A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  “That’s not what I meant.” He didn’t answer. And I couldn’t stop; in the vulnerable aftermath of sleep, in that dark hollow in the heart of the mountains, the coals burning so low that Galant was no more than a shadow outlined against dull red glow, I felt more acutely than ever before a need to unburden myself. “You know I never wanted to be a farmer,” I said. “Barend could never wait to be his own boss and run his own farm. To me it was worse than a prison.”

  “What did you want to do then?”

  “That’s the worst of it. I don’t know. I’ve never been given a chance to find out. But somewhere in the world there must have been something else for me to do. I would have become a man in my own right. Now I’m chained to the farm.”

  “Why didn’t you go away?”

  “I couldn’t let Pa down. I was scared of him. And afterwards —well, then I got married. Now I have a family. I have responsibilities. It’s impossible to give up everything and go away. Sometimes I try to persuade myself that I have a good life, that I’m free. But the land itself holds me captive. I have to obey the seasons. What I do depends on rain or heat or the soil or the grazing. Sometimes I wake up at night and it’s like the day the sand caved in; I can’t breathe. I want to cry out, and I want to get up and shout curses that will wake up the whole house. But all I can do is get up and go out, and walk down to the kraal to look at the cattle or sheep lying there, all those dumb sheep, chewing their cuds, stirring when they see me, too stupid to do anything about it; and then I think I’m just as dumb as they are, locked up in my kraal for the night, driven out in the morning to graze, and brought back at dark. And sometimes I wish a bloody leopard or a lion would jump into the kraal and kill me and drag me out for good.”

  “You’re stupid,” he said in quiet contempt. “You got everything you want. You don’t need a lion to kill you.”

  “For God’s sake, try to understand.” Unreasonably, irrationally, I was now pleading with him. “You’ve got to understand.”

  And he asked: “Why?”

  For a long time I didn’t speak again. His question was burning more surely into me than any hot coal. Why indeed? Why the need to humiliate myself in this vast night, prostrating myself in front of a slave, begging him to understand me? But there was no other who might, and that must have been the answer. In all the world there was no one to whom I could go to beg for this understanding I now required of him. This was an agony for which Ma-Rose would have no remedy. Hester? She could only make it worse by quickening the need. There was no one but Galant, and he denied me the single word of comfort I required.

  I fell asleep again, and this time dreamed of Hester. Her dark solemn eyes set so far apart in the narrow face, the beautiful lines of cheekbones and stubborn chin, the small straight nose and wide mouth, the vulnerable throat; I remembered the candid grace of her body when we were children, the sultry tone of her limbs, the fascination of the bluntness in which she differed from us; and I woke with a smothered cry, swollen and erect and achingly without her.

  “You dreamed again,” Galant said, a sound of accusation in his voice.

  “I was dreaming of Hester.”

  “Hester?”

  But I didn’t answer. This time I was possessive of my dream and I leaned forward, drawing my arms tightly round my knees as if to hold on to what I’d already lost, trying to retain the exquisite hardness even as I felt it, throbbingly, subside.

  “Once when we were small,” he said, “she and I came home in a storm and Ma-Rose covered us in a kaross and dried us in front of her fire.”

  I glared at him in the dark, resentful of his memories, yet at the same time feeling a new warmth in me moving out towards him, in the awareness of sharing something of her in this night, even though his memory could never be as intimate as mine. If this were, absurdly, all we had to share it still lent meaning to the darkness in which we sat huddled somewhere in those godforsaken mountains far from home. In this fitful sharing there was an aching, exhilarating awareness of a freedom I’d never known. For once, for those few brief dark hours, we could share an experience because neither had to look up or down to the other. And yet, what mockery in that momentary freedom. I knew I was sitting beside a man whose body had been torn and broken at my own bidding.

  “What did you dream?” he asked again.

  “It’s gone already,” I lied, reaching in my mind for the remembrance of that forbidden desire. “You know how it is. Don’t you ever dream?”

  He shrugged.

  “What do you dream of?”

  He remained silent. After a long time—and one was conscious of time then, because the wind had risen and was tearing and wailing round the rocks; and occasionally the horses stamped or snorted outside—he suddenly said: “Tell me about the Great River.”

  “What about it? You know I’ve never been there.”

  “The Cape then.”

  “What do you want to know about the Cape?”

  “Anything you can tell.”

  “You should have gone with us.”

  “I asked you to take me. You said no.”

  “You had to keep an eye on the farm. There was no one else I could trust.”

  “When we were children you promised to take me one day.”

  “Next time you can go with me.” I thought: If I’d taken you, all this may have been avoided. Was this your way of taking revenge?

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Again he said: “Tell me about it.”

  Like many years before, when Pa had taken Barend and me to the Cape for the first time, I told him whatever I could recall, whatever I thought he might like to hear. The bustle in the squares and cobbled streets, the military parades, the wagons arriving from the interior loaded with produce, the boisterous sports meetings at Green Point, the open-air concerts, the congregation in the Groote Kerk on Sundays round the pulpit with its carved lions in dark gleaming wood; we’d even done the fashionable thing and climbed Table Mountain (the slopes strewn with the soles and heels of flimsy shoes discarded by our predecessors), and I told him of the stupendous view from up there, the blue and green of two great oceans mingling, the patterns of white breakers changing lazily, almost imperceptible to the eye; I told him about the fleet of ships sailing into the Bay like a flock of sea birds approaching with wings outstretched and white plumes fluttering, and the throng in the harbor as the rowing boats docked, sailors and soldiers and passengers mobbed by townsfolk and slaves fighting and jostling to offer their trays laden with wares for sale; I told him about the changed fashions—the dull colour of years ago yielding to the brighter hues of lilac and blue, mulberry and rose and green; women’s waists growing smaller, waistlines dropping, the wide skirts fuller and more graceful than ever; the men in tall top hats and tailcoats. All the time he interrupted me, too eager to wait, anxious to hear everything simultaneously, plying me with questions about the cannon on Signal Hill—ships arriving and leaving—the clothes worn by slaves—the gatherings at the town fountain and the mill—clandestine cock-fights in the quarry below the Lion’s Head—music in the Gardens—the shops and stalls run by slaves—the markets—the mountain—the sea. I was surprised by what he already seemed to know; but when I prodded him he grew evasive, mumbling something about remembering what he’d been told by me before, or by Ontong and others: and then he’d start a flurry of new questions. What I knew I told him; what I didn’t know I invented. What did it matter? He wasn’t concerned with truth or falsity, only with an image as outlandish as possible of that distant place, the gaudiest colour, the wildest adventures. In our improbable night everything seemed plausible; and as I went on I entered more and more into the spirit of his imaginings, feeding him on the fantasies he so obviously craved. Some of my inventions were so marvellous that we would both burst out laughing, and like a child at play he would urge me on: more! more! It
made the time pass more rapidly, it diminished our awareness of discomfort and cold (for the last wood had been burnt and the embers were dying); above all it reinforced the amazing closeness developing between us as we sat in our hollow remote from our everyday lives, close to the bright possibilities of childhood. But perhaps it was informed by anguish: perhaps our talk was compulsive: for below the territory of memories and dreams and wishful thinking we explored ran a dark slow current which I tried to deny but which was there and which, whenever we fell silent, obtruded like the night. It became as necessary for myself as for him to keep talking, pretending, laughing, and weaving fantasies. But that subterranean course was there, welling up below, forcing its way up ever more closely to the surface where sooner or later, I knew, it had to break out and flood the forced gaiety of our make-believe.

  “There was one terrible thing I’ll never forget for as long as I live,” I said; and in saying it I knew I shouldn’t, for this was the dark current running below and for the first time I recognized it; but of course, having acknowledged it, it was too late to stop. I faltered for a moment.

  “What happened?” he prodded.

  “We were walking away from Greenmarket Square, up towards the Lion’s Head. A slave came past us, on his way from the mountain; a young Malay in a red turban, carrying a huge bundle of firewood and an axe. I’m not quite sure how it started, but I believe he was jostled by someone, a soldier, and the bundle of wood fell on the pavement. The thong holding it together slipped loose and the sticks were scattered on the ground. A few people laughed. Someone jeered. When we looked round it was just in time to see him suddenly going into a frenzy, and raising the axe. The soldier tried to ward off the blow but it hit him on the shoulder, almost severing his arm. People started screaming. The slave was swinging the axe in all directions, beating them off. I could see the whites of his eyes as he hit out this way and that, bellowing like a bull. And then he ran right into the crowd, dispersing them like a bucket of peas, throwing over the tables and stalls of the vendors, kicking out of his way their buckets and barrels, as his arms went on flailing and striking out. Everybody was shouting: ‘Amok! Amok!’ A young girl stumbled as she tried to get away from him. The daughter of a colonel in the regiment, I was later told. She was wearing a pale yellow dress. The blunt side of the axe caught her on the side of the head. Suddenly there was blood everywhere. Then he axed down a small slave child who must have thought it was all great fun for he was just standing there laughing and jumping up and down.”

  I wanted to stop but I couldn’t.

  “And then?” asked Galant.

  “Then a detachment of soldiers came. They surrounded him but he wouldn’t give up. He was still bellowing. Everybody else on the cobbled square was dead silent after the child had been hit. Hundreds of people, but not a sound. Not a movement. All the fruit and vegetables and eggs and hides and other produce littering the square like a battlefield. One single small bright butterfly fluttering over a bucket of flowers. You could almost hear its wings in that silence. As if everybody was holding their breath. Only the soldiers in their scarlet coats advancing in a ring, very slowly, very cautiously. And then the mad Malay made another rush towards them, his head down, axe raised, bellowing. He hit the first soldier who tried to stop him. The axe came down. It made a strange sound. The man’s skull was split open like a pumpkin. The curious thing was that, because of the silence, everything seemed to be happening very slowly, you could see each individual movement as if it were isolated from all the others. That’s what it was. Everything was separate. Nothing made sense. But as his axe struck the soldier the square came to life again and it was pandemonium. They opened fire. Because the place was so crowded several people were grazed by shot. The slave went down, his arms still churning, his body tossing and squirming on the ground like a snake.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “They dragged him off. We didn’t stay. I felt sick. There was no point in remaining there, gawking like vultures.”

  “But afterwards,” he insisted. “What happened?”

  “How must I know? We left the next morning. I suppose they hanged him. Perhaps they first flogged him and cut off his ears. I don’t know what they do to them nowadays.”

  “Where did they hang him?”

  “The gallows stands outside the town just below the Lion’s Rump. Three tall pillars with three crossbeams.”

  “Do many people go there?”

  “I suppose so. I believe it’s one of the great spectacles of the Cape.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “What do you mean, afterwards?”

  “After they hanged him.”

  “How must I know? I guess a murderer’s body is quartered afterwards and his head is stuck on a pole in the place where he used to live so that people can see it and be warned.”

  “And it stays like that?”

  “Perhaps the vultures come.”

  He was silent for a long time. Then he said: “At least he got the soldier.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, shocked.

  “You said he killed the soldier.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “The others: were they also killed?”

  “I don’t know. I think the child died later, from what I heard.” I shuddered beside him, feeling again the nausea I’d felt in town that day. “Can you imagine such a thing?” I asked. “The man must have been mad.”

  “They threw down his firewood,” he said.

  “For God’s sake, what’s a bundle of firewood?”

  He didn’t answer; and I didn’t feel like talking any more. It had been a mistake. The hidden current had emerged from what had seemed such solid earth and now we were in it, struggling in silence not to be drowned in its darkness.

  All the other memories came back to me, the many things I’d been battling with ever since that unfortunate visit to the Cape. For indeed, this time it had not been the fun-fair of earlier visits as I’d tried to persuade both Galant and myself. That dark undercurrent had been there all along. The visiting fleet, for all the color and exuberance it had brought to town, had borne disturbing rumors, all the more worrying since no one seemed sure how much of it had been based on fact, how much on conjecture. The town was rife with speculation. And at least this much was clear, corroborated by hints in the Gazette: that, perturbed more and more by the flow, of ominous reports from missionaries at the Cape—undoubtedly the misguided dangerous fools from the London Missionary Society—philanthropists in England were increasing the pressure on the Government to take away all our slaves. And one of these days, I heard people say, Hottentots would no longer be required by law to work or to live in a fixed place: they would be free, just imagine, to come and go as they wished. Some people had gone to talk to the Governor about it. But what reply did they get? “The matter is being investigated.” No attempt to deny anything, only covering up for as long as possible, knowing no doubt they had us at their mercy. But others said no, the Governor himself wasn’t free to do as he wished, he had to wait for orders from across the sea. No one could say for sure what was going to happen, or when. Any day a ship might come from that distant place none of us had ever seen and where all laws, it seems, are made, to confirm the worst rumors. And what would become of us then? It was one thing to resent the farm as I had always done, and to wish for a different life; but to be driven from it by the laws of strangers, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, that was something else. And that was precisely what would happen if they suddenly came to take away our slaves. How could we possibly till this rude land on our own? It was so vast, there were so few of us.

  But even that bleak prospect was not, in itself, the worst. What really made me numb, as if I’d been bludgeoned, was the impotent rage that came from the rediscovery that our lives were held hostage by the whims and wishes of a distant adversary we didn’t know and had no ho
pe of influencing. Whatever we planned or decided was quite simply irrelevant: invisible forces might intervene at any moment to ridicule and destroy our cautious schemes.

  In the past I’d often argued with Barend about the English and what had seemed to be his blind hatred of them; I could not reconcile this rebelliousness with God’s injunction to obey the authorities set over us. But on this visit to the Cape I’d finally been persuaded that he was right after all. Not the fact that they were English made them evil, but that they were foreigners, aliens in our land; that they ruled from a distance; and that they removed from us the control over our own lives and well-being. For as long as I could remember we’d handled our own affairs and made our own decisions and scrupulously planned our own future. This, I think, was the heart of it: to be denied that control which gave one a stake in the future. Take away a man’s grasp on the future and you take away his dignity: the one cannot exist without the other. Some of the townsmen jeered at us. “You’re just too lazy to do your own bloody work.” “How can you complain of threats to your freedom if that freedom is built on slavery?” “All you people are concerned with is lording it over others. Freedom is not at stake at all, it’s only the lust for power.” They did not understand about that dignity without which existence is a mockery. Cushioned and comfortable, what did they know about our lives out there beyond the mountains, a sprinkling of people devoted to taming a wild land so that others might live in safety? Did we choose to be there? If God had not willed it, how would we have survived? Even I who resent my bondage to the farm must submit to that Will. And how was that conceivable without at least believing in a purpose beyond our daily toil and the sweat of one’s brow? And what purpose if not to tame and civilize? The past was a mess, the present perplexed me; all I had to hold on to was the future, and that lay embedded in the very land that oppressed me. It was the paradox of my condition; and submission to the land meant submission to God. That was what made it tolerable. But to accept this destiny, this tenuous grasp on the future I had to make the farm prosper with the help of those God had given me. Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ. Why else did God in His infinite wisdom cause Ham to err if not to make his masters flourish in the land given unto them? Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. How could these men from Cape Town know that a man’s need of slaves has nothing to do with oppression or wealth but with one’s responsibility to the future?