It’s a moonless night in the bush. Zoe withdraws into her tent carrying the gas lamp and pulls out Aunt Claire’s diary from the satchel.
She doesn’t open the pages at random. She knows what she is looking for.
Franschhoek, April 14, 1966
Today I saw Gerard again, by pure accident. He took me off guard. I did some errands in Cape Town and, before coming home, I stopped for a cup of tea in Long Street. The waitress had just laid the pot on my table when I saw him. He stood in front of me, hunched in his baggy jacket, the collar of his white shirt stained and unbuttoned. Two years had passed since the day I had run away from him, in that cold dawn. He looked dismal, worn down, his face gaunt, his eyes devoured by an inner fever. Still beautiful though — like a fallen angel. I sat there, speechless.
His hands were smeared with colour, as they were on that night when they explored my body. It was pure madness — risking his life for one breath of love! I had rushed out of his studio in panic. Then, back in my room, I had looked in the mirror and followed with my thumb the strokes of Prussian blue on my breasts and the Sienna fingermarks running deep inside my thighs. He had left his signature on my body.
Finally, he broke the silence. He said he had waited for me, night after night, working like a madman, filling canvas upon canvas with my absence. I saw his jaw muscle tighten, a bitter grimace suddenly marred his face. His torment was almost palpable. “How ironic,” he said, shaking his head. “In London, they like my desperado paintings.” As he spoke I couldn’t take my eyes off his arms, dangling loosely at his side. All of a sudden he had become a rich man, he told me, and then added: “Like your father would have liked, I suppose.” That bit crushed me. His stare was as hard as stone. I found it difficult to breathe.
“Do you have someone else, Claire?” he asked, burning his eyes into mine. I tried to speak, but I couldn’t utter a word. I felt like I had just bitten into a mouthful of sand. My lips stuck together.
“Do you have someone else?” he asked again.
I gestured for him to sit at the table, but he stood there, his dark curls tumbling unkempt over his face. He kept squeezing his hands into fists.
All the feelings that for months I had stifled with great effort came back to me in a rush. I still loved him. Fiercely. I would have given anything to be his muse, his concubine, his slave. Instead, I could do nothing but drift away from him — a shadow without a master.
Finally, I managed to repeat what I had already promised him that night, that he would always be the only one: “That was our deal, Gerard.” At this point, he opened his fists, stretched his long fingers and let out a resinous groan, like a tree burning from the inside. He drew a chair to my side, sat down and, with infinite tenderness, took my hand in his.
“Why don’t you come back then? Where did I go wrong?”
I begged him not to torment himself. Again, I restated that the problem was not him, it was me.
“Why lie so shamelessly?” he cried, rising abruptly to his feet. I could feel the full tension of his body, a tightrope about to snap. He said that he felt my pleasure under his hands. That he knew how to recognize a woman in love. That yes, he had had many lovers, but it was me he wanted for life. That, without me, he was lost.
He was about to break. And I with him. He retook his seat.
Trying to hide my pain, I mentioned his talent: “You said it yourself: It’s my absence that makes you paint the way you do ...”
He let a thick silence fall upon us.
I looked at my dark brew. When I raised my eyes again to meet his, I cringed. In them, I could only read what he had once called “the yellowness of hatred, the acridity of contempt.” He had used that same colour and that same unforgiving stare for the portrait of a man betrayed by his companions. Now he was pasting it onto himself. Meant for me.
He stood up and, before taking his leave, he stabbed me with these words: “Claire Du Plessis, behind your soft lips there hides a ruthless woman. Your family name has made you haughty and contemptuous. I despise you, even though I can’t stop loving you.”
After he left, I kept looking at my hands, clasping the saucer. How long I sat there, staring at the rotten fabric of my existence, I don’t know. I barely registered when it got dark and they turned on the lights in the café. Finally, the waitress came up to my table: “We’re about to close.” I paid and went out into the dusk.
The next entry in Aunt Claire’s diary is dated four days later.
Franschhoek, April 20, 1966
Gerard is dead. He killed himself. I found it out in the most brutal way, reading the evening newspaper: “Gerard Pienaar, the thirty-five-year-old artist from Cape Town who managed to break into the London art scene with his vibrant works, was found dead this morning in his studio by his cleaning lady, Mrs. Priscilla Arends. Forensic analysis determined that he committed suicide with a lethal dose of cyanide. No suicide note was found.”
There follows an entire page to commemorate Gerard’s figure as an artist that Aunt Claire must have copied from another newspaper. A subsequent note also seems to have been taken from a newspaper article:
“In his will, which the artist dictated to his executor just three days before his death, Gerard Pienaar left all his works to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town except for one picture titled ‘Sorrow,’ which at his explicit request is to be delivered to a woman whose identity must not be publicly disclosed.”
The diary ends on a last short note.
Franschhoek, 27 April 1966
I didn’t attend his memorial service, which was held privately by the family. Yesterday, at five in the afternoon, a mailman delivered my funeral gift. I’ ll never let anyone see this canvas. I will keep it rolled up in the trunk, and, when my time comes, I will make sure that it will be buried with me. I will live with the pain of his absence, as he lived with mine, albeit for a much shorter time.
Zoe closes the diary and holds it between her hands, under the chin. She sits there, on a military cot, in the laden-grey light cone of a hand torch, listening to her thoughts.
She has become a prisoner of her family’s plotline. Like her aunts, she has come to identify herself with a character in a pre-set script written by someone else. The sense of inevitability enveloping her life is becoming unbearable. She feels trapped in a cage of predestination, with invisible bars and no rescue plan. She rushes out of the tent, gasping for air. The bush is dipped in black, shrouded in silence. The camp fire is dying down, no one tending its flame. She has never felt so utterly alone.
28
DISENCHANTMENT
“THERE IS NO permanent source of water in the vicinity. Animal life is scarce — just a few birds, the occasional insect. The stillness is near perfect, the silence arresting. The place eerie to the extreme.” Zoe jotted down this note in her field journal the day they tackled the Aha Hills. A few weeks later, as a post scriptum to her regular entry, she added: “So far, no one has seen black baboons riding on horseback, or screaming obscenities to the big sky.”
After two months spent exploring the area, the team’s efforts are now concentrated in one place: a cave they have discovered at the foot of the hills. It’s a relief for Zoe and her workers to enter this cool earth’s womb while out there the land scorches in the fierce sun.
Past its spacious entrance, the cave makes an “S” bend before narrowing sharply downwards for about fifty metres. At the end of a black tunnel, slippery with rubble, there lies a small chamber lined with rounded rocks.
Zoe spends most of her time underground now, studying by torchlight the silent alphabet of rocks, sediments and remains of prehistoric animals relentlessly unearthed by the team. The cave must have sheltered generations of predators and — hopefully — humans.
Always by her side, Moses works fast and efficiently.
The rainy season comes without them hardly taking notice.
“Down there you guys are missing a formidable show,” Daniel tells Zoe one late afternoon as th
ey both watch distant rumbling clouds challenge the inert high-pressure system. A few days later, the clouds are closer, bigger; they hover over the midday heat waves like giant cathedrals.
Then one afternoon, drawn by the sudden commotion coming from the entrance of the cave, she climbs out of her lair and finds herself in a crashing downpour. The rain pelts down impetuously, as if to establish its sudden, although ephemeral, supremacy on the parched land. The earth receives it like a courtesan would welcome in her bed the crusader just returned from the Holy Land: with docile, yet eager submission.
The men are all dancing around, shouting and singing. Zoe walks away from them and, raising her face upwards, lets the sky’s tears rush over her. Her khaki shirt, now sodden, adheres to her body and she feels her nipples stiffen at the contact. With her eyes still closed, she imagines Dario’s lips on hers. Then, all of the sudden, it’s not him but Kurt she is trying to kiss.
A few weeks later, Koma walks into the camp while Zoe is busy cleaning up oryx bones. The sun is already low in the sky.
“Kom, Zoe. To the waterhole. This is a good time.”
A good time for what? For talking? For watching a sunset? For just being? She follows him, walking along the narrow path through the tall verdant grass. With the rains, what until not long ago looked like an inconspicuous salt pan now brims with water. An array of animals come here again to quench their thirst. She and Daniel have spotted impalas, warthogs, bat-eared foxes, hyenas. This time, the silence that envelops the place has a surreal edge.
Koma crouches on a small outcrop of flat rocks and Zoe squats by his side. As usual, behind a seemingly indolent attitude the old shaman conceals full mental vigilance. He misses nothing: the smells carried by the breeze, the warning signal given by a weaver bird, the faint track left by a honey badger. Suddenly, his whispering alert tears Zoe away from her thoughts.
“Olifante.”
She looks around but can’t see nor hear any sign of them. They both sit motionless for a few more minutes, in a world gradually turning copper coloured. At last, she spots them: silent, dusty shadows moving slowly through the bushes, delicate in their heavy sway. Zoe counts at least seven female pachyderms, some of them with their calves holding on their tails or following behind. Before reaching the pan, the matriarch sniffs the air with her raised trunk; satisfied with her reconnaissance, she trots blithely towards the water followed by the rest of the herd.
Zoe takes her time to watch the scene, then turns to look at Koma. His gaze is fixed on the horizon, his expression unreadable. After a long while the old shaman speaks: “The shadow is still with you, Mejuffrou. We couldn’t chase it away.”
That night, Zoe hands Sam two letters and a parcel to be delivered the following day to the post office in Tsumkwe. The first letter is addressed to Professor Kuyper and contains a detailed report on the latest excavation site, with the request to extend for at least another six months her research in the Kalahari. The second letter and the parcel are meant for Kurt.
Kurt,
Thank you for the book and the note with which you accompanied me into the desert. I never thanked you for that, fearing I might show any tender inclination towards you. I entrust you with the diaries of my aunts and the family’s secret they contain. By reading them, you’ ll understand the reasons for my aloof silence.
Like all the Du Plessis who came before me, I too didn’t want to believe, couldn’t believe in the reality of a supernatural cause to our disgrace. Someone else paid for my skepticism. One year ago, my partner died in a hijacking. Yet another coincidence?
Evidently, we cannot escape the past.
You are a writer. Who knows, one day you might find a way to put to good use the story of the Du Plessis.
Zoe
That’s all she can grant Kurt.
Two weeks later, Daniel pays a visit to the camp bringing with him the mail, including two letters for Zoe. The first one is a telegram from Kuyper:
Granted three-month extension. Stop. Not more than that. Stop. Homo sapiens’ footprints found in Langebaan. I advise to leave ASAP for the Cape. Stop.
The second is a letter from Kurt, written in his nervous handwriting. Zoe retires to her tent to read it.
Zoe,
The trust you have confided in me, together with your aunts’ diaries, is a precious gift. Remarkably, your female ancestors were adept at storytelling. All of them. I felt with them when I read what they wrote as they choked back tears, remorse, anger. And I thought of you up there, trying to find a way out from a chain of deadly recurrences.
By sending me these diaries, you have broken the conspiracy of silence.
Ancestral heritage and modernity, religious superstition and scientific evidence have been at war for centuries. You are a woman of science, but for too long the Afrikaner blood flowing in your veins has been pressing against the temples and obscured your sight.
Time to let go. Leave the past to whom it belongs: the dead. I will try to do the same.
The memory of you is like water flowing softly through my fingers. Don’t stop its course.
Kurt
She walks out of the tent. Still holding the letter in her hand, she turns her head up to the sun. The harsh mid-day light bites into her eyelids. Without mercy.
Eight more weeks slip away, uneventful. Then, one afternoon in which Zoe stays behind to classify their recent findings, Moses comes back to the camp much earlier than expected. His eyes shine with satisfaction as he hands her what he’s just discovered in the cave. It’s an almond-shaped flint, symmetrically flaked on both faces, which gives it a cunning sharpness. Zoe touches the rudimentary stone object as if it were a precious jewel. Its features are the result of a Palaeolithic mind at work.
As for the type of Homo (ergaster? habilis? erectus? sapiens?), this is up to them to discover.
The dark cave where she has retreated for so long, keeping away from the outer world, has finally talked to her. Overwhelmed, she firmly embraces her crew leader, holding him to her chest, all the while whispering: “Dankie, dankie, dankie.”
Moses doesn’t say a word, but his big and slightly puzzled smile talks for him. For over a year this man has tried to comply with her seemingly absurd needs and requests. Too many times has he seen her disappear into that cave as if it were a temple, a place of worship. Until a chipped stone, a small prehistoric hand axe, finally has brought her to herself.
29
THE MISSION
THE EXTRA THREE months granted by Kuyper are coming to an end with no other significant discoveries from the bowels of the Aha Hills. Still, she’s not ready to quit. The cave has just shown them a glimpse of what it’s jealously hiding. “It will open up again,” she keeps telling Moses. “We can’t give up now. Not so easily.”
One late afternoon, driving into the camp after yet another day spent in the cave, Zoe spots Daniel’s Land Rover parked behind the kitchen tent. As she slows down, ready to stop, two other men wearing large-brimmed safari hats busy talking to Wally turn around and walk over to where the ranger is waiting for her.
“I brought you a couple of guests,” Daniel says, rushing to open the door of her Land Rover without even waiting for the dust to clear. He has a sheepish look, like a child expecting to be reprimanded. She looks over his shoulder and meets her brother’s and Cyril Kunene’s grinning faces.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, without concealing her irritation.
“Here’s your rescue team!” André cries half-heartedly, taken aback by her cold reception.
“Oh, so I’m the crazy woman lost in her desert who needs to be saved from herself?”
Zoe can feel her upper lip trembling, revealing — she is sure — her anguish and her anger, for she suddenly feels her world has been violated.
“I spoke with Kuyper. He was okay with us coming to visit you,” her brother says, stammering, unsure of how to deal with this sister of his, so unexpectedly distant, lost in a dimension unknown to him. “And
he gave me this. For you ...”
He reaches into his rucksack to pull out a manila envelope. Zoe opens it and finds a formal invitation to the 1997 International Conference on Paleoanthropology, to be held in one month’s time in Zanzibar. She goes through it quickly and sees that she’s scheduled to give the keynote speech. Title: “Southern Africa as the cradle of humankind: an alternative hypothesis.”
“What nerve! He knew I wouldn’t agree. It’s way too early to make any such assumptions — at least publicly.”
“Kuyper sounded quite positive about it,” André says. “He stated that with Lady J and your recent finding up here you had enough to make a case.”
“Then he needs a PR woman, not a scientist,” she says. “How come you talked to my boss, if I may?”
“I called him to let him know I wished to visit you to discuss important family matters. That’s all.”
She lets out a sardonic chuckle.
“I thought you could show us the Kalahari and, in return, we’d help you decamp,” André says changing the subject and trying to ease his way out of the tense exchange.
“No objections to having you as my guests,” Zoe says. “As for decamping, when the time comes I have my team and won’t need any extra help.”
André looks at his sister in puzzlement, ever more abashed by her off-putting reaction. He keeps quiet, though.
Zoe turns to Daniel and says: “Be so kind please to bring my guests back with you when you leave.”
The bushranger nods, tipping his hat with his middle and index fingers and rushes to unload fresh produce from the Land Rover.
Zoe glances at Cyril, who all this time has kept himself to the sidelines.
Why is he here? This is family business.
Her brother doesn’t seem to care. He charges again, his jaw visibly tense. “Is it true that you’ve been practically living inside the cave where you’ve been digging?”
The Afrikaner Page 17