by Andre Brink
“I could have been dead today,” Khusab said that evening after he’d got his voice back.
“Don’t complain,” said old Khamab. “You should be glad it was only your legs. If it had been T’kama, his whole future would have been scalded.”
Neither he nor any of the others felt like discussing the event. There are things one should rather leave alone. But if old Khamab had thought that silence would help the tribe forget more quickly he was sadly mistaken. For day after day the misfortunes continued, and each time Khusab was involved.
The next thing that happened was to his wife, who at that time was expecting their second child. (The first was about thigh high, and people were beginning to wonder why the next one was taking so long, for Khusab was a strong man and his wife both hale and willing.) She was so healthy she could outrun a hare if she had to. But all of a sudden, one night, she was taken with the cramps and the child came out. Dead. She too nearly died, and she was left so weak that the people were forced to camp there for a whole week. That gave the jackals and night walkers time to discover the kraal of thorn branches, and soon there were losses among the sheep. What made it eerie was that, even though watchmen were put out at night, the sheep disappeared from right under their eyes without a bleat or a whimper.
“These are no ordinary jackals,” old Khamab was finally forced to admit. “Must be the thas jackal. Those are the dead coming back in the shape of animals to plague us.”
When at long last Khusab’s wife had recovered sufficiently for the trek to resume, they stuck to the foothills of a long mountain range where there was enough grazing. But then came the rocks. On a clear blue day, not a breath of wind, only a single koo bird writing its great silent curves in the sky as it watched the plains below, a number of heavy boulders came tumbling down from the tallest cliff above them, thundering down the slopes, tearing loose other rocks, sending sparks flying so that the whole mountain was heavy with the sulfur smell of lightning; and the people got such a scare they didn’t know which way to run. The whole tribe might well have been wiped out, together with all their cattle and possessions, but as it turned out Khusab was the only victim. By rights he should have been dead, but at the last moment old Khamab grabbed hold of him and pulled him away, so only one of his legs was struck.
That night he suffered much pain, and old Khamab took him into his own hut to look after him. Which made things easier for the hyena. Got right into the shelter where Khusab’s wife and child were sleeping, and dragged off the screaming boy. By the time the other people came running the hyena had disappeared into the night. If it was a hyena. Not even a marrow bone was left behind.
Anxious to move on, in spite of his wounded leg, Khusab urged his people to cover as much ground as possible the next day, after they had sprinkled fresh water over their encampment to discourage the night walkers and the Sobo khoin. Whether it was because of their great haste or because he had such trouble hobbling on one leg is difficult to tell, but late in the afternoon Khusab had his encounter with the snake. A cobra. Before he could properly take aim with his kierie the fangs had perforated the thick flesh of his calf.
Old Khamab immediately came running up with his knife, pushed Khusab to the ground, made a deep incision in his calf, and started sucking and spitting out the venom, sucking and spitting. Afterward he rubbed gaib from his horn into the cuts, powdered leaves and pounded roots, chameleon, bat, tinktinkie, shrew, covered with an ointment of grease and sweat and buchu from his own body. But Khusab continued to writhe with pain. Once more Khamab began to suck and spit, but all to no avail; and at the first light of day Khusab seemed to be on the verge of dying. As a terrible last resort, old Khamab ordered the most drastic remedy of all. A sheep was taken from the flock and skinned with great caution, taking care not to draw too much blood as the animal had to stay alive throughout the process, its bleating enough to cause the strongest man’s legs to buckle. In spite of the almost human whimpering the knives continued relentlessly until the skin was stripped entirely from the animal. The whole tribe gathered to watch, knowing that if the sheep—reduced by now to a whitish, bluish bleating carcass—managed to get up and stagger off, there was hope: and scouring the veld in the direction the skinned animal had taken, one would be sure to find the cause of the evil. But if it refused to get up and remained where it was, it was all over for Khusab.
Only in this instance the naked sheep neither staggered off nor stayed. Struggling to its feet, it started turning round and round, like a person in a dagga stupor, or drunk with honey beer. Until at last it sank back to the ground, bleating pitifully, tears running from its eyes.
“What does this mean, Khamab?” the people asked.
“I don’t know.” It was the first time in his long life our old t’gai aob was forced to admit defeat. “I honestly don’t know. He didn’t walk and he didn’t stay where he was either. My only advice is that we must turn back and fetch T’kama. We must keep on the move day and night without stopping to rest, until we have found our chu’que again.”
“What about his woman?” asked Khusab, still groaning in agony.
“If he wants to keep her she must come. All I know is that Gaunab will destroy us all if we leave T’kama where we left him.”
13
In which two birds prepare to die in the wilderness
That, at least, was how they afterward related the story of their aborted trek to me. While they were away I had been working on a shelter for the woman and me until we could decide what to do next. Like a weaver bird I built us a nest; like a weaver bird she kept on tearing it apart until it was completely to her liking. At night I kept a fire going to keep off the lions and other marauders of the dark, because they seemed determined not to leave us alone. During the daytime I was usually so tired from lack of sleep that I could barely stand on my two feet. And when one morning I lay down to rest in a spot of shade I fell into such a deep sleep that I was totally unaware of the woman’s going off to forage for food. By that time there was nothing left of the small supply the tribe had given us.
If only she had first brought back the berries to ask for my advice, but I suppose she was so famished that when she came upon the shrub it never even occurred to her that they might be poisonous.
When I found her many hours later her stomach was emptying itself in both directions with such violence that she had almost lost consciousness. As I lifted up her head her eyes turned upside down. The berries in her vomit and her excrement—some chewed, others still whole—told me all I needed to know. Old Khamab would have known a remedy, I did not. I picked her up and carried her back to our nest. She was still groaning, but very faintly, and from the dead weight with which she lay in my arms I knew she was dying. I couldn’t even speak to her: the words we had begun to exchange were too poor, too clumsy, for what I had to say. I wanted to tear out my guts like a wounded baboon. I wanted to scream like a thorn bush screaming at the sun. I wanted to bleed like an aloe bleeding in early winter. But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even cry.
I stumbled into the bush in search of something I could not even name, scared to death at what I knew for sure I would find on my return. Yet I could not leave her there either. Even if it meant that I would have to watch over her body and keep away the vultures and the scavengers until it had decayed completely, returned to earth; or until I too was dead.
When I arrived back at our nest, Khamab and my people had returned.
14
In which the reader learns of the woman’s incurable wound, as the tribe continues to wander ever more deeply into the valley of the shadow of death
Blue-bush roots and blue-bush twigs, mixed with powdered poison thorn and boiled in water, was what he gave her to drink, followed by a dose of dassie urine. Rubbed the still warm dung of goats into her stomach to ease the pain. Then added a good pinch of dried porcupine stomach to quench the fire in her insides. And the foll
owing day, when she was still deathly pale and trembling, he gave her regular doses of wild geraniums that had grown in red soil very far away. We stayed there until at last she was back on her feet; and all the while I kept her in the nest I had built for her, well away from the other people because the illness had made her t’nau. Only after she had completely recovered could the women wash her clean again, and then we all returned to where they had left Khusab for dead.
Except he wasn’t dead at all. Sat waiting for us, all smiles, completely healed and strong again, with a calabash of honey at his side, and the carcass of a duiker strung up over the fire. A lion had brought it to him, he said. That sounded like Heitsi-Eibib’s handiwork.
“Now all we need is for you to succeed with the woman,” old Khamab told me. “Then the tribe can prosper again.”
But succeed I didn’t. No matter how wiry and thin I had become from all our wanderings and suffering, that bird in my loins continued to grow. For a while I kept it tied to my knee with a leather thong to keep it from swinging and slapping about; then to my calf, but still it went on growing, until I was getting worried it would get trampled underfoot or trip me up while walking. So I made a loop and tied the end to my waist with a riem. Bigger than the cobra that had attacked Khusab. And all for nothing; a useless, in fact obnoxious, appendage.
I remembered the story our old people used to tell about the first man on earth, the first khoib made by Tsui-Goab; and how he’d become so lonely that Tsui-Goab was forced to make him a wife, hewn from stone like himself. But because he had never seen a woman before, he had no idea of how to deal with her, so they simply lived together, side by side. Then, one day, he came upon a dry tree in the veld and decided to break branches from it for their fire; but the woman offered to climb it instead. And as she took up position above him, legs astride on two sturdy branches to start breaking firewood, he looked up and had the fright of his life. That gaping wound between her sloping thighs, which he had never noticed before. He took to his heels like a whirlwind across the plains, weeping and lamenting as he went. Until he nearly ran right off the edge of the world. But he was stopped just in time by Tsui-Goab, who asked him: “What is the matter?” And the man said: “A terrible thing has happened. My wife is dying. She is suffering from the most terrible wound you have ever seen.” “Where is this wound?” asked Tsui-Goab. And the man said, “Between her thighs.” Tsui-Goab clicked his tongue and said, “Tsk, tsk. Don’t you understand, man? It is on account of that wound that I gave her to you and it is for the sake of that wound that you must care for her and love her.”
Which was fine for him. But there I was with that woman at my side, the most beautiful woman Tsui-Goab had ever made, yet her wound had to remain untended because I was too big, and growing bigger every day. And if what old Khamab had said was true, that we would only prosper again once I had succeeded with her, that explains why our life, our trek, remained so hazardous. She had recovered from her illness, as had Khusab, but our struggles and sufferings continued unabated as we moved further and further, the mountains on our left and the sea far to the right, until we had passed the furthest places we had seen before.
From afar it had always seemed a fertile region, one green fold upon the other; but it turned out different. The streams were drying up; many days we trekked without a drop to drink. And because this was strange territory we could not, as on other journeys, rely on ostrich eggs and calabashes of water once buried there for future use. Neither were there tsammas in those parts. Only, few and far between, roots and acrid, fat-leaved shrubs; and sometimes we had to spread our karosses on the earth at night to catch the dew. But it was never plentiful, and animals and people were wasting thin.
As far as we went there were predators on our heels. No matter how many precautions we took, from one full moon to the next there would invariably be losses of sheep taken by leopards and hyenas and jackals. And they were getting bolder by the day as they grew used to our presence. In the middle of the day a leopard once dragged a small shepherd from his flock; his little comrades were ashen with fear when they came running with the news.
We had no choice but to organize a hunt. A whole day was set aside to ready our weapons, tuning and greasing the bowstrings, honing the arrowheads and dipping them in strong new poison. All the men set out together. It wasn’t long before we found the spotted beast in a thicket. Khusab took aim. The arrow lodged deeply in the creature’s shoulder, and with a roar it came storming from its hiding place, rolling and thrashing about trying to dislodge the arrow, then suddenly jumped up and made straight for us. A hailstorm of arrows, but he either dodged them or slapped them away. Not one stuck. One of the men went down under the leopard, his throat severed before we could move in for the kill. The beautifully marked skin we brought home with us, but no one was proud or cheerful, for it was a good man we had lost.
Soon afterward, as we sheltered in the mountains, we were set upon by a band of Sonkwas. Not a sound to warn us. Three of our men killed on the spot, at least half of the sheep driven off in the night, two young women dragged away. Once more we had to set out on a trek of many days and nights, without daring to call a halt, to get as far away as possible. But which way to go? Not even old Khamab knew the answer any longer. It became the kind of journey where one stayed on the move for the sake of moving.
And still I had the woman to worry about. By that time there were more and more words we could speak to each other, my Khoi words in exchange for those she had brought from far across the seas.1 It was still not enough for us to sit down and have a proper conversation, but we had come a long way from mere silence, or from gesturing. Not that it was any help in what one might term our relationship. Every new attempt at entering her added alarmingly to the girth and length of my member. Soon I was able to wind it twice around my waist, like a hefty belt, the end tucked in. Which was reasonably comfortable, except when it got it into its obtuse head to stand up, because then it would break out of the loose knot I had tied and jump to attention, invariably hitting me like a lethal club between the eyes.
And still the misfortune continued. Children dying of illnesses no one had ever diagnosed and impervious to Khamab’s medicine and magic. Twins born, to be exposed in the veld to appease the evil they represented. Predators. Sheep and cattle dying mysteriously. Drought. Hunger. Unbearable thirst. Inexplicable quarrels breaking out among the people. In one kierie fight two men were badly wounded, and afterward no one could explain what had caused it in the first place. Women flying into a rage and attacking each other with nails and teeth.
From time to time we would enter the territory of a black tribe, not yellow-brown like us; once or twice they were hostile, but most allowed us to stay. However, they were also suffering from the drought. They had known dry periods before, they told us, but never anything as severe as this. They had no food to share with us. In some places we were chased away like enemies because we threatened their meager food supplies; and they kept us away from their water. Which caused more sheep to die. On and on it went. And it got worse: for soon it was no longer a simple matter of animals and drought and sickness, but something terrifying and quite unheard of.
We first became aware of it when some of the children came home with stories of people they had met in the veld: people they had recognized. Recognized? Yes, indeed, they said excitedly, the people who had been killed in our great battle with the Beard Men on the beach. We scolded them for telling lies; when they came home the following day with the same kind of story we thrashed them until they could neither sit nor stand. But that same evening, beside our campfire, we saw those people with our own eyes: circling round and round us, keeping just beyond the edge of the light. I recognized them myself. And from then on Gaunab ran amok quite openly among us. Night walkers came into our temporary huts to suck the men dry and ride the women and terrify the children. Sobo khoin, Shadow People. The dun-colored ones. As if all the graves in that vast land
had opened to vomit up their dead. Trees suddenly bursting into flames at night. Rocks breaking open to let out liquid fire. Snakes crossing our tracks and sprouting wings to fly off through the deadwood trees and disappear into the searing white light of the sun. Never before had we lived through times like those.
My only source of sweetness was the woman. We had begun to multiply our few words, to use them with new and different meanings, so that by now we could lie together at night and talk like people, whether in her strange language or in mine. We would share a handful of food. In the dark we would huddle together, even though it had to be back to back, or with her behind me, as my thing was too big for me to snuggle up against her: moreover, it would keep on twitching and jumping about so much that sometimes in my sleep it would drag me right out of the hut as if it had a terrible life of its own. And she with that incurable wound.
I was sorry for her. After all, it wasn’t her fault. So why should she take my condition so much to heart? Or was there another reason? Yet for what other reason would she have begun to work so hard to make life bearable for me, whereas I should have been the one to care for her? She rubbed my bad shoulder. (Especially when it turned winter again the pain was sometimes very bad.) When there was something to eat she would share her portion with me. And now and then, when the desire became unbearable, she would try to comfort that intimidating bird-thing with her hands; then it would shoot up against the roof of the hut, where the jet would unfurl like a huge thistle, to rain its white wetness over us. But that was as far as we could go.
Perhaps it was the urge to be of use or help that drove her one day to kill a hare with a stone. We had all gone out into the veld in search of something—anything—to eat; and when we came back she was roasting the hare on the coals. I had never seen her look so proud. Licking a sliver of succulent flesh from a fragile bone she broke off a leg and held it out to me, calling happily:
