by Andre Brink
At the same time, in a way I couldn’t explain, her words had sent me back to darknesses within myself. Stay away from me, I thought. And yet I knew I couldn’t bear it if she were really to let go of me.
She began to stroke the wrinkles from her soaked dress. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Because it is too dangerous here?”
With what might be a smile in her serious eyes she said, “Perhaps it’s more dangerous down there.”
Terrifying
WE PARTED IN the bluegum wood. When could we meet again? What with the storm coming up, we’d have to wait at least until the next evening.
“Then we’ll try to find your mother’s coffin,” I said.
“Are you really going to risk it?”
“The sooner we find out the better. There’s already been too much loose talk. What we need now is proof.”
“I don’t want to cause you trouble.”
“It’s worse for you, Emma.”
“I can take it.”
“Tomorrow night then.”
I waited until she had disappeared through the trees, and then went off in the opposite direction, to the far end of the valley. By the time I emerged from the wood heavy clouds were already charging across the sky overhead. It was almost unbelievable, but I saw it with my own eyes. Even so, my thoughts were so screwed up that I registered very little of what was going on around me.
As I started going down the last steep slope to Tant Poppie’s house, the wind sprang up from below, so violent and so sudden that it nearly swept me off my feet. It was all I could do to jog down the incline, stagger round the house and tumble through the front door.
The wind was rapidly building up into a gale. Where I took up position in front of my bedroom window—Tant Poppie was out—all kinds of things came blowing past outside: pitchforks, wheelbarrows, chickens, seven ostriches, two pigs, eleven drying-trays and one whole haystack. Funny in a way, but not really. It was fucking terrifying.
I have no idea how long it went on, as I stood there in a kind of daze, even when I could no longer see anything. The dark had swooped down like a large bird descending on the valley with widespread black wings. And all the time the wind was raging, tugging at the roofs, at the walls. There were moments when I feared the whole place was going to be blown to hell and gone. But after a very long time the violence began to abate. There were a few last brief gusts, tearing something down here, smashing something else there. But at last it died down. The clouds were blown away. The stars came out again. And through all of it not a drop of rain had fallen.
To Talk To
I remained at the window, as if waiting for something to be completed, but nothing happened. At least not anything I could have expected. I thought I saw something moving outside and pressed my face against the panes, but it was just about impossible to distinguish anything in the dark. Yet I was convinced there was something. And then, yes, there was a glimmering of light, a swinging lantern, and a woman in a black shawl carrying it. Another of the sisters of the night? But this one looked middle-aged, quite unlike the others.
With her swinging lantern she went round the house to the front door. She came in without knocking, and only then did I recognise her: Dalena, the wife of Lukas Death. I remembered the piercing way she’d looked at me that morning.
“I’ve come to talk to you,” she said, out of breath. Behind her calm appearance I could sense other, more turbulent things.
I lit an oil lamp too and we sat down at the long dining table.
“An apostle?” I asked, not expecting her to accept, but she did.
When we were both seated again with our tin mugs, the silence became tangible, inside and out.
Like a Torrent
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” she said at last. She held the mug with both hands as she drank, as if to quench a thirst. “But there are things I need to hear from you. I can’t bear this any more.”
“What is it?”
“It’s about Little-Lukas.”
“Yes?”
When at last she began to speak it was like a torrent, as if everything she’d been holding back came bursting out all at the same time. She was Little-Lukas’s mother, she said, she had a right to know, but no one wanted to tell her anything, she knew what he’d done wasn’t right, but that didn’t change the fact that he was her child, the only one she’d ever had, and he was never very strong, but such a bright little fellow, and she couldn’t take it any longer that his name could not be spoken in decent company.
“Look, one can keep silent for so long and then no more,” she said. “Even a stone will cry out.” She was clearly beginning to crack up. “You know, even though I loved him so much Little-Lukas was never really allowed to be mine. When he was small there was often trouble between me and his father, so it was mostly Tall-Fransina who brought the child up. I blamed her a lot, and I suppose in a way I still bear a grudge, but at the same time I don’t know what would have become of him without her. And afterwards it was Emma. I was always kept to the edge of his life. But he was my child.” She tightened the shawl over her shoulders. “And then he went away, over the mountains, out of my hands.”
“There really isn’t very much I can tell you, Dalena.”
She was close to breaking point. “Tell me anything,” she said urgently, “even if you have to make it up. I want to know everything. I know nothing.”
I started working through my memories; it was like rummaging through an old trunk in an attic. There was so little really, but I tried to stretch it as far as I could. The day of the symposium, the night with the killer bottle of OB, the telephone conversation, the afternoon of Little-Lukas’s death. She was soaking it all up like rain.
“They said he was irresponsible, he brought it on himself,” she said. Her eyes stared at me. “But that’s nonsense. It was they who killed him, the old men in the valley. I know them. It’s they who fix the limits and the laws, and woe betide the one who steps over. And that is why God is angry with us now, but they are too pig-headed to admit it.”
“It was an accident, Dalena. You must try to understand that.”
“You’re the one who cannot understand.” Her colourless eyes briefly flared. “I’m not accusing you Neef Flip. But you know nothing about us.”
“I’ve been trying my best to find out, but wherever I turn I run into blank walls.”
Wrong Colour
“It’s the old men,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “They wanted Little-Lukas out of here, away from Emma. The whole thing was between them and her. Because she was just about the only girl who would never open her legs to anyone. Not to Jurg Water, not to Isak Smous, not even to Hans Magic.” A brief silence. “And not to my husband either.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that a Godfearing man like Lukas Death would do a thing like that?”
“Why not? This is the Devil’s Valley.” Her eyes were glowing now, like embers. “But for Emma there’s never been anyone but Little-Lukas. Which was why they thought if they could send him away she’d forget about him. And he was a clever boy, he’d do anything to study. Not even Emma could stop him. But then it didn’t work out the way they’d planned it, because Emma just kept on waiting for him. They knew if he ever came back he would take her from under their noses. That was why they had to get rid of him you see.”
“It was Emma who encouraged him most of all to go on with his studies,” I said emphatically, but as gently as I could.
“No, she just wanted him for herself. You can ask Tall-Fransina, she complained about it all the time. All the things Emma did to keep him here.”
“No, Dalena. Emma saw that Little-Lukas had reached a dead-end here, that was why she wanted him to use his chances.”
“I’m not saying anything against Emma,” she interrupted. “But for Little-Lukas she was nothing but trouble. It would have been better if the two of them never got to know each other, there my husband was right. If she wasn’t t
here they wouldn’t have had to kill him.”
“But it was an accident, Dalena,” I repeated. Anxious to persuade her I laid it on thickly. “Look, I was there. I saw it happen. The car drove across a stop street. It could have happened to anyone.”
“What did he ever do wrong?” she asked angrily. “I mean, he wasn’t black or anything.”
“What on earth has black got to do with it?” The crime reporter was pricking up his ears.
She closed up. “Nothing,” she said curtly. “I’m just saying. And now I don’t even have a grave to look after, no bones, nothing.”
My thoughts tied a quick loop. “Dalena, I can give you something of Little-Lukas’s. If you promise to tell me what you meant when you spoke about not being black.” This was an underhand thing to do, but I just had to find out. For the first time I could see a crack in the wall the settlement had been putting up around me.
Her mouth was set in a grim line. At first she refused to speak. But then I suppose the mother in her got the upper hand. “It just means that all these years we’ve had children of the wrong colour born among us and then the people had to get rid of them. The throwbacks. But Little-Lukas was no throwback.”
Somewhere, dimly, something was beginning to make sense. But for every answer there were two new questions.
“Throwbacks to what?”
“How must I know?” she asked blankly.
“The skulls,” I said, more to myself than to her, getting up quickly to go to my room. But the two little skulls were no longer on the wash-stand where I had left them. For a moment I wondered if I’d imagined them too. But that was too bloody much.
After a while the blind anger subsided. I mean, it wasn’t really a loss, it made no difference to what I knew or didn’t know. The most annoying part was the discovery that once again someone had fucked about in my things.
“What is it?” asked Dalena-of-Lukas behind me.
I turned round. “I dug up two little skulls this morning. Under the heap of stones behind the graveyard.”
“Yes, I remember. You brought one round to our house.”
“You saw it?”
“Of course. You came to show it to Lukas.”
Thank God. So this, at least, had not been a hallucination.
Unmistakable Whiff
“Now they’re gone.” I came towards her. “Do you think they belonged to dark children?”
“How must I know? All bones are white. But if you found them under the stones I suppose they must have been the wrong colour.” Her fingers cut into my arm. “You said you had something to give me from Little-Lukas. Where is it? What is it?”
“There was no one to bury him after he died, so I had him cremated.” I told her about the arrangements, the landlady, the small box of ashes. And then I came out with it, “I brought his ashes with me. I told Lukas Death about it, but he wasn’t interested. So I thought I’d just go and bury it on my own one night.”
“I want my child back,” she said so firmly that I had no choice left.
“Go back to your seat. I’ll fetch it for you.”
Unless the box had also disappeared in the meantime. But as I stepped back into the bedroom I stopped. On the foot of the bed, in the faint light coming from the voorhuis, sat a figure I immediately recognised. It was Little-Lukas. No doubt about it, with those thick glasses. He was swaying lightly as he sat, as if he’d had too much to drink. And I caught the unmistakable whiff of White Horse. On his knees, which he held primly together, he clutched the little box.
It lasted only for a minute, then he was gone. But the box was sitting there on the foot of the bed, as if someone had put it out for me.
Feeling quite numb, I returned to the voorhuis with the unprepossessing remains of Little-Lukas Lermiet. Dalena didn’t bother to open the box. She just took it from my hands and pressed it against her breast like a baby. Her body remained very straight. A bloody formidable woman indeed. “There’s so little left of him,” she said. She didn’t cry, but it was a wrench just to watch her. After a long silence she said, “If I hadn’t come to you tonight they’d have stopped me again. They take everything. They took our whole history.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, intrigued.
“Well, if there were dark children, it must have started with a mother, somewhere,” she said. “There’s always a woman in the background. Not that you’d know if you only listened to Lukas and them.” And at last she gave way to the angry flood I’d seen coming for such a long time. “What have they been telling you? About Grandpa Lukas who came in here and did just what he wanted? Lukas Nimrod who killed everything that moved? Abraham Koen who bought and sold and lied and cheated? Carpenters and builders and hunters? Jacob Horizon who travelled to the ends of the earth. Strong-Lukas who wiped out the government’s commando, and the two handsome rebels we captured to clear our blood, and Lukas Devil who locked up the census men in the church tower. Did they say where the women were in all of this? Do you think those rebels, Jurg Water’s grandfather and his two friends, would have agreed to stay here for the rest of their lives if a girl like Tahta Lightfoot hadn’t bewitched them by dancing naked in the moonlight and lying with them like Ruth with Boaz in the Bible? And why do you think the census men followed Lukas Devil into the church if there hadn’t been a girl tied up inside like bait in a trap? She was locked up there with the men and left to rot, we don’t even know her name. I can spend a whole night telling you all the stories, and we wouldn’t even have dented the surface. But why should you listen to me?”
“Please tell me, Dalena. I promise you I’ll listen.”
On Her Back
DALENA SPOKE THROUGH much of the night. I dearly wished I could dash out to fetch my tape recorder, but I didn’t dare interrupt the flow of her story, as that might put an early end to it. So I’d just have to catch up with my notes afterwards.
She began with Grandpa Lukas, the Seer. Who quietly stole away one night, when his family was in dire straits in the heavy snow of the valley, to pick his way back to the outside world without them. What was to become of his wife and the last remaining children wasn’t his concern. They’d become blinkers to his inspired eyes, shackles to his itchy feet. But half-way up the mountain he took a wrong step and fell down a krans and broke his leg. That was where his wife Mina found him three days later and carried him all the way down on her back. Don’t ask me how she managed it, she hadn’t even fully recovered yet from the beating he’d given her. But she never reproached him with word or look.
And then the gangrene set in, said Dalena, and it was Mina who had no choice but to tie him up with thongs so he couldn’t resist, and then she hacked off the leg with a pocket knife. The operation had to be repeated three times as the gangrene crept ever higher. First at the ankle, then above the knee, then in the groin. She’d first tried to knock him out with the infamous Cape Smoke of the time, but even then the pain was so terrible that the cliffs echoed with his roars. He sobbed like a child, begging her to end his misery by killing him there and then. But she swallowed back her own tears and told him not to act like a bloody baby, and then took a chisel and hammer to chop through the marrowbone inside. Afterwards she scoured the mountains for herbs she could use to ease the pain and heal the wounds, and in the end she pulled him through. Lukas Seer did not want to live any more. What was life to a man without a leg? But Mina made sure he would survive with her.
Only after he’d begun to recover, she broke down. What she’d been through had been too much for flesh and blood and she fell seriously ill. But Lukas Lermiet never thought of finding herbs or remedies to save her life. Morose and brooding, he spent his days sitting on a rock, staring into the distance, cursing God for striking him such a low blow, and Mina for leaving him to cope on his own; and he only got up again after the vultures had devoured her dead body. We don’t even know where her remains were put to rest, if ever they were.
One Must Die
In the second generation, too
, a woman played a role. Lukas Nimrod, the Seer’s firstborn son with his second wife, spent so much time making the Devil’s Valley a safe place to live in that it was relatively late in life before he took a wife. She was Sanna, and nobody was quite sure where she came from. All we know is that she’d been married before, because when Lukas Nimrod took her, she already had two half-grown sons. They were the cross he had to bear in his hectic life. For Lukas Nimrod was a hard man and he had little time for another man’s offspring. They were given more beatings than food, and it went from bad to worse after Sanna had begun to give birth to his own children, one every nine months, and sometimes two.
The crisis came when his stepsons were approaching twenty. For all those years they had borne without complaint what their stepfather had made them suffer. But by the time his strength began to wane they were at the height of theirs. And then they rose up against him. Presumably most of the men in the Devil’s Valley were involved, as Lukas Nimrod’s terror had fallen on them all. So a whole gang of them went with him on a hunt from which he wasn’t supposed to return.
Except that it turned out differently. When Lukas Nimrod’s two stepsons crept up on him during the hunt, one afternoon when he was peacefully having a smoke, he knocked the first one’s feet from under him before he could pull the trigger. The shot fired by the second hit him in the shoulder. But Lukas Nimrod’s strength was legendary, and the pain drove him into such a rage that he was even more ferocious than ever. Singlehanded he overpowered both his assailants and tied them up. This so scared the other men on the hunt that they all helped enthusiastically to drag the culprits home.
Right up there in front of the church Lukas Nimrod summoned his wife to witness the fate of the rebel scum. They were to be executed before her eyes.
Sanna fell to the ground and clasped his knees, begging him to save her sons. But he just kicked her off. She refused to give up and at last, for the sake of peace and quiet, he made a decision.
