by Andre Brink
“Pa won’t like it.”
“Pa’s lying there like a corpse. What does he know about what’s going on?”
“He’ll know.”
To avoid trouble I changed the subject. “What does the world look like the way you came?”
“Some farmers are still threshing, but most have finished.”
“You satisfied with your harvest?”
“Yes indeed. It’s been such a dry year but the harvest was one of the best ever.”
“Did you by any chance come across someone looking for a stray mare?”
“What stray mare?”
I explained.
“No,” said Nicolaas. “But you can leave her here if you want to. Sooner or later someone’ll come to claim her. As it happens I have an empty stable, and if she’s as fiery as you say she is I’m sure Galant will enjoy looking after her. If no one comes for her I’ll just keep her. Then I needn’t go to Tulbagh to buy another.”
“Yes, it’s much better to stay out of the towns,” I approved. “Those English are just a pain in the ass.”
“I don’t think they’ll be giving us much more trouble,” he said. “I looked in at Frans du Toit’s place on the way and he told me there’s been no sign of commissioners or messengers yet, and it’s almost the end of January. It can only mean that they’ve given up the idea of liberating the slaves.”
“I suppose he had a lot to say, as usual?”
“Yes, he held forth on things like justice and order again.”
I laughed. “A lot of hot air.” I said. “It’s because of that face of his. It’s always easier for a man with some blemish to feel holy. Only thing he’s good for is big words.”
The young blonde girl came in to call Verlee—something about the baby—and he left with her.
“I really don’t see the need for messing about with schoolmasters,” I told Nicolaas. “He’ll just stuff your children’s heads full of nonsense.”
“Now don’t start on that again.” He got up. “Come and show me the mare.”
Abel was waiting at the back door.
“You want the cart, Baas?”
“Aren’t you staying over?” said Nicolaas.
“Thank you, I’d like to.” I turned to Abel. “Find yourself a place to sleep with Galant or someone. We won’t be going home till tomorrow.” It would make Hester properly worried, I thought, if the boys and I stayed away for the night: just the medicine she needed.
From the stable we took a walk through the orchards and the beanfields down to the worn-out threshing-floor.
“Why’s it still looking like this?” I asked, annoyed by his negligence.
“I haven’t had time to have a new floor laid since the threshing.” Nicolaas said apologetically. “But I already told Galant to make sure it’s repaired and smeared again tomorrow.”
We took a detour past the kraals and the vlei on our way home. Dusk was deepening. A new sense of peace had invaded the place, filling the valley like cool clear water. From the vlei we looked towards the farmyard with its solid homestead and its outbuildings, the schoolhouse and stables and sheds; the kraals and huts; and, to one side, the small square of the walled graveyard, empty but for the single grave of Hester’s father.
I remembered the restlessness I’d felt all afternoon. I’d been wrong, I thought now. All hadn’t just been whirlwind and vanity. Look at the peaceful solidity of the place. Like my own. In Pa’s youth, and in the time of our great-grandfather, all of this had been wild and untamed. But fighting against savages and wild beasts our race had conquered it, and now it was ours, forever. We’d known danger and disorder too: all the annoyance caused by the slaves in recent years. But at last it was over. With strong action to show them who was in command, we’d kept the whip in hand, and now everything was under control. As far as the eye could see the land was ours. Looking out across it I could understand the profound satisfaction with which at the end of the week of creation God had surveyed everything He had made, and had seen that it was very good.
I even felt a brief tinge of longing as I thought of Hester. After all, we’d been created man and wife.
Campher
I never thought it would get beyond the stage of talking. How often in my life hadn’t I witnessed something similar?—a wind rising, then wavering and dying down again. Even the day on the threshing-floor I still thought Galant was only showing off to hide his chagrin when his master refused to rise to his baiting. (While surely anyone should have known in advance how the man would react.) The first indication I had that their threats might in fact be translated into action was on the Sunday night just after Galant and Nicolaas van der Merwe had come home with the schoolmaster. I’d gone over to the huts as usual for an evening sopie with the slaves. Dollie wasn’t there—thank God, I thought afterwards, otherwise everything might have gone awry—as he and old Plaatjie Pas had to repair a sty where the pigs had broken out in old D’Alree’s absence.
I was shocked to discover how far Galant’s plans had progressed. On the journey he’d actually begun to prepare the slaves on the neighboring farms for rebellion; the air was thick with it.
“Are you quite sure it will work out?” I asked him, very cautiously so as not to arouse any suspicion.
“Of course,” Galant said quickly. “Isn’t that exactly what you said? You been with us right from the beginning.”
“Indeed. I just wanted to make quite sure that you’re serious.”
“You think I’m joking?”
“No, no. You can depend on me, Galant.”
He stared at me very intensely, trying it seemed to see what was hidden inside me; at last he said: “All right then. We agreed on Tuesday night. It gives us two days. You better tell Dollie too. We need every man.”
Back in my hut that night I couldn’t close an eye. In the end I went outside, leaning back against the doorpost, staring up at the stars. Light, almost transparent clouds swept through the sky in a high wind. The moon was up. The motion of the clouds made it seem as if it were the moon and stars passing so swiftly and soundlessly overhead. More than that: as if the earth itself, the farm, the yard, the hut, I, were sailing through the void. I had to steady myself with my hands pressed to the ground in order not to fall, feeling quite dizzy.
I shut my eyes. And in my imagination I saw the rebellion succeed: I saw us rising here at Houd-den-Bek and claiming Nicolaas’s guns and taking over. I saw us setting out, trekking from one place to the other, to ever more distant places across plains and mountain ranges, adding to our ranks as we went, until a vast army was following us, an army greater even than Napoleon’s, changing into a hurricane that swept everything out of its way. I saw us marching through the streets of Cape Town, cheered by the multitudes, and sweeping up the side of the Mountain like an enormous wave that nothing could stop any more, until we reached the top, where we shouted those glorious words for the whole world to hear: Liberté—egalité—fratemité! In my dream I saw my mother joining me, suddenly young again, her hair blonde and a smile on her face; and I took her to a new place of our own where we might live with my father and all my dead brothers and sisters, including Elsje, restored to normality. I could hear her say: “Joseph, my son, I’m proud of you. I always knew you had it in you.”
But then I called up another vision—the image of a failed rebellion. I saw a small bunch of men caught unawares and overwhelmed and dispersed; I saw corpses littering the earth, and maimed men crawling like spiders with broken legs, like the hundreds I’d seen on the battlefields of Europe. I saw conquerors riding over us on horseback, threshing us under their terrible hooves; and I saw a handful of survivors rounded up, wretched and tattered, and in their eyes the hopeless hungry stare of defeat; I saw us stumbling along in a long row, hands tied behind our backs, one chained to the other, and guards on horseback driving us on with their whips; I saw us ha
nging from the crossbeams of a row of gallows, swinging in the wind, eyes staring and black tongues protruding from our mouths; and birds coming down from the sky to consume the bodies until only the white skeletons remained; and I heard the wind making a sound of desolation through the empty eye-sockets and the ribs. I saw my mother buried old and worn to the bone, without even a coffin to receive her, and her gnarled hands folded on her chest, her eyes staring upward in one final reproach for all I’d promised and never done.
It was a balmy night; but I began to shiver as I sat there. Never in my life had I been quite so scared and hopeless. My teeth were chattering. And overhead the thin clouds still drifted past, as if the world itself were falling, an endless unstoppable fall.
All the wonderful slogans of my youth resounded in my ears again. But I could see nothing but the failure and defeat and misery resulting from those ideals: a world covered in battlefields and armies, rags, maimed people, corpses and skeletons, famine, crying children, hate, violence, terror, fear.
Was it really inevitable then for all dreams to be no more than illusion? And did I have any right—in the tenuous hope that it would prove more than illusion—to join Galant and the others in this desperate adventure? Or would that be the surest way of finally forfeiting everything, even hope?
But it was too late now for any attempt to stop it. They’d already committed themselves, and I was involved in it: they were looking up to me as one of the instigators. If I were to go to them now and say: “Look, it’s madness, I’m pulling out,” they would tread right over me and turn me into the victim of something I myself had set into motion. But what could I do then? Was there really no other way?
I was scared. God alone knows how scared I was.
But it was too late even for fear.
What, moments before, had been only a vision, a nightmare from which it was still possible to wake up, had now assumed absolute certainty: nothing but failure and defeat could come from it.
Two sorts of people I’d known in my life: those born to oppress, and those born to be slaves: and each was the condition for the other’s existence. In their midst, from time to time, there were those individuals, like me, who were dissatisfied, proclaiming other possibilities—but we were the exceptions (the way one sometimes found a child with a club foot or a calf with six legs) who only succeeded in causing a measure of discomfort to the others. Our only possible victory lay in defeat. And that turned us into an abomination. It had taken me a long time to reach this clarity—and God knows, a dream is not relinquished easily—but at last I’d learned my lesson; and that night, on an earth falling like a shooting star, there was no doubt at all in my mind.
There was no hope of preventing it: at least not through direct intervention. But something was still possible. Call me cowardly; call me anything. I feel no shame to admit I was afraid. But even if I could save no more than myself it would already be something. For my mother’s sake, perhaps: I couldn’t inflict on her the blow of yet another failure and another dead son.
Very early the next morning, while old D’Alree was still fast asleep, I called Dollie and told him Galant had arranged with us to wait in the mountains where they would join us for the big day. To make it sound more plausible I suggested we take one of D’Alree’s two guns with us.
It was like inviting the man to a feast. He pulled back the great shoulders that had begun to droop of late; and his eyes were aflame. It took all my powers of persuasion to keep him from going on the rampage there and then and destroy everything on the farm. Old Plaatjie shouldn’t get wind of anything, I warned him: he was too untrustworthy and could tell on us.
“So why don’t we just cut his throat straight away?” asked Dollie.
“Then the farmers will immediately know we’re on to something. It must be kept secret.”
“But won’t they guess something if they see the two of us are gone?”
“Galant will explain to them,” I said. “We discussed it all last night.”
“I should have been there.”
“Don’t worry, Dollie. You’re here now.”
We waited until Plaatjie had taken the sheep out to the veld and D’Alree had begun to potter around in the yard before Dollie slipped into the house to steal a gun and some food. We fled into the mountains where we hid until nightfall. “Wait here,” I said to Dollie. “I’m going to fetch the others now.” May God forgive me: I didn’t mean to do Dollie any harm; but someone had to be sacrificed in the process, and in any case it shouldn’t be for long. Waiting outside in the yard until old D’Alree’s light went out, I crept to the house and hammered on the door; and when he opened, scared and flustered, I told him that Dollie had absconded with a gun and that I’d been following in pursuit all day. Now I’d finally tracked him down, and I needed the other gun to overpower him before he became a menace to the neighborhood.
D’Alree suggested that we call in the Van der Merwes to help us, but I persuaded him that too many pursuers might spoil the hunt; and with the gun, a length of chain, and old Plaatjie Pas ostensibly to give me a hand, I returned into the mountain. In a safe spot I told the old man to wait, while I went on alone.
Dollie was pleased to see me again.
“Where’s the others?” he asked.
“They’re on their way.” Then I brought the butt of my gun down on his head as hard as I could, and tied him up with the chain. The gun he’d brought with him I hid among the rocks before I called old Plaatjie to show him that I’d apprehended the deserter. “Now go home and tell the Baas not to worry any more. I caught the man and he’s dangerous; so I’m taking him to the Landdrost right now.”
I wasn’t running away. In that terrifying night I’d thought it all out very lucidly. I knew that Galant and the others were all looking up to me as a leader; and they needed Dollie’s great strength. With the two of us out of the way, I hoped, they would reconsider in time and abandon the whole insane idea.
Let them blame me if they must, I thought. I’d been blamed for many things in my life. But I’d always acted with the best intentions. I’d always believed implicitly in the enchanting slogans. But now I’d finally seen what resulted from them and I owed it to myself as well as to them not to soil my hands with such a venture.
If the others really were reckless enough, after my clear warning, to proceed—then it was their own responsibility.
Mine lay with my life, and my aged mother.
Abel
At last I was going to get my fiddle back. That was what I told them on the Sunday night when we were all sitting in front of the huts making the final arrangements, after Galant had come back from the farms. All I needed was a good gun to shoot my way open to the Cape; there I’d go straight to the betting place and put my gun on the cocks and win back my fiddle. “The rest of you can do what you want,” I said. “But I’ll lead the way up the Mountain with my fiddle and make your feet itch so much that the whole world will start dancing.”
“We talking about serious things,” Galant said. “This is no time for joking.”
“You think I’m not serious?” I laughed. “You all talking about freedom. Right. So let me ask you: just what’s this thing you call freedom? It means eating when you hungry and drinking when you thirsty and riding a woman when you got the feeling; and it means taking up the music when you happy or sad, with no one around to make you shut up or move away. As for the rest, I shit on it.”
Right after dark, as soon as the white people had withdrawn into the house, we gathered round the cooking fire: everybody from Houd-den-Bek; and Campher from old D’Alree’s place—Dollie and old Plaatjie, he said, were held up by work, but he promised to take them our message—and I. Even Ma-Rose was there, shrivelled up like an old quince. Everybody that mattered was there that night.
In the beginning all seemed to be holding back, each waiting for someone else to say the first word, because i
t was such a big thing; and when you suddenly know it’s right there and there’s no way of stepping past it any more, it makes you slightly short of breath. Ma-Rose had brought an apron full of late sweet peaches from the orchard; and for a long time we just sat munching them as if we had no hurry in the world. Achilles was nibbling the softest ones with his toothless gums, chewing like an old tortoise, the sweet juice running down his chin, which made us all laugh.
“You look like a man who hasn’t got a care in the world,” I told him.
He looked up, the firelight gleaming on his wet face, his tongue still licking the last drops of sweetness from the corners of his mouth. “And why not?” he said. “There’s nothing better than a peach.”
“Maybe,” I joked. “But I still think the best kind of peach in the world is a fig.”
Our talk annoyed Galant. “We got more to discuss than just figs and peaches,” he scolded us.
“Fig is king,” I said. “But you’re right. Now’s the time to talk, for there’s a big thing coming.” I couldn’t help laughing from pure joy. “Just another day or two, then we’ll be running free through the world, and take whatever we want. I can already see myself—another laugh broke from my stomach—“I can see myself sitting on the stoop at Elandsfontein, sopie in one hand, pipe in my mouth; and taking out the pipe to shout: ‘Hey, Barend! Move your ass, man. Bring on that wagon, I’m going on a trip.’”
The eyes of the young ones were beginning to twinkle; they were tittering. It was like taking out my fiddle and tuning it for the dance.
“Otherwise I’ll be calling Barend to tell him: ‘Hey, Barend, I want you to ride over to Houd-den-Bek and tell Baas Galant it’s time he gave that useless Nicolaas a proper flogging again.’”
The others were beginning to join in the fun; I was really getting into my stride now.
“And if I get the feeling,” I said, “I’ll just walk over to the huts and say: ‘Open up, Hester, your Baas wants to come in.’”