by Andre Brink
Her pale cheeks are flushed with anger. But she controls herself for a long time, looking down at her hands in her lap, before she says: “It's all lies.”
“Oh no, it's the honest truth.”
“You’re a liar!”
“Of course I’m a liar,” he says quietly, deliberately, looking into her face. “You’re not expecting to hear the truth.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she asks, humiliated, on the defense.
“You’re too white for the truth.”
He looks at her. She looks back. He can see her clench her teeth, lifting her head slightly, with that old haughty fierceness in her eyes. Then, still sitting as she does, with her knees pulled up and her arms folded round them, she drops her head on her elbows and shuts him out. He cannot make out whether she does it to confirm her independence or because she has to hide a sudden girlish weakness. Do not tempt me, he thinks: do not provoke me. You’re white, and I am brown of my own brownness. Do not let me think you’re no more than a woman. Do not plunge us both into the abyss.
And, standing there opposite her, she sitting on her stone, rounded and complete, they both, simultaneously, become aware of the silence as all sound stops. Not the gentle, gradual ebbing away of sound in the dusk, but an abrupt shock of silence imposed upon the world as if the birds and the beetles, the insects in the tall grass, even the leaves in the trees, have suddenly been clamped in an invisible, enormous hand. She looks up.
“What's happened?” she asks. “Why is it so quiet?”
“Something has died,” he says. “That's the way it happens. Everything goes quiet all of a sudden; and then you know.”
They found him on the afternoon of the second day, on the far side of the long plain, where the foothills of the next range began. Since early morning, emerging from their shelter for the night, they’d been watching the vultures, the almost invisible specks drifting on the highest currents of the wind and slowly spiraling downwards among the hills. No more than three or four to start with. Then, appearing from nowhere, another ten or twelve; until the sky was black with them.
On this side the plain was much more densely overgrown than before. The earth was dry, with bare parched patches in the shallow gravel ditches eroded by the wind, and clusters of dry branches blown in among the brushwood. Yet, from a distance, it appeared luxuriant, for the gnarled, thorny shrubs were green from the moisture sucked up from very deep down: white-thorn and tanglewood, hedgehog euphorbia and naboom, aloes, kiepersol and karee and cross-berries, assegai wood, the pale blue of plumbago. An indestructible wild, fierce landscape, its thickets so dense that, every now and then, the oxen found it impossible to force a passage and had to make wide detours in search of game paths and half-hidden trails. If it hadn’t been for the vultures they would never have discovered the body at all.
As it was, they had to swerve far off their course to reach it. Yet neither of them even considered the possibility of not going. Even from ten yards away there was nothing to be seen, except for the vultures covering the ground and the thorn-trees, some of them with wings half-spread, the hideous bare necks stretched forward, the yellow eyes eager and evil. Reluctantly they flapped out of the way as the intruders approached; a couple even dared to follow them with ridiculous little flopping hops, cowardly aggressive. But in the end they all retreated to more distant trees.
He was lying under a shelter of branches. The first they noticed was the pathetic gaiety of small torn patches of clothing fluttering from the dead branches and the long white thorns—next, the black three-cornered hat, its proud plume broken and disheveled.
“ Stay here,” said Adam.
But she slid off the back of the ox and followed him.
A sudden squawk made them stop in their tracks. Two of the vultures had trapped themselves under the branches covering the body and were trying to break out with a thrashing of wings and claws, their beaks and throats and breast-feathers stained and slimy with blood.
Feeling death approach, he must have covered himself with the branches he’d gathered days before. If he hadn’t done that, in his efficient, calculating, Swedish way, there wouldn’t have been anything left for them to see.
It was still not a wholesome sight. Most of the face had been torn away; the long maroon overcoat was torn to shreds, some of the shining steel buttons missing; the waistcoat with its gold embroidery was tattered, leaving part of the chest exposed, a couple of ribs horribly protruding through the mangled flesh.
Elisabeth forced herself past Adam. He tried to ward her off, but there was something in her attitude as she took his arm and pushed him aside which made him yield.
“I must see it,” she said quietly.
The Hottentots had deserted them; the cattle had been stolen; Van Zyl had shot himself and had been buried without really involving or concerning her. But this one was hers, this one she dared not avoid. This was what they’d traveled through the hinterland for; for this she had given up the Cape to come with him.
In spite of the stench she went closer and began to pull the branches out of the way. There was a sudden flurry among the surrounding vultures, as if, for a moment, they all meant to charge and converge on her, but Adam noisily scared them off. Farther back, the oxen were stamping and sniffing anxiously.
Strange, all she could think of was the lion hunt. How he’d hit the female with his first shot, stopping her for a second before she resumed her charge with a shattered shoulder. The Hottentots screaming, dropping their guns, fleeing in all directions. You dropping on one knee to take aim. The sickening dead click of the flint. And then, in a brownish, yellowish, roaring streak, the lioness jumped on you and hurled you to the ground. But in mid-jump there was the sudden report from a Hottentot's gun. And as the beast came down on you, Booi was beside you to grapple with it and pull it away. The great jaws locking on his shoulder and upper arm. Now it's all over, I thought. But the lion was already dead, and while Booi rolled aside and went on screaming, the animal remained motionless on top of you. After a long time you began to move under it, crawling out. You looked in my direction but your eyes were blank. Suddenly you started running, away from me, towards the nearest tree, a mere sapling. Like a baboon you scrambled up that bare, slender trunk, but the moment you reached the top, it suddenly bent over and deposited you back on the ground. You didn’t even seem to be aware of it. You simply started climbing again. The same thing happened. Three times you climbed the sapling, and three times it bent over and dropped you back on the ground. Only then did you stop to look round, discovering that the lioness had been dead all the while.
Erik Alexis Larsson: Who are you? This disgusting, bleeding, tattered thing cannot be you. Who were you, calculating latitudes and longitudes and heights above sea level so precisely, stuffing birds with such consumate skill, naming all the plants and animals of the wilderness? Who were you and how did you get here? Tell me, I want to know, I am your wife. I have a right to know, I’m bearing your child. I want to know. My God, can’t you say something?
Adam remained a short distance away from her, among the branches she’d scattered to reach the body. Here it begins, he thought, feeling the sun beating down on him. Here you will start learning too. Knowledge of death, that's the inevitable start. The day the snake bit me and the old woman sucked out the poison, rubbing in herbs, reviving me. And then that other time when I was dying of thirst on the cracked bed of the dried-up river, mirages dancing in my eyes: the old Bushman with his hollow reed, sucking water from the gorreh where there hadn’t been anything; spitting it out on my tongue and into my mouth. “You could have died here, right on top of this water. Why don’t you keep your eyes open? What are you doing here? If you can’t look after yourself, you must stay away from here.” Muddy water in my throat; the taste of life.
“You can’t stay here,” said Adam.
For the first time it seemed to penetrate her consciousness. She got up quickly from where she was sitting beside the body, and hurried a
way, and quite suddenly began to vomit, pursued by the sweet stench wherever she went. Her stomach continued to contract, retching wildly, dryly, long after it had emptied itself on the hard ground.
“We must do something,” she whispered at last, deathly pale and numb with cold in the heat, stumbling back towards the oxen and leaning her head against the load.
“What can we do?”
“We can’t leave him there like that.”
Impulsively he said: “You want to bury him in a ditch like a Hottentot?”
“I don’t want the hyenas to get at him.”
“They’ve already been at him,” he said with deliberate cruelty.
“Oh my God, can’t you do something”
“The ground is too hard and we have nothing to dig with. We can cover him with stones and branches. But it’ll only keep them off for a while.”
“Well, cover him then. The sun is so hot.”
This time she didn’t follow him. She sat beside the oxen, in their meager shade, watching him struggle with huge stones and heavy branches; from time to time she shooed off the protesting vultures half-heartedly. They would flutter off into the sky, but in the end they always came back. For them there was no need to be impatient.
Once again her stomach started heaving and she bent over to retch, but nothing came out. For a moment she was blinded by pain. Then the convulsions eased and she sat up again and watched him pile up the burial mound.
There is always a first night. After the feast—after the dancing and the meal at the long table: hams and partridges and venison, hares, fish pie, suckling pigs with mouths agape round yellow oranges; slaves rushing this way and that, soundless on their bare feet, serving Bordeaux and cool Moselle, nothing indigenous—after the feast we retired to our rooms, the guests still carousing downstairs. You apologized and went to the small salon to finish some work. I don’t know what it was, I didn’t ask, probably notes or calculations of some sort, something, sitting under the lamp. You briefly kissed me on the cheek and said: Perhaps Mrs. Larsson should go to bed, I’ll still be occupied for some time.” I wanted to sit with you and watch you work, but I was afraid to be a nuisance. Mother sent up two slave girls to undress me. Poor things, they’d been awake since five in the morning and it was already past midnight, with no prospect of going to bed soon. As they undressed me and loosened my hair and washed me, I closed my eyes, trying to pretend to myself it was you caressing me. I thought, deliberately: My bridegroom. But it sounded silly. And after they’d left I took off the long white nightdress with its lace frills and embroidery, and lay down naked, waiting for you. The day was breaking before you entered.
“I thought you’d be asleep.” You sounded surprised, almost annoyed.
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
I turned away so that you could undress without embarrassment, but all the time I was watching you in the little side-mirror: how large and white your body was, how strong, shaped by lands and voyages, and I tried to imagine how you would hurt me and cause me to bleed. I wanted to bleed, mulberry blood for you, for my own sake too: to know what it meant to be a woman, to be transformed into a person by you. You climbed in beside me, and kissed me, then turned round and were asleep instantly. And when you took me the next night that was precisely what it was: you took me, and used me, and then it was done. It wasn’t even painful, with barely a show of blood.
“Is that all?” I asked.
“What?”
“Is that all—just this?”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I don’t either.”
And then you slept again. Not I.
Now I would wish to ask again: “Is that all?” But once again you give no answer. Is that all? This pointless, ridiculous, sordid little bundle of rags on the plain—like a bird that has fallen and rotted, its feathers scattered by the wind? It's nothing at all.
Or everything? I know now: it is not the death of a man that is terrible. That is commonplace. What is terrible, is the death of everything you have believed in, everything you’ve hoped for, everything you thought you loved.
Rest in peace, Erik Alexis Larsson. There is always a first night.
That night, among the hills where they have made their little camp, her cramps grow worse.
All the way from where they’d found the body, until late afternoon, they went on without speaking. He glanced at her from time to time, but she didn’t even seem aware of his presence, moving through the world like a piece of driftwood on a dam, unconscious of her own motion. The light was startingly clear: no haziness on the horizon, no mystery in the kloofs among the hills: each object defined in light, revealed in light, stone as stone, and tree as tree.
She was conscious of pain all the way, like the previous days, a constant companion, almost trusted by now; but nothing particularly bad. Since they halted for the night, it has become more definite, individual aches outlined like the trees or stones in the landscape; but she bit on her teeth and said nothing. But now, in the dark, for the first time, it has grown so bad that she cannot suppress a groan.
Adam wakes up immediately.
“What's the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“I heard you.”
Through clenched teeth she utters another groan. “Oh, God, if only I were back in the Cape. Somebody would have known what to do.”
“What's wrong?”
“It's here.” Holding her belly, rubbing it slowly, pressing down. A secret tremor seems to start again inside, throbbing outwards, like the shudder of an earthquake. But she feels no urge to vomit like before. This time she knows, almost biologically, that her body is trying to rid itself of part of her, of the child.
Perhaps, if I lie very still, it will go away.
“Bring me the brandy.”
He hands it to her and she swallows a mouthful.
“We’ll reach the Hottentot village tomorrow,” he says. “Do you think you can hold out till then? They’ll know what to do. We’d have got there today if it hadn’t been for…”
She gulps down some more brandy. “What difference will the Hottentots make? They’re useless. Just a filthy lot.”
He doesn’t answer.
But after a time—the stars have moved across the nearest hill with its grotesque silhouettes of aloes and dead tree-stumps—she begins to sway her head to and fro on the hard ground where she is lying, both hands pressed against her stomach, contracted with pain.
“Do you really think the Hottentots can help me?”
“They’ll know more than I do.”
“How far is it?”
“Not too far.” He gets up to fetch the oxen. “It won’t be easy in the dark, but we can try.”
An hour later she nearly slips from her ox. He notices it just in time to catch her. She has lost consciousness. Only then does panic strike him.
Clumsily he forces some more brandy between her teeth and helps her to mount the ox again.
“Hold tight. I’ll walk here beside you. It's not so far now.” His voice sounds pleading.
She groans again. The brandy has slightly dazed her but it is also nauseating.
Now she is no longer conscious of separate events. There is only the uneven hobbling of the ox swaying under her; the pain pressing down on her until she's breathless, then lets go; sweat on her face; branches tearing past when they do pass too closely; an occasional curse or muttered comment from Adam. Slowly it is getting light, a greenish dull glow in the east; sunrise; then, suddenly, dogs barking, cattle lowing; voices, people.
She is too befuddled to take any notice of the settlement. It is a village of some thirty or forty circular huts scattered round a palisaded cattle kraal in the center; to one side, isolated from the rest by a clump of trees, a few more huts reserved—which she won’t know, of course— for the sick, and for unclean women. Amidst the bleating goats and yapping mongrels, people approach, excited and half-asleep: young girls with beads and skin aprons; old wome
n with caps and long cloaks and painted faces; half-naked young men wearing beads round their necks, brief aprons over their buttocks, jackal tails in front; shriveled old men huddled in goatskin karosses.
They recognize Adam. He speaks to them, pointing at her. In a curious throng they surround her, all talking at the same time and trying to touch her. Then some of the old women chase off the others with loud imprecations, haul her from the ox—she is drawn up in pain, smelling the pungency of the rancid fat and buchu covering their bodies—and carry her off to one of the huts beyond the trees. Inside it has been severely swept, the earth is hard and smooth, a single reed-mat spread over it. Lying down she looks up at the simple pattern of plaited slats and folded cowhides covering the framework of the hut; overhead is a vent, revealing a bright segment of sky. She feels another spasm gripping her, but they’re holding her arms and legs. Some of them force her to sit up, tugging at her clothes. She tries to help them unfasten and undress her, feels all clothing peeled from her; lies down again, trembling with cold fever. Someone lifts her head and presses her mouth against the edge of a calabash. She is overwhelmed by the strong smell of herbs, but cannot move her head. Strange hands cover her naked perspiring body with animal skins. Fierce spasms shake her. She can no longer control her body. Until it subsides; until everything is torn from her, bleeding, and the women bring water to wash her, to cover her up again and leave her, dimly conscious of birds chattering in the trees and slowly drifting into sleep, wishing she would die.
Where sleep ends and consciousness begins again, she cannot tell. In front of the hut, or among the trees near by, someone is blowing a monotonous tune on the long stiff feather of a ghoera, and the low sad tone intrudes upon her dreams. Sometimes there are shadows shuffling in or out. There is an ancient woman watching patiently at her side, a cap of zebra skin covering the bird-like skull, the shriveled face cracked like the spiderweb patterns on a dry river bed, the breasts elongated and narrow like two old empty bags with a fistful of mealies in the bottom of each; puffing away quietly on her long pipe, emitting small clouds of bitter-sweet hash smoke. Thin and distant, dogs are barking, goats bleating, children crying or laughing, sounds from another, remote existence.
