1998 - Devil's Valley

by Andre Brink

  Of The Soul

  There was something haphazard about our progress down the mountains, as the garden gnome didn’t seem to be following any known route. From time to time he would stop to fit a small pebble into the skin of his catapult, close his eyes and let fly. Zen and the art of whatever. Then he’d grin in my direction, mumble something, grab at his fly, and start waddling off along the trajectory traced by the pebble. Until we’d get to the spot where it fell, when the whole process would be repeated.

  In this way we zigzagged crazily down ever more arid slopes, among what is usually described as towering cliffs, ranging from yellow through orange to deep red, across huge carbuncles which at a distance appeared fucking unscalable. Once we seemed to head straight for a blank rock-face, but at the last moment the little runt swerved into a small thicket, and motioned towards a hole through which it was just possible to crawl on all fours.

  In passing I glimpsed a series of rock paintings in various pigments, white and black and sienna and ochre, on the sloping ceiling right above my head: eland, elephant, little men with bows and arrows and spiky hard-ons. Right across the scene was a name chiselled into the rock in large uneven capitals: STRONG-LUKAS. But there was no time to look more closely or ask the odd question, otherwise I’m sure my waddling guide would have buggered off without me.

  Beyond the breach in the cliff the path became easier for a while. Until we reached the next damn obstacle. Then the next, and the next. Every now and then I made a hurried smoke-break. In my fucked condition it’s all that helps. Then off we’d go again. One hour, two, four. My chest was rattling like an old·fashioned bellows, my lungs were burning. If only I’d been one of the fitness freaks who regularly climb Table Mountain over a weekend, but apart from raising my right arm or the occasional short series of pushups with something female poised below, I take no exercise. Perhaps this trip would bring on the inevitable coronary, which might at long last get home to Sylvia what she’d lost. Fat chance, though, thinking of her parting shot: “You’ve got syphilis of the soul, Flip Lochner.” The filthiest and truest thing she ever said to me. (“Fuck you,” I answered. “What makes you such a sad case is that you can’t even swear properly,” she said. “You have no imagination.”—“Fuck you,” I told her again.)

  As we went down, the kloof grew more and more bloody impossible. And more parched. What from above appeared fertile, even lush, turned out to be screwed by green drought. Even shrubs and bushes that still put up a green face crumbled to dust as one brushed against them. The ravine was becoming narrower too. Overhead the cliffs were closing up. The remaining sliver of sky turned the deep blue of a bloody bruise.

  Stopping for another life-saving draw, I asked through the smoke, “You sure you know the way?”

  Prickhead uttered another sound which might mean anything, his fingers working frantically in his groin. But that was as much as I could get from him.

  “Where are we going?” I tried again.

  He seemed to find that very funny, for he convulsed in laughter, so violently that I began to fear epilepsy. But after a while he placed another goddamn pebble in his catapult and let fly. And off we went again.

  Some way down the next slope I was forced to take off my rucksack as our ledge was shrinking to a pencil track. My guide continued to move along surprisingly bloody light-footed on his padded feet, but I stepped on a loose stone, staggered in panic, let go of the rucksack to regain-my balance, and just made it. The bag went tumbling down the fucking precipice until it was finally stopped, fifty or sixty metres down, by a grotesquely distorted wagon-tree. Shit. This was all I needed.

  Splinters

  I cautiously picked my way down after the rucksack, managed to get hold of it and struggled back to the ledge. There I squatted down for a while to catch my breath, feverishly undoing the bloody thing to check the contents. Prickhead stood watching in fucking fascination as I rummaged. Thank God the tape-recorder was packed deep inside, wrapped in clothing; at a glance it seemed okay, but I would have to examine it more carefully later. But the camera was fucked. The broken lens came tinkling from the bag as I undid it. All I could do in a kind of impotent rage was to throw the useless thing into the void that gaped below, as the phrase goes.

  Still shaken, I turned to the precious cardboard box in the side-bag. From outside it still seemed all right. Then my heart sputtered as I saw a moist stain spreading through the cardboard. With clumsy fingers I tore the box open, prepared for the worst. My fucking bottle of fucking White Horse down the drain. Everything in the box in which I’d so lovingly cradled it was soggy, and riddled with sharp splinters. Inevitably I cut a bloody finger in the process. Under the gnome’s beady eyes I sucked my finger, then began to remove the splinters one by one from the soggy mess in the box. The way an army doctor might pick shrapnel from a wound, except I’m not sure the doctor would so lovingly suck each piece of shrapnel clean. Even the grainy substance of the contents of the box didn’t put me off. Although what was left after I’d cleared away the worst looked pretty unappetising. I grimly replaced the box in the bag.

  It was some time before I scrambled up again to resume our journey. Just in time, it seemed, as Prickhead had started working away so furiously at his groin that his eyes were beginning to get a glassy stare. Worked up into a proper lather of another kind, I stumbled on after him, following the latest pebble from his catapult.

  Until, at bloody last, we crossed a rockfall to the bottom of the valley where a dried-up riverbed ran along a line of withered trees. Old wisps of beard-moss and lianas studded with ferocious thorns hung scraggily from the highest branches. One of the largest trees, an ancient wild fig, had been split from top to bottom, scorched by lightning in some forgotten time. It must have been the mother of all bolts. Presumably the whole valley bed became one churning flood after a bad storm, but right now it was as bleached as bone. The trees were still alive, but only just; their roots must reach half-way down to bloody China.

  We followed the dry riverbed, Prickhead waddling on his weird bow-legs, the catapult now draped across a sloping shoulder. It still seemed improbable for him to move with so much ease.

  And then, just as I was beginning to think I’d run right out of steam, we came through a last thicket of trees and saw the valley opening up ahead, with signs of fields, and vineyards, orchards, all bleached by drought, but still bearing the unmistakable imprint of civilisation. There were houses too, few and far between, some of them in a parlous state but all of them apparently inhabited. Four, five, six, followed by a hulking whitewashed church, much larger than one would expect in such a wild place, with a square, squat tower. For a moment I couldn’t make out anything more, as the valley swerved to the left.

  When I turned back, Prickhead had disappeared. In a sudden panic I looked round: would I ever, if I had to, find my way out again?

  Rucksack

  Right now the fucking rucksack required more urgent attention. I lowered it on a large flat rock in the middle of the dry riverbed and removed the tape recorder from its womb of odds and ends of clothing. It was one of those nifty little jobs that can fit into a shirt pocket. The red light went on when I pressed the button, but the tape was stuck. So much for technology. A journalist’s fate worse than death. I pressed it to my ear but there was no sign of the familiar reassuring hiss. Even a few vigorous shakes made no difference. I’d shaken other things with more success in my life. Furious with frustration I gave it a slap, my stock solution for hitches in anything from a PC to a parking meter; and for once it actually worked. The little wheel was turning again, its whisper music to my ears. I pressed Record, went through my alphabetised repertoire of synonyms for the female pudenda (more satisfactory than the standard one-two-three-four-five), rewound, then pressed Play, and listened approvingly to the recitation, in my own voice, of what years ago had still been within my range of the accessible; just after the letter ‘p’ I switched off.

  Kitsch

  Now follows
an event that gets my knickers in a knot. It doesn’t reflect well on me, but what the hell. I’ve hit rock-bottom anyway, as Sylvia or the kids or any of my colleagues would be only too happy to testify. A hairy turd is worse than any second-hand car dealer. So here goes, and devil take the hindmost.

  Just as I’m bending over to do up the clasp of the rucksack again there is a splash. I straighten my back to look. On the far side of a small thicket of withered underbrush and reeds I discover a long deep pool that somehow escaped my notice earlier. A movement in the pool catches my eye. Now for the kitsch part. I know it sounds like overdoing it, but I swear by my mother’s corns that this was how it happened. Crime reporter signing on. A naked girl comes scrambling from the pool, her back to me. She bends over to wring the water from her hair, then sweeps it back over her shoulders. A long black mane that ripples in shiny wet waves all the way down to the bulge of her buttocks. In the interests of truth I must specify that her body is a bit on the thin side to my taste. If this had been my fantasy I’d have filled her out a bit, more curves, more moulded kind of thing. But this is the point: it’s not a dream, she is real. So I have to take her as she comes.

  Then, like an obliging model, she turns to face me. She throws her head back, both arms raised, her feet wide apart to steady her on the slippery surface of the wet rock. Long legs, if kind of sinewy. The thing about legs is this: no matter how thick or thin they are, how short or long, they meet somewhere. And there’s nothing wrong with the bush that marks this meeting point. Black tufts sprout abundantly from the armpits too, something I’ve always had a weakness for. Altogether, it’s the total wet-dream image. Except, as I said, the girl’s not exactly the Birth of Venus. I did my stint of Art History at varsity, don’t underestimate me, and Botticelli clearly had no hand in this one. Even so, beggars can’t be choosers.

  Gentlemanly Thing

  I just stand there, kind of dumbstruck, like Lot’s wife. After a while she lowers her head again, but remains standing with her hands stuck in her thick dark hair, the points of her elbows raised to the late light, looking straight at me.

  Jesus, now I’m really flexing the old purple-veined stylistic muscles. I’ll soon be the man I used to be. Watch this spot. But I can’t keep the girl waiting: she’s still standing there at the edge of the pool, looking straight at me. Yet there isn’t the slightest hint of embarrassment or shock in her gaze; nothing exhibitionist either, I should add. She simply stands there, looking at me, right into my face as far as I can make out through the threadbare screen of brittle twigs and reeds and stuff between us. I can see the late sun glistening in the droplets on her skin, touching like brush-strokes the elevations of her nose and cheekbones, her collarbones and shoulders, et cetera.

  The one who feels caught out and embarrassed is me. As if I have no fucking right to be there. And that’s saying something, because there isn’t much I haven’t seen in my line of work, the whole range from the shit-smelling awful to the bloody beautiful. Take my word. Feeling trapped like a schoolboy in a girls’ locker room, I bend over to start fiddling with the straps of the rucksack again. Then it occurs to me that I might do the gentlemanly thing and offer an apology. I straighten up. But it’s too late. The lady has vanished.

  And not only the lady. The bloody pool too.

  I broke through the underbrush and tangled weeds to where it had been a minute ago, but there was no sign of water. The hole was there, a rough rectangle among the rocks, but it was empty and quite dried up. So obviously there was no sign of wet footprints either.

  Quite Normal

  Now don’t tell me it was a mirage, a hallucination prompted by a too rampant urge and too little occasion. She was there. I can recall every damn detail. Not only the mane of tumbling hair, the straight black eyebrows, the cheekbones, the wide mouth, but something else I’d like to add for future reference, as it is of some importance. The girl had four tits. One pair quite normal, of the size and shape one would expect, the nipples perched like two bees (who said it first?) exactly where one would look for them. And then, a narrow hand’s breadth below them, like small smudges on an artist’s paper, something first drawn, then erased, but not quite, not altogether, another pair. Not proper-sized boobs, these, only a suggestion of two mild swellings, stings of the aforementioned bees; but no doubt about the nipples. You think this is the kind of thing I could have imagined?

  I can remember telling myself: Now this is something I wouldn’t mind having a closer look at. Investigative journalism. But the thought also brought a tinge of guilt, as if with that candid gaze she could read my mind (the lingering stain of fucking Calvinism, like a dirty rim in the bath); and that may well have been the reason why I bent down over, the rucksack again. The truth, almost the whole truth, and nothing but.

  While I was still scouting among the sparse dry reeds fringing the edge of the dried-up rock pool, in search of some trace of her, a voice behind me said:

  “So there you are.”

  Story of My Life

  MY FIRST THOUGHT, when I returned home after Little-Lukas’s death, was that the bloody accident had once again put paid to all hope of doing something on the Devil’s Valley. Story of my life. But the boy kept haunting me. A few days after the accident I phoned his landlady to find out whether she’d heard anything from his relatives; and about funeral arrangements, that kind of thing. (From our crime reporter.) No, to both questions. There had been no news from family and friends, and unless someone turned up to claim the body the municipality would probably have him buried. The rent, she reminded me, was still outstanding too.

  I usually put on a tough-guy act, but in the end I’m a soft touch. I mean, I shout at the fucking bergies who squat on the stoep, then slip them the odd rand, even though I know bloody well it will go straight into a bottle of blue-train. As a result, every month I’d screw up my budget, and Sylvia would have her field day. At least that is now over and done with. Anyway, in an unguarded moment I undertook to pay the landlady her blasted rent, as well as the funeral costs if no relatives pitched up during the next week. Three thousand two hundred and thirty-one rand for a simple cremation, no service, no coffin, no nothing; only a nondescript little brown cardboard box with Little-Lukas’s ashes, delivered on my doorstep by a tall man who looked like Groucho Marx.

  Abandoned Notes

  What was to be done with the box? I considered arranging a burial, but the picture of Groucho, the landlady and myself in the cemetery on a wet winter’s day in Cape Town was too much for me; besides, I couldn’t afford any further expense. That was how I started thinking about taking the ashes to the Devil’s Valley. Kind of pilgrimage. Also, it was as good an excuse as any.

  I dug up my notes abandoned thirty years ago, on the Seer’s trek into the Swartberg, stowed in a dilapidated old box in the dust and cobwebs and mouse shit and silver moths and cockroaches in my garage. I added to it the cigarette box from my night of cheerless carousing with Little-Lukas, and then began to sort out the confused memories of our meandering conversation.

  There wasn’t much sense to be made of it; and most of what returned to me through the remembered fearful swell of OB was hedged in by question marks. Any report slapped up out of that whore’s crotch of notes and recollections would have seen me fired on the spot. But frustrating as they were the memories kept haunting me. In the messy business of my life it became a single constant spot of reference. The reassurance of a few small hard facts: this and this and that I knew, this and this and that was certain, unshakeable by wind or weather, adversity or time.

  I went to see my editor on the question of accumulated leave; he seemed singularly happy to let me go. From an adventurous colleague I borrowed a rucksack, purchased what was necessary in the line of provisions, added my tape recorder and my camera, plus flash and tapes and film, and set off for the Little Karoo to feed the long-starved rat. In Oudtshoorn I spent a day on enquiries until I found a helpful garage man who agreed to take me into the mountains in his fo
ur-by-four, as far as the beacon from which I would have to strike out on foot. That was the Wednesday, a tranquil day in late April, in the afterglow of summer.

  Or For Worse

  I’d counted on a week, but the garage man persuaded me to stretch it to ten days.

  “Saturday suits me better, you see,” he said. His name was Koot Joubert, a solid block of a man, as heavy as a Bedford truck, if one can imagine such a vehicle with sideburns. “I’ll be coming back from Prince Albert next Saturday. Round about noon, I think.”

  High up in the mountains where he dropped me we confirmed the time.

  “I’ll be right here at the beacon,” I said. “If I’m not here, don’t wait for me. That’ll mean that I decided to stay longer.”

  “Don’t think you will.” With a rumbling laugh like an old engine starting up. “The people down there is a strange lot. Judging from the ones who sometimes turn up in town for shopping, that kind of thing. They’re a wild bunch, man.”

  “See you next Saturday, Koot.”

  “No, right, okay.” He offered me a hand the size of a gearbox. “Hope you come back alive.”

  I could think of several questions I’d still have liked to ask, but decided to wait and see for myself. I refused to be discouraged in any way. I’d bloody well waited long enough to get to the brink of this tract of history that had tantalised me for so long. For better or for worse, so help me God.

  At the side of the gravel road I remained standing until Koot Joubert’s dust had settled among the rocks. Then I turned towards the Devil’s Valley, with a huge curving slope straight ahead; I felt like a mole on a woman’s tit.