Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  Bang bang.

  I wish.

  Jaco feels better with his gun in his trousers strapped to his thigh. It makes his thigh warm. It’s one up at all times. He likes to know it is there. We must look after ourself now. There’s a lot of reasons to carry a gun with all that’s going on here, the Congo people who are cannibals where they comes from and all the Zim people who are not so bad but they can’t get jobs up there so they swim across the Limpopo, nobody knows how many has been eaten by crocs. That poes Zuma gives all the jobs to his buddies from Zululand. One day they is sitting on their arse in Zululand the next they flying first class to Paris for a conference talk talk talk talk. That is what they likes most, talk talk talk. All what Zuma does now is to jump around wearing feathers and leopard skins and then they all drinks beer and kills an ox and cooks it. The President is the chief so he gets the liver. He has twenty-one or twenty-two kids. Maybe more. When a white guy applies for a job his application goes to the bottom of the pile. Sorry it’s lost. Jissus I would like to kill them all. That mofgat de Klerk gave the whole country away for nothing. Did Oliver Tambo build Union Buildings? No he fucking did not. I am a Retief and we doesn’t forget what they did to Piet; he had to watch Zuma’s ancestors kill a hundred and fifty men, women and children. Little childrens like my girls clubbed with a knobkerrie. My beautiful daughters Elmarie and … what’s her name oh ja, June. Junie like Junie Carter.

  Jannie and Stoffel is going home.

  Cheer up, says Stoffel, it could be worse.

  How?

  I don’t know.

  Let’s go and shoot some great whites.

  Very funny. Fuck off.

  18

  Bertil is surfing with Vanessa. He really can surf after two weeks. Surfing has taken him over. He spends hours in the surf. Now he is wearing a T-shirt which reads It is not tragic to die doing something you love. Nellie is a little nervous. I promise to speak to Vanessa to make sure that a life-saver is always around when Bertil is surfing. He hasn’t yet tried to ride the very big breakers that come roaring towards the beach. He makes a good job of the smaller waves. I can see that his eyes are on the big surf, which can be terrifying. Bertil tells me, without irony, that surfing is a ‘post-capitalism pastime’. I think he means that it is another way of seeing the world; that the objectives of surfing are entirely personal, without rules; that the ocean is absolutely free and democratic; that it gives no special favours to bankers … et cetera.

  Little Isaac wants to surf too. He stands on the beach watching Vanessa and Bertil. They wave to him from the deep water. I take him on a body-board in shallow water with a rope attached and launch him into the gentle waves. He tries to stand up, but so far standing up is beyond him. I show him how I body-surf, without a board at all, but he is not interested. He wants to be a surf dude riding the big waves. It is heart-rending how persistent he is and how often and how cheerfully he falls off the board. God, he is two and a half years old. I too have found myself becoming besotted with him. Bertil and Vanessa often come onto the beach to talk to him and to help him. He is like the baby Jesus, suggesting some special insight. He seems wonderfully happy among us. He calls Lucinda ‘Mom’; there is no mention of another mother. Nellie and I have stopped worrying about where he should be by rights. We have become unnaturally, even culpably, relaxed. Lindiwe is trying to teach Isaac some Xhosa, as if he should be able to speak it because he is black. Actually ‘black’ doesn’t quite describe Isaac. His skin is honey-coloured. His hair has become reddish. Lucinda swims every day now. We are all in thrall to the sea and its magical powers.

  I have the idea that I should travel to Natal to see Piet Retief’s grave. I am not sure what I am hoping to find. I see that Nellie and Lucinda don’t really want to come; I detect a little weariness when I bring up Piet’s name. So I suggest we all fly to Durban and book into a hotel so that Bertil can surf, Isaac can paddle, and Lucinda and Nellie can relax on the beach or in the hotel’s swimming pool. And I will set off early in the morning to see the grave, alone if nobody else wants to come, and I will return in the evening. I agree that I should take a driver.

  I remember from my childhood only one of Durban’s aspects, the rickshaws on the seafront, pulled by Zulus dressed in extravagant versions of traditional dress, all feathers and porcupine quills and beadwork. The rickshaw men in those days had cow horns on their heads. These rickshaws were once the taxis of Durban, but for many years now they have been a local entertainment, taking tourists for an energetic ride along the front. We watch as they parade, leaping in the air, whistling and shouting as if they were going into battle.

  Nellie thinks it would be demeaning to the men to take a ride. On the other hand, we would be supporting local initiative. Isaac and I take a ride and he loves it. He waves at Nellie and Lucinda as we go floating by, and he laughs when our driver leaps in the air blowing a whistle and we can see the ocean through his legs. The air here is heavy and steamy indicating that we have wandered into the tropics. We all go down to the beach to cool off; Bertil wants to try the surfing; he has researched it online and he knows exactly where the best surfing is, Veetchies Break. Surfers have their occult networks. Isaac has an ice cream, which quickly melts onto his vulnerable little chicken chest. Suddenly I see to my amazement Bertil catching a long break and riding it at speed. He is our hero. In a few weeks he has become muscled and brown and quietly pleased with himself. He has the surfer look, a tolerant, visionary appearance. His hair is bleached by the sun and by the ocean.

  ‘Did you know you could do that?’ I ask him when he comes out of the surf, shaking the water from his head.

  ‘I was like hoping to try one of these breaks I had read about and we just took off.’

  ‘You looked so good, Bertil,’ said Nellie. ‘For a moment I couldn’t believe it when Frank said it was you.’

  ‘I recognised you by your cozzie. The flying palm trees.’

  ‘It was luck really,’ says Bertil. But we are not fooled.

  Lucinda is by the pool at the hotel. We tell her about Bertil’s triumph. She congratulates him as if it is a major development. He smiles modestly.

  ‘You are one cool dude,’ she says. ‘Nellie, will you be able to look after Isaac if I go with Dad tomorrow to wherever it is he is going?’

  ‘Of course, darling. I would love to look after him.’

  I have been waiting for an opportunity to speak to Lucinda and I am glad that she suggested coming with me. What my father would have called a proper conversation. So far she has still been something of a wraith, not wholly with us. But she has been amiable and content, which is enough for me at this time. I see that this place has had a profound effect on all of us. Living by the sea seems to encourage us to follow its rhythms and to have an awareness of the tides and waves that mark the hours.

  Landscapes, I think, remind one of home and encourage a longing to be home. When I am at my house under the mountain, by the sea, I feel that I am home, despite the violence and the desperation that are never far away.

  19

  Lucinda and I leave early in the morning, trusting ourselves to Gibson, the driver, who wears a smart uniform, a blue safari-suit, and a nautical cap. Off we go into the hopeful morning, heading north along the coast. Already some surfers are out. The sea has a blue-green colour this morning. It is more tropical than where we come from. The waves are small, the sea calm. Little knots of men, standing at the water’s edge, are casting with huge rods, deep into the waves. A fisherman pulls in a large silver fish, struggling hopelessly. In that instant we fly by and the fish story is incomplete, for ever a fleeting image.

  We are soon travelling through sugar-cane plantations. Way inland we can see a thunderstorm; the distant rain has given the sky a cross-hatched appearance. Gibson says it is moving, towards the Drakensberg. I wonder how the trekkers coped on those mountains in their wagons when these fierce thunderstorms struck.

  ‘Those are the mountains that Piet Retief came down when h
e was looking for somewhere to settle. Over in that direction.’

  ‘Why are you doing this, Dad? Really?’

  Lucinda’s face is sleepy and clouded and warm, and she sits with her legs folded under her and her head on my shoulder. I wonder if she has recovered completely; I hope that this is not just a period of remission. It has been a terrible hell to see my beloved daughter slipping into irrationality; who would blame me if I chose to believe that she will soon be herself again?

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘You are a sly old fox, aren’t you? You have always had your own private thoughts and ideas. What’s this Zulu outing really all about, Daddy?’

  ‘I don’t have a secret agenda. Or any fixed agenda. It’s just that, as time goes by, I feel the urge to make my peace. I have been thinking about it almost every day. Going to see my – our – ancestor’s grave may help. I believe in serendipity, so I am sure it will be worthwhile. But the truth, darling, is that I am basically just curious. I always want to get a sense of what a place is like.’

  ‘Are you ashamed of being Piet Retief’s descendant or are you kinda pleased, like people who are related to Billy the Kid or Bonnie and Clyde?’

  ‘Look, Retief was a bankrupt who left the Cape Colony, recklessly taking his children and followers with him; his son, Cornelis, was one of the seventy killed, followed by another hundred or so servants, women and children, all because Retief was naïve, convinced he had a real treaty with Dingane, and also because he thought that God was on his side. Unfortunately, neither was true. I am pretty sure his plan was to take Dingane’s country. Does that sound to you like someone I should admire?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  Perversely, I do value my relation with Retief, as if it gives me some substance, some authenticity, some purchase on this land. For better or for worse I am descended from pioneers. In its own way it is like having ancestors who landed at Cape Cod in the Mayflower. (Although they had intended to land in Virginia.) ‘And, by the way, there is some evidence that the treaty a party of Boers claimed to have found months later was a fake.’

  The landscape unrolls, gloriously.

  ‘Do you love Nellie?’

  ‘What a strange question.’

  ‘Not so strange. I think she is great. Like the best thing that could have happened.’

  She holds my hand just as she did when she was a child, with a light but persistent grip. And now I can see her as a four-year-old, eager, always cheerful, building houses with cushions and chairs and blankets to hide in, and singing loudly and raucously from inside her hide-away.

  And soon after her fourth birthday, Georgina and I started our war.

  ‘I do love Nellie, darling. Yes. She has made me calm after all those years with your mother. I have never blamed your mother, by the way, it was just that we were a total mismatch. I am as much to blame. Maybe more so.’

  ‘Dad, I have wanted to ask you this for a long time …’ I brace myself. ‘Did my drug phase have anything to do with the break-up?’

  I take comfort from the words ‘drug phase’ because it suggests she thinks it is all over.

  ‘No, darling. It was never your fault. You watched, appalled. I thought you went off the rails because of our rows. Was it awful for you at home?’

  ‘It was pretty bad but I was always on your side, Daddy. You know that. Mum seemed to like enjoy arguments. Whatever we said, she contradicted us or she had a better idea. Whatever I wanted to do, even finger painting when I was three, she would like take over and tell me how to do it properly. And she always wanted me to dress like her, boots and furs and big necklaces even when I was five or six. Beautiful mother with beautiful daughter. I was just an accessory.’

  ‘I am so sorry.’

  I know it’s true.

  She is looking out of the window now towards the storm. It has moved away so that all we see of it is a smudge on the horizon. As we turn off the coastal road and head inland, Gibson says we have another hour and a half to go. I ask him about his family and his home. He glances at me in the mirror.

  ‘I am from Ladysmith, sir. I have four children.’ (He pronounces it ‘chill-ren’.) ‘Two boys and two daughters, sir.’

  We stop for a break above a river, shaded by a single tree. Gibson says there are still a few crocodiles down there. On the other side of the river is a kraal of round, traditional, thatched huts and a few mud huts with corrugated-iron roofs, held in place by rocks. Startlingly bright kingfishers dive into the water from their perch on a dead tree. They are like bright Christmas decorations. Chill-ren emerge from the kraal and hop across towards us on huge, worn, red boulders. A small grey dog swims across, paddling fiercely and optimistically. I hope there are no crocodiles just here. Gibson has sandwiches and water for us in a coolbox and some sweets and drinks for the children. But when they ask for money he is severe, and they retreat, chastened. They watch us from within an anxious little circle. Lucinda is all for digging into her tote bag for money, but Gibson says it is not good for them to beg. Lucinda gives the remains of a sandwich to the dog, which has correctly identified her as a soft touch. The dog suddenly shakes itself violently, wetting Lucinda. She laughs. Gibson is concerned and produces a roll of kitchen towel. He warns that some of these dogs have rabies.

  On we go, blissful. Lucinda is sleeping; it is the sleep of the innocent; I am almost convinced that she is recovering. Of course I can’t judge whether the effects of drugs will linger, nor if her brain has been altered for ever in some way. The brain is a mystery to me, both in its workings and in its symbolism. Scientists say it has a mind of its own.

  While my troubled daughter sleeps, I watch the landscape unfurling; for my own amusement I try to name birds and spot weaver-bird nests hanging over water and I look out for meerkats and old farmhouses and early roads and abandoned cement bridges that are now bypassed, and trading stores and Nguni cattle and signs of Voortrekker roads and mission churches and women walking stoically as we throw up dust around them and the darting leaping flight of impala and snakes on the road and ant hills and donkeys ridden by children or pulling carts and school children in uniform and the signposts to farms and millenarian missions. There are plenty of missions of this sort. It seems that the poorer you are the more you are likely to turn to bogus religions for some sort of comfort. It may be that my ancestor and those who came after him destroyed a thousand years of belief and custom, which interpreted and contained all that was required for the life the Zulus lived. Denigrating the indigenous peoples and their customs was one of the worst crimes of colonialism.

  ‘Are we nearly there?’

  ‘Oh, hello, sweetheart. Yes, nearly there.’

  ‘Lovely sleep. I read somewhere that sleep is a brief respite from mortality.’

  ‘I like that.’

  She places her head on my lap and I stroke her hair. I am seized by optimism; I feel it is me as much as Lucinda who is coming alive after a long hibernation.

  We drive down a very bumpy track, past a mission, and stop under some trees. Gibson leads us on foot in the direction of Dingane’s kraal. We pass through a palisade of large dried branches. Gibson says that the kraal is being re-created as accurately as possible. The kraal, the isigodlo, the heart of Dingane’s kingdom, was huge. About ten beehive huts have been built so far. It is wonderfully evocative. Once there were hundreds of beehive huts, for a thousand of the King’s trusted warriors and his five hundred women. At the centre of the isigodlo was the enclosure for his revered cattle. The King’s house is twice as big as any other, and is built exactly on the original site, as indicated by the remains of the wooden posts that held up the beautiful beehive structure. There are no people around at all, but I can easily and vividly imagine the place as a bustling Zulu metropolis.

  We look down the hill to the mouth of the isigodlo. Eight hundred yards away is the hill called KwaMatiwane, the killing fields. Here thousands were killed over the years. Death was only separated from life by the breath of
the King. He could kill on a whim, and did.

  ‘That’s where our ancestor died. Young William Wood wrote that Piet was the last one to be clubbed to death, so that he was forced to watch his followers and his son being killed.’

  ‘I don’t want to go down there,’ says Lucinda.

  Gibson drives us to the memorial for Piet Retief and his comrades. It is placed on the crown of a small hill. It is strangely similar to hundreds, even thousands, of memorials in British towns; it is essentially a Victorian memorial in the shape of an obelisk, bearing the names of the seventy Boers who were murdered by Dingane’s warriors. A few sentences place the blame on the Zulu king. The citations are written in Dutch. The word ‘moord’ – murder – is used.

  I hold Lucinda’s hand as we gaze at the grave, not communing with our ancestor, but simply overwhelmed by the quietness and emptiness of the landscape and the palpable sense of tragedy, a double tragedy, that took place here. This awful massacre has drained the life out of the surroundings. I am reminded of Terezín, which has a deathly quiet, unable to sustain the weight of its own ignominy. Although the Boers all died, this was also the beginning of the end for the Zulus. I think that this is the birthplace of the notion of the ‘swartgevaar’, the black menace, which justified so much cruelty and repression.

  On the way to Blood River, I ask Lucinda if she wants to hear my theory.

  ‘Sure. Why not? Your theory about what?’

  She looks surprisingly interested in what I have to say.

  ‘About apartheid. I think it was the product of fear. The whites were terrified of the blacks, particularly black men, and the massacre right here was the confirmation the Boers needed that you couldn’t trust black people. Never mind what the whites did to the blacks over time, they retained this fear. Retief complained about unruly “Caffres” in his manifesto. When he arrived here, hoping to steal Dingane’s land and enslave his people, his worst fears of unruly Caffres were realised.’