by Andre Brink
The body I loved, no longer moves. It was the events of this body, I think, which at long last turned me into the only historian I’ll ever be, when my body wrote the chronicle of hers, and hers of mine. Now she is dead.
Was this, I wonder in a wave of nausea, what the motherfucking old Hans Magic meant when he said, ‘Leave me alone with this feeling in me’?
Just leave me alone now. For fuck’s sake, just leave me alone.
Above me, on the edge of the dry pool, stands Dalena. I’m trying very hard to follow what she says. Her breath, which came in deep gasps when I first saw her, is back to normal. She actually appears unnaturally calm.
Over and over again I hear myself asking the same questions. Why she? And why Lukas Death? And why Emma?
Dalena talks to me as if she’s trying to soothe a child. I try to follow. It had to be done, she says, because Emma was Lukas Death’s child. With the girl Maria, all those years ago. It happened when he went to fetch her back after she’d run away. His best friend, Ben Owl, had asked him to. But he cheated on Ben Owl. High up in the mountains he fell on Maria when she was half-asleep and didn’t know before it was too late what was going on. After that she refused to have anything more to do with him. And when she found out that she was pregnant she agreed to marry Ben Owl, to spite Lukas. And Lukas married Dalena. Little-Lukas was born only a few months after Emma.
Now you’ll understand, says Dalena, why Lukas Death’s life became a living hell when the two children fell in love. He couldn’t tell anybody why he was so dead against it. She herself had always had it wrong. Only last night he finally told her.
“Now it doesn’t matter any more, I don’t care if they all know,” she says, “I have found peace in my mind. I have done what I had to do. But you must hurry up now, Neef Flip. The people down there will have heard the shots, they’ll be coming up here any minute now. They mustn’t find you here.”
“But Emma…”
“There’s nothing more you or anyone else can do for Emma. She’d have wanted you to get out of this place. For her sake too.” A very brief pause, then she adds under her breath, “And perhaps for mine, who knows?”
Dark Mole
I walk along the edge of the hole alone, over to the far side. Here is the spot where she stood that day. I stop. I go down on my haunches. I touch the rock with one numb finger. For here are her footprints, clear as anything, pressed deep into the rock. Slowly I get up again. I stare across the empty pool. Dalena has gone back into the tangled underbrush. I can’t see Emma’s body from here either; but perhaps it is because I’m crying.
From down below, behind me, I can now clearly hear voices coming this way. Maybe Dalena will delay them, maybe not.
As if stoned out of my mind, my guts like a millstone weighing me down, I crouch down low and duck into the underbrush along the dry bed. God knows if I’ll ever find my way again. But even if I don’t find all the shortcuts Prickhead followed that first afternoon—and for all I know they may not have been shortcuts at all—I swear to God I’ll get out of the valley sooner or later. How long did it take Mooi-Janna’s pursuers to get to the top? At least they had her there waiting for them, with her dark hair undone, her straight eyebrows, her four nipples.
Today was the first time I’ve seen Emma’s body, when I kneeled beside her down there in the dried-up pool to fold the torn flaps of her dress over her. My hands were trembling, and I tried not to look. But there was time enough to see, and I know now that there were only two, not four. With a small dark mole like the footprint of a goat just below her left nipple, exactly as Tant Poppie had described it.
Memorise this, I thought, remember, hold on to it, against all the nights and days and delusions to come, when I might be tempted to distort and betray it, to lie about it. My body will not forget.
Nothing Happened
Once, when I have to stop to catch my breath—there is no sign of my pursuers any more—I look out over the long narrow valley stretching out far below, tranquil in the can’t-care-less glare of the sun. There is an ungodly quiet over the mountains.
I have made unexpectedly good progress. Already it is difficult to believe what has happened down there. All I have, I the historian, I the crime reporter, in search of facts, facts, facts, is an impossible tangle of contradictory stories.
And yet she said, It doesn’t mean that nothing happened. Don’t ever forget that.
At the time I still thought that perhaps one day I could manage to put all the bits and pieces together and make sense of them. Now I’m no longer so sure. Not because there are so many stories I’ve not yet heard, but because I suspect that even if I were to know them all there would still not be a whole, just an endless gliding from one to another.
All I know is that I came here, that I tried to trace a history, and that I’m now on my way back, alone. Less than I was, or more.
Crude Capitals
This is the Bushman Krans. So I’m still on the right track after all. The colours of the rock paintings are surprisingly bright, as if they were done yesterday. The eland, the few elephant, the wildebeest, the small male figures with their silly little pricks. And chiselled right across them, the inscription in crude capitals: STRONG-LUKAS. The hero of his tribe, the one who wiped out the enemy commando. Somewhere below these very cliffs must lie the bones of the girl he shrugged from his back when they no longer needed her. To keep their honour and their pride intact, for all the generations to come. It is as if I can hear Ouma Liesbet Prune’s little cricket-voice chirping again, “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.”
All of it as improbable as the skeleton of a whale in the mountains. And yet I was there, I saw it, I crumbled a piece of bone to dust between my fingers. Does that mean anything? Or am I beginning to grow into my own story like a toenail? Would Tant Poppie have a remedy for that?
Is The Last
For the moment everything is focused on a single point. To get out of here. And I’m well on my way. The day is almost over. For how many hours I have been going I cannot calculate, but it’s been a fucking long time. Just a short distance more. Our crime reporter is returning with a story after all. Perhaps this time he’ll meet his deadline. It may not turn out to be publishable, but that is neither here nor there. What counts is that the rat will have been fed at last.
Here are the two grey boulders, speckled with lichen, with fire inside. One of them has been split in two and lies broken on its side. The light is fading. Dusk has fallen. A thin little breeze is rustling in the brittle grass. Summer is over. It is autumn now.
Less than a hundred yards to go and I’ll be out.
Then something hits my burning breath right out of my fucking lungs.
In the distance, on a small outcrop of rocks, at the ridge of the rise, exactly where Mooi-Janna would have met the men, sits the almost transparent figure of the shrunken old patriarch, his piss-stained beard tangled in the breeze, the two crutches beside him. His flock of mottled goats are grazing in mock-tranquillity to one side. He is staring into the distance, away from me.
I can hear my heart thudding in my ears. All I still have to do is to get past him. This is the last ordeal.
And then I hear him say, without looking at me, “I been sitting here waiting for you.”
Glossary
ag oh well
agterryer batman, (Coloured) aide
baas master
bantom quartz-like pebble, fool’s diamond
bergie Cape Town vagrant
biltong strips of dried salted meat
blue-train methylated spirits
boetie sonny (literally: little brother)
bredie stew
buchu fragrant herb, often used for kidney complaints
bywoner tenant farmer, usually poor-white
> Cape Smoke nineteenth-century husk brandy made in the Cape Colony, notorious for its potency and pungency
christmas-worm accordion
Comrades ANC-supporting activists in black townships in the 1980s
dagga South African marijuana
dassie rock-rabbit
doepa medicine, usually with a connotation of a magic potion
droewors dried sausage
dwaal, in a dazed (literally: to wander)
duiker small antelope
eland large antelope
fynbos scrub, shrubbery, undergrowth
geelslang yellow-snake, extremely poisonous species of cobra
ja yes
kappie old·fashioned bonnet
karie strong beer brewed from honey
kaross blanket or bed-cover made of animal skins
Khoikhoi indigenous inhabitants of South Africa, known (pejoratively) as ‘Hottentots’
Khoisan collective appellation of related indigenous peoples (“Hottentots’ and ‘Bushmen”)
kierie stick, cane
kist large chest
klipspringer small antelope in mountainous habitat (literally: rock-jumper)
kloof ravine or narrow valley
koppie rocky hill
krans cliff
leguan iguana
lobola (African) bride-price
maar but; just
mebos sugared dried apricots
meerkat ground squirrel
meid (pejorative) black or ‘Coloured’ woman
mooi pretty, beautiful
mos indeed; as you should know
muti witch-doctor’s potion
naartjie tangerine
nagmaal holy communion
necklacing lynching by burning tyres, often performed by anti-government activists on suspected pro-apartheid informers
neef cousin or nephew; also familiar form of address for a man roughly the same age as the speaker, or younger
Newlands rugby stadium in Cape Town
Ossewa-Brandwag extremist right-wing Afrikaner movement which resisted the effort of the South African government under Prime Minister Jan Smuts in support of the Allied forces against Hitler in the Second World War (literally: Ox-Wagon Guard)
oom uncle; also familiar form of address for older man
ouma grandmother
oribi small antelope
padkos traveller’s provisions (literally: food-for-the-road)
pandoer Khoikhoi or ‘Coloured’ soldier in nineteenth-century Cape Colony
predikant Dutch Reformed preacher
Rebellion 1914–1915 uprising of Afrikaners against the decision of the South African government to support Britain in the First World War
riem(pie) leather strip, thong
riempiesbank bench with thong seats
samp stamped maize kernels
sjambok horsewhip
skinder gossip
smous pedlar, itinerant trader
steenbok small antelope
stoep veranda
Swartberg Black Mountain, a range in the Little Karoo
tant(e) aunt; also familiar form of address for an older woman
veldskoen rough handmade shoe
voorhuis front room
wagon-tree tree-protea, the hard wood of which was used to make the fellies of wagon wheels
witblits home-distilled alcohol, moonshine (literally: white lightning)
witdoek black vigilantes in cahoots with police during riots in the Cape Town area in the 1980s (literally: white-cloths, from the distinguishing scarfs they wore)
witgat (coffee) acrid brew made from an indigenous root
EOF
Table of Contents
Cover
Come A Long Way
Infamous Fruit
Crawling So Deep
Smooth and Blunt
Story of My Life
Usual Places
Coffins
First Morning
Bloody Nerves
The Goddamn Dead
With the Children
Cakes and Tarts
Everything Except Death
Rough Tongue
Squawking
Flies
Same Thing
Erotic Dreams
Little Railway Track
Got Pregnant
Fires of Hell
Tempt Fate
Dragged Her Out
Terrifying
On Her Back
Nanny Goat
Up To Heaven
Smoked Ham
Telling Lies
Dusty Quinces
Cheer Up the Men
Heartbroken Widow
Destruction
Fireflies
A Goddamn Adventure
From the Rafters
Old Hottentot Custom
Threadbare Flour-Bag
Strange Contortions
Camel
Goddamn Crime
The Same Dress
Four Tits
Plaited Thongs
All Over the Valley
True Colours
Half-Asleep
Glossary
