A Far Off Place

by Laurens Van Der Post

  From that morning on she would follow Nuin-Tara every day, armed with her own digging-stick, for lessons in collecting edible bulbs and tubers from the earth. Nonnie was amazed by the vast varieties of the desert potatoes, turnips, artichokes, parsnips, onions and truffles that came out of the ground. Also, at the foot of dunes and sheltered levels, there were the melons and cucumbers protected by sharp spikes, looking like vegetable hedgehogs; wild little triangular figs, raisin berries, dried plums and nuts. The melons and cucumbers François and Xhabbo greeted joyfully, explaining that they were one of the desert’s greatest delicacies, the rare eland cucumber. When she looked unbelieving at François, he took his knife, skinned one of the fruit carefully and held it up to her nose and she found it smelt more like a cucumber than any she had ever savoured anywhere else. The result was that they would often dine by their fire at night on fresh liver, kidneys and whole ribs of venison grilled on wooden coals with fragrant desert herbs heaped over them, accompanied by a desert macédoine of vegetables and fresh cucumber salad as well.

  Sooner than she would have thought possible this role of helping in the cutting up of the meat François and Xhabbo brought home for them, curing and drying it for the journey onwards, the search for tubers and bulbs to supplement their diet, became a routine of Nonnie’s life to which she looked forward eagerly every day. She found that somehow she was busier than she had ever been in her life before. One of the things that had appalled her in her first view of the desert from the top of the dune was its apparent emptiness and a threat implicit that the hours and the days and nights ahead would be as empty and to be consumed only in a relentless physical effort and recovery from effort, so that she could travel on into something more and more vacant. But now her days were full and overflowing with work, new and made meaningful in a way women understood better than men, by the fact that it was devoted to finding food for survival. It was as if she were acquiring a new art of reading by letting Nuin-Tara teach her how a mere twist and curl of a tiny leaf above the sand was a sign that there was a great bulb concealed in the earth underneath. She learned from Nuin-Tara to read the sounds birds make when game was near and when not; what insect glitter or spatter of song betrayed the presence of water hidden in the sand, and how there was not an animal, bird, insect, tree or plant that was not part of a vocabulary of a meaningful prose, inscribed, as on a great and ancient hieroglyphic parchment, recording the jessential story of life in the desert.

  Even when the day appeared to her done and she was ready to camp down, help with cooking their dinner and then hasten to bed, she found that her duties were far from ended. For instance, François insisted that while the light of the day was good they would not relax until they had repaired the damage done by the day to their clothes. He produced from one of his haversacks a couple of military “housewives” and he and Nonnie would sit side by side mending the tears in their clothing. This of course in itself was no great labour. But before her physical self adjusted itself to being on the march and at work from dawn to sunset every day, it was almost more than she could manage. But once she was adjusted, she began to look forward to this domestic end to their constantly recurring nomadic days, as a moment of total and blessed reunion of their full company, perfect for recreation and conversation. But before long even this hour was threatened with fatigue from a new cause.

  François all along had been far more concerned about their clothes than even Nonnie had been, though a different way. First of all he was convinced that not only his own ankle boots but Nonnie’s would not last much longer on so long and harsh a march. So on the first day the river-bed suddenly curved away towards the south, where Xhabbo announced it wriggled on to a part of the desert where there was a route used by men who could be their enemies, they climbed out of it on to the dunes. As they felt the wind on their faces, showing the direction on which they had to go through grass, brush, parkland and the deep, though now almost scarlet sand of the desert itself, François made Nonnie take off her shoes and socks as he did his own.

  He explained that the sooner they got used to walking barefoot in the smooth desert sand the better, because they had to preserve boots and socks for the rougher country which they would encounter in a few months’ time. He made them do this at first only for a couple of hours in the cool of the morning and the cool of the evening because the desert sands in between were too hot and rough for their comfort. But gradually they were able to increase the hours until finally there came a day when sewing by the camp fire Nonnie had an extraordinary feeling of accomplishment which she could not explain to herself. She became unusually silent with the effort of tracing its cause. Suddenly it came to her. She dropped a stitch, threw down her mending, jumped up and did a little step or two, imitating Nuin-Tara’s trip of joy and gratitude.

  Coming to stand in front of François, who was gaping at her in astonishment, she exclaimed, “But don’t you realise it, François? Look at you sitting there with your obsequious Hin by your side as if nothing had happened! Don’t you realise that for the first time in my life, perhaps even in yours, you blasé old Huguenot, we’ve gone barefoot all day long?”

  François felt rebuked and despondent because he had been insensitive enough to overlook it, and not realise truly what an accomplishment it was for Nonnie. Significantly enough, Xhabbo had known at once what Nonnie’s dance portended and spoke to her in simple Bushman words that she could now well understand. Soon, he hoped to give her not only Bushman shoes for herself but also for François and Nuin-Tara and himself as well, because already he had a tapping that hartebeest were near; the antelope that was Mantis’s second favourite and whose skin he wore as a cloak and used to make shoes not only for his children to walk on through life but out of which he created the greatest love of his life—the eland. And indeed, the very next morning, almost as ifin command to Xhabbo’s tapping, a great magenta hartebeest presented itself alone, being obviously rejected by the young bulls from its little family group. Though still vivid with life, it stood before them condemned to exile by an inexorable law of natural succession.

  So François, at Xhabbo’s bidding, had less compunction in shooting it and making camp hard by the place of the killing, although the day had barely begun.

  That very afternoon Xhabbo pegged out the skin and cleaned it meticulously of all wet tissue and blood so that it could dry slowly in the warm of evening. Early the next morning, since Xhabbo declared that where a hartebeest was killed they would have to live for at least three days if they were not to waste the meat and cure all of it, he borrowed Nuin-Tara’s digging stick, went off into the desert and returned with an enormous white bulb which he could only just carry. The bulb was cut up into chunks like cakes of soap and Xhabbo set all four of them from then on to take turns in soaping and scrubbing the dried-out skin with their portions. In the rubbing, the acid juices that came out of the bulb made the skin change its character until by evening it was clean as a skin newly delivered to a cobbler’s from a sophisticated tanner’s yard. In the morning Xhabbo made them stand barefoot in turn on the skin and traced the outlines of all their feet with the point of his knife on its surface. That done, he sent Nuin-Tara off into the desert from which she soon returned with the leaves of the wild sansevera, from which they then extracted thread for sewing by the yard.

  Borrowing François’s needles, which Xhabbo admitted were better than the ones he could make out of the thorn he used as a rule, he set to cobbling. By the evening he had made four pairs of sandals, each sandal with a long leather thong which they passed between their big toes and tied back finely round their ankles, like the finest of sandals to be seen on the earliest Greek urns. And that was the end of their barefoot marching.

  It was so suddenly and delightfully brought to an end that Nonnie could not help making fun of it, remarking, “I really cannot see, François, how you could have inflicted all this misery of learning how to walk barefoot in these awful sands when you must have known all the time that
we could have had sandals from Xhabbo for the asking. Or was this something not thought of in your philosophy, you old Bushman Horatio?”

  François was far too happy over such a display of exuberance from Nonnie to bother defending himself. He just told her that sand or no sand she would never regret the hardening the soles of her feet that walking barefoot had brought to them. Besides, hadn’t it been fun in such lovely sand? Hadn’t it been wonderful to recover the freedom of one’s own feet after years of imprisonment in boots and shoes.

  François had good reason for responding so light-heartedly. Although Nonnie had maintained a plausible show of high spirits with a courage and constancy that François admired more than he could say, and although no one could have been more conscientious in doing her share of the work on so strenuous a march, he knew that she did it all not with relish but with great effort of will and out of natural sense of duty. He knew this because after all, he himself was moving through a similar valley of shadow. They were in that sense identical twins of fate and needed neither words nor thought even to know what each other was feeling. There was clearly no real and spontaneous joy in her as yet. Her moments of happiness, bright and vivid as they inevitably were in a temperament naturally so urgent as hers, were isolated and not joined in a chain of continuous experience as they had been before the massacre. For many weeks now as one crowded day after the other took them deeper into the desert, he looked in her as he looked in himself in vain for signs of permanent change. By day they had too much to do to give a thought to themselves and were absorbed utterly in the necessities of the moment. But in the evenings, when there were lulls in their conversation, and they had nothing special to do, he would find her staring into the camp fire as if into a place of shadows where fire was unknown.

  However, recently he thought that her breakthroughs into enjoyment had come near to enjoyment for its own sake and were more frequent and prolonged. This one, sparked off by so light a cause, seemed to him the best of all.

  As a result, he hastened on in a happier tone, “We’ve not only thought of sandals, Nonnie, we’ve other plans for you. Guess what?”

  Nonnie, taken aback, stared acutely at him. “Now come off it, François,” she exclaimed, excited, “don’t pretend that you can be at all mysterious and unpredictable to me. You’re just bluffing because you feel ashamed of the way I’ve caught you out over the sandals.”

  “Oh well, if that’s the way you feel about it,” remarked François, determined to repay her in kind, “We’ll say no more about it, shall we, Hin?”

  He looked down at Hintza beside him, to find Hintza did not know who to turn to next for intuition of what was to happen; Nonnie or François. Utterly bewildered, he was flashing his great purple eyes from one face to the other for suggestions like a spectator following the passage of a tennis ball flying from one champion racket to another at Wimbledon. It was not Nonnie’s happy protest that made François speak, so much as this look of perplexity and frantic search for enlightenment on Hintza’s features, a Hintza who he knew was terrified at times that there might be even the shadow of real differences in the pretences exchanged between François and Nonnie and he would be called upon to take sides.

  “Perhaps you can’t guess what it is because you don’t think it’s much,” he declared. “And perhaps it would not be to a civilised person like you. But it’s just that we’re going to make you a dress.”

  “Oh you’re not François. How can you be so cruel to tease me like that?” Nonnie exclaimed, as dumbfounded as afraid to put too much hope in so intoxicating a prospect.

  “Indeed we are,” François assured her. Convinced at last, she felt her face go warm all over with delight. “Xhabbo, Nuin-Tara and I have only been waiting for a duiker to turn up. It’s only because we haven’t seen one yet that we haven’t made your new dress before.”

  And he explained himself fully to Nonnie, her eyes shining with a light that would have told anyone more experienced than François, how much more than joyful anticipation was alive in them then. They needed a duiker, he enlarged, because it had the lightest, softest and most flexible of all buck skins available in the desert, except that of the steenbuck who was too small for the purpose and even more rare in that part of the desert. It was a skin softer than that of the finest chamois. It was to other skins what silk was to man-made materials.

  A long nine days later François and Xhabbo, out alone, came across a family of duikers, unusual in their grouping because they tended as a rule to go their way by day singly, a fact that convinced Xhabbo it was another sign of how they were being protected by Old Black Lightning who announced his presence to them nightly by his roaring. He was so punctual that had they had a watch, they could have set it by his calling. François was able to shoot two of the largest of the buck and in the evening came home not only with meat enough for the next fortnight but two skins of a quality that made Nuin-Tara react like a sophisticated woman who had just come across a completely new weave of wild silk in some leading fashion house in Europe.

  The curing and tanning of the skins took four whole days. It was only on the fourth evening that they were able to sit by the fire, passing skins from one to the other for approval, before Xhabbo finally placed them in Nonnie’s lap and told her to look and see how ready they were for her at last. She felt the skins all over, fingers trembling with excitement and unbelieving that the softness was real. She had to hold them up to her face and test the feel of them on her cheeks again and again before she accepted that such supple material could grow in so harsh an environment.

  There and then she was made to stand unusually shy and tender within, by a fire heightened for the occasion, while François tried the largest skin round her waist, folded it almost double round her and saw that it reached just to her knees. He made her hold it to herself so that he could fold the other over her shoulders. It reached down to her waist. Nonnie, a little fearful that François would let Xhabbo make the skins into a replica of Nuin-Tara’s clothes, was astonished to hear him say, “If you don’t mind Nonnie, I’m going to make the dress myself. I had to learn to make my own boots, leather trousers and jackets and to work in leather years ago. It was part of a man’s education at Hunter’s Drift. I think I know exactly what to do with these skins, if you would let me.”

  Nonnie for once did not know if her trust, great as it was, went quite so far as to accept François as both dress-designer and tailor. But when she looked down at him, on his knees like some haut couturier beside her, holding the skins against her slender body, seeing the warm, enthusiastic look in his eyes, love seemed more important than trust. She did not have it in her either to protest or tease any more.

  Moved almost beyond words, she managed to say, “Oh, would you, François, would you please, quick! How dear and wonderful of the three of you.”

  At once François produced the pencil which he kept with his dispatch book. Keeping Nonnie standing there by the fire as a model, with a shapely silhouette the most select of models would have envied, he tried and retried the skins in many ways upon her, until satisfied that he could mark out the simple design he had in his mind in dark firm lines on the cream-white skins. Though she was still not without fear and anxiety, something compounded of gratitude and love too great in their sum for subtraction made her watch him closely as he spent the next two hours carefully cutting out the skins.

  François longed for some magic whereby he could present all complete to Nonnie there and then, but it took him another fortnight of slow, constant stitching by firelight before he had the skin provisionally sewn to his design. Even then he had to be as patient as the patience demanded of Nonnie, who found it maddening that when the sewing appeared almost complete and she was burning to try his work on, in order to have some idea of the shape to come, François stubbornly refused. He just packed the skins neatly into his rucksack, saying that she would only get the wrong impressions before it was complete.

  For another week she had to watch
him carving round objects out of blood-red wood which he had cut from a branch of a dead tree and only towards the end of the week did she understand when she saw the first smooth dark red glowing wood transformed before her eyes into a perfect oval wherein two holes were burned with the fine tip of Xhabbo’s spear, heated in fire.

  “François, you old fox, or should I say jackal,” she remarked impressed. “You’re making buttons! And if I’m for once allowed to speak uninterrupted, very original and beautiful buttons indeed.”

  The next day François disappeared mysteriously from camp. This pretence of going hunting was not convincing and was fully exposed as fraudulent when in the evening he returned to hand Nonnie a skirt of suede with six buttons down the side, fitting firmly into her waist and reaching just below her knees. To match it there was a cape tied with one single great round button of the same wood round her throat, enfolding her shoulders like the cloak English nurses wear.

  When she walked into the firelight from behind the great storm-tree where she had changed, Nuin-Tara and Xhabbo greeted her with a clear cry of admiration and delight. Nuin-Tara even paid the dress the compliment of upbraiding Xhabbo in fun for the first time on the march by demanding why he had not thought of making something like it for her. And yet even that was not the end of this addition to Nonnie’s wardrobe.