by Andre Brink
A Goddamn Adventure
AS I PASSED the cairn behind the churchyard in the dark grey dawn, I became aware of a figure following me. It was too dark to see much, but even before I recognised him from his swinging walk I knew who it was. I stopped. To tell the truth, I’d been expecting him for a while now. As with Ben Owl the night before, this appointment had been a long time coming.
“Good morning, Oom Lukas,” I said.
“Yes, morning.” The Seer approached, hobbling on his crutches. “You’re early.”
“That’s so.”
“Just as well, you have a long road ahead.” He waited for an answer. When it didn’t come he prodded me impatiently. “You going home today, aren’t you?”
“No, Oom Lukas.” I looked straight at him, but in the treacherous light he seemed transparent. “I’ve decided to stay on for the time being. There’s no hurry.” I was surprised by how calm and steady my voice sounded; only I knew what lay behind it. For this time I wasn’t blundering into something I didn’t know about. This was my choice, not just a goddamn adventure. “I started something and now I’ve got to see it through.”
“Have you not dug up enough about us yet?”
“No,” I said.
“Look at the place.” Supporting himself on one crutch he made a sweeping gesture with the other. Most of the destruction was still mercifully hidden in the dark, but I knew what he meant. “And it’s all because of you.”
“It was a storm. I had nothing to do with it.”
“God is angry.”
“Not with me.”
“Every time things go wrong in the Devil’s Valley it is brought on by outsiders.”
“If you ask me, the trouble began when the first Lermiets came in here.”
I expected him to be offended, but he just gave a difficult little laugh. As on the first day, it sounded like the rustle of old leaves.
“You’re a strange one, Neef Flip.” He shuffled to the heap of stones, where he laboriously lowered himself between the two crutches until he was seated. Then he took a filthy little snuffbox from a tattered pocket. “Want a sniff?”
The mere thought was repulsive, but to win some goodwill—or time?—I shook out a small quantity of the snuff on my crooked forefinger. It was so strong that my eyes promptly started watering and I sneezed five, six, seven times, enough to expel my guts.
The old Seer grunted with satisfaction and helped himself to a copious sniff.
“So you reckon it was I who started it?” he asked.
“I don’t think any one person is to blame, Oom Lukas. It’s just something that’s been building up over the years, like a bad boil. Now it’s ripe. And if it did start somewhere it could only have been with you.”
“Things don’t always happen the way one wants them to. You think I would have stayed here if there was a way to get out? But I mos got a leg.” He shook his crutches in a show of impotent anger.
“Your time is long past, Oom Lukas,” I said cautiously. “Why don’t you go to rest?”
“Shall I tell you?” His dull eyes began to glimmer more brightly. “Because I don’t like the idea of facing that devil. He’s just waiting for me to come down.”
“What devil, Oom Lukas?”
“Hm.” He took another generous thumbnail of sniff. “You sure you want to know?”
“I came here to find out. I can’t stop half-way.”
“Then on your head be it.”
On Top of the Grave
He looked hard at me. Then he leaned forward on his crutches. Like any old man telling any story.
“When we trekked in here,” he said, “this whole valley was full of enemies.”
“I was told the Valley was an empty wilderness at the time.”
“They just too scared to tell you, man, don’t ask me why. But there were Bushmen and Hottentots all over the place. We had to get rid of them to clear a spot for ourselves. The few who survived agreed to live in peace with us. They damn well knew what was good for them. And for some time things went well. But then my wife died.”
“That was Mina?”
“Who else?” He snorted. “You know what it does to a man to be burned by desire and have nothing to douse it with?”
“Your second wife was Bilhah?”
“God knows what her real name was,” he said. “I christened her Bilhah. I mean, how can a man sin with a woman’s body if she doesn’t have a name from the Bible?”
“She was a Hottentot woman,” I said with a straight face.
“What else could I do?” he asked. “Abraham and Isaac and Jacob also had to make do with what they could get, didn’t they? It’s straight from the Word of God. And anyway, a root needs moisture, it’s that way inclined.” He scratched his beard. “And there would have been no problem either, except then her bloody husband mos got difficult. Well, he left me no choice, we had to fight it out. I thought a few quick slaps would do it, but that shit was a real devil in the shape of a man. And underhand too. I tell you, if he’d come to me man to man, I could have killed him with one shot, but he waited till I was asleep. So it was with our bare hands. From morning star to red dusk. Until at last I pushed him down into his own fire. The coals were almost gone, but still hot enough to give him a good roasting while I sat on his head.”
“You killed him?”
“Of course I killed him.” He spat something green past me. “And shall I tell you what I did next? I am a Lermiet, Neef Flip, I got my pride. Dog-tired as I was, I dug a hole and put the body in it. And then I told his wife to lie down on top of the grave and I gave it to her right there. The next day I built my house on that very spot. Seventeen children I made on that grave. In later years they rebuilt and change the house a bit, but it’s still there where I built it, where Lukas Death lives now. Sometimes the heat still comes up from the old grave below where we used to do our thing.”
“And since then you were the baas here?”
“What do you think? No one ever dared raise a hand against me. Some of that devil’s children tried to crawl back here and take their revenge, years later, but by that time my sons were already growing up and we were man enough for them.”
“And your sons?” I asked. “Lukas Nimrod and the others, did they also take their wives from Bilhah’s relatives?”
“Lukas Nimrod took Bilhah’s daughter, yes. But what’s the difference? By that time we were all one family.”
“So the throwbacks from later generations came from Bilhah?”
“They were the exceptions,” he said, pride in his voice. “We Lermiets are good breeders. We fucked the whole Devil’s Valley white.”
Thorn In His Eye
I narrowed my eyes against the first colourless light coming through the mountains. “Why were they trying so hard to cover it up?”
“One doesn’t keep on sucking from a dry teat.”
“Bilhah was your own wife. How could she bring shame over your descendants?”
“I’m not saying anything against Bilhah. She was a good meid. But white is white when it comes to the crunch, goddammit. And God takes pleasure in pure blood. A bastard race is a thorn in his eye.” He leaned further forward to stare me right in the face. “Look man, there’s nothing one can do about tomorrow. It comes as it must. All you can do something about is yesterday. But the problem with yesterday is it never stays down, you got to keep stamping on it.”
The old Seer sat back again. He seemed to have done with me. The light was stronger now. I sat weighing up his story in my mind, testing it against the many other versions I had heard. Was there anything true about it, anything at all? Or was Emma right when she said that it didn’t really matter, as long as it made sense? Whatever ‘sense’ may mean: but I suppose that was her point. In spite of my suspicion and resentment, I felt moved by something in the old fucker, perhaps in all his breed. With the lies of stories—all the lies, all the stories—we shape ourselves the way the first person was shaped from the dust of the earth.
That is our first and ultimate dust. Who knows, if we understood what was happening to us, we might not have needed stories in the first place. We fabricate yesterdays for ourselves which we can live with, which make the future possible, even if it remains infinitely variable and vulnerable, a whole bloody network of flickerings, an intimate lightning to illuminate the darkness inside. And what lies at the root of it all is not this one’s crime or that one’s sin, but the involvement of a whole community. And now I, too, had been drawn into it.
How fucking precarious it all was. For them. Above all, for myself. That first afternoon, ten days before, a bloody lifetime ago, this same old man had warned me, up there on the mountain, You going into it with open eyes. It wasn’t true, I hadn’t known. How could I? But now I knew. It was a knowledge for which, for all I knew, I had traded my soul.
From the Rafters
TANT POPPIE, AS I might have expected, was already at work in the kitchen when I came in. I’d have preferred to slip quietly past her to my room, but she stopped to fix such a glare on me that I hesitated. She said nothing, asked nothing; but she stared with her raptor’s eyes.
“How are you this morning?” I asked, feigning innocence.
“Awful, thank you. My whole body is racked with pain.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
Her quick eyes darted suspiciously across my face. “Don’t you believe me then?”
“Oh I do, I do. I think you’re an incredibly strong woman to bear it all so bravely. It must be a hard life.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You got a lot to say for someone who has just come in.”
I refused to take the bloody bait. “I was talking to the Seer,” I said with a poker-face.
“All night long?”
I shrugged. It wouldn’t surprise me if she knew already, the way these people seemed to know everything; but she wasn’t going to hear it from me.
“I made you padkos,” she said, pushing across the table a bundle tied in a checkered cloth. “You have mos a long way to go.”
Trapped. But I tried to handle it as undramatically as possible. “I decided to stay on a little longer, if it’s all right with you. Otherwise I must find another place to stay. I really don’t want to put you out.”
“What made you change your mind so suddenly? Only yesterday you were all set to go.”
My right hand made a ball-and-claw in my pocket. But I refused to budge. “There’s just too much unfinished work still to do.”
“And what does Grandpa Lukas have to say about it?”
Now watch your step, Flip. “I’m sure he understands,” I said noncommittally.
“One wonders,” she said, turning back to the oven built into the side of the open hearth, “one wonders what use it could be.” She plucked open the iron door and grabbed a breadpan with her bare hands. She turned the pan over and suddenly called out in dismay, “Now look what you made me do. I turned the bread upside-down.”
“Just turn it back.”
“It’s too late.”
“It’s a silly superstition, that’s all.”
“How can you say such a thing?” She was so upset about the bread that she didn’t know which way to turn.
At that moment a dirty little figure appeared in the front door. It was Piet Snot.
“Tant Poppie,” he said breathlessly, “Pa says Tant Poppie must come quickly. Oom Ben Owl is hanging from the rafters.”
Hit the Fan
Tant Poppie waddled right over the poor child. And before he could scramble to his feet I followed her. In front of Ouma Liesbet’s house, which looked even tattier than in the dark last night, the settlers stood gathered in the dusty road.
Now, thought the crime reporter, the shit has hit the fan.
The crowd immediately made way for Tant Poppie, but before I could follow the gap had closed up again. Only when a familiar stench approached from behind, followed by Hans Magic and his aura of buzzing flies, did the tightly packed crowd part again, and after taking a deep breath to last me for some time, I stuck to his heels. At the same time a small hand clutched my arm. It was Piet Snot again. He’d brought my chameleon with him—he must have fetched it from my room—and placed it on my wrist with an expression of deep reproach. Fortunately Hans Magic’s smelly passage was so overwhelming that the people took a while before they closed their ranks again, which gave me time to work my way inside.
Tant Poppie, Dalena-of-Lukas, and a few other people were at work around Ben Owl’s body which lay outstretched on the floor, as stiff as a board and with his tongue protruding, his twisted face a deep purple. The kind of scene I’ve described in many a filed report. Matter of juggling the adjectives. From one of the rafters overhead a twisted thong still dangled. To one side lay an overturned chair, presumably kicked over by Ben Owl. Jurg Water was hovering in the background, brandishing the long butcher’s knife with which he must have cut the thong. But it was clearly too late. Tant Poppie’s efforts also proved fruitless.
“God does not sleep,” pronounced Brother Holy from a dark corner, clearing his throat as if preparing to propel himself into a sermon straight away.
“It was all unnecessary,” said Hans Magic in an accusing tone of voice. “Why didn’t he come to talk to me before doing such a stupid thing?”
“You were the one who shrivelled up his foot,” Brother Holy reminded him.
“If he didn’t go where he wasn’t supposed to go, there would have been nothing wrong with his foot.” He took out his dagga pipe. “And then, for all we know, Maria would also have been alive.”
“I don’t think he ever meant to harm Maria,” I interposed.
“And what do you know about it?” asked Hans Magic through a heavy cloud of smoke which, mercifully, began to dampen his olid fumes. But the flies remained a fucking pestilential presence.
Unable to keep silent any longer, I said, “I spoke to Ben Owl last night.”
Everybody in the voorhuis turned to me. The people kneeling or squatting beside the body rose to their feet. No one said a goddamn word.
Just One Blow
“After what happened at the graveyard yesterday I wanted to find out more from him,” I explained. “It was clear for all to see that he knew more than he said. I thought he’d get angry with me, or clam up. But he was very frank. I suppose he already knew he was going to commit suicide.”
“And what did he say?” asked Jurg Water aggressively. “You’re very quick to poke your nose into our affairs. What with your bloody forked stick and all. As if you know anything about finding water.”
“I know nothing about water, Jurg,” I tried to placate him. “I told you I only did what Ouma Liesbet asked me to. My rod found her body, that’s all. When it comes to water, you’re the expert, not I.”
“That Jurg is a bloody sham anyway,” bitched Hans Magic, looking at no one in particular. “When there was water everywhere in the Devil’s Valley he couldn’t stop bragging about that rod of his. Pranced up and down like a billy goat smelling a nanny in rut. But now that we really need the water he’s useless.”
“You old stinking turd,” Jurg hit back. “I’ll need just one blow to knock you down.” I could see it was no idle threat either. Truly strong men, I’d discovered long ago in bars and other joints where the boys are weeded out from the men, are not the ones with the broad shoulders and the six-pack bellies who become Mister Universe, but those with sloping shoulders and flat arses like Jurg Water. They’re the ones to avoid.
“You lay a finger on me,” snapped Hans Magic like a mangy little cur facing an Alsatian, “and I’ll wither up your hand like Ben Owl’s foot.”
Jurg Water, I noticed, took a small step back.
This Man
Then Lukas Death came forward, looking fucking uncomfortable as if he was there much against his will. After taking his time to clear his throat, he asked, “Neef Flip, you were saying?”
“I said all I wanted to say, Lukas. I only came to find out whether
Ben Owl could tell me more about Ouma Liesbet’s empty coffin. He admitted that the two of them buried Maria after the stoning, but that he went back on his own later to dump the body in the Devil’s Hole.”
“Why would he do a thing like that?” asked Jurg Water, still from a safe distance.
“He said it was the only place where even Hans Magic wouldn’t find her.”
Lukas Death screwed up his eyes to peer through the billowing smoke. “Where do you fit into the story then, Oom Hans?”
“Maria deserved better than she could find here among us,” growled Hans Magic. “Ben Owl was the one who couldn’t understand that. It was to keep him away from her that I struck him with my gift. I only tried to protect her.”
“You had your own dirty designs on her,” Dalena-of-Lukas said unexpectedly from the back. “First on her, then on her daughter. But Maria wanted none of it, nor did Emma. Don’t pretend it isn’t true.”
“You’re just saying that because you picked Emma for your Little-Lukas,” Hans Magic hit back.
“Keep Little-Lukas out of this,” barked Lukas Death in a rare flash of anger.
“And why should I?” demanded Hans, also losing his temper. “He was the one who brought all this over us. He spread the story in the outside world and sent this man to us.” He was looking straight at me. “And from then on everything has been turned into a heap of shit. Even the rain stays away.”
I didn’t like this turn to the discussion. There was a barely subdued violence smouldering among the people, just waiting to break out.
“It was dry since long before I came, Oom Hans,” I said, trying to restrain my voice.
“That’s true,” cried someone from the back. Other voices agreed. It was like a wind that came up and then died down again, but only for now.
Its Own Tail
Like so many times before, it struck me how shallow the fucking resentment and the rage lay under the surface, how ready the people were to growl and bare their teeth at the slightest provocation. But also how diffuse everything was: no conversation ever pursued to a conclusion, no accusation followed up. It was all bloody random and haphazard, as they kept snapping in all directions, going in for the attack at the slightest opportunity. But it lacked conviction; it had become habit, as if they just went through the motions without really knowing or even wondering why they were doing so. And all I could sense below it all was a kind of panic. But where did it come from, what was its target? Each fucking dog kept on chasing its own tail.
