1998 - Devil's Valley

by Andre Brink

  It was a hell of a long time since anyone had called me Boetie; but given her age it was perhaps her good right.

  “Ouma?”

  “Come and talk to me.”

  Well, it wasn’t as if I was in any hurry. But it meant climbing up to the attic landing, hoisting myself up to the roof from there and following the parapet to the chimney. God knows how that little wisp of a creature managed to get up and down.

  It took me several minutes on the roof to catch my breath. From close by she looked fucking ancient, the thin skin on her face like the crinkled skin on a cup of boiled milk. Her eyes were watery and ringed with red. She gave off a sour smell.

  From up there one could see the whole tract of the Devil’s Valley, running all the way from the dry riverbed in a long gentle curve to Tant Poppie’s house at the far end. The two rows of houses past the solid church which stood there like Luther of old, so-help-me-God-I-can-do-no-other. Some distance away in the bushes, well beyond Tant Poppie’s house, I noticed another dwelling, more a hut than a house, which I hadn’t seen before.

  The little sparrow beside me must have followed my gaze, because she said in her tiny insect-buzz of a voice, “That’s Hans Magic’s place.”

  “Why does he live so far apart from everybody else?”

  “That’s how he wants it.” A dry chuckle. “Just as well. No one can stand it too close to him. It’s years since he last had water on his skin. And then he’s ugly too.”

  “I’ve seen other ugly people around the Devil’s Valley, Ouma Liesbet.”

  She sniffed. There was a bright drop at the end of her bony nose. “Boetie, when I say ugly I mean ugly. You see, there’s a dull kind of ugly, which is the ordinary kind. And then there’s an ugliness that’s all bright and bold. That’s the way God himself meant ugly to be. And that is Hans Magic.”

  Lightning Bird

  I would have liked to find out more about the man, but by the set of her sunken mouth it was obvious that she wasn’t so inclined. I continued my survey of the settlement. The sheds and backyards and haystacks. The long line of common fields, vegetable gardens, vineyards and orchards on the opposite slope; and on the near side, the ostrich pen with its hedge of aloes and stacked thorn-branches, and the bluegum wood beyond. From here one could look unhindered into all those lives.

  “How did the ostriches get here?” I asked.

  “Isak Smous’s grandfather brought in a few eggs many years ago. That was in the time of the feather-boom.” A tinny chuckle. “I hatched them myself.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “It was easy. I was still young. I had a good body. And let me tell you, you won’t find such fine feathers anywhere else.” A dry laugh. “In my youth, when we celebrated New Year, I used to dance for them, I’d wear nothing but feathers. And then the menfolk plucked me.”

  “How come that you’re spending your days all alone up here?”

  “I’m waiting for the Lord, didn’t you know? No one can tell the day or the hour. When the time comes His judgement will fall on all of us, that’s what we were brought up with.” Suddenly inspired, she continued with a tone of deep satisfaction. “This is only a temporary abode, says the Bible. Sooner or later God will send His thunder and lightning to raze the whole world to the ground. If you read Revelations you’ll see there will be nothing left.” She made a pause, then added quietly, “But there’s another kind of lightning too, and I sometimes ask myself if that isn’t worse. It’s the one inside us, the one laid by the lightning bird the old people spoke about, you know, they had so many stories.”

  “How does it go?”

  “It comes from far back. They used to say that if God gets angry with the world He sends a storm, and in the storm a lightning bird comes down from the clouds to lay her eggs deep inside an antheap, like coals of fire that go on smouldering in the dark. And there they stay, sometimes for years and years, no one knows they’re there. It’s like a fever in the blood. When their time comes, they hatch; and then their fire destroys everything.”

  “It must be tough if you never know when they’re going to hatch.”

  “That’s just how it is,” she said resigned. “All we know is that sooner or later it is going to end. One day will be the last. That’s why I’m waiting up here. Only at night it’s not so easy, the stars make such a racket.”

  “You need someone to look after you.”

  “There’s my distant nephew, he’s three or four times removed, Ben Owl. He sleeps in the daytime because his eyes are too weak for the light. But in the dark he misses nothing. He looks after me as well as anyone could, every night he brings me food and drink and spends some time with me. Even if it’s a bit of a nuisance, what with all those voices in his head talking so loudly, and all at the same time, I can hardly hear myself.”

  Chameleon

  Before I could answer, and without any transition, she asked, “What are you doing with that thing?” She pointed at the chameleon on my shoulder.

  “Oh, he’s quite harmless.”

  “It’s his kind that brought death into the world, did you know?”

  “How can you say so?”

  “That’s what the old people used to tell us.” She leaned back against the chimney. “They said that in the time of Adam and Eve God sent a chameleon to Paradise with a message: Just as the moon wanes and dies and then grows full again, you mortals will die and always rise again. But the chameleon is a slow creature, as you know, and it took its time. One day, when it was resting on a twig, a hare came past and asked about his business. The chameleon told him about the message and from the goodness of his heart the hare offered to run ahead and spread the news. But he was in such a hurry that he forgot half the message. And when he arrived in Paradise he told Adam and Eve that God wanted them to know: Just as the moon wanes and dies, you mortals will also die.” The laugh she gave sounded almost cheerful. “Well, that was that. The harm was done, and by the time the chameleon arrived in Paradise the people had already received the message of death. Which is why, the old people said, Adam and Eve maar turned to eating figs.”

  I tried to sort through all the irrelevant shit in my mind. “If I’m not mistaken, Ouma,” I said, “that story was first told by the Khoikhoi people.”

  “And who might they be?”

  “The Hottentots.”

  “We’ve never had those in the Devil’s Valley,” said Ouma Liesbet with comic indignation. “It’s a story handed down by our own people.” Without waiting for an answer she asked, “What are you going to do with the little dragon?”

  “Piet Snot gave it to me to bring me luck.”

  “What would he know about luck?” She clicked her tongue. “Poor little turd. He hasn’t got it easy with that father of his.”

  “Who is his father?”

  “Jurg Water of course.”

  I added two and two together and arrived at rather more than four.

  “Can you tell me more about the Valley?”

  “Of course I can, but why should I? Life is too short to waste on gossip.” And then she seemed to forget all about me and started mumbling to herself, something that sounded like a counting-out chant. “Lukas Seer begat Lukas Nimrod, and Lukas Nimrod begat Lukas Up-Above, and Lukas Up-Above begat Strong-Lukas, and Strong-Lukas begat Lukas Bigballs, and Lukas Bigballs begat Lukas Devil, and Lukas Devil begat Lukas Death, and Lukas Death begat Little-Lukas.” Another dry chuckle. “And that’s only one of the lines. Because you must know, the old Seer had seventeen children, nine sons and eight daughters. And with each of the eight daughters he had a few more. And just before he died he even had a child with one of his granddaughters. All scriptural, of course. You know, like Lot and his daughters. Today evil is sprouting like weeds in the valley. That’s why I prefer to sit up here until the Lord comes to fetch me.”

  “How can you be so sure that He’ll come?”

  “He came for Elijah, didn’t He? And He came for Enoch. And He came for Lukas Up-Above
. He told me Himself I’m next.”

  “What exactly happened to this Lukas Up-Above?”

  Single Bird

  “He spent his whole life trying to get out of here,” she said. “If you ask me, it’s because he had such a shrew for a wife, no one could stand it with her. But poor Lukas was so fat, he could barely walk. They say he was twice as double as Jurg Water, and high on his legs. That put him on the idea of flying. He first made wings of all kinds. Feathers, branches, wood, bags filled with tumbleweed and thistles and reed-plumes. But every time he nearly killed himself. Then he tried wind. First he got all the children together to rake up a wind with branches. When that didn’t work he started eating anything that would blow up his stomach, so that he could fart himself across the mountains. That time he very nearly died.”

  “And then he gave up?”

  “Not a hope. No, next thing was, he tried fire. He stuffed big bags with dry grass and set fire to them. But one day the whole mountain caught fire and just about everything burned down, the fields, the orchards, the roofs of the houses. And he too. Scorched off all his tailfeathers. He fell from high up in the sky on his own roof, it was just flames all over, his own wife burnt to death, which was her just deserts.”

  “That must have set him back.”

  “Never. For a while he gave himself up to drink. He thought if only he could get drunk enough flying would come by itself. But it didn’t work either. Then, after he’d been cured of the drinking he made himself a little cart. His heaven-cart, he called it. A little square box of a thing, like the basket of rushes the mother of Moses wove to put her child in. And when it was finished he built a huge cage and sent out the children to catch all the birds in the Devil’s Valley. With traps, and cages, and lime, everything you can imagine. For weeks and months on end the children brought back birds. And when they’d caught every single bird in the mountains he hitched them to his heaven-cart and there they went, over the mountains, to hell and gone. He was never seen again. Up to heaven he must have gone. And now it’s my turn.”

  “But it must be very uncomfortable up here.”

  “Here on the roof I don’t bother anybody and they don’t bother me either. Also, I don’t have a coffin like the others, so it’s better to wait up here.”

  “Weren’t you married then? I thought every woman in the valley gets a coffin as a wedding present?”

  “That’s so. And I got mine too. All measured and everything. And my groom and I gave it a proper lie-in, I can tell you. But then I gave it away. That poor young girl Maria needed it more than I did.”

  “Would that be the mother of the girl Emma?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  “Please tell me about her.”

  Kind of Mark

  She sucked the inside of her toothless cheeks. Perhaps there was a story coming, I thought, but in the end she only shook her head, which looked like a frayed stocking drawn over a darning shell.

  “The least said the better. All I know is that life in our valley has been going downhill ever since Maria died. That was a sign. These are the Last Days, Boetie. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood. You think you saw blood last night? But there’s more coming.”

  “How do you know about last night?”

  “I saw you, of course.”

  Mad as a fucking coot. Yet it brought a brief, sense of relief too, after Jurg Water’s rebuff. At least I had a witness, so for once it hadn’t been a dream. If her word was anything to go by.

  “So you saw the hunt?” I asked eagerly.

  But her mind was wandering. “Ag, poor Maria. And what’s going to become of Emma now with Little-Lukas dead and all?”

  Trying to get the conversation back on track, I prodded her: “Tell me about Emma, Ouma Liesbet.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “The day I came here I saw her swimming in the rock pool over there. And then she just disappeared again.”

  “Perhaps it was better for you that way. Remember what happened to Little-Lukas.”

  “Emma couldn’t have had anything to do with his death.”

  “It was to get away from her that he left. All I know is that Little-Lukas was perfectly happy here, but he was so scared of her he’d have done anything to get away from her.”

  “I thought he loved Emma.”

  “He loved her, yes. But he was scared as a hare.”

  “Tant Poppie Fullmoon said this morning that Emma has the mark of the Devil on her body.”

  “Poppie knows what she knows.”

  “What kind of mark would it be?”

  “If there is a mark she must have got it from her mother. Ben Owl always said Maria caused trouble and Ben had reason to know. A thing like that is passed from mother to daughter. One doesn’t talk about it. You either see it or you don’t, and what you don’t see isn’t meant for you. Now go on, I must prepare to meet my Bridegroom.”

  Squawking

  INSIDE, ISAK SMOUS’S house looked just like all the others, except that it had more rooms—a workroom and a store for his wares, space for his offspring, and bedrooms for himself and Alie, and Malie and Ralie.

  One of the three meat-grinder women made us coffee. I should add that it was the only household in the settlement where I got offered proper coffee. Most of the other families were quite happy with a poison brewed from some bloody local root. I’d tried witgat once when I was on an assignment for my paper in the Northwest, but that was like ambrosia compared to the concoction of the Devil’s Valley.

  The wife (or sister, or sister) served the coffee in the store where we sat, and then rejoined the others in their rounds of feeding babies, kneading dough, churning goat’s milk, swatting flies with a bluegum branch, sweeping floors with a brushwood broom, chasing poultry from under chairs or tables, or whatever their chafed red hands found to do. It was an interior like those described by Burchell in his Travels, in the early nineteenth century: or even earlier by John Barrow, whose accounts of Boer life in the deep interior so upset the colonists.

  At one stage a din broke out when one of the three sisters climbed on the roof to throw a hen down the chimney. All hell broke loose as the squawking, flapping chicken came fluttering down, and I was on the point of jumping up when Isak calmly looked up through his stained and dusty half-moon reading glasses and explained, “They always clean the chimney on Mondays.”

  Closing the Door

  He returned to the much-thumbed exercise book in which he’d been adding up rows of scribbled figures when I came in. But there was a matter I just had to get out of my system, as pressing as any fart: “Looking at you right now, Isak, no one would guess you’d been on a hunt last night.”

  Half-surprised, half-annoyed at being interrupted in his calculations, he stared at me. “What funny questions you ask,” he mumbled.

  “I’ve got to know, Isak. You were there after all.”

  He just shrugged his sloping castor-oil bottle shoulders and stuck his nose back into his work.

  Sucking in my arsehole I went for broke: “Or are you telling me we weren’t there?”

  “There are things better not talked about, Neef Flip.”

  And that was bloody well it. I was left to my frustration while he finished his bookkeeping.

  All around him stood boxes and chests and bags filled with merchandise. It was a mystery how he’d lugged all that stuff across the mountains and down the precipices of the Devil’s Valley. But when I asked him about it, he just laughed, stroking his hand across his bald pate as if to flatten an unruly mop of hair.

  As restless as a fly he jumped up to show me the contents of his containers. Against one wall, the produce of the Devil’s Valley: honey and rolled tobacco, raisins and ostrich eggs and dried fruit and prickly-pear beer and calabash pipes, as well as Tant Poppie’s herbs, Jos Joseph’s miniature wagon chests, Sias Sjambok’s plaited whips, Petrus Tatters’s veldskoens. And piled up against the opposite wall the merchandise picke
d up in Oudtshoorn and Calitzdorp, or as far afield as Uniondale and Ladismith: sugar and salt and ammunition, needles and bolts of chintz, paraffin for when the lard ran out, here a hatchet head, there a ploughshare or a spade—only the most indispensable stuff, for in the course of time the Valley had become quite surprisingly self-sufficient.

  At a given moment he grabbed me by the arm and took me to the master bedroom, carefully closing the door behind us so the women couldn’t see us, and removed from under the bed a battered old tin trunk which he unlocked with an ancient key to show, with all the pride of a new father, what clearly was his treasure: the trunk was half-filled with banknotes, which he scraped away to reveal a sizeable molehill of golden pounds.

  “Where does this come from?”

  “It’s from all the buying and selling over the years.”

  “But what can you do with money in the Devil’s Valley?”

  “It’s not a matter of doing but of having,” he laughed.

  I grubbed in the coins with my hands, shaking my head.

  “There used to be much more,” he said in a flush of anger. “But these people were a lot of scoundrels. It’s hard on an honest man to live among such sinners.”

  “What happened then?”

  “In my father’s time a bunch of good-for-nothings—Lukas Death’s father, old Lukas Devil, was the gangleader—waited until he’d gone over the mountains, then they stole all his money. They melted the gold and made a billy goat out of it and put it on the pulpit in the church, calling on all the people to worship it, can you imagine a thing like that, just like the Israelites in the desert.”

  “Sounds a bit far-fetched to me,” I said curiously.

  “It’s the honest truth I’m telling you, Neef Flip. And if you ask me why they did it, I’ll tell you it was from pure spite, spite and jealousy, because they couldn’t stand somebody else making a success of his life.”

  He ceremoniously closed and locked the trunk again, and pushed it back under the bed. Then he steered me back to his store.

  Every Word