by Andre Brink
In glaring daylight they come for me because Nicolaas has arrived; he goes with me to the high big room I know from the first time, except now the Landdrost isn’t there, only his assistant.
“What would you like me to do to him?” the man asks Nicolaas.
“I thought a good flogging might bring him to his senses.”
In the courtyard there’s a tall post they tie one’s hands to. Post and ground are stained as with rust. Overhead the rare swallows come and go undisturbed even by the sound of the blows falling.
“Will you go back with your master now and do as he says?” the man asks me after the flogging. “If not, we’ll have to put rings on your legs.”
“I shall bear what I deserve from you and my master.”
“All right. Then you can go. But if it happens again you won’t get off so lightly.”
“Thank you, Baas.”
As we go out the man calls Nicolaas back to him; and standing outside the door I can hear them talking.
“Mr Van der Merwe,” says the man, “I’ve done this to satisfy you. But in the future you should be more careful when you flog your slaves. A thong or a strap or a cane is in order but a sjambok can cause trouble. If this should come to the notice of my superiors you may lose the slave. The Court in Cape Town is very strict on procedure nowadays.”
Nicolaas has brought a spare horse for me; and together we ride off from the Drostdy. My body is torn. From time to time the pain makes my head reel. But I’m hardly conscious of it as I sit thinking about the man with the lion’s voice, wondering whether he’s on his way to the Cape now and whether he’ll be lucky or not. And I think about the Great River which must be very far away indeed.
The man remains in my thoughts all the time, even in the night while we shelter against the fog in the mountains. Nicolaas tries to talk to me, rambling on and on like the man in chains; otherwise he drifts off into sleep; but I stay awake. Not because of the pain, but through thinking about the stranger. Here I’m on my way back to Houd-den-Bek even more bruised than when I came to Tulbagh to complain. Yet I hardly care about it: in a way meeting that man has made it worth my while. But do not ask me why.
Goliath
It was not worthwhile going all the way to Worcester to complain. It was Abel who insisted I should go. “You just ask Galant,” he said. “I’ve often talked to him about it. If the law says something the Baas got to listen. And if the law says no work on Sundays and the Baas makes you work in spite of it, then you got a case for the gentlemen.” If you let the Baas have his way, said Abel, you are giving him the boot to kick your ass.
That’s the only reason why in the end I went to complain. True, in a way I suppose I won my case; but I know I really lost. The day in Worcester, when the Landdrost told me to go back to Elandsfontein, I knew I’d lost. No matter that he promised to send the commissioner to make sure everything would be all right. For days and weeks and months in between there would be only Baas Barend and us; where would the commissioner be then?
And when the commissioner came, a fat flabby breathless man who never looked anyone in the face, I knew that my complaining had just made everything worse. “Does your master treat you well?” he asked me. What could I say, with Baas Barend standing there next to him listening? He’d already told me what to say. And the commissioner was in a hurry; I could see he was in no frame of mind really to pay attention to me. “Come on, speak up,” he said. “I haven’t got all day, you know.”
“The Baas treats us well,” I said.
Why should he pretend to be so powerful? I could see he wanted to believe the story the Baas had told me to tell, that a horse had thrown me. For if he couldn’t believe that it would cause him trouble and I know he didn’t want that. He’d been sent to check on us; but if it really came to a choice he was one of the masters and they would always stand together. We’re on one side. They’re on the other. And it can never be different.
“I’m never going to complain again,” I told Abel after the man had left. “I’m in the Baas’s hands and I’m not going to go against him.”
“You going to let him do just what he wants from now on?” he said.
“He got the right to do what he wants. My right is to suffer whatever he does, and no more.”
“I’ll be waiting for him with a spade in my hands when he comes home tonight,” he said, choking. “Then we’ll see.”
I wanted to stop him but I was still feeling weak after the flogging of the week before; and I knew Abel wouldn’t let anyone interfere with him anyway. And to tell the truth, there was a last desperate rush of hope in me that whatever wild thing he might attempt he would succeed. But when the Baas came home from the hunt and called Abel to take his horse I saw him obeying very meekly. And I thought: If even Abel is too cowed to do anything there is no hope at all.
From that day I did whatever work was given me to do without complaining. It was the only way to survive. If one isn’t alive one is dead. And of life I know a little bit, but of death I know nothing at all.
Nicolaas
What perversity decreed that my survival should depend on him?
We were delayed in Tulbagh—there were traders and messengers from the Cape and men from distant farms had come to town—so it was past noon before we steered the horses from the cluster of whitewashed black-thatched houses towards the wagon-road up the slope of the Witzenberg. How I abhorred those tracks ground into the very stone, on which I moved to and fro, forced always back to the farm, allowed no will of my own, predestined on my course by the wish of a father with no concern for private urge or aberration. Before we were halfway through the mountains, soon after we had dismounted to lead the horses where the track became too steep, the fog came down; one of the silent, swirling mountain fogs descending so swiftly that the world is obliterated before you have become aware of cloud. Vision shrank to three yards, two, a foot. Occasionally an unexpected whorl would still open up a dizzying, brief glance of slopes below, a precipice, a tangle of protea or erica; but soon there was only a blinding whiteness.
“I think we’d better turn back while we still can,” I proposed. “We can stay over in town and try again tomorrow.”
“You scared?” he snarled.
“Of course not. But it may get dark.”
“So?”
I looked at him, but there was only the challenge of his obdurate stare. We went on for a while. The horses were getting restless, snorting noisily. I stopped again.
“Galant, we’re looking for trouble. This fog is not going to let up.”
He shrugged.
“Let’s turn back,” I said, reining in my horse.
“If you insist,” he replied. “You’re the master.”
There was a defiance in his voice, which stirred up new anger in me. After all that had happened there was still no sign of subservience in the way he carried his battered body; there was pride in the very tatters he wore and through which I could see the arrogant accusation of black and bleeding welts and bruises. He said nothing, but already he had made it impossible for me to turn back without acknowledging defeat. The anger subsided. I felt weary. I had hoped—for what? Anything but this. Had it become impossible then to conduct a simple relationship without a constant sense of having to measure my will against his? But if he refused to yield, then neither would I. Stumbling blindly through the wet fog, we went on, dragging the horses whose hooves sent loose stones rattling down slopes and cliffs, the sharp separate sounds of their falling soon muffled in that gentle but insidious whiteness that enveloped us, obscuring the solidity of the mountain, altering geography, mocking both memory and sense of direction.
“Where you going?” he asked once.
“Up the wagon-road, of course,” I said. “Can’t you see?”
“Oh.” There was a dull smile on his face, his eyes brooding but mocking.
&nbs
p; Regardless, I went on, following what I grimly forced myself to believe was the well-worn track through the mountains; but my confidence was eroded by his silence; certainty ebbed. From time to time I stopped, but it was useless to look for landmarks in that uniform mist. Bent double, both to keep my eyes as close to the ground as possible and to counter the resistance of the horse with my full weight, I led us on, satisfied in the simple knowledge of plodding upward, not down. From the fog sudden shapes would present themselves, swimming towards one like obtuse fishes in muddy water: a gnarled wagon-tree, an eroded rock, a wet green shrub. And even as one looked at them their stark outlines would fade into a blob, a blur, and disappear again. My only reassurance lay in the animal presence of the two horses and in Galant.
“I wonder whether he got away,” he said unexpectedly. “In this fog they won’t easily find him.”
“Who?”
He looked at me sharply as if my voice had surprised him; perhaps he’d been muttering to himself.
“The man in chains,” he said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, you don’t.” He offered no further explanation, and again I stumbled on, driven by the urge to keep moving as if that in itself was our only hope.
“You can’t go up there,” he said behind me.
“I know the way. Just follow me.”
There was a track visible in the fog, running horizontally to the right; thirty or forty yards further on, if I remembered correctly, it would swing sharply to the left again for the next steep climb. Without waiting for him, I plunged into the fog which was darkening rapidly now; the sun was probably setting. But if my hunch was right we didn’t have very far to go to the last ridge. And from there, even if the fog persisted, I would have no trouble to find my way. Soon we would be riding over the farmyard at Elandsfontein, where we might stop for a cup of tea with Barend and Hester—yes, certainly with Hester—and then up the narrow valley that runs between Duiwelsberg and the Skurweberg, round the forbidding heights of Vaalbokskloofberg, to the gentler plains of Houd-den-Bek.
He grabbed me so suddenly from behind that I cried out.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted in rage, raising the sjambok to strike him.
“Look,” he said.
I stared, but could see nothing except the fog and the dull dark shapes of rocks looming at a few yards’ distance. Then there was a momentary thinning of the mist as it swirled and folded in the wet wind, and I saw the earth breaking away from me, no more than a step or two ahead, a sheer drop to an invisible bottom, a hundred or a thousand feet below. The next moment the fog closed in again.
Galant was still holding me by the arm to steady my sudden fit of trembling. It took a while before I could pull away, pushing the horse back so that I could get past him along the ledge I’d mistaken for the wagon-road. Avoiding his eyes, I stood peering into the mist; but I no longer expected to see anything familiar. For a long time, trying to recompose myself, I couldn’t speak at all.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked at last.
“We can shelter under some rocks not far from here,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“It’s near the wagon-road. To the left. I’ve sheltered there against the rain before.”
“But how in God’s name—?” I drew in my breath slowly. “Do you mean to tell me you knew where we were all the time? And you let me—”
“I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“Stupid baboon!” I growled at him. It was not what I had meant to say; but I was still weak with shock.
At first sight there didn’t seem to be much shelter under the tall pile of rocks that must have tumbled from the cliffs countless years ago. But Galant knew his way through them. Slipping over and under them, quick and sure as a lizard in spite of his tortured body, he led me to a small hollow in their midst, its sandy floor still dry. We tied up the horses outside, ignoring their meekly protesting whinnies; inside, he told me to light a fire—there was dried bracken and driftwood among the rocks, damp from the mist but not unmanageable—as he scuttled off without explanation, returning some time later with an armload of bushes: heather and protea and buchu, their sweet and acrid smells prickling to the nose. These he arranged in two rough piles to serve as bedding for the night. There was hardly enough space for both of us beside the fire, but leaning back against the uneven rocks, we managed to dig ourselves in without too much discomfort. The fire gave off more smoke than heat, causing one’s eyes to smart unmercifully; and from time to time we clambered out, ostensibly to check the horses but really to gasp some fresh air. The fog persisted; there were no stars.
There was a disarming closeness in that small hollow, as we sat with shoulders pressed together and legs drawn up to share what heat there was. At last, after the months and years in which we’d lived our separate lives, each carefully avoiding the other, we could no longer pretend to be untouchable. For a long time we both remained rigid, straining with our minds to deny the contact of our bodies; but as one yielded to sleepiness and fatigue, as the night wore on and lay more heavily on our limbs, the tightness relaxed. While my body slackened I could still feel him resisting in the glowing, smoky darkness next to me, but in the end he, too, succumbed.
“You saved my life,” I said at last, grateful for the protection of the dark.
“I just stopped you. It was nothing.”
“Do you remember the day we dug into the sandbank and it collapsed on us?”
“That was long ago.”
“We had good times together.”
He said nothing. His resistance was maddening; yet I went on prodding, trying to force some response from him, some sign at least of repentance or remorse, an acknowledgement that the past was not entirely irrevocable, that redemption was still conceivable. It was ridiculous, of course, and in any other situation I would have recognized it as such; but it seemed particularly necessary, in that small hollow, forced so closely together, to go beyond the obvious. He refused to cooperate and if I hadn’t been so tired I might have given up, or lost my temper. But one draws a strange persistence from weariness. In the new vulnerable state of my dependence on him, that night, I realized that this had been at the root of my outbursts against him: this urge to force a response from him, to move him, to prise him out of that passivity in which he was untouchable, a smooth intractable surface of rock which one could scale or explore without finding any fissure. The very wounds I’d torn into his body might have been efforts to get inside him, to break through that surface; and indeed the skin had broken, but there were membranes of the mind which kept him forever inaccessible. But surely there was no need for it: this was the fierce conviction that urged me on. There was no need. Yet his patient silence in itself confirmed how wrong I was. Our innocence was irrecoverable: but why did it mean so much to prove the contrary? Between us, indeed, lay the death of the child; and my increasing gnawing guilt; and perhaps the body of a black woman. But there was more to it than that. Those were only the obvious symptoms of a more insidious evil at which I could only guess and towards which I could only grope. It seemed a night made for it. But what was the use if Galant refused to respond? After trying in vain several times to prod him I withdrew from his sullen antagonism and immersed myself in my own thoughts.
All right, he was undoubtedly in pain, and blaming me for it. But that in itself had only been the result of that other evil I could sense but not explain. That we were no longer heedless boys but master and slave: could either really blame that on the other? It was something neither could avoid or even wish undone: the very condition of our mutual survival.
I must have fallen asleep at some stage. I remember confused snatches of dreams before the image settled: Galant and I were boys again, playing in the sandy bank below the dam, tunnelling into the mud left soft and sodden by the ra
in, crawling inside, huddled together, whispering and giggling; and then it subsided. Only, in my dream it was not the wall that caved in but the dam itself that burst, and a great black flood of water came washing over us, drowning us.
“Hey!” A voice called through the flood, and it was Galant shaking me by the shoulder to wake me up.
“What happened?” I stammered.
“You shouted. I think you were dreaming.”
“I was. I dreamt about the dam breaking. You and I were in the tunnel together.”
“Why can’t you forget about it?”
“I don’t know.” Suddenly I said: “You know, when I married Cecilia and my father gave you to me—it was because I’d asked him to.”
“Why?”
“I knew we’d get along on the farm.” No, it wasn’t that. I tried again. “I felt I—well, I thought I couldn’t handle the farm without you. I wouldn’t know what to do. Do you understand what I mean?”
“You said it before. And what is it to me? You learned to farm when you were small.”
“I know. But Pa was always there. He was always in charge. Then I got married and suddenly—it was just I. Suddenly everybody was expecting me to be a man and a farmer like the rest. I had a wife, I had a farm. And I—all I wanted to do was run away. But I knew I would never be able to look Pa in the eye again, and that would be the worst of all. He’d always looked down on me. It had always been Barend, Barend, Barend. I wanted to make a success of it. I damned well had to, I had no choice. But I didn’t know how to begin. And all I could think of was to ask him to let me have you so you could help me.”
“You doing all right.” After a brief pause he added, with a small bitter touch in his voice: “You’re a good master.”
