by Guy Butler
‘Her heart, her lungs, and her rheumatism.’
‘All at the same time?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Why do you think she’s dying?’
‘She says so. She looks terrible. She said if I didn’t get a doctor to her before she dies she’d disinherit me.’
The Doctor glanced across at his wife to share a joke, but, as she had no Afrikaans, she could not share it.
‘Who is looking after her?’
‘My wife tries her best, but she gets in my mother’s way, as I said. So we have provided a Hottentot girl, Magda, and her daughter Griet, who sit in the loft with her by turns, for company. They run up and down the stairs with messages and plates of food. The food gives less trouble than the messages. Except when the messages are about the food.’
‘She has no other company?’
‘I go up for five minues after breakfast, and my twin brother, Pieter, after lunch. He takes her the newspaper, but she doesn’t read it any more. It’s too full of sin, she says, it gets in her way. Pieter stays a long time. I think he gets in the way too, sometimes.’
Andries Vosloo was very tired and badly galled from his long ride. He’d adopted the old custom of the farmers in such crises. Choosing his best horse, he’d galloped hard to the next farm, Blinkberg, about two hours’ distance, and, leaving his exhausted mount there to recover, he’d asked for the best of Langjan Loots’s horses. Loots’s best horse turned out to be a brute, who shied at anything and had flung him off, twice, so he’d felt lucky to be alive when he arrived at Hans Lategan’s of Petrus Poort. Hans had lent a good horse which took him on to Tulpsiekvlakte, where he got his last mount from Major Bristles Brodie. All the horses for the Doctor’s return ride were reasonably good, except that one he’d have to use between Petrus Poort and Blinkberg – unless he could persuade Hans Lategan to lend him something better. Hans might do something for a new doctor.
David wrote down the names of the farms and the farmers.
‘If you can get there by tonight, it will save my name with my mother. I promised her a doctor within twenty-four hours.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Tell her I’ll be back tomorrow, or the next day. I must now go and see the Dominee.’
‘The Dominee is still away in the Cape.’
‘Is that so? When will he be back?’
‘Two days.’
‘Are there any other ministers in town?’
‘Only the Roman Catholic missionary.’
Andries Vosloo shook his head. There were limits to religious tolerance.
‘There’s not, perhaps, a Xhosa witchdoctor in the town? Or an old-fashioned Malay wizard?
‘What for?’
‘There’s some annoying nonsense on the farm that needs attention of that kind’, he said. ‘From someone who specialises in so-called supernatural silliness.’
‘Such as?’
Vosloo shook his head. ‘It’s all nonsense, man. You’ll see and hear for yourself. Myself, I wouldn’t bother, but my wife pesters me to make inquiries.’
He had spoken of the occult as though it were on a par with other chores on a shopping list.
David reached Tulpsiekvlakte at half-past eleven. Major Bristles Brodie invited him in for a ‘cup of tea or something stronger’ while the horses were being changed.
‘Thanks. Tea please; a quick cup, if you don’t mind.’
Mrs Brodie dispensed the tea. She was a ritualist (‘Milk first? or tea first?’). Nothing was allowed to hurry tea. The slow pace forced one to take note of the Mason bone china, and the pale, watery water colours on the prettily papered walls, a delicate refined decor which had nothing to do with the stones and xerophytes of the veld. Would his Janet camouflage, protect and incapsulate herself like this good lady? He hoped not. But the Persian carpets and stinkwood favoured by the wealthy Dutch could be just as alien to a Scots girl. As for the Major, he was a bird watcher, and knew more about the birds of the Karoo than he, the Doctor, did. The cory bustard, for instance. A favourite bird. Handsome. And that cry. He’d first heard it one dawn during the Boer War, on patrol at first light …
‘I’m afraid I must be going’, the young man said.
They saw him swing into the saddle; then they stood on the stoep and watched the fresh horse dwindle to a dancing dot in the heat waves.
‘Nice young man’, she said.
‘Who’d be a doctor? Riding eight hours to see a crazy old woman who doesn’t need a doctor.’
‘The son said she was dying.’
‘She “dies” two or three times every year.’
‘Don’t we all, in this desert?’ she said, grabbing the chance to misunderstand him.
’Now, my dear, none of that’, said Bristles.
The poisonous tulp after which the farm was named was not in bloom but the slangkop was – dozens of yellow racemes on long stalks like cobras’ heads, swaying. Sinister? Perhaps. But part of himself. Somewhere, about two hours ago, he’d started noticing such things again. Of course, he’d pointed out this and that to Janet on the journey, affixing names to flora and fauna. But now it was as if the initiative had passed from him to them. The outline of things, their shapes, small and large, were naming him, nailing him with their sudden recognitions of things in his mind. He was riding into himself, a self that he had almost forgotten, which had last been as vivid only in dreams and nightmares in Edinburgh or Utrecht, or daydreaming on a barge drifting down the Rhône.
He’d had to slow down to enter a drift; and the dry sand bank, half in shade, half sun, had a klapperbos with its red pods transparent as jelly jube-jubes on it, and his childhood holidays on a dozen farms came tumbling from the back of his head into his eyes. And on either side of the watercourse, which the track crossed twice with each bend, the cliffs rose, their rock strata twisted like a layered birthday cake that an angry child had mauled in a tantrum. And kareehout, with light green leaves, fresh-coloured, like thin sliced cabbage; and rats’ nests in clumps of thorny mesembryanthemum with the pale spikes of ashbush growing out of them.
How as boys, they’d set fire to the dry sticks of those nests, and, happily murderous, wait on the well-marked tracks which the fleeing rodents would take, heavy sticks in hand. One could kill a rat without a twinge, particularly when he showed those long teeth.
And the meerkats and ground squirrels! He and his cousins would lie flat on their stomachs right next to a clutch of holes, with their hands in thick felt hats or purloined leather gloves. The heads would pop up, first one and then another. They’d almost stop breathing – until one of the little animals was erect, outside his hole – before making a lightning zap to grab the squeaking beast and – then to let him go.
The sight of his first kiepersol tree with its odd, patterned spikes against the sky (tall among white-thorned mimosas at the base of the ironstone koppie) was so poignant that he thought he should stop, dismount, sit down, light his pipe and try to find out why. But there was a dying patient waiting somewhere ahead.
By the time that he had climbed the long serpentine route up Petrus Poort he was aware that the air was rarer. How many feet above sea level was this plain? And there was the farm, a huge Victorian ostrich baron’s palace, with an ornate wooden verandah all round it; and avenues of Mexican aloes, and pepper trees, and other exotics from other desert countries. The candelabra of a Mexican aloe is one of the most elegant flower stalks in the world.
Dotted in millions over the gravel and lime and sandstone flats, were the grey-green spheres and ovoids of the Karoo shrubs, never much more than a few feet off the ground; and floating above these, the black, grey and white ovoids of the ostriches, balloons tied to the earth by the strings of their legs, which often dissolved in the heat waves; and above the bodies, the ovoid heads, always steady, – even if the neck and the body and the wings and the legs were moving with a boiling motion. And in the head, the egg of the eye, that large, beautiful eye, with long lashes which a coquette
might envy.
It was all cool and dim inside Hans Lategan’s shuttered ostrich palace. There were glass cases from which glimmered silver trophies awarded on agricultural shows for bird and plumes, and trefoils of fine white feathers, beneath which he thought the words ‘Ich dien’ should be inscribed. Perhaps not.
There was little money in ostriches now, said old Hans. He kept some of his best birds, hoping, hoping. As for the Vosloos, it was far from his nature to be unkind about them and their mother, but after all, she’d been very beautiful once; and, when dealing with a difficult old woman, one should always remember that with gratitude. When last had he seen her? At her husband’s funeral, two years ago. What a saint that man had been! – a fact which had only become apparent by the hell that had broken loose when he was no longer there to contain it, or absorb it, like blotting paper. What hell? Well, the sons, Andries and Stephanus, the twins. Identical. You see, the Hottentot midwife had forgotten to tie a riempie round the ankle of the first infant to emerge, so that there was no certainty as to which was the eldest son. Not even the mother, Petronella, knew which was her first born. So the sons took turn and turn about, at being eldest son. Three months on, three months off. This was fine for domestic arrangements, and even the wives, who didn’t really like each other, managed to live with it. But the lawyers were making all sorts of difficulties. That’s what lawyers were for, of course. They wanted to know: who was to inherit? Was the estate to be split? If so, how? But Petronella was emphatic: No. As far as she was concerned there would always be an eldest son, namely, whoever was on duty at the time when she died.
One of the great advantages of this system was that the twins were particularly attentive about visiting their mother even when not on duty: just to assure themselves that the old girl’s health was not being tampered with by the one who was there.
Dr Martyn laughed out loud. ‘O come on, Oom Hans, you mustn’t suggest things like that!’
‘Perhaps not’, he said with a mischievous twinkle, ‘but stranger things do happen, particularly up there at Arries Graf. I mean, those identical twins. Not a twin in the families of either father or mother for two centuries. But twins are common as dirt among the neighbours, like Marais and Therons. And, as I said earlier, Petronella had been a beauty in her day. But you’11 see for yourself when you get up there. Take no notice of scandal from an old man with not enough to do, except fill his mind with the possible dramas in other people’s lives.’
As they finished the golden bottled peaches, Oom Hans said: ‘I’m lending you one of my own horses. That thing Loots lent Andries Vosloo is a disgrace. It nearly killed the simple Andries. Just like Loots, a real mean old swine. And you can tell him so from me; but don’t leave my horse there. Let him go. He’ll find his way back every time.’
‘Every time?’
‘Yes. Every time Petronella decides to die, we have this drama. Some people say it was Petronella’s last bout of dying that killed off your predecessor. He was an old man, you know, and just couldn’t take the long ride in the saddle.’
‘But he’s retired and living in the Strand.’
‘So some people say, in the Strand. But many people here like to believe otherwise. They know the difference between mere event and a good story. And believe me, that’s a preference which family doctors have to appreciate.’
And, as a parting shot, when the Doctor was already in the saddle. ‘You see, Doctor, most patients don’t see themselves as a string of symptoms or biological events. They see themselves as characters in stories.’
What an extraordinary nice, wicked old man. But then, when you live alone for days on end and at last get a bit of company, you’re likely to go overboard. What was his story? Why was he inventing all those tales about others? And what were the mere symptoms, the mere events in his life that he was so concerned to elevate into a drama?
And there’d been another thing about him, which he had only noticed when they’d moved into the sun: something about his colouring and the cast of his features – the set of eye and forehead? The Doctor knew the danger of talking in stereotypes, but as he believed he had observed this one for himself, he excused it on the grounds of fresh observation, not the application of old prejudice.
Martyn’s hypothesis came from many gatherings in Scotland, in England, and on the continent, at which South Africans had been present in large numbers – formal parties mostly, where the standard dress had ironed out the obvious nationality markers, like kilt, lederhosen or slouch hats. He found he could pick out the South African males with little error. Sure, there were those South African males who escaped, as pure English or Scots or German, common European non-descripts, as it were. But there were whites who had Africa stamped into their faces: a certain cragginess of feature, a set of eyes in the sockets as if adapted by millions of years of heat and sunlight; and the skin, much wrinkled around the eyes and brow, with a golden undertone: no trace of your Germanic pink or your mediterranean olive skin, but thin gold. Martyn’s hypothesis was that such faces owed something to the earlier peoples of the land and/or the Malay slaves and political exiles from the east. It was not a new hypothesis, of course; but it was fresh whenever anyone new made the discovery and particularly when they applied it to themselves. And this, with the help of his shaving mirror, Martyn had done. Sometimes, as now, galloping in the sun, he felt his face to be particularly African. It was, for instance, not as subject to sunburn as it might be; nor did his eyes ache from the glare.
It was fairly soon after leaving Petrus Poort that he’d seen in the distance among the other heights of the Renoster mountains a great dolerite dome – an unmistakable shape, shining, particularly after rain, like the disc of a giant’s shield abandoned on the heights or even the shell of a god-sized mountain tortoise that had been asleep since the creation. Blinkberg. And he knew that his route, up the course of the dry river bed, would take him there, to Langjan Loots’s place. And what height above sea level would that be?
He dismounted to water his horse at a trough next to a windmill. There was hardly a breath of air, but he waited until the metal petals above him began to turn slowly, and then more quickly, until the still tower shivered under the wind’s caress like a girl. And he waited until the cold water came pulsing out of the pipe. He laughed, pulled his hat off, sat down on the edge of the trough and stuck his head under the pipe to baptise himself again into the depths from which that water came, and the spaces across which that slight wind had moved.
Shaking his head free of water, wiping the drops from his forehead with the back of his wrist, he opened his eyes – to find that he was being intently watched by two tiny eyes from the other side of the trough, immobile eyes in a brown, round boulder about fifteen inches high. Instinctively he froze. Other details quickly followed. The eyes were set in a blunt, grey, bone skull, with a beak like a hawk, but neat, with nostrils on its end, not sides: an anvil-shaped head, smart but set on a scrawny ancient neck beaten back into the stone itself – the solid bumpy carapace of the biggest mountain tortoise he had ever seen, each bump the centre of a more or less rectangular scale, black and gold patterning, like rings in a tree, the signature of the seasons which had beat upon its growing form.
Man and reptile stared at each other. The man thought: ‘Marvellous! How beautifully camouflaged! I would never have seen him if he’d been five feet away among those Karoo bushes and stones! He’s probably twice my age. I won’t move till he does.’
Neither moved. The man thought: He’s turned to stone – I’m getting cramps, dammit. And he tried to straighten the offending leg without moving the top half of his body. But suddenly, exhaling with the hiss of a surprised snake, the head disappeared into the carapace, and the scale-studded forelegs closed shut on it from either side.
The man stood up, and looked at the surrounding Karoo landscape, and thought: This tortoise must have meant far more to the Khoikhoi than to us. Stone age people worship the stone from which their tools and weap
ons are made. Some say the Khoi were stone-worshippers. They would have felt reverence for this almost immortal drought-resistant mobile stone.’ And he remembered strange stories of immemorial cures, and ceremonies, and magic in which tortoises played important roles.
What the head behind the scaly portcullis of the forelegs thought no one knows.
The man thought: Maybe I am a fool on a wild goose chase to allay the well-known neuroses of a spoilt old woman and the rivalries of her twin sons; or maybe she really is ill. In either case, she and I lack something which this creature has, but I don’t know what it is. If I move away a little and wait, he’ll stick his legs out, and then his head, and then with the clumsiest walk in the world, stagger under his own stony weight right up to the trough, and drink.
But the waiting horse broke into the unspoken dialogue by drinking noisily, and swishing its tail to chase off a horsefly.
The man thought, putting his foot into the stirrup, grabbing the pommel: I’ll leave him to drink in quiet, on his own.
How the creature inside the stone made up his mind that it was time for him to stick his front legs out a little, and then his head, we do not know; with the clumsiest walk in the world, staggering under his own weight, he moved right up to the trough, and drank.
Langjan Loots lived in a neat wattle and daub barracks among some ancient riverine mimosas and trees. He’d inherited it from his father, and simply by looking after it, and not submitting to the fanciful and pretentious notions of three successive wives, he’d saved himself thousands of pounds. It was marvellous how little you needed to spend in shops if you kept your house small and simple. People called him mean, and his first wife had left because, she said, she couldn’t bear to live out there, almost like animals, worse off than the Hottentot shepherds, she said.
Why worse off? Because, for one thing, the Hottentots were allowed the human liberation of laughter. Those people laughed, they enjoyed themselves. On nights of the full moon, and the equinoxes, they’d sing and dance and drink all night through in an orgy, while Langjan shook his head and pitied these signs of depravity. All drink was a wicked waste of money; everybody knew that dancing was of the Devil. When his second wife went mad one night, and sneaked out, and joined in the servants’ revelry, he’d sent her back to her own people, with her child, and a dignified and injured note in broken High Dutch to the effect that, as he had been deceived about the pedigree of his bride, he was returning both mare and foal to the dubious stable of origin.
