A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  It must have been about a week later. David was all right again. Amazing how quickly a child recovers. I had to prepare the meat that morning; it was a Monday, slaughtering day, and the meat had to be washed. It’s a long way from the yard to the washing place and I couldn’t manage the child at the same time. So I let him drink his fill and closed him up in the hut.

  How could I have known that such a small child would manage to open the door?

  Ma-Rose had left early with the sheep as Ontong had to water the orchards that day; so there was no one near.

  After I’d finished with the meat I took the barrel back to the kitchen. Just as I came out again the Baas said behind me:

  “Bet.”

  I looked round. He was as pale as the day with Lydia.

  “Bet, didn’t I warn you about the child before?”

  That was all he said. But I knew immediately; from his face.

  The child was lying outside the hut on his side. He was still breathing, but only with difficulty, a rattling sound. I saw his body. But I couldn’t cry. I picked him up and carried him down to the water where I’d washed the meat. I bathed him and brought him back. On the way I saw Ma-Rose in the distance with the sheep. She waved. I didn’t reply. Just before sunset the child died.

  Ma-Rose was with me then; she went over to the house to tell them.

  It was full moon. In the rising of the moon the Baas came to the hut. I was sitting on the bare dung-floor, my breasts heavy and painful with milk. He stooped in the doorway, as large as the night.

  “Bet, you’ve got to forgive me,” he said. His voice was rasping in his throat. “I quarreled with my wife. I lost my head. I never meant to do such a thing. You know I’m not like that.”

  “Yes, Baas,” I said.

  “My God, Bet, tell me what you need. Anything. I’ll give you anything.”

  I sat looking down, and swallowed a lump. I wasn’t crying. There were no tears at all in me. How was it possible?

  The next day they buried David, wrapped in his small grey blanket. No one was sent for, no one came to look at him. He was buried just like that. I didn’t want to see.

  The Baas came to the hut again. “Bet, you must forgive me.”

  I pressed my head against his hard knees and grabbed him by the legs. I couldn’t let go again. I felt I was drowning. I was thinking of Lydia. Lie down there. The way he went back to her the same night to abuse her torn body. I understood nothing about it all, and I still don’t. I knew I’d lost Galant. He would never forgive me or anyone else. But that wasn’t what shook me as I knelt there holding his legs and groaning like an animal, the sound Lydia made when she was beaten, like a dog, a bitch in heat. That was it: an emptiness growing and expanding inside me all night so that I felt like crawling out to the yard to howl under his window like a dog.

  That was it: and from that day I couldn’t let him be. I lusted after him day and night. I followed him wherever he went, begging with my body to be taken. He paid no attention. But I followed him. He had me in his hands as if I were a slave. I wanted him to order me: Lie down there. I silently pleaded with him. I followed him. I felt that was the only way ever to fill up the emptiness inside me again.

  Did I really believe that, somehow, it would bring my child back to me if I turned my body into carrion and threw it to this man so he could tear me apart like a vulture? Surely that was madness. But one doesn’t think straight at a time like that. You only feel it burning. You’re thirsty. You’re thirsty. Take me, I wanted to tell the Baas. Break me. Galant will never touch me again. I’ve lost my man. I’ve lost everything. I’m rejected by everybody because my child is dead. It’s lonesome. It’s night. Take me. Break me apart.

  But he wouldn’t. Mad Lydia was good enough for him; not I. To him I was sinful. In my womb I carried death.

  Lydia

  But my feathers. The beatings, the shouting, the voices around my ears. What are they saying? The men with the cocks. The big featherless cocks. Pinning me down. The pain. Break me like a lump of earth. Why won’t you let me be, why not for a single night? But I got my feathers. Stuffed into my mattress in the hut. Goose feathers, chicken feathers, swallows, weaver-birds, cranes, vultures, even the mountain-eagle. The feathers of years and years, picked up and carried home. The men are hurting me. Day and night. The woman with the sjambok. What are they saying? Voices, voices. But my feathers. I speak to the birds. Those with feathers, in trees. I speak to swallow and wild-goose. All feathered things. They tell me to wait. One day I’ll fly away like the swallows.

  Barend

  After much thought I have come to the conclusion that our troubles started the day the English arrived in the Cape. We had problems with the Government before that: Pa often told me about Great-grandpa’s quarrel with the Landdrost in Tulbagh; and over the years there would be the occasional agent or bailiff turning up to collect taxes or bring news of new laws. But for us the Cape was always remote, and the land is big. If there was trouble in one place one could load one’s wagon and move off to where no man had left his footprints before and where no neighbor smoke smudged the horizon. But since the English arrived—in the beginning it wasn’t too bad, they probably felt uneasy to venture far from the Cape; but since 1806 or thereabouts they became more intrepid and troublesome—since then we’ve had problems.

  Take the droughts to start with. We’d always known droughts in this land; it was drought, among other things, that had sent Great-grandpa trekking again after having staked out his part of paradise at Houd-den-Bek. Still, drought came and went, and if one humbled oneself before the Lord one could always count on survival. But the English, who did not have the true faith—they couldn’t even speak the language of the State Bible, how did they expect God to understand them?—brought the wrath of God upon the land. And nowadays, when there’s drought it remains dry; and the rains only come when the earth has been devastated, and then it’s a flood. Then there’s locusts. We’d never known them in the Bokkeveld before, Pa assured me. There had been rumours from elsewhere, but our highlands were safe. Suddenly, these last few years they arrived three times to lay waste the veld and the wheatfields. Not to speak of the inspectors and commissioners and other pests who began to wear out the wagon-road over the Witzenberg to plague us here. All of a sudden there’s levies to be paid, and taxes, and quitrent, and God knows what; and forms have to be filled in listing everything one possesses or doesn’t possess. Wheat, fruit, sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, slaves, poultry; the lot. And if you dare raise voice or hand against them you can be sure there will be a bailiff on your doorstep in no time—perhaps even a platoon of Hottentot pandoers—to drag you to the Drostdy.

  It was a detachment of pandoers that started the whole business at Slagtersnek. We’d heard enough about that, all right; and when the Hottentot woman Bet came to work for Nicolaas, he questioned her very carefully about the whole matter, knowing she’d come from those parts near the Border. I’m not saying anything about the right or wrong of it, because I’ve heard those Border Boers can get troublesome—not that one can really blame them. But when it came to hanging, after Freek Bezuidenhout had been shot by the pandoers and his brother and the rest had taken up arms against the English, God intervened with His own hand to break four of the five ropes on the gallows. Any Christian would have let the condemned men go after that. That’s what the Scriptures say. But to me it was the surest sign of all that the English were godless, when they simply called for new ropes to hang the four men again, finishing them off this time.

  “I swear a holy oath,” I told Pa the day we first heard about Slagtersnek—it was shortly after our wedding, on a Sunday; we’d all gone to Lagenvlei for the service; only Hester had stayed at home—“if an Englishman ever sets foot on my farm to force his law on me I’ll shoot him on the spot.”

  Nicolaas, I remember, reproached me in his holier-than-thou manner: “Render unto Caesar what
is Caesar’s, Barend.”

  “No Englishman is my Caesar,” I said curtly.

  “A Roman was Caesar to the Jews,” he said. Nicolaas mellowed considerably in his views afterwards, once I think he discovered the Bible could not be applied literally to the ways and laws of the English; but in those early days he could be infuriating at times. If there had been Englishmen in Biblical times, I told him, God would have said something different. And if we didn’t look out they’d be taking this land from under our feet.

  The day we got married Pa gave us a word from Joshua to cherish. I don’t have much time for reading, I’m a farmer and I have work to do; but when I do have some time to spare I enjoy rereading those words in the twenty-third chapter, from the fourth verse:

  Behold, I have divided unto you by lot these nations that remain, to be an inheritance for your tribes, from Jordan, with all the nations that I have cut off, even unto the great sea westward.

  And the Lord your God, he shall expel them from before you, and drive them from out of your sight; and ye shall possess their land, as the Lord your God hath promised unto you.

  Be ye therefore very courageous to keep and to do all that is written in the book of the law of Moses, that ye turn not aside therefrom to the right hand or to the left; that ye come not among these nations, these that remain among you; neither make mention of the name of their gods, nor cause to swear by them, neither serve them, nor bow yourselves unto them; but cleave unto the Lord your God, as ye have done unto this day.

  This word was always honored on my farm, on Elandsfontein; we never turned right or left. What trouble we had came from outside. Unless Hester be termed trouble. One thing that weighed upon me from the beginning was the extent of my addiction to Hester. The Bible says nothing about coveting one’s own wife. And yet I often felt that the extreme nature of my desire must be sinful, ever since my eyes had been opened for her the first time, a bare girl in a dam. I thought marrying her would assuage the fever, but it made no difference except possibly for worse. Through the years it steadily increased, as before my eyes she matured into a woman, even though she retained that hard thin negative body. And her resistance against me, her efforts to fight me off with tooth and nail so that in every encounter I had to tame her anew without ever really succeeding, were enough to drive me to distraction. She would throw me like the grey horse Pa had given me when we were small and who’d refused to allow anyone on his back until in the end Galant had broken him in. Not that I would have liked to see Hester docile. Her very wildness increased my desire.

  From the first day I seemed unable to do anything right in her eyes. I could have chosen Houd-den-Bek as my farm, a fertile place I’d set my heart on for years, but I brought her to Elandsfontein to spare her the constant memory of her father—but even that failed to please her.

  I knew there was something godless in it. The way she resisted the idea of having children, for instance. I wanted to fertilize her and see my child grow inside her; I believed that would finally break her in. Pa had always said: “The only way to manage an impudent woman is to put her up the pole.” But it didn’t work with her; she seemed to reject my very seed. And when at last it happened, when I’d almost begun to give up hope, after more than three years of barrenness, when she was already eighteen, she deliberately mounted the wildest horse on the farm, spurring it on with her sjambok until it threw her and she brought down the baby. I thought: If ever I raise my hand against a woman it must be today. A man cannot be mocked like that; it is an outrage before God. But when I saw her lying in the big bed all the rage left me: her dusky skin terribly pale, the big black eyes glowing in the narrow face, the dark hair tousled on the pillow Ma had embroidered, the high cheekbones, the wide mouth drawn into a narrow line of hate against me; and her hands on the white sheet, the long fingers, the bitten nails; the upper arm and the roundness of her shoulder. My body turned to water; I was a tree growing in water, and I could feel my roots losing their hold. What I desired above all else was to go to her and kneel beside the bed and say: “Forgive me.” But why and for what? What had I done that required forgiveness? And I knew only too well that stooping to such unseemliness would earn me her contempt forever. As on the day with the lamb I felt close to tears. But I had to restrain myself. She would despise the slightest sign of weakness in me. So I turned round and went out again. Outside I had to wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. I tried to convince myself it was only because of the fierce sunlight, but I knew it was really because of this woman who was my wife and whom I desired so much that I felt like the burning thornbush which just burned and burned without ever turning to ashes.

  Even after the children had been born it made no perceptible difference to her. She would remain my adversary until the day of my death; and the only way in which to remain worthy of her was to be as strong as she, never to give in, never to show a tender spot on which she might get a hold, for then she would destroy me.

  That, too, in a way, had been predestined by the interference of the English. For the day we’d gone to Tulbagh to get married it turned out the Dutch predikant had made a mistake with the date and had left for Cape Town; and unless we were prepared to go home and come back the whole way the following week we had to make do with the English clergyman. What could we do but resign ourselves to the inevitable, even while knowing it could lead to no good? And in due course God proved me right: but at what cost.

  Still, most of our troubles came from outside, from the Landdrosts and their underlings. In the early days they’d all been people of our own stock. In the time of Landdrost Fischer we never had any problems about slaves and other business when we took the matter to Tulbagh; but the Englishman Trappes was a bastard. And it was clear for all to see that God disapproved of the man too, because he’d barely been in Tulbagh six months when the Drostdy was practically washed away by a flood. After that we had to travel all the way to Worcester for legal business. And what with all the new laws and regulations the English were making in the Cape there hardly ever came a newspaper without more problems. How the slaves got wind of such events and speculations I couldn’t tell. They must have been blown about secretly like a plague; and the moment you put a foot wrong they knew all about the new laws and ran off to the Drostdy to complain. The only choice left us was whether to follow in pursuit immediately or to wait until the summons came. We had no proper say on our own farms, and that was asking for trouble.

  I’d always had problems with runaways. They said I ruled them with too hard a hand. Even Pa once remonstrated with me. But it was easy for him to talk: he’d had his slaves for years, they’d all been broken in long ago and each one knew his place. It was different for me, starting with a new lot. And times had changed too. They knew it only too well. All the more reason to break them in harshly so they would be sure who had the last word on the farm. I was baas, and they’d better accept it right from the beginning. Otherwise they’d bruise my heel the moment I turned my back. One could take no chances with them: they might look servile enough, but deep down they would always remain savages. Perhaps I should have followed Nicolaas’s example and taken over some of Pa’s old trusted hands. But the idea didn’t appeal to me: slaves are like dogs that don’t take readily to a new master. Above all I wanted a fresh start on my own farm, all ties with the depressing past broken.

  Whoever didn’t do his work properly had his backside tanned without any more ado. The problem was that they knew my hands were really tied by the Government; so whenever they felt my punishment had been excessive they’d run off to Tulbagh. A few times I managed to overtake them on the way and bring them back for another, more severe flogging: if after that they still felt like complaining at least they’d have sufficient reason. And once old Landdrost Fischer had branded a runaway’s back with his irons he would think twice before deserting again. Even so I lost two for good (and several Hottentots as well—but these had always been a worthless lot anyway) and
that was quite a loss, for they were damned expensive. And when Trappes took over I soon found out that with the English even a runaway slave’s word sometimes counted for more than his master’s. That time with Klaas I was fined fifty rix dollars. But at least I had my revenge when Klaas came back.

  “Let’s see what my fine is worth to you,” I said as I tied his wrists and ankles in the shed and flung him across the barrel.

  For once I was prepared to go all the way: and whatever the consequences it would be an unforgettable warning to the rest. But Klaas was tough, he kept us busy all afternoon. And in the end it was Hester who came to put an end to it. Which was quite a shock, because she’d never previously interfered with my management of the farm. Her place was indoors, I’d given the house into her hands to run; the rest was my responsibility. Except for that once. At sunset she opened the door of the shed where we were working on Klaas, and came inside. At first I thought she’d brought me some coffee, for a flogging makes one thirsty. But she stood there empty-handed, trembling.

  “Will you stop this immediately?” she said. Right in front of the slaves.

  “Hester, you stay out of this. It’s none of your business.”

  “I tell you it’s going to stop.”

  I couldn’t allow myself to be humiliated in front of my inferiors. Once again I raised the sjambok and brought it down on Klaas’s shoulders. Suddenly she was beside me, grabbing the frayed end of the sjambok.

  “Don’t you understand how this bastard insulted me?” I said, shaking, but trying to be calm. “Cost me fifty rix dollars. I lost four days in the process, and it’s sowing time. And when he came back he cheeked me again.”

  “As long as I’m on this farm you’re going to behave yourself with the slaves.”

  “Hester, watch your tongue!”

  She was still pulling at the sjambok, trying to wrench it away from me. If I hadn’t been so angry it might have amused me: I could have pulled her off her feet in one jerk had I wanted to.