A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  I never told anyone about them. It was given in my situation not to admit unnecessarily to frailty of body or mind, salvaging what I could of pride. I had neither wished nor willed this life, yet I had eloped with him; I would live up to that challenge and survive. That, perhaps, was one of the only ways permitted one to express love in this crude land: softness is out of place here, only the tough grow old. It has taken me many years, and much suffering, to realize this.

  There were vulnerable hours, usually at night, when I dared to wonder: What would have happened had I refused to elope with Piet? What other life would have opened to me had I married my foreigner in his dapper suit and become Madame D’Alree? But I tried to avoid such sterile reveries. The alternative remained, but only as a shadow to the harsh light of my real existence—an impossible dream and perhaps not even desirable.

  There certainly was a time, as I felt Nicolaas at last slipping from my grasp irrevocably to join the masculine world, when I nearly broke down. Hester saved me, saved my fierce diminished pride. A thin dark brooding child of six, she came to us. She was the daughter of Lood Hugo, who was Piet’s foreman at Houd-den-Bek. In those days, before the boys married and took over, Houd-den-Bek and Elandsfontein were part of this farm, and Piet had foremen and a handful of Hottentots and slaves stationed on each to work the lands and tend the goats and sheep. Lood was a hard worker, uncommunicative but dependable. Of his wife we saw very little, he kept her to himself much as Piet did with me. Rose or some of the slaves occasionally said that she was unhappy—God knows how they come to hear these things; they have an uncanny way of perceiving the hidden lives of their masters—which I had no reason to disbelieve, since she was very young, barely fourteen if I remember well, at the time of their marriage; and she became pregnant within a month. Both mother and child barely survived the birth; Rose was sent to pull them through—that woman is everywhere—and for almost two years before she died Anna Hugo was bed-ridden. By that time an older sister of Lood’s had come to live with them to look after the baby (though it was rumored that, while she survived, Anna clung to her child with a possessive love refusing to share her with anyone). The arrangement worked well for a few years, when the sister unexpectedly married a widower from Graaff Reinet or some other outlying district on his way to sell his produce in the Cape. They offered to take the little girl with them, but Lood insisted on keeping her. However, loneliness appeared to be taking its toll of him and he began to neglect his work, which Piet couldn’t tolerate. They had a few quarrels. Lood took to drink. For days on end he would lie in his house in a stupor, or the slaves would find him in the veld and carry him home, an unworthy spectacle. What must they think of us if we do not set a proper example? We have rules of decency to live by; if these should be allowed to decay into disuse what would become of us? On one of these occasions the child was brought to us. When he was sober, Lood came over on horseback to take her back. Piet was reluctant as he no longer trusted the man; and I found it hard to give up the new child, a girl I could fondle without fear of losing her to the men around me; but I knew it was right for her to be with her father whom she obviously loved. It was bitter solace, after the humiliating quarrel with Piet, to see the thin hard man on the brown horse pressing the child possessively to his body, rigid in his wounded pride, as they rode off.

  “I should have kicked him off the farm,” said Piet.

  “He needs another chance. He is a lonely man.”

  “Aren’t we all lonely?” he said. “That is no reason for a man to break.”

  “He has a child.”

  “He doesn’t deserve it.”

  But he gave Lood another chance. And I believe the man seriously tried; but in less than a month a shepherd came over from Houd-den-Bek to report that Lood had drunk himself into oblivion again and was lying mumbling and giggling in his room while the sheep were breaking out. Piet took his sjambok and mounted his horse.

  “Don’t do anything unreasonable,” I pleaded.

  “Have you ever known me to be unreasonable?” he asked, and rode off.

  He came back at sunset, looking pale and stern, holding the girl in front of him on the horse. There was no sign of tears on her face, but in her eyes I saw the look I had witnessed once or twice when there was no way to avoid it in a lamb when its neck is drawn back taut for the throat to be cut.

  “What happened?” I asked, although I knew.

  “Given him the hiding of his life and left him to think it over.”

  “Not in front of the child?”

  “Take her inside,” was all he said.

  The next morning the slaves from Houd-den-Bek brought news of Lood Hugo’s death.

  “How could you, Piet?” I said.

  But it had not been Piet’s doing. Unable to bear the final humiliation Lood had shot himself.

  “A waste of powder and lead,” said Piet.

  “There has been an accident,” I told Hester. “You must be brave. Your father is dead.”

  “That man killed him,” she said, facing Piet, without raising her voice.

  “No, please,” I said, not daring to look at him. “Your father went out last night. To—to hunt. The gun went off by accident.”

  “That man beat him. I saw him.”

  “She needs to be taught a lesson,” he said. “I won’t have this in my house.”

  “You will not raise a hand against this girl,” I said, interposing myself between the silent straight-backed child and his rage. “You have torn my sons from me. I have never interfered when you disciplined them, even if it broke my heart. But this one you won’t touch. Not ever. She’s mine now. I married you and I’ve borne the consequences every day of my life; I have never set myself against you. But if you do this girl any harm, I’ll take her away with me and you will never see us again. I hope you understand that.”

  He stared at me with an expression I’d never seen before; and he uttered a brief, harsh laugh that sounded like a bark. He didn’t say a word. Turning on his heel he went out, and through the open door I could see him stalking furiously across the pale ochre of the veld, tall and defiant, immense in his solitude, and I knew defeated.

  “Come,” I said to Hester. “You’re dirty, you need a bath,” although she wasn’t dirty and had had a bath the previous night before I’d put her to bed. But there was a different, dark need to fulfill now, an ablution as of a newborn, to establish her as mine, an affirmation of myself in her. There was nothing premeditated about it: I acted with the blind, savage instinct of the mother animal licking the wetness of birth from her young. And as I stripped the clothes from her to wash her in the tub before the kitchen hearth—naked she was a fragile bird-like little thing—I actually felt my breasts aching in a shocking but barren desire to suckle her. She stood unmoving, patient and indifferent to the urgent caresses of my cloth as I washed and washed the little bird-like body, the delicate shoulderblades, the straight back and tight exquisite buttocks, the narrow rib-cage and vulnerable soft stomach with protruding button, the shameless innocent cleft, the hard thin legs and bony knees: washing her limbs as if in those motions I were shaping them and giving them substance, forming them from clay as long ago and mysteriously I had shaped the others in my womb. There was no response when I pretended to tickle armpits or toes, no compliance when I folded her in the large cloth to rub her dry, and when I put on her clothes again—I undertook to sew new ones that very day—there was, at most, a small quick smile not to acknowledge my efforts but to express relief at being restored to herself.

  A week later she ran away for the first time. A shepherd found her in the veld and brought her back: she offered neither resistance nor explanation, listened gravely to my gentle reprimand, and ran away again the day after. I had to thrash her to bring home to her the danger of such recklessness, the need for obedience. She didn’t cry. She hardly ever cried in all these years, although upon occasion I
saw her face contort in the effort to restrain the urge.

  She went off again. It took much patience to establish that she didn’t have anything against us; that she only needed to return, from time to time, to her home at Houd-den-Bek. I lived in ceaseless dread that she might come to harm: hyenas, baboons, snakes, a leopard, God knows what; but I had to learn to accept it, there was no other way, unless she were to be kept tied or locked up. As she grew more used to us and resigned herself to us, she occasionally spoke about her wanderings, mentioning calmly that a snake had reared and spat at her but had gone away when she’d scolded it; that she’d seen a leopard stalking her but had chased it off; that she’d come upon hyenas attacking a lamb but had torn it from them. Piet got furious at her lies; I persuaded him she didn’t mean it, that it was only her imagination and that girl-children were like that; and I urged her to be more careful and not to embroider too much on what had happened lest we begin to disbelieve her. It was disconcerting to learn from a shepherd, after the hyena story, that a badly bitten lamb had indeed been found, and signs of a struggle, and the tracks of scavengers; and occasionally some of her other wild tales were corroborated. But it remained difficult to distinguish, event from imagination, and all it emphasized was what I had already painfully discovered: that in spite of all my efforts and my need to have her to myself, she would forever be solitary and independent. There was in her a quality of virginity that had nothing to do with the behavior of men and women: she was accountable only to herself; what she shared with others would be munificence, decided by herself, but peripheral, never touching the essential.

  And yet she was a companion to me. Whatever I decided to teach her she would learn: embroidery, sewing, reading, cooking; in everything she was quick, deft, precise, dissatisfied with whatever fell short of excellence. At the same time she showed a strange detachment, as if these things which occupied our days were really irrelevant: while there was no harm in doing them, and a certain satisfaction in doing them well, what really concerned her was her secret and would never be shared. So that her company, assuaging my need, also made my redundance more acute.

  I loved to brush her hair, long dark hair reaching down to the small of her narrow back, and she would resignedly stand for what seemed like hours every night while I brushed and brushed, one of the rare luxuries I’ve ever permitted myself since I left the Cape. That wealth, that splendor of hair. Until one day, without any explanation, she cut it all off with my large sewing scissors. When out of shock I began to cry she simply watched in mild bemusement; it was one of the few times I punished her. But it was of course useless. Once again she’d asserted her independence from me; once again I was reminded that the solace I’d found in our relationship was my illusion only, no part of her reality.

  At night I lay awake wondering what would become of her, disturbed by her intensity. After Piet had fallen asleep, breathing so deeply it seemed the very walls of the house distended and contracted, I often got up again to go barefoot to her mattress in the corner of our room. Even in sleep her narrow face appeared grave, yielding nothing to my gaze; sometimes she was still awake, her eyes meeting mine steadily in the light of the candle, imperturbable and wise.

  “Why aren’t you sleeping, Hester?”

  “I’m just thinking.” Or: “I was looking at the moon.” Or: “I was listening to the jackals.”

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Once she asked: “What were you and that man doing in the dark?” She persisted in calling him “that man.” Never “Oom Piet.”

  “It’s very late,” I said dumbly. “You should sleep now.”

  “He won’t kill you too, will he?”

  “He has never killed anybody, Hester.”

  “He killed my father.”

  I was less upset about the reference to her father than about the discovery that she had witnessed, albeit in the dark, Piet’s laborious nocturnal assault on my unresisting but negative body; and the next day I told the slave women to move her mattress to the front room.

  It was after that night, possibly because her remark had awakened me to it, that I made more disquieting discoveries about the fascination matters of the flesh held for her. One day I happened to hurry inside disgusted by the performance of the dogs in front of the house, to find her, unaware of my entrance, standing at the window staring out at them in such intense enthralment that I caught my breath. Her mouth was half opened and she was breathing deeply, almost panting, the tips of her fingers pressed to her cheeks, her dark eyes—when she finally turned to face me—glittering like liquid fire.

  “What are you doing there, Hester?”

  “Nothing.” She absently, with the back of her hand, wiped a trace of spittle from her lip. On the tan of her cheek—there has always been a beautiful half-submerged darkness in her skin—I could still see the imprint of her fingers.

  “You mustn’t look at those dogs.”

  “Why not, Tant Alida?”

  The gravity of her innocence unnerved me. I preferred not to discuss the matter. But I lay awake again that night beside Piet, his vitality overwhelming even in sleep, worrying about Hester. How would she ever adapt to our decencies? She had in her the same ferocious pride that had driven her abject father not to the shame but the courage of suicide. But if she would not submit, what other way was there open to her? How incurable would be the wounds inflicted on her by the men of this land? I thought of Piet; I imagined him and his sons walking across the farm: and after the merest tinge of pride—those are my men, I have fashioned them—I was left in awe not of what they were but of what, for women, they could never be. One of such would take her and presume to tame her as a dog would, a ram, a stallion, a bull. Or had she always been aware of it like a fever of the blood? Was that the root of her solemnity, ungraspable even to herself, my virgin almost-daughter?

  That it would be one of my own sons I could not guess, although looking back it now appears unavoidable, if still uneasily tinged with incest. They roamed the farm together, the three of them and, yes, the slave boy Galant.

  I find it difficult to recall him as a child. He was always there, in the background, a shadow to the others. I thought of him as Rose’s child and might have disliked him for it; but he had an obedient, winning way. One could send him out with the boys, and of course with Hester, and be sure there would not be mischief, at least nothing serious. He used I think to know his place. Of course he did not have the terrible experience of my sons in being wrested from a mother to become a man in a father’s demanding world. He never as far as I can remember caused any trouble. Now he has murdered my son. I am shaken by it, how can I not be?, yet I cannot grieve because it all seems so remote now. I have grown old, not so much perhaps in years, but inside. There is a sense of peace in this ultimate closeness to my speechless husband, but there is weariness too. Our graves are waiting up there in the small enclosure on the hillside above the house. It will be good to rest at last. I am reconciled to the earth. But I doubt that I shall ever understand. Nicolaas, my son.

  Nicolaas

  Slaughtering days were busy days on the farm. Every Monday Pa had a sheep slaughtered for the week, but that was unremarkable. The real slaughtering day came in early autumn, just after the first frost, when the beans had been harvested and most of the outdoor work was drawing to a close and life on the farm was beginning to bend inward. Then there was slaughtering on a grand scale—ox and sheep and pig alike—to make sausages and brawn and biltong and salted ribs, to smoke hams and legs of mutton for the winter months. For Barend and Galant those were great days, but Ma tried to keep me away from the bloody business for as long as possible; until curiosity got the better of me and I insisted on going with the rest. “You sure you can face it?” asked Pa, in the way he had of making me feel useless. “I want to go,” I whined. “I want to. I want to.” Ma still felt reluctant but Pa was adamant: �
��If he thinks he’s up to it, he’d better come with us. We’ll soon find out if he’s a man.”

  With a great show of bravery I went down to the large flat slaughtering-stone with them. But when Achilles cut the throat of the first sheep and the blood spurted all over his trousers and bare feet, I got sick. I turned away my burning eyes, hoping they wouldn’t notice, for then I would never hear the end of it. But Pa never missed anything. “Well, Nicolaas,” he jeered, “why you suddenly looking so pale?”

  Without wanting to I stammered, on the verge of tears: “I didn’t want to be here.” And that was the way it always was. I never wanted to be there.

  There may have been a time when all was well. I should like to believe it, but what would be the use? What has remained of it all? Odd names and memories presenting themselves at random: like when the fog closes in over these highlands swathing everything in its blankness—only the occasional rock or hump or shrub protruding: you know very well they must be connected in some way; hidden in the fog must be a continuous and significant landscape, yet it remains invisible. All sense relinquished long ago, leaving only a meaningless opacity. Once upon a time the sun was shining. Once upon a time there were two boys and a girl—three with Barend—once there were two boys—once a boy and a girl—once a child who got sick at a slaughtering-stone and was mocked by the others. Once upon a time there was a woman who was nobody’s mother but whom we all called Ma, Ma-Rose, who dried our tears and laughed with us, and who used to tell stories better than anyone else in the world. Once upon a time there was a dam. Once there was a mountain. Once upon a time, long long ago. The ponderous world is smothered in a fog.