A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  One particular trip to the Cape I remember well. It was in October, I’m not sure which year, but Barend must have been about fourteen, Nicolaas ten; and Hester had already come to live with us. She stayed behind with Alida. We’d hardly reached the Cape when rumours started about slaves rising at Koeberg and in the Swartland. Instigated, it would seem, by two Irishmen who’d stuffed their heads full of wild tales of freedom. What else can one expect of foreigners? There were the most horrible rumours: thousands of slaves on the rampage, making their way plundering and murdering from farm to farm and heading for Cape Town, set on driving us all into the sea. Everybody had something more terrifying or extravagant to add. And then it all turned out to be so much chaff in the wind. All that had happened, if I remember well, was that a few ringleaders had rounded up their men, trekking from one farm to the other, binding or locking up the white farmers, stealing guns and ammunition, and gorging themselves with food and wine; and then this tattered, drunken army had set out on the road to Cape Town, to be dispersed and blasted to bits within an hour by the army. A miserable business. Some of the leaders were hanged afterwards, I heard; the rest were flogged or sent to jail, and that was that. And all the commotion over the single false rumor that the Government had decided to set hem free: and when nothing had happened by the appointed date they broke loose. So ludicrous and unnecessary. And still I shall never forget that day.

  The people massing in the street. The women with their parasols. The slaves with their carrying-poles. The coachmen stopping left and right. Like an antheap kicked open. In the shops people were forgetting about buying or paying or taking what they’d bought. Market stalls were abandoned to looters. And slowly the streets were drained of life. Small clusters of people remaining for a while in anxious discussion before they, too, dispersed. Soldiers trooping past on horseback. Hooves clattering. Doors bolted. Wooden shutters let down and barred. Silence came sliding over the town like the shadow of a cloud. As if an enormous invisible hand had erased a picture drawn in sand, in front of one’s very eyes. One felt quite alien and out of place. Only in the distance, by the sea, could one still hear the gulls. Then even they seemed to fall silent.

  I had no inclination to stay on. Not even when news came that it was all over and the people began to make merry in the streets. I ordered my sons to the wagons and we returned to the farm with what we’d bought and bartered in town—groceries and ammunition, chintz and baize, copper wire and ironware; and also the slave Achilles I’d acquired just before the turmoil had begun. A stiff price too, he cost, for what with the importation of new slaves being stopped by the Government, prices were going up to high heaven.

  It is a hell of a road back to the Bokkeveld, but all the way, as I remember, I kept silent, not talking to either son or slave. For it was an awful thing that had happened, a blasphemy against God Himself who had decreed that the sons of Canaan should forever be the servants of Shem and Jafeth. In silence I sat on the wagon, my pipe clenched between my teeth, staring at the slow landscape. Somehow it seemed quite different from before, now that one had come so close to losing it all. The skull shapes of Paarl mountain. Green valleys opening up on either side below the blue ridges of the mountains. The Old Kloof. The tollgate at Roodezandskloof. From the deep valley of Waveren up the impossible mountains, through the narrow strip of the Rear-Witzenberg, across the Skurweberg, into these remote highlands. Home. But even home looked strange. I barely recognized the frail woman with her dark hair drawn into a tight bun, who came out to meet us. As if a strange presence had touched it all and turned it all transparent, revealing veins and secret organs and the skeleton below.

  I brushed Alida off when she came to greet me. There was something more urgent I had to attend to first. I ordered the mantoor to summon all the laborers to the yard, even those who’d gone far out into the veld with the sheep. I waited in silence for them all to come home. Then, one by one, I had them tied to the front wheel of the wagon and flogged by the mantoor, every one of them, man, woman and child; thirty-nine lashes for each grownup, and twenty-five for a child. The mantoor was last; I flogged him myself. Only then, after they’d all had their share, did I speak. “Let this be a lesson to you,” I told them, “should you ever get it in your heads to rise up against me. Now go back to your work and finish whatever you were doing.” Then I went into the house, and kissed Alida, and sat down to eat.

  I’ve never had trouble with slaves all my life. Now I’ve been shamed by my sons. And all because of Galant, brought up, one might say, like a child on my own farm. Lord, consider Thy Servant Job.

  Galant

  High up in the mountains, in the solid rock, lies the footprint of a man. The mark of Bushman or Khoikhoin, says Ma-Rose, imprinted in the sunrise of the world when stone was soft; perhaps the mark of Heitsi-Eibib himself, the Great Hunter of her stories, or Tsui-Goab’s, when he came down to shape men from stones. I dream about that footprint. Imagine leaving your mark like that, in stone, forever, come wind or rain. My own tracks cover the length and breadth of the Bokkeveld, the tracks of child and man. Across the farmyard of Lagenvlei and that of Houd-den-Bek, through the veld with its ditches and stone ridges, up the broken slopes and into the many mountains. Footprints marking my treks into the Karoo, with Ontong and Achilles and the sheep, in search of warmer winter grazing. Footprints in search of runaway sheep or hunting down marauders, including that one lion. Footprints up to the dam, mine with those of Nicolaas and Barend, and Hester’s narrow ones. Barefoot, all four of us. Except for Sundays or visiting days, when their tracks show the marks of shoes.

  “Ma-Rose, why do you and I always walk barefoot?”

  “That’s how it is.”

  “I also want shoes, for the thorns.”

  “Only masters wear shoes.”

  Tracks. Tracks. Across the mountains to Tulbagh, to Worcester, some of them marked with blood. Runaway tracks. Homeward tracks. Yet none of them visible, gone in wind and rain. They’re there, but you cannot see them. No sunrise footprints these, forever marked in stone.

  Look at my feet. Look hard, at every mark and crack and scar and callus from toe to heel, tough, hard as horn. It’s all my wanderings through the Bokkeveld you can see here, summer and winter, and drought and frost. Here it is marked, grass and stone, mountain and plain, earth and water, house and hut, everything. With my feet I’m glued to this world, and there is no escape.

  I cannot say: this—and then that—and then that. All the tracks run together. Look at my feet.

  Always coming back to Ma-Rose. Ma-Rose smelling of dung-fire and buchu, warm as a kaross protecting you against the world, surrounding you like an attic filled with smells. Ma-Rose with her cure for every ill. Buchu for the bladder, touch-me-not for gargling, wild garlic for croup and honey-tea to cheer you up, bitter roots for colic, dagga for sore eyes, aloe for the stomach, little davids for constipation, something for everything. And stories for all occasions. There are the water-weeds you’re not allowed to touch because they’re the spirits of girls who offended the rain: and rain is to be treated with respect, otherwise it sends the lightning to kill you and turn you into a weed in the marsh. —There are the night-walkers running about in the dark accompanied by their owls and baboons: moving backwards, and carrying diseases to naughty children; it’s the night-walker women who come to a man in his dreams and make him hard and draw his seed from him leaving him weak and weary in the morning; and it’s the night-walker men who visit a woman in her sleep to plant the seed of dead children in her womb and turn her insides bitter so that she will never look at an ordinary man again. —There’s Tsui-Goab who made the world and all the people, and rain and sun and wind and fire; and Gaunab who lives in the night and rules over all that happens in the dark. —And there’s the Lightning Bird that scorches the grass where it settles to lay its egg which burrows into the earth in search of moisture. There it lies abiding its time, swelling and growing, until the clouds star
t thundering overhead again: then a new Lightning Bird is hatched. The lightning is its spittle, and the clouds its dark wings spread out over the world. —Such are the stories of Ma-Rose. And whenever I cannot sleep she holds me close to her, uttering the sounds of a mother-hen as she caresses me, taking my small member in her hand and rubbing it, ever so gently, until my feet leave the ground and I begin to drift away like a cloud over the mountains, far away, beyond the Cape that Nicolaas has told me about, beyond everything, and I fall asleep.

  Always Ma-Rose. Tied in a bundle on her back while she goes about her work, kneeling to rub the floor, or leaning over the open hearth to reach the copper pots and the black kettle, stirring me to sleep. She remains close even when I start helping her in the house, sorting knives and spoons from the wash-up tub, or filling with firewood the large square box beside the hearth, fetching and carrying under the watchful eye of the mistress, the Ounooi Alida. Then out to the yard. Gradually my own footprints begin to mark the ground. The harness of the farm settles on me. “If you work well, we’ll get along,” the Oubaas says, “but if you’re cheeky or neglect your work, it’s the strap. Right?” “Yes, Oubaas.” From now on it’s no longer Ma-Rose but Ontong who supervises me and shows me the ropes. But she is always there to return to.

  In the beginning the work is easy. Gathering wood or dung-cakes. Feeding the chickens and keeping them out of the vegetable garden. Chasing birds in the wheatfields and the orchards in summer: the sun blazing down until you can hardly see straight as you march up and down beating a bucket with a stick and shouting yourself hoarse. Long before sunrise the cicadas start screeching, going on till dark on one single note. Your shirt sticks to your back like an old tough hide. And when you stagger home at dusk it’s time to give Achilles a hand with the milking. Not to mention the eggs. If the nests are full, there’s no problem. But when the hens abandon the nests it means roaming about in search of eggs until it’s too dark to see—only to find, very often, that they’ve been stolen by an otter or a leguan. With an aching body you drag yourself back to Ma-Rose’s hut, its door ajar and a candle burning, dark-yellow, inside. You’re almost too exhausted to eat. All you want to do is lie down and sleep. But more often than not there’s no room for me because a man has taken my place on the mattress beside her; and I have to make myself comfortable somewhere else. Some nights it’s the Oubaas who’s visiting her, then I’m warned well in time not to come home but to take my kaross to Ontong’s hut. In summer I simply bed down in the grass near the furrow, where one can lie on one’s back and watch the stars above; sometimes the moon is so bright it seems to be shining right inside your head. Yet even before you have properly drifted off there’s Ma-Rose’s voice shouting:

  “Galant, the morning-star is fading. Don’t keep the Oubaas waiting.”

  When it’s harvesting time I follow the reapers to pick up the stalks and ears dropped by the less experienced men. But soon I’m one of them, and this is no longer child’s work. Bending, swinging your arm, swinging your whole body as you stride ahead with every swish of the blade, trying to keep up with the rest of the row; swaggering or bragging when the day is still young; when someone farts there’s no end to the joking. But as the day wears on in that sun the men grow silent. It’s gruelling work not to fall behind, and if you do the foreman’s sjambok flicks over your buttocks or back—sometimes merely teasing, a brief warning, but if he suspects you of malingering that thin switch cuts a clean line right through shirt or trousers, leaving its burn till nighttime. Once the wheat is down, the wagon must be loaded, the tall stack expertly strapped down for the swaying journey to the shed, there to dry out properly over Christmas.

  On the first windy day after New Year the threshing starts. It’s what I prefer to all the other work on the farm. Watch your step with those milling horses or you’re trampled right there with the wheat. Treading and grinding, up to their chests in straw, round and round, the great hooves thundering past. Until the Oubaas or the foreman decides it’s time to break. Then the shout comes: “Take ’em away!” and as soon as they’re out of the way there’s another shout: “Turn over!” One’s arms are almost torn from the shoulders, lifting and turning the fork with its heavy load of chaff and grain. The straw is worked out of the way with the long wooden forks, over and over, leaving the grain cleaner every time round, until it is ready for the shifters and winnowing-fans whose swooshing sound will persecute you into your very dreams at night. At last, the West wind now steady and strong, the winnowing starts, the chaff forming small speckled clouds overhead, hanging in the wind before they drift off as the heavy grains rain down on the hard floor. Shovel and up and over, shovel and up and over. It’s like dancing. Sweat prickling all over your body, as the faces of the men around you turn grey in the chaff, leaving only their eyes exposed, glistening moistly in the dust. Your throat gets dried out, but there’s no time to rest. While the wind lasts the winnowing must go on, until the last dirt and chaff dust has been cleared away and the bags are filled and taken off to the wheat-loft. This is a final test of strength: and you’re not a man unless you can walk up the stone stairs to the loft with a full bag on your shoulders. “Hup! Whoa!” And at last it is flung down and stacked with the rest.

  It is at Lagenvlei that harvesting and threshing usually begin; from there we work our way round the mountain, past Houd-den-Bek as far as the turn-off at Wagendrift. One farm after the other. When you’ve cut your way through them all you know you can do a man’s work.

  The harvest home, the year gradually quietens down, except for the bean-harvest and the vineyards; but in these parts there isn’t much treading to do, nothing like across the mountains in the winelands of Tulbagh and Worcester. Oubaas Piet keeps just enough grapes for his couple of half-aums of brandy every year. And once the wine has fermented on the husks, buzzing and rumbling like a bees’ nest, he personally takes charge. For two or three days he never comes home, even eating his meals beside the still, and sleeping there at night, if he sleeps at all. For the following week, while he tastes the new brew, he is worse than a wounded buffalo. But we have a good time all the same, for he is generous with the faints.

  At this stage the beans have also been harvested and the fruit picked and dried; the swallows are gathering on the cliffs and the first frost is forming pale patches on the grass in the mornings, brittle underfoot. It is time to bring in great stacks of dung and wood—good hard tkoin-wood that will smolder right through a long cold night—for winter descends very suddenly on the Bokkeveld; and the kraals and stables must be prepared for those animals that will stay behind on the farm while we take the sheep to the warmer grazelands of the Karoo. The men who remain on the farm will weed out new lands and burn the stacks of dry shrubs; and before the cold North-wester has died down ploughing will start. And soon the whole familiar round begins anew, your footsoles cracked and numb with frost, and the drop at the end of your nose frozen into a permanent icicle. No respite. Yet it is wholesome too, winter and summer each at its appointed time and you in step with them, it’s like a heartbeat going on and on. You can’t break away from it; but it keeps you going. In a way every year is different, of course. One year a great thunderstorm or a flood; the next, a freak wind or a drought, or oxen breaking out of their kraal, or sheep freezing to death, chickens dying of sunstroke, a leopard coming from the mountains to drag off lambs or calves, a flock of springbok or hartebeest trekking across the farm in a cloud of dust, baboons devastating the orchards, a dam wall breaking, someone maimed or killed in an accident, a child falling into a pot of boiling water. Always something new, something different. But the broad course of the seasons runs unchanged. Pasturing and ploughing in winter; sowing in spring; harvesting in summer; bringing in the beans and grapes in autumn. And then the new beginning.

  The Oubaas sees to it that I am broken in thoroughly, taking turns with all the different kinds of work to check my strengths and weaknesses. A few seasons in succession I’m sent t
o the grazing lands with the shepherds, across the Black Hills down to the shrubby plains of the Karoo. I go hunting with the boys, taking turns with the big gun, and hell to pay if you waste powder or lead. I’m tried out at leading the oxen; I’m even given a few turns at driving the wagon and wielding the long rhino whip. This is the province of Achilles; but it’s Ontong who teaches me to ride and work with horses. I like the wagon—the joy when a mere flick of the long whip and a series of shouts urge the oxen into action, all straining together, yokes creaking and thongs stretched taut—but nothing can compare with the horses. From the very first day I think of them as mine; I can work with them for hours, and when I talk to them they seem to understand every word.

  The big grey stallion. It is with a peeled eye that I watch him, ever since the drizzly early morning when, without Ontong to help me, I find myself thrusting an arm shoulder-deep into the mare to ease him out. A wild creature, the very devil of a horse, meant for veld and mountains, not for yard or stable. Looking at him I can feel my guts turn in desire. In my deepest sleep he comes galloping through my dreams, from nowhere to nowhere, as wild as the wind. But he’s been set aside for Barend. Goddamit, why? What does Barend care about horses? That stallion will break his neck.

  “Today we’re going to break in Barend’s horse,” the Oubaas announces one morning. It’s like lightning hitting me in the stomach, and I gasp for breath. Barend’s horse? He’s mine. My grey stallion.

  A horse like that should be tethered to a tame one for a week; preferably he should have one on either side. But this stallion has never allowed anyone near him, so today it’s all or nothing.

  “You take him, Barend, he’s yours,” calls the Oubaas. Barend is shit-scared, anyone can see that, but he’s keeping a tight jaw to impress his father. The grey is being held by four strong men, but almost effortlessly he pulls them this way and that, like half-filled bags. It takes Barend a lot of effort to mount and steady himself, but he’s hardly hit the saddle when the stallion sends him tumbling through the air and ploughing a wet trail through the deep manure of the kraal.