by Andre Brink
And perhaps, who knows, it’s better this way. Because the hardest thing to live with is hope. And now at last that is gone.
Moses
No use saying one should have done this or that. You got to take a chance when it comes, but you also got to know where to stop. The world isn’t as it should be, sure, but who am I to try and change it? Rather enjoy a bit of life than lose it all. What’s the use hanging on the gallows like them or working in chains for the rest of one’s life? I could have been there with them if I hadn’t kept a clear head. The important thing is to see the lightning in time, so you can duck. Else you get blinded.
When I was in the Cape with Baas Nicolaas I heard with my own ears that our freedom was promised for New Year or thereabouts. And I spread the news when we got home, and I was pleased. But when nothing happened I resigned myself. The ways of the Dutch are different from ours.
Then, when Abel came to the grazing place to tell us that the whole Bokkeveld was rising up, I stood with them like all the others. It seemed the right thing to do, and I began to polish the good gun Oubaas Piet had given me to protect the sheep. The bullet I blessed with spittle. I was ready for action. In the band of my hat I stuck a new guinea-fowl feather.
But when Goliath arrived in the night with the Nooi and the children, it took just one good look to know this thing was turning bad. And when I heard that Baas Barend had also got away, I said to Wildschut:
“No use, man. Whatever Abel told us, the world has now bent over to show us its backside.”
And to the Nooi I said: “At your service.” So she could know on whom to rely.
Still, when daylight came things looked different again. When we got to Elandsfontein and saw how the place had been thrown upside down, I couldn’t help feeling a touch of excitement. Just then Galant and the others turned up—he was wearing new yellow boots on his feet and a blood-flag round his hat—and they told us about what had happened at Houd-den-Bek. So I looked at the men and cried to Galant:
“Here we are, Captain! Just say the word.”
One had to stay on the winning side. Else there would be trouble.
We went into the farmhouse with them. In the daylight we found a barrel they’d missed the night before, and Wildschut and Slinger and I joined in the drinking. In my mind I could see us riding to Cape Town, our numbers swelling all the way until there’d be hundreds of thousands of us on the march. Who in the wide world could stop us now?
But we’d barely reached the grazing place again when I heard Slinger shouting: “They coming!”
One glance at the commando on their horses and it was clear which way it was going to go. I had no desire to get caught there with a gang of criminals and be shot to pieces for a thing in which we’d had no part at all.
So I was right in front, and I admit it with pride, when we ran to the commando to surrender. Galant and Abel started shooting as soon as they saw what was happening; one bullethole right through the rim of my hat. But by that time the commando had already drawn up and the gang had to run for their lives. I’m glad to say we helped the farmers round up some of the evil-doers. I’ve always been a man for law and order. Ask Oubaas Piet. He wouldn’t have given me all the responsibility of his grazing place if he hadn’t trusted me well.
Now life is peaceful again. I’m not saying it’s the way I like it. But I’m not complaining. It could have been worse.
Piet
There’s nothing my hands can hold on to any more. Powerless my talons lie on the bed beside me. Before, I had everything in my grasp: farm and people, earth, mountain, slaves, wheat-lands, cattle. Now it’s pulled away from me like a sheet, exposing my shame. Bare-assed one comes into the world and bare-assed one leaves it. There used to be giants in the earth, but their time is past.
Damn old D’Alree. When I got home for tea that afternoon and saw him idly sitting there it annoyed me so much that I just turned back to the lands. The reapers had already started on the wheat. Moses and my other hands, and all Nicolaas’s laborers; his wheat was already down. They probably never expected me back so soon. No one saw me. Right behind them I stopped when I heard what they were talking about. Murder and mutiny. A terrible rage got into me. I gave a roar and grabbed a sickle to mow them down. Then it just got dark very suddenly. Since then I’ve been lying here like a baby. I could have stopped them. But what’s the use of good intentions? God doesn’t consider them. When the ark of the Lord came to the threshing-floor of Nachon and the oxen stumbled, Uzzah put out his hand to prevent it from falling. Yet God killed him right there. That was all the gratitude he got. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.
Galant
The masters are dead, but we are not yet free. Is an ox free just because the yoke is taken from its back? A man who’s lonely goes to sleep with a woman: does that make him any less alone? So much could have been avoided had one known in time. But how can one know without going through it? Never in advance; always only afterwards. Is it the same, I wonder, with death?
Still, there was the hour in the loft.
Here I’m hiding in the mountains and time is running out. I’m sitting very high up, beside the human footprint trodden into stone for good. All the others are gone now. Just before sunset Thys also left me; he was the last. I suppose he got tired of wandering about with me. He must have expected something different from me, some great action which might have justified everything; something to carry to the grave and make death less terrifying. He’s so very young.
Down in the valley, after he’d gone down, I heard shots. Perhaps he was killed. Perhaps he killed some of them. More bodies.
They know I’m here. Only darkness holds them back. At daybreak they’ll be coming up; I’ll be here still, with Nicolaas’s shoes, tied together, over my shoulder. It’s so much easier barefoot; I’m used to it. Anyway, they hurt me. I don’t know whether there’ll be another shooting when they come for me. Nor do I know whether they’ll kill me or try to take me alive. To be caught or not is no longer important. It has nothing to do with freedom any more. That is what Thys couldn’t understand.
Down in the valley lies Houd-den-Bek, even though I cannot see it now, in the dark. Beginning and end. I’m very high up here, close to the stars. The sky is clear. Only in the distance, in the direction of the Karoo, there is from time to time a flickering of summer lightning. Storms passing far away. But here it’s very clear.
How well I know my mountains. Yet tonight they feel distant, although they’re all around me. I’m here; but I’m no longer with them. Already I’m on my way. Tomorrow when I leave, and later when I’m dead, every rock and crag and tough shrub will still, I’m sure, be here; without me. They’ve always been here. Holding me like cupped hands they’ve sheltered me all my life. Beyond all my comings and goings, beyond fun and floggings, work and rest, suffering and uncertainty and brief happiness, they’ve always been here, good and solid. I needed them.
Yes, they can go on without me, forever. And yet I feel a strange doubt: What I know of them no one else can ever know; and if I die something of them must die as well: that knowledge I have of having seen them, of having hidden in them, of feeling them around me. They require me for that knowledge. This footprint in the stone is like my own.
Another glimmer of distant lightning. For a moment it’s there; then it’s gone: so quickly that I’m left wondering whether I ever saw it, or only dreamt it. Still, it was there.
Did I dream the hour in the loft?
In its own way the lightning is as everlasting as the mountains. Deep in the earth the Lightning Bird lays its egg; and when its time comes it hatches in the dark and fire returns to the world: a fire that burns and scorches and strips away all that is superfluous, so that life can sprout anew in red-grass and scrub, in small yellow flowers, in everything that grows. Like life in the womb of a woman the egg of the Lightning Bird lies waiting in darkness to be born.
&n
bsp; Perhaps there’ll be a child after my death; a son.
Alone. From the beginning, and forever. I thought, when we were children, that Nicolaas was with me; but he wasn’t. Later I thought the same of Bet, but she turned against me.
Pamela, closest of all: then came the white-haired child. I thought the others were with me, Abel and those, but that didn’t last either. Not that I’m blaming them in any way—some got frightened, others were stopped—but that’s what happened. Each man was fighting his own war. We were not really together. We never really understood each other.
Hester.
Has it all been in vain then? Was it too much to think we could take our freedom? I have only this night left to find the answers. Tomorrow I’ll be going down the mountain; and what will happen afterwards I do not know.
Usually one lives like a man walking with a candle in the dark. Behind him, where a moment ago it was light, darkness closes in. Ahead, where it will soon be light, darkness still lies undisturbed. Only where he is right now is there light enough to see by, for a moment; and then he moves on. But in a night like this it is different: then the darkness that was and the darkness that is to be merge in the light of what is now. I can close my eyes and see inside. Everything is alive in the heart of the flame. Within the falling of the stone lies the silence of before and after.
That is what it was like in the loft. Except there was no thought then, only the blindness of the act. Now I must bring the light of thought to it. That is why I allowed myself this last night; it would have been too easy to go down with Thys.
I have come as far as I could. On New Year’s Day, when Nicolaas gave us the clothes and nothing more, a light died in me. What else could we do but kindle a new fire to warm us? All of us, even those who were scared, even those who later turned against us, stood together then. It was important. In that fire we had to burn out the weeds closing in on us. But soon we were dispersed. And then there was only Nicolaas and I.
Poor Nicolaas: you thought I had it against you. You thought it was you I wanted to kill, for some reason or another: because you’d lied to your father about me when we were children; or because you’d kept me away from the dam when you went swimming with Hester; or because of floggings or quarrels; because you’d landed me in the Tulbagh jail; because of shit. It wasn’t you. It was all those whose places you took as you stood in that terrible silence in the door. Not your father, not Barend, not Frans du Toit. You had no name then, no face. You were all the white men, all the masters, all those who had always set themselves above us and taken our women and called their farms Shut-Your-Trap: Houd-den-Bek.
And poor Galant too! You thought you were rooting out the masters from the earth to bring us freedom—and all you did was to shoot down one man. Lying dead on that moth-eaten old skin were not the masters of the earth, smothering in their own blood: it was only one man, you, Nicolaas, who used to be my friend and should have been it still.
Lightning trembling on the horizon.
In the loft we were together. A single hour.
Has it really been in vain?
We’re not yet free. But does that mean that freedom doesn’t exist?
All right, I suppose we lost. But what we fought for still lives on, without beginning or end, like the mountains, like fire. And for that it was worth while. Perhaps there are things in whose name it is better to lose than to win. Provided you try.
This I could never have known unless I’d tried, my handful and I, to break the chain called Houd-den-Bek.
This I could not have known except through the fire of that hour in the loft. Dark lightning.
When Thys called: “There he goes!” we all broke away from the front door and ran after Barend. Abel fired a shot. So did I. The dogs started barking madly. We followed Barend up the quince hedge for some distance, but he got away. In that darkness it’s useless to look for a man; once he’s escaped into the mountains he’s gone. I know.
They all trundled back to the back door which he’d left open behind him. I remained outside for a while before I went round to the broken front door again. At the side of the house I found Abel’s Sarie with the children; one by the hand, the other, wrapped in a blanket, in her arm.
“Where you going?” I said.
“They breaking everything inside,” said Sarie. “It’s not good for the children. They’re small. So the Nooi said—”
“Yes, take them away from this place.”
Then Hester came round the corner after the children. She stopped when she saw me, barely a yard away, clutching the front of her white nightdress with one hand. In the moonlight I could see something of her face; but her eyes were shadows.
She seemed frightened.
“I told Sarie to take the children away,” I said.
“Thank you. I—”
I looked at Sarie. The elder boy was tugging anxiously at her hand, half hiding behind her to keep out of my way.
“Go on,” I said. “You can wait behind the shed. No one will find you there.”
They went away.
“Thank you,” Hester said again. I think it was what she said; she spoke so softly, as if her throat was dry.
Then she said: “Galant.”
Nothing more. We didn’t move, dark in the moonlight, close enough to touch; but we didn’t touch. She dropped her hand and stood quite still. The top of her nightdress, I noticed, had been torn open. One flap hung right down. Unmoving, she, I. With everything of all those years exposed between us. The dark was like a kaross sheltering us; like so many years ago in Ma-Rose’s smoky hut. I could feel all those stories moving invisibly around us. Once again we were in the veld where she’d been bitten by a snake; and I took out the poison with a black snake-stone. We were in a stable in the heavy odor of horses and straw, bleeding weals on my back; and she untied my hands and washed my broken body. In a dusky kitchen we stood together by the glowing hearth: “Stay here, don’t go, don’t leave me, I’m alone.” Everything: naked. She moved. Her face, it seemed, was wet with perspiration. I know mine was. Her breast exposed without shame. Behind us, far away, inside the house, the night was reverberating with their noise; but I scarcely noticed it. It belonged to another world. Here were we. Time had stopped. Nothing happened. Nothing passed. She. I.
Until—how, I don’t know, I don’t remember—I raised a hand towards her as if to touch her breast, but I didn’t dare, I wouldn’t ever, no I did, but only just, a finger on the small shadow of her breast, and said, I think it was I:
Hester
“Come,” I think it was I: a single word and even that seemed superfluous as we walked, leading and led, but who by whom?, round the house and up the broad stone steps to the loft above, grass sprouting here and there, a gentle caress to the bare soles. —Utter darkness here, the world obliterated and irrelevant as it breaks and flounders below; remote from this intimate burrow in the dark, confined yet limitless, ours, now, and everything reduced, as in recovered childhood, to touch. The rough grain of wood, prickliness of straw, a half-open bag with wheat spilling from it in a gentle cool hard stream running through open fingers. Clothes torn or fiercely thrust aside. Invisible, night grows dense, hard and definite, to assume the shape of a man. I mold him in my hands, fierce and gentle and in awe: the hands that clawed at Barend in rejection and disgust, now affirm the shape of a man-body, coarseness of hair, bone of shoulders and rib-cage and hips, the surprising insistent swell of buttocks, hard knees; that member always denied, now discovered in wonder at its brutal—hardness and vulnerable softness, coaxing, insistent, violent; the mysterious bag at its base, swaying, swollen, a peculiar coolness. I’m crushed by his full weight, my legs helpless and apart, kicking to find some hold; the surface of a back gnarled and marked with seams and welts, calluses, old scars. This must be the end, there can be nothing beyond it, darkness, blinding light, as he pushes down on me, crushing me, breakin
g me, giving me being, a name, an inseparable existence, a loneliness, excruciating fulfillment. He lunges, thrusts, hammers, pounds in silent frenzy, impaling me, cleaving me, sundering and slaughtering me, setting me free forever, unbearably. For Barend I had only the nakedness of a body exposed by clothes torn from me, this was altogether different, the nakedness of a child in a dam, shameless affirmation: I am—I am—I am. Thresh me, break me, shape me: running with fire.—
Gasps, cries, sobs, an uncontrollable panting, surrounded by silence: not a word. Impossible, unthinkable to articulate. All we could do, all we had to offer one another, that is the horror and the miracle of it, was that brief brutal sharing of bodies, avenging and celebrating everything we’d lost, everything we’d never had, everything forever beyond our grasp, a desperate groping towards the only thing not yet denied to us because it did not yet exist, the future. The day in the stable decided this: his pain and my rage, and the untying of his hands: it is no choice of our own, we can but submit to what we, ourselves, have made unavoidable.
—Will the world condemn me for this and cast me out? But it will never know. I myself shall deny it, because this is mine only. And yet, looking back one day, long after he is dead perhaps, will not I too find it incomprehensible, despicable, risible? No. I cannot. I am two things that can never be risible: a child, and a savage. We recognized it in one another, from the beginning. And only this once, liberated from the corruptions of both power and suffering, in the madness and violence and destruction of our familiar world, in this terrible merciful total night, are we free to admit and share it. Never again. But having shared it now, it remains forever ours, beyond death and the mountains.—
