1998 - Devil's Valley

by Andre Brink

  Anyway, our Lukas Lermiet left Graaff-Reinet in the company of Gerrit Maritz, but soon ran into trouble with the old sourpuss preacher of the group, Maritz’s brother-in-law Erasmus Smit, and it seems that, possessed by a vision, and accompanied by a few like-minded spirits, the Seer turned off course to trek south-east, into the forbidding Swartberg range. Just as ancient maritime charts of Africa marked certain parts with the legend Hie sunt hones, there were old maps of the interior on which the Swartberg was superscribed with the words Hier zijn duvelen, or Here be devils. Hence, I guess, the name ‘Duiwelskloof—Devil’s Valley.

  Odd Reference

  There was not much more on Lukas Lermiet and his descendants to be found in the Archives, apart from the odd (sometimes very odd) reference in minor official documents. In the 1890s an agent of the Cape government was dispatched to collect taxes or quitrent or whatever from the people who’d apparently disappeared into the Devil’s Valley without a trace; but he was screwed out of his clothes and sent back across the mountains like my finger. Whereupon a whole armed detachment came all the way from Cape Town to avenge the honour of Her Fucking Majesty. Once again without result, for no trace of the blasted commando could ever be found; and soon afterwards the Anglo-Boer War gave the distant government other priorities to care about.

  From the time of the 1914 Rebellion came a reference to a couple of burghers who’d escaped into the valley to hide from government troops, never to be heard of again. Much later, during the Second World War, a small band of right-wing extremists from the Ossewa-Brandwag fled into the valley to get away from Smuts’s officers, and the bodies of two policemen sent after them were later found in a deep kloof where they’d presumably fallen to their death. Once again the matter was not followed up.

  After the war individuals from the Devil’s Valley sporadically turned up in the outside world, and a legend took root about a community of physically or mentally handicapped people in the mountains, the sad outcome of generations of inbreeding. Somewhere in the fifties a team of census agents were sent out to record particulars of the inhabitants, but they never came back; on another occasion an exciseman dispatched to investigate rumours of illicit distilling met with a fatal accident in the mountains. Still later the University of Stellenbosch mounted an expedition of anthropologists and sociologists and God knows what other -ists on a research project, but they returned not only empty-handed but stubbornly mum about the expedition. Then money ran out as the government started cutting down on university budgets, and that was that.

  All of which I found promising enough. But my designated supervisor found it too insubstantial. How about the Development of a Christian National Character Among the Voortrekkers, 1836-1843 instead? I might still have pressed my luck, but that was when Sylvia appeared on the scene and began to play me off against Twinkletoes van Tonder; and if I were to abscond for a couple of months to do research in the Devil’s Valley I had little doubt that in my absence he’d settle so tightly into her own little devil’s valley that once again only his toes would stick out. That was the end of my project. But at the time I thought it would be only a temporary setback. If you ask me, every person has a rat inside, a rat which keeps gnawing away and which you must feed if you hope to survive, otherwise it consumes your fucking guts. And the Devil’s Valley was my rat. I was going to feed it. But for thirty years nothing came of it, until there wasn’t much left to consume in me.

  Comes Out Red

  That is, until Little-Lukas Lermiet appeared on my horizon a few months ago. The occasion was a day-long seminar in Stellenbosch on ‘History and Reporting’, to be introduced by Professor Hardus (Twinkletoes) van Tonder, Head of the Department of History, D. Litt. et Phil., S.H.I.T., Dean of the Faculty of Arts, as well as Vice-President of the South African Academy of Education, Arts and Science. My presence, as member of a panel on Investigative Journalism, was either pure coincidence or fate, depending on the paradigm, I think that is the term, you use. Our editor was called away on an important mission requiring all his attention (something to do with his wife’s investments), the news editor was otherwise engaged (he has a friend with a box at Newlands), two others who’d been approached were not available, which was how yours truly, well down the pecking order, came to be delegated at the last minute.

  This kind of seminar is not my line at all. Do I still have a ‘line’? I have no idea any more what I’m doing in journalism. Cynicism stains one like nicotine. There was a time…but forget it. Compromise is the name of the game, until you swallow your last lump of self-respect like the vomit of a bad hangover. Right up to the eighties there were moments when in a flush of misplaced romanticism or something I still thought I had a ‘role’ to play. You go out on a story to Old Crossroads or the KTC squatter camp, you look on while police set fire to the shacks of people who refuse to move elsewhere; you see a child, sent by his mother to the corner shop for a half-loaf of bread, run down by the cops in the yellow van, who then jump out to shoot him execution-style. Then you go back to the office and file your story with the news editor, a shithead ten years younger than yourself, who draws red lines through most of it and tells you to rewrite the piece. Anything you give to that cunt is like a fucking tampon: it goes in clean and comes out red. And when you object, he blows his top and tears up the sheets. You try to protest. He looks you in the eye and asks, “What are you trying to do, Lochner?” You tell him, “I was there, sir.” He says, “For your information, this never happened.” And after the incident has been repeated three times you give up trying. You cannot resign either, because jobs are scarce and you have a wife who has Joneses to compete with and two kids at varsity, so don’t rock the boat, buddy. When you shave in the morning, you look past your own image in the mirror, pretending you’re not here. You feel like a whore on the point of retiring, but she’s already got AIDS and all she can still hope for is to infect a few more fuckers before she croaks.

  Fucking Symposium

  And then they have the bloody cheek, on a Saturday you planned to spend working on your Cortina and watching rugby on TV, to pack you off to a fucking symposium on Investigative Journalism. Look, if you have to, ask me about crime statistics, and I’ll be happy to oblige. Last year: an average of three murders an hour, a rape every twelve minutes (or, considering that only one out of every thirty-five is reported, one every twenty seconds), an armed robbery every five minutes, a case of child abuse every ten minutes (but of course even fewer of these are reported than rapes), and this happens twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, right? As Alan Paton said, “Ah but your fucking land is beautiful.” And we still have Mandela. But all I’m trying to say is, ask me a thing like that and I’m your man. But don’t come to me with symposiums and conferences and shit. So what does a man do? You go. That’s what you do.

  In a Corner

  Crap of a high order, lasting a whole morning and afternoon. Afterwards the big brass decamped to a reception in the rector’s house, while I ended up with a few other rejects and off-cuts and a group of rowdy students in a pub.

  I landed in a corner, a position I’m no stranger to; and by the fourth or fifth round, when I was comfortably leading on points, I was approached by a spotty youngster. Little-Lukas Lermiet, the name registered after the second or third attempt. As nervous as a fucking puppy not sure whether he’s going to be stroked or kicked. Quite an intelligent, narrow face, but his eyes looked like a frog’s through those thick glasses, and he had a bit of a st-stammer. The kind of dude that just begs to be screwed out of his senses by a really wild girl to change him into a fucking prince.

  He clearly wasn’t much of a talker; and I was, not to put too fine a point on it, introspectively inclined. It was a mere week after Sylvia had left me the note (with two typos) and both children had telephoned to make sure I had no doubts about who was to blame; and striking up a conversation with a pimply youth was not high on my list of priorities.

  “Sir, there was s-some
thing you said this morning…” began Little-Lukas.

  Few people call me sir; and my contribution to the morning’s discussion, I knew perfectly well, had been a load of shit. So there was much bleary-eyed suspicion mixed with my feigned curiosity.

  “…about the D-Devil’s Valley in the Swartberg.”

  I could vaguely remember the reference, yes. Some stray off-the-cuff remark about topics still waiting to be investigated.

  “I-I live there.”

  Deep in my guts I felt something stirring; the old rat was gnawing again.

  He was the first inhabitant of the Devil’s Valley I’d ever come across in the flesh. It would seem that an old pedlar, a smous, had plied him with books in the Valley, until much pleading and effort and bargaining at long last landed him permission to study outside. Before his time the odd bright youngster had from time to time been allowed to go to school in one of the towns outside the Devil’s Valley, but Little-Lukas was the first and only one ever to go to university. As far as I could gather, however, more and more young ones in the past few decades had simply left the place for good. Then why did one never run into them? Perhaps no one thought of asking; also, most of the exiles presumably chose not to broadcast the matter. It sounded as if the valley had become practically deserted, in spite of a tradition of large families. “There’s only the old ones and the very young ones left,” he said, “and of course the h-handicapped ones.”

  Had I met the little nerd thirty years earlier it might have made a difference, but when I first became interested in the history he’d not even been an itch in his father’s balls yet. Now it was a bit late in the day. Still, we started talking. In fact we got so carried away that after the pub closed we went off to his digs where he produced, of all things, a bottle of Old Brown. Now I pack a mean slug, and I take my Scotch as it comes from its mother, it’s part of the job description, but OB plugs my arsehole.

  Godforsaken Place

  The first part of the conversation I could still follow. Little-Lukas spilled whatever beans the Devil’s Valley could muster about its founding father, the Seer. His first arrival at the deep valley in the Swartberg. The perilous descent, for which the rear wheels had to be removed and the wagons propped up on bundles of wood to brake the pace. After the first day the oxen refused to budge, whereupon Lukas Lermiet first used his heavy hippopotamus whip on them and when that didn’t work, gouged out their eyes with a knife. Instead of solving the problem, it made everything worse. One wagon after the other, drawn by the crazed and blinded oxen, fell to fucking smithereens down the steep cliffs. Lermiet’s fellow trekkers turned back in small demoralised groups to retrace their own trail through the mountains, all their possessions lost. Not one of them ever reached the outside world again. It was winter, the weather was bloody awful, the snow lay knee-deep on the slopes. What happened to them was never recorded: they must have frozen in that desolate landscape, or fallen to their deaths down any of a hundred precipices.

  Seer Lermiet grimly persisted. The heavier the odds the more clearly he saw their glorious future down below in the Devil’s Valley. In the end only his own family remained to trek ever more deeply into the mountains in the drifting snow. One of his sons rebelled, but was hit over the head with a length of wood and died after a day or two. Then three of his other sons ran off after tying him up in his sleep. They, too, must have died in the mountains; their bones were never found. All that was left were Lermiet’s wife Mina and a daughter and two small sons. Mina pleaded with him to turn back: couldn’t he see the whole thing was doomed? This valley was worse than hell itself. Lukas knew only one response. He gave her a thrashing that left her close to death. She never fully recovered. Abject with terror she and the remaining children went with the Seer into the valley of death where he’d seen the Promised Land in a fucking vision.

  That was still only the beginning. The worst of the winter lay ahead. The two youngest children died of pneumonia. Mina was still bedridden from the flogging. Only then, Little-Lukas said, God appeared to the old shithead and advised him to turn back. All right then, the Seer announced, at the first signs of spring they would leave for Graaff-Reinet. For about a month they enjoyed a spot of peace and quiet, preparing for the return journey.

  But on the day before they were to leave, Lukas Lermiet went into the mountains in search of a white gazelle he’d seen in another of his dreams. High up on the slopes he stumbled over a loose stone, fell down a cliff and shattered his bloody leg. He would never again be able to walk properly. Which meant he was doomed to spend the rest of his fucking natural life in that godforsaken place, and his family with him.

  Shards and Tatters

  This tale was followed, throughout the long night in Little-Lukas’s digs, with the bottle of OB between us, by countless others. But of the rest of our conversation I had only a seriously pissed recollection when I woke up again some time the next day in the dank suburban house in Gardens where I’d spent most of my married life with Sylvia. I couldn’t even remember how I’d got back. Also, there was other urgent and unpleasant business to attend to. The house had to be sold, Sylvia was demanding action. For the time being I still tried to stall, reluctant to face a battery of agents and house-seekers with snotty comments about damp patches on the walls, structural cracks, loose tiles, hazardous wiring. But through the ruins of my screwed-up world and the heavy hangover I continued to chase random memories of my night with Little-Lukas. The fucking shards and tatters and loose ends of stories. A smous returning with exotic wares from the farthest corners of the world. A girl with four tits. A child with goat’s feet. A large naked woman on a bed crawling with cats. And something about a magician who could track you down to the very end of the earth? Yes, I quite vividly remembered this yarn: someone had broken into a house in the Devil’s Valley, leaving a shoe behind; the magician clamped it in a vice—and an hour later a man with a shattered foot arrived crawling on all fours and howling with pain. And much more. But all of it mixed up and rather crazy, with no bloody head or tail to it.

  Commotion

  I did recall that at some stage during the night I’d scribbled the chappie’s address on the back of a cigarette box, and after much searching I managed to retrieve it among dirty underpants and gluey handkerchiefs in the laundry basket. A couple of times when I telephoned there was no reply, but at last one afternoon I heard Little-Lukas’s st-stammering voice in my ear. He sounded embarrassed, apologising for having wasted my time like that and shooting off his mouth. The inhabitants of Devil’s Valley were not supposed to confide in outsiders, he explained breathlessly. If his people were to find out…

  I pulled out all the stops. For the first time in years something had caught me by the balls again. Little-Lukas remained diffident, stammering more and more as I waxed eloquent, like in the old days when I’d still dreamed about an academic career, long before the world had up-ended its shit bucket on my head. At last Little-Lukas, still far from convinced, relented: all right then, I c-could come back some time and bring my tape-recorder. But ‘some time’ was too vague for my liking. What about tomorrow? No, sorry, he had a t-test or something. The day after? A history assignment, for Professor van T-Tonder. Fuck the man gently but thoroughly. The day after that? And so I drove him back day by day until the following Wednesday. Time? Let’s make it three. Place? At his d-digs.

  When I arrived, there was a commotion in front of the sprawling Victorian house where Little-Lukas had his rented room. A crowd in the street, two yellow police vans, an ambulance. Dead on the spot, an elderly woman told me at the garden gate when I enquired. She had wispy hair drawn into an untidy grey bun like a fucking merlon. Little Lukas was just crossing the street on his way home from lectures, she said with what I can only describe as funereal glee, when the car came charging over the stop street, driving off without even slowing down. Shame, such a nice boy, one doesn’t even know if he had relatives. She’d been like a mother to him, even if she had to say so herself. And what abo
ut the last month’s rent? But the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, and who were we to complain?

  Smooth and Blunt

  JUST BEYOND THE two massive boulders that must have broken away from the highest cliffs in prehistoric times to come to rest at this spot above the Devil’s Valley, I noticed a movement in the fynbos. Something was coming my way. For a moment I was unsure whether it was man or beast, but it turned out to be the former. Benefit of the doubt. Not much more than a metre tall, and totally hairless as far as one could see, the face ageless and expressionless, smooth and blunt like a prick. His misshapen legs were too short for his body. He was barefoot. Two large flat feet that seemed to have no bloody bones in them, like a fucking duck’s. In one hand he carried a catapult, with the other he was scratching his groin.

  Involuntarily I stepped back, glancing round in the direction of the old dude who’d shown me the way, but he was no longer to be seen.

  “I’m looking for the road down to the valley,” I explained. “The old man up there told me…perhaps you could…”

  He grimaced with open mouth, made a vague gesture with the hand holding the catapult, and waddled off into the fynbos. I wasn’t quite sure what to do. But after a moment he came stumbling back and waved at me again, making an unmistakable gesture with his obscene blunt head. I began to follow him. Abandon ye all hope.

  It was dead quiet among the high cliffs, and all the way along the great slope as we went on, a silence which made me feel totally fucking alien: not the usual kind of silence one expects in the mountains, which is at least broken from time to time by a rustling of wind or the shrill of a cicada or whatever; but the silence of something missing, something lost. I couldn’t explain it. And it was only much later, at least a week, before I realised what it was: in this godforsaken valley there were no birds, not a bateleur or a grey partridge, not a weaver or a sparrow or a swallow of any description, sweet fuck-all. But by that time it was like already too late.