by Andre Brink
“Of course. Years ago.”
He was silent for so long that I thought he’d fallen asleep.
“Barend?” I asked, unable to control my excitement. “Don’t you say anything?”
“I never expected that from you.”
Whatever that might mean.
At noon the next day, when we were all at table for our meal of bread and meat and milk, Pa looked up after saying grace, and said: “It seems Hester is old enough to get married now.”
“What’s that?” said Ma, putting down the plate she had just picked up.
Hester was staring straight down at the table, blushing lightly. It surprised me that she should have approached Pa before I had; but one never knew with her.
“Barend told me about their plans this morning,” Pa said as he began to carve the blesbuck joint.
It was like being kicked in the balls. I couldn’t see straight for a while; all the voices sounded distant. Across the table from me I saw her raise her head to look at Pa, at Barend, then at me; I’d never seen her quite so pale.
My own voice had a distant sound when I protested: “But that’s impossible. It’s Hester and I—”
“Barend is the elder,” Pa said sharply. “It’s for him to choose. Although I must say I would have preferred my sons to marry tall, large women. I’d like to see the Van der Merwes breed a strong and durable race. But if that’s what Barend wants—”
“Has Hester no say in it?” asked Ma, with a sharpness I didn’t expect from her.
“I believe Barend has already spoken to her,” said Pa.
“That’s right,” Barend said. “Not so, Hester?”
“But my God—!” I burst out.
“In this house we do not take the name of the Lord in vain,” Pa said very sternly. “In any case it has nothing to do with you, Nicolaas, so shut up. Well, what do you say, Hester?”
She looked up again, at nobody in particular, quite blankly; she moved her lips as if to say something, but then she dropped her head again. Through the duskiness of her skin she was as pale as a wall. If only she’d say something, explain something. To think that she could turn against me and deny me like all the others. God must have willed it like that. But if so, He must have discerned some unspeakable evil in me to punish me in such an outrageous manner.
—And yet there must have been a time when the world had been whole. Early mornings, hunched against the cold, squatting beside the black iron pot with Galant and Ma-Rose, scooping our porridge with our hands, our eyes watery with smoke. Prayers at night, the five of us round the long dining table in the light of the oil lamp, the slaves a dark bundle on the dung-floor near the kitchen door, Pa’s voice droning on and on, shaping each word separately like mouthfuls of food chewed well. And bedtime, huddling under the blankets, the wind tearing at the thatch overhead, Ma entering with the candle to tuck us in and briefly sit with us and hold us in her arms. Sunrise in the veld, Galant and I following the sheep in the joyful assurance of a whole day undisturbed ahead of us. Barend and Galant and I and Hester at the dam, robbing the weaver-birds’ nests of their pale blue eggs. Hester pressing her wrist against mine to mingle our small smears of blood. The rare but precious occasions on the wagon to the Cape, with Pa.—
Pa. Always Pa. No one but him. The others seemed like the small branches and twigs one has to clear away to reach the trunk of the great, solid tree you wish to climb. He had always eluded me. That hard safe fork I never reached. And on that fifteenth birthday of Hester’s the deepest hurt, I think, lay not in her, or in what Barend had done, but in Pa, who appeared finally to have turned away from me in that one withering remark: It has nothing to do with you, Nicolaas, so shut up. I’d always tried, God knows. When I was very small I had done whatever I could to help Ma, yet she forced me from the nest like a bird. To Barend I’d always given whatever he’d demanded, and more, in the hope that it would persuade him to like me and approve of me. Everything I’d done on the farm I’d shared with Galant, because I’d needed to have him there beside me. And for Hester I’d sacrificed everything in order to ensure that she would always remain with me. But behind all of them there had always been Pa, that single towering figure.
No one was as strong as he was. No one could walk up the ladder to the loft as easily as he, carrying the full bag of wheat on his shoulders. No one could match the ease with which he could hold down a bull-calf to castrate him. “A farmer isn’t worth his salt unless he can outwork all his slaves,” he used to say. And no man on his farm or any other in the neighborhood could keep up with him, ploughing or reaping or digging or building. I wanted him to be proud of me. Or, if that was impossible, at least to acknowledge me. But in his eyes I never was good enough. “Got to be a man, my boy. A real man. Marrow in your bones. You’re too much of a fancy turd.”
“But what do you expect of me, Pa? Tell me. What is ‘a man’?”
“A man’s got hair on his chest and he farts like a horse.” Followed by his guffaw, like the bellowing of a bull.
Barend sprouted hair on his chest. Not a rough mat of hair like Pa had, but impressive enough. I remained smooth, to my eternal shame. To me it was a sign that I would never live up to Pa’s expectations. But I swear I tried. I swear to God. I toiled on the threshing-floor until I staggered and fell down. I kept up with the reapers until I got sunstroke and had to be carried home in a high fever, my mind rambling for days. When we went to Cape Town I would take my turn at driving the wagon, putting everything I could into it so he could see how good I was: but all he did was to smile indulgently as if he was at most amused. Not once did he really acknowledge me. And on that day, when he said: “It has nothing to do with you, Nicolaas, so shut up,” it was a final confirmation of my worthlessness in his eyes: a man without hair on his chest.
And yet I tried again; once. Hope is an indestructible weed. (Was even my marriage, later, to Oom Jan du Plessis’s daughter Cecilia another attempt to prove to Pa my manliness? I’m not sure. It had more to do, I should think, quite simply with saving face; with proving not to others but to myself my chances of survival.) What happened was the coming of the lion, and perhaps because it followed so soon after Hester’s birthday it offered itself as a last opportunity to win his favor. At the time of her birthday the animal had already made its presence known in the neighborhood: we’d heard of damage done on this farm or that, of sheep caught and dragged from the kraals at night, of tracks much too large for a leopard or other common predator. And then a slave child was caught at one of Pa’s grazing places: dragged right out of the hut where it had been sleeping among the other people. And in that same night we heard its roar in our mountains, a sound that set one’s whole body atremble, one’s very skull and guts and marrow. Even though one had never heard that sound before, the moment it came there was a dark instinct that recognized it and reacted to it, as if one had been expecting it since birth. A single roar, followed by a series of deep rumbling sounds as if the mountain itself was heaving; and then a rhythmic sighing, almost too deep to hear, a subterranean presence sucking one in and out as it breathed, in and out. In that sound one discovered how untamed the land still was, and how untameable. There hadn’t been a lion in these parts for God knows how long: but suddenly, behold, it was there.
There was no need to send out messages or confer with neighbors: the next morning, unbidden, the whole of the Bokkeveld turned up for the hunt. And just as sure as our recognition of the sound the night before was the resolve not to return before the intruder had been killed. It was a simple imperative, an appointment with death. Not just the lion: but death itself, which always prowls among us even though we may not always recognize its sound so readily.
This, I knew, was the chance I had of proving to Pa that I should not so lightly be dismissed or disregarded.
In that morning’s hunt all our earlier hunts seemed to be revived. We’d always hunted in single file wh
enever we’d gone in search of leopard or hyena or lynx: Pa in front, then Barend, then I, and Galant bringing up the rear. When it was dangerous, we stuck closely together, each hard on the heels of the man before him—with the result, inevitably, that when Pa stopped in his tracks the rest would bump into him, one after the other. One day, stalking a wounded leopard that had eluded us more than once, Pa had warned us several times not to tread on his heels like that, but we’d been too scared to pay attention. Until he properly lost his temper.
“Barend,” he shouted, “if you bump into me again I’ll thump you!”
Numb with fright, Barend could only mumble: “If you thump me I’ll thump Nicolaas.”
(And if you thump me, I’ll thump Galant.)
Yes, in spite of the frayed tempers, there had been a closeness among us on the hunt, a togetherness in the invisible presence of that threatening leopard (which we later found, harmlessly dead, in a thicket). I felt an intimation of that same closeness on the morning we set out to hunt the lion, Galant and I with a handful of unarmed helpers going off on our own. For those few hours everything that had recently happened seemed to recede and become irrelevant; it was as if even Hester’s birthday had never occurred at all. I was so wrapped in thought that the lion came charging at us before I properly realized it. Quite instinctively I jerked the gun up against my shoulder; but the cock got stuck. Running blindly, I’d already resigned myself to what seemed inevitable, when I heard the shot behind me and the lion came tumbling down on me, throwing me to the ground. Even then I couldn’t believe I was alive; I was, in fact, still amazed by the ordinariness of death when Galant grabbed me by the arms to pull me to my feet. I was covered in dust. My eyes were burning. But worst of all was the horror of knowing I’d proved myself a coward in front of everybody. It was so damned unfair: it had been the gun’s fault, not mine. When I saw Pa and the others approaching I couldn’t face them with the truth.
“He nearly got Galant,” I panted, breathless, as Barend came up to me. “I got him just in time.” But I was really talking to Pa who stood behind him, his broad-brimmed hat between me and the sun.
What difference could it make to Galant? It was immaterial to him whether he or I had shot the lion. To him it was nothing but a hunt, an animal tracked down and dispensed with. To me it was a last attempt to grab back something of what I should have known was irrevocably lost.
“Well I never,” Pa muttered briefly, glancing at me before he turned away to round up his hunters. He must have read the truth in my eyes. No doubt of that. And the contempt of his silence was worse than any blatant accusation of having lied.
The others were all thronging around us in excitement, shouting, laughing, jostling, prodding the dead animal with their feet or their guns. But at last, after they had all gone off, the two of us remained to skin the carcass. Always the two of us. Galant and I. If only he would say something. But his considerateness in keeping silent branded me with a deeper guilt than could be expiated with words. I hated that dead lion as we squatted beside it to skin the body: how could it lie there so wretchedly, allowing us to go about our degrading business? Only minutes ago it had been awfully, terrifyingly alive. Now it was a dusty old carcass, its mane tangled with dirt and thorns and dried grass, its teeth worn and broken, its head disproportionately large for its bony body, its eyes blueish in the blindness of death, its claws blunted. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it: it was unworthy of a lion to be like that.
A giant, a great roar in the night, a creature that could inhale and exhale one in the deep living sound of its breathing, had turned into the miserable victim of everything that had gone wrong between us. Its death was the death of something I would have wished to be, something that desperately needed to remain inviolate, something no man should be allowed to relinquish. Like losers we tramped back home in the dust, carrying its skin as the trophy of our defeat; I in front, Galant far behind. If I were to stop unexpectedly, there wouldn’t be anyone near enough to bump into me. And all I was conscious of was that I didn’t want to be there; that I wasn’t meant to be there: as on that distant day with Achilles at the slaughtering-stone.
Achilles
I have nothing to say about those days. What happened happened afterwards. It’s their business, not mine. It’s their land, not mine. My land is where the ship brought me from, where the ’mtili trees grow, and that is very far away. They came with the long’ guns to hunt us the way one hunts hares. The old ones they shot or clubbed off into the bush. It was only the young ones they wanted. They examined us very carefully—eyes, teeth, muscles, legs; they felt our balls; they broke into the girls to test their depth, and bruised their teats. And then they drove us from one slave pit to the next, on the long road that runs from Zim-ba-ué to the sea, where the palm trees grow and the sun rises from the water. Those who’d grown too feeble were left behind for dead. The rest of us were loaded into the ship in row upon row, bound in long chains. Impossible to stand up or turn over on your side. Those who died died in their chains. Those who didn’t, survived. Salted meat and pork and sour beer. We arrived in the Cape, skeletons with loose teeth, sick with the smell of vinegar. Food and arrack for a month in the lodge to revive us; then into the stone quarry below the Lion’s Rump to strengthen us. At last there was the auction, and the gong beating.
I ran away from the first farm. They brought me back and flogged me. I ran away again. They brought me back and flogged me. And again. Then I was sold to a more distant farmer. I ran away, but he too had me brought back and flogged. After I’d been sold another time, and had run away again, they branded me with irons and kept me in the Dark Hole of the Castle for a long time. In the end one gives up trying to run away. You know it’s no use. You know you won’t ever find your way back to your own country again, the land with the baobabs and the ’mtili trees with their bare white trunks and dark crowns; where you had a name that was your own, Gwambe; where you had your place beside your mother, and where your father sat with the headmen of the Bakonde. Here you are called by another name: Achilles. It means slave.
The big man brought me on his wagon from the Cape to this place beyond the mountains. As soon as we arrived on the farm he had all the slaves flogged, me too, so that we would heed him. I never tried to run away again. One gets old before one’s time. But one never forgets. When I sleep I can still see the moon rising from the dark sea moving against the shore. There is a wound that never heals, like the scar from the hot iron, except this one cannot be seen although you never stop feeling it.
What did they know about it? They were children. Barend and Nicolaas, who used to tease me or shout at me as if I were their size. Galant, whom I’d taught to drive the wagon: I could see that he was clever with his hands, but I never thought he’d learn to kill too. And the little girl Hester who would often come very quietly to watch us work; and who sometimes smuggled a biscuit from the kitchen in the pocket of her pinafore. She was different. But she too was no more than a child and couldn’t be expected to understand.
Hester
The feel of things. Textures. The hairy skin, gently pliant to the touch, of Dad’s jacket. The worn head of a clay pipe and the jagged edges where the stem had broken when he fell. The cold metallic shock of a gun-barrel. The large coarse hand enfolding mine; and then the silk and bristle of the horse against my legs.
The surfaces of kitchen and living-room and bedroom, confining me. The fine hard top of the yellowwood table at mealtime, yielding easily to a nail, uniformly even to the open hand. The blandness of a water-candle tapering smoothly to the coarse wick. Copper, iron, wood. (Smells too: cinnamon, cloves, onion, wood-fire smoke.) A mattress stuffed with chaff, pleasantly prickling to bare skin, adjusting slowly to the insistence of a body.
Above all the things outside. The wooden farmyard gate, worn away and oiled by hands. The jaggedness of rock grating the skin, ridges and crevices, the weight of a stone in the hollow of a
palm. The dried grass of a weaver’s nest and the perfect fragile shell of the small egg; the rough bark of a willow-branch scratching the skin of inner thighs. The squelchiness of mud worming through fingers or toes. The feel of water: droplets running from a cupped hand down to the elbow; splashing icily against a face immersed in a mountain stream; laving and enclosing lasciviously the swimming body. (Keeping watch, out of sight, as I lolled and swam, was he warding off others as he’d promised, or himself secretly spying? Rather hoping he was, I offered him in his absence more of me—here is my body: look; see what I can do, what I am—than when he was near, servile and attentive.)
But this is not enough. Not only to feel but to know what it feels like to be feeling. Not to feel the surface of the rock against your skin but to know how from inside it feels you. Its weight in the earth, its stillness, its silence. And how it feels the rain. The first drops, their smell, and how they bring to life the smells of grass, heather, lichen, earth. Soaking you to the skin; the feel of clothes clinging in cold lust, sucking at your flesh as he sucked that other day, after the snake; the smell and feel of your own body, separate limbs, an aching ecstasy inwards. I would sit in the rain, if they let me, head down, arms and legs drawn in, the shape of a stone, to feel it wash over me, permeate me entirely. Thunder. Not coming from clouds above but reverberating in the earth. The wish to be bare then, the nakedness of desire. Skies aflame, a sound of mountains falling, crashing about me; a dissolution into pure liquid existence, shaping me, running and beautiful. Once when I went back to Houd-den-Bek there was such a storm, the first I’d ever been part of; and when they found me—why in such a frenzy? why so nearly desperate?—it didn’t matter that I hadn’t reached home. I had been cleansed and that was enough.
It was in search of him that I went back every time. They wouldn’t take me to his funeral: perhaps there had been no funeral—even though, afterwards, there was the grave. Once I even tried to dig it up to make sure, but I tore my nails on the hard soil and had to abandon it. It would have been no use anyway. What I needed of him was more than the touch of his jacket, his crusted boots, his father-smell: I needed his memory of me which they’d taken away. That man had come and flogged him like a runaway slave, tossing me this way and that as I clung to his thrashing arm screaming in terror and rage; then took me away on the horse. And afterwards, when I went home, Dad had gone. The memory had gone. There was so much about myself of which I knew nothing: the beginning, the early years, Mother. But he’d been there, he’d witnessed it, he’d become the custodian of my wholeness and when he died it could not be retrieved. Everything about me which he’d known had been buried with him. Driving my father to his death that man had obliterated part of myself: there had been Mother, then Tant Nan, then Dad: in losing him I lost my grasp on them all.
