A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  “I will not overburden you with the details but permit me to give you one example how France died there. I commanded a unit of parachutists. We were parachuted into Dien Bien Phu during the great siege. Do you know that twenty-five per cent of my men were killed parachuting because the parachutes were faulty? They had been sold and bought with full knowledge of the fact. The manufacturers and armament profiteers in my country bribed the ministry of a corrupt regime to overlook that they were faulty, knowing that thereby they were risking the lives of thousands. And do not think it happened only with parachutes! It happened with many other kinds of vital war materials and happened because the State and the civilians in France did not care about us who thought we were dying for France. They were either indifferent or cared only about the money they could make out of the war. It was common knowledge among all us soldiers. I had known of it from the beginning. But that day when it happened to my men who trusted me to take care of them in battle, France died, and I was left with nothing, and nowhere to take this gift of mine.

  “And so,” the Frenchman concluded wearily, with a turn to his more prosaic military self, “in the end I brought my gift here where you see me, because as a prisoner-of-war in Indo-China I met our Chairman and his masters. I found them in need of my gift. I found also a cause devoted to compelling this villainous life of ours into being good and just to all.”

  “You, mon cher, may ask, what is there that is so important about such a gift? But I can tell you there is everything in it for me. It is only in the face of danger, the more extreme the danger the better, that I, Jean Armand, become something more than myself, that I am rescued from a self I despise and that fatigues me greatly. When all men are frightened and dying around me, I find myself in a state of exaltation unbelievable with a clarity of mind and capacity for seeing and taking decisions that is extraordinary. Often in the midst of battle, a calm that passes all understanding possesses me and I do not hear the noise of battle and all is so quiet within me that I can hear something like a voice saying to me, ‘Jean Armand, for this you were conceived, unto this end you were born.’ So great a feeling of peace comes to me then that in the silence after the voice and beyond the sound of battle, I hear a distant music yet great and distinct, that I never hear in other music, and I see a beauty éblouissante seen in no work of art on earth. I see the beauty of the courage in man which is the only thing that makes him free. I see men you would dismiss as negligible transfigured in battle and noble with this beauty, and I feel myself no longer alone and unwanted but in a great company of many more than are fighting with me.

  “You would not call me superstitious but it is as if I hear the tramp of all the men who have ever fought for life since the beginning of time come marching up from the other side of the world to stand at my side in battle.

  “It is only when the battle is over and the war is finished and this gift is no longer needed that I, Jean Armand, feel alone and know fear that is like a physical pain of which I cannot speak. Then suddenly all that is extraordinary in life is gone and there is no beauty and music left, and the world is drab again with ordinary men full of extraordinary greed, and I am afraid, not only for me but for all of us. Even now, I confess, I do not want this conversation to end although we have said everything that we can say to good effect. Because then the silence will come at me and this silence is not a silence so much as a voice of fear that I do not understand and know not how to solve.”

  The Scot, who was amazed by the eloquent outpouring from his disciplined colleague, so spare in mind and spirit, put out a hand as if to comfort him, but paused half-way as if he knew how inadequate and even perhaps unwelcome the gesture could be to such a seared and enclosed personality. He spoke instead in a voice warm with sympathy, “I understand, I think, more than I have understood before. But, you see, there speaks the rejected Pascal in you.”

  “Pascal? I do not understand what Pascal has to do with it,” the Frenchman exclaimed, as if he felt the flow in his thoughts stopped like a man tripped up in full stride.

  “Yes, Pascal, mon,” the Scot replied even more warmly, since the sympathy he meant to convey appeared to have been obscured by the surprise caused by his remark. “The Pascal who said somewhere in his past—how he too was frightened by the silence eternal of those infinite spaces.”

  As he finished, the Frenchman lit yet another cigarette and sat there looking into the darkness, the firelight red in his glass eye, while the Scot opposite leaned forward, slightly puffing away at his pipe.

  Down by the river it seemed to François that the frogs had never sounded so loud, and night sounds were now more highly orchestrated by the addition of new instruments; the far-off voice of a lion, the cough of a leopard nearby and the whimper of little bush-apes sent to the tops of the tallest trees by fear, and the long black-sea call of the plover like a bosun piping the Dog Star on deck for its watch on the wake of the night that is the Milky Way.

  He did not know enough yet to realise that they might have sounded so loud and meaningful because they were witnesses to another round of what is perhaps the oldest and least resolved dialogue in the heart of man. That it might indeed have been on some such night that Aristophanes was induced by the Brek-ke-keks-keks-koax-koax of the prototypes of frogs to set two of the greatest specialists in the workings of fate to argue out, in an underworld of the dead, the meaning of suffering on life on earth.

  Yet the oldness implicit in it all made François instinctively turn to what was oldest in his young life. For despite a certain glimmer of recognition of some humanity in the scene which had come to him in the beginning, it had slowly reverted to resentment and then grown to an anger which he thought, wrongly at the time, was reflected in the stirring and restlessness of Hintza, who kept putting his nose to François’s check and nudging him repeatedly.

  The anger, produced by what he had heard, came to a boil. Had he been capable of putting all of his emotion into words, he might have cried aloud, “How could two men like you come to such killing before you had settled this argument in and between you? The least one might have expected from the lot of you was that you should have been absolutely certain in your own minds that you were right, before you robbed people of their lives forever. It’s unforgivable that you can still sit there arguing about the rights and wrongs of it all like members of a debating society and not the leaders of a band of the killers you are. And oh, so sorry for yourselves. You seem to be more concerned about your own emotions to your killing than the killing itself. Dear God, those frogs by the river make more sense than you. For they find a frog’s life in a world full of enemies cause enough for a gratitude so great that they are compelled to break out in song and tell the stars how full of it they are!”

  All recollection of how the Scot had, after a fashion, pleaded for him and the humanities vanished, and the tide of condemnation turned to run fast in François. The contrast between what these men had done and the well-beloved night of Africa, which was wrapped like a blanket around him, was overpowering, because no other night on earth is so instinct with love as the night of François’s Africa. Even at that tragic moment in his life, it had come tall and bejewelled, to sink to its knees to the ground like a mother by a hurt child, to remove all the pain of the sun that had scorched it, and so to enable the earth to forgive the day its fire. It was a natural moment of infinite compassion that made the lack of compassion in others incomprehensible and unendurable. It joined what was the oldest he had in himself, and that was his dead father, Ouwa, resurrected in his memory. It was almost as if Ouwa were there beside him to remind him that the debate he overheard was slanted and incomplete. There was a third voice not yet heard in the debate and, as far as François was concerned, it was a voice that was decisive. It spoke through all sorts of things Ouwa had said over the years in connection with this very cause those men by the fire purported to serve. He remembered with a pain which blurred his eyes with tears, that all the many dear people as well as brutal
enemies who had been killed in the bush in the last forty-eight years were not the first casualties in this particular war. His father, Ouwa, was the first. He had been the first, as far as François knew, to take up this cause and the first to die, killed by the common enemy of all three of them. Yes, he had to admit it; Ouwa, the Scot and the Frenchman had the same enemy and were on the same side. That was the irony of it. Ouwa himself had been murdered, as he saw it, by the people the other two called the “tyrants in the south” killed simply by their turning their backs on Ouwa, rejecting him irrevocably because he had recognised error in their way of life, and was trying to put it right in the only fashion that life could ever be put permanently right.

  Fragments of all sorts of related things Ouwa had said came to him in words so full of illumination that they shone like fire-flies before his eyes, coming red and glowing out of the darkness of the past and vanishing in an up-down, down-up little rhythm into the darkness of what was still to come. For instance, he recalled Ouwa talking to his mother, Lammie, so far back that he did not understand all of it at the time but in words that had stayed with him because he knew from the tone of his parents’ voices that they were words of overwhelming importance.

  Lammie had been asking Ouwa if they were not wrong to be so uncompromising and should they not modify their attitude to the people who had turned their backs on them, and Ouwa had answered, “It isn’t any good because you see every human being has his own inborn sense of contract with life. He has, it is true, also an important sense of contract with the community into which he has been born and its system of ethical rules and other obligations with a validity he cannot reject lightly. But above that is his own special contract with life itself. This contract is entirely between him and life and nothing, not even the community, can be allowed to suppress it, if it should drive him into conflict with it. This contract is in the keeping of its own voice—a voice we call conscience and no man can refuse to disobey this voice and ever know any peace again. Believe me, this unease, this disquiet and enmity of neighbours that has come into our lives, because they found us guilty of having broken our contract with society, is a peace that passes all understanding in comparison with what would happen to us if we broke the special sense of contract that you and I have with life itself.”

  There were many other memories, now that the past was in full resurrection. There was Ouwa again saying that it was only by education and re-education and patient exhortation and evocation and change of heart and imagination that men could be permanently changed. You could not punish men into being better; you could not punish societies into being more; you could not change the world by violence and by frightening people into virtue by killing off their inadequate establishments. The moment was upon us when we had to accept without reserve that the longest way round in the human spirit was always the shortest way there. How Ouwa’s tongue relished the irony implicit in the paradox. There was no short cut to a better life on earth. Impatience and short cuts were evil and destructive. There were no short cuts to the creative, there was no magic in creation except the magic of growth. Creation was growth and growth was profoundly subservient to time laws of its own, which could not be broken without destroying the process and bringing down disaster upon all. And here the sonorous voice of ’Bamuthi joined that of Ouwa, the deep bass echo coming from the cliffs of Amageba where the evening shadows gather in the ancient mountains and where his spirit was believed to have gone, reiterating again and again, “Remember, Little Feather, patience is an egg that hatches great birds. Even the sun is such an egg. Hamba Gashle! Go slowly, because if you go slowly, good things will come to you and you will walk to the end of the road in peace and happiness.”

  Then again there came the measured, slightly pedantic voice of Ouwa urging that the real art of living was to keep alive the longing in human beings to become a greater version of themselves, to enlarge this awareness of life and then to be utterly obedient to the awareness. Obedience to one’s greater awareness, and living it out accordingly to the rhythm of the law of time implicit in it, was the only way. Unlived awareness was another characteristic evil of our time, so full of thinkers who did not do and doers who did not think. Lack of awareness and disobedience to such awareness as there was meant that modern man was increasingly a partial, provisional version instead of a whole, committed version of himself. That was where tyranny, oppression, prejudice and intolerance began. Tyranny was partial being; a part of the whole of man masquerading as his full self and suppressing the rest. All started within before it manifested itself without and tyranny began within partial concepts of ourselves and our role in life. Hence the imperative of obedience, obedience to our greatest awareness and the call always to heighten it still.

  All this, Ouwa would add, meant living in terms not of having but of being; a difference which in his own inimitable, ironic way he always stressed was something our civilised superiors could learn from their primitive inferiors. For what, he often asked, was the difference between the ’Bamuthis of this world and the Europeans of Africa, if not that the Europeans specialised in having and the ’Bamuthis in being.

  At that flashpoint of memory both Ouwa and ’Bamuthi were joined first by what his old nurse Koba had told him of the Bushmen and then above all by the figure of her dispossessed kinsman Xhabbo, poor in everything in which the Europeans and the Africans were rich, but rich in a way in which they were poor and deprived; rich in a sense of belonging. Though naked in body Xhabbo moved brightly dressed in François’s imagination in his own vivid, unique experience of life and not in the second-hand experience that passed for living in the civilised world without; never alone and unknown but always feeling known and part of life and travelling in the company of even the remotest of the stars.

  And then he remembered Ouwa saying that that was why any real change in life could begin only by example and the texture and quality of being brought to it. Hence no one could take others further than he had taken himself. The meaning of one’s life depended on the element of becoming in the midst of one’s being; the process of becoming a more authoritative expression of new possibilities and qualities of life.

  This was followed by Ouwa’s insistence—if one could use so emphatic a word for the expression of the thought of one who hated emphasis—that this special contract which a man had with life itself demanded that he accept without reservation or resentment the whole of his past as the raw material for the being he accomplished in the here and now, as material for becoming something more than life had been either in the past or present. And he remembered Ouwa saying with unusual tenderness that the life of any human being or any animal, even the smallest of insects, could be taken only in defence of life conceived in some terms such as those and never for any other reason.

  Watch your dislikes as much as your likes, he would add, and remember all men to tend to become the thing they oppose. The greatest and most urgent problem of our time was to find a way of opposing evil without becoming another form of evil in the process. Hence the New Testament’s enigmatic, “Resist not evil.” One had just to pray, or as ’Bamuthi would put it, to ask with one’s heart, to be delivered from evil and try to be something that was not evil and more than good; something he called whole.

  One had to reject corruption by suffering as much as corruption by power, be equally uncompromising and unsentimental about both. These two were the main sources of corruption in man, although there was a third, increasingly desperate contributing factor; corruption by numbers, our tendency to allow collective values to become man’s greatest values. Had Lammie and François ever thought, he had asked with a subtle, ironic curl to his lips, that when Christ referred to “Where two or three are gathered together in my name” he might have been expressing a maximum and not a minimum? Had François and Lammie thought how significant it was that Christ’s real work was concentrated on only twelve disciples? He had spoken to thousands only once to deliver his Sermon on the Mount; but thereafter mostl
y to the public in as small numbers as possible. Even so, one of the twelve had proved a wrong one, though perhaps not by accident but by design.

  The time had come, Ouwa had suggested, to change the group approach, to make the collective individual and the universal specific, and to avoid mass solutions and the abstractions of numbers like the plague. Men and their meaning were in danger of drowning in a flood of the collectivism of numbers greater than the world had ever experienced, and all creation depended now on the speed with which men could be detached from it, breaking it up by being their own unique selves. Something along these lines, he thought, would make one a modern man. Did François and Lammie realise that so far there had only been one truly modern man, and he had been crucified two thousand years ago?

  He, Ouwa, had been told that all this was no use and too late, for the final disaster was already upon us. Ouwa disagreed. One must live life, he thought, as if disaster would never come. It should be one’s own finest point of honour never to accept disaster, if for no other reason than making certain that when disaster did come it was the right kind of disaster life needed. It could be that for the moment the greatest victories were only to be won by losing in such a way that losing became a form of winning. Here, unsolicited in François’s memory, came a kind of pagan Amen in an echo of ’Bamuthi’s deep bass voice: “Little Feather, the warrior who returns to his kraal from battle without purifying himself first of the spirit of killing that took him away brings the vanquished back with him and the vanquished will conquer him in their turn.”