A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  The new grey uninspiring day had already lightened up considerably by the time I reached Elandsfontein. I was numb all over and I could feel a dangerous fever mounting; and Barend, galloping home frantically from wherever he’d been scouring the veld for me, was in such a rage that he hit me. I offered no resistance. Not only because of the numbness, the strange euphoria of exhaustion, but because of an inexplicable contentment in me: the way I imagined one would feel after making love all night long with a man one truly desired.

  In spite of his explicit interdict I often returned to Houd-den-Bek in those early days. Not on foot, alas—it was much too far, two hours at least on a fast horse—and always taking the precaution of carrying with me a basket with newly baked bread, or jam, or a joint of meat as a pretext: but if no one saw me as I sat at the grave or simply roamed about, I would not seek them out to deliver the karmenaadjie. There were angry scenes with Barend every time he found out, but in the end he resigned himself to it. He had trouble enough with slaves running away. His wife, at least, came home again: if not willingly, at least from a sense of obligation.

  When I was with child I became absent-minded, I suppose. I’d always loved riding as fast as possible. Speed shook loose my thoughts; it set them free to take off on their own. On that day the horse suddenly took fright—a snake, a tortoise or a meerkat in the way—and swerving at full gallop to avoid it, trod in an aardvark hole and threw me. That was when I lost the baby. Afterwards I found the urgency to return to the grave abated.

  In the beginning, in the delusion of adolescence, one believes in savage rebellion. Ensnared in your condition—woman, wife, underling—only two escapes offer themselves as alternatives to violence: madness, or suicide. But survival as such takes precedence, even over dignity. It is not surrender, but an ultimate patient readiness in the body and the mind. Domesticity. Becoming more and more like Tant Alida? No. Mine is not acquiescence but abeyance. Knowing that life is more than this. Looking at a barren land one may not suspect the hidden water courses running below. It is a subdued existence; what battle there is has become submerged, with only the occasional eruption to shake and revitalize one. There is a wildness and a violence lurking somewhere, ready at the right moment to lunge like a horse running dangerously in the night.

  Bet

  It was a long road I had behind me and I’d hoped finally to find peace at Houd-den-Bek, but what happened? We were only a handful of Khoin, trekking this way and that through the years, from Outeniqua to the Camdeboo, round the Snow Mountain and up to the snake-bends of the Fish River; from the dry scrubland of the Karoo to the gnap-trees of the Suurveld. But life was growing ever more troublesome; the Law was following in our footsteps wherever we went. One could no longer come and go without a pass; before you were allowed to do any work you had to be booked in with a master; you could be shot before you even knew you were trespassing. And so we decided to settle in Bruintjieshoogte with what remained of our goats and fat-tailed sheep. We found work with several Boer families—Prinsloos, Labuschagnes—and for a long time we had no complaints. Then life became difficult again. The Boers were pushing from one side; and from across the river Hintsa’s people, the Red Blanket Men, were pushing back. One would wake up in the morning to find all the cattle kraals deserted. Then the commandos would set out on horseback, law or no law; and at night the Xhosa fires would be burning on the hilltops: and soon there would be a new raid.

  I tried to stay out of it, listening to the talk from both sides. We’ve opened up the land, said the Boers, this belongs to us. No, said Hintsa’s people, Tixo made the world for everybody so that a man’s cattle may graze wherever they find good land. And so it was one word after another, and soon it was war. We just happened to be in Grahamstown for the Baas’s Christmas shopping, and we were surrounded right there in the small white town among the green hills. The Xhosa warriors came streaming down the slopes like black water from a broken dam. Oxtails swinging, ox-hide shields shaking, assegais sailing through the air like swarms of locusts. I thought we’d never come out alive again.

  But it wasn’t from fear that our group made a getaway as soon as the worst was over. If your time is up you’ll die, no matter where you try to hide. What sent us fleeing was knowing that it wasn’t our war. What concern was it of ours? If Boers and Xhosas wanted to kill one another, let them, as long as we of the Khoin weren’t crushed between their two millstones. No one can stand that. And so the handful of us made our escape while the gunpowder was still covering the town like a cloud.

  I left with my baby on my back, but it died on the way to the Cape. There were few of us when we set out; but we were even fewer by the time we crossed the mountains from the Karoo. There we split up into twos and threes, each going his own way; the tribe was no more. I worked on the farms I passed, sometimes in a kitchen, otherwise in the fields; and in the time of the bean-harvest Baas Nicolaas found me in Tulbagh and hired me. Said the Nooi needed someone in the kitchen. She had one slave woman but it seemed the two of them didn’t get on well; and what they really needed was a cook.

  “Then it’s just the work for me,” I said. “In Bruintjieshoogte I learned to run a household from kitchen to voorhuis.”

  And I had no reason for complaint. They were easy people to be with and I soon took a liking in Galant. Old Ontong was living with the slave woman Lydia. Achilles was a bit of a washout; and the others were just casual workers hired for piecework. I’d been without a man for a long time then, not counting the few encounters on the other farms where I’d been doing odd jobs on the way, and that makes one ruttish and moody. If the root isn’t planted the furrow goes to waste. So I was relieved when Galant took me. He wasn’t a man of many words and he could be very brooding and apart at times. But he had lightning in his hands. And I’ll say this for him, that he was a rider second to none, of horses and women alike.

  I soon learned to fit in with the Nooi’s way of working. She had a quick temper and couldn’t stand bungling or skimping, but that suited me. She never did me short in anything. It was only with Lydia she couldn’t control herself, and we often discussed it round the fire of an evening. We all knew about the Baas’s weak spot for Lydia of course, and his visits in the dark of the night; but that was his right and none of us complained about it. But the Nooi simply couldn’t stand Lydia; and the Baas must have given her cause for that, for every time after he’d taken his evening walk to the woman’s hut there would be trouble the next day. Then Galant or one of the others would be called to tie Lydia up in the stable. It usually happened as soon as the Baas had gone off to the veld; and the Nooi would take the strap herself. Now there’s flogging and flogging and I’ve had some of both in my life; and that’s why I say it wasn’t proper the way she did it. Once she’d started she couldn’t control herself. Only after Lydia’s screams had changed from the sound of a woman in labor to the whimpering of a dying puppy the beating would stop. Then the Nooi would come out, shoving Lydia ahead of her, and Lydia wouldn’t have a stitch of clothing on her body. Sometimes the clothes were beaten to shreds; mostly they were just torn from her in rage. And that was a bad thing to my mind for Lydia isn’t a child any more, she’s older than me, she’s got children of her own. But as naked as my finger she would be driven out to the veld to collect wood or dung-cakes, even in winter. Sometimes the ground would be covered in snow, white-grey as cinders and crackling underfoot, but no matter: Lydia would be naked. Then we usually sent someone with a karpss after her when the Nooi wasn’t looking, to cover her up until it was time to come home.

  The first time I saw it, it made me feel sick. I was expecting Galant’s child then and I suppose one has less resistance in a time like that. It wasn’t just the beating: it was the Nooi’s way of talking while she went on flogging the woman. A strange moaning tone of voice, almost sobbing. Once I listened at the stable door but I couldn’t make out anything she was saying, except that it sounded like the Bible, which I knew fr
om being called in for prayers every Wednesday and Sunday night. Galant found me there and angrily took me away; I was shivering, not only with cold.

  “Come away,” he said. “You got nothing to do here.”

  “The Nooi will kill Lydia yet.”

  “You stay out of it.”

  “Why don’t you talk to the Baas about it?” I asked.

  “It may make it worse.”

  He took me to our hut. But after he’d gone out to give Achilles a hand with the cattle I returned to the stable. That was when I saw Lydia coming out naked. But it was the Nooi herself I couldn’t help staring at. Her face flushed a deep red, her hair all dishevelled and damp with sweat, her cheeks streaked with tears; and she was panting. It might have been of tiredness, it was enough to wear anyone out, even a woman as strong as the Nooi. But it was something else that upset me, unless I just imagined it because of the child in me: but my first thought when I saw her was that she looked like a woman who’d been with a man all night.

  If Galant didn’t want to interfere, I thought, perhaps I should speak to the Baas myself. But then something happened that really shook me. After one of the beatings, just as Lydia was on her way home in the late afternoon with her load of dung-cakes, naked, and black-and-blue, the Baas came round the corner of the shed from the orchard. He stopped in his tracks when he saw her and he grew pale. There was still light enough to see by, and I’d just come from the kitchen with the water barrel.

  “What’s the matter, Lydia?” he asked.

  Her face was smeared with tears and snot. She was covered in bruises, not only her back but everywhere, even her belly and her breasts. Yet she held herself straight, tall and gaunt as the aloes of Bruintjieshoogte, with the load of dung on her head, staring at the Baas without saying a word.

  At that moment the Nooi came from the kitchen, impatiently pushing me out of the way. “Have you ever seen such shamelessness, Nicolaas?” she said. “She’s been impossible all day. And no matter what I say to her she cheeks me back. I’ve spoken to you about her often enough: today you must do something.”

  He still seemed very pale, but he said: “Lydia, lie down there.” And then he gave her a flogging with his sjambok.

  All the time the Nooi was standing behind me on the doorstep, breathing open-mouthed. When I couldn’t stand it any longer I went away to fill my barrel and came back round the house to enter through the front door. I’d seen enough. At least, I thought, this would be the end of his nightly visits. That would be something. But the very same night, I swear to God, he came out to Lydia again. And the following evening we were all called to prayers as usual, as if nothing had happened at all, and the Baas and the Nooi sat at the table with the brass lamp on it, and he opened the clasps of his big brown book and started reading to us, slowly and deliberately, savoring every word.

  That was when something inside me turned against them. I’m an easy-going person by nature and I usually get along well with others; but in the kitchen I began to shut myself off from the woman. I would do the work I was given to do; but I kept my heart but of it. And to my mind the Baas was worse than the Nooi. What she’d done was bad enough; but in her own way she might have had a reason for it. White people are strange in their ways. But what the Baas had done was a shame and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.

  I was tired of trekking about; and I had Galant’s child in me. Had it not been for that I think I would have packed up and left. As it was, I stayed on, but only with much resentment, and trying to keep out of the Baas’s way as well as I could. I would say good morning or good night to him because that was my duty; but no more. I wouldn’t forgive him for not having had the guts to stop his wife in her bad ways.

  And that was why the thing with the child was such a shock to me. I just couldn’t understand myself at all. Why should one wish to do what repulses one most? It turned me into a stranger to myself. Truly, one is an abyss; worse than any in the cliffs of the Skurweberg.

  We were delighted with the child. I’d never seen a man so ridiculously happy as Galant. I felt my breasts aching with an uncontrollable flow of milk out of sheer joy to see him like that. And just as well, for Galant became as addicted to my milk as the baby. Said it was the sweetest drink he’d ever tasted. There were times when I had both of them at my breasts at the same time, father and son together, pumping and drinking greedily and noisily; and as I looked down on their faces, their eyes closed with contentment, I could properly feel my stomach turn with happiness.

  “You mustn’t fuss over the child like this,” I warned him sometimes. “It’s tempting the evil spirits. Suppose something happens to him?”

  “Whatever can happen to him? You’re here and I’m here too.”

  We called him David. One night the Baas read about David, it was a Wednesday, because the prayers were shorter than on Sundays; and he read about David and King Saul, and how the king had thrown his assegai at him and how David had got away into the mountains, knowing the time would come when he would be king himself. And when he went back to the hut Galant said: “We’ll call him David. Because his day will come too. He isn’t a slave like me.”

  “What’s so bad about being a slave?” I asked him. “There’s not much difference between my life and yours on the farm. They’re good to you. The Baas made you mantoor. You’re in charge of everything. You can sow and reap, and you got heifers and lambs of your own. They give you food and clothes for nothing.”

  “I’m still a slave.”

  And that was all he said. I left it at that, for it was no use arguing with him when he was in that mood; he always was a deep one.

  The child was about a year old, just over, I was weaning him, when the Baas sent Galant to the Karoo to fetch some cattle he’d bought. Fifty-eight cattle, I remember well; it was just after the winter, in the time of the big housecleaning and the replastering of the walls. Galant was away for twenty-six days. I counted them off, for when a woman is weaning one gets bothered by one’s swollen breasts and the only thing that helps is the root of a man.

  David was difficult to manage, for he was used to drinking whenever he felt like it; and he was teething too, and snotty. I was tempted to take him back to my breast again, but that would be even more bothersome. For the child was becoming a nuisance in the house and in the yard, and the Nooi had already complained a couple of times. She was not the sort of woman I would like to give reason for complaining. I had more work than I could handle, not only in the house: in the absence of Galant and Achilles I had to give a hand with the sheep too. So it was a bad time and one had to be sharp to stay out of trouble.

  It had already happened once or twice that when I’d left the child at home—when it was possible, Ma-Rose would come over to keep an eye; but she was also helping out with the farmwork—he would come crawling to the house after me. Clever little bastard. But difficult. Then the Baas gave me a warning: “The child is getting troublesome,” he said. “You better see to it that he doesn’t get under the Nooi’s feet.”

  “Yes, Baas,” I said. But what I thought in my heart was: You better watch out. Don’t start ordering me about. I’m not Lydia.

  I spoke to Ma-Rose and she promised to do what she could, but it wasn’t going to be easy. And just the following day as I brought the sheep in to the kraal I saw that there was something wrong. David was lying beside the hut, tied to the bitter-almond tree, and making little sobbing sounds in his sleep as he jerked and twitched his legs. My insides went numb. When I came to him and untied him I noticed the black bruises all over his body.

  “What happened here?” I asked Ma-Rose, struggling to keep calm.

  She was preparing skins in the backyard, turning up the Heavy brey-stone that stretched them and made them supple for Ontong to cut his thongs. She seemed composed, but I could see she was working much faster than usual. Once she was nearly hit by the stone as she let go of the
skin and the weight came whizzing down to the ground.

  “Ma-Rose, what the hell happened here today?”

  “I had to tie the child to the tree. He came crawling to the house again and Nicolaas told me to take him back. Then I had to take the washing down to the vlei.”

  “What about these marks?”

  She wound up the skins with the stone again. It came down spinning like a whirlwind.

  “I know nothing about that,” she said at last, not looking at me. “Why don’t you ask them at the house?”

  First I suckled the child. No matter that I’d been weaning him; he was in need of mother’s milk. Still holding him to my breast, his small body shaken by violent double-sobs, I went to the house, scattering the chickens in my way.

  “Yes, Bet?” asked the Nooi when I came into the kitchen.

  “I came to ask what happened to my child,” I said. Thinking: Just tell me I’m cheeky. Then I’ll pick up one of these pieces of firewood.

  I suppose the Nooi could see I was in no mood for nonsense.

  “There was trouble in the yard, Bet,” she said. “The Baas got very angry. I told you to keep the child away from the house.”

  As she said it he came through to the kitchen from the voorhuis, stopping in the middle door. He said nothing, just stared at me with his smoky blue eyes. His shirt-sleeves were rolled down, but loose. I stared back at him. I thought: If only I didn’t have this child at my breast right now. But I couldn’t say a word. I remembered Lydia, and the day he’d said to her: “Lydia, lie down there,” and how she’d lain down on the ground in front of him, offering dumbly her bruised body to his lash. Something inside me contracted in fear. My man was not there; he was far away in the Karoo with the cattle and I was alone.

  Without a word I turned round and went out. I couldn’t see properly and it was just luck that I didn’t stumble over anything.