An Instant in the Wind

by Andre Brink

  “Just for a moment. I’ll be all right.”

  But soon, watching her in the narrow strip of shade, he realized that she was more exhausted than she’d made him believe. With deliberate, perverse glee he looked up at the vultures in the distance, wondering when they would start drifting this way. For them the plains always had something in store.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I want to look out from that ridge over there.”

  “I’ll come with you. Really, I…”

  “No, stay here. I’ll be back soon.”

  She remained behind, lying on her side, resting her head on her elbow. From time to time she raised her head. There he was on the ridge now. She wanted to get up and go to him. Just another minute's rest. Her head reeling, she abandoned herself to memories of leaves and shade. The mulberry tree. A young girl high up among the leaves, astride on two branches, legs wide apart, her mouth stained by red-black berries. Leaves rustling below, a hand furtively touching her leg under the long skirt she’d pulled up above her knees for climbing. Glancing down: a glimpse of a bare brown arm—it must be one of the slave children she always played with in the garden, disregarding her mother's stern commands. Resuming her silent raid on the tree, picking, thrusting the berries in her mouth, pretending not to notice anything. Moving her feet a little wider apart. Feeling the hand stroke upwards, up to the gentle pulpy parting of her young sex. And the purple stains on her thighs and between her legs when she got home again; and her fear at the thought that it might be blood.

  She slept. Waking up, she found that the late afternoon shadows had crept up on her. There was no sign of him. But their bundles were still there, under the tangled bushes.

  She swallowed. Her throat felt parched and swollen, her tongue heavy. She sat up, but a spell of dizziness made her lower her head on her knees again.

  When she finally got up unsteadily, she saw him approaching in the distance. Running. How could he?

  He was shouting something, waving his hand. A sob was stifled in her throat. Water! Had he found water?

  No, not water. But two huge ostrich eggs. God knew how he’d managed to rob the nest without being killed by the male bird, let alone how he’d discovered it in the first place. But there he was with the eggs.

  On a flat rock from which the day's heat was flaring like white fire, he assembled some twigs and dried leaves and lit them with a spark from his tinder-box. She squatted opposite him to watch. The fire was hardly necessary, the stone was so hot. Carefully balancing one egg on its tip, propped up by smaller stones, he made a hole on top, forced in a blob of fat, then pressed the two prongs of a cleft stick together, into the hole, and began to stir, rubbing the back of the stick between his open palms. Spellbound, she watched, her lips half-opened and cracked, with small dry crusts of blood clinging to them.

  It felt like a very long time before he finally said: “Right.”

  Even after he’d removed the egg from the fire, holding it in a piece of animal skin, they still had to wait for it to cool. He broke away the rim of the hole, widening it so that he could blow on the curdly mess inside. It was still scalding, but not able to wait any longer she took the large shell in her cupped hands and began to slurp from it, luxuriously sucking in the half-cooked, quivering egg, burning her mouth, swallowing greedily. Then she handed it to him.

  The sun was setting. A new coolness caressed them, drying the sweat on their shoulders and backs.

  And suddenly she laughed, almost carelessly, joyful; for now they were fed and their thirst was quenched—and they still had some left for tomorrow. The dark was cool and lovely on their bodies. The day had been hard, but now it was over. They had survived this, too. Life was good and generous; they needed so little.

  She thought of her mother's never-ending bickering in the Cape about the two sons in their grave, the barbarous land, the unbearable existence without her family or the music and art of Amsterdam, canals and gables and carrillons, and coaches on the cobblestones; the barrenness of this outpost, a lingering death. You must get away from here, my child, this is no place for civilized people. You’re European, you have good blood in your veins, you were not meant to go to pieces in a colony. Here one is always broken in the end.

  No, Mother, look: we’ve found an egg, the land is kind to us, one can live here.

  “And tomorrow?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow we go on.”

  Together they looked at the billowing expanse of the plains under the moon. From very far away they heard jackals cavorting, a hyena uttering its chilling whoop. What lay behind them was of no importance, it was past. This space lay before them, all its possibilities enclosed in the future, on the border of reality. All they had to do, was to say: I will. For it was will that opened it, will that made it happen.

  “From now on it will be better,” she said, close to him.

  “Anything may still happen.”

  “No, the worst is past.”

  The worst is not yet past. Even she is forced to admit it. That was just a beginning, an initiation, a provisional ordeal. The days remain cloudless and white and hot; the earth is hard-baked, and where there used to be brooks the mud lies cracked in complex patterns. Still there is a hard and hidden compassion in the land which keeps surprising them. Once, when they least expect it, it takes the form of a long pool of water in the wide bed of an otherwise dried-up river among the large bony knuckles of scorched hills. It is surrounded by thickets of mimosa with fluffy yellow flower-balls buzzing with bees. Did not she and Larsson camp here too? She is almost convinced of it: every time this curious discovery of moving in against him, against her previous self- on her way back to the beginning.

  This time they stay over for a full week, camping under the trees beside the water, without a single objection from her. In fact, she is reluctant to obey when, one evening, he announces:

  “Tomorrow we move on again.”

  Refreshed, they continue, reassured by the knowledge that even the desert contains surprises. And for the moment they have sufficient water— two bags, the calabashes, and a couple of ostrich eggs filled to the brim. They are washed clean; their energy is restored.

  It takes a single day to get dusty and dry again, and this time there is no sign of water, although they follow the course of the dry river. In spite of drastic rationing their supplies dwindle alarmingly and after a full week they have still not found anything. In the past it never exceeded two or three days.

  On the second day after they drank the last water, both of them realize, without having to discuss it, that they have reached another crisis. They have some moisture left to safeguard them against the worst thirst: jackal's food and kambro he has dug out, and a collection of bitter fleshy leaves. But that is not enough: it merely suspends the inevitable.

  She lies fast asleep when, in the late afternoon, he suddenly notices the small brown bird fluttering and twittering in the dry branches covering the sandy hollow where they have decided to rest until nightfall. His first impulse is to wake her, but he finds it hard to disturb her deep sleep. Perhaps, he decides, he’ll be back before she wakes up. Perhaps. He can but hope.

  The bird is still twittering in the branches overhead. He gets up, looking down at her sleeping in the sand, then turns to follow the bird on its fluttering, excited way from tree to tree. He has his assegai with him, and his knife; and, of course, the empty skin-bags. Still the bird leads him on, farther and farther away from the dry river bed.

  Once he stops to look back. But the bird goes wild above his head, flapping and screeching hysterically. There is no sign of a nest yet, but he shrugs his shoulders and goes on.

  It is a long way. He knows from previous experience how unpredictable a journey it can be: half an hour or half a day, it's impossible to tell. But he cannot let this chance go by. Somewhere on these plains there is a hidden bees’ nest, and he must have the honey. For her sake, above all.

  Dusk begins to fall. He looks back the way he has come. It mu
st be four or five miles now, back to her. Will she have awakened by now? Is she looking for him? Is she terrified? Or will she accept that he’ll be coming back and patiently wait for him? He won’t reach the honey before dark now, that is obvious. Somewhere here he’ll have to stay the night. Perhaps the bird will remain with him, perhaps not—but that is the risk he has to take. If he turns back now, he can still reach her before it is quite dark, but it is highly unlikely that the bird will follow him and then all is lost. And if they don’t find food by tomorrow, it may be too late.

  Alone under the first stars, he leans against the side of an erosion ditch where he has cleared a space for the night. Somewhere in the thorn-trees above him the little bird is fast asleep. Possibly. It is too dark to see for sure. Faith.

  In this complete desolation, keenly aware of her somewhere on these same plains, under the same dark sky, exposed to space, his love is agony and anguish. He never willed or wanted it. But it has happened, and now it has him in its grip.

  There was one woman he dared to love when he’d barely reached manhood and she was younger still, lost in this new country, with dreams of Java in her exile's eyes: dreams first revealed to him by his Grandmother Seli, which might account for the acuteness of their impact on his mind. Some of the older men tried to get at her, but he warded them off. At first he only protected her, not desiring anything beyond that, perhaps knowing in advance how futile it would be. Fucking in the dark, all right; relieving one's frustrations, avenging one's rage or passion on another body, all right. But not love. That was too terrible. In the end he couldn’t resist it any longer. He tried to, but he couldn’t. The smoothness of her skin, her round shoulders, her shy and barely nubile breasts, the pronounced hip-bones of a very young girl, her narrow hands. I love you: I dare not: I love you. I lose myself in you, in the sound of your voice, knowing it's hopeless. Then, one day, just like that, without a word of warning, she was gone. She was supposed to wait for him at the garden gate, with the milk-pails from the cowshed; but she never came. And later, by sheer coincidence, he heard: Oh, but she's been sold, didn’t you know?

  She. Even here in the desolate dark I dare not think your name, it's too intimate. Forever she.

  There is a strange, harsh beauty in being, suddenly, alone like this. To weigh. To think. Even more intensely than the night he was away from her, following the hunters’ trail. First she, now you. Equally vulnerable, both; with something equally unyielding too. But she was sold. And that is why I have this fear in me about you. For what will happen to you? Dare it last? Is it possible? One is always betrayed.

  There was another woman, of course, but she was different. After the old Hottentot crone, cast out by her tribe, had cured him of the poison of the snake, he hunted down her people and spent a year with them, roaming through the land. Took a wife and made her a hut and moved in with her like one of them, a member of the tribe. She looked after him, he provided well enough for her; but that was all. And after a year he found he couldn’t stay any longer, he had to go off again. She cursed him in his face and spat at him and clawed at him with her nails. The others merely shrugged and laughed—that was a woman's way—but his own heart shrank in him. It was because she was childless, he explained; which wasn’t the reason at all, of course. He simply had to be alone again, equipped with everything they’d taught him, ready for the land, exposed to it. Except for this heart always yearning for the Cape.

  And now there is this new woman, Elisabeth, opening the road back to the Cape. But it's a hard country, and honey is scarce.

  At daybreak he finds the honey-bird still with him. He smiles. All right, we can go on. An hour later they reach the hollow anthill where the bees have made their nest. Making a fire with two twigs rubbed together, he begins to smoke them out, breaking open the nest with his assegai and his hands, filling his bags. On a stone a little way off he leaves a few honeycombs for the bird before he turns back on a fast trot in the stinging rays of the early sun.

  She has spread out their last bit of food on a rock when he arrives at the dry river bed. With a smile she looks up and runs to meet him.

  “I’ve been so worried about you,” he says passionately. “Are you all right?”

  “Of course.” Serenely she looks up at him. “I wasn’t frightened at all. I knew you’d come back.”

  “I should have woken you up to tell you before I left.” He holds her tightly against him. “But you were so fast asleep, and you needed the rest so much. I didn’t think I’d be away so long.”

  “You’re back now, aren’t you?” she says quietly.

  “I’ve brought us honey.”

  “So we’ll get through?” Suddenly there are tears in her eyes.

  “Yes.”

  Sitting down, he opens the bag and takes out a piece of honeycomb for her. She sits down beside him to eat it from his hand, licking off his fingers.

  “What have you been doing all the time?” he asks.

  “Just waited. Slept. Then waited again.”

  “And you really weren’t afraid?”

  “No. I thought: if anything happened to you, I would simply stay here very peacefully until I die. I wouldn’t worry about anything any more. It's useless, isn’t it? It was so quiet. The night was very beautiful, did you notice? In the day one doesn’t always realize how beautiful it can be.”

  They eat in silence. The honey is too sweet to have much of it; but it brings a surge of new energy.

  “Are we going on today?” he asks later.

  “I don’t know.” She is sucking her fingers. Then looks up abruptly: “Actually it was good to be without you. One gets too used to one another. You stop thinking. Being all by myself has cleared my thoughts again.”

  “What did you think?”

  “That I loved you.”

  “Was that all?” he asks teasingly.

  “No,” she says, her eyes still serious. “But that was the most important. And because I love you I don’t want anything to happen to us. We must get out of this valley so that we can reach the Cape safely.”

  “That's what we’re trying to do.”

  “I mean: we can’t just go on like this. All the time we’ve been thinking it would get better. I really believed it. But the river beds stay dry. Suppose there's nothing farther on: I mean really nothing—no honey, no water, no roots, nothing at all?”

  “We’ll find something.”

  “But it is possible that there may be nothing.”

  “I suppose so.” He looks at her searchingly. “But what else can we do?”

  “What lies beyond the mountains?”

  “On that side there's the forest.” He points to the south.

  “Like the one we knew?”

  “Yes, but worse. Almost impossible. All the way as far as Mossel Bay. From there, of course, it's easy.”

  “Yes, that's the way we came.” She reflects. “And over there, to the north?”

  “The Karoo.”

  “What is it like?”

  “I’ve never been there, I don’t know for sure. But I’ve heard it's very dry, almost a desert.”

  “It can’t be worse than here. And perhaps it has rained there. Before we reached the Camdeboo they also warned us it would be a desert. But when we came there it had rained, and it was very beautiful.”

  “How can we be sure that it has rained in the Karoo?”

  “How can we be sure that it hasn’t?” she insists.

  He shakes his head.

  “It can’t be worse than here,” she repeats urgently.

  “Perhaps it is.”

  “If it's all flat we can trek fast and reach the Cape much sooner.”

  “Or die on the way.”

  “If we go on like this we may also die. And if we try the forest, we may get lost.”

  “What do you want to do?” he asks point-blank.

  “I want to get back to the Cape.”

  “Along this valley I more or less know the way,” he says. “It's ba
d, but I know what to expect. Beyond those black mountains I don’t know the world at all.”

  “Haven’t you got any faith?”

  “It's a matter of life or death, Elisabeth!”

  “That's why I’m talking about it,” she says. “We can’t just go on like two tortoises. We have to choose.”

  “And you choose the mountains?”

  “Yes.” And she thinks: How very strange, whatever Larsson may have maimed or killed in me, this he has kindled and confirmed—this thirst for whatever lies beyond the mountains.

  Leaving the valley also means finally turning away from Larsson. From now on there is no longer rebellion against his memory, but a new movement wholly without him. The anxious excitement of following a half-remembered trail, calculating progress in terms of secret beacons, is renounced. These mountains are a line of demarcation and a bridge between memory and innocence, the half-familiar and the utterly foreign, a dimension absolute unto itself.

  Leaving the dry river bed they trek to the foot of the northern range, following its foothills and contours in search of a breach which will let them through. From nearby the mountains appear even more formidable than from a distance, the red cliffs towering in grotesque formations marked by the violence of floods and sun, wind, and landslides. But after four days they find what they are looking for: a kloof cutting through rock and earth to make way for a narrow river of which only the dry bed remains.

  It is a strange sensation: not of traveling through the mountains but of penetrating right into them. As they go on, the walls of the kloof grow more perpendicular; below, it deepens into a ravine carved out by prehistoric floods; on either side the cliffs stagger upwards, opening up into chaotic masses of tumbled rocks, or leaning over, almost touching sides, forming a near-tunnel below. It is cooler here, and damp; the rust and yellow of lichen covering the rocks deepen to the moist green of moss. In the river bed pools of cold and crystal-clear water make their appearance.

  At first they abandon themselves to the luxury of the water and the exhilarating coolness. But there is something unearthly about their journey: the twisting kloof is cold and stern, dangerous, hostile, not condescending in any way. The mountains where they hibernated were a haven and a peaceful shelter: this great range is a threatening antagonist. In the narrow sliver of deep blue sky high above them they see, from time to time, the specks of eagles or vultures hovering: this is no country for human beings.