. One of the Caffres runs ahead and takes up position between her and me, I the evil blond giant. The Hottentot to the left of me shoots the Caffre in the chest and he stays down and his blood pumps out of him. For a moment it looks as if there’s going to be a massacre. One warrior hurls an assegai, but it lands between two farmers. A Hottentot fires but misses. A Christian lashes a warrior with a sjambok. Langa shouts at his warriors to stand back.

They weren’t the only ones who were scared. We weren’t looking for bloodshed, dammit. Could the girl see, there where she was standing, how this big Christian’s hands were trembling by his sides?

And these are the days of the years of Abraham’s life which he lived, a hundred threescore and fifteen years.

The farmers and their tame Hottentots looked around in confusion. I took off, my hands now fists, made for the nearest Caffre between her and me. The wretch was hardly fully grown, probably as old as she. I start thrashing him. He is down on the ground and is holding his frizzy head. I don’t stop. Somewhere somebody shouts something and then there are hands trying to drag me off him. I let go of the Caffre and hit out at the Hottentots trying to hold me back. All three of the creatures. Did she join in the laughter? I heard them laughing, the Caffres roaring with laughter at the crazy white man laying into his own Hottentots. Did she look away then? You’re also going to want to look away. Go ahead and try. Try to turn your head when I get up with blood around my mouth. Try to look away when the Hottentot staggers to his feet, pulling his hands from his face as if they’re stuck to it. She did see. Just look at the way she regards me. The poor Caffre girl beheld it all and understood nothing. I am not ashamed. For what? She knows nothing. The Hottentot looking up with the white bone where his cheek used to be.

Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people.

I wiped my hands on my trousers. Walked up to her. She looked at me and didn’t move. She mustn’t come and act the victim here. Didn’t she, when I bent over her, lick that little hand, the one that’s now making such a fuss about the damned little bead? And didn’t she wipe clean my bloody beard and lips with that same little hand? Yes, girl, what are you looking at? You know that right there in the dust, among your Caffres, with that gentle, slow wipe across my mouth, you gave yourself to me. You wanted to be the wife of the wildest among the wild. You were scared, but you couldn’t keep those little kudu eyes off me. Now you’re still looking. But with a different look.

And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre.

Maria pushes her chair back and I stop reading. She doesn’t get up. Nombini’s little bead is lying still in the bowl. She puts the dish down on the table. The Lord alone knows what a woman thinks when she looks at you like that. Does she remember how I hoisted her onto my horse? How her old husband spat on the ground and did nothing more? How her people glared at her? How we loaded two more girls on the horses of the Hottentots? How the other two put up much more of a fight and scratched Van Tondere’s face? How we rounded up the cattle? How one of the young Caffres stood in our way and was taken apart with our rifle butts and sjamboks? How we rode off and nobody followed us? I’m sure the girl remembers it all. Now I am sorry that I covered her eyes when I looked back and saw Langa’s Caffres descending upon the cheekless Hottentot who had fallen off his horse and killing him with stones and assegais.

The field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth …

I see how Maria is looking at me; I lose my place.

That night I went to lie with her and made her mine. I told her my name is Coenraad. But why would the girl think of that now, if there is so much she can reproach this Christian man with? Does she remember how gentle I was with her? Oh no, if she thinks at all of our first lying together, she’ll think I was like a goddam pipsqueak when I touched her, uncertain and hesitant without her assent. That she had to reassure and encourage me before I could mount her properly. That I looked mighty proud of every gasp I could squeeze from her. Why would the girl think that it was a long day for me too? Why would she remember how I lay behind her all night long? Would you believe it, the next morning the girl tells me that I muttered and sobbed in my sleep. Just what a man wants to hear on his honeymoon. Should have left her right there in the veldt for the hyenas. As it happened, we chased the other two girls into the veldt with sjamboks that morning. But my little princess remained seated next to me. She could have run off with them if she’d wanted to. Why would I want to stop her, haven’t I got a wife? But she remained sitting and now she’s sitting here and glares at me and doesn’t want to let go of the little bead. I seize her hand and force it open and grab the thing off her palm and put it into my mouth and chew it fine and swallow. She remains sitting. I find my place in the verse:

There was Abraham buried and Sarah, his wife. Here endeth the Lesson tonight.

Maria gets up, takes the porcelain dish from Nombini’s hand again, this time more politely, and puts it on the pile of plates.

Is the whore going to help me wash up, or am I Hotnot to both of you now?

Maria, don’t be jealous. You’re my wife.

I wish I was, Buys.

You are, that I promise, my beloved dear Sarah. Weren’t you listening to what I was reading?

She walks away, sighs, then turns around:

Jealous, Buys. I wish I was jealous.

The lightning flashes and outside the whole world scintillates. In the bright glare of the lightning nothing remains hidden and we lot at the table see each other as we are and the surface of everyone’s countenance is illuminated for an instant and reveals no depth and is wholly unknowable and then it is dark again and the shadows drape soft comforting masks over our faces.

On this night the house is steamed up with the breaths of human and animal. It is as if the air itself turns to smooth and damp walls. The rain has stopped but the dripping carries on. The house is full, even the pig has to sleep outside and the pig never sleeps outside. The house feels empty. The house feels big and endlessly known, endlessly repetitive. As if there are passages and halls into all eternity, as if every drop dripping into the bowl has to resound. But nothing sounds in this house.

I lie next to Nombini in the front room and listen to the faraway thunder and Maria’s snoring even further away.

The next morning the clouds have gone and the air is translucent. I yell at the Hottentots. The jackals have been at the sheep. I take Nombini to the labourers’ huts and tell them they have to build her a hut as the Caffres build their huts and she’ll stay among them and they will listen to her because she is my wife. The Hottentots talk among one another and look at the young woman who remains standing there when I walk back to my house. The young girl who doesn’t look back – as I look back – to see where her man is going. She remains standing, alone and with two children on her arms, and looks at them.

At dusk two days later I ride to her. I twist Glider’s reins around a branch and sling the roll of hides over my right shoulder and the two guns over my left and I don’t stoop low enough to enter the hut. I curse and she laughs from her beautiful belly. That evening she and I sit by a fire in front of the hut and the labourers coming from the fields greet us cordially and walk on. Towards the end of the week I saddle my horse and go hunting elephants and don’t find a single one and come back home.

It is still autumn, but see, I’m hibernating. I sleep till afternoon, then walk up and down in the house wrapped in hides, go and lie down again. If I go far enough, all the way to the end of sleep’s labyrinth, I find silence. The house is bigger than any I’ve ever stayed in before, but the longer this winter sleep lasts, the more the house shrinks around me. As if the reeds on the roof and the clay on the walls are compacted around me like a nest and then, weeks later, as if the walls turn sticky and soft and enfold me like the membrane of a chrysalis.

My people soon learn to leave me alone. For the most part I don’t hear them and if they do make me aware of them, I roar at them before spinning myself into my chrysalis again. I curl myself up in my karosses and bedspread that I’ve thrown down in the corner of the room. Maria sleeps on the bed. She says my groaning keeps her awake. She says I am welcome to go and lie with my Caffre girl. I remain lying in the corner.

I concentrate on keeping as still as possible, every movement is considered before it’s executed. I know the soul of every muscle. Late in the afternoon of a day of which I do not know the name I lie staring at a snail trailing across the floor. I look at the fury with which the snail crawls out of its shell. Just see the horns slowly unfurling.

The children are buzzing around Maria like blowflies and ask after their father.

He’s lying in wait, I hear her say.

For what? they ask.

She sends them out. She is a mother, she knows about withdrawing into shells, the preparation of a passage out. Her mouth twists when the child kicks inside her. Do you think that when she’s standing like that looking at her Coenraad lying on the ground under his hides, do you think she sees me and thinks of snakes in their holes? Or do you think she remembers how her father in their hut at the Senekals paced up and down every night?

In the late afternoons I disappear. Then I go to the sea. On the plain the wind blows without cease. You can’t hear the sea from the house, but it’s not far. I hold the shell and turn it over and touch it, careful not to break it. I lick at it. While I’m looking at it and holding it, the shell’s shape makes absolute sense to me, and as soon as I think of it again under the heap of hides, it becomes wholly incomprehensible.

How could I have known that twilit afternoon that the shellfish excretes its own house? Who could possibly have told me that the building material seeps through the creature, how it distils its miraculous covering according to its need? I press the shell to my eye and see darkness; I press the shell to my ear and hear the sea. I could not then put it into words, can still not do so, but what I saw was something of an eternal shaping and reshaping without cease.

Back at the farm I do put two things into words to two people. The first is Windvogel, to whom I say: Count your blessings, friend. You live alone. The second is Nombini to whom, when I am sure she’s asleep, I whisper: In a shell you don’t need a door or a gate, everybody is too scared to enter.

I owe six years and five months’ worth of quitrent on Brandwacht, one year and eleven months on De Driefonteinen and one year and five months on Boschfontein: a total of two hundred and twenty-four rix-dollars. The Caffres stream over the border and murder Christians. The Christians blame me because I look for trouble with the Caffres and have dealings with their women and then on top of that smuggle them weapons. Why smuggle guns to the Heathens who rob me and whom I rob? To strike up alliances on both sides of the border? Not to chuck all my eggs into one Christian basket? Simply to make the game more interesting? Indeed. Inter alia.

Farmers start abandoning their frontier farms and moving west, back to civilisation. Nobody believes me when I lay charges against the Caffres who steal my cattle, because who would trust such a totally depraved creature? No Christian’s wife opens the door to me, no Christian calls at my farm. My own family no longer knows me. The landdrost and his lackeys don’t bother me with my debts, as long as I stay out of their way and keep my trap shut and eke out my miserable existence on my godforsaken stretch of sand that through all the ages has been washed into the sea by the Sundays River.

The drought returns, and the locusts and the migratory buck devour and trample everything that remains, and the Christians who haven’t yet trekked west now trek west.

On 21 January 1793 the French chop off the head of their king and on 13 July Marat is murdered in his bathtub by a woman with a kitchen knife and later in that year Langa, whose wife is now living with me, takes all my cattle and burns down my farms and my house and everything in it and leaves me adrift in poverty.