The Afrikaner

by Arianna Dagnino

  “Who told you such nonsense?” she says.

  She actually knows where this information comes from. During his last visit, Daniel showed a certain apprehension about the manic doggedness with which she was devoting herself to her underground excavations. She tries to meet his eye, but the ranger is already off, walking briskly toward the camp kitchen.

  “Is it true or not?” André asks.

  In the sudden quiet, there comes the faint noise of an engine hurtling across the scrub. Moses and the rest of the team will soon be back.

  “The cave — my lair — is an hour’s drive from here,” Zoe finally says stretching her arm to grab the backpack from inside the jeep. “Tomorrow, right after breakfast, I’ll take you there for a grand tour of the premises. And yes, I have slept there a couple of times, against Moses’ best judgment.”

  Trying to ease the tension of her own making, she adds: “Dinner will be served soon. I’m sure Wally has cooked something special to welcome you.”

  André and Cyril look at each other without saying a word.

  That evening, after dinner, none of the workers stay behind for a smoke and a chat by the fire. They instead follow Sam and Daniel to the bushmen’s village, from which come the sounds of singing and dancing.

  They’re alone now — Zoe, her brother and Cyril. No one seems eager to break the silence.

  André lights one of his Gitanes and blows a long plume of smoke into the night. Then, keeping his eyes closed, he begins to speak: “For years you kept me unaware of your torments, ousus — you, the eldest daughter of our family ...”

  She gasps. He knows! Her mind rushes to Kurt. Betrayed — she almost gags at that sudden, horrible feeling. But, anticipating her reaction, her brother makes a reassuring gesture, demanding not to be interrupted. “I haven’t been honest with you either.” Then, his eyes fixed on hers, he says: “There will be no descendants of the Du Plessis in our family.” He pauses, draws from his cigarette again and throws the rest of it into the fire. “At least not from my side.”

  He pronounces the last words mechanically, dropping his arms to his sides, like a puppet whose strings had been suddenly cut. Then he turns slowly towards Cyril and smiles at him with sad sweetness. Who knows how many times before tonight André has repeated these words to himself — a solitary actor rehearsing his lines. She watches the thin web of wrinkles that has started to make its way across her brother’s face. Only his eyes remain those of the child in the attic.

  “We’ve been hiding our relationship and you know why, Zoe,” Cyril says, coming into play under a new light.

  The anger rapidly washes out of her system. The unexpected revelation of her plight takes a back seat now that she’s confronted with their secret. It could have cost them dearly under apartheid’s draconian laws against homosexual and interracial relationships.

  Zoe watches the two men in front of her, their faces animated by the web of light and shadow cast by the flickering fire. They look so different from each other — one almost as pearly as the morning mist, the other carved in dark wood. Yet they both look at ease now that the weight of imposed silence and shame has been lifted. Perhaps this is what it means to be free, after all.

  “You’ve left me speechless,” she says, her elbows on her knees, her hands cupping her chin. “I look at the two of you and it’s like I’m seeing you for the first time.”

  “Perhaps we belong to a new species, which still has to be studied,” André says. “A species useless for reproductive purposes, I’m afraid.”

  She jumps up and goes to kneel behind her brother, putting her arms around his shoulders and pressing her chest against his back. André places his hands on hers, grateful for this gesture of recognition. They are close again, as close as ever possible.

  “Let’s talk about you, ousus,” André says.

  “Not tonight,” she replies, suddenly stiffening.

  He takes both her hands in his, passing a finger over the scratches, the bruises, the nails lined with dirt.

  “Is the finding of a single flaked piece of flint enough for you to believe that down in that cave there could lie something relevant?” André asks.

  “Sometimes a lot less suffices.”

  Zoe lies awake in her cot, under the pitch-black vault of the sky. Since she came into the bush she has never seen so many stars hanging up there. Thoughts pop in and out of her head — disorderedly, incongruously. Kurt broke her trust, burning her first steps out of the cage. André has finally someone by his side. While she is alone, again. She should drop all sense of responsibility, for once. Break the camp rules, renounce her self-inflicted discipline. Take a shower. Yes, a shower. A long one. One that can wash away the resentment, the rancid smell of self-pity.

  When sleep comes, it comes to her with surprising swiftness, out of sheer exhaustion.

  Early the next morning, Zoe walks out of the tent and, in the glimmering half-darkness that precedes dawn, makes out the silhouette of Cyril crouching by the fire. She walks slowly but resolutely to him and sits down by his side, her back straight, her neck aching from the tension.

  “Goeiemôre, Zoe,” Cyril says. “Just in time for a fresh brew.”

  She doesn’t reply.

  They drink from their cups in the silence only broken by the crackling of the fire and the soft singing of the weaver birds.

  She understands he’s waiting for her to speak first.

  “You saw Kurt, didn’t you?” she finally says. Then she stops and breathes deeply, trying to control the angry note in her voice. “He told you about the diaries.”

  “Yes, but you shouldn’t blame him for that. He read in your message the intention to break with the code of silence behind which your aunts hid all their lives, for generations on end. Once in the know, André decided to come up here. ‘She needs help,’ he kept saying. Nothing could have stopped him.”

  As Cyril speaks, Zoe nervously stirs the fire with a stick. There’s a lull in the conversation, in which he follows her movements, perhaps trying to decipher what she’s silently telling him. Then he goes on. “André felt it was necessary to send you a strong signal, to inform you that we, in our way, would do the same: We’d come out, break the silence. I’d stand by him.”

  Zoe keeps poking into the fire, taking her time. When she speaks, her sombre tone ill-conceals a dull rage: “Is this what I’m supposed to do? Let’s put Kuyper aside for a while. He’s mostly interested in pushing the southern African hypothesis out there, in the big world. He has an agenda and wants to pursue it, no matter what. Let’s talk about Kurt, instead. Why couldn’t he keep for himself what I shared with him? Why betray me?”

  “Betrayal is how you want to see it. He knew about us, about me and André, I mean. I guess he felt obliged to let us know about your plight.”

  “Oh, he knew about you two? So, in Gansbaai I was the only one kept in the dark!” She grimaces as she shakes her head, her eyes on her boots.

  “Don’t take it personally, Zoe. Look at it from another angle. In doing what he did, Kurt tried to help you. He does care a lot about you, if you get what I mean.”

  She keeps staring at her hands, holding the cup.

  “His atonement has lasted long enough,” Cyril says after a while.

  She stiffens.

  “What do you mean? Atonement for what?”

  Cyril raises his eyes to meet the first sear of red in the sky, then frowns.

  “There are things about his past very few people know. It’s up to him to tell you about it.”

  She falls quiet.

  After a long while, she stretches her hand out to him. Cyril takes it gently, as if it were a dove’s broken wing. How fragile it looks within his large palm.

  The bush and the camp wake up and the spell is broken.

  André comes out of his tent, mumbles a good morning, walks to the fire and grabs the kettle of coffee.

  “Dankie,” Zoe says, looking at her brother affectionately as he refills her cup. Th
en, with a soft smile she addresses the two men. “Stay a couple of days, even more if you wish. I’ll take you around. But don’t you worry: I’ll manage the decamping with my team. Then, I’ll be home.”

  André breaks into a wide smile, draws his sister to him and starts rubbing her scalp, ruffling her hair, now grown wild and untameable. “Here is my ousus!”

  30

  BENDING IN THE WIND

  THE DAY BEFORE her departure, Zoe goes to the kraal to take her leave. She spends several hours with the elders and then with the children and the women, who present her with a farewell necklace. It has been made by interlacing an intricate pattern of ostrich-eggshell beads and dyed seeds. It’s a rudimentary piece of craftwork, yet invaluable. She knows how much collective work has gone into shaping and drilling the hard shells of ostrich eggs into those tiny beads.

  There’s a lot of dancing and singing and laughter and tears before they let her go, before she feels ready to leave.

  When she finally walks back to the camp, the bloodshot dye of the sunset is already seeping over the bush. She stares at the plain, which now, after the rains, quivers golden green at the edge of the camp. The lushness of the scene can’t dispel the melancholy of the moment.

  Soon I’ ll be gone. Most probably, never to return.

  Old Koma is crouched under a camel-thorn, waiting for her. She kneels at his feet.

  “You decided to stay, Oom.”

  “Ja. We’ll die here, with our people. With our stories.”

  “Your stories won’t die, Koma. You’ve been teaching the young.”

  “Nee. This time is different. When the last of our old people die, there’ll be no one left who knows what life was in the time without time. Then, the slightest breeze will erase our footprints for good.”

  Zoe follows the old shaman’s gaze and lets her eyes sway with the tall grass, savouring the perfect intimacy of their silence.

  “This time I feel it’s even harder to go back to where I come from, Oom.”

  There’s another long silence before Koma speaks again.

  “Your steps will take you beyond worry. The shadow has been tamed now.”

  She looks at him, bewildered. Sensing her confusion, the old shaman adds: “It fears you now. You can keep it at bay if you want.”

  If I want, she murmurs to herself.

  “At times, we need to be like the weed that bends in the wind,” she recites. “Now I understand what you meant that day in the Karoo, Oom.”

  The old Bushman smiles at her before drowning his ancient eyes in the setting sun.

  31

  THE ANCESTOR FROM LANGEBAAN

  BACK TO JOHANNESBURG, Zoe sends Kurt an envelope containing a short message and an almond-shaped plaster-cast object.

  Jo’burg, March 15, 1997

  It’s a copy almost as beautiful as the original, which will soon be presented to the world. Archaeologists call it a “biface.” More poetically, you can consider it a chipped stone heart. Hold it in your hand and see how it fits — how it feels. This is not all I found in my wilderness, but this is the only tangible thing I brought back with me.

  “Don’t tell me you’re heading down there just to check on some hominid footprints discovered by someone else,” Sam said half-jokingly as he bid farewell at Tsumkwe airport a few days before. “I hope you’ve more rewarding plans in store.”

  She has indeed other plans, though she wouldn’t bet on their benefits. She means to confront Kurt: not so much on what she still perceives as a betrayal, but on the murky chapter in his past Cyril hinted at.

  She’s back to the Finistère, its rituals, its smells, its dwellers: André, whom she treated so severely; Cyril, the black prince; old Georgina, the merciful. The place is unchanged. What’s missing is the meek, chastened girl seeking refuge from the evils of the world in her parents’ farm. That girl is gone. No need to look for her. No regrets.

  On the day before her visit to Langebaan, she calls Kurt to ask him if he wants to come along.

  As if by tacit accord, they only exchange necessary information on the logistics of the trip. The conversation is so awkward it almost acquires a surreal tone. She asks him to drive to Milnerton; she will meet him there with Henrik Visser, the young researcher at Stellenbosch University in charge of the site. The three of them will reach their destination with her colleague’s car. It means she and Kurt will not be alone in their trip. Whatever needs to be said between them will have to wait the right moment, the right setting. This time, nothing will be left to chance.

  Towards the end of their phone call, Kurt breaks a piece of news: “In two days I’ll be flying to Senegal for a conference of African writers.”

  There’s a short lull.

  Waiting for me while I play the role of the stubborn ascetic out in the desert: No, I could not expect this of him. Serves me right. Zoe tries hard not to let her disappointment seep through as she says, feigning nonchalance: “I doubt you could ever pass for truly African in their eyes.”

  “Most probably.”

  “I’ll lead the way,” Visser says, stretching his arm towards the western tip of the lagoon, which lies within the West Coast National Park. Zoe and Kurt follow him past the park’s entrance, walking barefoot in single file along the coast. Skirting the sandstone cliffs, they scramble up and over huge granite boulders smoothed round by the sea. The rocky vaults crop up from the sand, like domes of an underwater city surfaced millions of years ago from the ocean bottom.

  They carry on for about twenty minutes until they come to an open area shaped by high dunes flanking the bay. All around, the sea water shines like melted opal.

  “There,” Visser says in the same casual and affable manner with which he has entertained them all along. He points his finger towards a flat sandstone ledge, hurriedly demarcated by red and white zebra hazard tape to restrict access.

  They walk up to it. Zoe squats to inspect the signs more closely.

  Here it is, the Langebaan trackway: just three prints, faintly discernible, showing the broad sole and narrower heel of a human being — right foot, left foot, right foot again. That’s all. Yet, to expert eyes it reveals so much. “Look at this one, in particular,” her colleague says, crouching down beside her and pointing at the central one. “The big toe, the ball of the foot, the arch and the heel of the foot are well discernible. Most likely a woman. About 1.5 metres tall, judging by the length of the step and given a foot length of about 23 centimetres.”

  “The Homo turned out to be a girl,” Kurt whispers in Zoe’s ear as he squats by her side.

  “Close your eyes and picture the scene,” Visser says. “Imagine going back in time 120,000 years. It’s winter, heavy rain has just soaked the dune with water. A woman — a modern human anatomically identical to us — comes out of her shelter and walks down the sloping dune towards the water. A small antelope, possibly a steenbok, flees at the sight of her. We’ve found its spoor over there.” Their guide points his finger towards another ledge.

  “The woman combs the beach, looking for mussels. Later on, the wind blows dry sand on her trail, covering it. In the course of time, the proof of her passage in this world will be buried under a 10-metre thick layer of hardened sand and seashells. Only the slow forces of erosion will bring it back to the light. For us.”

  “This is all that remains of Eve’s pretty feet, then?” Kurt asks.

  “Aha! I see you’ve been reading the newspapers’ account of the finding,” Visser says. “Once again, they came up with a trite African Eve’s story. This time, though, if the dating proves to be accurate, we might be pretty close.”

  “Meaning?”

  “These could indeed be the footprints of one of our earliest female ancestors.”

  Zoe has kept quiet, letting the men do the talking. Now she stands up and, again without saying a word, takes in the sweeping ocean views. She watches the arabesque of tidal channels and, in the distance, the turquoise water of the lagoon trapped against the beach b
y golden sand. All around, she doesn’t detect any other human presence.

  She is jealous and it’s hard to admit. She has spent months digging thousands of kilometres away, in an unforgiving desert, only to come up with a chipped piece of stone, no more than a pointed amulet; while a geologist who went picnicking with his family just a few kilometres from home stumbled onto something that might change the course of paleoanthropology.

  There’s more to it. She thought she was immune from the need to be noted, recognized, celebrated. Remembered by posterity. While instead, all along, she’s been toiling away on the same grounds. She went into the desert to offset her woes, forget her misfortunes. True. But beneath it there lay this other purpose: the chance to leave a mark. Her mark. Like everyone else, she could not simply ignore the greatest of human fears: the inevitable descent into oblivion. It took a bout of envy to let this final piece of truth come up.

  “Well?” Kurt asks her.

  “This time it will be difficult to dismiss the southern hypothesis, which locates the original home of humankind not in the Eastern plains of Africa but further down, in its southern tip,” she says.

  Then, making a vague gesture with her arm towards Namibia: “Which is what I was trying to prove up there. The last Ice Age dried up much of the African savannah, leaving behind pockets of habitable land. One such area is the strip of territory stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to the Kalahari Desert.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Visser says with a grin as he wipes off his glasses in the hem of his T-shirt. “It’s high time those braggarts in British academies stop thinking that Africa boils down to Kenya and Tanzania.”

  They are alone now. Finally. Visser has taken his leave with an excuse, wandering off the dunes to avoid — he readily guessed — being the thorn among the roses. Kurt and Zoe sit side by side on a rocky plateau, surrounded by the polished rock domes of the lost city. The muffled roar of the surf accompanies their words and, above all, their silences.