A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  But in the last spasms of the dying night, when the coals begin to turn from red to grey and the jackals cavort like the spirits of the dead, when the baboons start barking on the highest cliffs and the night-walkers creep into the huts of sleeping men, the merriment subsides; and I steal away from the others to take Nicolaas’s stallion from the stable and ride off into the dark on my own, everywhere and nowhere. It feels as if death is hard on my heels, and sooner or later it will track me down. There’s a loneliness in such a night, lonelier than anything I’ve ever known; as in the distance I hear Abel and the others ride off, back to the farms of their masters where soon, in the clanging of the slave bells, they will have to get up, without ever having been down, for a new day’s work. So brief is our merriment: and then the runaway horse is returned to its harness.

  I get off from Nicolaas’s stallion and I pick up a stone which I hurl against another, striking up sparks in the dark. I go to one of the stone walls we’ve built and I begin to break it down, heaving off stone after stone to hurl into the night like pebbles thrown into a dam, except this time there is no water and one sees no rings. I shut my eyes very tightly as I throw the stones, trying to shatter the images of children swimming in that black dam, all of them with their smooth otter bodies. You can’t go with us today, Galant. You’re not allowed to look at Hester. You’re a slave.

  But I hit nothing.

  Panting and shivering from the effort, I go back to the horse and steer it towards Ma-Rose’s hut. She never minds being woken up.

  “What you gnawing at your heart like this?” she asks.

  “I’m fed-up with myself, Ma-Rose.”

  “What do you want of me?”

  How do I know? Would it help to be a child again and crawl in beside her under that heavy kaross, yielding to the caresses of her skilful hand, stroking and stroking my little thing until I fall asleep? It’s not so easy any more.

  She brews bush-tea on her smoky tkoin-wood fire. Her eyes are watery. She’s as old as the mountains.

  “Tell me a story, Ma-Rose.”

  “You mad? You grown-up now. It’s no time for stories any more.”

  “Tell me about the Great Hunter Heitsi-Eibib. Tell me about the Water Woman. Tell me about the Lightning Bird that lays its eggs in the ground.”

  I go back to the hut built with my own hands and to the woman who is mine.

  She moans sleepily and sits up rubbing her eyes. The warmth of her woman-smell. “Where you been all night, Galant?”

  “Just riding.”

  “Cocky at night, limp in the morning,” she says, her teasing voice lazy and low with sleep. “Come to me.”

  It helps. She understands. She knows the needs of my body. She looks after me night and day. Now that she’s the cook in Nicolaas’s house she brings me meat and other food apart from what has been set aside for us. “Eat,” she says. “Meat is what you need.” She also brings me morsels of news and gossip she’s heard in the house. Another slave run away from Barend: it happens all the time: he has a heavy hand. Other news too. This master or that has gone away for a day or a week or a month, there’s a new place for making merry at night. But it’s especially on the days the newspaper is brought that Bet keeps her ears open to bring me news. A new law about slaves in the Cape, she says. Man and wife can no longer be sold separately. There’s been another meeting in the Cape. They want slave children to be set free at birth. But the Government is against it. There’s always news, and mostly it has to do with slaves.

  “You sure it’s true?” I ask her eagerly, anxiously. “You sure you heard right?”

  “I heard. And I read it too.”

  “You can read?” I ask in amazement.

  “They taught me at Bruintjieshoogte where I lived.”

  “Then you must bring the newspaper to the hut so you can show me.”

  “They won’t ever let a newspaper out of their hands. You know how it is.”

  “But you working in the house. It’s easy for you. You can always put it back afterwards.”

  “I already told you everything it says.”

  “Why you backing out now?”

  “I’m not backing out. I just telling you.”

  “Bet, you want another hiding?”

  Even beating her is useless; she’s a stubborn woman. So I have to do it on my own without her knowing. In the afternoon I see her going out to the hut. I know Nicolaas is at a distant grazing place and the Nooi in the kitchen garden. I hide among the young peach-trees at the front door, carrying a bundle of wood so I can explain if someone sees me. When I’m quite sure there’s no one around I slip through the door. The newspaper is in the kist in the front room, the voorhuis; that much I know from Bet.

  Hearing the squeak of the back door hinges, I hide the paper in my bundle of wood and I hurry out in front, ducking behind the trees.

  “Here it is,” I say to Bet in the hut. “This must be the one you saw yesterday. It was right on top.”

  “Galant, this is trouble.”

  “Read.” I push it under her nose. “Read to me. I want to hear.”

  “I already told you everything.”

  “Read, woman!”

  “It’s about the Government.”

  “Show me the Government’s mark. I want to see it with my own eyes.”

  “Here.” She presses her finger on a row of tracks in the middle of the paper. I study it closely.

  “And what does it say here?”

  “About the meeting. The things they said.”

  I grab the newspaper from her hands, crumpling it.

  “Don’t!” she cries. “The Baas will—”

  “His name is Nicolaas.”

  “He’s our baas,”

  I push her aside and thrust the crumpled paper back into her hands. “Show me that mark of the Government again.”

  “I already showed you, Galant.”

  “I want to see it again.”

  She’s frightened now, I can see that. Hesitating, she presses her finger on one of the small rows of tracks.

  “That’s not the mark you showed me just now!” I shout.

  She trembles and tries to crawl out of reach. “The Government has many marks.”

  “You lied to me, Bet. You can’t read, no more than I can!”

  “I tried to make it easier for you, Galant. Now please—”

  “You cheated me. I don’t take that from anybody.”

  I pick up the axe I used to chop my bundle of wood.

  “No, Galant, please!”

  “Bet!” the Nooi calls from the kitchen. “Where are you?”

  I have to let her go. But I remain in the hut until I hear the horse coming through the gate: then I go out, the newspaper openly in my hands.

  “I want to know what it says about the slaves,” I tell Nicolaas as he pulls the reins over the horse’s head.

  Surprised, he takes the newspaper from me. “What are you doing with things you don’t understand?”

  The world is trembling before my eyes, but I restrain myself. “Nicolaas, I want to know what this thing says.”

  He laughs, but uneasily, keeping the horse between us. “It says all sorts of things,” he answers, smirking. “It talks about a white hen that hatched a black cat in another country.”

  I have the reins in my hands. The knuckles of my fingers show up pale through the skin.

  “Now unsaddle the horse and rub it down,” says Nicolaas. “The sun is already setting.”

  I know I cannot touch him. He knows it too. It’s different between us. I see it in the way he walks back to his house. All I can do, that night, is to ride Bet bareback, to ride her hard.

  I ride her well, and now she is with child.

  This is something different again, and it makes me resentful. What am I to do with a chil
d? What will become of him? Every new foal born on this farm is broken in; and I don’t want that for him.

  “I don’t want it, Ma-Rose,” I storm at the old woman. “This is no place for a new child.”

  “But he won’t be a slave like you,” she reminds me. “He’ll be Bet’s child and she’s a free woman, she’s of the Khoin like me.

  It trickles through my body like a draught of old Achilles’s honey-beer. A terrible lightning. I feel like crying; but I also feel like laughing. Under the stars I ride home on Nicolaas’s horse, looking up. This child will come and go as he likes. He can go as far as the Cape if he wishes. Here I am, riding in the night: but that child will trot off into the sunrise. Tomorrow has never been any concern of mine. All I’ve ever had is my bit of today. But this child: his tracks will run all the way to the daybreak.

  It is such a dizzying thought that when the horse stumbles over a stone I lose my grip and roll over the ground, grazing knees and elbows. I feel like cursing; but I’m laughing too. All you bloody white hens, I think, you can breed as many bloody black cats as you wish. What do I care? Tether me if you want to; keep me on as short a rein as you can find. But this child of mine will run off into the rising sun.

  Hester

  There was no need for Barend to choose this place. He is the eldest, he had freedom of choice. And Houd-den-Bek is the better farm. Water in abundance, wheatlands on the plains, veld for grazing. The soil is rocky but fertile and deep. It is an open farm, even the graveyard lies exposed. But to keep me from the grave of my father and the house in which I’d been born he chose Elandsfontein, in this narrow valley between two steep ridges of mountains, remote and austere, here to confine and possess me.

  It is a fight of animals, nightly resumed, and as he claws and thrusts to subdue me, hoping no doubt to break me in like a mare, I resist in the savage knowledge that he is more vulnerable than I, that even as he rides me there can only be abjection in his triumph when, limp and ludicrous, he withdraws, having bruised and torn no more than my body. This is the true struggle: to keep desire and the dream intact. The body must survive. Our limits are circumscribed by its contours and urges. But the body is a moveable asset and there is earth below, and the liquid insistence of water. These he cannot possess by using me; yet I, in my own body, have access to them.

  Our children are the result of this unremitting war. I did not wish them, yet in having them, boys both, I have acquired a new invulnerability. They are not of me, yet strangely shaped by my body they assert my independence from him. In the beginning it was fruitless. There must be a bitterness in my womb, I thought, poisoning his seed and killing it; and I relished it. Children I believed would but confirm his hold on me, and in my monthly flow I asserted a fierce virginity which had nothing to do with the first stained sheet he had hung from the window for only the swallows and the mountain eagles to see. My barrenness was exemplary and proud. I thrived on the anxious staring of his mother and the annoyed whispers of that man who is now my father-in-law: “I told you to pick a tall strong woman, Barend. For God’s sake, man, what is to become of the Van der Merwes?”

  When I first fell pregnant I was numb with revulsion. I refused to accept it. It must be some growth inside me, a sickness. Everything in me denied a child. He was the last to whom I would admit it, yet he must have suspected it. Whenever he thought I was unaware of it he would stare at me, not in lust or anger but with what seemed like awe. A new gentleness became apparent. Perhaps that was what revolted me more than arrogance or assault. It reminded me too much of what Nicolaas had been like before. Against violence I could arm myself; mildness was more insidious. When I was alone I would fold my arms across my stomach and try forcibly to expel this growing thing from my body, this alien presence threatening my solitude from within. Then came the first tentative stirrings, the merest flutter of minute limbs, an eyelid-flickering of tiny fist or foot. And something changed. I fought it as if my last freedom was at stake; but I knew I’d lost. The child was inside me and I wanted it. More desperately than I’d ever dared to want anything since the death of my father I wanted this living moving child within me. When I lost it—and it was so unnecessary, so stupid—I wanted to die. I knew that was why I’d lost it: because I’d desired it too much, the way it had happened with other things before. But this time it was worse. The aching emptiness inside was not a return to what had been my normal state but a confirmation of loss. Losing what one has never had is more searing than physical pain; it is the death of the possible. It is a retraction of the horizon, a revised and ruder definition of the body itself. Earth eroding; a subterranean spring drying up.

  As I lay in the bed in pain after losing the child, Barend came in. Something welled up in me: a desire for him to come to me, to hold me. I needed to tell him I was sorry. I needed forgiveness and closeness. But I saw the hard anger in his eyes and realized again how much he hated me for what had happened. So I remained silent and he left. It was the last chance, I think, we had of reaching out to touch. Pregnancy had made me vulnerable; I knew I had to be doubly careful lest I be invaded.

  There was no repetition of the first elation when it happened again, and if there was no acquiescence there was no resistance either. It was no marvel; it was only inevitable. “Normal.” Not an act of extension but of simple and necessary fortification against the future. The dream did not die but only, by entrenching itself, sealed itself off more effectively from the world, allowing less than before of private hope or tenderness.

  I was forbidden to return to Houd-den-Bek again, except on the occasional obligatory family visit with Barend. The first time had been, of course, for Nicolaas’s wedding. I’d known it would be torture: Barend flaunting me; that man his father expounding on the virtues of large fertile wives; the old woman going out of her way to make me feel “wanted”; neighbors peering to detect the first signs of pregnancy even though we’d then been married for barely two months; Cecilia parading in anxious pride through what had been my home, baring her large teeth in a fixed, uneasy smile as if desperately to prove that her stays were not too tight for that strong ungainly body; and Nicolaas staring with vulnerable eyes like an antelope wounded and waiting, uncomprehending, for the shot that will put it out of its misery. And torture it was, even though mitigated by the rain which limited the crowd and inhibited their merriment—unlike the outrageous throng that had mobbed us here at Elandsfontein and driven me to seek refuge behind a barricaded bedroom door, later broken down forcibly by Barend for the first pitched battle in our interminable war. Even so their feast became too much for me and I slipped from the voorhuis as soon as I could. In the kitchen at that moment there was only Galant; the other slaves were in front, serving meat and brandy.

  It was a strange pocket of silence: the crowd inside; outside the streaming rain—and in the kitchen none but the two of us.

  “You looking for something?” he asked.

  “I’m going.”

  “Shall I bring your carriage?”

  “No, I’ll walk.” I hadn’t planned it at all; but as I said it I realized the full extent of my need to be alone, even in that rain. No: because of the rain.

  “You can’t go in this weather,” he said.

  “I’ve always liked the rain.” And suddenly I added: “Don’t you remember?”

  He remained impassive. He’d probably forgotten. In a sense it was a relief, I suppose; yet there was a curious feeling of rejection in his attitude as if he were denying not only his own memory but part of what, who knows, might have been important to me.

  As I opened the door the rain threw me back into the kitchen and I had to gasp for breath.

  “I told you it was bad,” he said.

  If he hadn’t I might have stayed. Now he’d turned it into a challenge and I said: “I’m going.”

  “I can walk with you to show you the way.”

  “I’ll find the way.”


  “You’ll need a lantern.”

  “Don’t be silly. In this rain?”

  He watched me sullenly as I stood with my weight against the door.

  “Galant,” I said, in a surge of urgency—unable to take him by the shoulders and shake him, with only my voice to persuade him—“you’ll be living here now. For God’s sake, look after the place for me.”

  “I will, Miss Hester.”

  It stung me. He’d never called me that before. I turned round and hurled myself into the rain, leaving him to shut the door. The storm was worse than I’d thought. Much worse. Once I’d staggered out of the yard there was total blackness. It felt as if the whole world was being washed away. Within moments I was drenched. I found my way back to the outbuildings and stumbled into the stable, a steaming darkness with softly neighing animals and the piercing smell of urine. I knew them well and as I spoke to them they recognized me. Shivering, weighed down by the wet heavy clothes, I sought and found heat against their large bodies until I felt I could brave the rain again. No need to grope for reins and saddle in the dark. Choosing the horse I knew best I led it outside and scrambled on its back, lying forward to steady myself, feeling along the entire extent of my body the reassuring power and warmth of the great animal moving through night and rain, a contraction and motion of muscles, the deceptive obedience of so much savage strength. More than once I nearly fell asleep on his back from exhaustion, waking up only as I started slipping or when he would suddenly stop or swerve to avoid some invisible obstacle.