David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  David had come upon him by surprise. The man who had asked his father for directions and for food—old Dawid pointing with a bicycle part at the track to Rooiberg—and who he imagined trudging through the veld in search of the gypsum mines sat propped up behind the kraal wall, sleeping through the afternoon heat. His mouth hung open, the lips loose, and a fly made its way across his face, to-and-fro, hovering around the open mouth. Sinking to his haunches, clutching his knees, the child sat staring at the sleeping man, at the black and pink of his mouth, perhaps willing him to wake up, perhaps wanting to hear him speak, tell his story—but there is, in fact, only their mute figures. To read desire into that image is to fabricate once more, and David braces himself for the bald truth, the silence and the lack: just a child and a fly hovering about an insensible figure. There is no stone, no milky white crystal found on a riverbank, no whorled shell carrying the roaring message of the sea, of the world. There is a buchu essence bottle, from which those who travel alone get their comfort, and as if to explain its emptiness, the man gurgles drunkenly.

  The child left on tiptoe, but his hands, he remembers, were plunged boldly in his pockets. And yes, he felt, as he stopped to check if the man was still asleep, a reassuring stone in his pocket; he felt no urge to part with it. Under his bed he had a collection of more precious stones, but the one between his fingers was not a thing to pass to another. Only the fly was there, tiptoeing tenderly about the mouth, and he remembers feeling relieved by that presence.

  So it is possible, he says, to correct a false memory, in the end to arrive at the truth and find out what really happened.

  Yes.

  What more does he want? I can tell by the way he drums on his briefcase that this is not enough, that he is disappointed in my response. But have the terms of our collaboration changed? Am I no longer to consider myself as purely listener and scribe? Am I now expected to offer interpretations?

  So? I venture.

  Don’t you see that if I once believed the first version to be true, who knows whether this one is not another invention? Is there any way of telling, when I was once so clear about what happened, the sequence of events, and I am now equally sure about the new version? Why believe anything at all?

  So is this what it is all about—searching for a way out, for reasons not to believe his own eyes and ears? In which case the hotel could later become a classroom, the hit list a child’s exercise book with the names of his classmates written with a flourish, and Dulcie a page torn out of a novel—a story re-remembered as belonging to another.

  It occurs to me that David is, in spite of himself, becoming dependent on speaking to me. I say nothing, but I fear for him. For the telling that will surely take over.

  CAPE TOWN 1991

  It was mid-May, after a glorious spell of still sunshine, winter came suddenly, before dinner, wind pouncing viciously as if it had until then been kept banned behind the mountain. In the northern suburbs lights sputtered for minutes, electricity lost its nerve, and nearly cooked boboties and chicken pie crusts sighed and sagged in their ovens. Only Tygerberg stood eerily illuminated in the dark.

  David arrived with fragments of Le Fleur’s writings, a faded copy of Griqua and Coloured People’s Opinion as well as photocopies of several dense, poorly typed or handwritten pages. He stood leaning against the door; his hand traversed the gap between door and frame, checking the cold wind that whistled into the room.

  Cape Town houses were not made for winter, he said. The settlers must have persuaded themselves that this was a paradise of eternal summer in spite of the terrible wind and rain in the peninsula. And now we carry on the pretence.

  I offered to turn on the single-bar electric heater, but he waved it away, turning to leave. As if he hadn’t come of his own volition, I had to persuade him to stay. He seemed not to know whether he wanted to show me the manuscripts. We sat for a while at the kitchen table, listening to the frenzied rain on the tin roof—not huddled, but an aura of sorts spun by the sound of the elements drew us together even as I toyed with the boerewors on my plate. When he broke the silence he spoke loudly, as if to prevent me from picking up on another level of speech, on words uttered on another wavelength that threatened to become audible.

  David needed help reading the typescript; he could not understand why it was indecipherable, why it appeared to be written by an illiterate madman when indeed he knew that the self-taught Griqua chief was nothing of the kind. He had seen several copies of the journal that Le Fleur produced, as well as letters to officials with various defences of his position. He looked troubled, made as if to hand over the papers, then withdrew them. This gesture, at the very beginning of our collaboration, came to characterise his relationship with me. David did not at that stage intend it to continue beyond reading the fragments, did not at that stage think about anything other than piecing together the Le Fleur story. He had become obsessed with childhood memories about the Chief, by a sense of mystery surrounding the stories of his own family’s relation to the Chief.

  What, for instance, he said, do you make of this letter to his son, Adam:

  Wees versigtig, ek word gevind waar ek gesoek word; wanneer gesoek word, word ek nooit gevind nie—Take care, I am found where wanted; when wanted never found—and Mother still drinks of the clean waters of your grandfather, Captain Kok, mother drinks it so slowly today. The great problem of the white people is that their thoughts have come to a standstill, they sit like rabbits on a stone, the young Boers hand over their work to our young people.…

  I giggled. David gave me his schoolteacher look and continued, Listen to this entry from his diary:

  Present-day churches are all military churches. Boys are trained for war; girls are trained for war. Yes the Griqua Choir Girls, there is the new kingdom, for they are preparing for singing when the harlot and the beast is punished in the voice of many waters: Say Hallelujah…. No Liquor Brewers, no war material makers, no greedy landgrabbers will be left, no military training, no airforces, no Man-o’-wars will be made by the Girl Kingdom.

  Ah, a crackpot visionary and a proto-feminist, I laughed. Does it not prove that the man simply isn’t what you want him to be?

  He kept silent. The wind howled in its attempt to carry off the roof; the hibiscus tree beat itself against the windowpanes, and, not a little afraid of the vicious wintry night, I was pleased to have David there. Only once, as we sat at the table poring over the typescript, did the electricity falter. The lights flickering on and off added to the bizarrerie of the text, its strange mixture of English and Afrikaans, the outlandish syntax, the madness that dripped from the ill-formed, fallen branches of those sentences.

  I’ll go back, he said, to my meeting in Guguletu.

  What became clear as the lightning flashed across the window was that these texts were no cause for fear and anxiety, that David, having come from the meeting wild-eyed and trembling, was using the Griqua material to displace that of which he could not speak.

  Sitting half-propped in his bed, his green eyes ablaze in the weathered brown face, his jaw set with the fury and frustration of years, he hisses at the scribe perched nervously on a three-legged stool, a thin, creaking man who knows that it is not worth his while to interrupt, to ask the old man to go more slowly, to admit that he did not quite catch it. He, the amanuensis, would not dare to ask any questions, would write the words exactly as they fall from the Chief’s lips, or improvise where he had not quite heard, not quite understood. The double possessive of the Namaqua hulle se surely would be his own, since that is not a construction that occurs in the Chief’s variety of Afrikaans.

  Justice, he shouts, nothing more than justice is what I demand so don’t bring me your English judges no don’t bring me your Scottish judges who know nothing of the beauty of the divine scales they may dip or dive this way and that but in the end they must quiver in celestial balance as the truthful mind one that is free of prejudice and greed well the truthful mind settles in divine justice such a
mind we have not one among the thieving missionaries look look those scales are ablaze with heavenly light the bush of Moses burns.…

  As a flash of winter sunlight bounces off the window pane, he struggles against the pillows.

  No I won’t go to Rhodesia rather again Robben Island or the Breakwater for me I have no fear of prisons but governor of Rhodesia oh no you can’t buy me off I am no coloured cur we have fashioned ourselves into a proud people a grand Griqua race no coloured nameless bastards I Paramount Chief of the Griquas the Opperhoof …

  And then he falls back whimpering, calling for Rachael—Ag, Dorie, Dorie—who is long since dead, so that the thin young man of tired wrists, more adept at tucking him back into bed and soothing his brow with vinegar water, leaps to attention.

  Once, in the beginning, he had tried to reason, to assure the old man with his knowledge of history that there was no need to go to Rhodesia, that there had been no question of a governorship, but having roused the Chief’s fury, he now desists, and instead, in silence, simply mops the revered brow and strokes his hand, grateful for being a Griqua rather than a currish coloured and, above all, grateful for the break from writing.

  But it could not always have been like that. The language is not always that of dictated speech; rather, the typed pages, on long foolscap sheets that ignore the lines, appear to be transcribed from a handwritten text by someone who was neither a good typist nor well versed in English syntax or vocabulary, since he was unable to guess at possible constructions where the writing was illegible.

  •

  David was skeptical. Surely it is in code, he said, on another late-night visit in that terrible week of relentless wind and rain in which we could barely hear ourselves speak. One surely cannot have such a mixture of good and bad language, such a muddle; besides, it is known that the Chief was fluent in both languages, that he had a way with words.

  I explained that it was possible to speak well and not be able to write, that Rachael may have been responsible for the earlier well-written pieces.

  He persisted. Why could it not be in code?

  Are you able to decode it? I asked.

  No, but I could ask people in security who have expertise in that kind of thing.

  So, saying what he ought not to have said to an outsider, he revealed the level of his involvement, deliberately, without signalling the act, and I knew that there was more to it, that things were not as they should be, and waited not without fear for what would come next, for it went without saying that such a breach of loyalty could not be without consequence.

  I insisted on the influence of an amanuensis. Except, of course, that the Chief’s slippage into fantasy also makes his syntax slip accordingly, often introducing a code-switch, by which I simply mean the movement between English and Afrikaans.

  I do not overlook the effects of senility. Or the effects of habitual communion with God.

  Communion with God brought many miracles, explained Ouma Ragel, fussing about her pots and pans. Unlike Great-ouma Antjie’s close, round hut, where little Davie was drugged with wood smoke, the cooking shelter, still round but attached to a new rectangular brick house, was roofless. Here a fire crackled under the three-legged pot, and Ouma’s stories of the Chief were flavoured with the rich smell of mealies, beans, and marrowbones that simmered all day long.

  The Paramount Chief had written a million letters to Queen Victoria to show that good woman how her subjects, in the bright light of Africa, had succumbed to the darkness within their hearts. This civilisation thing that Europeans had brought along was on the whole, he had come to believe, like the human heart, a two-sided thing, not altogether bad—even if their hymn-singing was nothing to write home about—but it was the instability, the eggshell fragility of the great idea that made him shake his head in disappointment. Why did it sway so drunkenly between light and dark, unheedful of the cracks revealed for all the world to see? What could be done to preserve the high ideals of civilisation? Le Fleur, bursting with pious energy, had declared himself willing to take on the task. Was it the heat, he asked, that made her subjects arrogant and bad mannered, ungrateful and blatantly uncivil towards their hosts? The good queen had sighed and called for vinegar and brown paper, for truly the problem hurt her head, and thus she had been unable to reply. For King Edward and his role in the prison miracle the Chief had a special regard, and thus high hopes of a solution. He had, after all, approved the presentation of the country’s finest diamond, the Cullinan, as a birthday present for the king. But the new monarch, burdened with his inheritance—the multitude of colonies, his crown impossibly heavy with the Cullinan square brilliant, the weight of the Star of Africa in the sceptre such that he could barely lift it—was similarly swathed in the traditional vinegar and brown paper and thus could not muster a reply to the numerous letters.

  Lord Milner was furious. What right had the upstart in rough leather breeches to write to royalty? Why did these people not busy themselves with practical things? Would Le Fleur not be better employed seeing to those filthy round huts that no God would risk entering until they have been straightened out into rectangular dwellings? Milner had had enough of Griqua troublemaking. The governor should not have to put up with representations from any Tom, Dick, or Harry; no, he would not condescend to see the man.

  But, said Andrew Abraham Stockenstrom le Fleur, this time standing six feet tall in a fine dark suit, he was the Griqua chief, heir to Adam Kok, and in the sharpest of sharp letters he forced that haughty man to receive him. Finding himself at last in Lord Milner’s room, into which a young man in a gold-braided jacket had shown him, Le Fleur proudly declined a seat but paced up and down, examining his peculiar surroundings. There he saw, through the contemptuous eye of the liveried attendant, the loftiness of civilisation realised in a high ceiling and elaborate plaster moulding. An intricate ceiling rose carried the weight of a chandelier from which crystal light bounced in the late morning and decorative thistles bristled along the gilt-edged cornices. The pale blue of the walls was covered with portraits of empire builders. In a recess there was a fine engraving of an early Cape scene with slaves going merrily about their business—the only cheer among those austere, ornate pictures—but he averted his eyes from such levity. It was the great men of power, executed in fine dark oils, with their bright white collars, wearing their grandness on their painted sleeves, that held him to attention.

  The Chief was thus occupied, leisurely pacing the picture gallery, whilst Lord Milner kicked his heels and drummed his fingers through the minutes he needed to let pass so as to keep the upstart waiting. Under the watchful eye of the young attendant guarding the silver knickknacks, Le Fleur found himself mesmerised by those Argus-eyed walls, drawn into the optical tricks of white collars spinning into the dark paint, until, to steady his palpitating heart, he placed himself among the painted men of power. Instead of thinking of the arguments he had rehearsed all year, he displaced a minor colonial figure to settle himself in the gilt frame where, arranged between two dignitaries, he became yet another image in dark oils with a stark white collar. As the minutes ticked by he saw the advantage of being somewhat to the left where the light fell more kindly, and so boldly supplanted Cecil John Rhodes himself. Now, frowning comfortably in his frame, he saw himself as chief of all coloured people under the banner of Griquas, for why would people choose to carry such an indecent name when they could all be Griquas? And so it came about that Lord Milner found him charming and malleable, meekened with power-pride; the vulgar documents of land claims and petitions remained folded in an inner pocket.

  When Le Fleur left, a peacock, waiting on the lawn, raised and spread its jewelled tail in which he saw his own green eyes reflected a hundred times. Then the creature, crying pitifully, steered him down the avenue, so that the man was forced by that Argus-eyed fan to walk backwards, all the way down, along borders of blue-beaked strelitzias, down to the public road where his old Ford waited.

  A sellout, David is forced
to admit, that’s what he became. All those lofty ideals, pshewt, he whistled, lost in their own grand and godly rhetoric. No, I have some sympathy for our comrades who turn the wrong way; it’s not easy to resist a meal when you’re hungry, not through week after week of not being able to feed your children. But they don’t kid themselves that they’re doing the right thing; they understand their own treachery, don’t turn it into an ideology. Now take our great man: the Chief continued to believe in himself; he had no idea that he was betraying his own ideals, falling into the hands of the policymakers. In fact, he offered them Apartheid, reinterpreted his own words to suit a new belief in separate development. Siss, he said, pulling a face, a separate homeland for a separate Griqua race! He should have been kept in prison; nothing like prison for keeping one’s ideas sound, for keeping the politician’s hands clean, he echoed.

  So you have no sympathy with him?

  Of course not. Why do you think I’ve given my life fighting for a nonracial democracy?

  DULCIE and the events surrounding her cannot be cast as story. I have come to accept this view of David’s, especially since he has been more cooperative of late.

  There is no progression in time, no beginning and no end. Only a middle that is infinitely repeated, that remains in an eternal, inescapable present. This is why David wants her simply outlined, wants her traced into his story as a recurring imprint in order to outwit her fixedness in time, in order for her to go on, to proceed, as in the stories he sometimes finds time to tell his children: and then and then and then.… Thus, as a result of doing this or that, a jewel is found, a frog turns into a prince, a maiden restored to her true love. But for Dulcie, whose life is swathed in secrets, such resolution is not possible; the thin anecdotes, the sorry clutch of hints and innuendoes, do not lead to anything.