A Chain of Voices

by Andre Brink

  “What you need is a proper lesson!” said Barend.

  I went out into the dazzling light.

  “Where are you going?” Nicolaas called after me. I turned to look back at them. “To my father’s grave,” I said.

  “Oh for God’s sake, Hester—!”

  I walked on blindly, down to the left, into the narrow valley. Just as well no one followed me; I might have done something irresponsible. For a long time I simply went on walking, through the gate in the farmyard wall and across the veld. It wasn’t the right direction, but it didn’t matter. It was no use going to the grave in that frame of mind anyway. Heading for the rough foothills opposite, I felt drained of thought, reduced to simple motion; and when at last, high among the foothills, I became conscious of fatigue I sat down on a stone, raising my face to the uncomplicated forgiveness of the sun and the breath of the wind. Once again, as in those distant years when I was a child, there were the familiar textures: smoothness and roughness of rock, brittleness of grass, the resilience of skin on my upper arms as I held them tightly to contain myself, the reassurance of bone in knees, the gentle hardness of thighs. This was I: yet who was I?

  A recognition of the body. Twitches of hunger affording a particular satisfaction in the stubborn knowledge that it would not be stilled; numbness from sitting; a familiar pressure in the bladder. What strange sense of defiance in simply drawing up my skirts and squatting there, not hidden behind stone or bush but openly in animal simplicity, heels apart, the small irregular jet hissing from my invisible self, fine droplets spraying my ankles, the dark stain on the ground spreading unevenly, seeping reluctantly into the dry crust, oozing away, leaving a momentary frothiness, then gone; a miracle as of birth; a most fleeting part of me forever secured by the abiding soil. Only through the water of one’s body can one commune with solid earth. Not past or future was freedom, but this insignificant, tremendous moment. One always thinks of freedom as of something “out there,” remote and separate, a territory to be reached by climbing a mountain or swimming a river or crossing some frontier. But is there, ever, anything “out there”: freedom? truth? Can it ever be anywhere, or otherwise, than here, in here, inseparable from who you are, what you are, what you were, what you alone allow yourself to become? Curiously content, I walked back at last, making a detour to avoid the front of the house, then cutting across the backyard in the direction of the small stone enclosure of the graveyard.

  Passing behind the stable I heard a moaning sound, but so dubious, more sigh than sound, that it might have been my imagination. Suddenly the anxiety returned, flooding me. I went round the stone building. Ontong and Achilles were squatting on either side of the wide door, staring sullenly ahead.

  “Good afternoon,” I said, hesitant in their presence.

  “Good day, Nooi Hester.” Old Ontong’s face was as inscrutable as always.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “The Kleinbaas told us to stay here, Nooi.”

  “Why?”

  Again I heard the sigh, the moan, and this time it was unmistakable. Clenching my teeth, I stepped into the doorway. It was so dark in the stable, after the brilliance outside, that I was blinded for a while. Then a shape defined itself, black upon black. A man dangling from one of the crossbeams in the roof, his feet barely touching the ground, his arms stretched and tied above his head. He was naked. It was Galant.

  It had never occurred to me that it might be he. My stomach contracted. My head was reeling. Supporting myself against one of the rough doorposts I turned back to Ontong:

  “What’s he doing here like this?”

  He was still staring into space, refusing to look at me: “Baas Nicolaas said he must stay there until tonight.”

  “Cut him loose, Ontong.”

  “The Kleinbaas will kill us.”

  “Ontong, I order you to.”

  He didn’t reply.

  I moved a few steps inside again; then returned to the door. “You can go to your huts now,” I said.

  They refused to move.

  “Ontong. Achilles.” I had to restrain a sob of anger in my throat. “Go home. I’ll tell Nicolaas myself.”

  They looked at me. Ontong shook his head slowly. But in the end they got to their feet, mumbling something I couldn’t make out, and went off, obviously reluctant.

  “Galant,” I said.

  “Go away,” he hissed, his body shaking as if in rage.

  “Why did he do this to you?”

  “Go away.” He was so obviously in pain that it was more a groan than a command.

  “Let me help you,” I pleaded.

  “I don’t want you here.”

  I looked round hopelessly. It was still difficult to distinguish objects in the dark and only after some time I discovered a heavy wooden box filled with straw which, with great difficulty, I managed to shove towards him so that he could take the weight off his arms. At first he refused even that relief.

  “Please!” I said.

  “I told you to go away.”

  Kneeling beside the heavy box I shoved again, trying to force it right under him. I looked up at him. It was still dark, but my eyes were growing accustomed to it. Until that instant I’d been concerned only about his agony. But kneeling there, looking up, it was the discovery of him hanging there, and naked, that shocked me. Clutching the grainy, splintered wood of the box I pressed my face against it, feeling it graze the skin of my cheek and almost relishing the cruelty of that harsh touch. It was the immediacy with which a remote past returned that shook me so. There was no sense of myself being there, in that dark stable smelling so piercingly of horses and urine and straw, and recollecting images from many years ago: those images were tangible in their urgent reality. For a few instants we were children again, clutching one another for warmth, sheltered under Ma-Rose’s voluminous kaross, our bare skins conscious of its rude caress. For a few instants we were gliding smoothly through the muddy water of the dam, the weavers flitting and singing overhead. For a few instants I felt the warm insistent sucking of his mouth against my leg as he drained the snake’s poison from the precise marks of the wound. But at the same time we were not children any more. It was a woman kneeling in the straw; and this was the body of a man.

  Was he aware of it too or was it an inevitable reaction to shock that below his belly that dark shape should stir uneasily, and jerk, and grow monstrously before my eyes; that man-thing I had never seen, least of all in my husband whose violent couplings had always occurred in the dark and to whom I’d never shown myself in return? Now it was there, visible and aggressive, impossible to deny, and for the first time in years another submerged layer from my youth returned—that fascination, that luxurious terror with which I’d furtively stared at bull and cow, at horses, dogs and goats. Pure animal experience and for that very reason innocent and fierce.

  “Go away,” he groaned again.

  That made it easier for me to get up, turning away from him briefly, aware of practicalities again.

  Then there was a sound at the door, and a dark figure appeared.

  “Hester? What are you doing here?” It was Nicolaas.

  I didn’t move, still trying to control my breathing.

  “Hester?”

  “Untie him,” I said.

  “But—”

  “I told Ontong and Achilles to go. Now untie him.”

  “You don’t understand. He nearly killed my horse.”

  I struck him in the face. “You disgust me, Nicolaas,” I said. “It’s the sort of thing I’d have expected of Barend, not of you. I’m ashamed of you.”

  He stared at me. His face was contorted as if he wanted to cry. In rage I snatched a sickle from the wall and thrust it in his hand.

  “Now will you cut him loose?” I shouted.

  He climbed on the box and started sawing at the thongs
that held Galant’s wrists. Galant must have lost consciousness for he slumped the moment his arms were loose, and fell.

  Tie up a man, I thought then, and he is no longer a man. There is no limit to what you can permit yourself to do to him. Untie his hands, I know now, and there is no limit to the responsibilities you may have to assume for that simple act.

  “He’ll be all right,” Nicolaas stammered. “They’re tougher than you think.”

  I didn’t look at him. He went to the door.

  “Hester,” he said. “Honestly, I—”

  “I’m not interested in what you have to say any more.”

  He went out into the blinding light.

  There was a wooden bucket half filled with water in the corner near the door. Only afterwards did it occur to me that it might have been dirty, meant for the horses. It didn’t matter then. There was no cloth of any kind, so—in that strange numbness, as if it were all happening in my sleep—I tore a piece off the hem of my dress, and soaked it, and started washing Galant’s face. After a while he moaned again.

  “Go away,” he said.

  Even if I’d wanted to obey I couldn’t. There was neither will nor thought left in me. In mere mechanical movement I tried to contain myself, struggling obtusely against this dark flood threatening all understanding. I didn’t even want to understand. Soaking the cloth at intervals I simply went on washing him, cleaning his body, the way I presume one cleanses a corpse. Only he wasn’t a corpse, and he was in pain, for he winced and twitched at times; and occasionally, although he visibly tried to stifle them, there were muffled sobbing sounds coming from his throat. I washed the blood from him, but it was not because of the blood; it was the need to find atonement for everything I couldn’t grasp in a violent world where neither he nor I belonged. I washed his body as if for the first time in my life I was discovering the shape and reason of limbs and their miraculous relationship. I even touched that fierce club rising from his loins, accepting that in that half-dark hour nothing should be avoided or denied. He groaned again; again he murmured: “Go away,” but he must have known by then that I had to continue. In a way I wasn’t even concerned with him, this slave, this man, Galant. In having him cut free from the thongs that bound him it was myself I’d tried to liberate; in washing him I was praying for my own impossible salvation.

  Someone entered. It was the slave woman Pamela who’d served tea that morning and whom I’d seen before.

  “Baas Nicolaas told me to come,” she said.

  I resented the intrusion; at the same time it offered release—if only through postponement of what I couldn’t comprehend anyway.

  “You would have come even if he hadn’t sent you,” I said, not knowing why.

  After a moment, meekly, I rose to my feet. Neither the woman nor I said a word; Galant, too, was silent. Staring at each other over his prostrate body we didn’t move. There was an intensity in that wordless confrontation which, it seems to me, is possible only between woman and woman.

  I wanted to say something, but I felt my voice struggling in my throat like a bird fluttering to escape. At last, mumbling incoherently the first words I could think of, I turned and left. I don’t think she even heard me.

  Pamela

  “Take him. Look after him. Don’t let anyone ever do this to him again.”

  That was what the woman said. I wasn’t sure I could trust her just like that; one cannot be too careful with these people. In the evenings they read to you from the Bible but the next day it’s something quite different. Much safer to be wary and to keep one’s own counsel. I stood at the stable door watching her as she walked through the yard past Baas Nicolaas who was still standing near the chicken-run; he tried to talk to her but she walked right past him, and that persuaded me that she’d been sincere. Even so I waited until he too had gone inside before I dared to return to Galant.

  “Can you get up?” I asked him.

  “What makes you think I can’t?”

  But it took quite an effort to help him to his feet and on the way to his hut we had to rest several times; just as well that Bet had already gone to the kitchen for I was in no mood to have her around. The others kept their distance when they saw us approaching, as if it embarrassed them to look at us openly. I preferred it that way as I felt even more exposed than Galant, as if it was I dragging myself naked through that yard; in any case he was my responsibility now, not theirs.

  “The woman was kind to you,” I said when we stopped outside his hut so he could catch his breath.

  “What’s she to me?”

  “Come inside. You must lie down.”

  “I’m all right.”

  Obstinate. But he didn’t even know what he was saying; and when I helped him down on the mattress he passed out again and I had to bring him to with water. After I’d made him comfortable again I sent one of the youngsters, I think it was Rooy, to fetch some medicine from Ma-Rose, for he was clearly in a bad way. Just before sunset she came down to see for herself, with a skin bag filled with ointments and medicine; soon the whole hut was filled with the smell of her camphor brandy, linseed oil and castor oil, Dutch drops, honey and herbs, and the many weird concoctions she’d brewed herself. Even that was not enough to her taste and after a while she went out again.

  “Where you going, Ma-Rose?” I asked.

  “Got to get some brandy from Nicolaas. I need it for Galant.”

  “You not going to ask them anything. I won’t have it.”

  But she refused to listen and perhaps it was just as well for the brandy put him to sleep. Only then, with a grunt of relief, did she return to her own hut. Soon afterwards Bet came home from her evening work in the house—Nooi Cecilia wouldn’t go to bed before everything was in its place—but I stopped her at the door:

  “You better go to sleep somewhere else. I got to look after Galant.”

  She didn’t object. It had been a bad day and I suppose she knew as well as anyone else that it would take only a small spark to set everything alight. After she’d gone, at long last, silence settled on the farmyard. From time to time one of the dogs would bark or yelp briefly, or start chewing something; or there would be an uneasy stirring in the kraal; for the rest it was silent. In the distance, once or twice, the call of jackals: the sort of sound that expands the night and hollows it out. Then nothing. A silence brooding heavily on the world. But I didn’t mind at all. Hanging from its hook the lantern was burning steadily, turned very low. Galant was sleeping. I sat beside him, staring at him in the deep silence, still unable to believe that he was at last with me.

  From the very first day Nooi Cecilia had brought me to the farm I’d noticed him, probably because he mostly kept away from the rest and never forced himself on me. The others, every one of them from old Ontong and Achilles down to the young ones—the bragging Thys and little Rooy who couldn’t even properly make a horn yet—were pestering me day and night; for a while I’d thought it might be useful to make them think I was keeping myself for Abel, knowing no one would dare interfere with his woman. But I could never really come round to accepting him: he was running after women too much, and anyway I didn’t feel like taking a man just yet. Only to one man had I willingly given myself before, and that was Louis who’d worked with me at Oubaas Jan du Plessis’s place: but then he’d been sold, leaving me behind with the child who later died of an inflammation. Pining for Louis had made me thin. And once I’d recovered I made up my mind that no other man would claim me for himself again. Which was why I almost felt relieved when at first Galant kept so much to himself. For I could see it wouldn’t be easy to refuse him. I desired him, there’s no shame in admitting it: but I was scared too, knowing that if ever something were to happen between us it would be like a river coming down and taking us with it, pulling out one’s roots and breaking one’s branches, and throwing one out on some forsaken bank one still dreaded to think about. I fear
ed the possibility of that flood. At the same time I knew, even then, that nothing could keep it from coming down sooner or later. And when Nooi Hester looked at me that afternoon and told me: “Take him. Look after him,” I knew the flood was ready to break. That brought a stillness into me. I still felt scared. But I was willing to give myself up to it. I was not only resigned, but ready. I wanted to have him and submit to him.

  All night long I sat beside him, wiping his face when he perspired; and when he moaned in his sleep I would apply Ma-Rose’s ointment to his wounds, very gently, cautiously, lightly, using only the very tips of my fingers, to soothe him and to cool the fire that burned him. When he shivered from cold fever I covered him with the kaross; and when he grew restless from heat I uncovered him again and sponged his naked body.

  At last the restlessness seemed to leave him and he fell into a deeper and more peaceful sleep. Even then I kept watch beside him, gazing at him in silence, contented and amazed. Everything I’d ever known passed through my mind as I sat, as if it was imperative to sort it all out before I could go any further. The farm where I’d been born, beside the Breede River; and the people I’d known. The day in Worcester when my mother and I had been sold to pay for our master’s debts; and the journey to Buffelsfontein on Baas Jan’s big wagon, across the mountains and into the Bokkeveld. Nooi Cecilia who’d always been kind to me, passing on to me all her old clothes, teaching me to sew and crochet, to cook and to darn; and spending her afternoons reading to me from the Bible until, terrified at the thought of the eternal fire and brimstone of hell and the weeping and gnashing of teeth, I’d consented to be baptized at the very next Nagmaal in Tulbagh. Then came Louis. And soon afterwards the summons from Nooi Cecilia to join her at Houd-den-Bek as she couldn’t see eye to eye with the other servants. Thinking back that night in Galant’s hut everything seemed very far away indeed; as if the only sense in all those separate events had been to prepare me for this night. Round us lay the darkness without end; in the dim light inside we lurked together like children in the womb of a dark mother. And everything was still waiting to be born.