A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  Galant did most of the building; he knew better than Nicolaas what to do. A thorough and skilful worker. And yet I never felt at ease when he was around. From that first rainy night: his way of staring silently at one. Not that he was impudent. That would be something one could punish and overcome. It was that singular expression, as if his eyes were free. There was also his refusal to address Nicolaas as baas. Had it been me I would have had him flogged. But to me he was subservient. Yes, Nooi. No, Nooi. Right, Nooi. If you say so, Nooi. When I spoke to Nicolaas about it he would only laugh and shrug: “That’s unimportant, Cecilia. We understand one another. We grew up together.”

  They should have abolished slavery long ago. I cannot stand slaves. They cringe.

  And there were those frightful dreams I used to have about them.

  In Father’s house they hadn’t bothered me much—except in the form of that one recurrent nightmare—probably because I, too, was an underling. But in my own house and in my own farmyard it became annoying, an aggravating circumstance. Wherever one came or turned or went they would be hovering in the background or shuffling past soundlessly on their bare feet, eyes gleaming in the half-light. Like shadows, like cats; everywhere. Looking down as one came past—except for that Galant—or suddenly busying themselves very conspicuously; but as soon as you’d passed you could feel the eyes following you again. One wasn’t free to be mistress in one’s own home while they were around. In their meekness and ubiquitousness they ruled over hearth and home. Because they knew, and I knew, that they were indispensable. Like something soft and pliable that gives way to a prodding finger: but the moment you let go it returns to its original shape. Or like water. Unlike the solidity of stone: this is fluid, it chooses circuitous ways, it recedes and returns; it erodes.

  Granted: we built and farmed and prospered. Side by side Nicolaas and I continued on our separate ways. I began to resign myself to the fact that his secretiveness was inevitable, part of our condition. Leaving in the early morning, returning for lunch and an afternoon nap; then out to the veld again. Sometimes he went to Tulbagh—more often I think than was strictly necessary—leaving Galant behind to keep an eye on the farm. He also developed the habit of getting up from the supper table at night and walking out into the dark without a word, sometimes staying away for hours. To that, too, I resigned myself. I had to allow him his way of life without questioning him about it. But below the surface the process of erosion had already started.

  My first discovery of it had come one evening when he’d gone out on his own as usual. I’d gone to bed, but it was a warm night and after a while, feeling thirsty, I got up. In the familiar darkness of the house I went to the water-barrel in the kitchen. The dung-floor was seductively cool under my bare feet. I pushed open the top half of the back door to let in some air, and stood there looking out into the peaceful night for a long time. There was no wind. The high serrated outline of the mountains opposite. The imperturbable moon. Then I saw him coming back towards the house: not from the gate he would have used to visit the kraals, but from the opposite side, through the old cherry orchard, from the direction of the huts. Those were all in darkness. Only one door stood open, revealing the flickering light of a fire inside. It was the hut where Ontong and Lydia lived. But Ontong, I knew, wasn’t there. He’d left early that morning to go to a grazing place where jackals had caught a lamb.

  Galant

  It’s different. No matter how, but it’s different. Houd-den-Bek is not Lagenvlei. Nicolaas can never be master like the Oubaas. “Galant,” Oubaas Piet says, “Nicolaas is going to marry Nooi Cecilia from Buffelshoek. He’ll be needing a pair of good hands to get Houd-den-Bek going. I’m giving you to him as a present. From now on you’re his slave.”

  Ontong comes with us, only on loan as I have it, but in the end he stays on. And after a while Achilles also joins us: in exchange the Oubaas will get part of the harvest for seven years, they tell me. At Lagenvlei it’s Ontong and Achilles who keep an eye on me, but here on Houd-den-Bek I’m made mantoor over them. Doesn’t matter. “You treat a man who’s older than you with respect,” Ma-Rose warns me. “Specially if he could have been your father. If you don’t I’ll put the night-walkers on you so they can suck you dry. You heard me?”

  “I heard you, Ma-Rose. But I’m not sure about Nicolaas yet.”

  “You’re going to Houd-den-Bek with him, that’s all. It’s not for you to ask.”

  I keep my eyes open and already on the day of the wedding I can see Nicolaas hasn’t got it in him to rule his wife. And I see Hester keeping to herself, away from the other guests, ready to snarl at anyone; even at me, when she hurries through the kitchen into the rain, as if it’s my fault that she will now be cut off from Houd-den-Bek and the grave of her father. In her eyes, too, it seems, I’m only a slave now. That sets me wondering about Nicolaas again.

  Soon after the wedding he takes me up the Sandberg with him. It rises right out of the marshy vlei behind the house, layer upon layer, red and grey. From up there one can see very far. Down below is the marsh, now swollen from the rains into a dam so long and wide among the hills that coming from Lagenvlei you have to make a great detour to get to the yard. Newly whitewashed, severely white, the narrow house with its thatched roof stands in the middle of the bare yard, with the orchards and beanfields below, and the strips of wheatland, as far as the first stony outcrops of the Skurweberge opposite. An unusual mountain range, this. Down towards sunset it stretches all the way from the Rear-Witzenberg, past Elandsfontein, to the elbow of Wagendrift where it disappears, only to reappear opposite Houd-den-Bek, like a river that runs underground part of the way. In the direction of sunrise the veld swerves round the marshland and the Sandberg towards Lagenvlei. Everywhere, as far as the eye can see, it’s Houd-den-Bek.

  “I’m no longer under my father, Galant,” Nicolaas says, looking out over what is now his. “I’m a married man now and you and I are going to turn this place into a proper farm. It’s not what I wanted but it’s what God has ordained for me.”

  “Why you talking about you and me?” I ask him. “The farm is yours.”

  “You’re my right hand, Galant. Without you I’m stuck.” He points to the far side of the narrow valley where the rocky foothills come out of the earth. “You can have a field of your own over there, for pumpkins and beans and vegetables, and some wheat. I’ll give you all the seed and manure you need. And if you work well I’ll set a heifer and two lambs aside for you every year.”

  “You’ll be a good farmer,” I say without looking at him.

  It is not what I have in my mind to say, but I say it nevertheless. For from his way of talking I know it is different now. We’re not boys any more. It’s different. There’s a harness holding me; there’s a rein. Sometimes it’s short and sometimes slack, but it’s there for good.

  “Is that all you can say?” he asks, and his voice has the sound of disappointment in it.

  I do not reply to that. How can I know what he really wants me to say? It is his farm; I am his slave. In silence we go down the steep slope again, separate and together. It starts drizzling again, which makes it easier to keep one’s thoughts to oneself.

  In the house, too, each goes his own way although we all live together. These first weeks, until the rain lets up, we have to sleep in the kitchen; the old huts have not yet been rebuilt. It’s Ontong and I in the corner by the hearth, and the woman Lydia from Buffelsfontein between us. A good woman, a generous body; but she’s not right in the head. At times she suddenly starts running about like a chicken stung by a bee; then she must be subdued and brought back, her mouth foaming and her eyes turned up so you can see the whites; and whenever she’s not working, and even sometimes when she’s supposed to be working, she’s picking up things, feathers and twigs and leaves, which she stuffs into the mattress. All because of a blow with a kierie on the head when she was a child, Ontong says. But Ma-Rose believes she must h
ave stood in someone’s shadow at sunrise, for that is supposed to bring a darkness into one which only very special medicine rubbed into an incision in the skin can cure. Still, Ontong is Malay, and even he can do nothing for the woman: Lydia remains what she is.

  It makes a man ill at ease to be with someone like that, but if she’s the only woman around, you have to accept it: and in the dark it’s not so difficult. She may be strange, but it’s better than nothing. So Ontong and I take turns with her. Until her moods get the better of me: “You keep her, Ontong,” I tell him. “You got more patience.”

  As soon as the rain is over Nicolaas takes me out into the messy yard. “The Nooi is getting fidgety with the lot of you under her roof,” he says. “I want you to cut wood in the kloof and build yourself a hut. There’s clay and reeds in the marsh. Ontong can also build one.”

  “A hut just for myself?”

  “You need a place to live.”

  That’s why I’m saying Houd-den-Bek is a different sort of place. All my life I’ve been living with others. Now I’m allowed a place of my own, like a weaver-bird building its nest in the first warmth after the frost. All those nests overhanging the dam. But keep the dam out of it. Its time is past.

  It’s hard work, chopping branches and carrying armloads of rushes and reeds; but in the late afternoons when she finds the time Lydia gives a hand to cover the reeds with clay. Before the first bean harvest the huts are finished, mine well apart from the one shared by Ontong and Lydia. Look at me: master of my own hut, its dung-floor hard and smooth, my kaross rolled open in the middle, kist against the far wall, all my things from Lagenvlei. Good enough even for Ma-Rose to move in: I can see her heart is bent on following me to Houd-den-Bek. But when at last she decides to make the move it’s to a hut of her own, at half an hour’s distance from us, all by herself. “I won’t be tied to another man’s yard, Galant,” she tells me while I finish off her hut in the first frost of winter. “I don’t ask favors from any man. I’m free.”

  “The lightning will strike you up here on the hill,” I warn her. “It’s too exposed.”

  “I’m not scared of no lightning.”

  And I know why. I’ve seen her in storms before: if the lightning grows too wild or comes too close to her liking she goes out in the rain and bends over with her backside to the storm, and raises the back flap of her kaross. Nothing scares off the Lightning Bird so effectively as the sight of Ma-Rose’s bare behind.

  In the end I stop complaining about her independence. For it is the time of Bet’s arrival on the farm, the young woman from the distant Eastern Border who turns my limbs to water. An easy woman, Bet. Difficult when she’s difficult, but easy with her body. Usually, when there’s a new woman in the neighborhood we all go to her like horses to a trough, for a woman’s cunt is a precious thing in these parts and a man is in need of wetness. So when Bet arrives, and before the moon is full again, I ask her: “What do you say, Bet? Look at this hut, it’s mine. Are you moving in?” Like a weaver-bird she inspects the nest, plucking out bits of straw here and there, looking inside and out, ordering me to move the door so it faces the sunrise, the way the Khoin people want it, telling me to change this and that; and in the end it is to her liking.

  I go to Nicolaas to tell him: “I’m taking a woman to be with me. It’s Bet.” And he generously marks an extra two lambs for us to celebrate.

  The work of course goes on as usual, for the place is neglected and gone to waste and the hands are few. From time to time Nicolaas takes on Hottentots who happen to come past; or Frans du Toit or some other farmer in the neighborhood sends over the hands they can spare; but the permanent hands are few, mine and Ontong’s and later Achilles’s too. In the beginning we do everything together. But gradually the work gets sorted out. The horses are mine. Nicolaas doesn’t like horses; same as with dogs. He never trusts them properly and so they’re wary of him too. But I’m a horseman. I can spend a whole afternoon brushing them or leading them or feeding them or whatever. True, I’m the mantoor, I got to keep an eye on everything on the farm: but it’s the horses that are mine above all. And then the building. Nicolaas wants walls all over the place. Kraals. Stables. Sties. A stone wall round the farmyard and the kitchen garden. Another round the small graveyard of Hester’s father. A new mudwall to dam up the sunrise side of the marsh. And new furrows everywhere to take water to the beans and the wheat and the orchards and the small patch of tobacco. Digging, paving, then plastering with mud. All this stonework is mine. Ontong is the one for the tools and implements. He cures the hides and cuts the thongs, he works in the smithy in the back shed, he mends ploughs and wheels and wagons; and if there’s time, which isn’t often, he can make tables and chairs and kists better than any other man I know. When Achilles comes over to Houd-den-Bek he is given the sheep and goats and the small herd of cattle to look after.

  This is our regular work, each man to the shape of his hands. But there’s other work we have to share, the work of the seasons. On Houd-den-Bek something of everything is sown and planted, and that keeps us busy. The old lands, overgrown and gone to seed, must be weeded and ploughed again. Wheat and barley down in the bottom of the valley. And that means laying out a threshing-floor and smoothing it and spreading dung and hardening it. Closer to the house are the beanfields and the orchards. The old cherry orchard. The young peaches in front of the house. The apricots and apples.

  On the far side of the marsh, the vlei, where the Sandberg begins, Nicolaas tries to get a small vineyard going too, but it never works. Unlike Lagenvlei, where the Oubaas picks enough grapes for his few half-aums of husk brandy every season, Houd-den-Bek’s brandy all comes from Tulbagh or Cape Town, a few barrels kept in the shed; and I am in charge of the key.

  Just as in my childhood the work runs with the seasons. When the swallows fly away after the beans have been harvested Achilles takes the sheep to the winter grazing of the Karoo; those of us who stay behind must weed the bushes from the veld and burn dry grass and prepare the lands for ploughing, come frost or snow. By the time Achilles and the swallows come back the lands are ready for sowing. And then it’s hoeing and weeding and watering till midsummer when the wheat turns yellow, when it’s reaping and stacking and threshing and carting away to the loft. And almost before that is done it’s time for the beans again and the fruit, picking and drying, as the days grow shorter and cooler round the edges. Before the first frost settles in, tea must be harvested in the mountains, and there’s curing of hides to be done, and hunting, and slaughtering for winter; and the wagons are prepared and loaded for Nicolaas to take the year’s produce to the Cape. The same coming and going as at Lagenvlei, always beginning again and drawing to a close like the sun rising and setting; and then beginning anew.

  I’m appointed over the others and Nicolaas stands over me. And still I don’t know about him; about my place. Right hand or slave? We’re not children now. These days he always wears shoes; I go barefoot as before. What does it mean then, to say: You and I will farm together? I try him out with a plough, one afternoon in the last frost of winter. It’s a bad day for ploughing, drizzling, and the North-wester blowing right through one, but Nicolaas insists the work must be done. Today we’ll find out, I think. And I see to it that the plough gets broken on an outcrop of stone. At sunset the work is still undone and Nicolaas comes down to have a look.

  “What’s this?”

  “Broken.”

  “Why didn’t you come up to the house to tell me?”

  “I tried to mend it myself.”

  “How did it get broken?”

  “I broke it,” I say. “I told you this was no day for ploughing.”

  He grins, but nervously. His eyes are searching me; I stare back; he looks away. “Oh well,” he says at last, “anyone can have an accident.”

  “I pushed it over the stones.”

  “These banks can be treacherous,” he says. “One
never sees them before it’s too late.”

  I can see he knows it’s not like that. But he wants to believe what he believes. He must avoid what has really happened; he must avoid me. What will he do on Houd-den-Bek without me? But what will I do if he refuses to let me find out what I am here?

  Whistling, I walk through the unevenly ploughed lands, back home to Bet. But I know the matter is not in the open yet. This horse has not been broken in. He’s been knee-haltered, but not for long. Nicolaas is still scared to jump on his back and ride him as he should. But it has to happen, sooner or later. We can’t avoid it for good.

  And all the time, day after day, the work goes on. It pays no heed to weariness or pain: back-ache, tooth-ache, coughing, a runny stomach: Ma-Rose gives medicine and the work goes on. Like a worn-out nag tied to a millpole one goes on, round and round, winter and summer.

  Still, there’s merrymaking too. When Nicolaas is off to Cape Town and Nooi Cecilia spends some time with her father who is ill, we rule the roost. In the evenings the men arrive on horseback, Abel and others, and it’s music and dancing and cavorting and showing off. No one can play the violin like Abel; no one can keep up with him when he dances his wild reels. And when one gets tired there’s husk brandy stolen from barrels on many different farms; and when we run out of that there’s always old Achilles’s honey-beer with a kick worse than any stallion’s. It takes a full year to mature before it’s properly ripe for drinking, and then it’s pure firewater. It’s a dozen eggs or more in a clay pot, and vinegar on top, or lemons if they’re available which isn’t often; and when the eggs have disappeared, shells and all, it’s honeycomb in abundance, and milk, and stolen brandy; and some of Ma-Rose’s nameless herbs if it’s to be something really special; and after months in a dark corner of the hut, it goes into calabashes sealed with clay, until the following winter. Achilles’s honey-beer is the fiery heart of all our wildest merriment. It’s dancing and drinking and joking and quarreling from darkness to dawn. Lots of fights over the few women among us many men. Over Bet too. I won’t allow another man to touch her now that she’s moved in with me. One night old Adonis from Buffelsfontein rides home with my axe still stuck in his skull. There’s one who won’t try to fool around with Bet again. Afterwards I lay into Bet with a kierie just to make sure she won’t make eyes at other men; and then I lay her down and ride her so she won’t forget she’s been ridden. And outside in the yard the merriment goes on, filling the night with its shouting and music.