A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  And all I can say about what has happened is that I was there.

  In the beginning I thought it was not enough to know: one needed also to understand. Now I’m not so sure. Is it enough to understand unless you also try to change it? That was what Galant tried to do. But where did it land him? Only his head will come back to Houd-den-Bek.

  This Houd-den-Bek. All these years we believed it was cut off from the world, a region apart and contained within these mountains. We thought we were on our own here, that nothing could touch us from outside. But it was a delusion. Like that lion, so many years ago, that arrived here from nowhere and disrupted our quiet lives, all of us, too, came in here with our yesterdays and our worlds clinging to us. Now, out of the shadow of death we’re all looking back over the past. And perhaps someone will hear us calling out, all these voices in the great silence, all of us together, each one forever alone. We go on talking and talking, an endless chain of voices, all together yet all apart, all different yet all the same; and the separate links might lie but the chain is the truth. And the name of the chain is Houd-den-Bek.

  We’re looking back; and I can say that I’d seen it coming from far off, through years and seasons of sun and snow and wind. Indeed, I saw it all. I understood. But is that enough?

  No. In this ache that remains of everything I’ve witnessed I know it is not the answer. It depends on how you understand: on how you reach understanding. What is important is not just to understand with the mind, but to live through it all. To avoid nothing. Not to judge. To suffer without presuming that pain gives one a right to anything. To pity. To love. Not to give up hope. To be there: that is what’s important. We’re all of us human, and I pity us all, for I’m the mother of all.

  Ma-Rose is my name.

  I was there.

  Du Toit

  I thought I knew what had happened. I did what was expected of me, neither deterred nor encouraged by our several histories. Beyond the passions and terrors of our personal involvement lay, small and sordid, what seemed like irreducible fact. Now, having taken down all their statements, each the summary of an existence, I am perplexed by the obscurity of the truth. Where does it reside? In these affirmations and contradictions, this incipient pattern, or somewhere in the wild and senseless groping of that initial action preceding the word? Does it evolve from the litany of repetition, or is only the unutterable true? Can the virgin be celebrated except in the act of violation, or innocence established except in its corruption? But if it is such a precarious undertaking to arrive at the truth, how does one find the way to justice, of which I am supposed to be the officer and instrument?

  Justice: a word as profound and passionate as that faceless naked woman I burn for and will never possess, kneeling head down at my disposal, offering the cleft flesh I feverishly dream of, a fire in which to sheath and engulf myself—forever unattainable because of the shameful mark of Cain I bear upon my face. A word as disgusting and noisy as a pig held down by slaves for my furious entry, briefly to assuage the searing of a different flame. Pig-woman, loathed and loved, confirming a base need, an innate incompletion; girl-sow, degrading, risible, and indispensable. Justice: I pursue and espouse you, accepting that to find you would irrevocably change woman into sow.

  The facts, then. On the morning of Wednesday 2nd February last the old man D’Alree accompanied by Barend van der Merwe arrived at my place Wagendrift with a message that murder was being committed on the farm of Nicolaas van der Merwe. I forthwith, with their help, assembled as many people in the neighborhood as I could collect, whereupon I led a commando of about a dozen men to Houd-den-Bek.

  On arriving there we found the said Nicolaas van der Merwe, as well as Hendrik Jansen and the schoolmaster Johannes Verlee lying dead on the floor, Van der Merwe at the front door of the house, and the two others in the kitchen. We immediately examined the bodies, and found on Van der Merwe three wounds, one through the back of the shoulder, one in the right eye and one through the head, but the one in the eye had only grazed it. On the body of Verlee we found a wound in the left arm, another in the left side, and a third through the left hip. The left arm was almost entirely shattered. In addition, he had received a wound in the stomach. On the body of Jansen we found a wound in a slanting direction along the right breast, and one in the left side, but whether they were both occasioned by the same shot or by two different ones I cannot tell.

  The wife of Van der Merwe was also wounded and lay on the bed in her room; the wound was in the lower part of her abdomen, and she would not allow us to examine it.

  In the back yard, on a small patch of grass, we found the young woman Martha Verlee sitting with her knees drawn up and staring into the distance; her baby was lying in a bundle of blankets beside her and was crying, but she paid no attention to it. She appeared equally oblivious of our presence and would only, in response to our questions, shake her head from time to time. I believe it was not before she was taken to the farm Lagenvlei and delivered to the care of old Mrs Alida van der Merwe that she recovered her speech, and even then she was unable to give any coherent account of what had happened.

  In and around the house we also found two elderly slaves of the late Nicolaas van der Merwe, namely Achilles and Ontong, and a female Hottentot by the name of Bet who was tending the wounded lady of the house and comforting the three small girls we found huddled together in the loft.

  After a brief inspection we rode thence to the place of Barend van der Merwe, but finding it deserted we proceeded into the mountains where, about three-quarters of an hour’s distance from the farm, at a grazing place of old Piet van der Merwe, we caught sight of the murderers who immediately mounted their horses. Two of my commando fired at them, and they also fired some shots at us, without however anyone being wounded on either side. I specifically saw Galant turn his horse round, stop, and fire. What made him conspicuous was that he had a blood-flag tied to his hat and was wearing shoes, presumably stolen from his late master, whose body had been found barefoot.

  The servants and slaves belonging to old Piet van der Merwe immediately approached us on foot to surrender themselves, informing us that they had not had anything to do with the murderers. An old man named Moses took us to his hut where we found Hester van der Merwe in hiding with her two small boys, in the care of a young slave Goliath who, it appeared, had aided her to escape the night before. She was restored to her husband and although she appeared somewhat reluctant to be reunited with him, they thereafter returned to their home while the rest of the commando pursued the criminals.

  At the sheep kraal we found a horse which we were informed belonged to Klaas, who had run away on foot. Jansen’s servant Hendrik had likewise been thrown by his horse and was soon recovered by the commando among the rocks where, like Klaas, he had fallen down in a state of inebriation.

  The same evening the youngster Rooy was also apprehended in the vicinity of the grazing place. Abel was caught the following day as he tried to make his escape through the mountains in the direction of Tulbagh.

  I immediately proceeded with a preliminary examination of the four prisoners in our care. All of them reported incitement by Galant to the effect that the slaves had been promised their freedom a long time ago, but that this had not taken place, so that they now felt they had no choice but to make themselves free. Thereupon I drew up a memorandum which I sent, with the prisoners, to the Special Heemraad. I was subsequently informed that the Landdrost had met the prisoners at Goudini, from where he had sent them on to Worcester.

  The other accused were all apprehended in the course of the next fortnight. Initially Achilles and Ontong had been allowed to come and go as they pleased, but after some clothing belonging to their late master had been found in their huts I gave orders for them to be arrested as well. The slave woman Pamela was not apprehended until six days later when she was driven back to the farm by the pangs of hunger, she having taken only a small crust of b
read with her at the time of her flight into the mountains. Galant himself was only taken on the 13th day, soon after members of my commando had come upon him and Thys in the mountains. Thys offered considerable resistance and had to be subdued by force; but when Galant eventually surrendered he did so without making any effort to defend himself. At that time we lay encamped in a remote part of the mountains above Houd-den-Bek, and it is not inconceivable that Galant might have killed several of us under cover of darkness had he so wished; yet he came down to us unarmed and with raised hands. He was barefoot once again, with the shoes of his late master, laces tied together, slung over his shoulder. At first we thought that he must have run out of ammunition, but following our inquiries he led us to a place a few hundred yards away where he had concealed his gun and a leather bag filled with powder and shot.

  I had to restrain my men from doing him too much harm, since they were understandably enraged about the brutal murders for which the prisoner had been responsible and for the many days he had forced us to continue our hunt for him in that rugged terrain; and having, in the end, bound him hand and foot I thought it wise to send the members of the commando back to their homes. Galant and I proceeded through the Bokkeveld and down to Tulbagh alone, I on horseback, he on foot. Our progress was slow, owing to the injuries he had received at the time of his arrest. But in a sense time seemed no longer of much importance. What had happened belonged to the past; and what was still to happen, however predictable, belonged to a time and a place we had not yet attained. This was a moment in between, a suspended existence in which we were accountable only to one another.

  The man intrigued me. I tried to prod him, but he was very reticent. Not that he appeared sullen or recalcitrant, or that he seemed deliberately to withhold anything from me; and I doubt that it was a matter of incomprehension. In fact, he made the impression of a man at peace with himself and with the world. He offered no complaint about the manner of his treatment at the hands of the commando at the moment of his arrest, or about the rigors of our journey. He simply did not seem to find it necessary to speak; and when he did, he offered little more than the briefest responses of a commonplace nature.

  Or is it that in these extremities, and beyond redemption, beyond the entire compass of our ordinary existences defined by right and wrong, only the commonplace has the right to exist, acquiring for itself, perhaps, that small bare simplicity of truth it must originally have possessed?

  I made many attempts to draw him into conversation, to extract some meaningful answer to my questions.

  “Galant,” I would say, “why did you do what you have done? Why such a terrible thing?”

  He would look at me with a blandness that shook me, as if he found the question wholly redundant.

  “To be free,” he would reply.

  “But was it necessary to go to such an extreme?”

  “What else could I do?”

  “Surely there were many other possibilities you could have tried first.”

  “I tried.”

  “But murder?”

  “We murder every day, in our hearts.”

  “You grew up with Nicolaas. He was your friend. Did you not find it almost impossible to do such a thing?”

  “Before you do a thing it looks difficult. Then you do it and it is done. It is like digging, or chopping wood, or riding a horse. When you’re a boy you think you’ll never be able to do it with a woman. Then you do it and it’s easy.”

  Were his eyes mocking, defying me? I felt my face burning with rage and shame.

  But I persisted: “With a woman, there are children. With this murder you haven’t gained or earned anything. Except more deaths.”

  He shrugged.

  “How can you not feel horrified by it all,” I asked, “now that it is all over?”

  “It is not over. It will never be over.”

  “You’ve lost. It has ended in defeat.”

  “There is not defeat,” he said quietly. “For the moment you are stronger that’s all.”

  “We shall always be stronger.”

  “To be strong will not make you right,” he said.

  I got angry. “You think you had right on your side when you left that house strewn with corpses?”

  “There was not right or wrong there,” Galant said. “There was only the killing, doing what had to be done. If there is right it will be for others, one day.” More softly he added: “Perhaps.”

  “What use is that to you?” I said. “You don’t even have children to survive you.”

  “There may be a child,” he said.

  “Where? How?”

  He smiled and looked down, not bothering to reply.

  “There’s nothing but ruin and waste,” I insisted. If only I could take him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.

  “There’s always the children,” he said, not looking at me. “On us they can trample. They can winnow us in the wind. They can blow us away like chaff. It doesn’t matter. The wheat remains. The grains. The bread. The children.”

  He must have become deranged, I think, by what he’d done; I discovered no sense in his ramblings, and his silences were disconcerting.

  As we proceeded we spoke less and less frequently.

  “Don’t you feel any remorse?” I asked on our last night together. “Did you really hate Nicolaas so much?”

  He looked up, as if in surprise. “I did not hate him,” he said.

  “You killed him in cold blood.”

  “I loved him,” he said. “So I had to kill him.”

  “You’re not in your right mind any longer.”

  “I loved him.” For once there was a hint of urgency in his voice as if it was important to him to make me understand (but what? am I not simply transferring my own confused wishes to him?). “He grew up with me. Ma-Rose was our mother. We were together. Then he turned away from me. He became not Nicolaas but a man I didn’t know. A man strange to himself. I had to free him from that man. I had to break into his whiteness to make him my friend again. That Nicolaas.”

  “I don’t think you know what you’re saying.”

  He stared at me for a while. His eyes were burning like embers. He probably hadn’t had any sleep for many nights. But he didn’t reply.

  “It will soon be over,” I said, prompted by an incomprehensible urge to comfort him. “Tomorrow we shall be in Worcester and from there they’ll take you to Cape Town.”

  “Yes,” he said. “At last I shall go to the Cape.”

  “You’ve been there before,” I said. “Last year when you ran away.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Why did you come back?” I asked.

  “I had to.”

  “You really were very stupid, Galant!” I cried, exasperated with the man.

  “Who are you to say that?” he asked. “You do things with pigs.”

  In a fury I grabbed a piece of firewood and hit him in the face with it. A thin black line of blood trickled from his left eye across his face. He made no effort, with his chained hands, to brush it off.

  I couldn’t help feeling a tinge of regret.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “But you have no right to taunt me like that.”

  “My hands are soiled,” he said. “So are yours. We are alike. Yet you are taking me to the gentlemen of the Court so that they may kill me. That is your justice.”

  “There’s a big difference,” I said hotly, “between murder and—” I stopped short.

  He only shrugged.

  It was the last time we spoke.

  Everything has gone its predictable course from there. And now, when it is all over, when the truth has been established and justice done, when some have been killed and others imprisoned, we shall be free to go home, history our only burden.

  I have nothing more to add. I
t is, it must be, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  Thys

  Then Galant gave me a blow that landed me flat on my ass. “I thought I could depend on you?” he said. “Well, if you so shit-scared, you can just stay here!”

  That was what persuaded me to go.

  I’d been with him all the time we spoke about what was going to happen. It was only that night, when at last we heard Abel’s horse coming round the huts, that I got scared. Suddenly it was no longer just talk; it was real. That’s why I said: “You really sure we got to go through with this? It’s fire. And fire burns.”

  “What do you know about fire?” asked Galant. “You got to feel it before you know it.”

  “Then it’s too late.”

  That was when he struck me and Abel spat at me. And only much later, after the fire had died down again, when I came back from the Karoo and joined Galant in the mountains and the commando got us—and I gave them a hard time before they finally took my gun from me and beat me down—I discussed it with him again; and by then he was quite changed. Is such a fire really worthwhile, I asked him, if it just burns itself out like that?

  “You mistaking the flame for the fire,” he said, without looking at me; in those last days he always seemed to look right past or through one. “All you see is the outside. The real fire is different. It’s inside, and it’s dark, like the heart of a candle.”

  I’m not sure about what brought the change in him. It was there even before I came back from the Karoo where I’d escaped to from the grazing place where they found us after the killing. If I think back now, it seems to me the change was already there that night on our way back from Baas Barend’s farm. He was the one who kept us going, but by that time I think he was already changed. Perhaps that was the darkness inside the flame he spoke about. Right in the beginning, before we set out from Houd-den-Bek, he had an argument with Abel who wanted to take the road to Lagenvlei first so we could start with Oubaas Piet; Galant would have none of it.