A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  “I don’t trust him,” I said. “I always worry about people who are so concerned about others. He got no need to bother about us. So why’s he going on like a fly on a hot day? Do you believe him, Galant?”

  “Let me be,” he mumbled. “We’ll see what happens. It’s almost time for Christmas and New Year.”

  Just before Christmas Campher was again with us, reaping on the lands. A terrible day, one of the hottest, the cicadas like thorns piercing your ears. Nobody felt like talking; not even at breakfast time. Only Campher went on.

  “You’re really prepared to swallow a lot, aren’t you?” he said. “Why do you allow yourselves to be driven like this on such a hot day?” And all because in the early dawn the Baas showed us the patch of wheat he wanted us to cut that day; and it was blue murder. But if he said so it just had to be done, even if it meant working till moonlight.

  “If the wheat is ready it got to be cut,” said Ontong. “It means food for all of us.”

  “Food for the Baas,” said Campher. “Leftovers for you. What do you say, Achilles? You must be a wise man, you’re so grey.”

  “I know nothing about leftovers,” I said gruffly. “I’m satisfied with what the Baas chooses to give me.”

  But he went on and on. By the time Bet came down with the second sopie of the day—for when the harvesting was going on the Baas wasn’t stingy: no less than four sopies a day it was—we rested in the shade for a while; and there the Baas found us when he came down to see how we were getting on.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not bad, Baas. Just hot, Baas.”

  “It’s too early for malingering.”

  “No, Baas. We not malingering, Baas.”

  “I thought you’d be further by now.”

  “We’ll finish, Baas,” I said. “Wheat’s good this year.”

  “Ja.” He looked round. “Well, I’ve also got work to do.” He grinned at me. “I feel the heat just as much, but have you ever heard me complain, Achilles?”

  “That’s so, Baas.”

  “Remember what the Bible says about the sweat of your brow?”

  “True, Baas.”

  “Perhaps one day you can go back to your land, Achilles. How would you like that?”

  We all looked up at him.

  “How can that be, Baas?”

  “You too, Ontong.”

  “I don’t understand what you saying today, Baas.”

  “Just talking. One never knows, does one?” He laughed. “Tell me: suppose you were set free one day: would you like to go back home?”

  There was a sudden burning feeling in my eyes; in broad daylight I saw the ’mtili-trees of my dreams shimmering in the white sky. The long road leading from Zim-ba-ué to the sea. The sun rising among the palm trees.

  “How shall I ever find the way back, Baas?” I asked him. My throat was dry with lust, as for a woman. “I suppose my mother and all will be dead by now. Will anybody still know me?” But in my mind I could see myself coming back, walking down the plank from the ship; and the people thronging on the shore to gape at me; and suddenly a voice shouting: “But that’s Achilles! That old man there is Achilles who was taken away when he was a child!” Except he wouldn’t say Achilles, but Gwambe, the name that was my own.

  “That’s right, Achilles,” said the Baas. “No use going back, is it? Much better to stay here.”

  “If you say so, Baas,” I said; but keeping my head down so he wouldn’t see my face.

  Suddenly Galant spoke up. “Don’t let them tease you like that, Achilles. Don’t let them crush you. Only ten more days—time enough to get this wheat out of the way, and move on to Lagenvlei—then it’s Christmas. And soon after that it’s New Year.”

  It was very quiet; even the cicadas seemed to have stopped.

  “And what is that supposed to mean, Galant?” asked the Baas.

  “You know as well as I what New Year’s going to bring,” Galant answered in his cheeky way.

  “Have you been listening to rumors again?” asked the Baas, in that tone of voice that meant: Watch it!

  “Nothing wrong with my ears,” said Galant. “Nor with my eyes. And I’m just waiting for New Year to come round.”

  “You still have time for idle talk,” the Baas said crossly. “Come on, the work’s waiting. And for your impudence you can cut down that patch over there too after the others have done.”

  Galant straightened his back and looked at him. But he didn’t say a word. Just as well. Otherwise we’d have had a fight on the farm again.

  All the time the Baas was with us the man Campher said nothing. Keeping right out of it as if it was none of his business. But as soon as the Baas was gone, walking through the young beans on his way home, the man suddenly found his voice again. How much were we going to take from the Baas before we had too much? Hadn’t we swallowed enough of his shit? He went on and on, until I asked him straight: “Why didn’t you say a word when the Baas was here? Why didn’t you talk to him then?” Campher just looked at me, his pale eyes burning in his face; then took up his sickle and started reaping again.

  “I can bide my time,” he said over his shoulder.

  I turned to Galant, for he had really upset me. “You mustn’t cheek the man like that,” I told him. “You know what’ll come of it.”

  “He won’t touch me again,” he said. “Has he once laid hands on me since the winter?”

  “One day you’ll be going too far again.”

  “No. He knows our freedom is coming close now. What about all those questions he asked you about going back to your land? It’s because he knows. He’s getting very careful.”

  “What do you have against him?” I asked. “The Baas is good to us. Why do you think he gives us food? So we can work for him. And if you don’t work you deserve to be flogged. The Baas is working just as hard as the rest of us.”

  “Won’t someone bring me a handful of grass?” Galant jeered. “So we can stuff it up the old man. He’s talking through his asshole.”

  “You’ll be sorry yet,” I warned him. “You saying all sorts of things today—and tomorrow a commando comes to take us away. Then we’ll all stand in a row before the gentlemen of the Cape, our hands tied behind our backs.”

  “Let them come,” said Galant, raising his sickle. “The whole Bokkeveld will stand up when the day comes. We’ll shoot them all the way back to the Cape. Just you wait: one of these days I’ll be standing on top of the Lion’s Head with my gun in my hand, and they’ll all see me from a long way off.”

  I hunched my back and got on with my reaping. I had no stomach for that sort of talk. After some time I briefly stretched my back to ease the pain—in the distance I saw Ma-Rose passing on her way to the farmyard, and I wondered what had brought her such a long way on a day like that—and I said to Joseph Campher. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? You a white man, yet you allow Galant to talk like that?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” he asked. “He knows that soon there won’t be any more slaves. What’s the matter with you then? Aren’t you man enough?”

  “I know what I know,” I mumbled.

  “The day I gather my army I want only real men. Not shit-scared old wives.”

  “Say what you want,” I said, bending down with my sickle again. “You can’t make me do what I don’t want to.”

  As in the shimmering sun of a hot day I saw the ‘mtili-trees of my land.

  Perhaps, I thought, freedom is also just a shimmering of lies.

  If only they’d listened to me.

  Hester

  I could never stand that man. Gross, exuberant, and cruel, he’d cast his great shadow across my childhood ever since the day I’d seen my father fall under his whip. Yet there was no joy, no sense of spite, in discovering him motionless and shrunken when, inevitably, the whole family g
athered at Lagenvlei for Christmas, only two days after the stroke had felled him on the land. It was unsettling to see him lying there with his fierce and hopeless gaze. On every previous Christmas he’d dominated house and farm with his boisterous presence, whether roasting the carcass of an ox on a huge spit outside, or grabbing someone’s violin to lead a parade of musicians across the yard, or intoning in his patriarchal voice one of his favorite booming passages from the Bible:

  While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

  In a way the excesses of his life, however offensive or maddening at times, had been to all of us a bulwark against the end. With him struck down we were all, suddenly, hopelessly, exposed to the inevitability of our own death. Pausing briefly on the threshold of his room to meet his stare, my anguish was not for him but for myself as in a sudden rush—an utter and purifying wind sweeping not past me but right through me—I remembered all the nights I’d lain awake beside a snoring Barend, my nails cutting into the palms of my hands as I’d stared into the darkness thinking: My God, this can’t be all: it can’t just go on like this forever: somewhere, invisible now but undeniable, there must be something more than this slow aging, this fatal oozing away of possibilities, of hope. Somewhere there must be a force so vast that one day it must explode inside me, bursting into brightness and meaning, opening up what now seems stopped, or stoppable.—All the nights Barend had stripped me naked, then avenged himself on me for finding only nakedness; turning resentfully from me to escape into crude sleep, abandoning me in my other nakedness to the dark.

  Again, as I left that room with its smell of irrevocable decay to blunder through the familiar rituals of Christmas day, I acknowledged this silent cry in me: There must be more than this. Something must happen, and soon, while I am yet alive to respond to it. And only weeks later did I discover, in retrospect, the terrible thing that had been prepared below the surface of that unremarkable day.

  It had begun in ordinary enough fashion; there had even been a touch of frivolity in the efforts of our drivers to outdo one another: Abel on the front seat of our four-horse carriage, Galant on that of Nicolaas and his family. I’d enjoyed the chase, the wild clatter of the wheels over the ruts of the wagon-track, the swaying of the carriage, the thunder of the flailing hooves, my hair getting undone in the wind. But Barend stepped in angrily to reprimand Abel; and I suppose he was right, it might be dangerous to go on racing like that, risking our own lives and those of the two small boys who were screaming in the exhilaration of fear; and so we rode on more sedately, just far enough behind Galant to escape his dust.

  I had hardly seen him since that wintry Saturday, six months before, when he’d turned up at Elandsfontein in search of his bullock. In fact, I had the distinct impression that he was deliberately avoiding me: he’d always been reticent, of course, especially in the presence of others, but those months there had been something different in his attitude, a bitter aloofness, a pointed sullenness. I’d heard that he’d been flogged again and that he’d run away—to Cape Town, I believe; and once I’d tried to discuss it with Nicolaas, but he’d angrily brushed it off. I hadn’t insisted: we’d grown so far apart since the reckless innocence of our youth. And yet—

  In the afternoon, when everybody had retired for a nap after gorging themselves on the Christmas meal in that stupefying heat, I slipped out of the house, eluding the ever-alert children who would be clamoring to go with me; and making sure that no one had seen me (the maids were washing up in the kitchen, but the farmyard lay deserted, shimmering in its bare whiteness), I followed the footpath up the incline behind the house, back to the dam I hadn’t visited in years. Apart from the shrill of the cicadas there was no sound; even the weaver-birds in their dangling nests were silent, dazed with heat. Muddy brown and green, the dam lay in its hollow, the repository of an entire childhood. Unremitting memory.

  He was sitting so still on one of the large boulders on the near side that I wasn’t even aware of his presence before, alarmed by the sound of my approach, he jumped up to skelter towards the willows.

  I caught my breath, startled by the suddenness of his movement.

  “Galant!” I cried.

  He stopped, clearly reluctant, almost guilty.

  “Why do you run away from me?”

  “I’m not.”

  The insolence of his color.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I was just—” With a vague, hesitant gesture I pointed towards the water, as if that in itself would be explanation enough.

  He said nothing.

  Cautiously I went towards him; he seemed ready to bolt.

  “Every time I’ve been to Houd-den-Bek these last months you’ve kept out of my way.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “But surely—”

  Almost in contempt he turned to go.

  “What have I done wrong?” I cried.

  He turned round to face me, his dark eyes glowering.

  “Nothing,” he said, “You’re a white woman. You can’t do wrong.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Galant!”

  “Did it really please you to have me flogged?” he suddenly blurted out; it was like the snarl of a cornered dog.

  “But I never had you flogged!” I protested. “When? And why should I?”

  “It was you who told me to stay that day I came after the bullock. You gave me food. You told me to take the brandy. I didn’t want anything. You forced me to.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, stunned.

  “When Barend came back you told him I’d interfered with you.”

  In the oppressive heat I could feel a thin trickle of sweat running down the side of my cheek; but I felt too dazed to brush it off.

  “That’s not true,” I whispered. “How could you think that I—”

  “I no longer try to think what you may do. It’s not my business. Whatever you do is right. Except that it’s Christmas today; and it’s only a week to New Year,”

  I shook my head numbly; he must be mad, I thought. Or I. The madness that had always been lurking just below the surface of our lives.

  “Why do you deny it now?” he asked. He came a step towards me. For a moment his voice almost sounded pleading. “There’s no need to. If you did it, you had the right. Just don’t lie to me. That’s one thing you’ve never done.”

  “I’m not lying,” I said hoarsely. “I swear. I never said a word to Barend. How can you accuse me of such a thing?”

  He stared at me. Neither of us moved. Another trickle of sweat found its way down my temple and across my jaw:

  “Klaas was there,” he said at last in a changed tone of voice; and then it was very still, only the cicadas shrilling.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled.

  “Don’t say that!” he cried angrily. Suddenly he bent over and picked up a stone, and hurled it into the water; then another, and a third; I’d often seen him do it as a child. I knew he wouldn’t speak again, so I turned and went away, a curious mixture of relief and oppressive sadness in me.

  I waited for two days. Then, as Barend came back from the lands—our reapers were late that season; on the other farms the harvest had already been brought in before Christmas—I told him: “Klaas was cheeky with me today. And when I scolded him he talked back.”

  One uses what weapons one has. Yet suffering offers no redemption; and it gives one no rights. In its own way it corrodes, and corrupts. The only significance of the past is that it is past.

  Klaas

  What else could I expect of the woman? She was white. That first time she pretended to be so upset about the flogging. When they try to be kind it’s even worse than when they’re cruel; one never knows when they’ll turn round to ask the price for it.
She was just waiting for the chance; and a day or two after Christmas, simply because it pleased her to do so, with no reason at all, she had me whipped.

  All those years I’d cringed and cowered in their sight. I’d tried to worm my way into the Baas’s favor. This was my reward.

  And so when Abel came round with Galant’s instructions, telling me the time had come to rise up against them, I was ready.

  Galant

  New Year’s Day. The harvest is in and it’s not yet time for threshing. We still waiting for the west wind. It’s the one day of the year we’re given off: a day of presents for all the laborers for the year ahead; and since as far back as I can remember a day of merrymaking and dancing. Unharnessed, we play about like young horses. Every year. Except this one.

  For nights on end I talk to Pamela about it, for she wants to rein me in.

  “For Heaven’s sake don’t put your heart on New Year,” she says every time. “It’ll hit you too hard if things go wrong.”

  “All these years I been taking their bit in my mouth and heeding their heels in my flanks,” I tell her. “But now we heard the word of freedom. Christmas is past. So it must come on New Year’s Day. How can you say I mustn’t put my heart on it?”

  “Since when can you trust a white man’s word?” she says. “What happened when you told them we wanted to get married? How many times have they given their word and broken it?”

  “This word is different,” I insist. “It comes from far away, from a land across the sea. The newspaper itself said so. I heard it.”

  “What difference does it make? The people who live across the sea are also white. They’re all the same and they all stand together.”

  “Then it’s time for us to stand together too.”

  “You saying all sorts of things lately,” Pamela replies. “But you never say what’s really in your head. What do you mean we got to ‘stand together’? Suppose New Year’s Day comes and goes just like Christmas and nothing happens—what then? It’s all just wind.”