A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  I remembered how he and Nicolaas had both tugged at my teats when they’d been babies. My two lambs, black and white. And as I sat there watching over him in his fitful sleep I thought: Tonight I’m split in two, like an old stone falling apart. For I love them both. And I pity them both.

  I thought and thought. So many things had been stirred up by that thas-jackal. The child who’d died. All the dead filling up the world. Soon I would be dead too. And Galant. All of us. One by one we were dying as we lived. And one day, when the last of my race had died and we would remain only as a memory, a tale told by the Honkhoikwa to their children at night, all the innumerable dead of my tribe would wander about desolate in the dark. At night, when their homes grew silent and everything seemed deserted, the dead would wander in countless numbers, all those who’d died in this beautiful, violent land where my people had once roamed free. Only the dead would remain. Like a vast black flood they would fill up the hollows, rising higher and higher, soundlessly, until everything was smooth and even, black and shimmering in Tsui-Goab’s moonlight. Tha-tha-tha.

  Nicolaas

  A river rising. I was still holding blindly on to something, branch or tree; but my grip was loosening. When had it started? Even about that I had no certainty. There was the death of the child of course, but that in itself only brought awareness of a flood already swelling. Still, in a way it was decisive.

  If only I could have explained it to Galant. But how could I do that when even in my explanations to myself something remained beyond my grasp? Was it enough to blame Cecilia for driving me to the deed? I’d married her, I’d tried to be a dutiful husband to her, I’d even tried to desire her. But in her aggressive insistence to be used, to be degraded in order to vindicate her womanhood, she intimidated me. That sturdy milk-white freckled body had become a nightmare, so daunting in its health, so strenuous in its demands, sucking me into her as if to devour me entirely in order the more passionately to condemn the baseness of the act when kneeling beside the bed as soon as it was over she would ask for a cleansing of the accursed flesh.

  Was it made easier or worse by the terrible remedy first suggested by Ma-Rose? I still hesitate to find an answer. Did I proceed in desperate obedience to her or in helplessness against the evil fascination of the deed she’d conjured up? When I was young I had a body. And your Pa knew me. Was it revenge against him or an effort finally to be worthy of him even if it meant damning my soul? Surely this was the ultimate blasphemy: would I yet burn for it, or did God’s punishment reside in the very beastliness of the act? Those laborious hours with Lydia in the stench of her dark hut: her passivity driving me to ludicrous inventions and excesses of lust and cruelty, knowing in advance that she would unquestioningly submit to whatever I desired. Whether I flogged her to placate Cecilia for some imagined wrong done to her, or caressed her, would be the same to Lydia, a submission to the whims and idiosyncrasies of the master. She would neither question nor seek to comprehend whatever I did to her, or why. My desire would mean as little to her as my rage, my need as little as my abhorrence of myself or her. I was the master, she the slave, she would do what I wished; that was all. Whether I fondled her or kicked her in the crotch or derisively strewed feathers from a torn mattress all over her sticky body, was entirely immaterial to her. And if I felt driven, some nights, almost to strangle her in order at least to force some reaction from her, I finally held back in the knowledge that even that would be part of what she considered my “right.” Perhaps the only absolution lay in the disgust it awakened in me, and in the consequent ferocity with which I might then return to my own wife, so starkly clean and civilized, and waiting so piously and eagerly to be abused.

  Wouldn’t it have been easier, less despicable, to make use of Bet rather than of the poor imbecile Lydia? I must admit to a peculiar fascination Bet had for me after the death of her child: the way she almost flaunted herself. Yet that was what restrained me in the end. Not guilt alone—and God knows there was enough of that—but fear. For why, if not in search of revenge, had she taken to following me about wherever I went? And what would be easier than for her to get at me when in the spasms of lust I was most vulnerable? The temptation was there, but I was too scared. And the abhorrence I felt for Lydia in a way neutralized the sinfulness of what we did together: in the deed itself lay its punishment. With Bet there might be a real and less complicated pleasure, and that would be damnable. If only Cecilia would say something, accuse me, curse me, attack me, ask God to forgive or punish me: but piously and without a word she would subject herself to me, in her own way as submissive as Lydia in hers. And even when I failed with her, if in the middle of our loveless coupling my mind would wander and I would fall asleep, she would gently persuade me that it did not matter: using her, whether aggressively or through inaction, was all that was required.

  Yet she did become more restless as time went on, more assertive; there came a keener edge to her voice as she became more accustomed to the paradox of her strength. And gradually the taunts began. Why could we have no sons? All other respectable people had sons. Unless it was punishment for some dark, unspeakable sin on my part? (There she would pause, looking pointedly at me, but without ever taking Lydia’s name, or Bet’s for that matter, on her lips.)

  “It will happen in time,” I insisted. “If it is God’s will.”

  “Even Hester has a son. Who would have thought that flat body could ever give birth to a child? But there she is, with a son, and a second on the way. I’m sure it will be a boy too.”

  “Why do you blame me?” I once flared up. “If you’re so eager to have sons, why don’t you have them? It’s your body that shapes them.”

  “Even slaves have sons!” she retorted. It was the first time she’d gone so far and I think she too realized how outrageous it was; but having said it, she persisted: “Even Galant has a son.”

  Perhaps that was why she’d been against his child from the beginning, complaining of the nuisance when it cried about the house, tied in a bundle on Bet’s back, or “messing about” once it had begun to crawl.

  “But I don’t really care about sons, Cecilia,” I said. “I’m happy with the daughters God has given me. I love them.”

  “There must be something wrong with a man who doesn’t want a son.” There was a tone of bitter glee in her voice. “That’s what it is. You’re not a real man. Why else do you grow limp when you’re doing what a man is supposed to do?”

  I could strike her then; but Ma-Rose was standing in the kitchen, listening. In helpless anger I stormed out, and as I went round the house I stumbled over Galant’s child who came crawling towards the kitchen in search of its mother. I could not control myself. But I swear to God I never meant it to die; on another day I would not have laid a hand on it.

  What was this strange, mad, blinding rage that came upon me almost without warning at times? I could not remember having experienced it as a child. It was as if in such moments I suddenly became a stranger to myself: as if I was looking down, from somewhere high up, upon myself raging and ranting; it seemed like madness, so unnecessary, so foolish. I wanted to reach down and touch that raging man and whoever was his victim, and ask them not to pay too much attention, it wasn’t meant to be like that at all, it was a dreadful mistake: but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I wanted to cry out to God: Why was He doing this to me? Why could I no longer understand Him? I had always tried to live according to His commands. As a child, listening to the deep drone of Pa’s voice, I’d found everything so clear, so reassuring, so self-evident. Why this confusion now, this feeling that the Word itself had become inadequate to cope with my grownup life, this inability to control the world of which I was supposed to be master? For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

  But even that confused me. In my utterance it became powerless, another evasion. If only I could break through to someone; to Galant. But between us lay a
dead child. And what terrified me was the apprehension that this need not be the worst: that this, in fact, might be only the beginning.

  Ontong

  “How can you look on without ever raising a finger or say a word in protest?” they often asked me.

  But it wasn’t for me to interfere. I’d seen what happens to those who do.

  I have nothing to say about myself, it concerns no one. My body was in their hands but my thoughts were my own. I wish I could say that Allah knew my heart, but He’d abandoned me long ago, and I Him.

  “How can you look on when they do these things to Lydia?” they asked. “You live with her. You got to stop them.”

  Yes, I lived with her. But what we shared was ours; in everything else that happened we were apart. If the Baas had the right to sleep with her it was also his right to do other things with her body. Bodies are public. When we closed the door of the hut to shut out the world I would hold and comfort her, and put ointment on her wounds: that was ours. But when the sun rose and the slave-bell rang we would return into the world, each on his separate way. What must be will be.

  “How long can one resist before one breaks?” Galant sometimes asked.

  There was no reason or need to break, I told him. If a man broke it was his own fault. There was Achilles: a broken man. Because he’d been a turbulent creature in his youth who’d not recognized the difference between what can be changed and what cannot. And now, on Sundays or when the Baas was away, he would get drunk on his own honey-beer and break down, sobbing in a dark corner or pestering others with snotty tales about the distant land he’d come from, and the trees of that place, and the people, and the tits of the girl who was to have been his. Then it took a lot of persuasion to talk him out of his mood; or even a blow to the head or a kick under his ass. What was the use, I would ask him, behaving like that? A man was made to endure, to carry on. The one most patient, most resilient, most prepared to wait, I told him, would survive. A stone can be picked up and thrown away, or split with a crowbar. But water cannot be held in a hand, no man has power over it. So one should be like water.

  He annoyed me no end. I too could, if I wished, recite names that would bring a shiver of pleasure to the spine, musical names that would help me forget the aches of the body. I could say: Jogjakarta, or Madura, or Rembang, or Tjirebon, or Tjilatjap. I could say Surabaya, and Ranjuwangi, and Kediri, and Melang. And these would ring in my mind and bring back a view of palm-trees and flying pigeons and the sea, and lumbering buffaloes blowing bubbles in the water; and the taste of coconut milk on the tongue; and the sound of boys calling in the padis; and the smell of cloves and coriander and saffron and pepper, and the sweet curled bark of cinnamon. But these I kept to myself; they concerned only me.

  And the dreams. I would dream of moonflowers and birds, and of a woman like a palm-tree, a woman as lovely as the young girl Lys who’d been Galant’s mother, and I would wake up, sad and stiff, and only Lydia would be there beside me. But how could I blame her for not being the woman of the dream? I would gratefully take her, and share with her what the night had to offer us, knowing it would soon be day again and the days were hard. The dreams made it possible to endure: but I knew it would be no use packing up to go in search of that impossible woman. One had to accept responsibility both for the dream and for the waking, otherwise there could be no survival.

  “Do you understand that?” I asked Galant.

  “I’m trying to,” he said. “But it’s not easy.”

  “I know. But at least it’s easier for you than for me: you’ve always been where you are now. You were born here, it’s your place. Mine was taken from me before I was ten years old.”

  “I’m not so sure,” he said. “Perhaps it’s easier for you after all. When things get bad here you can dream of your own place. Whether you’re there or not you know it’s somewhere. But I can go nowhere. And I don’t belong here either. So what do I do?”

  “It’s just because you’re young that you say such things,” I said. “Wait till you’re an old man like me.”

  “You think I want to become an old man like you?”

  “It’ll happen, whether you want to or not.”

  Of course that didn’t satisfy him. And I kept on wondering and worrying about him. Could he really be my child? How often, in the evenings or at work, I would stare at him when he wasn’t aware of it, looking for an expression, an attitude of the head, a fold of the ear, a posture of the body I could recognize as my own. But can one ever be sure? Or doesn’t it really matter? He was there and I was there, harnessed to the same carriage.

  In the beginning, when we first moved from Lagenvlei to Houd-den-Bek, we used to take turns with Lydia at night and shared our work in the daytime. I had the impression that he was going to settle down all right. He remained and would always be a loner, of course, preferring to keep his own company—something he might have got from me—but I wasn’t aware of anything ominous or wrong. It was obvious that things between him and Nicolaas had changed, but that was to be expected: they weren’t children any more. And they were trying to adapt, each to the other; like two young dogs sniffing and circling each other before making friends. When Bet came to the farm it was even better. For the first time Galant really seemed to relax. And I was confident that everything would work out well after all.

  It was only after the death of the child that I began to feel worried. I know he went to Ma-Rose to talk things over with her and she must have straightened him out for there was no immediate storm. But he went on brooding. Nothing had really been settled. He seemed to be waiting for something to happen, almost deliberately looking for trouble. Sometimes when we went to the kitchen to wait for the food which Bet dished out, Galant would go to the doorstep, making sure he could be heard from the front room, and pick a quarrel with her:

  “I say, Bet. Aren’t we getting anything to eat today? Or do they want to keep us waiting so we can be fed with the dogs?”

  “Looking for trouble, are you?” she would answer, glancing nervously over her shoulder towards the middle door.

  When the food was brought he would look at it and sneer: “What’s this mess again? Do they think they can feed a man soup only? They waiting for an animal to die before we can get some meat again?”

  “I’m just doing what I’m told.”

  Once Nicolaas came through to the kitchen while they were arguing like that. I drew back and busied myself with my pipe, not wanting to get involved in any of their trouble: but I could still hear what was being said.

  “Don’t you like the food then, Galant?” he asked.

  Galant mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

  “You never complained at Lagenvlei.”

  “The Oubaas never gave us reason to. But meat seems to be scarce here at Houd-den-Bek.”

  I could see that Nicolaas was growing tense. He raised his hand towards the back of the door where the sjambok usually hung, but he didn’t take it from the hook. It would take much more provocation than that for him to strike Galant. We all knew that. And that, I suspected, was why Galant went on defying him: he wanted to find out how far he could go. He must have known that after the death of his child he would have even more scope than before, because it was clear for all to see how heavily the event lay on Nicolaas’s mind. But someone like Galant would never be satisfied with that. He couldn’t have any peace of mind before he’d established beyond all doubt how far the bough could be bent before it would break: testing it—forcing it a bit more—easing up for a moment—pushing some more—listening for the inevitable splintering sound. And that was what I couldn’t accept. It was unnecessary; one could get by comfortably without such constant strain. But it was useless even to try to make him see reason.

  He was always at it, in all sorts of ways. What really surprised me was the business of the horses. Galant had always had an extraordinary way with them. I used t
o eavesdrop as he tended them in the stable, treating each horse as if it were human, as if it were a woman: stroking and caressing it, nudging it, talking to it with endless patience and understanding. He would regularly, without any permission from the Baas, go up to the loft to fetch them wheat or barley for a treat. Even sugar, stolen from the kitchen—especially after the slave woman Pamela had been borrowed from Nooi Cecilia’s father’s farm when the Nooi couldn’t get along with Bet any more; for Pamela took a liking in Galant from the beginning. Not that he seemed to respond to her, not at first, although she was not a bad-looking woman. A bit on the thin side perhaps, but with fine features, quiet, almost shy; and a hint of embers smoldering deep inside her. She possessed in fact that rare mixture of fire and water that does something to a man. And so whenever Galant needed something from the house—an extra bit of meat, a sopie from the brandy jar, sugar for the horses—Pamela would get it for him. And she even took the punishment for it if it was discovered; without ever revealing that she’d been instigated by Galant.

  But in those days Galant started taking his frustration out on the horses. Not every day, he was much too fond of them for that; and not on all of them either: he would single out Nicolaas’s own horse, the liveliest animal on the farm, a beautiful black with a star on his forehead. And I began to notice that whenever there had been trouble between Nicolaas and Galant—not even open trouble, just that silent testing and measuring and weighing that went on between them—Galant would take it out on the horse. I knew he adored the animal. Apart from Nicolaas he was the only one ever allowed near the stallion; and he used to spend more time with it than with the rest of them combined. But now he deliberately started maltreating the stallion. When he led it down to the vlei he would tug fiercely at the reins to hurt the tender inside of the horse’s mouth. He seemed deliberately to provoke the horse into whinnying and rearing up in fear or pain; and that would give him reason for another angry tug. Once he’d managed to work the animal into such a state that it would start bucking and running, hurling Galant this way and that, he would take the sjambok and lay into it, beating the horse until it was trembling over its whole body.