by Andre Brink
The whole bundle of offerings retrieved from Heitsi-Eibib’s grave, wrapped in her bronze-colored top dress, I held out to the woman, explaining at the same time that as soon as her menfolk returned I would offer them a full bride price for her. But of all my talk she appeared to understand as little as her companions had before; and if my ghai apron hadn’t still been straining with urgency, I might well have given up trying to communicate with a woman from a tribe that didn’t even possess the power of speech. Round and round the shell I moved, trying to catch a glimpse of her face, but she kept on ducking out of sight. So in the end I decided that if language proved fruitless I should try another approach. I began to coo like a dove, I called like a bokmakierie, twittered like a weaver bird, warbled like a piet-my-vrou; I imitated the cries of the jackal and hyena, I grumbled like a lion. But she paid no attention. Kept on turning her head away. Until, at my wits’ end, I cautiously laid a hand on her shoulder to calm her down. Which turned out to be the wrong decision, for she uttered another of her shrieks and grabbed the rowing-stick that was lying on the floor of her shell and started belaboring my head and shoulders.
It wasn’t just because this annoyed me, but because I knew there is only one remedy for a woman in that state, that I snatched the rowing-stick from her hands and gave her a swipe to the side of her head.
She made a moaning sound, and fell down.
No matter what I did, I couldn’t bring her around again.The only solution was to revive her with fresh water. I heaved her on my shoulder and carried her past the rocks to the mouth of the stream, where I laid her gently in the cold water, her head on the bank. I’d never seen anything quite as beautiful as that, and from close by too. Almost involuntarily my hands followed the path of my eyes to convince themselves that she was really true, this smooth creature, this woman.
That was how they found me, the hunters, when they returned from the bush. At first I thought it was their way of shouting greetings when I heard them screaming from a distance, and I gleefully waved back at them, laughing with joy, taking in one hand the thing that was standing all by itself so that they could see my intentions were honorable, considering that by that time they’d been to the bushes with so many of our women.
But to my amazement I heard once more that thunder-clap coming from a clear sky, seeing at the same time smoke wafting from the mouth of one of their kieries; I felt a jerking movement in my arm and suddenly I was covered in blood.
It is difficult, five hundred years later, to give a clear account of what happened. A matter of memory. We had never seen guns or shooting before, remember. Those of us who’d gone with the hunters had witnessed something of it earlier in the day, as they reported later; but I’d been waiting innocently on the beach, so I had no idea at all of what had happened when the ball struck me. That it could have been much worse I realized afterward when I was told how Khusab, remembering what had happened to springbok and wildebeest on the hunt, had tried to snatch the gun away from the leader of the expedition just as he was taking aim. Khusab, the son of T’kuni, the son of Gaun, whose mother had been one of the San. The two of us, as I have said before, he and I, had grown up together, had dug out tubers and roots and wild onions together—baru and kambro and njaba—had learned together to shoot arrows and make fire and herd sheep, had hunted together, had hidden side by side at the edge of the clay pit to spy on the giggling girls as they stretched the inner lips of their entrances to form lobes as long and red as the gills of a wild cock, a sight for a man’s eyes to revel in, and silky to the touch. When the strangers had first begun to barter, offering us their pernicious firewater, Khusab had led the revolt against me as I have already, sadly, told. But on that day it was he who saved my life.
From the moment that first shot died away there was turmoil on the beach. Some of the k’onkwa started shooting blindly with their guns, while our men retaliated with bows and arrows; some of them picked up stones to throw—that reflex still seen in our townships half a millennium later; others tore into the strangers to wrestle them to the ground. The whole beach was teeming with shouting, fighting bodies. A thunderstorm of shots, five or six of our people tumbling down, their bodies jerking and twitching in the contortions of death; while two of the Beard Men fell under our stones. I shouted at Khusab. With two or three of the others he came running to me to give a hand with the naked woman, who was by now scratching and biting and thrashing about to get back to her people. We dragged her off to the thickets beyond the dunes while the din of the battle raged on. More shots, more men falling. It was as if Gaunab the Black One himself had been let loose among us. And all the while blood was streaming down my shoulder until I was red from head to toe.
From the far side of the bay our women and children had heard the noise and came running home. That was when it really went dark inside me, for I saw the strangers taking aim at them too. Several of them fell down, small children among them, and there was nothing at all we could do to stop them.
We scurried into the bushes, dragging the wild woman with us. If those Beard Men had known anything about tracking there would have been little hope for us; we left a spoor of broken branches and blood and drag marks as far as we went. But they were either stupid or scared, or both. We were forced after a while to tie up the woman’s mouth with thongs, though it made my heart contract to see her like that—didn’t she realize I meant her no harm?—and at last her moaning stopped.
Deep into the euphorbia forest we went, not daring to go near the huts, as the k’onkwa already knew that route by heart; until at last it seemed safe to call a halt so that old Khamab could attend to me. He was our t’gai aob, our wise old medicine man, who could converse as easily with the Sobo khoin, the People of the Shadows, as with us. He was older than any tortoise, and there was nothing he didn’t know. The blood that was still flowing from the wound he caught in the horn of a buck. For fear that the k’onkwa’s poison in the wound might be as bad as that of a snake, he pounded a dried lizard and mixed that with thornwood ash to rub into the wound, then sealed it up with goat fat sprinkled with finely rubbed dried leaves. Into a calabash of water he stirred ground porcupine intestines, which he forced me to drink.
Only then did he speak, softly, so that no one else could hear, his voice rough and grumbling with contained anger.
“Why did you bring the woman?”
“I want her.”
“She is not one of us.”
“I must have her.”
“Have you seen the evil you brought on us today? Isn’t that enough for you yet, T’kama?”
“Khamab, I know it is a terrible thing that has happened. But I must have her. Tsui-Goab sent her to me.”
“Who are you to take Tsui-Goab’s name so lightly on our lips?”
“I know it was He.”
“And suppose this isn’t the end of it? Suppose it is just a beginning?”
“She’s mine, Khamab. I cannot give her up now.”
“This may be a thing of blood and years.”
“So be it then. I must have her.”
Still grumbling under his breath, he left me. At the other side of the fire, where the darkness began, I saw the woman sitting on the ground, leaned back against a trunk. The food the other women brought her she hadn’t touched with hand or mouth. Just sat there staring into the fire.
“Khois,” I whispered. “Woman.”
She didn’t look up. Perhaps she hadn’t even heard me.
“Khois.” More loudly this time.
Still no movement. There I was, at this side of the fire, rampant with desire. But it was more than desire. An urge to be with her, forever, through days and years of the heat of summer and the cold of winter, hard earth, springbok stampedes, dust, clay, illness and suffering and the birth of children, moon dances and the monotonous drone of the gurah, plains, mountains, bushes, day and night, life and death.
I touche
d my shoulder. The bleeding had stopped. But there was something in me knew that old Khamab had been right. This was not the end of the blood.
4
In which an answer is given to a question which must have been smoldering in the reader’s mind for some time now, to wit: Given the anxious circumstances in which they spent that night, the emotional condition of the woman from the sea, the nature of the narrator’s wound and the size of his member—did he have intercourse with her?
No.
5
In which a solution to a tricky situation is temporarily postponed while the narrator proceeds to describe the decisive events of the following day
Dazed from lack of sleep, we got up the next morning, knowing we had to make preparations for what lay ahead. Before the day was out the matter of the Beard Men, the k’onkwa, would have to be settled one way or another. There was not much talk in our ranks. I could easily have reproached my people for not having heeded my warnings from the beginning by keeping away from the strangers; but then, not without justification, they might just as easily have replied that nothing had gone wrong before I had become involved with the woman. It was better for all of us to concentrate, not on what lay behind us, but on what was to be done.
As it happened, the matter was resolved much more easily than anyone had ever expected. A few of our men, sent out to survey the beach, returned to report that the strangers were burying their dead. Soon after came word that they were on their way to our huts, each man with his thunderstick. The women broke into loud wails and ululations when they heard the news, but I ordered them to be silent. Leaving the white woman to their care, with a small band of older men for their protection, the rest of us moved swiftly into the bushes along the narrow path to the beach. The rest was almost ludicrously easy. An arrow shot from the bush makes no sound at all: by the time you notice it your legs are already buckling and you are left with a burning spot in your back, or wherever it struck you. The first man did not even cry out. Perhaps that increased their fear. The second, hit with less accuracy, began to scream like a wounded baboon. Some of the others were ready to turn tail, and their leaders had to prod them forward with their guns. But after the fourth there was a stampede back to the beach.
My men were eager to ransack the bodies of the fallen, but I stopped them. Not a patch of foreign cloth, not a span of copper, not a feather from a hat should ever be seen in our midst again.
Khusab and I remained behind to keep watch; the others returned to the huts. From behind the front row of dunes we saw the shells rowing a few hundred yards into the sea, where they drew in the sticks, bobbing about in silence as if they couldn’t make up their minds about coming or going. Only after a very long time, when the sun had already passed us overhead, two of the boats came back. Warily the Beard Men began to cross the beach. Khusab wanted us to call in our men again, but I held him back. The two of us were enough. We remained hidden in the underbrush close to the path, in which the seamen proceeded with great caution, stopping in their tracks every few yards to check the surroundings. It was soon evident that they had come to collect the bodies of their fallen comrades. But just to make sure they would never return to our coast we shot a few arrows into the sand the moment they reached the beach again, staggering under the weight of their dead. This time we did not mean to kill them, only to warn them that we were watching. They got the message.
After they had rowed off I sent Khusab to call our people. We were all assembled on the beach when the four great waterbirds in the distance puffed up their billowing white feathers and slowly sailed away. The woman was with us, her ankles tied together. As the birds moved away she crumpled wretchedly into a small bundle on the sand. I kneeled beside her and untied her legs.
“You can stay with us now,” I told her.
She made no movement.
“I won’t do you any harm,” I assured her. “All I want is for you to be with me. You’re mine now.”
She still made no movement.
The others began to bury our dead. It was no pleasant task as the vultures had been there before us. The first they went for were the children, one of them a baby in an abba skin.
All the while I remained beside the woman, until the work was done. The others were preparing to go home. I motioned to them to go, the woman wouldn’t try to escape any longer. For a long time after they had left I tried to comfort her and raise her spirits, but she didn’t even seem to be aware of my presence.
In the late afternoon, both dejected and annoyed, I took her back to our place and handed her over to the women. All by myself I returned to the beach, and in the red glow of the sunset I went up the hill to Heitsi-Eibib’s cairn, where I left new gifts for the great hunter.
One could still make out, if you stared very keenly and used a bit of imagination, four dark specks in the furthest distance of the sea, disappearing sometimes behind the swell, then appearing once more, then gone again. On the beach the tide rose slowly and meticulously, covering with foam the tracks of the people who had been there, the dragging marks of the dead, until nothing at all remained. It was as if my world had been restored to me. The strangeness had been peeled away. Still and brimful the sea lay before me, as calm as the face of a woman telling a lie.
6
In which the day breaks
Looking back across five centuries I find it hard to recall a particular morning, and I cannot guarantee that it was then as I’m telling it now. But here is my attempt, with the advantages of hindsight:
I can see myself sitting there throughout the night, leaning against the bare trunk the seamen had planted in Heitsi-Eibib’s cairn, my wounded shoulder growing painful in the severe night cold, throbbing with angry life, drooping like the broken wing of a bird. The stars passing overhead, the upside-down moon, the glowing embers of Tsaob stretched across the sky. In the predawn the twittering in the thickets, and in the first streak of light a row of black geese in the gray sky. They must have noticed that winter was setting in. Of the seabirds that had brought the Beard Men to our shore there was no sight at all. Not a single footprint in the sand. A bushbuck barking beyond the first euphorbias. For the rest, only me sitting there, caught in the great fist of the land.
The woman. I’m thinking about the woman. When I get up from here, soon, she will be there, mine now. We have passed the moment when choice was possible. Yesterday I might have let her go, I might have decided to return her to her people. (Would they have taken her back? But that was part of something else.) I could have let her go and freed myself of her. Now she is there. Now I have taken up the burden of her existence in my conscience—this is how I register it now, whether or not I was fully conscious of it then—and with her, so much more besides: generations, and faith, and violence, an entire future, life, war, hope.
We cannot stay here. This shore has been violated. We must pack up and trek away into the remote interior.
An early-morning breeze has sprung up. I can feel the hill yielding to its gentle insistence, can feel us drifting slowly through space, the hill with its single arm stump outstretched, I with my drooping wing, traveling into the day, high above the lapping sea. It is as if the world is changed into song, not the twittering of birds or the hadedas waking up or the geese squawking, not the gulls, but the world itself singing in its deepest darkest voice, a rumble deeper than the roar of lions or the thundering hooves of trekking wildebeest, a singing of the earth and its rocks and hills and thickets and mountains, from throat and mouth and intestines and bones and rampant cocks and the secret depths of women, a rumble ringing in my own ears. Listening to it I accept my land, I sing my land, in my tongue and throat I give it sound, I name it. I say: wood, and turn to wood. I say: mountain, hill, rock, river, sea, and become each of them in turn. I say lion, jackal, mockingbird, partridge, kiewiet, I say kombro, I say dagga, I say kierie and kaross, I say khuseti, I say t’gau, I say k’hrab, I say k’arahup,
I say beetle and fly and field mouse, I say vulture and carrion, sun and moon, day and night, Tsui-Goab and Gaunab, I say creature, I say man, I say woman. I say future unfolding, horizons breaking, trees exploding, suns erupting from rocks, women giving birth to monsters and giants, fishes playing the t’koi-t’koi, guinea fowl snaring antelopes, snakes carrying firestones on their forehead, Heitsi-Eibib dying time and time again and rising every time from stone, I say plains turning into flesh, I say blood and bleeding, I fill the day with names, I inscribe the plains like a sheet of paper, I say laughter, I say weeping, I say death and birth, I say gazelles in a calabash and ostriches in curdled milk, I say falling stars and chameleons and hares with split upper lips and lice carrying messages from the waning moon and water snakes devouring themselves and fat-tailed sheep sailing upside down through the sky. I say everything that is still to happen and everything no one has ever thought up, I say a terrible I and a fearsome you, and in the sound of my own shout I walk into the day that breaks open before me like an egg from which impossible new words are hatched.
7
In which fine feathers fail to make a fine bird
The others were already making preparations for the trek when I reached our encampment. No one had discussed it beforehand: like the migrating geese we all simply knew, simultaneously, that we could not remain in a place where such things had happened. The land lay waiting for us, and it was vast.
All the way down the rocky hill, across the beach and over the dunes and along the path through the undergrowth—here and there on the slopes of low hills the aloes already beginning to glow red-hot as if preparing to set the place on fire—I was worrying about the woman. How would I ever tame her? She was clearly wild with fear. Another direct approach was out of the question after she’d taken to her heels the very first time I had undone my ghai apron. (And to think I’d done it only to reassure her, perhaps to impress her: was it not the greatest compliment a man could pay a woman?)
