The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘That’s what my uncle said. My job is to collect the new plants. The ones we haven’t heard of yet in Europe.’

  ‘What do you mean, collect?’ Adriaan asked, but before the young doctor could explain, Hendrik shouted, ‘Come on! There’s lots more to take before she sinks.’ And the two young Van Doorns continued with the plunder, but when there was nothing left and the ship started to break apart, Adriaan was drawn back to the scientist, and while the other trekboers helped the shipwrecked passengers build temporary huts to protect themselves till rescue ships arrived, he and Seena stowed the precious books upon their two horses and started walking back to the farm, accompanied by the young Swede.

  I had intended [he wrote in his report published by the London Association] doing my collecting in India, but Providence sent my ship upon the rocks at the southern tip of Africa, where I was rescued by a remarkable couple with whom I spent the four happiest months of my life, living in a wattled hut. The husband, who could not read a word of any language, had made himself a well-trained scientist, while his wife with flaming red hair could do positively anything. She could ride a horse, handle a gun, drink copious quantities of gin, swear like a Norwegian, prune fruit trees, sew, cook, laugh and tell fabulous lies about her father, who, she claimed, had four wives. I remember the morning that I cried in my bad Dutch, ‘God did not intend me to go to India. He brought me here to work with you.’ They opened a new world for me, showing me wonders I had not anticipated. The husband knew every tree, the wife every device required for a good life, and when the four months ended in their hut, I was better prepared to start my collecting than if I had matriculated in a university. To my great joy and profit, this wonderful pair wanted to join me, even though I warned them that I might be gone for seven months. ‘What’s that to us?’ Mevrouw van Doorn asked, and they rode off with me as unconcerned as if headed for a fête champêtre in some French park.

  They traveled farther east than Adriaan had gone on his first exploration, then due north into a type of land which not even he had ever seen. It lay well north of the mountain range and was desert, yet not desert, for whenever rain fell, a multitude of flowers burst across the entire landscape, submerging it in a carpet of such beauty that Dr. Linnart was amazed: ‘I could spend a lifetime here and identify a new flower every day, I do believe.’ When Adriaan inquired further as to why the Swede was collecting so avidly, Linnart spent several nights endeavoring to explain what the expedition signified, and in his report he referred to this experience:

  Van Doorn wishing to know what I was about, I decided to unravel for him the full extent of my interest, holding back nothing. I laid forth Karl von Linné’s organizing principle of genus and species, and within the first hour this natural-born scientist understood what I was saying better than most of my students at the university. He then asked me why Linné bothered with such a system, and I informed him that my uncle intended to catalogue every plant growing in the world, which was why I had come to South Africa, and he asked me, ‘Even these flowers on the veld?’ and I said, ‘Especially these flowers, which we do not see in Europe.’ So with that bare instruction, he proceeded to collect some four hundred flowers, not less, arranging them in grand divisions according to Von Linné’s principles. It was a remarkable feat which few scholars in Europe could have duplicated.

  The caravan consisted of Dr. Linnart, the two Van Doorns, Dikkop in charge of everything, and ten Hottentots paid by the Swede. Two wagons accompanied the expedition, loaded with small wooden boxes into which the specimens collected by Adriaan went. On four separate occasions Linnart said that he could not credit the wealth of flowers on the veld, and each time Adriaan assured him that if he went farther, he would find more.

  But interested as Dr. Linnart was in botany, he was even more captivated by Seena’s remarkable capacity for keeping the camp lively, and he was enchanted one morning when she said briskly, ‘Biltong’s gone. You, Linnart, shoot us an eland.’ So he and Dikkop had gone hunting, and although they failed to get one of the huge antelopes, they did knock down two gemsboks, which they butchered on the spot, bringing back to camp large stores of thinly cut strips of the best lean meat.

  ‘Looks good,’ Seena said approvingly as she tended a pot in whose liquor the meat would be marinated.

  Linnart, hungry to know the procedures of every operation, asked, ‘What’s in the pot?’ and she showed him: ‘A pound of salt. Two ounces of sugar. A heavy pinch of saltpeter. A cup of strong vinegar, a little pepper and those crushed herbs.’

  ‘What herbs?’

  ‘Any I can find,’ she said. And into this cold mixture she dropped the strips of meat, stirring them occasionally so that each would be well penetrated. When she was satisfied that the gemsbok was properly marinated, she directed Linnart to remove the strips, take them to the sunny side of the camp where the wind could strike them, and leave them there to dry.

  When they were hard as rock, with flavor permeating every cell, they were packed in cloth, to be gnawed upon when other food was lacking. ‘The best meal for the veld,’ Linnart exclaimed as he nearly broke his teeth chewing. ‘Better than the pemmican our Reindeer People make. More flavor.’

  The best part of each day came in the late afternoon when Seena and the Hottentots were preparing supper, for then Dr. Linnart sat with Adriaan, discussing Africa and comparing it with other lands he had seen. He liked to take down his atlas and press flat the maps of areas he spoke of, and then little Dikkop would crowd in, look at the incomprehensible pages and nod sagely in agreement with whatever the Swede said. Adriaan, who could not read the words, grasped the geographical forms and he, too, approved.

  ‘Look at this map of Africa,’ Linnart told the men one evening. ‘Your little colony is truncated. It ought to run all the way north to the Zambezi, its natural boundary. And east to the Indian Ocean.’

  ‘Here in the east,’ said Adriaan, tapping the map, ‘are many Xhosa.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Tell him, Dikkop.’ And the Hottentot expressed his apprehension over the large tribes of blacks that Sotopo had described during their meeting in the glade.

  ‘Mmmm!’ Linnart said. ‘If that’s the case, sooner or later …’ And with his forefinger he indicated the blacks moving westward and the trekboers eastward. ‘There’s got to be a clash.’

  ‘I think so too,’ Dikkop said.

  ‘But up here? Toward the Zambezi? Have any of you gone up there?’

  ‘The Compagnie wouldn’t allow us,’ Adriaan said.

  ‘But the Compagnie lets you live where you are, hundreds of miles from the Cape. What stops you from exploring the north?’ When neither of the men responded, he said, ‘Men should always move out till they reach the final barriers. East to the ocean. North to the Zambezi.’

  If he implied that the trekboers were delinquent in comparison with other peoples who had explored other lands, he had some justification, but if he thought that they held back through lack of adventurousness, he was wrong, as he discovered when at the end of seven months they came back south through the mountains, looking for signs of the Van Doorn farm:

  Then I learned what trekboer means, for when we approached the farm where I had spent those four happy months, I saw to my horror that the place had been wiped out. The roof of the hut was flapping in the wind. The kraal was deserted. The gardens had gone to weeds and there was no sign of sheep or cattle or human beings. It was total desolation, and I looked with anguish at the young Van Doorns, trying to anticipate how they would accept this tragedy. They were unconcerned. ‘Father moved, I suppose’ was all my extraordinary guide said, and with no more concern than if the journey involved perhaps a mile, we set off eastward toward a destination we could not guess. At the forty-mile mark I asked, ‘Will they be here?’ and Van Doorn merely shrugged his shoulders, saying, ‘If not here, somewhere else.’ I was especially impressed by the indifference of red-haired Seena. When I asked her one night after an especially difficult d
ay fording rivers, ‘Where do you think they are?’ she spoke like a sailor: ‘Who cares a goddamn? They’ve got to be out here somewhere.’ And at the end of the seventy-fifth mile, by my calculations, we came upon a handsome valley in which the old man had staked out a circular farm comprising, I calculated, not less than six thousand acres of the best. For this he paid only a handful of rix-dollars annually, was not obligated to fence it, and when he judged the pastures to be exhausted, he was free to abandon it and move some seventy miles to some other spot of equal beauty, to treat it as roughly. ‘Tiptoeing through paradise,’ they call it.

  It became a tearful moment when this brilliant young man left the Van Doorn farm and headed toward the Cape with his two wagons filled with specimens. Adriaan and Seena did not cry, of course, for they had known for some time that he must leave them. The tears came from Dr. Linnart, who tried three times to make a flowery farewell speech to the effect that he had lived for nearly a year with nature and with two people who understood it better than he did, but every time he looked at Seena he was so overcome with love and fellowship that tears choked him and he had to start over. It was an expedition, he affirmed, that he would never forget; he ended his comments rather awkwardly: ‘My cousin, who publishes his books under his Latin name, Carolus Linnaeus, would send you a copy of the volume in which this material will appear, except, of course, neither of you can read.’

  Several of his comments regarding his trip to the Cape were widely circulated in Europe and America; after recounting his horrendous experience in crossing the final mountains, when his specimens ran the risk of being lost in a sudden fog, he told of coming to Trianon:

  It was impossible to believe that the same family which occupied the huts in the wilderness also owned this delectable country mansion, laid out as meticulously as any French palace. It boasted four separate gardens, each with its special quality, and a façade which, while not ornate in any way, displayed an elegance that could not be improved upon. These Van Doorns make two kinds of wine, a rich sweet Trianon for sale in Europe, where it is highly regarded, and a pale, very dry white wine of almost no body or fragrance until the last bottle has been drunk. Then it remembers beautifully …

  At last we reached the Cape, which had been described by several Dutchmen as something comparable to Paris or Rome. It was a miserable town of less than three thousand souls, unkempt streets and flat-roofed houses, with some recollection of Amsterdam in the canals that brought water down from mountain streams. The Castle and the Groote Kerk, a fine gabled octagonal building, dominate life here, the former telling the people what their hands must do, the latter instructing their souls.

  The avaricious Compagnie utilizes the Cape not as a serious settlement but as a provisioning station on the way to Java. Compagnie law dominates all: the church, the farmer, the clerk and the future. There are no schools of any distinction, the scholarchs barely able to keep ahead of their students. Yet the Compagnie officials and the few persons of wealth live indulgently, as I witnessed during a splendid dinner at the Castle, where no fewer than thirty-six fine dishes were offered, and even the ladies, who ate separately, partook most liberally of the governor’s largesse.

  My visit to the Cape occurred two years prior to my collecting tour in the English colonies of America. These colonies were launched more or less at the same time as the Dutch venture in Africa, and I was constantly oppressed by comparison of the two. The colonies had scores of printing presses, the most lively newspapers and journals, and books in every town. I was able to consult with scholars at several fine colleges, Harvard, Yale and Pennsylvania among them. But my most doleful concern grew out of my extended meeting with Dr. Franklin in Philadelphia, that self-educated genius. He reminded me precisely of Adriaan van Doorn, for the two had identical casts of mind. But because of the cultural opportunities in the English colonies, Dr. Franklin is acknowledged to be a great scholar, while Van Doorn, who can neither read nor write, is called at home Mal Adriaan, Crazy Adriaan …

  It was my own ignorance that caused a major disappointment. Although I knew some Dutch, I had expected to speak mostly French, because of the large number of immigrants who reached the Cape from that country. I had taken mainly French books with me, but when I tried to use the language, which I speak moderately well, I found no one to talk with. Custom and the stern measures of Compagnie rule have eradicated the language, and throughout the colony no sound of French is heard.

  Adriaan and Seena had four children, who were reared in the same slapdash manner that prevailed at Rooi van Valck’s, and to a degree, at the hartebeest huts of the Van Doorns. They were raised with love and boundless physical affection, much as if they were young puppies, and they showed signs of becoming close copies of their wandering father or their rowdy and profane mother. The first and third had red hair inherited from the Van Valcks; the second and fourth, light blond hair like the Van Doorns; and in 1750 it seemed probable that they would be frontier nomads like their parents, illiterate, contemptuous of Compagnie authority, and delightfully tied to the soil of which they were a part. In a few years strange young men would wander in to court the girls and then start eastward to launch loan-farms of their own, stepping off the six thousand acres to which they felt they would always be entitled. ‘The land out there is limitless,’ the trekboers proclaimed. ‘We can keep moving till we meet the Indian Ocean.’ And if a man kept his farm for about ten years before leapfrogging to virgin soil, the process could continue for another hundred years.

  ‘Of course,’ Adriaan said when such predictions were being made, ‘sooner or later you’re going to run into the Xhosa.’

  ‘The what?’ the newer trekboers would ask.

  ‘The Xhosa.’

  ‘And what in hell are they?’

  ‘The blacks. They’re out there, beyond the big river.’

  But since he was one of the very few who had seen them, and since the farms were prospering in the new lands, the Xhosa barrier was ignored.

  In many ways the Van Doorn farm now resembled that of Rooi van Valck: grandfather, grandmother, Adriaan’s family and his brothers’, the numerous grandchildren, and many servants, and the large herds of cattle. Life was good, and when one of the women cried at midmorning, ‘I want someone to chop this meat,’ any man in hearing distance was eager to help, because this meant that the cooks were going to make bobotie, and there was no dish better than this on the veld.

  Seena, who had often made it for her father, usually took command. In a large, deep-sided clay baking dish she placed the chopped beef and mutton, mixing in curry and onions, all of which she allowed to brown while she pounded a large handful of almonds mixed with additional spices. When all was blended and seemingly done, she whipped a dozen eggs in such milk as was available, and threw this on top, baking the entire for about an hour. While the smell permeated the area, she boiled up some rice and took the lid off her crock of chutney. No matter how big the baking dish, no matter how few the diners, there were never any scraps when Seena made bobotie. ‘All credit to the curry,’ she always said.

  To sit at a table after a hard day’s work and to have a mug of brandy and a huge plateful of bobotie was the kind of treat that kept a farm contented.

  Occasionally Grandfather Hendrik brought out his big Bible, hoping to instruct the children in their alphabet, but they felt that if their parents and their uncles and aunts survived without reading, so could they. But once or twice the youngest boy, Lodevicus, who was now eleven, showed signs that he might be the one who would return to the earlier scholarship of the Van Doorns who had lived in Holland. He would ask his grandfather, ‘How many letters must I learn if I want to read?’ and Hendrik, referring to the Dutch alphabet, would reply, ‘Twenty-two.’ And he would show the boy that each letter had two forms, small and capital, taking unusual care in explaining that in Dutch, unlike other languages, capital IJ was not two letters but one. It was all too confusing for Lodevicus, and soon the boy was out rampaging with the other
s.

  However, old Hendrik noticed that it was this same Lodevicus who was beginning to show impatience whenever Adriaan disappeared on one of his explorations: ‘Why isn’t Father here to help with the work?’ And he became quite agitated if Seena accompanied her husband, as she liked to do: ‘Mother ought to be home, making us bobotie.’ The three other children accepted their father’s strange behavior and showed no concern when he was absent for months at a time. Moreover, they enjoyed it when their parents began to say, ‘People are crowding in. Too many Compagnie rules. That valley where the cattle grazed last year looks better.’ But Lodevicus said, ‘Why can’t we stay in one place? Build us a house of stone?’

  Hendrik and Johanna, always willing to move when they were younger, now sided with their grandson: ‘Lodevicus is right. Let’s build a house of stone.’ And they argued that this piece of land was good for another twenty years, if properly managed. But Adriaan became increasingly restless, and red-headed Seena backed him up: ‘Let’s all get out of here!’ So the wagons were loaded, the huts were abandoned, and with little Dikkop in the lead, everyone moved eastward, but along the way, Hendrik whispered to his grandson, ‘Lodevicus, when you’re older, you must stop wandering and build your house of stone.’

  It was during one such journey that old Hendrik, now sixty-nine, collapsed and died. This was no great tragedy; his years had been full and he had lived them at the heart of a lively family whose future seemed secure. But there was the matter of burial, and this posed a difficult problem, for whereas Hendrik had been a religious man who would have wanted God’s words to be read over his grave, the family no longer contained anyone who could read. Johanna brought out the old Bible and there was serious talk of burying it with the old man who had loved it, but at this moment Lodevicus happened to look away and saw a rider coming down the hills to the west.