Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  They lay side by side on the bed until the candle was almost burned down. Through the shutters, Barney saw the slotted sky begin to lighten, and he heard the dawn birds twittering on the coral-tree outside. It was morning on the Great Karoo.

  Without a word, Louise kissed him, and buttoned up her dress, and left, holding her wooden clogs in her hand as she tiptoed along the duckboards which connected the woodshed with the house. Barney stood by the half-open door and watched her go. One of the geese said, ‘monnk’.

  Barney and Simon de Koker set out at six, after a breakfast of cheese and brown bread in mevrouw Loubser’s black and white tiled kitchen. Already, Alf Loubser’s lunch of boiled mutton and dumplings was simmering on the iron range, fragrant with bay-leaves and rosemary. There was no sign of Louise.

  ‘You’ll give my regards to your daughter,’ said Barney, as he climbed up on to the ox-waggon. Simon de Koker and Donald were already seated, and Simon de Koker was tamping shag tobacco into his pipe.

  Mevrouw Loubser’s eyes slanted sideways. She wore a white bonnet, like a woman in a Vermeer painting. Her hands were rough from digging vegetables and bleaching linen and plucking geese.

  Simon de Koker snapped his whip in the morning air. Donald grinned widely at nothing in particular. The oxen plodded out of the Loubser’s yard and out along Donkin Street, where young pear trees lined the route from Oudtshoorn and the south. The sky was already deep blue, and rich with cumulus clouds.

  ‘How did you find Louise?’ asked Simon de Koker, after twenty minutes or so, when they were on the outskirts of town.

  ‘Louise?’ asked Barney.

  Simon de Koker let out an unexpected giggle. ‘She’s simple, you know. Touched in the head. Poor old Loubser’s been dying for someone to give her a baby so that he can marry her off.’

  There was a long silence. Then Barney said, crossly, ‘I though she was going to marry someone called Nils Groenewald.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s the story, man,’ said Simon de Koker. ‘She was. But Nils Groenewald trekked up to the Transvaal to make his fortune in cattle farming, and in a week he was killed by a Zulu. Degutted, so they say. And ever since then …’

  Barney stared at Simon de Koker, but said nothing. As they trundled out north-eastwards across the wind-ruffled hooyvlakte, they saw Alf Loubser and some of his boys in the distance, gathering in a flock of merino sheep. Simon de Koker waved, and Alf Loubser waved back. Barney tugged the brim of his veld hat further down over his eyes and looked the other way.

  In later months, Barney remembered the trek across the veld to Oranjerivier as if it had happened to somebody else. This somebody else had spent six weeks of his life jostling from side to side on the hard wooden seat of the ox-waggon, surrounded by blinding curtains of dust. This somebody else had gone out every evening into the darkness gathering sticks, and then sat exhausted by a popping, crackling campfire, while Donald stirred up a pot of beans and biltong – or, if they’d been lucky with the guns that day – fresh antelope steaks, steaming with blood.

  One night, for hour after hideous hour, this somebody else had lain awake under a baobob tree listening to lions roaring – a ravenous, echoing sound like tons of coal being dropped down an empty well. And every day, as the morning winds stirred the Karoo, this somebody else had prayed to arrive in Oranjerivier safely, undevoured by beasts and unbitten by snakes, please God; and to find his brother alive.

  They reached Oranjerivier quite suddenly; and for Barney, unexpectedly. One minute they were crossing the veld, their waggon jolting and shaking across stretches of dried grass and windblown sand. The next they were rolling along a grassy track beside a muddy and easy-flowing river.

  ‘There,’ said Simon de Koker, nodding along the riverbank. ‘That’s Oranjerivier.’

  Barney stood up on the brakeboard. He had not known what to expect. But here it was – a clustered settlement of twenty or thirty houses and cottages, surrounded by tents, flags, storehouses, kraals, and makeshift huts.

  ‘You can take me straight to Derdeheuwel?’ asked Barney.

  ‘Whatever you like,’ said Simon de Koker.

  They drove through an avenue of gossiping willows, and then out past the main settlement of Oranjerivier to a small farm spread across the side of a hill. The farm was fenced around with split rails, and the track which led up to the house was lined with blue poplars and sausage trees. It was past four o’clock, and the shadows of the trees crossed the hard-baked ground like the spokes of a wheel.

  Donald drew the ox-waggon up in the farmyard. The place looked dilapidated and deserted. On top of the thatched roof of the house, a rusted weathervane groaned and shuddered in the north-west wind. The white paint was flaking from the stucco façade, and most of the window frames were rotted and grey. A stray cockerel strutted across the yard, stared at them indignantly, and strutted off again.

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ said Barney.

  Simon de Koker jumped down from the waggon and tethered the oxen up to the verandah rail outside the farmhouse. The four dusty beasts stood patiently in the late sunshine, occasionally twirling their tails at the flies. ‘You don’t know Monsaraz,’ Simon de Koker remarked.

  While Donald knocked a crust of mouldy meal out of a bucket so that he could bring water for the oxen, Simon de Koker gripped Barney’s sleeve and led him along the verandah to the front door. The door was wide open, and the tall Boer dragged Barney straight inside without knocking or shouting or tugging at the tarnished brass bellpull.

  The inside of the farmhouse was spectacularly filthy. There was dust and rubbish all over the floors and the rugs, and the hallway was cluttered with pieces of rusty dismantled ploughing machinery, a broken wall clock, two backless chairs, dozens of empty paint-pots, torn-up Portuguese newspapers, a banjo with no strings, two bales of Bushman grass, more wine bottles than Barney could count, and a dim cheval mirror in which both Barney and Simon de Koker found themselves reflected like phantoms of the old voortrekkers, brown and sweaty and smothered in dust. On the veld, their only mirror had been a tiny metal disc which they had used for shaving, and so this was the first time Barney had seen himself properly for over six weeks. He looked thinner and yellower in the face than he had imagined himself, but he looked like an Afrikaner.

  There was a clatter from one of the side parlours, and a tall black woman appeared, her hair twisted around in red and blue beads, her eyes bloodshot with gin. She wore a simple white cotton dress which was ragged around the hem and soiled with dirt. She could not have been more than twenty years old, and yet she leaned against the wall scratching at her elbow like an old woman. She sniffed. She did not seem to be able to focus on them.

  ‘Where’s Monsaraz?’ demanded Simon de Koker. ‘Bossman in?’

  The woman made a vague gesture and then lurched past them, disappearing through a door which Barney supposed must lead to the kitchen.

  ‘I hope you’re not shocked, man,’ said Simon de Koker. ‘You’ll see plenty worse examples of what civilisation can do to the native races. Mind you, the natives have always been pretty gruesome around here. If a woman had twins, they always used to kill one of them at birth, by stuffing mud in its mouth. And I could tell you some stories about the Zulu.’

  Barney glanced at him, and then, without a word, pushed his way into the room from which the black woman had just appeared.

  Inside, it was dark. The shutters were closed tight, so that only a few chinks of sunlight penetrated the suffocating heat and the shadows. There was a ripe, overwhelming smell of sweat, sex, and dead flowers. On a brass bed in the corner, fully dressed in a grubby white suit and a Panama hat, with his limp penis hanging from his open fly, lay a sallow young man with a pointed beard.

  ‘You’re Monsaraz?’ asked Barney. ‘You own this place?’

  The young man on the bed did not answer.

  ‘I’m looking for my brother,’ said Barney. ‘Derdeheuwel used to be his. His name’s Joel Blitz. Mr de Koker here says you
may have bought it from him.’

  Monsaraz scratched his face noisily. ‘Blitz, was it?’ he asked, in a voice that was refined, but slurred by drink. ‘I knew his name had to be something Jewish. He told me Barker.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’ asked Barney.

  Monsaraz sat up, frowned, and then stood up, tucking himself back in his trousers but not bothering to fasten the buttons. He walked with dragging feet across to a tall mahogany bureau, and poured himself a large gin from the stone bottle which stood beside the mirror on top of it. As he drank, he watched himself, as if for signs of rapid decay.

  ‘Well,’ he said, wiping his mouth, ‘the truth is that I have no idea. No idea whatsoever. I paid him the money, exchanged the deeds, and off he went. He tried, you know, but he couldn’t make the farm pay.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like you’re doing much better,’ remarked Simon de Koker.

  ‘No,’ Monsaraz agreed, ‘but then I’m not trying.’

  Barney said, ‘Joel didn’t give you any idea where he might be going at all?’

  Monsaraz belched. ‘He wasn’t that kind of a man. Very … taciturn, he was.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like Joel,’ said Barney.

  ‘People change when they live out here,’ Monsaraz told him. ‘Look at me. I used to be one of my bank’s most promising young overseas agents. Now I’m a sod farmer. Well, I’m not even that.’

  Simon de Koker said, ‘This place stinks.’

  Monsaraz poured himself another gin. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It stinks of self-pity. Do you want a drink?’

  Barney shook his head. ‘I want to find my brother, that’s all.’

  ‘I wish I could help you,’ said Monsaraz. ‘But men disappear out here. Sometimes because they want to, sometimes because they don’t want to. It’s just a little worse than hell.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Barney, ‘what would you say if I stayed here for a while? Maybe worked the farm for you.’

  Monsaraz peered at him. ‘What would you want to do that for?’

  ‘I need the work, and I need a place to stay. You have money, don’t you?’

  Monsaraz looked suspicious, and then waved his arm. ‘A little,’ he said. ‘Do you mean to say you’d want paying as well?’

  ‘If this farm was straightened out, it could make a reasonable living for both of us. You could pay me out of the profits.’

  ‘Well, listen to you,’ said Monsaraz, coming up closer. ‘The young businessman.’

  Simon de Koker pulled a face. ‘What do you want to stay here for?’ he asked Barney. ‘If you want to look for your brother, I could find you a room with the Reitz’s. Good and clean. This place is a muckheap.’

  ‘It needn’t be for long,’ said Barney. ‘If other farmers can make a living around here, then so can Mr Monsaraz.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Monsaraz, uncertainly. ‘Your brother couldn’t make a go of it.’

  ‘I’m not my brother,’ Barney told him.

  Monsaraz swayed, and shrugged. ‘All right, then. If you want to. But don’t expect any help from me.’

  Barney turned to Simon de Koker. ‘I’ll pay you now, for bringing me here,’ he said. He felt suddenly self-assured, although he was not completely clear what he wanted to do, or why he wanted to stay. ‘If it’s possible, I’ll take Donald off your hands for a while, too, so that he can help me hire some workers. We can afford workers, can we, Mr Monsaraz?’

  ‘As long as their wages don’t encroach on the gin budget,’ said Monsaraz. He looked pale and rather unsteady, as if he were going to be sick. ‘That woman was like a spider,’ he added, in a mutter. ‘A great black spider.’

  Outside, in the yard, Barney gave Simon de Koker seventeen pounds. Simon de Koker beckoned Donald over, and laid his arm around the black man’s shoulders.

  ‘You stay here with Mr Blitz, help him find kaffirs to work on this farm,’ he said. ‘You take care of Mr Blitz, or else next time I come by I chop off your sausage. You got me?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ nodded Donald, grinning widely. ‘I like to stay here in Oranjerivier. Very good sisters here, very kind. I stay here long time.’

  Barney smiled, and took Simon de Koker’s hand. ‘Thank you, Mr de Koker. I think you showed me more than the way here. I think you showed me that Cape Colony is a country that you have to fight to live in, or not live in at all.’

  Simon de Koker wiped the sweatband of his hat. ‘You came here because of a tragedy, didn’t you? Someone died? Someone you want to forget?’

  Barney nodded.

  ‘Well,’ said Simon de Koker, ‘don’t forget them completely. I never forget my Adaleen. This country should be their memorial.’

  He lowered his head, and then raised it again, looking Barney clearly in the eye. His downturned mouth was almost twisted into a smile.

  During the autumn, when the wild syringa trees on the bushveld began to turn to the colour of fresh-minted pennies, the first rumours began to fly around that more diamonds had been found on the Orange River. Barney did not pay them much attention at first. Through January and February of 1869, with Donald fussing and strutting around behind him, he was working from first light until way after dark on the farm at Derdeheuwel.

  They employed a dozen kaffirs now, and two half-educated Griquas. One of the Griquas was a second cousin of Nicholas Waterboer, chief of the most numerous of the Griqua tribes, and Barney appointed him foreman. The other Griqua, whose name was Adam Hoovstraten, was tall and lanky like a giraffe, but handy with a saw; and Barney set him to repairing the farmhouse and the stables.

  Derdeheuwel had been neglected for years. Barney could see the marks of Joel’s first efforts to clear it – a half-tilled field at the back of the farmhouse, and a new chicken-run. But it looked as if Joel had quickly lost heart and given up. There was even a new windmill lying on its side in the barn, still waiting for a well to be bored and for someone to erect it. The second week he was there, Barney borrowed drilling equipment from the farmer across the hill, a hard Englishman called Stubbs with a face like crumpled brown paper, and within five days he had his windmill up and working.

  Monsaraz took hardly any interest in the proceedings at all, except occasionally to lean on the verandah with a drink in his hand, watching Barney repairing the cattlesheds. If Barney looked his way, he would raise his glass and call, ‘Salut!’ Then he would wander back into the house and lie down in his darkened room with one of his black girls. There were two of them – one he christened Prudence and the other ‘A Moça da Fazenda’, which simply meant ‘The Village Girl’. He seemed to fornicate with them on and off all day and half of the night, although he never took off his white suit.

  Barney was convinced that Monsaraz had thousands of pounds hidden on the farm somewhere. Monsaraz never worked, and never ran short of liquor; and whenever Barney asked for money to buy livestock, he would push an envelope filled with five-pound notes under Barney’s bedroom door after dark. By early March, Derdeheuwel was fresh-painted, and stocked with over a hundred head of hardy Scottish cattle, all at Monsaraz’ expense. But Barney never asked him where the money came from, or why anyone with what appeared to be bottomless funds should choose to live in near-exile on the Orange River.

  Every night, after the cattle had been brought in, Barney would sit in his parlour by the light of an oil-lamp and write letters. He wrote a tender note to Leah, back in New York, and to Moishe. But he also wrote regularly to post-offices and attorneys’ offices and local divisional councillors all over north Cape Colony and Griqualand, asking for news of his brother. Not many of his letters were answered. None of them held out any hope that Joel could be found. ‘This is a vast and dangerous domain,’ wrote an official from the Crown Agents in Hopetown, with Imperial pomposity. ‘It is quite conceivable that your brother could have been devoured by a lion.’

  In March of 1869, Cape Colony caught diamond fever. Schalk van Niekerk, who had discovered the Eureka diamond four years earlier, came across an
other stone that had been picked up by a Griqua shepherd boy on a farm near the Orange River. It had come into the possession of a Kaffir witchdoctor, who used it as a magic charm; and van Niekirk had been obliged to pay the man 500 sheep, ten cattle, and a horse for it. But when he sent it down to Capetown for evaluation, it turned out to be a superb white diamond of eighty-five carats, the Star of South Africa, and it was eventually bought by the Earl of Dudley for £25,000. Laying the diamond on the table in front of the Cape Parliament, the Colonial Secretary Sir Robert Southey announced, ‘This is the stone, gentlemen, upon which the future of South Africa will be built.’

  A correspondent in the Colesberg Advertiser asked sarcastically, ‘I wonder what that fellow Gregory would say now, if he were here. Perhaps in this instance it was also dropped by an ostrich (?)’

  Within weeks, more diamonds were picked up along the banks of the Vaal River a little further north, inside the boundaries of the Orange Free State. The Cape Argus carried headlines that screamed Diamonds! Diamonds! Diamonds! and by April the tracks from Capetown were crowded with diggers of all nationalities.

  The Great Karoo was as dust-blown and as pitiless as ever, and several diggers died on the way, but one reporter said that ‘they saw in their lively imaginings diamond fields glittering with diamonds like dewdrops in the waving grass or branches of trees along the Vaal River, and covering the highways and by-ways like hoar frost.’

  So – regardless of the political independence of the Orange Free State, which had been so bitterly won by the Boers after the Great Trek of 1834, its territory was rapidly invaded by swarms of avaricious prospectors, whose one determination, when they woke up each day, was to be rich before lunch. Soon, every likely stretch of riverbank along the Vaal and the Orange had been staked out as a claim; and latecomers to the diamond fields had to start ‘dry diggings’ further inland. The Boer farmers around Hopetown and Klipdrift and Pniel found their fences torn down and their trees uprooted, and one by one they gave up the struggle to farm on land that was ravaged again and again by illegal prospecting, and they sold out.