The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  After my third long trip through the country, friends at the mine asked what my most lasting impression had been, and I said, ‘Just once I’d like to enter some South African town and see a statue to someone who wrote a book, painted a picture or composed a song.’ I was weary of those dreadful monuments to minor generals who had fought battles involving thirty-eight men. It’s as if our country were festooned with statues of Francis Marion, Pierre Beauregard and James Van Fleet. I’m sure they were meritorious fellows worthy of remembrance, but they would form a fragile base for constructing a national hagiography.

  As for my final guess, if the Götterdämmerung Afrikaners do use their blazing guns to protect themselves for the rest of this century, I think they can get away with it. But any hope of later reconciliation would prove impossible. I would expect them, sometime around 2010, to retreat under pressure to the Cape Province enclave, there to become the Israel of Africa, surrounded not by Arabs but by blacks. I cannot see them leaving Africa, nor should they. They have no other homes. They have lived here much longer than most American families have lived in the United States.

  You have probably detected that I write with more fervor than ever I dared exhibit in your class. The reason is simple. I fell in love with an adorable Afrikaner girl, much prettier than those professional models who appear in wooden shoes on your Holland, Michigan, postcards, and through her I saw the best of Afrikanerdom, which I liked much better than I did my own English strain. I saw them as excellent people trying to find their way. Alas, she married the other guy, the one with the machine gun at the ready, and I find myself speculating on what her future will be. I am desolate of spirit.

  Philip Saltwood

  He was indeed desolate. He had come to South Africa to find diamonds, and had found none. He had tried to marry a beautiful girl, and had failed. Most nagging of all, he had tried to comprehend a land with which his family had many ties, but had finished his tour as ignorant of its real construction as when he started.

  He did not know why Frikkie and Jopie were so determined to settle questions with their machine guns, nor could he guess how much longer Nxumalo would be willing to make concessions. Indians, Coloureds, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaners—he was puzzled by them all, and especially by Craig Saltwood, who had accepted exile. Had he been Craig, he would not have fled.

  Yet he was leaving. His work was ending on a cascade of falling notes, like a music box that has run down; his only reasonable next step was toward the exit. He packed his gear at the camp, notified Pretoria that all accounts with the workmen would be cleaned up as of Saturday, and made inquiries about flights back to New York, where a group of oil men wished to talk with him about problems in Texas.

  By Wednesday he had things in order, with clean-up jobs assigned to all men still on the payroll. He talked with each about plans, about his wife and children. By now the blacks trusted him and were willing to explain their uncertainties: ‘Maybe a job here. Maybe we go to Zimbabwe to help get their mines working again.’ They were wonderfully resilient men, these Zulu and Xhosa, and he felt that regardless of how badly the black and white leaders messed things up, these technicians would keep their proficiencies ready to serve whatever type of government emerged. They did not seem sorry to see him go, but they did respect the high standard of his work as they had witnessed it. He knew his job.

  The white workers usually knew what they were going to do next; like the blacks, they were not sorry to see the American go. He had never really fitted in, never quite understood the reasons why they had to keep the blacks in their place.

  ‘Don’t mess with any gangsters,’ they warned him.

  ‘Tell Jimmy Carter we’re desperately awaiting his next words of advice.’

  ‘If you see Andy Young, up his bucket.’

  They were a competent, rowdy lot and he would be pleased to work with them anywhere, anytime, but they did not represent the South Africa he had grown to love. That was centered on Vrymeer, and when the camp was fairly well secured he drove over the hills to Venloo and then out to the farm nestling beside the lake. When he came down the approach and saw once more that enticing cluster of buildings, the five rondavels, the step-lakes and the herd of blesbok, he stopped his car, studied the relationship of each item to the others and thought: This is paradise, chopped out of rock and rich even in time of drought.

  He noticed that several months of dry weather had lowered the level of the lake considerably, so that the rather steep flanks were visible, one layer after another of seemingly different kinds of rock: More likely all the same rock, but stained different colors by different exposures to water and air. He was about to formulate additional thoughts when a large group of flamingos rose from the far end of the lake, wheeled about in breathtaking patterns for several minutes, then landed delicately on one of the smaller lakes, annoying a flock of guinea fowl that had been pecking at the sand nearby. Whatever thoughts he might have had about the lake vanished, so he drove down to the yard, parked the car, and shouted, ‘Marius!’

  Before he could reach the house Van Doorn was at the door, laughing uproariously and waving a newspaper. ‘Philip! I’m so glad you arrived. This is so good it must be shared.’

  ‘What have the Americans done now?’

  ‘No fear. This is Afrikanerdom at its best,’ and he dragged Saltwood into the main room, where the first thing Philip saw was a colored photograph of Sannie in her wedding dress. Quickly he turned away, but as he did so he caught Marius looking at him, so he asked casually, ‘How’s she doing?’

  ‘Fine. Frikkie has a job with government. Everyone has a job with government.’

  ‘What’s the hilarity?’

  ‘The drought.’

  ‘I fail to see the humor. Things look rather barren out there.’

  ‘Not here. Up north at Blinkfontein.’

  ‘Let me see,’ Philip said in total confusion as he reached for the newspaper.

  ‘No, you must read the background story first. I have it here somewhere,’ and Marius held on to the paper which had caused his mirth while rummaging through a pile by the window. ‘Here it is.’

  When Philip took the old paper he had no doubt as to which story had caused the merriment, for the first page was dominated by a carefully posed half-page photograph of a man completely nude, accompanied by the headline: NUDIST IDENTIFIED AS CAUSE OF DROUGHT. The Straight-faced story explained that Mrs. Leopold van Valck, chairlady of the Blinkfontein Moral Action Committee, speaking on behalf of her forty-three members, had determined that the prolonged drought which had so harmfully affected her area was caused by God’s anger at a man named Victor Victoria, who invited couples, not always married, to his farm near Blinkfontein to engage in nude sunbathing. Mrs. van Valck believed that if Mr. Victoria was allowed to continue his nude bathing, God would continue to afflict Blinkfontein, so her committee was handing down an ultimatum: ‘Get some clothes on or face the consequences.’ She did not indicate what these consequences were, but implied that they would not be pleasant. On the other hand, if Mr. Victoria would consent to get dressed, she assured him and the other citizens of Blinkfontein that rain would fall fairly soon, in accordance with II Chronicles, Chapter 7, verse 14:

  If my people … shall humble themselves, and pray … and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

  She concluded, ‘So it’s up to you, Mr. Victoria. Put on your clothes and bring us rain.’

  Philip passed the paper back with a sigh. ‘We have crazies in our country, too. And you ought to see what happens in Texas.’

  ‘That’s not the point!’ Marius cried, slapping the later paper into Saltwood’s hand, and there on the front page was another photograph of Mr. Victor Victoria, fully dressed, accompanied by the headline: NUDISTS DRESS, HEAVENS BLESS. On the afternoon of the morning on which Mr. Victor Victoria’s guests put their clothes back on, a torrential rain arrived, not only ending the drought but also was
hing away two small bridges. Mrs. van Valck, chairlady of the Blinkfontein Moral Action Committee, was quoted as having said, in the midst of the storm, ‘Mr. Victoria is a good neighbor. He pays his bills. And he listened to reason.’ There was a second photograph of Mr. Victoria, fully clothed, at one of the washed-out bridges, with the caption: I MUST HAVE WORN TOO MUCH.

  ‘Perfect ending for my visit.’

  ‘Are you really leaving?’

  ‘Reluctantly.’

  ‘Amalgamated would certainly find you a job, the price of gold being what it is and diamonds doing so well.’

  ‘Yes, but …,’ He indicated the photograph of Van Doorn’s daughter.

  ‘I know at least two dozen girls in Pretoria as pretty as Sannie.’

  ‘But not Sannie. If things had worked out differently …’

  He was standing at the big window, looking off toward the lake and the striations left around its sides by the drought. ‘If it rained up in Blinkfontein, it’ll be moving down this way within the next couple of days. Your lake should fill again.’

  ‘Always has. Looks to me as if it’s been there a thousand years, maybe a million.’

  ‘Things here are very old,’ Saltwood said perfunctorily. Then he stopped, turned, and faced his friend. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said it looked to me … Well, I know nothing about these things, but I’ve always thought the lake had been here for thousands or even millions of years.’

  Grabbing Marius by the arm, Philip ran toward the lake, and when they stood at its edge, he said, ‘Suppose this lake has existed for eons. Why did it settle—here in this declivity?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The only explanation would be that it filled some natural dip in the earth. And what caused that dip? The mouth of an old pipe.’ He knelt down, pecked at the striations with no purpose, for they could reveal nothing, then rose and cried, ‘Marius! What I’ve been searching for could be right here.’ And he turned eastward toward the spot where old Pik Prinsloo had found his diamonds, far beyond the intervening hills, and with a sweep of hand obliterated the hills, for he supposed correctly that they had erupted millions of years later than the formation of this lake.

  With the hills gone, he could visualize the river that had carried the diamonds downstream; it had come from the west, probably, along this chain of little lakes, and it had flowed eastward right over the roots of those hills, and it had not turned northward, along the path of the river that now existed, but always eastward in a logical direction, bearing the diamonds with it.

  ‘Marius!’ he cried. ‘I think I’ve found it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The pipe that produced those diamonds. I’ve spent a year searching in the wrong direction.’

  ‘You think it might be here?’

  ‘I’m convinced of it. Not because of anything I’ve seen here today, but because I’ve exhausted all other possibilities.’

  The words had a heavy impact on Van Doorn, for he saw his country in the process of exhausting its various possibilities before it came to grips with the towering one that threatened its existence. But as with Saltwood and the diamonds, preliminary exploration required time and the cauterizing of old animosities. If Philip had spent a futile year searching for his diamonds, South Africa could afford ten or twenty searching for its solution:

  Let’s say ten years’ toying with the idea of a total, military-style repression, then maybe five with some kind of neo-fascism, then another five in a retreat to sanity, and then perhaps another ten in fumbling attempts at a shared democracy. Hell, time moves in vast cycles, but this whole thing could be solved in my lifetime. In my white-hair period I could see a splendid society here. We wouldn’t have to scuttle down to the Cape enclave. Black and white, Coloured and Indian could participate equally.

  ‘Marius, are you listening?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I’d like to drill one more experimental hole. Over there at the margin of your lake.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I’m convinced I’ll find kimberlite. Maybe five hundred feet down, through the detritus.’

  Detritus, that’s the word. The awful accumulation of wrong decisions, improper turns. You scrape away the excrescences of history—the hangings at Slagter’s Nek, the awfulness of the prison camps, the sins we’ve committed with apartheid—and maybe you get down to the bedrock of human society, where diamonds hide. God of my fathers, how I wish we could bring in the psychological drills and probe down to bedrock.

  ‘So, I have your permission?’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To drill the test hole … down to kimberlite?’

  Kimberlite! This nation of mine will gamble a billion rand to find the next kimberlite in hopes that diamonds will be uncovered. But it won’t spend ten rand to find the kimberlite of the human soul. We’ll turn the clock back a billion years to find gems worth absolutely nothing in a reasonable world, but we ignore the flint-hard gems in the human conscience that are worth all the raw money in the world. It’s an insane society, and if Saltwood does find the new cache of diamonds, everyone in Pretoria and London and Amsterdam and New York will say, ‘South Africa has saved itself once more in its time of crisis.’ We buy financial credits, but not intelligence.

  ‘I’ll keep the mess off to one side,’ Philip said in great excitement. ‘Not bring in too many vehicles. And the lake poses no problem. We’ll go down two or three thousand feet, then fan out our shafts north and south.’

  ‘And the detritus? There’s bound to be a lot.’

  ‘There always is when you find diamonds. Ten tons of rubbish for every carat. We’ll pile it over there. Never see it from the house.’

  The flamingos rose from their small lake, formed their ballet in the air, and danced about the sky in celebration of discoveries about to be made. At the end of one grand sweep, their red feathers blazing in sunlight, they passed the spot at which Philip would place his drills, then headed north. Next year when they returned, the lake would be quite different.

  Glossary

  In writing of a people with a language as evocative as Afrikaans, the temptation is to lard the narrative with a spate of colorful short words like kloof (ravine) or astonishing compounds like onderwyskollegesportsterreine (education college sports fields). I try to avoid this device, judging it to be exhibitionism which does not aid the reader. However, to write of the Afrikaner without a seasoning of his language would be an injustice. I have, therefore, used those few words without which the narrative would lack verisimilitude, and in this glossary have marked with an asterisk those which can be found in our larger dictionaries as English adoptions.

  *ASSEGAI slender hardwood spear Arabic

  BAAS master; boss

  *BAOBAB tree with swollen trunk Bantu

  BAYETE royal salute Zulu

  *BILTONG strips of sun-dried, salted meat (jerky)

  *BOBOTIE ground meat, curry, custard Malay

  *BOER farmer (capitalized: South African of Dutch or Huguenot descent)

  *COMMANDO Boer military unit (member of such unit)

  *DAGGA marijuana Hottentot

  DANKIE thanks

  *DISSELBOOM main shaft of ox wagon

  *DOMINEE minister of Afrikaner churches

  FONTEIN natural spring (fountain)

  HARTEBEEST HUT wattle-and-daub hut with low walls, no windows

  *IMPI regiment of Zulu warriors Bantu

  *INSPAN harness draft animals

  JA yes

  *KNOBKERRIE club with knobbed head Hottentot

  *KOPJE small hill, often flat-topped

  *KRAAL African village; enclosure for livestock Portuguese

  *LAAGER defensive camp encircled by wagons

  *LOBOLA cattle paid for bride Bantu

  *MEALIES British maize; American corn (hominy grits)

  *MEERKAT small mammal (resembles prairie dog)

  MEJUFFROUW Miss; young unmarried lady

  MEVROUW
Mrs.; becomes Mevrou

  *MFECANE the crushing (forced migration following Zulu consolidation) Bantu

  MIJNHEER Mr.; becomes Mynheer and Meneer

  *MORGEN land measure (about two acres)

  NACHTMAAL night meal (Holy Communion) (becomes Nagmaal in Afrikaans)

  OUBAAS old boss (old fellow; grandfather)

  OUMA grandmother

  *OUTSPAN unharness draft animals

  *PREDIKANT clergyman (especially of Dutch Reformed churches)

  *RAND unit of currency worth about one dollar (abbreviation of Witwatersrand)

  *RONDAVEL hut with circular floor plan

  *SJAMBOK short whip of rhinoceros or hippopotamus hide Malay from Persian

  SKOLLIE hooligan (especially Cape Coloured)

  *SLIM clever; crafty; cunning; shrewd (the original English meaning of this word)

  *SMOUS itinerant merchant (peddler) German

  *SPOOR track or trail of man or beast

  *STOEP stoop (porch)

  *TREK arduous migration (especially by ox wagon)

  TREKBOER nomadic grazier

  TSOTSI member of street gang Bantu

  *UITLANDER outlander (capitalized: foreigner, especially on the gold fields)

  *VELD open grassland with scattered shrubs and trees (veldt is archaic)

  *VELDKORNET minor district official (in military: lieutenant)

  *VELDSKOEN rawhide homemade shoe (also veldtskoen)

  VERDOMDE damned; cursed

  V. O. C. Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company)

  *VOLK nation; people

  VOORTREKKER forward trekker (member of the 1834–1837 Great Trek)

  VRYMEER Freedom Lake (in Dutch: Vrijmeer)

  Pronunciation: In general, words are pronounced as they look, except that J = Y; V = F; W = V; OE = U. The name Van Wyk = Fan Vake; and for no reason that can be explained, Uys = Ace. Vrymeer, of course, is Fraymeer.