by Andre Brink
My Hand Between
Even when she started caressing me with an urgency that caught me unawares, I still tried to resist: “Emma, we’re tempting fate. This is too bloody dangerous.”
“I know you want to.”
“As soon as we’re out of the Devil’s Valley, I promise you we’ll make love. But not here, not now.”
To my consternation she said, “You did it with the others who came to you.”
“How do you know that?” I stammered.
“I just know.”
“That was quite different,” I protested, “I didn’t even know them.”
“And if we never have another chance?”
“Don’t say that, Emma.”
“Do you rather want me to go back to Little-Lukas?”
Quietly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world to do, and in a way it was, she pulled up her dress to her waist and placed my hand between her legs.
Crime reporter forfeits last opportunity of redemption. Chooses hell with open eyes.
So yes, Your Worship, yes, we did. The earth didn’t move, but when she came she cried. And as a matter of fact, so did I.
Not Alone
I was still inside her when, finding her invisible face in the dark, I said with an urgency I couldn’t control, “We cannot stay here after this.”
“I know,” she said, her hands entangled in the hair on my back. “You will have to go.”
“You too, Emma.”
“We’re not talking about me now.”
“You can’t risk your life for nothing.”
“You call this nothing?” She briefly stirred, and with a contraction of subterranean muscles I did not expect in one so inexperienced, she clasped me and made me swell again.
“We’re talking about life and death, Emma.”
“Don’t talk,” she whispered.
We made love again, even though I never thought I’d be up to it again so soon. We were both exhausted. Perhaps we even fell asleep. But we were still joined when, sometime in the night, I said once more, “You must go back with me, Emma.”
And after a very long pause she said, “All right, I will. As soon as we can get away without anyone knowing.”
“We mustn’t wait too long.”
But she had drifted off already, in the crook of my arm, in Lukas Up-Above’s ample coffin. I couldn’t sleep. Even the sense of fulfilment I felt about what had happened could not contain the many fears that beset me. And to make it worse there was the strange sensation—throughout the night, until just before dawn when she rose, and kissed me, and tiptoed out—that we were not alone. It wasn’t just the sound of footsteps pacing through the house all night: that was probably Lukas Death wandering about, keeping watch. It was something else, and more unnerving in its way. It was too dark to see anything, but the stale smell of whisky in the room betrayed his presence. I’d recognise White Horse anywhere.
The Same Dress
FROM THE CONFUSION of those days, in which all bloody chronology was suspended, only two encounters remain vivid in my mind. With Henta, and with Gert Brush.
Henta in the bluegum wood, the day little Piet Snot was buried, a small interval between all the preparations for the Valley’s next assault on God. I couldn’t face going to the funeral. Nor could Henta, I suppose. But this meeting was different from the others. There was no provocation. Although she must have sensed how diffident I was, because with a bitchy edge I hadn’t expected of her she said:
“Oom needn’t be afraid of me.”
“What makes you think I’m afraid?”
“You never liked me.”
“Henta, that’s not true.”
“It is. Everything I do you think is dirty.”
“Please stop it.”
“Why didn’t you go to the funeral?”
“Why didn’t you go? He was your brother.”
Instead of answering she asked, “Will you be going away now?”
“What makes you think such a thing?”
She just shrugged. The thin material of her torn dress—still the same dress—clung to her. She bore on her body the smell of the night as others do the smell of sex. Out of the blue she said, “Won’t you please take me with you?”
“If you go with me they’ll immediately come after us to fetch us back.”
“Well, I’m not going to stay here any more.”
“You mustn’t do anything rash, Henta.”
“What do you want me to do with this thing then?” she pressed her two palms to the curve of her lower belly. I remembered the prayer-meeting and I felt sick. I thought: My God, she wasn’t pretending after all.
Her eyes stared at me, the once-beautiful eyes which had seen too much; nothing of which could now be effaced. We’re all marked. Everything brings us closer to our own death. (Little lesson from the crime reporter.)
I wanted to reply, but couldn’t; she wasn’t expecting anything more from me either. Without warning she turned round and ran off, effortless as a bird taking flight, leaving no scar. I stood bewitched. I wanted her to come back, but to which name would she respond? Henta? Talita? This time I didn’t even have a bunch of bluegum leaves as an alibi. Who still remembered Talita Lightfoot? Who would remember Henta? For how long must the circles on the surface of this dark pool still go on? What price must still be paid, what sacrifices brought, before she would be redeemed? And all that remained in me after the girl had disappeared, forever, among the fragrant eucalyptus trees, was guilt. For something I still couldn’t understand, but which felt like betrayal. Worse, much worse, than any other act of fucking betrayal I’d committed before, and God knows there were many.
Four Tits
GERT BRUSH. I didn’t go to his place on purpose, but when in passing I saw him at work on a painting in his voorhuis I climbed up the few steps to the stoep. Like the previous time, I had the impression that I’d caught him unawares, and he quickly put out his hand to turn around the canvas he’d been working on, but then left it after all. His face was smudged with paint.
“Am I disturbing you, Gert?”
“Not really. I was just messing around.”
“I still meant to thank you for speaking up for me the other day.”
“This place is like a beehive,” he muttered. “I don’t know how long this can still go on.”
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“Because I think you mean well.” He wiped his face with a much-used cloth, succeeding only in making a greater mess of it. “But I think you have outstayed your welcome, if I may say so.”
“If it was only me I’d have gone long ago, Gert. But I’m worried about Emma. She deserves better.”
“We all deserve better.”
I came closer. The canvas on his easel was just a confusion of brush-strokes, yet it seemed vaguely familiar.
“Isn’t this the one you were working on the last time I saw you?”
“Could be.”
“Why did you paint out Emma’s face?”
“It wasn’t Emma.”
“But I saw it myself.”
“Must have been a mistake.” He looked ill at ease. “I was trying to do a portrait of Mooi-Janna. But it didn’t work.”
“Strong-Lukas’s daughter? The one who…?”
“Yes. It was the first time I tried to paint one of the women. The problem is no one can remember what she looked like. My father and grandfather also tried, I know, but it was no use. In the end we just paint the face we can call up most clearly.”
“But the black hair, the straight eyebrows…?”
He started to wipe the top layer of paint from the canvas with his cloth. “All anybody knows about Mooi-Janna with any certainty,” he said, “is that she had four tits.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Everybody knows. That was why she could do what she did, you see. No man could resist that. And you must admit, it’s not the sort of thing one sees every day. But of course I’d never
dare to paint that, the people wouldn’t allow it.”
Plaited Thongs
THROUGH ALL OF this, as in the days before Nagmaal, there was a sense of urgency building up. Its focus was the Final Solution proposed by the Council of Justice to solve the problem of drought. Pure sacrilege, boomed Brother Holy through his bouts of scratching, but no one was paying much attention to him any more. It had been Hans Magic’s brainchild. And I must confess that even if the means were old·fashioned, the thought behind it was pretty up to date.
The idea was to bombard the clouds when they showed themselves again: literally to shoot the rain from them.
“And if you hit God?” asked Brother Holy in righteous fury, tying himself into a most undignified knot to scratch his arse.
“Then He better duck,” sneered Hans Magic.
Not that there was much danger of that, the fucking technology was far too primitive. The plan was to select two sturdy saplings in the bluegum wood, close enough together to be used as props for the catapult they had devised, and then to tie a long loop of plaited thongs between them. Once this was done, all the men in the Devil’s Valley—with the exception of a few conscientious objectors—would give a hand to pull the two saplings back as far as possible, fit a heavy boulder into the loop, and then to anchor the contraption in that position until the clouds came over. According to Lukas Death this was among the techniques first devised by Lukas Up-Above in his attempts at flying; and it had taken him six months to recover after a quite spectacular failure. It was after this event that he’d turned to birds.
All things considered, it was quite a feat. And in a way it restored to their ranks something of the unity that had been so sorely disrupted. To Emma and me it came as a bloody blessing as it gave the settlers something else to focus on.
The contraption was put to the test several times. With the first few attempts one of the trees, or both, snapped in the process, causing the rock to drop limply right in front of them. The fourth or fifth time round it hit Jos Joseph who was too slow in scampering out of the way, and shattered his spine. This caused several corrections to be made, and stronger trees were selected, but to play it safe it was agreed not to have another trial run: faith would do the necessary.
By the third or fourth day everything was ready. Only the clouds had to put in an appearance. And as it turned out, they proved to be surprisingly cooperative, because after the previous gales they’d more or less fallen into the habit of coming over in the afternoon. The wind sprang up. The first clouds came rolling through the mountains, white at first, but rapidly growing darker. The whole settlement was present, including the sceptics, the conscientious objectors, and even Brother Holy. A few of the oldest inhabitants, and some of the sick too weak to move, were transported to the bluegum wood on handmade stretchers or wooden wheelbarrows, as this promised to be a spectacle no one wanted to miss. The only absentee I was aware of, and a notable one at that, was the old Seer. Which confirmed my hunch that after spilling his black beans he’d finally chosen to go to rest.
Uninvited, and still scratching away, Brother Holy intoned a rambling prayer. But no one paid attention. Well before he’d finished a chorus of voices shouted, “Watch out!” Whether it was meant for the crowd or for God, was not quite clear.
Requiescat in Pace
The plaited thongs were pulled loose from the anchor. The two elastic saplings swung up. But something in the calculations had gone wrong, because at the last moment the cocksucking Peet Flatfoot didn’t let go in time with the rest of them, so that he was propelled into space with the rock. Ejaculatio praecox, in, a manner of speaking. For lack of velocity the projectile and its human pilot plunged to earth a mere thirty yards or so away. Requiescat in pace, Prickhead.
“I told you so,” exclaimed Brother Holy in a thundering voice before the next itch convulsed him into a ball.
Most of the spectators, shaken by the accident, gloomily prepared to return home. But Jurg Water was so inspired by the event and by the clouds which continued to churn overhead, that he had a rare moment of inspiration. “If we all fire up into the clouds together,” he proposed, “who knows, we could make the rain come down.”
There was very little discussion. Lukas Death was the only one with open reservations: this was a serious business, he argued, there was too much at stake to rush in blindly without weighing the consequences. But he was soon outshouted. Some might have felt that they owed it to the late Prickhead to succeed the second time round, so that his death would not have been in vain. Others were simply fired by the excitement they’d already worked up and which demanded an outlet.
From the bluegum wood the procession moved downhill to the settlement, where the men scattered among the houses to return within minutes bristling with the most unusual assortment of firearms I’ve ever seen. The latest models, as far as I could judge with my limited knowledge, were Lee-Metfords and Mausers. But there were ancient elephant guns too, which I remembered from history books, and impressive old flintlocks and blunderbusses and double-and triple-barrelled carbines.
Loading was a damn serious business. The men operating muzzle-loaders were allowed to start first, as it was one hell of an elaborate process first to pour a handful of gunpowder down the barrel, followed by a round bullet and a piece of greased cloth pressed into position with a ramrod, after which another handful of gunpowder had to be poured into the pan and the lid closed. Only then could the rifle be cocked, ready to take aim. It took careful planning to make sure that all the preparations would result in a single Big Bang. Lukas Death tried one last time to dissuade the trigger-happy men, but Jurg Water rudely brushed him aside. From a safe distance Petrus Tatters began the countdown. An earsplitting salvo thundered among the high cliffs.
“Got him!” shouted Jurg Water.
“Now you’ve gone too far,” cried Lukas Death. He was trembling, but whether in rage or fear was hard to judge.
A huge bank of thundercloud, hovering directly above the settlement, had begun to twist and writhe about in a most alarming manner, as if it had actually been wounded. The dark boiling mass threw out white scalloped edges as it began to fold into itself. And the wind which had been tugging at us sporadically, began very rapidly to work up a terrifying speed.
Even Hans Magic was beginning to show signs of alarm about the way things were going.
“This is bad,” said Lukas Death, now scared right out of his fucking wits. “I warned you, but you wouldn’t listen. God will not be mocked. We must get back to our houses. Make sure all the doors are bolted and secured.”
In the absence of Brother Holy who was imitating the fucking convolutions of the thundercloud, Lukas stretched out his arm towards his distressed people. In a breaking voice he invoked the love of God, the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the powerful presence of the Holy Ghost to be with us all. Without bothering to say Amen he broke into a trot to get home before the storm broke.
All Over the Valley
IN THE BEGINNING all four of us sat in Lukas Death’s voorhuis listening to the wind raging outside. From time to time large objects came hurtling and careening past the windows. Although it was no new experience any more, this time it was more terrifying than before. Nobody spoke. We were all huddled together, yet each was utterly alone.
The darker it became, and the wilder the storm raged outside, the warmer the scorched circle in the middle of the floor felt under our feet. In the deep dusk of the interior it was glowing an unearthly red, as if all the heat of the Seer’s long-ago couplings on his enemy’s grave had been rekindled.
When the thunder started, Dalena rose to cover the few mirrors in the house with cloths. After that she couldn’t sit down again. The storm was growing steadily worse. The violence was unbelievable. It sounded as if the very mountains were falling. It must have been in a storm like this, in prehistoric times, that the earth was torn open and the deep gash of the valley ripped into it. Perhaps that first great battle between the Seer and the
Devil was being fought again; for all we knew the whole fucking Book of Revelations was finally being thrown at us. Which would bloody well have served the Devil’s Valley right, I thought: but why the hell should I be caught up in it? It was fucking unfair. If God wanted to have it out with this nest of vipers, then by all means, and with my blessing; but keep me out of it.
In the midst of all that noise Dalena suddenly went through to their bedroom, and when she came back she was holding something in her hands. At first I couldn’t make out what it was. But when she opened the front door and it felt as though all the wind in the valley came gushing in to blow the lot of us away, I recognised it. By then it was too late to stop her.
“Dalena!” shouted Lukas Death. “For God’s sake, woman, come back!”
“You didn’t want him back,” she called into the wind as she let go of the battered little box. The wind immediately tore it from her hands. “There goes Little-Lukas,” she said quietly. “Now he’s all over the valley.”
Lukas Death ran after her to bring her back, but she was already inside. It took all four of us to push the door to again.
“Now one can at last be at peace again,” she said with a curious expression of relief on her drawn face.
“How could you do a thing like that?” He grabbed her by the front of her dress and started tugging with a kind of uncontrollable rage that left me dumbstruck.
But with surprising strength Dalena shoved him away. “Let me be, Lukas,” she hissed. “I’ve just about had it with you.”
“How can you humiliate me so in front of other people?” he shouted. “Dalena, have you forgotten that I’m the appointed Judge of the Devil’s Valley?”
She took a deep breath. “Let’s go to the bedroom, Lukas. We can talk there.”
Column of Fire
The two of them withdrew to their bedroom. We remained behind, too dismayed to speak for some time. From behind the closed bedroom door there was a long bout of angry, arguing voices, but at last it subsided. Emma went over to one of the two small windows in the voorhuis to look out.
