by Andre Brink
In the mountains, that night, I thought: however terrifying it had been, there was something beautiful about the violent death of the baboon. It was like the sordid killing of the bull or the storm in the Bay of Biscay. Because in such moments one knows that one is alive. Dreadful in itself, yet indispensable—these rare moments which keep us going.
But perhaps I was younger then. I needed the sudden violence to shock me into awareness. Now I demand much less, my needs are humbler. In the quiet persistence of suffering I discover again the desperate knowledge that I am. I am going on. Just that. The horizon remains unattainable, I have resigned myself to it. Nevertheless I am going on. Without this despair it would not be possible. Without it I wouldn’t even know that I am alive. Because of this despair I love you.
Once there was a paradise beside the sea. We were there: do you remember? And because we have lost it we can believe in it.
Still they go on, through the cold nights and the naming days. When there is a moon, they trek by night and rest by day, although it makes it more difficult in other ways—it is almost impossible to sleep in the glare; it is hard to find food in the dark.
As long as we don’t give up. To go on, to endure, to survive; that is our condition. Not the moments of ecstasy, but the humble persistence which makes such moments bearable.
More and more slowly. His arm grows worse. It is really almost unbearable to shuffle on. Even the dog cannot last much longer. Impossible as it seems, the days are growing ever more sizzling and white. They can no longer proceed in the light at all. But what about food? Only the dog can now provide for them.
It becomes something of a macabre game to try and work out: How much longer? Flesh and blood cannot last indefinitely. There is hardly flesh and blood left, just bone and sinews and leathery skin. Oh, horizon.
In weary serenity, all thought suspended, she walks on beside him. The only answer to suffering—that is why she is still alive—is to be prepared to suffer. Rather than resist one must abandon oneself to it, allowing it to slowly burn into you: into everything inside you which has not yet existed, lending it consciousness: so that, painfully, in the process of being stripped of everything, one can give birth to oneself.
At last another halt, the inevitable halt.
As far as this, then? This sandy hollow is the landmark of the end. She helps him to plant the sticks among stones—his arm is hurting too much—and to drape the kaross over it. When, at nightfall, he makes no effort to get up for the next lap, she accepts that this is, indeed, the end. And almost relieved she lies down and shuts her eyes.
But she has reckoned without his bitter will. He is only waiting for her to sleep, having thought it all out in advance. He refuses to admit even the possibility that they should have come all this way simply only to die like animals on the veld. And as soon as he is sure that she's asleep, he softly calls the dog to him. Struggling to its bleeding paws the mangy creature waddles towards him. Adam rubs its ears and pats the huge head; and the dog wags its tail and with its dry tongue begins to lick his face and hands.
“Lie down,” he says, pointing to his lap.
The dog lies down with its head on Adam's knees.
Holding the knife in his left hand, he continues to stroke the head with his right hand for a while; then folds his fingers over the muzzie.
It won’t take long.
With a muffled yelp the dog tries to struggle free when its head is suddenly drawn backwards, stretching the throat for the blade.
It's better for you too.
Blood comes spurting from the severed arteries. Adam's right arm is too weak to hold the wriggling, kicking body down and he has to fall forward to press the dying dog to the ground, subduing its final feeble struggles against his chest and belly. It feels like a woman, it is like love.
He doesn’t cry, but there are tears running down his cheeks. He thinks: Now I have raised my hand against my own mother. Whatever follows I deserve—the scourging and the irons under the screeching gulls, the chains, the island, the arid land. I am my own hell.
The buck in the cave she could still accept, however grudgingly. But not the death of the dog.
“My God, Adam!” she whispers hoarsely when, at daybreak, she wakes up in a fever to find him roasting the meat on the fire.
“Don’t talk,” he says, “It's done. Just eat it, you need it.”
“It will be like eating one of us.”
“No. Please.”
She refuses to open her mouth. He tries to force her, like he did with the snake. But with sudden uncontrollable anger she slaps the meat out of his hand.
“I won’t!” she sobs. “I’d rather die.”
“Don’t be stupid. It's meat, it's life.”
“He came with us all the way.”
“I tried to chase him away, but he wouldn’t go.”
“He saved our life with the fawn.”
“He can save us again today. He was starving to death anyway. Like us. He could no longer catch anything.”
“He was ours. He was all we’ve ever had.”
“You must.”
“Go ahead and eat him if you can!” she cries in despair. “But don’t try to force me. I won’t. And then go off alone and leave me here.”
“I did it for you,” he pleads hopelessly.
“Leave me alone.”
“Just try a small piece.”
“No.”
“Look.” He puts a morsel in his mouth, chewing with difficulty, swallowing.
“You’re a savage!” she says, shaking with silent fury, “I hate you.”
“It's no use pretending to be white now!” he flares up. “Just look at yourself.”
She shuts her eyes, trembling.
“Eat. If you want to stay alive.”
“What is happening to us?” she whispers in a state of shock. “We can’t destroy each other like this.”
“Eat. Else you’ll be destroying yourself.”
“I cannot eat his flesh.”
“For God's sake!” he says wearily. “You’ll have to eat it in the end. You have no choice.”
She only shakes her head.
It is becoming quite ludicrous, she thinks, on the brink of collapse: every time an extremity, followed by respite, a new effort, shuffling deeper into nothingness. Surely one must have the dignity, sooner or later, to say: Now I refuse.
My mother said: Elisabeth, you’re held in esteem, you’re an example to others.
And you: How can you survive if you’re not prepared to be an animal?
“Give me a piece,” she whispers towards the evening, not daring to look up at him, although she knows there will be no spite in his expression. It's only that she cannot face herself in his sunken bloodshot eyes. Her body revolts against the bit of meat. But she forces a second morsel down after the first has been rejected. Her stomach contracts, but with sheer will-power she keeps it down, lying un-moving on the ground, too sick to stir.
It's madness, madness. Why bother to stay alive if it's so easy to give up? It's unnatural. It's inhuman.
Why does she return to life? Why face this new discovery of him after the slaughter of the dog? Why try to live with this new discovery of herself?
“I want to die, I want to,” she mumbles in a monotonous, distant voice, forcing another piece of meat down her throat, keeping it inside, pariting, trembling on the ground—a hideous, burnt and broken thing lying in a bundle, a small bare heap of bones and parched skin, tufts of hair, glowing glowering eyes: a human, living thing.
When the Hottentots arrived three days later they were still there. The meat had strengthened them, but they had not moved on yet, overcome as they were by lethargy and fatigue, worn out by the prospect of facing the same round yet again—the slow decline, the swelling throat, the tongue drying out, eyes tightening in their sockets, the world reeling, the first blackouts; followed by another small supply of meat or plants, an anthill raided, a lizard killed: a new disgusting beginning
.
From far off they noticed the cloud of dust rising against the afternoon sun and drawing nearer.
“Buck?” she asked, not sure whether she should be glad about the possibility of new relief, or despairing about the certainty of worse suffering following it.
“I don’t think so,” he said, screwing up his eyes. “Unless it's only a small herd. But perhaps…”
“What?”
He didn’t answer. For an hour he kept his eyes steadily on the horizon. The cloud approached, still and red and brown, obscuring the eye of the sun.
“It's people,” he announced at last. “It must be Hottentots on trek.”
“But all that dust?”
“Cattle.” His voice was so low that she didn’t immediately grasp the significance of his words.
When it became clear that the trek would pass a mile from them they immediately tied up their bundles and set out across the plain, driven by the same eagerness of the day of the mirage. Once, in fact, she stopped for a moment, a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, to make quite sure that it was not another hallucination, before running after him again, panting open-mouthed.
There were fifty or sixty people in the trek: frail, thin men and women and children, grey with dust, accompanied by a herd of cattle and sheep and countless dogs. The cattle were in a sorry state but the fat-tailed sheep could still draw on their own resources.
At first the band seemed hesitant and suspicious about the two strangers on the open plain. But the moment Adam addressed them in their own language, their hard-baked faces wrinkled with glee, breaking into smiles. He translated for her; some of them who had mastered the rudiments of Dutch started chattering directly to her.
Yes, they’d been in the Cape: look, here were the beads and copper they’d bartered; they’d had brandy too, and rolls of tobacco, but that was all finished. Now they were trekking on through the thirstland: someone had told them of good grazing land a month from here, to the north.
“Why you not come with us?” one of the spokesmen enquired. The world bad back there.”
“No,” Elisabeth said quickly. “No, we must get back to the Cape.”
“Why ‘must’?” They seemed baffled.
“We’ve been on the road for such a long time now,” she tried to explain.
“But we return to the Cape one day,” the Hottentot assured her. “As soon as the rains he come. Then it's easy trek through here, you’ll see. What difference a month or a handful of months?”
“No, we must…”
He shrugged, indifferent.
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“Is true,” he admitted. “I not understand.” Then, narrowing his eyes: “How come a white woman trek through the land like this?” With open curiosity he stared at her: her shriveled breasts, her prominent ribs and hips. There was no desire in his eyes. She felt no urge to cover herself. What did it really matter?
“Well,” he said at last, clicking his tongue and spitting on the ground. “You think, and say us what you do. We stay here tonight.”
The women set out to gather wood. Towards sunset the dogs came running back from the veld, some of them with ground-squirrels, a few others with hares or tortoises. For once they were allowed to keep their quarry, since the men had generously slaughtered one of the weakest oxen in honor of the occasion. And they assembled round the fire, eating and chattering, laughing, drinking.
Elisabeth sat apart from them, withdrawn into herself, listening absently as they spoke in their own language.
After the meal they took out musical instruments and in the moonlight the reed-flutes began their breathy shrill, accompanied by the sad monotony of the ghoera and the rumbling of the rommelpot. With loud laughter and much clapping of hands the calabashes of heady beer were passed round. The young ones were dancing, sending up a cloud of dust over their elders watching and encouraging them from the fireside; the skin-aprons swinging and flapping in the frenzy of their dance. Under their feet the earth was trembling. She sat watching, fascinated by the intensity and exuberance of their merriment which seemed quite unreal on these plains where everything had been so predictable and silent for so long. In yesterday's sun these same people had been worn out by heat and dust, but now, in the dark, they were dancing themselves back into life, exorcising the silence with their music and laughter, gulping down the sour beer which sustained their ecstasy. For tomorrow—tomorrow would be hard again.
Tomorrow they were going on. She would stand beside Adam and watch the cloud of dust grow smaller on the plains, the noise dwindling, dying away in the distance. And then the dust would settle, too. And it would be exactly as before: he and she, surrounded by the pure anguish of light and space. Only, it would be worse than before, because the memory of tonight would taunt them in their loneliness.
Why not turn back and go with the tribe? In their midst they would survive. Here was meat; here was sour milk and a large supply of honey; here was talk and laughter. What did it matter if it took them another year to reach the Cape? There was a lifetime ahead of them.
But to turn back and face that terrible road again? She was too tired even to think of it. She wanted to be spared the choice. The Cape was so much nearer now than ever before. It was no longer lost: the Hottentots had miraculously restored it to them. Those beads and copper wire came from the Cape; a month ago they had been there. They had seen the Castle with its five massive corners, and the open square with the gallows, the canals running down from the Heerengracht to the sea; they had seen the Mountain from which she’d looked out across the incredible blue of the ocean below; and the houses with their whitewashed walls and thatched roofs, amber or brown or black with age, shelter against the violent South-easter. They’d seen the fishing boats coming in, loaded with galjoen and Cape salmon and red roman and snoek. They’d seen the boats bringing in the sweet red figs and crystal water from the wells on the island, and the loads of blue stone for new houses; the processions of the Governor and the Council of Policy; her father in a coach; Phoenicopterus ruber; slaves carrying water from the fountains opposite the cool Gardens; wheat-milis, mulberry trees.
It was true: it existed: only a few weeks from here. They had seen it all, and here they were dancing with her Cape still in their eyes.
Much later they all bedded down in a group, she and Adam pressed against the mass of anonymous bodies in the dark. She inhaled the odor of the rancid fat and buchu powder covering them. But was it worse than her own smell? She pressed herself against the body next to her, oblivious, in her half-sleep, of who it was: they were all together, warming one another against the cold of the night, bundles and bundles of people.
Among all the dark bodies in the dark he had recognized her and pressed her against him.
—I love you more than I do myself. This precious instant of togetherness the night allows us is all we have: here is my body, here I am, take me. Whisper in my ear, sink your small white teeth into my shoulder to smother the moan of your joy. Give me a son who will be free one day. You with the memories of Java in your almond eyes and the names of its beaches on your moist quick tongue: in your name lies my salvation, in your darkness everything becomes comprehensible and redeemable. Tomorrow I’ll wait for you beside the gate, and later I shall learn that you’ve been sold at a fair price. Tomorrow all of that will happen, and I shall lose you forever: but in this fleeting night you are eternally mine.—
“Well, you come with us?” asked the spokesman when they started packing up and herding their cattle and sheep the next morning.
She shook her head. “We must go on. It's not so far now.”
“But is bad.”
“We’ll get through. If you can help us with some food.”
“You barter?”
They reopened their small bundles. There was so little. Her shells? No. The pistol and the remaining ammunition? But we need it! Sorry, then we can’t do business. All right, take it. Take everything, we have nothing. Ju
st let me keep my Cape dress, and our aprons and karosses, our hand-made assegai, the sticks, the bow and arrows.
In exchange, they received a few bags of milk, half a sheep, and herbs for Adam's wound.
“What is the shortest way to the Cape from here?”
They were all talking together, and pointing. The way we came: straight on.
“Is there anything on the road?” asked Adam.
“A waterhole two days from here” said the spokesman. “Below a koppie, he look like a lion sleeping. The cattle make it bad. But still water to dig up.”
“Is that all?”
“Ten days from here, a farm.”
“With people?”
“Yes, is people. Honkhoikwa. But the farmer he shoot at us,” he said sullenly. “He say he not have water for so many people. Curse the cunt of his mother.”
And then they shouted and called and waved. The sun rose, a disc of fire. The trek grew small on the plains; the red dust accompanied them to the horizon. Adam and Elisabeth stayed behind.
“Now we’ll get through,” he said.
Ten days from here there was a farm and people.
A few days beyond the muddy water-hole trampled by the cattle they saw vultures again. Adam was the first to recognize the high pile of stones on the plain, one of Heitsi-Eibib”s innumerable graves. But the vultures were closer, swarming above an erosion ditch. And even from a distance the stench was unmistakable.
He wanted to bypass it, knowing what to expect. But Elisabeth was curious to see.
“It's the Hottentots’ people,” he said laconically, when she pressed him.
“What people?” she insisted, already beginning to suspect the truth; remembering.
They stopped on the edge of the ditch gaping in the hard soil. The bottom was black with vultures; they made no effort to abandon the corpses they were feasting on. The branches and karosses covering the bodies had been torn off and scattered in all directions. Shallow graves had been dug open forcibly. There seemed to be two or three grownups among the dead—old ones, as far as Adam could make out—and several children who must have been too weak to go on.
