by Andre Brink
Ma-Rose. Hester. Galant. The few durable names from that past. And yet they all abandoned me. Or did the flaw lurk in myself?
They never approved of Ma-Rose. Pa didn’t mind much, but Ma was suspicious and annoyed. “For Heaven’s sake stop calling her ‘Ma-Rose’. She isn’t your mother. She’s a Hottentot woman. And all this visiting with her must stop too. I won’t have my children growing up in huts like slaves.”
“But she tells us stories, Ma.”
“Heathen nonsense. She’ll land you all in hell.”
As I grew older and came to understand more about these matters I tried my best to convert Ma-Rose. It was of great importance to me that she become a Christian. But even the great brown State Bible failed to impress her.
“I know that book backwards, Nicolaas. Every night of my life I got to listen to your father reading from it and praying.”
“But it’s the word of God, Ma-Rose!”
“Then you better listen to it, he’s your God. Got nothing to do with me.”
“He’s master of the whole world. He made everything.”
“Tsui-Goab, the Red Dawn, made everything. Even Gaunab couldn’t kill him. Didn’t I tell you his story many times?”
“There’s nothing about that in this Book.”
She spat on the ground, barely missing me. “Tsui-Goab doesn’t live in no book. He’s everywhere. Up there in the sun. In the growing wheat. In the trees sprouting new leaves after the winter. In the swallows coming and going. In the living stone. In everything.”
“Ma-Rose, if you don’t listen, God will send fire from heaven to destroy you.”
“Let him send it then. Let him try.”
“My Ma says—”
“Let her say what she wants. You listen to her. But there’s nothing no one can say to me. My heart is my own. I’m the only free person on this farm.”
Invariably it was she who got in the last word. Like: “You watch out, Nicolaas: this morning I saw a swallow flying into you-and-Barend’s bedroom.”
My Book was Pa’s; hers was the whole world. And in it she could read whatever was required to deal with any conceivable occasion. Watch out if you hear a grasshopper chirping in the thatch, it’s a sign of imminent disaster. Or a shooting star, someone stepping on a grave, a hen that crows, the hoot of an owl, a hammerhead bird. The hammerhead was the most dire omen of all, whether you saw it peering into the water of the marsh and calling up the spirits of the dead, or flying past the setting sun, or uttering its three mournful cries over hut or house.
Her warnings both scared and angered me. I could find no retort to them in Pa’s Book, no means of exorcising them. And gradually she receded from my life, however much I felt I still needed her: something as large and safe as a mountain was moving away from me, leaving me exposed to sun and wind.
Galant seemed more amenable to our Book, although, I suspected that he was mainly putting on in order to avoid quarreling; I doubt whether he really felt convinced. With great urgency I would plead with him to persuade him it was now or never: suppose God came to take away his soul that very night he might be damned forever, which was worse than being struck by lightning.
“When I’m dead one day,” he would reply lightheartedly, “there’ll be more than enough time to lie in the earth and think of God.”
Ma-Rose’s hold on him, I presume, was too strong, And to preserve the peace and avoid losing him too, I held back with the Bible. For I needed Galant. He was the only one around who was prepared implicitly to accept me as an equal. To all the others I was either superior—Baas or Kleinbaas, “Master” or “Little Master” to the slaves—or inferior: to Pa and Ma, and Ma-Rose, and to Barend who’d always bullied me and whose main gratification seemed to exist in taking from me whatever I was really attached to. The little wagon Ontong had made me; the foal I’d marked for myself; the knucklebones I kept in the bag of musk-cat skin Ma-Rose had sewn for me; my clay oxen; my snake-skin; and the hoard of skulls I’d collected over a long time—birds and meerkats, baboon, jackal, warthog—and eventually he took Hester too. But Galant was my mate. Of course we often fought, and competed, and quarreled: but always as equals. Even in that, I suspect, Ma-Rose’s hand was visible.
Hester came later. And in the beginning she kept very much to herself. Only gradually, almost unnoticed, did she begin to follow us about, staying well behind and without saying a word, but with that quiet persistence that came to characterize her every move. The first time I made her a clay ox, she held it awkwardly and demurely in her hands as if unsure about what to do with it; but afterwards I heard from Ma that she’d taken it to bed with her. And one of the few times she ever cried was when she woke up the next morning to find it in pieces.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make you another.”
She followed us to the dam and sat watching with her big black eyes while I fashioned the new ox from the yellowish clay near the outlet in the dam-wall. A strange feeling it gives one to see a child handle a mere plaything like that, holding it almost reverently against her breast as she carries it about from morning till night. From that day she was inseparable from us. It was something of a nuisance when we went swimming. In the beginning we tried to drive her off with stones or handfuls of clay, but she would retreat only far enough to be out of reach, and return the moment we were defenseless, in the water; sitting pertly beside our bundles of clothes as if to keep watch. It was a bit unnerving to see her poised like that, in her long dress and pinafore and small veldskoens and frilly bonnet while we were cavorting naked; but soon we overcame the initial embarrassment and simply ignored her presence.
The dam was our place above all others. Much later, after I’d got married, returning to the farm one day to borrow a plough and not finding Pa at home, I strolled up to the dam again. To my grownup eyes it looked curiously unimpressive, even drab, muddy, and dishearteningly small. But when we were children it was a world in itself. No grownups ever went there. It belonged exclusively to the children. Grownups, work, slaughtering days, beatings, trouble, fear—all that formed part of the other world beyond the willowtrees, where we were forever aliens in the adult world. But this was splendidly ours, timeless in its tranquillity, inviolable. And unobtrusively Hester became part of it.
One afternoon, insisting as usual to assert his authority as the eldest, Barend once again tried to chase her away; and when she refused he unexpectedly grabbed her where she was standing on the upper wall, and pushed her into the water. It came so suddenly that none of us could prevent it. He was obviously scared when he realized what he’d done; but since there was no way of satisfactorily undoing it we all stood petrified, looking on in dismay and defiance. She shouted a few times, swallowing mouthfuls of water, as she thrashed about and spluttered; then began laboriously to make her way to the edge. It couldn’t have been easy in those heavy, clinging clothes and as far as we knew she’d never swum before; on the other hand it probably wasn’t very far, and certainly not very deep. Drenched and streaked with mud and slime she crawled out on the far side at last, coughing up water as she stood on all fours, and shaking her head like a wet dog.
“Ma’ll kill us dead if she hears about this,” I said in awe. “We’d better find a way to dry her clothes.”
Even before we could reach her she’d matter-of-factly stripped off the soggy clothes and spread them out on the bushes. As if it were the most natural thing in the world—and wasn’t it?—she joined us on the grass to dry herself and frolic in the baking sun. The clothes still looked a crumpled mess by the time we went home, but she must have told Ma some wild convincing story—she always could turn Ma round her little finger—for no one referred to that afternoon again and since then she regularly went swimming with us. I doubt whether any one of us ever gave it a second thought. But even that didn’t last. It happened just after one of the longest and most severe winters of my youth, which had kept us from the
dam for much longer than usual. On the first warm day after the last frost had cleared up we returned to the dam. But as we reached the quince hedge leading up to it, Barend stopped and looked round. Hester was following us, but at a distance.
“Look here,” said Barend, “Galant, you can’t come swimming when Hester is with us.” His manner of talking reminded me so much of Pa’s that I started.
“Why not?” asked Galant.
“Because she’s a girl, of course.”
“What about you then?”
“She’s one of us. You’re not.”
I looked back to where I could see Hester’s blue and white dress among the trees. In a few minutes she would be stripping it off to swim with us, as always. But what change had the winter months brought unexpectedly to make me feel breathless at the thought? For the first time, after our interminable quarrels in the past, I felt myself more in sympathy with Barend than with Galant. Except that I would have preferred to send Barend away as well. At the same time I didn’t want to insult Galant: he was still my friend. It was all very confusing.
For a while I didn’t know what to do. Then, looking down and drawing circles on the hard ground with my big toe, I mumbled: “Galant, I forgot to tell you. Pa wanted you to go down to the horses to look at the brown mare. She’s lame.”
He must have known it was a lie. But his only reaction was to screw up his eyes and ask bitterly: “Who wants to swim anyway? The ducks have messed up the whole place.”
We stared after him as he went away from us, kicking at small stones with his tough bare feet.
“Why’d you lie to him?” asked Barend.
“I couldn’t just chase him off like that.”
He muttered irritably. But before we could start a proper quarrel Hester reached us.
“What’s the matter with Galant?” she asked.
“He doesn’t feel like swimming.” Barend looked away. “Today it’s just the three of us.” He seemed in a hurry. “Well, come on. Can’t dawdle here all day.”
We went through the last tangle of trees and bushes, inexplicably self-conscious, as if we’d never been there before; as if something might happen we were not prepared for; as if in fact we were being watched by the grownup eyes we’d always escaped by coming here. I couldn’t look at Hester.
At the dam we found all sorts of pretexts to postpone the swimming: throwing pebbles into the water, chasing after the ducks, making footprints in the mud, gazing at the tattered remains of last year’s nests as if there was something very special about them.
“Well?” Barend asked at last. “Aren’t you going to swim today, Hester?”
“What’s that to you?” she said. “What’s the matter with the two of you today?”
Resentful at being linked to him in her remark, I tried to cut the knot. “See who’s in the water first,” I challenged them. But no one moved.
“Take off your clothes,” Barend abruptly told her.
“Why?”
“You can’t swim with your clothes on, can you?”
“What about you?”
“Come on, you’re not afraid, are you?”
She glowered at him for a while, then calmly moved her hands to her back to undo the ribbon of her dress. We stared as if we’d never seen her before. My throat was so dry I couldn’t even gulp.
“No,” she suddenly said, dropping her hands. “I don’t feel like swimming today.”
“Take off your clothes!” he shouted, once again assuming Pa’s tone of command.
A brief obstinate twitch of her lips; then she turned her back on us. Barend made a quick move as if to stop her; I was ready to grab him. But there was something half-hearted about his gesture anyway. Changing his voice he started pleading with her in a tone I’d never heard him use before:
“If you take off your clothes I’ll give you all the sugar lumps you want.”
She turned back, raising an eyebrow, but whether in amusement or premeditation I couldn’t tell. “And your new wagon?” she said.
“Anything you want.”
I drew in my breath, stunned by this show of generosity so wholly unlike him.
“And the snake-skin?” she persevered.
“I told you. Anything you want.”
“Will you let me have a shot with your gun when you go hunting again?”
He wavered briefly. Then he nodded.
She stood considering the matter in silence. The ducks were trampling and diving in the water. I allowed myself to become fascinated by the transparency of a dragon-fly. Far away in the yard the hens were cackling.
“Please!” said Barend.
“Oh stop it, will you?” I suddenly flew at him, unable to bear it any longer. “Hester, don’t let him!”
“Shut up!” he said. “Hester, I promise you—”
“No,” she said calmly. “I don’t think I’ll have a swim after all.” With that she turned and walked away.
I was expecting Barend to vent his frustration on me, but he wandered aimlessly to the far side of the dam where he squatted and began energetically to knead a lump of clay. My eyes were burning.
After a while he hurled the lump into the water, angrily wiping his hands on his trousers. “You think I care about a stupid girl?” he asked.
Long after we’d put out the candle that night I was still lying on my back staring at the ceiling, as if I would pierce the darkness with my eyes. Something inside me felt like crying, I didn’t know why. At the same time I was immensely relieved that he hadn’t been able to have his way with her. No, it wasn’t that either. He had very little to do with my feelings at all. They concerned only Hester, exclusively Hester. I didn’t want her ever to swim with us again. In an exhilarating and subversive way the afternoon had confirmed my possessiveness towards her. Not that it had given me any claim on her; but it had induced me, quite unasked, to assume responsibility for her, demanding from me much more than at that age I could really dare to undertake.
“I’ll see to it that they never bother you again if you want to have a swim,” I assured her the following day, adding, without either reason or logic: “Promise?”
How could she have had even the slightest inkling of what I meant? I doubt whether I was fully conscious of it myself. She briefly looked at me in her penetrating way, then said with the slightest of shrugs: “All right.” And from that day, whenever she went to the dam to swim, I would take up position out of sight among the lower trees to protect her from the outside world. There I would crouch trying to imagine her as I’d seen her so often in the past, the tawny body diving and turning in the water, smooth as an otter, her long dark hair all wet, drops glistening on her as she came out, her mysterious and miraculous girlishness. Never, not once, did I cheat by trying to spy on her while she swam, not even when she would innocently call to me to join her in the water. Against myself too, especially against myself, she had to be protected. For we are created flesh, inclined to evil.
Did she care about it one way or the other? Was whatever I might do or say of any concern to her? I made small furniture for her rough-hewn wooden doll; I blew out birds’ eggs for her and shaped her a fragile necklace; I collected knucklebones for her. And she accepted it all with graveness and with grace, but remaining always aloof, as if having or not having didn’t matter in the least.
Even at that early age one decision had already shaped itself in my mind: I would marry her. In that lay the hidden significance of God’s ordinance that she should have come to live with us. Most of my other frail certainties had already been eroded. Hester made it bearable to go on.
To her I dared reveal thoughts I could never utter to anyone else, not even Ma: how I feared and resented the farm; how I’d never wanted to be there. I told her of my resolve to leave it as soon as I could do so with impunity, to go as far away as possible, perhaps to Cape Town, or
even farther, to God knows where. Perhaps I could become a preacher. Or a transport-rider, at the very least. Anything, provided I need not remain imprisoned in an existence where others seemed to be at home but where I could never belong. She listened in silence, and nodded when reaction was required. I don’t know what she really thought about it. But she appeared to trust me: at least she appeared not to distrust me: and that in itself was encouragement enough.
With spike-thorns we scratched the skin of our wrists to draw small specks of blood which we mingled to seal our covenant. With cool, dry lips she pressed a kiss on my mouth.
She remained remote; that she would never cease to be. And whenever she ran away to the grave on Houd-den-Bek not even I could restrain her. Until she discovered how much I loved to stroke or touch her long dark hair she would absently resign herself to my caressing; but once she’d discovered my addiction she cut it all off. There was always something hard and shy about her. Yet I was content. It was all provisional: one day we would be together for good, and she would allow herself to share more generously.
“I’ll ask Pa to let me farm on Houd-den-Bek when we’re married,” I told her. “Then you can always be where you most want to be.”
She stared at me strangely and for a long time. “I thought you said you weren’t going to be a farmer?”
“I’ll do it for you: if you wish.”
“There’s lots of time still.”
But there was less time than we’d thought. We waited until she turned fifteen. In this part of the world it’s old enough. On the eve of her birthday—the day we’d agreed I would talk to Pa about it—I was too excited to go to sleep. My heart felt like exploding in my chest.
“What’s the matter with you?” Barend complained after a while. “You’re tossing and turning like anything.”
“Barend, I’m going to get married.”
His voice sounded stunned: “You mad? With whom?”
“With Hester, of course. She’ll be fifteen tomorrow. We’re going to talk to Pa.”
“Have you asked her?”