by Peter Rimmer
Taking his large pot of stewed meat and mealie meal away from the others, he sat on a rock and looked again at the large shell crater in the ground and it made him think. Families who fought with each other were always the ones that destroyed themselves. Were the Englishmen in Kimberley really his enemies? Only by killing each other would they make each other enemies for a very long time. Karel shivered in the heat and finished his pot of food, spooning up the mush into his large mouth and dripping the gravy down his rich brown beard. High above them all, caught on the thermals that had drifted the birds away from the Vaal River fifteen miles to the northwest, a pair of African fish eagles were crying their desolate call, seven-foot wingspan open to lie on the warm currents of air, the kwee-kwee cry, the last lament in the great blue sky dotted with puffs of white cloud, the birds oblivious of man’s insanity down below. Karel watched the great black and white birds, the tails white and shifting to keep the birds right with the thermals, the white heads calling with pain and joy to each other, and he watched them for a long time as they turned and drifted north back to the river. When he could hear their calls no longer, he was sad.
Sarie Mostert was twenty-two years old and the mother of the twins, Klara and Griet. For all of her life, the world had been hostile and the only weapon she had found for survival was her flashing eyes that once past fourteen years old, and directed at a male, went deep into his soul and then straight down to his genitals. In clothes, mostly dirty, that covered everything except her toes, the brown, soft eyes were the window to the body under the bodice and skirts.
In the slums of Pretoria, away from the single-storeyed houses with the hospitable stoeps, it was common to find whites poorer than the blacks as when the blacks ran out of money, they went back to their kraals to grow mealies and pumpkins round their thatched huts and run cattle in the endless bush or hunt. The whites had nowhere to go and no skills to live in the bush and sometimes the missionaries took pity on them, but not always. Good upstanding whites resented their poor relations for showing a bad example to the blacks and hoped they would go back to the slums of Europe.
Sarie could neither read nor write, and from the age of six had learnt to steal her food and clothes and share them with no one. Her mother had died of influenza when she was eight when the virus decimated the overcrowded and underfed slums, and Sarie’s father had disappeared soon afterwards, for which she was thankful. All she had ever received from her father was a hard, flat hand and a rough tongue. No one had cared about him or Sarie’s mother and no one had cared about the little girl with the flashing eyes. Survival was the only force Sarie understood, and the need was so strong, stretching back to her primal forbears high in the forest trees, that disease passed her by and blind cunning brought her the bare necessities of life.
In the bitterly cold nights of winter, newspaper provided the means for her survival, wrapped around her body, her feet and her face, ignored by all but the scavenging dogs. The dogs were her best and only friends and she had them lie down next to her, sometimes a mangy dog on either side whimpering from the cold but slowly giving each other the warmth of their bodies. Then they slept, woken by the cold cruel morning of another day when the scavenging started all over again, the little girl, dirty, smelly and hungry followed by two, three, sometimes four dogs, the dogs just skin and bones. From the dogs she learnt that eyes talked better than words, a whole world of soft expression and understanding. Her dogs spoke to her of sympathy, of guilt, of hope, and when she stroked them gently on their muzzles, they looked at her with the purest love which made all their struggle worthwhile. They were her family.
In the spring and autumn, she and the dogs left the slums early in the mornings, past the silent streets of the other world, the snores of comfort rumbling from closed-door houses, barked at but left alone, out into the country, barefoot Sarie trotting with the dogs. Ten miles into the veld, the dogs foraged for rats, big, fat, grain rats the size of rabbits, the dogs instinctively hunting in a pack, flushing and running down their quarry. Sarie used a stick on the guinea fowl, waiting for the birds to go up in the sparse trees to roost at dusk, softly climbing the trees to the sleeping birds and knocking them down with a swift sharp sweep of her stick, the dogs full of rat, content and away from the bird hunt. In the falling light of day, the small girl made her fire and roasted the birds and ate till at last her tummy was full. Then, with the fire piled high to keep away the predators, she slept curled up next to the dogs only waking to feed the fire. In those days and nights, she could reach out and touch her happiness, at night look at the stars and smile, in the day, dream by the side of a stream. Sometimes she sang, a beautiful sound, and the dogs’ ears pricked up to hear the music and all their eyes were smiling.
Every day when the sun was high and hot, she searched the fur of each dog for ticks, their ears and eyes, back and legs and then, rolling them over, scratched their bellies as she looked. When man, black or white, came close, the dogs bared their teeth, circling the girl with protection. When she swam naked in the small rivers and streams that watered the highveld, the dogs lay flat on their stomachs, their snouts stretched forward, and watched her, their eyes full of amusement. None of the dogs swam however much she called. They were the sweet, warm days.
Sarie watched where the monkeys and baboons had eaten berries from the trees and only then did she eat, her knowledge a deep instinct in her genes like her fear of snakes. The years went by full of feast and famine until the girl grew into a woman and the eyes of men grew hungry. She had made some human friends in the slums and some of the farmers, black and white, waved at the dog-girl even if they kept their distance from the hounds. She was part of their world like the veld and sky.
Billy Clifford was twenty-two when he first saw Sarie Mostert. He had woken with the dawn and gone out on the stoep of his father’s house in Church Street, the main road that ran through Pretoria. The Cliffords rented the small house while his father, a railway engineer from Dublin, helped build the railway line from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay to give the Boers access to a seaport without going through British territory. Shaun Clifford, Billy’s father, was a patriot and knew the pain of being forced to live under British rule. Any native who wished to stay free of the British was a friend. Billy was in the Transvaal to visit his parents, having graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, with a degree in English when the dog-girl walked past in front of the stoep, silent on bare feet, flanked by her dogs and carrying a tall, thick stick. He stood up to get another look at the strange sight in the African dawn, but the dogs growled and he sat back down again. Billy was bored, there being little to do for a young, Catholic Irishman in the heart of Boer Calvinism. His mother was with the Catholic nuns most of the day doing her good work, and his father was off in the swamps of Portuguese Mozambique building his freedom railway line for the Boers. Billy’s mother was happy to have his father out of Ireland: Gladstone’s Home Rule was not enough for Shaun Clifford. Independence for Ireland with the English, all of them, back over the Irish Sea, nothing less; and he’d fight for it and die for the cause if that was what it took.
Every morning, Billy rose with the dawn and sat in the big wicker chair on the stoep and looked for the dogs and the girl, afraid to go inside and make himself a cup of coffee. It was something to think about, something to do. All the neighbours spoke not a word of English and Billy had no Dutch. He had promised his long-suffering mother to stay for six months and was trying to start his writing but nothing came, only damp bad copies of the writers who had gone before him, the ones he had so avidly read for his degree. The two girls were married with children of their own and the big brother had left long ago to make a fortune in America and no one in the family knew if he was alive or dead. Billy’s brother had never been a man of words and used his fists to inflict his will. Billy feared the worst but kept his thoughts from his doting mother, whose life had gone out when her oldest child had sailed out of their lives without even a look back over his shoulder. So the day
s dragged by and his mind stayed blank and by the end of his third week in Africa, he did not even wish to read. After a week of fruitless early mornings, Billy gave up and listened to his boredom made worse by having no idea what to do with the rest of his life other than to write which he couldn’t, his mind as blank as the white pages, his imagination stuck in the nub of nothing. And to make it worse he had no money, Irish nationalism being far more important to his father than allowances for a work-shy son.
“You should have been an engineer like me, Billy my boy. Told you that. You can’t make anything with words a man can eat.” And then he had gone off into his swamps and left Billy with his mother.
Alone, always alone, Billy rode his father’s horse out into the African veld, the animal unable to go with his father down into the lowveld for fear of the tsetse fly that killed domesticated animals. Alone, he rode each which way the horse would go, caring nothing for the journey. Billy rode fast and well, happy to have the boredom beaten out of his bones, and just before the stallion lathered, Billy would bring the horse back to a canter and then to a trot, and with the slower rhythm the boredom would creep back onto the horse next to him when even the wild animals were no distraction.
The dogs, used to zebra and buck running away from them across the veld, had heard the horse but kept their heads down, looking at Sarie naked in the cool water of their stream. The old dog that had been with Sarie nine years was fast asleep under a tree, occasionally yelping at his dreams. A pair of crows lifted out of the tree and flew off downstream before calling back at the interruption, the crows having seen the man on the back of the horse. And when Sarie came out of the water clean and fresh, her nipples hard and pointing, she climbed up the bank of the little stream and looked up into the green eyes of Billy Clifford high up on the stallion’s back. While Sarie kept looking at him, the dogs rose up as one with their hackles and the horse shied, dancing a full circle before Billy brought the animal back under control.
The surprise for Sarie was not her nakedness but the reaction of her pack of dogs. Sliding off the stallion’s back Billy turned his attention to each of the dogs, ignoring her. Without a snarl, they lost interest and went back to their own pursuits.
“Have you got your clothes on?” asked Billy with his back to her after the dogs were pacified. With his right hand on the stallion’s neck gentling the horse he repeated the question. Then it dawned on him: she spoke no English and he spoke no Dutch. Then he heard the giggle, and they laughed out loud together and Billy’s boredom flew away high up into the sky. A week later without using one word with each other they were lovers, and the dogs took up the habit of trotting behind the big stallion, Sarie perched on its rump, legs astride, her arms clinging round her lover, her face pressed to his back.
The perfect happiness lasted six weeks. Shaun Clifford, returning from the malarial swamps for a short visit to his wife, was not a man to spend money on a son to have a girl in rags from the slums of hell as a daughter-in-law. The scandal, to which the lovers remained oblivious, was presented to Shaun by his wife the moment he returned and sent him into a blind temper. Billy had been away one night and had left Sarie by their river to return to his mother and found his father and two of the neighbours on the stoep in Church Street. The neighbours left quickly without a word and Billy’s world crashed around him. A man without money was at the mercy of his father.
On the third day of their terrible separation, Sarie walked barefoot back through the town with her dogs, past the stoep in Church Street, past Billy, wordless in the grip of his father’s arm, but their eyes met and hers smiled at him, the treasure for his years to come, and for the first and only time Mr and Mrs Clifford saw the mother of their granddaughters. The train left with Billy the next morning at the start of his journey back to Ireland and what appeared to him as the rest of his lonely life.
On the 28th November 1899, Koos de la Rey and three thousand five hundred burghers opened fire from slit trenches for the first time in warfare and decimated General Methuen’s British soldiers. Whilst advancing over open ground towards the Modder River ten miles south of Kimberley, Karel Oosthuizen’s youngest brother, Piers, fifteen years old, was riding onto the family farm upriver to make sure his mother was safe, permission having been given by General Piet Cronjé for the boy to leave the Boer army that was moving down from Mafeking to confront Buller’s generals. Sarie was the first to see the lone horseman. For a moment she watched, thoughtful of it being her man, Frikkie, until she recognised Piers. The twins kept close to her as they waited. Elijah came out of the barn and was the first to talk to Piers. Quietly, Sarie took her daughters inside to the room they shared behind the house, a small shed built by Frikkie as near to the main house as his mother would allow. Next to her shed were the servants’ sheds, bigger than Sarie’s with vegetable gardens and extra rooms for the black children, the children that were not allowed to play with the twins.
Sarie listened from behind her thin walls as Piers told the mother his news. Only when she heard that Frikkie was alive and well did she relax, as without her benefactor she knew the old woman would throw them out onto the open veld. In her hostile world, she had learnt how to protect her babies, the treasure of her life. The war, which she no more understood than the world itself, was coming closer. The following morning Piers was gone. Sarie sighed and smiled at her children. Whoever won the war would make no difference to Sarie Mostert. Even the blacks had a better status than a poor white with no husband and two illegitimate children. Again she smiled to herself. Life could be worse. There was a roof over her head and food every day for the three of them and the girls were full of health and energy, green-eyed like their father.
Elijah was a Xhosa and far away from his tribe and the place of his birth on the coast next to the confluence of the Indian Ocean and the Kei River. He had ridden the perimeter at breakneck speed with Ezekiel Oosthuizen, the father of the seven boys, the young Elijah leading the spare horses so the circle they rode all day was wider than any other of the Boers laying claim to their land. The two men had ridden from sunup to sundown to complete the ring and proclaim the farm they later called Majuba in celebration of the Boers’ victory over the British in the first Anglo-Boer war. He was an old man now and could no longer count a herd of springbok at two thousand yards but his sons were strong and their sons were strong and the great farm they had pegged out thirty years before had been good to them and never once had any of the families, black or white, known hunger. With a Sotho wife he had bought for five cows given him by Ezekiel Oosthuizen, life had been content until now. Elijah knew the history of the tribes that fought for and occupied the territory south of the great Zambezi River, and the terrible years of the Lifaqane when tribes slaughtered tribes in an orgy of self-destruction. Before the Lifaqane, his wife’s people owned the very land that made up the farm Majuba, a source of pride and irritation for his sons and grandsons who still dreamed of the power of their ancestors.
Elijah watched Piers ride away to his new war and was sad that at the end of an old man’s life, where an old man should sit under a shady tree while his granddaughters brought him beer to drink, it was all going to happen again. Elijah had never seen an Englishman, but he knew of their power and their defeat of the mighty Zulu. Now they were bringing great ships full of soldiers to Africa and they would crush the Boers as they had crushed the Zulus and they would never go home again, and in the end, the war would come to Majuba and Elijah, and peace and prosperity would be gone for him forever. From what Piers had told him there was going to be a great battle between the Boers and the British that had nothing to do with the blacks. Elijah shook his head in sorrow. When two lions fought each other in the king’s cattle kraal many cattle died, trampling each other unless they could break out of the kraal and run away from the fight. In despair, he looked around him and knew there was nowhere to run. He and his family would just have to wait and see. Talking quietly to himself, he went across to his pony, threw a blanket ove
r the animal’s back and rode away from the small group of buildings onto the open veld to find his sons and grandsons who were hoeing the acres of maize they had planted with the first rains a week after the white man had ridden out to war.
When he told them Piers’s story, he expected them all to worry about their families just like he had been worrying ever since Piers gave him the news of the impending battle. Instead, everyone but Elijah became excited and stopped hoeing the land and went off in a huddle away from the old man and Elijah feared even more for his children. For a brief moment, as he looked, he thought Kei, the youngest of his sons, named after the great river near where Elijah had been born, had grown six inches. On his face was a look that looked so far it had no distance. There was always one dreamer in every family and for the first time in his life, Elijah admitted to himself he was an old man. There was a new bull in the kraal and nothing he could do to protect the bull from its own destruction. His son wanted to fight both of them, Boer and British, and win back the land of his ancestors.
A week later, when Koos de la Rey was this time digging a twelve-mile trench in front of the hill at Magersfontein, the British having brushed aside the Boers on the Modder River with their overwhelming numbers, Kei rode north from Majuba on the best pony left on the farm. In the saddle holster in front of his right knee was the Mauser rifle Karel had taught him to use, left behind by Ezekiel Oosthuizen to protect his wife. Kei had smiled to himself at the idea. The little woman would have knocked herself over backwards if she had fired the gun. Over his shoulder rode cartridge belts from left to right and right to left. In his saddlebag over the pony’s rump behind his short-stirrup saddle was a month’s supply of dried meat. Beside them trotted a dog that had never left his side since the day Sarie had given him the best of one of her litters. The dog was skin and bones but could run all day beside the pony, a long pink tongue hanging from its jaws.