A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  Take good heed therefore unto yourselves, that ye love the Lord your God.

  Else if ye do in any wise go back, and cleave unto the remnant of these nations, even these that remain among you, and shall make marriages with them, and go in unto them, and they to you:

  Know for a certainty that the Lord your God will no more drive out any of these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps unto you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye perish from off this good land which the Lord your God hath given you.

  His face was flushed with anger. “What are you trying to tell me, Cecilia?”

  I closed the Bible very slowly and fastened the clasps. “One day you came in here,” I said, “and told me about a terrible thing Frans du Toit had done. You were shocked to think a man could sink so low. But today I’m asking you, Nicolaas: Is there any difference between what he did and what you’re doing?”

  “Cecilia, how dare you say such a thing?”

  I refused to let him off. There was an extraordinary feeling of calm and reasonableness in me; I knew I had God on my side. “Last year when we went to Cape Town,” I said, “I was amazed to see all the white children among the slaves. And it occurred to me that if it went on like that we would soon have no other choice but to set them all free. Can you imagine what that would mean? In this land which God has given us we will have become the equals of the beasts of the veld. In our madness we’ll eat grass like Nebuchadnexzar.”

  “You’re going too far!” he protested.

  “Rather humble yourself before God,” I told him. “Why don’t you go down on your knees and ask Him to tell you who it is who’s going too far?”

  One thing I felt distressingly sure of: we were living in a house built upon the sand. And the rain would descend, and the floods would come, and the winds would blow, and beat upon that house; and it would fall; and great would be the fall of it.

  Nicolaas

  So help me God. In that remote and impossible night on the mountain I had sworn that I’d never again raise my hand against Galant who’d saved my life. But the moment we descended into the Bokkeveld he shifted beyond my grasp again. In the enclave of that night it had been possible to talk to him; briefly, exhilaratingly, we’d been in touch as in childhood. Now we were back in our familiar positions, master and slave. I tried my best to honor the intention of that night, but it was almost impossible; and Galant made no attempt to make it easier. Even insolence, defiance, arrogance might have been manageable had they been the familiar refractory acts of a difficult slave; but it was the dark secret flood I could sense moving behind his actions that made me hesitate in uncertainty and anguish—all the more so since he too appeared to have no understanding of it. There was an increasing feeling of having irreparably lost my grasp, and the very effort to fight against the evil in myself had become feeble. It was such a simple discovery really: that revulsion diminishes; that only the first act of any series is important: the first time one forces oneself, in lust and loathing, upon a black woman; the first time one ties a man’s hands to flog him; the first outrage to what had been one’s “principles.” After that, in spite of intentions or efforts to resist, there is no effective return. It is oneself one has diminished. All that remains is the agony of the silence surrounding every act—a silence no longer penetrable from inside or out.

  It was hard enough, God knows, to live with Cecilia’s pious reprimands and her contempt—making it more and more difficult for me to rule her as a husband; sending me with always greater urgency back to that dark replenishment of virility recommended by Ma-Rose, to which, while abhorring it, I’d become addicted; and which only made me more and more reprehensible in Cecilia’s eyes. To punish her and assert myself; to punish myself and acknowledge her hold on me: how could I break out of this whirlpool dragging me ever inward? The sin in me; the sin in me.

  And Pamela made it worse. She was altogether different from Lydia. Having learned to live with revulsion, I was shocked to find only lust when I contemplated Pamela. Perhaps not even lust for herself? But a lust derived from the agony of knowing her closeness to Galant. She was the only possible means for me still to touch him. God knows I did not mean to harm her or evoke his enmity: on the contrary. This woman, this body had known him; knew him. Through her I groped towards that terrible closeness to him I’d known in the one night of my life when I’d been wholly free.

  It was, of course, in vain. She only added to the dark flood rising, rising, and over which I had long lost all control.

  To whom could I turn in my distress? The mere idea of discussing it with Cecilia was outrageous. Pamela never spoke at all, except in direct reply to a question; her silence an accusation more eloquent than anger. Barend would simply laugh at me in scorn, and I’d long ago forfeited all hope of access to Hester. It was unthinkable, for different reasons, to face either Pa or Ma.

  Ma-Rose? Perhaps. Yet the burning memory of how she’d been the first to encourage me on this road that had led me into the dark flood, inhibited me. In despair I thought of the old man who’d recently settled on a corner of Houd-den-Bek, the tailor and shoemaker D’Alree. He was a foreigner; he might not understand my urgency at all. Yet the very fact that he was a total stranger, disinterested, quite unconcerned with the motion of our lives, also commended him.

  I hesitated for a long time, until I could really bear it no longer. On one of my customary night walks I stopped outside Ma-Rose’s hut; in the smoky interior, glowing a dull orange in the light of her small fire, I could see the old woman moving about, preparing her brews and concoctions. My stomach contracted in the ache of longing to go to her. But I knew I could no longer face her, and went on, stumbling over the uneven veld with its unexpected ditches and its outcrops of rock. There was still light in D’Alree’s one-roomed thatched cottage. I made a detour to avoid the fire of the laborers—dark shapes swaying to music, laughing uproariously from time to time: the white foreman Campher sitting with the others. This fraternizing annoyed me; there was something improper about it. But it was none of my business. Through the open door of the cottage I could see the scraggy old man working at his rough table, his white mane tousled and shining in the lamp light.

  “Oh, Mr. Van der Merwe,” he said, looking quite startled to see me. “What a surprise.”

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “Why don’t you come in? Would you like a sopie?”

  “No thank you,” I said, but he was already pouring the brandy into two tin mugs, revolting stuff, burning up one’s insides, leaving one quite light-headed.

  “You must be very lonesome,” I said, postponing the second sip of brandy for as long as possible.

  He shrugged. “One gets used to everything.” He drained his mug, smacking his long thin lips, and took up his awl to resume his work on a half-made boot.

  “I’ve never understood why you should have chosen the Bokkeveld to settle in,” I said. “You must have seen a lot more interesting places in the world in your time.”

  “Oh indeed.” He slid a thong through his mouth, wetting it with spittle before he proceeded to sew up the back of the boot. “Come a long way I have. Born in Piedmont. You know where that is?”

  “Never heard of it.” Somehow, talking to him like this helped me to escape from the immediacy of my own anguish.

  “Travelled all through Europe before coming here on my way to the East. Never got beyond the Cape.” He suddenly stopped and looked up, an eager smile on his ancient monkey-face. “Did your mother ever tell you I knew her in Cape Town, before she got married?”

  With one casual remark he’d cancelled the only reason I’d had for confiding in him: the fact that he was an alien, and aloof from our lives. He’d known Ma. That explained why he’d come to live here. He was one of them. How could he be expected to understand?

  “It’s getting late,” I said, puttin
g down my mug without finishing his atrocious brandy. “I’d better be going.”

  “Why in such a hurry?” he asked in obvious disappointment. “We’ve hardly had time to talk.”

  “I just happened to be passing when I saw your light. Thought I’d look in to ask you—I’ll be needing a new pair of boots soon.”

  “Let me take your measurements.”

  “I can come back another time.”

  “No, no,” he insisted. “No time like the present, true?”

  Impatient and irritable, I allowed him to go about his business, fussing and breathing in his asthmatic way. On my way home, later, I had the curious, uneasy feeling of having left something of myself behind. As if, in allowing him to take my measurements and draw the outline of my feet on his leather, I’d given him an unreasonable and insidious hold on myself.

  Nothing had been resolved. Nothing could be resolved. In the dark kitchen Pamela would be asleep, passively at my disposal should I decide to wake her. And I knew I would. What else was there for me to do?

  It was Galant I really needed to talk to and touch. But our sandy hollow had crumbled long ago and caved in on us. And the dark flood was rising.

  D’Alree

  One is always alone. We talk and live past each other. After old Piet van der Merwe had first instructed Nicolaas to accommodate me on a corner of his farm I saw very little of my neighbors. From the beginning they resented the intrusion; I could feel it. They looked down on me as the foreigner, the stranger, the impostor. A Christian sense of duty obliged them to tolerate my presence, but I would never be allowed to belong. The Bokkeveld, I soon discovered, was reluctant to open its heart to outsiders. I would never be treated otherwise than with suspicion, as if I was not only a beggar living on their mercy but the carrier of God knows what evil diseases. The only one who occasionally deigned to come over for a chat was Frans du Toit, most likely because he felt as rejected as I did, if for quite different reasons. Rumor had it that the birth-mark covering the left side of his face was the imprint of the Devil. And yet I found him a pleasant enough young man, more knowledgeable than some of the others in the neighborhood, and conscientious to a fault, although I’d heard it said, probably out of spite, that he’d been made Field-cornet only because he’d allied himself with the English against his own people. I don’t judge anybody.

  We had long arguments, Frans and I. “What’s wrong about living alone?” I would say when he became rebellious about what seemed to be his destiny in life. “Keep your own counsel, then you won’t ever have to depend on others. Once you get involved with others there’s no telling where it may end. One gets drawn in before you know it. No matter what you do, heaven and hell are involved in every step you take.”

  “You should have become a preacher,” he would say. “Not a shoemaker.”

  “The two are much the same. When one’s hands are working with scissors or awl your thoughts are free to explore God and man.”

  “It’s easy for you to talk. You’re an old man; you can live without others.” There would be a brief pause before he added: “You can live without a woman. But when a man is young he cannot deny the needs of his body.”

  Then, depending on the circumstances, I would smile or sigh; and pursue my own thoughts again. How could I attempt to explain my own life to them? To these people I must seem like a madman, an old confused dodderer neglecting his work and his fields and slowly going to pieces among chickens and pigs and junk while he works away in fits and starts at making clothes and shoes; and who wanders about talking to himself in a foreign language.

  I found it difficult to explain it to myself: this heaven and hell I’d spoken to him about. For on the surface, admittedly, my life appeared so ordinary, even drab; and even what had seemed adventure in my youth now faded into irrelevance. It could all be summarized in so few words.—A young man bored with old Europe, and taking up his little bundle in Piedmont to set out and see the world; meeting a swaggerer in Texel who persuades him to join him on a voyage to Batavia; and landing three months later, after burying the big-mouthed acquaintance at sea, at the Cape where he is parted from his money in canteens and the female quarters of the slave lodge, so that he has no choice but to stay behind when the boat sails on; staying on temporarily as a shoemaker and a tailor, a sojourn that gradually lengthens into permanence, especially after meeting an affluent family, the De Villiers, and falling in love with their vivacious young daughter Alida, only to discover one morning that she has eloped with a wild man from the Bokkeveld; marrying another woman in due course, a decent good wife with whom he lives respectably and in mild prosperity until the day of her death, when he briefly returns to the land of his birth where everything has however grown so strange that he soon returns to the Cape; and yielding one final time to the Mediterranean urge in his blood he loads his few remaining possessions on a wagon and treks into the interior in search of an impossible memory; finding at last, in joy and dismay, on a godforsaken farm in the Bokkeveld the lost Alida of his youth and accepting the invitation of her husband—now old and much subdued—to settle on a corner of his son’s farm Houd-den-Bek where he can spend the few remaining years of his life in peace.—To me it was the closure of a circle long left incomplete. And all I wished was to be left in peace and not to become involved in the lives of others again.

  I had but few needs; and apart from Frans du Toit I seldom saw people. Occasionally there might be an invitation to a Sunday meal at Lagenvlei where the whole family would gather in their prim old-fashioned best clothes. From time to time the old man would come round to my place to cast a disapproving eye on the untidy yard. The elder son, too, could be quite unpleasant, muttering dire threats when his father wasn’t present. Nicolaas’s wife I found a truly Christian woman, always ready to send over a bowl of soup, or a joint of venison, a basket of eggs, a pumpkin, some freshly ground flour; although she, too, had an unsparing tongue about what she regarded as laziness and laxity. Nicolaas himself seemed too much of a loner to spend time in conversation with me. Always friendly when one greeted him, and prepared to exchange a few pleasantries or comments on the weather, the harvest, or the unreliability of slaves; but that was the full extent of it. Only once he visited me of his own accord. It was very late one night and he seemed to have something weighty on his mind, but in the end it turned out to be no more than a pair of boots he wanted me to make for him. Strange, I thought, for a man to come over in the middle of the night for a thing like that. But another man’s mind remains sealed in its own mystery.

  And then, of course, Alida, who had been the aim and motive of my whole reckless journey across the mountains. What could I possibly have expected before leaving the Cape? Yet one retains an image from a distant past and foolishly and fondly embroiders and embellishes it through the years. It was an acute shock to see her again. Not because of her age. Even then she was a handsome woman, although she’d become introverted and subdued, quite different from the sprightly young girl I’d known. Was that the real disappointment? To see such a light so dimmed?

  A few times, after I’d settled on Houd-den-Bek, I drove over to Lagenvlei. Her husband was always present. We had so little to talk about that my visits were soon abandoned. Yet something refused to die inside me, an ardent memory, a hope, an unfulfilled and who knows unfulfillable wish that nourished me in my solitude. And in the end, after many months of absence, in the high summer of last year, I returned to Lagenvlei and found her alone. She remained remote, aloof, almost taciturn—which my experienced eye of course recognized immediately as but the obvious defense of a vulnerable woman. I suppose I should have made it easier for her by not pressing the matter; yet I felt that for once I had to be importunate, to make her admit what was already so clear to me: that she regretted the decision of years ago; that she still thought of me.

  “Do you remember,” I said, after the slave woman had served the tea and left us, “when we were—�
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  “There is nothing to remember,” she said. “What is past is past. For ever. One has to resign oneself to the will of the Lord.”

  Her delicate head bent lightly as she leaned over to pour the tea, she sat against the white light of the bare window. No suffering worse than the remembrance of past happiness.

  Through the open door I saw Piet coming towards the house. She was unaware of his approach. I half-rose to greet him, but even before he’d reached the door he turned on his heel and walked away again. I took the cup from Alida and sat down. The opportunity had passed.

  Soon afterwards I heard that Piet had had a stroke on the lands, undoubtedly shocked by what he’d guessed about Alida and me. How unnecessary. By that time I’d been living in the neighborhood for two years; he must have known I could be trusted not to harm anyone. But they were a difficult lot, the Van der Merwes.

  Not that I want to sound ungrateful. They were kind and even generous to me. It was Barend who hired laborers to help me out; even the slave Dollie was his choice—with the best of intentions no doubt, although Dollie gave me no end of trouble. I had a much better understanding with the slave Galant whom Nicolaas would sometimes send over to give a hand with repairs or with ploughing or sowing or reaping my small patch of land; during the last winter he would often stay for as much as a week at a time; and he was always quiet and obedient, a good worker. Strange how ungrateful a slave can be though. I still remember the jacket Nicolaas ordered me to make for Galant. Chose the corduroy himself, expensive stuff, the best I had. Now one would have expected Galant to treat such a piece of clothing with great care. It was much too good for a slave really. But barely a year later, when Galant came back here to give me a hand with some job or other, the jacket was torn to shreds, an insult to my handiwork. However, when he was working here that winter I felt sorry for him in the severe cold and gave him another jacket which I’d only worn for a couple of years: yet not once did I see him put it on. Went about in his old rags all the time. I’ll never understand these people.