by Andre Brink
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
“Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.”
“There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.”
With a heavy sigh he closed the solid book, fastening the brass clasps.
“Let us pray.”
Kneeling on the dung floor, their elbows propped up on the hard benches, they listened to his prayer. Far outside something was rumbling, like thunder; but surely that was not possible.
Among the slaves and servants in the corner Adam crouched, not removing his eyes from her for an instant. Perhaps she was conscious of it, for she kept hers tightly shut. Her hands appeared to be trembling against her face; but it might be an illusion in the lamplight.
There she's kneeling down with you, under the same light: she belongs to you. She is on her way back. The taste of death is in my mouth. I love you: at this moment I hate you. Is it for this I brought you out of the land of the vultures? Only to kneel down again and shut your eyes, your body hidden in a silk dress from the Cape? I know how tough and dry you are, how horrible, how lovely. I allowed you to call me by the name only my mother knew. What will happen if I suddenly get up, and put my hand on your shoulder, and announce, “Leave her alone. She belongs to me?”
The prayer seemed endless. On the horizon there was another muted rumble like a vast herd of buck passing in the distance. At last it was over. They stood up, scraping their benches on the uneven floor. The yellow lamp was burning steadily on the table.
“Your slave can sleep here in the kitchen with the others,” said the farmer. He didn’t look at her.
“I…” Once again she hesitated, and swallowed, and said no more.
Behind him his shadow seemed enormous on the plastered wall, rising halfway up the thatched roof, distorted and grotesque. She bowed her head in hopelessness. During the prayer she had nearly fallen asleep. Every fiber of her body felt pervaded by fatigue.
“You’re sleeping with us,” he said bluntly.
“I’ll be all right on the floor.”
“There's place enough, the bed is big.” He looked at his wife.
“Take her with you, Lettie,” he ordered.
Then he went out, probably to inspect the kraals and the yard; to urinate.
“Come,” said the woman. She lit a candle in the name of the lamp and went on to the bedroom.
“Really, I…”
“He said so.”
From the door she looked back. In front of the hearth there was a vague, dark movement of bodies. She could not distinguish Adam from the others.
The pregnant woman sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, sighing as before. As she unfastened her dress and took it off and undid her hair, her shadow mimed her movements on the wall. In her shift she suddenly seemed much younger, vulnerable. She moved in under the kaross on the far side of the bed.
Elisabeth remained standing, her fingers on the bodice of her new dress. But she didn’t undo it.
“Aren’t you coming?” asked the woman.
She turned away towards the small window opening. Outside it was very dark. It smelled cool and fresh, unlike the mustiness inside. Something stumbled in the yard.
“Take off your clothes,” he said behind her in the doorway.
She looked round. He was standing with legs astride, hands on his hips, looking at her.
Then he came towards her. There was a large dark stain on the dung floor where she had spilled earlier, having her bath.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
“Oh, Hans,” moaned his wife from the bed.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” he snapped at her.
With her customary sigh she turned her face to the wall.
“Well?” he asked. “Why don’t you take it off?” He put out his hand and grabbed the front of her dress. She tried to stop him.
“What's the matter with you?” she asked blindly. “I’ve come here to ask for help. I didn’t…”
He tugged at the dress and she heard it tear.
“My God!” she cried, helpless with anger. “If I’d been a man you would have shown me hospitality. You would have given me a place to sleep. Now, because I’m a woman…” Her voice was shaking.
“Take off that dress!” he shouted.
She wrung herself from his grip, aiming for the inner door, but with a single move he cut her off, laughing through his teeth.
“Adam!” she called out.
He looked confused. Then he heard the shuffling sound behind him and swung round.
“Get out!” he ordered.
“Don’t touch him,” said Elisabeth, struggling to control her voice. “He is my husband.”
“It's a lie!”
“Oh, Hans,” moaned the woman, pushing herself up on her elbows in the big bed.
“He is my husband,” repeated Elisabeth. “He's come all the way with me.”
“Leave her alone,” said Adam.
De Klerk gaped at him, speechless. She would never forget that expression on his face: the disbelief and dumb frustration. The unthinkable had crossed his horizon.
Elisabeth stood looking at them, barely breathing. She knew there was no hope if the farmer decided to put up a fight: he could call all his laborers to his side. Everything was balancing between them, very slowly, and around them was the night.
Outside the thunder rumbled once more.
“I could have known it,” he suddenly exploded. “No decent woman would come here like this. A goddamned whore, that's what you are. We don’t mix with your sort. We’re Christians here.”
“I only asked for a place to sleep,” she reminded him.
“Take your black stallion and get out of here,” he shouted.
“Not in the night, Hans,” complained his wife, pushing the kaross from her and swinging her feet over the edge.
“You stay out of this!” he ordered.
“She lost her child,” the woman said.
“How do you expect us to go on?” asked Elisabeth, in an angry surge of rebelliousness.
“The way you got here. On foot. Or ride on his back.”
“My father is keeper of the Company's stores in the Cape!” she said, raising her head.
“ To hell with the bloody Company!” he said. “What have I got to do with the Cape? I’m over the mountains here.”
“The Cape can drag you out of here if I went back to complain.”
“Why don’t you give them a horse, Hans?” the woman asked. “That's not so much. Look at the poor woman.”
“Poor woman's arse! Going around with things like that!”
It was at that moment that Adam grabbed him by the shirt. Not the violence of the movement, but the unexpectedness of it, caught De Klerk completely by surprise. Instead of fighting back, he suddenly started pleading, pale with fear.
“Don’t kill me,” he begged Adam. “Think of my wife. She's going to have a child.”
“Will you give us a horse?”
“Yes,” he whined. “Anything you want. Lettie can make you some food for the road. Just let me go.”
Adam was breathing with difficulty to restrain himself. After a few moments he pushed the man away so violently that he stumbled to the floor. Before he could get up again Adam had snatched one of the guns from the wall.
“Take me to the horse.”
“That thing isn’t even loaded,” said De Klerk with a show of defiance.
“Where's the horse?”
The farmer glared at him, then turned to Elisabeth. She looked away.
“I’ll go and get the food,” the woman offered hurriedly.
Behind them, as they galloped from the farmyard in the dark, a shot was fired. Dogs began to bark hysterically
. There was an outburst of confused, angry voices. Then silence. Reining the horse in to an even walking pace, Adam picked their course through the night. There was a long way ahead; it would be senseless to tire the horse out too soon.
Everything had happened so fast that for a long time neither could say a word. It was an end. A transition. A beginning.
The air was damp on their faces.
“At least you knew me when you needed me,” Adam said, very softly, after what had seemed like hours, his voice completely strange in the dark.
She cowered, wanting to answer, but her throat was too taut for speaking. She could only shake her head against his chest.
“The Cape has come a long way to reach us here,” he said after another silence, with such rare bitterness that it struck her like a whip.
“No, Adam. Don’t. You mustn’t.” She struggled against the tears. “I told them you were my husband.”
He didn’t answer. She felt his body rigid against her back, sitting on the horse.
“I did it for your sake” She was pleading openly now. “Don’t you realize? I was scared of what he might do to you if I told him. I couldn’t face the idea of him insulting or humiliating you.”
“So he only sent me to the kitchen.”
“I did it so we could stay alive. Both of us. If we hadn’t stopped there to rest and eat—what would have become of us? You know we couldn’t go much farther.”
“You were prepared to pay his price.”
“I was prepared to destroy myself protecting you.”
He said nothing.
Leaning back against him she yielded to the tears, crying with more desperate passion than he’d ever known in her.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God!” she sobbed when, finally, she managed to form coherent words again. “Don’t let this happen to us. Help me, Adam. I can’t bear it any more.”
She was in such a state, she didn’t even realize that he’d stopped the horse, that he was taking her from its back, hooking the reins on his arm, holding her in love and dread.
“What is happening?” he whispered at last. “What will become of us if we no longer hold on to each other?”
She realized that he was crying too, his thin, wounded body racked by terrible sobs, though uttering no sound.
“Adam, Adam,” she pleaded. “Aob, Aob, Aob.”
Huddled together, they remained sitting on the ground till daybreak. It stayed dark a long time, for the sky was overcast.
“We must never let it happen again,” she said, moving her head against his throat. “Never. We must be good to one another, otherwise we won’t be able to bear it. We’re too small. We’re too vulnerable. And then there will be nothing left.”
“Come,” he said after a long time. “We can’t stay here.”
For they had not reached the end yet. There were mountains ahead which they had to cross. And then still farther. The Cape was drawing nearer, but they had not reached it yet.
On the hollow back of the old hack the farmer had so grudgingly given to them, they set out. Slowly the mountains rose higher in front of them. They didn’t even feel relieved or glad. They only went on: blind and dumb and drained, depleted, beyond disillusionment, through a landscape of naked suffering.
The humidity increased. Soon they could smell it. It was going to rain.
It is raining. Not that it really matters any more. A month ago, even a week ago, it would have made all the difference; but no longer. For the Karoo is behind them, and they have entered the mountains. It is no longer redemption, at most a touch of mercy. Still they abandon themselves to it with primitive lust.
Neither of them even thinks of sheltering from it. The mountains are steep, range upon range; never easy. But there are signs of other treks that have passed this way, even with wagons and cattle—and they follow the broad trail through the hills and kloofs. He is leading the horse, but at regular intervals they stop, turning their faces up to drink the rain, to feel it streaming down their bodies. Her long dress clings to her, wet and heavy, making it difficult to walk, but the sensation of its sogginess against her is exhilarating.
Cavorting like children they chase each other in the rain, leaving the horse to graze; catching and grabbing, slipping, rolling in mud and grass among heath and proteas, lying panting while it pours over them and soaks into them.
When at last they are too tired to go on he opens his bundle, struggling with the tough wet thongs, and takes out a kambro he dug on the other side of the mountains. With his knife he scrapes off the outer layer of skin and gives her the gratings, showing her how to rub it into a lather. She wrestles to strip the cloying dress from her, kicking it from her long legs and leaving it in a bundle on the ground. And while the rain continues to stream down steadily over them they soap each other's bodies, washing, rubbing, caressing for the pure joy of it. Slippery and smooth, shiny as otters, they make love on the grass in the rain, feeling themselves dissolve in mud and water, in this no-man's land between yesterday and tomorrow, between the barren plains and the fertile valleys of the Cape. Here they belong to nothing and are determined by nothing: in the pure play and heaving of bodies they are reduced to simple elements. And when, panting and exhausted, they finally cease to move, they remain on the ground intertwined like tree roots, their mouths open, while the running water washes them clean of mud and grass.
Nudging his head into the hollow between her neck and shoulder, laughing and relieved, he says: “You taste like earth and water. You’re beautiful, oh God, you’re so lovely.”
“It would be wonderful to die like this,” she says. “It felt like dying and living at the same time.”
After a long time he moves away from her, and she thrusts her hips upwards trying to retain him, wanting to cry out with the sudden feeling of loss and emptiness. Drawing up her legs she lies like a hedgehog to retain his warmth in her, her hair spread on the grass, mud-marks on her back.
“It will be dark soon,” he warns, helping her to stand up.
It comes as a shock to them both; what has become of the day? It is dusk already. They’ll have to spend the night somewhere here. But there is no shelter nearby, no cave visible in the falling rain, and all the trees and bushes are soaked. Under a slight protuberance they press themselves against the rock, with the horse in front of them to ward off the rain. But the wetness still reaches them. And it is getting colder too. The breath of the horse forms small white clouds in the deep dusk. Crouched in a kaross, they try to keep one another warm throughout the night. For there is no dry wood to make a fire, no warmth anywhere except in their shivering bodies steaming under the heavy skins of the kaross. Now they regret their extravagance, now everything appears excessive and rather childish. The moment which was so perfect in itself, so brimful of life, seems unreal and remote; the ecstasy of his seed in her, her screaming and writhing against him, is incredible and lost. Everything was so eternal, and is so distant now.
Can it never last beyond the moment? she wonders, feeling a cough forming in her chest. The moment of which one believes so confidently that it makes up for a lifetime of suffering. Now it has gone, and all that remains is this night in the mountains—the very memory is unreliable and vague. The moment was so self-contained, but all they have of it now is to know, or to believe, that it happened. And tomorrow?
Shaking with cold they see the colorless day approach; and without waiting any longer they run down the slope to work up some heat. A raging stream down below—brown water and white foam— then up the opposite slope. Keep moving, don’t stop. It is late afternoon again before they finally discover a shallow cave with some dry wood inside. Once he has a small fire going he feeds it with damp branches. It gives off more smoke than heat, but it is better than last night's total exposure. She is still coughing, but not as badly as in their winter cave. His arm is in a sorry state, though, even worse in the cold than before.
The rain lasts for two more days before the sun breaks through the loose, dr
ifting clouds, sparkling on the grass and their wet bodies. They reach a last neck on the mountains. Below them a wide valley fans open to the south-east. In the distance a thin line of smoke from a homestead streaks upward. There is the promised land: they are drawing near. Another week or two, surely no more than that.
Then the horse died. Of poisonous irid appearing after the rains, Adam said. The poor thing didn’t have much life left anyway, yet with her on his back it made a considerable difference to their progress. Now he lay on his side, with a huge swollen belly, in a patch of arum lilies.
They sat on the grass beside the dead horse. She was wearing the brown silk dress, dry but badly crumpled after the rain. The small mishap had unnerved them completely.
“Just when it started going better,” she said with bitter resentment. “Haven’t we been through enough already?”
“Perhaps we’ve been in too much of a hurry,” he said cryptically.
“Why shouldn’t we?” she asked. “We’ve been traveling for so many months already.”
“Where are we going, Elisabeth?” he asked with stunning directness.
She looked at him in amazement. “Why do you ask such a strange question?”
“Is it really so strange? All the time we’ve been saying: the Cape, the Cape, home, home.” Almost fondly he caressed the mane of the dead horse. “Which Cape are we going to?”
“There is only one Cape.”
“It seemed like that when we were far away. That's how we wanted it. But the nearer we come…” He was silent for a long time before looking up straight at her. Her hair was stirring lightly in the wind. “Our Capes are different. Surely you know that.”
“For neither of us it will be the Cape we knew.” She tried to convince him with the intensity in her eyes. “It will be a new place altogether. To start from the beginning.”
“You think it's possible to start again?”
“But we’ve already discussed it!” she said. “Why are you beginning to doubt it again?”
“It's not ‘again.’ It's been all the time. On the other side of the mountains it didn’t seem so important. It was more urgent just to survive. But now we’ve got to know.”
