by Andre Brink
Even among those I’d seen in Tulbagh the day before there had been weak-minded men softened by the curse of the Cape. There was old Karel Theron, puffing away at his pipe, surrounded by his nine sons, announcing with great conviction: “Only one way to outwit the bastards. Do what I’ve done; sell all your slaves while you can still get a good price. Then the Government can’t touch you. It’s the only way to be a free man.”
“Not all of us have nine sons,” I reminded him.
He glowered at me. “Then go home and start making some. You’re a young man, damn you. What’s wrong with you then?” As if Cecilia had prompted him.
“While you’re waiting for them to grow up,” said one of his sons, “ask your neighbors to give you a hand. What else are neighbors for?”
“It’s easy for you to talk,” I said. “Here in Waveren you all live close together. But what about us in the Bokkeveld and elsewhere?”
“You should have thought of that before you staked out your farm.”
“There were no problems with slaves then.”
“Then hire Hottentots.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said a farmer from Piquetberg. “Even as it is they come and go as they wish. What do you think will happen if they’re no longer forced by law to work? Haven’t you heard all the rumors? One of these days we won’t have a single laborer to depend on, and whatever we still manage to produce will most likely be stolen by the vagrants.”
“There’s still time to think about it,” said old Karel Theron. “Change your way of farming or move to another neighborhood. Nothing forces you to stay in the Bokkeveld.”
“You call that being a free man?” I asked. “Changing your whole way of life to suit the Government in the Cape?”
“The law’s the law.”
“There’s no such law yet.”
“But change is in the air. Can’t you smell it? Better do something about it now than cry over spilt milk later.”
“What about the slaves themselves?” I asked, as in so many earlier arguments with Barend. “What will happen to them if we just let them go? They have nowhere to turn to. They’ll die of hunger. They need us even more than we need them.”
“If you don’t have slaves you don’t have to worry about them,” said the old man, rounding up his sons.
In the Cape, before returning home, my final argument had always been: “Let them try to set free the slaves and they’ll soon see for themselves. If you treat your slaves properly they’ll never abandon you, not even if the law says they’re free.”
“How can you ever be sure?” The retort had come from Cecilia’s cousin, a foreman on a wine farm near the Eerste River.
“I know my slaves,” I’d answered confidently. “I know they’re loyal to a man.”
Then, returning to Houd-den-Bek, the first thing I’d witnessed was Galant killing my sheep: the one slave I’d trusted above all others. How could I not lose my temper? So much more than a lamb had been at stake: not just my trust in him, but what had remained of my faith in the future.
And now we were thrown together in a small hollow in the mountains, the direct outcome of all that had gone before; and in me were the turbulent recollections of all those interminable arguments, the heated discussions, the rising tempers, the sudden explosions among people who’d always been friends: in Cape Town, in Tulbagh, wherever one went, as if the Devil himself had been let loose among us to help us destroy ourselves even before the Government could. All that lay heavily on my mind as I sat beside Galant in the silence that followed my description of the Malay who’d run amok.
It was an oppressive silence and he was again very rigid next to me. It occurred to me that the reason why he wouldn’t lean against the rock like me might be that his scourged back hurt too much. I would have liked to ask him, but it seemed indecent; anyway there was nothing I could do about it, not now. And he’d brought it on himself, hadn’t he? Rather teach him a painful lesson now, and painful not only to him but to me as well, than allow this thing to get out of hand. We’d come a long way; we had a long way to go together. I sat there wishing fervently I could convey this to him. For God’s sake, I wanted to say, we understand each other, don’t we? We need each other! We’re companions. The past is not important. It’s the future. I need you on the farm, damn you.
But all I could say was: “Galant, in spite of what happened I want you to remain mantoor on the farm.”
“That’s for you to say.”
“I want to give you another chance. We’ll make a new start.”
He made no reply. Perhaps the story of the Malay was still weighing on his mind, as on mine. Yet it had been necessary to tell it to him, for his own sake and mine. Neither of us was allowed the precarious comfort of ignorance any longer. We too had eaten of the fruit—somewhere, sometime between that innocent day our tunnel had caved in and this night in our hollow in the mountains.
When I could no longer bear his silence I crawled outside. The wind threw me off balance; I had to gasp for breath in the shockingly cold moist air. The fog was still swirling. Overhead patches of sky would suddenly be revealed, blacker than the dull opaqueness of the mist, with incredibly bright pinpoints of stars and once a sliver of moon like a cut-off finger nail. Then the swift fog would cover it once again and I would have trouble to keep my balance where I stood, legs far apart, braced against the wind, trying to pee and spilling it on my trousers. An awareness of something physically closing in from all sides. I knew now that the feeling of oppression in our hollow had been caused neither by the proximity of Galant nor by our cramped quarters but by the somber knowledge of the Bokkeveld itself closing in, a frontier world shrinking around me, a natural freedom contracting. And I wondered achingly how, and for how long, we would still be able to cope and to hold our own, how long we would be able to reconcile our awareness of the need for justice with the imperatives of the moment. To survive, to survive: but at what price? A Malay drawn and quartered on the square below the Lion’s Rump in the Cape. Galant in the hollow below the pile of rocks somewhere in the fog behind me, scourged and wounded in order for both of us to be reminded that I was his master, he my slave: and that in this land neither could survive without this subtle and subjugating bond approved by God. It had become too complicated to understand. Braced against the wind, I blindly exposed my face to the wet lashes of fog, trembling in a terrible ecstasy as if I required that exposure, that punishment, not to feel vindicated but to survive. That word again. And I knew that from now on it would never leave me.
I was so cold that it took some time before I realized that Galant was with me, grabbing me from behind.
“What you doing here?” he shouted. “You got lost again?”
“No,” I stammered back with numb lips. “Of course not.” But perhaps he was right. And in a strange humility I allowed him to lead me by the hand, back to the shelter where all signs of the fire had disappeared and where the only warmth that could keep us alive came from our shivering bodies pressed together as in childhood.
Sleep seemed unthinkable; and yet from exhaustion we both drifted off into a stupor from which we woke, first I, then he, when the hard colorless light of day struck into our hollow. We could hardly move but forced ourselves outside. The wind had died down. The fog had cleared somewhat, although it soon settled in again. He obviously had more difficulty than I; he was in pain. I avoided looking at him. Neither of us spoke: the night was both too remote and too intimate to be discovered in words. Stamping our feet to drive out the numbness, blowing into cupped hands to restore some warmth, we halfheartedly revived ourselves, and untied the horses, and set out to complete the rest of the tedious journey home, back to the light drizzle and the sharp-edged Northwestern wind of a Bokkeveld winter. At Elandsfontein I stopped for tea while Galant spent some time with Abel tending the horses. Barend was out in the fields, but Hester was h
ome: more distant and silent than ever, and pregnant with what later turned out to be her second son.
Abel
“Look at Tatters.” It was Baas Barend who first called Galant by that name. And in the end we all used the nickname, but only behind his back and when he was safely out of earshot, for Galant had a quick temper. Only Goliath once risked to call him that to his face, quite playfully—“Hey, Tatters, I say!”—but that was the last time, and we had to carry Goliath down to the fountain to bring him round again.
It was on account of the jacket of course, the one he flaunted so much when he first got it. One would have expected him to throw the useless rag away after it got so tattered, but he insisted on wearing it. And not shamefully either, but proudly, as if he wanted all the world to see it. “This is my child’s jacket,” he told me, for we were close friends and he would confide in me what he would say to no one else. “I got this for David. I’ll never part from it.” A very stubborn man Galant was, once he’d got his mind set on something.
I was working in the backyard, Klaas and I both, sawing wood, when they arrived from Tulbagh that day, a cold drizzly morning with the first fog of winter. It was an old habit of Klaas’s to make me saw wood whenever he really wanted to take it out on me, for he knew how much I loathed it. And no use complaining either, because he’d just been made mantoor over me and he couldn’t wait for me to do something wrong so he could split on me. I used to be mantoor at Elandsfontein, ever since Baas Barend first bought me at the auction on Wagendrift, together with the bed and the two rams and the chest of crockery; and I remained mantoor until the time Galant ran into trouble while Baas Nicolaas was away to the Cape with the wagons. The most roaring time we’d ever had in the neighborhood and I know what I’m talking about for I grew up right there with the Du Toits. Wagendrift lies in the elbow of the narrow valley running up from Elandsfontein, where the mountains swing to the right towards Houd-den-Bek. It’s a farm Oubaas Piet Lagenvlei had always wanted on account of the way it cuts into his family’s property; but the Du Toits held on to it even after their old man’s death when the Madam quarreled with her sons and sold the lot. So I knew everybody in these parts. As a child, whenever I had to lead the oxen on the annual winter trek to the Karoo, I became friends with Galant. We saw a lot of each other through the years, a bit here, a bit there. But in all that time we never knew another month like the one Baas Nicolaas spent in the Cape, especially because it coincided with a fortnight Baas Barend was away hunting, for it was the time of year when Elandsfontein comes alive preparing biltong and dried sausage and salted ribs for the winter months ahead. I’d always been the huntsman on the farm, but that year there was some bad blood between Baas Barend and me because of a gun he said I’d broken and so out of spite he didn’t take me along. Now that had already annoyed me; and what with the nightly parties I suppose we overdid things a bit. Afterwards we all suffered the consequences. All right, I know my work wasn’t quite what it should have been in Baas Barend’s absence, but the main reason was that I’d talked back to Nooi Hester. All because I’d had another of those nights. And I’d really meant well: I’d planned to stay home all night because I knew the Baas was due back from his hunting the next morning and I wanted to look him in the eye when he came; but in the deep of the night I had visitors, Galant and all the others on horseback, looking for something to drink. “Sorry,” I said. “I got nothing either, but I’ll help you look.” And so we all set out for the nearest farms, Nooitgedagt and Koelefontein and Modderrivierskloof and such like. It was past sunrise before I got home, by which time Klaas, of course, was already at work; and the Nooi wanted to know where I’d been. My head was splitting and I could hardly see straight, so I suppose I gave her a rather gruff answer which Klaas of course reported to the Baas the moment he set foot on the farm. “And when you speak to Abel,” Klaas told him, “ask him where he spent his nights while you were away.” As if the bastard hadn’t been drinking with us all along. I tried my best to explain, but I’m afraid anyone could see that very little work had been done during Baas Barend’s absence, so that was that. And I didn’t feel so bad about the flogging I got either: it was my due and I took it as it came, the way one takes sun and rain in the Bokkeveld. But what I couldn’t take was that the Baas put an end to my mantoor job, which was one thing I’d always cared for. To make it worse he appointed Klaas over us, that old cunt-face.
And not two weeks later, when the thorn was still smarting in my heart, Galant and Baas Nicolaas arrived at Elandsfontein out of the fog.
“Why you looking such a sight?” I asked him, although I’d already been told about the beating by Ontong when he’d come over a few days earlier with a smoked ham for Nooi Hester.
“Gone to Tulbagh,” Galant said glumly, “I went to complain but all I got was another flogging.”
“Then things must be really bad,” I said. “Baas Nicolaas always favored you above the others.”
“Look how he tore my jacket.”
“Why do you care about a jacket?”
“You know it’s my child’s jacket. I got it for David. No one got the right to lay a hand on it.”
“Come and have some tea,” I said, trying to calm him down.
“Keep your bloody tea,” he said, sulking.
“Sarie will pour for you.”
“I don’t care who pours it.”
“You come with me, man.”
After all, there are few things in life so bitter that the sweetness of a woman and of tea cannot cure them. Take bush-tea: it’s got all the sun and rain of the mountains in it, drawing its taste from under the earth and from the mountain mist; and then it’s plucked. It is spread out and warmed in the oven to sweat it out, and it’s beaten and trodden, and in exchange it gives you the sweetest of sweetness. Just like a woman.
In a sense it was Sarie who brought me to Elandsfontein. I learned about her the day she set foot there, although at that time I was still living at Wagendrift with the Du Toits. It was something like the smell the bees catch when the wagon-trees come into flower. In a land where women are scarce all the men immediately know when a new one makes her appearance. It’s something you feel swelling inside you; and it makes you stiff like strung wire; there’s a new smell in the air. Sarie was generous from the start, and when she was with me she held back nothing. In those early days, whenever Oubaas Du Toit gave me a Sunday free I’d see to it that I arrived at Elandsfontein before the Saturday sun had properly set; and if the weather was good the two of us would slip away from all the other men and spend the night among the tea-bushes in the mountains. At a time like that a man’s rod keeps poking till daybreak; and all day Sunday. In between I reach for my fiddle to play for Sarie. I tune the strings and turn the mountains into water for her. And then I roll over on Sarie again and I tune her and I put my fiddlestick to her and I play her as if she were a violin herself, till she sobs and cries for joy, music in my years. It goes more and more slowly as the Sunday wears on until in the end there’s barely any kick left inside you, yet nothing can stop you. That’s the way it was with me and Sarie. And when at last the night filled up the hollows among the hills like a winter vlei swelling and spilling over its banks, we would have our fill and I would be drained to the last drop in my body: then I’d put my fingers into her and draw the sticky sweetness from her to last me the bitter week ahead. Back at Wagendrift I would bind up one of my fingers with a piece of rag and then fall asleep like a dead man. On Monday I would stagger through my work in a sort of daze. By Tuesday life would be slowly coming back, encouraged by Sarie’s whiff on my fingers. By Wednesday the sniffing would grow ever more vigorous as the smell began to fade. The next day, as the drought inside grew worse, I would undo the bandage on my finger to draw new courage from Sarie’s preserved memory. Even that used to be gone away by Friday; and when Saturday came around I would be biting the nail to the quick in search of Sarie.
Small won
der that, by the time Ounooi Du Toit quarreled with her sons and decided to sell out, my mind was made up about the woman I needed. There was a big crowd at the auction and several of them seemed to have an eye on me, including Frans du Toit himself; but I had no wish to be his slave. Not that he was particularly hard on his slaves—in these parts there’s no man could match Barend Van der Merwe for strictness—but because one never knew how things stood with him: one way today, another tomorrow. So I checked Sarie’s finger—it was a Friday: by that time I could already tell the days of the week from the state of my finger—and I cornered Baas Barend: “Baas,” I told him, “if you buy me I promise you you’ll never regret it.”
That the man had a good heart in spite of his reputation was proved when he not only bought me but the fiddle as well to keep me happy. For himself he bought the bed and the rams and the crockery; but the fiddle was for me. And that night there was wailing and singing and sobbing among the tea-bushes again.
Which was why I knew what I was about when I told Galant that morning: “You come with me. Sarie will pour you some tea.” For by that time she was living with me; and I never begrudged another man some of my pleasure: nor Sarie neither.
And it worked out well, as I’d thought it would. The tea cleared up his heavy mood; in its sweetness he found comfort.
“Now tell me what happened,” I said when Sarie handed him the second mug; and I took him by the arm to lead him round the house where we would be sheltered from the drizzle and where I could keep an eye on the gate so that Baas Barend wouldn’t catch us by surprise. “How’s things in Tulbagh?”