All the Tea in China

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  “By the way,” I asked idly, “where will you sleep?”

  “Why, in the wagon with you of course, where else? There are two pallets, each with a good palliasse of sweet hay.”

  “But my wife … ?”

  He had not known that I had a wife. He did not quite rend his garments, nor tear his hair – indeed, the latter was so richly pomaded that I do not think he could have secured enough grip upon it for tearing purposes. Back and forth the argument swayed: twice he stormed out of the drinking-shop in disgust, only to return for something he had forgotten and to give me one last chance to be reasonable; three times I, too, stalked out, only to be dragged back in and implored to be reasonable. Being reasonable meant that I should either abandon Blanche – women, he assured me with many an anatomical detail, are much like each other and can be readily replaced – or pay a monstrous extra charge to compensate him for sleeping outside his wagon, away from his goods. We came, of course, to an agreement in the end. The other clients of the boozing-ken, listening avidly, may have believed that I had broken the smouse’s heart, for this is what he vowed; while he – for this is what I cried aloud – had reduced me to penury and consigned my unborn children to the poorhouse. Altogether, it was a most satisfactory and profitable evening. I would not be a Gentile for a knighthood – even for a peerage.

  We – that is to say, Blanche, I and Orace – made rendezvous with the trek three afternoons later. The smouse made a great fuss about Orace, although I explained that he was only a bastard and would not need a bed. Then he complained about our baggage, which was more than had been agreed upon. Ever ready to meet a reasonable demand, I compromised by jettisoning one trunk of Blanche’s clothes. I had bought a fine battery or chest of weapons for our protection and explained to her that these would prove more valuable than basques and drawers and stays. She was not an unreasonable woman. I had also, at the last moment, bought a fine saddle-horse: I fancy I cut a fine figure on it, although the Boers, inexplicably, laughed at me. Next morning – not a time that you or I would call morning, but at the “hour of the horns”, when, before true dawn, a man with good eyesight can just discern the horns of the oxen against the sky – the whole cumbrous, complaining encampment of what was to be our trek roused itself, beat its oxen and blackamoors into activity and grated into a sort of motion. Northwards.

  So eager were these Boers for the sight of long-lost kinsmen, not to mention land and profits, that the Predikant was left on his knees, still bellowing prayers, and had to scramble into his cart and whip up his sorry mule for a mile before he could bring up the tail of our strange caravan.

  (I tried, from time to time, to discourse with this Predikant, hoping for intellectual stimulus, but I found that his learning was as narrow as his beliefs. He had a perfect knowledge of the more merciless parts of the Old Testament but was vague and evasive on the subject of Jesus Christ. I lost his friendship, I believe, when I postulated, simply as a point of argument, that the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah must have been drunk when they wrote. He never spoke to me again but I did not regret this. One of the few things I have learned in life is that only a fool argues with bigots when he could be in bed with a lovely and lustful woman. And Blanche, at just this time, was coming into full blossom as a lover: all the years of misdirected passion burst forth like petals of an autumn rose and her inventiveness astonished and challenged my simple Dutch lechery.)

  A trek is like a long sea-voyage but dusty. The dangers are as many but of a different nature: there is little danger of drowning, for instance. The boredom is exactly similar, day follows day in an unchanging pattern, one loses count of time, and after many days one can only recall trivial incidents, small oases in a desert of dullness. One such was the night when Orace was eaten by a lion. Poor child, he had failed to keep the fire bright and had fallen asleep. I was awakened by a gentle thudding, as though someone were pounding the earth with fists. Peering out between the laces of the wagon-flap, I caught a glimpse of a great yellow beast trotting away with a large object between its jaws, then, despite its burden, clearing the thorn stockade or bomah, which closed the entry-gap between the semi-circle of wagons, with one bound. I called crossly for Orace to make up the fire but he did not reply. A search shewed that he was missing and must have been what the lion was carrying. I had half a mind to go out with my heavy rifle and pursue the cowardly beast, but I was readily persuaded that this would be both hopeless and dangerous.

  I was quite cast down by the loss of this devoted child; indeed, I believe I shed a tear. Blanche comforted me, saying that she would learn to wash my linen, but she did not understand: I had become fond of Orace, foundling or no. Fond.

  Another day which sticks in my memory is the day after we crossed the Olifants River, skirting the high ground to the west of the great Desert of Kali-Hari. It was my turn to be riding far ahead of the trek as voorloper and I was nodding in the saddle when I noticed that my horse had come to a halt. Looking up, I saw through sleep-filmed eyes what appeared to be a monstrous cloud of dust hazing the air a few miles ahead. I rubbed my eyes clear and looked again. As far as I could see, from east to west, this cloud of dust was still rising. I galloped back to the trek-leader – although I had been warned against galloping a horse in that climate – and reported that at least a regiment, probably a brigade, perhaps a division of cavalry was crossing our front.

  He glared inscrutably at me from the forest of his brows and beard and said, although with little conviction, that everything was possible under God. Then he called up young Cloete, a man of fine breeding who had scouted as far as the Congo River itself, although not for gain, because he was one of the heirs of the great Constantia estate, where the finest wine in the world is made. (If you do not believe this last remark, I remind you that Napoleon Bonaparte himself, on his death-bed, called for a glass of Constantia.)

  Young Cloete, reins slack, moved out on his beautiful half-bred Arab at a ground-eating single-step pace, the great broad brim of his hat over his eyes and only one foot in a strirrup, so sure he was of his mount. (This is also a useful way to ride over broken ground or if you fear an ambuscade.)

  In twenty minutes he was back with us, smiling, but holding up his arm, palm out-stretched. The trek halted untidily, the men growling, the women squabbling, the children squealing and the oxen, horses, milch-cows, goats, mules, pigs, poultry and dogs each making noises proper to their kind.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Bok,” said Cloete as he dismounted and lay down to rest.

  “Is that offensive?” I asked the trek-leader.

  “No. It is bok.”

  I walked my tired horse back to the wagon and gave him a hatful of water.

  “Why have we stopped?” asked Blanche.

  “Bok,” I said.

  “The same to you!” she replied with spirit.

  Hours later our motley cavalcade ground into motion again and, before dusk, crossed the track of the great movement I had first seen. A thin film of the finest particles of dust still hung over it and for the breadth of quite half a mile, our wagon wheels pressed over a carpet of flattened corpses of little buck. Cloete told me later that this particular kind of antelope, once in a while, takes it into its head to migrate in unimaginable numbers, for no discernible reason. “They are almost human,” he explained. If I used the words “one million” in respect of this exodus of buck you would only laugh, for you have seen little of the world and know less. Cloete used these words, prefixed by the words “at least”.

  The irrational nature of this business of the bok vexed me strangely, for I had already made a fool of myself the previous day, when I had suggested that I might leave the trek at the River Olifants and proceed down it to the sea, finding a ship at the Western Coast. The trek-leader, whose religion, I think, prohibited laughter, sank his great bomah-covered chin further into his breast and controlled his breathing carefully before pointing out to me that the Olifants, except in spate, was a series of di
sconnected lagoons and that its course was, in any case, opposite to the direction I named. These Boers have a name for us British: rooinek – it means red-neck. My neck became red.

  In this business of the Afrikaaners’ religion I found much to reflect on. Their “Reformed Church” was strict in its doctrine but easy to follow: the whole truth was to be found in the Bible, therefore nothing else could be true. So, the earth had four corners and was therefore flat. Nothing could be more logical. (They marvelled that I should want to take ship to London: it was only a couple of hundred marches to the north-west, just as Jerusalem was a similar number of marches to the north-east. Perhaps this was the cause of the continual treks northward from the Cape: they did not like to live so close to the southern edge of the world.)

  There was no possibility of salvation for any but members of this Reformed Church – and, to judge by the rantings of the Predikant, precious little chance for them. One formed a mental picture of the Elysian fields, empty as the High Veldt except for an occasional Predikant wearing a justified look of righteousness and a few withered virgins wearing calico from hairy chin to scrawny ankle.

  They had the inhabitants of this continent of Africa neatly docketed. The Kaffirs were partly educable and might be beaten and baptised. The Hottentots were sub-human: the very word comes from the Dutch word for a stutterer; the Hottentot does not speak but he tries to. So, he may be trained and charitably fed and beaten but not baptised. The little yellow Bushmen, with hair like a sprinkle of peppercorns and buttocks which, in a good season, protruded astonishingly but, in times of hardship, withered into a sort of flaccid apron, were clearly non-human. They had to be exterminated, for all sorts of excellent reasons which I cannot recall at this remove of time.

  While we trudged at the maddeningly slow oxen-speed through giraffe country one of the skilled huntsmen in the trek would set out each Friday and kill a giraffe. This great, improbable beast would be skinned and the Kaffir “boys” would cut his hide, with infinite care, into one or perhaps two enormously long strips. On the Saturday all would fall to and grease this strip with the tallow from the creature’s kidneys and guts. On the Sabbath, when all who had the slightest hope of salvation rested and would do no more than eat and journey no further than nature and decency demanded, the Hottentots would loop and sling the riem, as it was called, over the high branch of a tree and, having attached a heavy stone to the lower ends, twist and re-twist it until it became a stout and resilient rope. This took quite twenty hours and the “boys” became lazy, lazy, for they knew, intuitively, that no one would beat them on the Sabbath and to their untutored minds the Monday, when they could and certainly would be beaten, seemed infinitely far away. They were a cheery lot, with no memory of the past and no care for the morrow, but I did not envy them.

  This beast, the giraffe, illustrates again the certainty of the Afrikaaners about the definitive nature of the Bible. There is no beast of that name in that Book so, clearly, it must be a camel – and kameel is what it was called. In the same way, the leopard was a tijger – what else could it be? One peculiarly ugly kind of antelope defied Biblical nomenclature, but the Reformed Church were not long at a loss: they called it the “wild animal”: wildebeeste. I was proud to share Dutch blood with these people; their pig-headedness exceeded that of the English by far.

  Inch by inch, day by day, the landscape changed: flat-topped trees gave way to scrub, earth became sand and sand soon became stones, then rocks; for days we might march towards a distant mountain which seemed but a few miles distant, then for days we might crunch through grass taller than a horseman’s head, correcting our course at night when the stars came out. Some of us died, of course: snakes and crocodiles, buffalo and sickness all took their toll but my own little party were spared except for Orace, whose loss I think I have already mentioned, and my horse. He had been sold to me as “salted” – that is to say, he was supposed to have survived the fever which kills horses in Africa. This was not true. As soon as we entered the area where horses die, he died. I quarrelled bitterly with the smouse because he had introduced me to the horse-coper who had sold and vouched for the animal and I knew he must have drawn a commission but he would not part with a stiver as recompense. He was a bad Jew; he treated me as though I were a Gentile. “This is no way to conduct business,” are the words I spoke to him from a full heart. He pretended to care nothing for them, but such words, spoken by a full-blooded Jew of the Sephardim to a mere son of the sons of Gomer is a terrible rebuke, terrible.

  The next day, at the mid-day meal, he approached me in an ingratiating way and offered to sell me a riding-mule at cost-price. My buttocks were bruised blue (I speak from hearsay, of course) from riding on the tailgate of the wagon but I affected to ignore the smouse’s existence. “See, Blanche,” I said, pointing at the sky, “a kite or vulture!”

  “They call it an aasvogel here,” she replied, smiling. I was not pleased with her. From women one wishes loyalty, not information.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Since I penned those last few words I have been thinking. Dozing a little, too, but also thinking. My difficulty is that this next episode, as well as being unpleasant, involves a matter to which the Statute of Limitations does not apply – I refer, of course, to murder – and also involves certain people with whose descendants I have a pleasant and profitable trade relationship.

  I think that if I mention the name of the smouse, which was Oppenheimer, any of you who may inherit shares in this House will realise that it is in no one’s interest to bruit the incident abroad. As to the other matter, that of the Statute of Limitations, I fear I can only surmount the difficulty by, for once, paltering with the truth a little. You may therefore treat the ensuing few folios as, in some sort, mere fiction.

  The cruel sun, glaring blindingly down on human beings threading their weary way across South-Western Africa, takes its toll from each one in a different way. Members of the Reformed Church become confirmed in their belief that the world is flat; women spend most of their day in bed and yet spurn their husbands’ attentions; little children grow old and wise overnight. The effect on me was that I dwelled more and more on the smouse’s perfidy in the matter of the horse until hatred filled and darkened my whole mind. Each time I set eyes on his accursed riding-mule I trembled with irrational rage. The smouse’s sickness from the sun took a curiously opposite form: he became obsessed with the notion that I hated him, and whispered to all who would listen that I had threatened his life. This was a monstrous mis-reading of my character, for I was then the mildest of men and had killed no more than six or perhaps seven men in my whole life – and always in self-defence, as I have related.

  Silly though these phantasies were, they nevertheless poisoned our lives and many a curious glance was cast at both of us, especially when the smouse had occasion to go to our – his – wagon for supplies or fresh linen. I watched him narrowly on these occasions, for I believed, by then, that he was capable of everything base. I received the impression that, while I watched him, the men of the trek were watching me.

  One day it fell to the men of our wagon – the smouse and me – to go out and shoot for the communal pot; it was the custom for each wagon to take its turn at this. I was bidden to ride eastward (on a borrowed horse), the smouse was to go west. Neither of us was skilled in the traversing of wild country and I suppose both of us must have unwittingly circled towards the north. After riding several miles without sighting any game, I tethered my horse just below the crest of a ridge and crept to the top, hoping that there might be a fertile valley, rich in game, on the other side. To my fury, all that was to be seen was that accursed riding-mule of the smouse, tied to a thorn-tree a bare hundred yards away.

  With a chuckle which rang crazily even on my own ears, I levelled my rifle at the brute’s hindquarters, confident that I could graze its backside enough to lame it without crippling. I cannot tell whether the sweat ran into my eyes or the heat-haze distorted my vision or whether some
madness possessed me; all I can say is that, as I squeezed the trigger, the hated beast dropped dead, a bullet through its heart.

  Something snapped in my brain: in a flash I saw what childish petulance had been inflaming my brain for days – and what a criminally stupid and unworthy thing I had now done. As the smouse’s head rose above the bush where he had been “still-hunting” I jumped to my feet, waving my gun and shouting, running towards him, longing to apologise and to repair our friendship.

  Poor, craven fool, he quite misconstrued my actions; he fired both barrels wildly in my direction, threw away his gun and took to his heels as though the devil was after him. It was idle to pursue – he ran as fleetly as any bok.

  I remounted and rode on sadly, taking little notice of my direction. Fortunately, I fell in with game: covey after covey of fat, mindless birds resembling guinea-fowls and a nice little gemsbok. The westering sun startled me: I realised that the laager was now to my south-east. Soon I walked my laden horse in through the thorn zareba – having approached from the direction in which the smouse had left.

  In an instant the laager was alive with activity: women’s hands flew as they plucked the fat fowls, pots were a-boiling from the gemsbok’s flesh, while dogs snapped and snarled for its entrails.

  There is little dusk in those latitudes: darkness falls from the air in minutes. It was in that brief dusk that the leader of the trek walked over to our fire. His face was grave and stern in the ruddy light.

  “When shooting, did you see anything of Oppenheimer?” he asked.

  I was exhausted in mind and in body and my mouth was full; I did a thoughtless, foolish thing: I shook my head. A moment later I choked on a fragment of bone and my mouthful sprayed out into the fire, almost as though I was suddenly overcome with laughter. He looked sombrely at me, then turned on his heel. Blanche went to bed. A fire was kindled outside the zareba to guide the smouse back.