A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  At last I heard the horses go away again.

  Bet

  My hands were tied. Old Ontong and Achilles stayed behind with me when the others galloped off to light their fire at Elandsfontein; and Galant instructed Ontong to keep an eye on me as he didn’t trust me. But saying Lydia was not feeling well Ontong soon left me, and so did Achilles.

  “Bet,” he said uneasily, avoiding to look at me directly, “now you’re on your own. Do what you think best.”

  But my hands were tied, faster than any thong or rope could hold them. It was like years before on the Eastern border when our small band of Hottentots had also been caught in the war of others, Boers on one side and Xhosas on the other. Would there be no end to it then? Could one never live one’s own life?

  Through the deserted yard I crept to the house, to the back door where I thought I might find the courage to knock and shout to the people sleeping inside: “For God’s sake, wake up and get ready, for death is running about barefoot in the Bokkeveld tonight.” But I didn’t knock. What was the thong that bound my hands? Surely it was more than just the memory of those other times when I’d tried to warn them only to be ridiculed and abused?

  I turned back again. There was no peace for me that night. At the hut which had been mine and Galant’s, when David had still been alive, I stopped. Those had been good times: he’d been so besotted with that child. Why should it have ended, and in such a way? I remembered how he’d rejected me as if I’d carried some disease in me. Just like the Baas. Everybody’s mongrel bitch. At the door of the hut I stooped to look into the past. The days at Bruintjieshoogte, and the long road to the Cape. The child I’d buried in the hard earth on the way; growing more and more empty inside as the years wore on. And here I was, with my bare hands tied. Where could one go on such a night?

  I set out on the footpath to Ma-Rose’s hut. Through the years we’d all trodden that path to ask her help when everything else had failed. From a long way off I could see her fire burning; and from the smell I knew she was brewing herbs. It made me feel better to see her quietly go about her business in spite of all. But she already had a visitor. From a distance it seemed like old Plaatjie. And so I turned away again. But it wasn’t only because of him: it was because I knew that in spite of all her herbs and stories and advice she would be unable to help me after all. It was a different and more personal sort of remedy I needed that night.

  The vlei lay gleaming in the moonlight, a dull sheet of water in the dark. Behind it were the mountains, its ridges black against the sky, like an enormous sleeping beast.

  Back to the kitchen door. With my head pressed against the smoothly worn wood I stood for a long time trying to make up my mind. It might have been my imagination, but I seemed to be hearing the muted sound of voices talking softly together inside; and the moan of a woman. Pamela; the Baas was with her.

  —When I followed you begging you with my body to put out the fire you’d kindled with the killing of my child, you rejected me. But you don’t mind taking her, to plant your white children in her womb. Then, for all I care, you can die like the scavenging dog you are!—

  The huts again. Looking back I saw a shooting star drawing its stunning white line across the house.

  I couldn’t bear to be alone. My breath burning in my throat I went to Achilles’s hut and lay down with him, simply to feel a human being close to me. For I no longer knew what to do, and my hands were tied.

  Deep in the night I heard the horses coming back.

  Dollie

  The bloody bastard Campher cheated me. How could I ever have trusted the shit? Because he was a laborer that worked with us? The hell. He was white. They always stand together.

  From my chains I spoke to him. “Why don’t you just run away if you so scared? Why take me with you, you scum?”

  “It’s for your own good,” he said, which just showed how mad he was. “What Galant is planning can only lead to ruin. I’m keeping you out of it. You’ll thank me for it yet.”

  “I won’t ever thank nobody for a chain.”

  “It’s just till we get to Worcester. Then I’ll set you free.”

  “I can’t wait to get my hands on that chicken neck of yours. I’ll break you to bloody pieces.”

  So he didn’t free me. Told the Landdrost without batting an eyelid that I’d deserted and he’d caught me. That meant the cat o’ nine tails and a year in chains.

  “A year’s better than hanging,” Campher said. “If I’d left you behind with Galant and the others you’d have hanged.”

  “If you’d let me be they would not have put out our fire so easily. But a year passes quickly,” I told him. “Then I’ll come to look for you. No matter where you try to hide, from the Cape to the Great River, I’ll hunt you down. You won’t have any peace day or night. For sooner or later I’ll find your tracks and follow them. And if I don’t get you in time my children will. Some day. For these chains you going to pay. You started a fire inside me that day you first lied to me and it’ll burn for ever till the veld is scorched black and you along with it.”

  Ontong

  It was a long night, after the men came back from Elandsfontein. That was where everything was finally decided for us. Not in the rage and murder and confusion of the next day; not afterwards, when the dead were taken away on the wagon to be buried; but that night, when we all sat together in Galant’s hut.

  The following day, when the people barred their doors and windows against us, I stopped Galant from setting fire to the place (he was acting like a man in a daze then, as if he wasn’t properly aware of what he himself was doing or saying: in a way, although he was right there with us, he was absent from all that happened, and when I spoke to him he almost looked surprised as if I was accusing him of something he didn’t even know about): it was wrong, I said, to burn the women and children with them, and to destroy everything we might otherwise have had. But it was not enough. There was another fire I should have put out in the night; and I didn’t. And with that I allowed the man who might have been my own son, how shall I ever know?, to be burnt to death. Galant, my son, born from my body of the girl Lys whom I’d known.

  They came back like men tired of feasting and with the bitter after-taste of too much drinking in their mouths. Galant very quiet. Abel with a clenched fist in the air. Hendrik with his head bowed, as if he’d been caught in some mischief. Thys brandishing a sabre, like a small boy beheading flowers with a stick. Klaas scowling. Rooy sleepily dragging his feet. All of them round the fire. And not a word.

  At last Achilles asked, in a voice that said he wasn’t really keen to have an answer: “So did you kill Baas Barend?”

  “No,” said Abel. “He got away into the mountains.”

  “Then it was bad work.”

  “We’ll get him in the morning, don’t worry.”

  “Perhaps it’s just as well he got away,” said Bet, standing away from the others in the door. “Perhaps a bad thing has been averted.”

  “What do you know about it?” Galant flew at her.

  “If you want to do a thing like this,” Achilles went on, “then you either do it well or not at all. To let him get away makes it worse for us. Now it’s a mess.”

  “Shut up!” said Abel. “Or would you like us to start with you?”

  Galant stepped between them to stop a fight. “No, Abel. Let him say all he wants to.”

  “You said, when we rode out, the time for talking was past.”

  “Yes. But now it’s different. Things have happened. We can see better now. And we got time. It may be our last. So I want each man to speak his mind.”

  “You want us to sit around talking while the Baas rounds up a commando?”

  “He won’t get far in the night,” said Hendrik. “And he was scared as hell.”

  “Why don’t we set on the masters of Houd-den-Bek right away?” said Abel
. “They all asleep now. Before they know what’s hit them they’ll all be dead.”

  “The house is full of guns,” said Galant. “We must get hold of the arms first, and for that we got to wait till morning. So we have time to discuss it now, after what’s happened.”

  “Why are there so few of you?” I asked when they fell silent. “Where’s Campher and Dollie and Plaatjie?”

  Abel mumbled something.

  “I can’t hear you,” I said.

  Galant looked up. “We went round to their place. Ma-Rose says Dollie ran away and Campher went after him. Old Plaatjie just disappeared.”

  “Then there’s not enough of us to do the job, man,” I said. “We can’t do without Dollie.”

  “And what about Campher?” said Achilles. “He started it all. He’s the master of the whole plan.”

  “Maybe it’s just as well,” said Galant. “I never trusted the man anyway.”

  “But Dollie?”

  “It’s a bad blow. But we can manage without him.”

  Thys sat digging into the dung-floor of the hut with the point of the sabre he’d brought back with him, hacking out small bits, like the ants got into the place. “If they already backing out now,” he said, not looking at anyone, “what’ll become of us in the end?”

  “What’ll become of us if we stop here?” Abel was quick to ask. “You think they’ll just let us be if we don’t do anything more? What happened at Elandsfontein is done. Now our feet are set on a burning road. If we stand still our soles will be scalded. All we can do is go on. And I spit on those who stay behind.”

  “I know everybody’s hand is against us now,” I said cautiously, to calm him down a bit. “But you sure it’s really necessary to kill? Can’t we just take our stuff and run off to the Great River? Galant said there’s a lot of free people living there. Why can’t we also be free like them?”

  “Free?” said Abel behind me. “Running off to live in a strange place like a criminal or a deserter?”

  “I’m already living in a strange land,” I said quietly.

  “But don’t you understand?” he asked in a tone of exasperation. “As long as there are masters we’ll never be free, no matter where we live. Running away won’t set us free. It’s right here we got to tread them into the ground.”

  “You make it sound like everything’s just right for treading,” I warned him. “But it’s no use going into something knowing it’s hopeless.”

  “No,” said Galant suddenly, turning his eyes away from the fire to look at me. “That got nothing to do with it.”

  “Oh really?” I said, stung. “Just look at what’s happened so far. Baas Barend got away. Some of our best helpers deserted. And you think it’s not hopeless?”

  “I tell you it got nothing to do with it.”

  “You want to make war knowing you can only lose?”

  “I don’t care about losing or winning any more.

  “Now you talking like Lydia,” I jeered. “You lost all your senses then?”

  “Perhaps Lydia isn’t so mad after all,” Galant said, paying no attention to the sniggers of the others. “There was a time when we needed to talk about winning or losing, about taking our freedom. Even earlier tonight, as we rode out to Elandsfontein, it was fitting to think of that. But now it’s different. Now I got to think of my son looking back at me one day to see if his father chose to be a slave or not. It’s not for myself I’m doing it. It’s for him. On the lands we’re burning down today there got to be soil for him to grow one day.”

  “Now I know for sure you must be mad,” I said. “Where’s that son you suddenly going on about?”

  He shook his head like he was despairing about me. “I know what I know. And you’re old.”

  “True,” I said. “I’m old. So I’ve learned to be patient. I know it works out better to bow and take it. By talking to your baas about what’s wrong, by showing him the yoke’s too heavy, you can persuade him to make your burden lighter. There’s no need for murder and killing.”

  “Oh sure,” said Abel, in a passion. “He’ll always make your load lighter for you. He’ll shorten the hours you got to work, or give you more food, or a better hut, or an extra sopie when you please him well. But we remain slaves, Ontong! That’s what we want to change now. Not a life that’s a bit better than before, but not to be slaves any more. To be free. I’m not an ox under a yoke. I’m a man. I got hands and feet just like the Baas. I walk like him, I eat like him, I take a woman like him. I get tired just like him. I get hurt like him. So tell me: Why should he be the master and I the slave? Let me tell you one thing, Ontong: if a baas tries to keep me under the yoke—fine, that’s his job, that’s what he’s baas for. But if I let him put that yoke on me, that’s unforgivable. Then it’s I who turn myself into an ox. And that’s much worse than just to be harnessed.”

  “You’re young, that’s why you can talk like that,” I repeated.

  It was Galant who spoke again. “After what happened this night no one can call me young any more.”

  “And what made you so old?”

  He looked at me from across the glare of the fire, as if first to test me thoroughly, holding very tightly in his hands the small bag of bullets I’d made for them that day. At last he said: “You won’t understand, Ontong.”

  It was a long discussion, that night, in the dark hours before daybreak. All of us took part, except for Bet who just sat brooding on one side after serving us something to eat, meat and bread and honey-beer; and Rooy who fell asleep in a corner. My heart lay heavily in me, like a great lump of clay. I didn’t say anything against Galant again, disheartened by those accusing words, the worst he could have said to me: You won’t understand, Ontong. He’d shut himself against me for good. We had become strangers and there was no hope for me ever to understand.

  Galant, Galant.

  You might have been my son. But have I been a father to you?

  Barend

  She never was mine, yet I’d always clung to hope. But that night I finally lost her. I knew that for sure when the next day our commando cornered the gang of murderers at the grazing place in the mountains and old Moses brought her and the children unscathed from his hut. Neither of us spoke. It wasn’t necessary. Together, beside each other, but strangers, we rode off, away from the rest, back to Elandsfontein.

  As we rode, from time to time, I glanced at her. Once or twice I even spoke her name: “Hester.”

  She didn’t give the slightest sign of having heard me; she was too remote even to appear resentful or on her guard. She was simply not there. At another time it would have made me furious. It might even have provoked me to assault her. But that morning I rode on meekly beside her, depressed by a feeling of doom. She was, I thought, more beautiful than before. Even after that terrifying night in which God alone knew what had happened she appeared serene, wearing her torn nightdress as if it were a wedding gown. There was a silence about her that was different from her usual aloofness: a silence suggesting that she no longer needed anything from outside to sustain her, no person on whom to lean. Erect like a flame she sat on the back of the horse, holding the younger boy in front of her; burning in that burning day like a flame without smoke.

  I loved her. But it was unthinkable to utter it. Even my relief at seeing her unharmed—and God knows, in the course of that unworthy night I’d sometimes, in my demented rage and shame, wished something terrible might happen to her—I couldn’t express: it would sound irrelevant and trite.

  Why hadn’t she escaped with me? There had been time enough. Even when they’d started hammering down the front door she could have got away through the back with me. I’d taken her by the hand. But she’d torn herself loose as if the contact had soiled her. I could hear the front door splintering under their blows. “Hurry up, for God’s sake!” I shouted. “They’ll murder us all. Come with me!” B
ut she stood unmoving, her arms crossed over her breasts to cover up the dress I’d torn earlier. “Let me be,” she said calmly, a pallor visible through the familiar sultriness of her skin. She almost seemed to relish the thought of remaining behind. The door was giving way. I turned and fled. It was not even a conscious decision, just something happening in my legs.

  From the outset the night had been like a runaway horse I could in no way control; and that eventually I would fall had been as certain as, on a distant day in my youth, the fall from the great grey stallion; only the exact moment and nature of that end had yet to be decided. First there had been Abel who hadn’t come back. Then Hester humiliating me in a way even she would earlier have regarded as outrageous.

  When I heard the noise at the kraal I did not immediately suspect something wrong. The merest touch of suspicion when Klaas responded so strangely to my shouts. Then came the gunshot. I felt no pain. My foot just gave way under me. As I looked round I saw Galant and Abel taking aim at me through the kitchen window. And all of a sudden the night was shaking with sound and movement. On a previous occasion my gun had saved me; now it was Abel’s turn. And it struck me very suddenly that ever since that earlier day this night had been predestined, an appointment neither of us could avoid.

  I fled blindly into the dark. But it still felt like a dream, impossible to believe. Because it was the unimaginable, the entirely inconceivable that had suddenly come true: the slaves had risen; they were armed; they were firing at me.

  Since my earliest childhood I’d been surrounded by them. I’d often quarreled and even fought with Galant. Many times I’d seen them angry, sometimes trembling in such a rage that I knew they could murder me. If only they hadn’t been slaves and I Baas Barend. But this, precisely, had been the determining element in our relationship, all those years: that they were slaves and subject to me; that there existed an invisible but unmistakable frontier separating us which they could never even conceive of to overstep. They might snarl, and grumble, and growl like vicious dogs. But they would never bite. They couldn’t. That had always been excluded; that had been wholly unthinkable. Only once had Abel approached to the very edge of that line; but even he hadn’t been able to cross it. Now, in one impossible moment, all that had been changed.