by Andre Brink
“T’kama, come and eat.”
We stood back in horror. She couldn’t understand what was going on. It was, inevitably, old Khamab who finally grabbed a calabash of water to pour the precious liquid over her, and her fire, and the hare, while covering his eyes in the crook of an elbow.
“Woman!” he shouted, his reedy old man’s voice breaking with shock and rage. “Do you really want to destroy us once and for all? Don’t you know the hare is the messenger of death?”
When we came home from the veld the following afternoon the woman was gone.
1. Portuguese? For the life of me I can’t remember.
15
Which features a failed attempt at copulation, with tragic consequences
By that time we had behind us a trek of many months through a large area of barren plains and brittle grass; but now we had entered a mountainous region where it was all too easy to get lost in great folds and knuckles and the dense virgin forest of deep kloofs. Impossible to follow a track for any distance. I was convinced that she’d got lost: gone, perhaps, in search of food, perhaps to atone in some way for the evil she had unwittingly brought upon us by killing the hare; and unable to find her way back through the undergrowth. More frightening possibilities—that the Shadow People had abducted her, or that Gaunab had changed himself into an eagle or a leopard to carry her away, knowing how mortally that would hurt me—I refused to consider. There were no traces of blood or struggle—not that this necessarily meant anything, as I knew only too well that Gaunab or the People from Beyond can come and go without leaving the slightest telltale sign.
In the little light remaining before sunrise the others reluctantly helped me to look for her, moving in ever wider circles around our camp. I knew I couldn’t count on them for much; they were all angry about what the woman had done, even if they were cautious not to say too much in front of me; but at least they went with me until the dark came down.
“We shall look for her again at sunrise,” I announced as we turned back.
Khamab glanced askance at me, hobbling along on his grasshopper legs. “It’s useless, T’kama. She won’t survive this night. It is too cold and she didn’t even take a kaross with her. And then there are the animals.”
I refused to answer, afraid I might crack up before him. But when I reached my hut there was a grasshopper chirping in the thatch; and in the night I heard an owl, which meant there were night walkers at large. What made it unbearable was the relief I perceived in the others. The way they saw it the evil that had dogged us from the start had finally skulked away.
Some of the people were eager to move on the following morning; and when I insisted we first resume the search, the thunderstorm that had been brooding among us for so long, like a lightning bird crouching in its anthill, suddenly broke loose.
“It’s Tsui-Goab himself who took her away so that we can have peace of mind again,” they said. “We’ve been disobedient to him for long enough. Let the woman be, and let us go.”
“We shall search for her first.”
“Then let those who feel like it help you. The rest of us are going.”
“You will do as I say, I am the chu’que.”
“It is you yourself who have turned away from us.”
They were clutching their kieries under their karosses. I could not face another fight among ourselves. So with a sigh I turned away. “Go then. But this thing will bring sorrow to you all.”
It seemed to be moving toward a peaceful resolution. But when they began to round up some of the cattle and sheep to drive off with them, I intervened: “If you want to go, then go. But the animals belong to the tribe.”
“We’re part of the tribe.”
“The tribe is where I am.”
“Then try to stop us.”
And so it happened that for the first time in our history a full-scale war broke out among ourselves; and all for nothing, owing to an act of treachery: while the battle was still raging, the deserters surreptitiously sent some of the children to open the kraal and turn out the sheep. Before this led to even more senseless carnage we had to give up and let the traitors go. Worst of all was the suspicion that even some of those who remained with me were not wholly loyal anymore. Some of them had been shaken by the needless violence.
As I look back now, the whole incident becomes even more pointless because the search for the woman turned out to be fruitless after all.
For most of the time, as we continued through the following days to scour the plains and mountains for her, we kept close together; but sometimes I set out on my own, even if it was against Khamab’s wishes. By that time I was so short-tempered that even he felt reluctant to object openly: only once, when yet another group deserted us in the night, he cautiously asked me whether I didn’t think it had gone far enough. I did not answer. What could I say?
Wandering about on my own like that one day I came upon two tortoises on a steep incline. Heaven knows what had so desperately fired their mating urge in the very heart of winter; they must have been desperate. A tortoise male will travel for days to find a female. When I arrived he had just found her. He tried to corner her this way and that, but every time she got away. Amazing how fast a female tortoise can move when she’s made up her mind. But with dour determination he went on, and in the end he managed to steer her among some fallen rocks where there was no way out for her. There he mounted her, a laborious process, his front legs rowing in the air like stubby, scaly wings vainly trying to fly, his neck stretched out so far it seemed he was going to climb right out of his shell, while he tried to bend his hard back so that he could get in under her recalcitrant carapace. And just as his beady black eyes began to bear an expression suggesting he was almost there she suddenly rose up under him, steadying her crooked front legs on a flat stone, and threw him off so that he landed right on his back, clawing in futile panic at the empty air. But she had also miscalculated the maneuver, and as she swung round to scuttle past him two of her legs slipped under her so that she, too, fell over.
There they would both have died. But knowing what frustration meant I took pity on them, and carried them back to our encampment, where I cut off their heads; and that evening at least we had tortoise soup to eat, sweet, soft meat to make life livable again. The curious thing about the whole experience was this: after we had finished all the soup, what remained at the bottom of the pot were not two shells as one might have expected, but two large round stones.
16
Concerning a conversation on the edge of the abyss
When I found her—time had stopped by then; it was a day outside all calculation—at first I could not believe my eyes. She must have died long ago; it must be, I thought, a spirit, or some trick Gaunab was playing on me. Because I had been walking all day, very cautiously, on the trail of a lion. The previous night the great beast had come right up to our huts, growling so loudly that the earth had trembled; and that had made me think that if I could track him down, and supposing he made a kill and then left the carcass, having had his fill, I might eventually fight off the vultures and the scavengers for a piece of meat. But then it was not the lion I found, but her, perched high on a rock, on a tall pinnacle stained red and yellow with centuries of sun and rain and dassie urine and lichen: and beyond her the earth seemed to fall away into an abyss whose like I’d never seen before. From a distance it seemed as if we had reached the very end of the world. Only when I edged up more closely, cautiously, like a leopard stalking his prey, did I notice an end to the tumbling cliffs below her: far, far below the earth continued, an expanse of trees and shrubs so dense it seemed like a sea of green, fading into a gray distance where it was impossible any longer to distinguish sky and earth.
“Khois.”
She did not even turn her head, merely pulled in her shoulders as if preparing to jump.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
/> I could not walk the last few yards to her, she was too far away.
“I thought you were dead.”
Only then did she look round, as if she found my presence as unbelievable as I did hers.
I was unable to steer my conversation in any direction; whatever I could think of seemed confused and superfluous. All I really wanted to say, over and over, was “Khois. Khois. Khois.”
She shrugged vaguely.
“There was a lion following you. You didn’t even notice.”
“I know all about him.”
“You do?” I gaped.
“Yes. He looked after me.”
“Now I know you are dead. No live person would talk like that.”
(Could it have been Khusab’s lion? I thought much later.1 But surely that was preposterous. That had been seasons and landscapes ago. And lions simply do not do that kind of thing.)
It was the woman who first spoke again, after we had both been silent for very long. “Why have you come?” It sounded like an accusation.
“Why?! How can you ask that? I haven’t stopped looking for you since the moment you disappeared.” I stared at her. She didn’t turn her eyes away. “Khois, what has happened? Did you lose your way? Did something”—for the first time I dared to say it; she was safe—“ did something carry you off?”
She frowned, and seemed perplexed by my question. “I ran away,” she answered simply.
I couldn’t believe it. “Just like that? You ran away?”
“My God,” she said softly. “Don’t you understand? I couldn’t bear it any longer. I can’t do anything right. I understand nothing about you or your people or this goddamned country. There’s nowhere I can go to. My own people abandoned me long ago. Everything is impossible. I have nothing left, no possessions, no future, no hope, no faith, not even clothes. What am I doing here?”
Behind her: the earth falling away into the abyss.
“Neither of us can run away, Khois. We can only go on.”
“Where to? There must be an end to it somewhere.”
“There is no end if we are together.”
“I wanted to die,” she said. “Why couldn’t I die? I tried. I thought I’d starve myself to death, it should be so easy, but then the lion brought me food. I wanted it to kill me, but it wouldn’t. Then I thought I’d freeze to death, but at night it came to lie beside me and kept me warm. I tried to jump from this cliff, but again the lion stopped me. Please, won’t you kill me, T’kama?”
“I’ve come for you. You must live with me.”
“I thought: If only I could get away. So far that nothing and no one will ever find me again, not even I.”
“And now?” I asked it so quietly I could barely hear my own voice.
She looked at me. “Now I’m exhausted. That’s all.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I know nothing anymore.” Her face quiet with pain, dark as the sea. “I don’t want to run away anymore. But I don’t know what I do want. All I know is that I don’t ever again want to be where you are not.”
I went to her. In total silence we sat together in the light of that transparent day. And that is how I still see us in my memories: man and woman in the beginning of the world, a desperate world. Beside each other, but without touching. Not a hand that moves, no wind, not even a breath or hint of it, only the words. I am thinking words. I remember another day when I was standing thinking words, but then, in a way, it was still easy. What I think now is: love. I think: fear. I think: revolt, despair. And I think: all of this is but a voice, sounds shaped by a throat and a mouth and disappearing into silence. Why these sounds and not others? Surely I might just as well have thought: Lambs. Us. Oltnka. Hangtree. Grstlm. Behind each separate sound opens a chasm, an abyss. New worlds beginning. Without end. And, like her, I know nothing else anymore. Except the words. I think: I am afraid. I am alive. I love.
1. See Chapter 14.
17
On word and flesh, and on how once again a woman is left in the lurch
Love, indeed. But what, could be done about it? One does not live only through words, but through flesh as well. And I was so excessively endowed with it. Merely seeing the woman again led to a mighty resurrection of the flesh. As for willingness, I had more than enough of it. And I daresay the woman too. But how to cleave her cleft with that enormous tree of mine? The very efforts I made to enter her caused it to grow to such a size that I was staggering on my feet to keep my balance. Yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing I could do about it. And after the thing had finally subsided—there were moments when I feared it would never do so again—I had to wrap it round my waist in four or five large loops, and tuck the angry head in under them, for fear of becoming the cause of stumbling to others. Would my fate have been easier to bear had I known in advance what I know now, and what will be revealed to the reader in the crocodile episode of the next chapter?1 Or worse? It is pointless to speculate. All I know is how unbearable it seemed right then. Everything lies embedded in the weight of this word. And throughout that long first night I lay with her after finding her again, she lying fruitless and awake beside me, I was thinking heavily: If this bird keeps on growing like this, Khois and I will need no kaross next winter; we will be able to wind it warmly around us both. In due course it will be easier to go around her than to come inside her.
1. The reader is requested not to turn the page before the time: in a story everything has its appointed place.
18
Concerning an adventure that, had it not been real, might easily have been a dream; or vice versa
At dawn we returned to the handful of people who had loyally remained with me, and together we resumed our journey: that was the turning point for us. In a wide curve we began to move south again. Hope springs eternal. But instead of improving, however impossible it seemed, conditions actually grew worse.
It was a landscape designed by the sun: pure light and rock. For days on end we trekked without encountering bird or animal or even a shadow. The withered wooden skeletons of trees that had grown there long ago were scattered in fantastic shapes in the heat, cracked open and pulverized by the violence of the sun, the roots frayed like charred intestines. A few remaining brittle blades of white grass stood trembling in what wind there was, offering not a mouthful of food to the emaciated sheep. There was no living, growing thing to be seen anymore: in that terrifying landscape not even the stones could grow.
Exhausting all the ceremonies he knew, old Khamab desperately tried to make the rain come down, but the sky was like a cow that had lost her calf and balked at being milked. He sent us into the veld in search of rare chameleons. If we found one, it was buried gently, upside down, care being taken not to harm it in any way. In the past this remedy had invariably brought rain within the very day: but not this time. When that didn’t work, we tried a cobra. Still nothing. After that we buried round stones in the sand. Nothing. Two children born years ago in a rainstorm were sent out one by one ahead of us to attract the rain, but the first was bitten by a snake and the second simply vanished, his tracks stopping in the middle of a patch of sand. Enough to make one feel cold in the middle of the day. And still there was no sign of rain.
On full-moon nights, exhausted and weak as we were of hunger and exertion and thirst, we danced from sunset to sunrise, singing our rain songs:
“Full Moon, Oh Moon,
We welcome you, Moon,
Welcome, Tsui-Goab,
Give us honey,
Give our cattle grazing,
So that they can give us milk.”
In a large circle the men sat blowing on their ati, rattling the t’koi-t’koi, tugging at the string of the gurah, while the women clapped their hands and danced around us. Perhaps we were still being punished for the hare we had killed, the doomed messenger of the Moon; perhaps it was
because of the woman, perhaps there was another cause: whatever it was, in that unholy land no rain ever fell.
All game had migrated long ago, so we had nothing to fear from predators. But what difference did that make? Death traveled with us all the way. And of other kinds of danger we had to contend with I hesitate to write today, for who would take my word for it? Who would believe that great boulders came into our shelters at night and devoured our children? That hardwood tree trunks attacked our men and knocked them down when they scavenged for food in the moonlight? That the storm wind violated our women and caused their bellies to swell, but without children, mere airbags that brought nothing but pain?
That was how it went. And in a way I suffered even more than the others, because in addition to our common afflictions I had that mighty bird to contend with day and night as it weighed me down and dragged me this way and that and wrenched me to my knees and sapped my strength. The woman was too scared to come near me, for when it reared up and went into a gallop it smashed everything within reach, so that most mornings the hut looked like a place hit by an earthquake. My own people were beginning to avoid me. A real quandary it was: without me they could not go on; with me they wouldn’t.
I often thought of Heitsi-Eibib’s history: of how his mother had eaten grass and was impregnated by the green sap, how she gave birth to a son who slept with her to engender more sons and brothers; and how he died many deaths, only to rise again after each burial. But for the woman with me there was no grass. She had nothing at all. And she suffered.
It was in that time, on the most barren and arid plains we had ever reached in our wanderings, that we came upon the river. On the long trek there we had often seen visions of water: pools and lakes and streams, green vleis surrounded by reeds and rushes and dancing plumes, once even a turbulent green sea. But every time it disappeared before we could reach it, often after many days of feverish travel during which we’d had to leave behind us people and sheep and possessions so that we could move faster. But this river did not vanish. When we first saw it in the distance, we began to run toward it, then slowed down to a walk; in the end we were crawling on all fours, stalking it cautiously so that it would not disappear like the others. But it stayed in place, and we reached it, a wide, shiny snake with greenish edges slithering across the rocks. It came from nowhere, breaking straight out of the parched earth a few hundred yards upstream to surge between its banks; and half a day’s journey lower down—we discovered afterward—it dove underground again to continue on its invisible course, with not a sign on the surface to betray its deep presence. A weird sight to behold. But it was water, it was a miracle, and it was there.
