A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  And yet. If only someone would tell me. Show me. What have I done, what am I, to be kept in this darkness? A horse locked up in a stable. The darkness of an attic.

  Why doesn’t Nicolaas help me? He’s different. No. He is like the rest. Whatever doubt I may have had is cleared away by the lion, although the lion itself remains a mystery. Down in the Karoo one sometimes still finds the odd marauding male, depending on the rains and the movement of game; but not in these parts, not in our Bokkeveld. Perhaps it is the drought, one of the worst ever, that has forced it so far away from its usual hunting fields, or the agony of age or of hunger. Whatever the reason, the lion is suddenly in our midst. The first we know about its presence is when sheep start disappearing from the kraal at night. Must be a leopard from the mountains, says the Oubaas. But the tracks are much too big for that. Then a slave child on a neighboring farm is dragged from its hut one evening; and a great roar is heard in the dark. From all the farms in the Bokkeveld the men come down with their dogs and their slaves, a proper army on horseback and on foot, armed with guns and assegais and sticks, whatever comes to hand. The three of us are with them, Barend and Nicolaas and I; for we’re not children any more, and Barend is soon to be married.

  Now watch out, the Oubaas warns gravely, standing in the yard like a tree with the sun behind him, his hair like a great mane, and shining. This is a matter of life and death, he says; he’s seen men maimed and killed before.

  In the beginning the tracks run boldly through the open veld; it seems only a matter of time before we run the lion to ground. But after a while they begin to curve back into the foothills where it becomes more and more difficult to follow them. The army is split up in small groups, each with at least one gun. Nicolaas and I are together, with a handful of slaves and Hottentots. Soon the others are out of sight.

  The first hour or so one is very cautious and very alert. You notice everything on your way. Insects in the grass; lizards scurrying across rocks; a meerkat on its hind legs in front of its burrow; an anteater digging up a termites’ nest; small quail and kiewiets; a secretary bird strutting along on stiff legs like the Oubaas of a Sunday morning; a small steenbuck and its ewe motionless in the dried grass; a speckled puffadder; a tortoise hurrying along slowly and deliberately on its way; a swarm of bees in a hollow tree; the specks of vultures circling in the distance; cobwebs glittering with dew. But as the sun grows warmer and the sweat starts trickling down your back, you become less attentive. In the silent heat you begin to feel drowsy. Which is why we get caught so unawares.

  All of a sudden there is something moving in a patch of dry protea shrubs, barely a hundred yards away. It can be anything. But you simply know it’s the lion, even though you’ve never seen one in your life. Nicolaas gives another step forward. The thing in the bushes utters a low, deep growling sound that causes the ground to tremble underfoot. The men with us drop their sticks and assegais in a wild stampede for the nearest shelter, a single thin dry tree. In a moment they hang from its branches as if a flock of large bats have swarmed into it. I find it so funny that I burst out laughing.

  But already the lion is charging, head down, dark mane streaming.

  “Shoot, Nicolaas!” I whisper excitedly.

  I see him raise the gun. But his hands are trembling too much.

  “Shoot, damn you!” I shout.

  In sudden panic he throws down the gun, looks round wildly, and starts running towards the overloaded tree. For a moment I’m too shocked to move. The lion comes streaking past me, only a few yards away without even looking at me. There’s no way Nicolaas can reach that tree in time. It’s all over. Except that a great invisible fist seems to grab me, causing me to do things I don’t even know about. The gun. The barrel trembling, then steadying itself. The sound of the shot, which sends me staggering back until my legs simply give way and I sit down in a thornbush. Madness. I could have killed Nicolaas.

  Everything is dead quiet, as if a giant horse has suddenly been reined in. One moment I can still hear Nicolaas shouting something. Then the lion is on top of him. Both tumble down in a small cloud of dust. Then the men come falling and scrambling down from the little tree. Nicolaas sits up slowly and starts dusting himself very meticulously. I start running, my arms flailing. We grab each other, dancing and laughing in mad joy.

  From all sides the other hunters come on running.

  “Good God,” the Oubaas says. “Well done.”

  “It was a near thing,” I hear Nicolaas say. “He almost got Galant. I was just in time.”

  I stare at the others. Is no one going to say anything? All they seem to be able to do is grin stupidly, staring past me. Then they shoulder me out of the way to get closer to the lion, to kneel beside it and touch it and look at its worn and broken teeth, to comb their fingers through its knotted mane.

  “On its last legs,” the Oubaas says. “Probably couldn’t catch buck any more. So he was driven from his pride and became a loner. Must have got desperate in this drought.” He lights his pipe with a grin of satisfaction. “Watch out when you skin him. Don’t want to spoil it. We’ll dress the skin for Nicolaas.”

  When we are alone again at last I ask him: “Suppose I tell the Oubaas it wasn’t you?”

  “Why don’t you?” he snarls. “You think he’ll take a slave’s word against mine?”

  Now he really is one of them. I don’t understand. Again the darkness, the attic closing in on all sides. Is there no light at all? Is there no one who will not betray me?

  Hester?

  Wherever our footprints lead, hers follow. Neither abuse nor stones will drive her away once she’s set her mind to it. Even the Oubaas and the Ounooi, I’ve noticed, get desperate with her at times. They try everything, including the strap, but she’s a stubborn girl. Barend and Nicolaas often get mad at her if she insists on coming with us; they only relent if I offer to carry her on my back. I don’t mind. She isn’t much of a load.

  What she seems to like most is to go to the dam with us, sitting in the grass or on the earth wall watching us, knees drawn up, chin resting on her hands; on such days we seem to go out of our way to show off to her. As she grows more used to us—her father, the foreman on Houd-den-Bek, is dead; she’s come to live with the Oubaas and Ounooi—she becomes less aloof; in the end we’re all splashing and swimming together.

  Then, out of the blue that, too, changes. It’s been a bad winter with early snow, and lasting longer than other years; on our way back from the Karoo with the sheep we lose countless lambs. And even after the swallows have come back there’s a late heavy frost. So it’s much later than usual when the weather turns warm enough for us to go up along the quince hedge, back to our dam. We all seem to have grown in winter; my clothes feel tight. And we’re unruly as young foals sniffing the wind. On this first day of the new summer the girl is also with us, as before, after the unduly long break of winter.

  But when we come to the end of the quince hedge Barend stops and looks very sternly at me: “Galant, we’re going swimming with Hester. You can’t come with.”

  “Why not? We always go together.”

  “From now on you stay away when she’s there.”

  As I look in amazement from one to the other, Nicolaas butts in: “I heard Pa calling you a while ago. You’d better go and see.”

  Disgusted, stunned, I turn away, stopping again to watch them at a distance as they trot up the rise to the dam. In a flush of anger I pick up a stone and hurl it after them, but they’re already out of sight. In the orchard I can hear bees buzzing. From the dam, as I strain to listen, I imagine their shouts of glee. And the weaver-birds. But there is a great silence between me and them, a silence following me all the way as I slowly walk up the mountain on my own. Looking down from time to time I feel an intruder here, a stranger arrived from elsewhere, and ill at ease among these mountains and ridges and plains, the young wheat in the distance and th
e patches of barley; although I know that, invisible, my footprints cover it all.

  We’ve always been together, haven’t we? They’re my mates. What earthly difference does it make whether the girl is with us or not? It’s like being part of a group of people and listening to someone telling a story; but halfway through you grow tired and fall asleep, to wake up again with a start much later and hear the same story going on: yet something is different now, you’ve missed out on something and now it’s lost forever; and although everything seems familiar it is really altogether different and you no longer belong with them.

  High above the farmstead I sit down on a boulder from where I can look out over everything that has just been denied me. I can feel the rage building up again, a horse inside me straining against the reins to break free. Pressing hard against one of the boulders poised below me I feel it shift slightly under my weight. Putting my full force behind it I push and heave, panting heavily, trying again and again until, at last, it gives way, balanced for a moment on the edge of the ridge below, then toppling over and rolling down, gathering speed, tearing smaller rocks and stones with it, in ever greater bounds, with a noise like thunder, and striking sparks from whatever gets in its way. Suppose the sparks set the grass alight? Suppose I start a mountain fire and it rages all the way down from here to the wheatlands of the farm below? Let it burn. Let it all burn down. I’ll be the maker of thunderstorms!

  How well I remember the other storm. It feels so close, I can clutch it like a stone. The drowsy Sunday afternoon, the Oubaas and Ounooi gone to visit neighbors, the three of us roaming the mountainside, shouting at baboons on the upper cliffs, scaring each other with the forged footprints of a leopard. Then the storm, the sudden thundering peal as if the mountain itself is crashing down on us. We scuttle down the slope in fear, Barend and Nicolaas far ahead, lightfooted, leaving me behind to cope with Hester.

  “Let’s stay here,” she pleads. “I love thunderstorms.”

  “It’ll kill us,” I say. “Hurry!”

  “No.” She clutches my arm. “Stop. Please wait, Galant. Look: lift up your face like this. Feel the rain.”

  Angrily I tug at her hand. “If the thunder doesn’t kill us, the Oubaas will.”

  “Look. Oh look. Did you see that flash?”

  “If the Lightning Bird sees you you’re dead on the spot. Now come.”

  “Galant, stay with me!”

  Desperate, I pick her up to carry her down forcibly. She kicks and shouts at me, trying to break loose. We both fall down, grazing knees and elbows.

  “Now look at what you’ve done.”

  “Just listen to that, Galant!”

  But at last we’re down the slope, where Ma-Rose’s hut stands proudly apart from the others. We’re soaked. I am too scared to face the Oubaas with this drenched child; and I know I can’t count on the boys to shield me. My teeth chattering, and trembling as much with fear as with cold, I kick open the rickety door of the hut and we tumble inside, into the heavy smell of smoke and buchu and Ma-Rose.

  “Look at you!” she scolds, but her voice sounds more comforting than angry. In her quick, matter-of-fact way she strips the clothes from us and spreads them round the fire to dry while we are bundled into a large kaross of dassie and meerkat and jackal skins. Then comes the smell of sweet bush-tea, and its fierce heat spreads through me as we sit huddled together, slowly giving way to the smelly warmth of the hut, close and safe and comforting as an attic.

  Prodded by Hester, Ma-Rose begins to tell us stories to pass the time while the clothes are drying at the fireside. All the stories I’ve known from my baby days. The water-weed you’re not allowed to pick; and the night-walkers, men and women, with owls and baboons as bodyguards; and Tsui-Goab; and the Lightning Bird that lays its eggs in the scorched ground. One story after another in that fragrant dark, the fire burning low on the tkoin-wood coals, small blue flames flickering and dancing, breaking out in flurries of sparks like fireflies, while we sink away into the warmth of our large kaross—and the smell of tea and herbs, of buchu and lard and woodfire—our bodies huddled together as, once before, long ago, Nicolaas and I in our caved-in hollow; except that in this closeness I feel no fear, there is neither hurry nor need to get out; this is all I ever want, this secret dark warmth, with the girl-child sleeping beside me, her head on my shoulder, and my hand moving almost by itself under the kaross, caressing her in the way Ma-Rose puts me to sleep at night, gently and evenly, touching and exploring in the unforbidding dark, a world as secret and wonderful as the tracks of one’s name on the smoothness of clay. Until I, too, drift off to sleep; and when I wake up, sometime in the night, the girl has gone and I’m lying beside Ma-Rose again, on the mattress in the corner, her soft warm body against me, her hand stroking me back into sleep.

  Can it be true?

  Galant, it is not for you to ask.

  But it must be true. For my body remembers. Only, it makes it even more difficult to understand. Like the attic. Always back to that one dark moment. And why? There’s nothing special about it at all—

  Whenever we can find a reason we scramble up the ladder to the attic. Its unforgettable smells: bunches of onions hanging from the beams; pumpkins and pomegranates; the sweet-sour quinces in winter; the two yellowwood coffins filled to the brim with raisins and dried peaches and apricots; the all-pervading smell of bush-tea, plucked in the mountains and warmed in the baking oven to “sweat,” then thrashed with whips and spread out to dry on the broad floorboards of the attic. Endless afternoons are spent up there, mostly Nicolaas and I; sometimes Hester too; or Barend, Only this once I am alone. I don’t know where the others are; it doesn’t matter. I’ve come here to be alone. I, Galant, in the house of the Oubaas. To see what it is like when they’re alone down here. (Ma-Rose, why do they live in a house, and we in a hut?—Galant, it’s not for you to ask.) I must know. There must be an answer.

  I crawl along the beams to the front of the house, to the long narrow slit between two boards. From all the times I’ve been inside the house with Ma-Rose it has no secret for me; it’s an easy place to come to know: the single long narrow front-room with a bedroom on either side; and the kitchen behind. The secret lies in what they do here when they are alone; in what they are. Today I must find out. The newspaper has remained sealed to me; but here I’m right inside the house, a rat spying on their deepest secrets.

  They are in the bedroom, in the heavy heat of the summer afternoon.

  The Oubaas on the edge of the big brass bed, bending over to untie his shoelaces and remove the boots from his curiously vulnerable white feet. A sigh as he rolls over on his back on the embroidered coverlet, for all the world like a tree that has been felled. The Ounooi sitting in a chair by the window, her needlework in her lap; but she isn’t working. She sits there staring blindly through the window into the whiteness of the heat outside—erect and still, her hair drawn back in a tight bun, her back very straight, and turned towards the bed as if to deny it as she stares into the distance.

  And that is all. Nothing more. There is no secret. There is no answer. Only the difference remains: they there, I here.

  Ma-Rose, Ma-Rose. But she has no remedy for this ache. I am left alone. To whom else can I turn? If I had a father: perhaps—? He must be somewhere in the wide world. But who is he, and where?

  Ontong

  The Oubaas appointed me to keep an eye on the child and teach him the farmwork. And he was a good learner. He might have been my own child; I’d known his mother, the girl almost too green to pluck; one always felt she would bruise easily. That, I think, he got from her. How often did I warn him: “Galant, it’s no use resisting. Wood breaks, but rushes bend. Ask me, I know.” I wanted to save him from that. But I could see he wasn’t listening. I’m Malay; I can see things coming.

  I had hoped that Rose would be able to teach him; a wise woman if ever there was one. But his aloneness, his al
oofness, depressed me. There’s no remedy for that sort. They pretend to be meek, but they belong to a breed of horse that refuses to be broken. When you least expect it they bolt. A pity. He had a good start, and it wasn’t I who put ideas into his head. I never wanted to have any part in it. If only it had been possible to discuss it with the Oubaas in time. But ever since he fell ill that day during the harvesting it’s been impossible to talk to him. No use discussing it with his wife either. Ounooi Alida has always kept herself apart from the people on the farm. Even more so after Nicolaas died.

  Alida

  He had been prised from me long before the fact of his death: I cannot grieve. All my life I have been in dread of losing husband and sons in violence, of being abandoned in this hostile land remote from the familiar Cape of my youth; nights of terror, by day an alien sun. Now I have lost my third-born—counting the dead one in between: I count them all—and Piet lies speechless, turning his pale eyes to follow me about. Yet there is hardly anguish, only serenity. In the obscurity of this death life has acquired a precarious lucidity. With nothing left to fear, no catastrophe can surprise me; I go about my business from sunrise to night unhurried and in control. There are slaves enough, I do not need to work but I do, and it gives me satisfaction. The urgency has gone, the compulsion to be occupied lest I yield to the despair of my condition, this existence, restricted and taut, with no room for individual desire or tenderness. Now I can take my time, I have acceded to the place prepared, invisibly, for me; and I am content amid the adequate truths of our landscape.

  They brought the body on the wagon, rolled in a brown blanket and already washed by the old woman Rose. She’d come all the way, a proud bundle shaking with the jolts of the wagon, abandoned to the pace of the slow black oxen. She did not address me, but she remained beside the body, looking at me while I looked at him, my son, this Nicolaas, the artless boy become alien and opaque, but now in death restored to me, his young face in repose reconciled to his former transparency and to the impossibility of comprehending.