by Andre Brink
Kamma was first lodged in a reed hut with the labourers, where the women tended her. No one really expected her to survive. But thanks to the stomach contents of a steenbok and still-warm musk-cat skins, to seven ticks in sheep’s fat, to bitter roots and bulbs, to a pinch of ground rhino horn and the sun-dried eyes of a jacopever bird, the chopped hind leg of a red-winged male grasshopper and three drops of blood from the comb of a black rooster, to a newly born striped fieldmouse swallowed whole, to the urine of rock-rabbits and the uterus of a pregnant porcupine, they saved her life.
As soon as she was back on her feet and more or less in shape she was given work on the farm, herding the sheep. In the beginning she was sent out with Adam’s oldest son, then with the others, but that was asking for trouble; because the brothers all had their father’s disposition, and Kamma was a winsome girl, all the more irresistible to the men for going about as naked as my finger, except for a minuscule apron. In a way she was even more beautiful than before and her habit of singing her songs all day long was enough to turn a man’s head. But all to no avail, as far as the sons were concerned. Not because of anything she did to prevent them: she never acted in a way which could bring her trouble. Every time it was pure coincidence. That, at least, was what it looked like. Until one started adding it all up.
The oldest son was the first to try. Right there in the veld where he was overcome by his desire. But she played the fool with him, luring him this way and that, dancing across the plain, singing all the time, until she reached a large flat-topped anthill where she lay down. There the large black ants known with good reason as ball-biters set to work on him and sent him home hobbling, with legs wide apart; while not a single ant attacked her. The second time, with the same pigheaded man, it was a billygoat that charged him from behind just as he was on his knees, preparing to enter her. He was sent tumbling through the air, landing three yards beyond Kamma, in a porcupine hole where the animal attacked him so viciously that for a month he didn’t know whether he was coming or going. The third time it was a ringneck adder that bit him on the backside just as he was aiming to take the plunge. And that was the end of the poor bastard.
The second brother was given an early warning when soon after the funeral of the first, as he was crouching on his knees in front of the prostrate singing girl, a lammergeyer passing high overhead dropped a tortoise on his head. The second time, barely a month later, a rabid meerkat sank its teeth into the youngsters member at the crucial moment and refused to let go. With the meerkat still dangling in front of him, and followed by the girl who was singing a song she’d made up the previous day about a man and a meerkat, he stumbled home. Three days later, by way of precaution, a new grave was dug in the backyard, but in the nick of time he was saved by a concoction Kamma had brewed. The youngster never went out with the sheep again, and just as well.
The third brother was still quite young and less impetuous than the others, but the girl’s songs drove him mad with lust. A long white thorn lodged inexplicably in his left testicle soon put an end to that.
The fourth – but by this time the picture should be clear. Henceforth Kamma herded the sheep on her own. But for someone like her, who loved to have an audience for the stories she sang, it wasn’t much of a life. And tending a flock of sheep hardly presented a challenge. So she soon took to leaving the sheep to the care of her mahems and a couple of secretary birds that sometimes came to keep her company, or to a lynx she had befriended. Once she invited a leopard, but that didn’t work out all that well and it earned her a thrashing when she came home missing three of her flock. Adam Oosthuizen had a hard hand with the sjambok he’d made himself, so he bragged, from the penis of a buffalo. After that, to save her skin, she changed the sheep into stones when she felt like wandering about on her own.
There wasn’t an animal or a bird on those plains she did not speak to. In her stories she could mimic the songs of birds so perfectly that one couldn’t tell the difference: the cry of a kiewiet or a kelkiewyn, the calls of finches and starlings and bokmakieries, the shrieks of hawks or mountain eagles, the twitterings of guinea-fowl or partridges, the maniacal laughter of the katlagter. She could spend whole days amusing herself in this way, and large swarms of birds would turn and tumble in the sky about her. But she spoke to the animals too and engaged in endless conversation with jackals and meerkats and lynxes and wild cats. She certainly had a way with languages; and in the end it was her downfall.
13
AFTER SOME TIME – a month or months, or years, what’s the difference? – Adam Oosthuizen had her brought back to the farmyard, and into his home. That must have been his design all along. Because somewhere in his thick Cro-Magnon skull the memory of a distant night of fireflies and stars had lodged; he was to remember it to the day of his death, and maybe afterwards as well.
Many times Adam went out to the veld to spy on her from a distance, her long-legged gait, the enticing rhythm of the small apron that danced at the meeting of her thighs, everything that tends to catch a man’s eye and mind. She must have been aware of his presence, but she never betrayed that knowledge by any sign; and he was hesitant to go closer, no doubt expecting her to dart off to the horizon like a duiker the moment she saw him coming. So he waited for her, until at last he felt she was tame enought to be brought inside to the hearth of the house that had begun as a wretched little one-room shack of wattle and daub, gradually expanding in all directions like a sociable weaver’s nest to accommodate the increasing number of offspring. Once inside, Kamma had to exchange her skin apron for a dress. This took a considerable amount of coaxing and several thrashings, but gradually she not only became used to it but learned to wear it with a certain grace. But no fire or brimstone could persuade her to wear shoes.
Whether Adam’s wife Johanna had become too worn out to object, or whether she really had no inkling, is impossible to tell; but not only did she accept Kamma’s presence, she actually became fond of the girl; and between her and her daughters they began to teach her the skills a young woman ought to know. Sewing and darning, making moleskin clothes, rudimentary cooking. Even a smattering of reading from the State Bible. Adam and his sons didn’t care about learning; on the rare occasions when they had to sign a document at the Cape to confirm a birth or death, a spidery cross sufficed. But the daughters were expected to read; and sometimes of an evening they would sing a hymn, so they enjoyed drawing Kamma into that. (Her own click songs were much too intricate for them.) In due course she became so fluent that on one of the family’s annual trips to Cape Town she was taken along and baptised in the church. From then on she was Maria, no longer Kamma.
It was a whole new way of life she had to adapt to. Even the food was different: instead of the veld food she’d grown up with – tsamma melons and kambro roots, flying ants and partridge or ostrich eggs, locusts, sour milk, honey, things like that – she now shared the Oosthuizens’ meals of sour bread baked in an anthill and soaked in milk, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, crushed wheat. The only item that appeared on both menus, only much more copiously on that of the Oosthuizens, was meat, whether of goat or sheep or cattle, or venison, guinea-fowl, pheasant, partridge. Most difficult of all to get used to was the routine of regular meals, morning, noon and night. But Maria proved to be an astute learner, and within a few months one would have thought that she’d grown up in a house.
Only one object in the house never ceased to mystify her, and that was the single mirror in the voorhuis. Johanna had inherited it from her mother, who’d brought it from Holland; and she’d refused to part with it, even on the interminable honeymoon voyage from Cape Town all the way up the West coast. Now it was hanging on the crudely whitewashed wall, the only ornamental object in the house. The first time Maria walked past it she stopped in her tracks, cautiously retraced her steps, and took another look; she turned her head sideways and saw the person on the wall imitate her; then put out her tongue, to find that gesture, too, repeated; she called upon the great hunter-god Heitsi-Eibib and ran f
or her life. It was dark when they finally brought her back from the veld, and then she refused to cross the threshold into the house.
It was days before she could be coaxed inside again. This time she crept up to the mirror very cautiously, sidling along the wall with her back pressed against it; standing next to it she took the precaution of first pulling the heavy mirror a few inches away from the wall to peep behind it. But there was nothing, only the roughcast whitewashed mud surface. That reassured her. Her body still pressed against the wall for security, she slowly moved her head to the edge of the frame and then very quickly peered round it. And once again called on Heitsi-Eibib as she took to her heels. At the front door she collided heavily with Adam Oosthuizen who just happened to be on his way inside.
He gave her a backhanded cuff that sent her sprawling against the opposite wall. For several minutes Maria remained there, huddled in a small bundle, clutching her knees and uttering small whimpering sounds which brought back tempestuous memories to Adam’s mind.
‘What the hell is up with you?’ he asked, not too angrily.
She buried her head more deeply in her arms.
‘Maria, I’m talking to you!’
This time she made a half-hearted gesture with one hand, still without daring to look up.
It took Adam Oosthuizen a while to catch on. Then, guffawing from his guts, he picked her up in one hand and carried her across the dung floor to the mirror, forcing her forehead against its cool smooth surface. With an anguished cry she tried to disengage herself, but she was helpless in Adam’s mighty grip. She opened her eyes, and stared in disbelief.
‘Ammase!’ she gasped. Which, translated, was a crude variant of ‘Good heavens!’
What she saw in front of her was not only the strange young ghost-woman she’d seen before, but also Adam Oosthuizen’s familiar broad face framed in blond hair and red beard. You must remember that she’d never seen herself before; but she was quick-witted enough to grasp that the face beside Adam Oosthuizen’s heathen head could only be hers. Still disembodied, only head and shoulders; but during the next few days she discovered that the rest could be discerned as well, provided one came close enough and then looked down. From time to time she still checked behind it, just to make sure; and she never disgraced herself again in front of others. But she never became entirely at ease with the mirror.
At the same time she was too fascinated to stay away. She could be so absorbed in the mirror that she’d forget all about her duties, which would inevitably result in punishment. She also brought her birds into the house to show them the miracle – at first it was only the mahems, but soon all the others came too, which necessitated quite drastic cleaning up afterwards.
One day the mirror disappeared. Johanna was frantic; and there was only one suspect. It took another flogging, poor thing, before Maria took them to where she’d hidden it in a hollow anthill. Yet that very night, after the punishment, the mirror went missing again. This time it was found in one of the many added rooms – the one Adam Oosthuizen had set aside for his own use to fulfil his patriarchal obligations towards wife and daughters. Curled up in front of the mirror, her body still racked by sobs from time to time, was Maria; and this time Adam let her be and instructed the rest of the family to keep away too. Later that night he went to the room to comfort Maria in his own manner. It was the first time since Maria had been brought into the house that he’d done it openly. Soon it became a habit. And the family dutifully acquiesced in the inevitable. For some of the daughters, of whom five happened to be pregnant at the same time, it might even have come as a relief.
14
ONE DAY A large group of farmers from the Stellenbosch region visited the farm with their fleet of wagons on a bartering trip inland. They knew that Adam had travelled that way before and invited him to accompany them as their guide. Annoyed by a houseful of babies and with ants in his arse from having been confined in one place for too long, Adam was more than willing. And with shrewd foresight he took Maria along too. She, in turn, refused to budge without her mirror. This sent poor Johanna into such a rage that she had a stroke which paralysed one side of her body. She could never close her left eye again. In an unsettling stare it remained open night and day, missing nothing. During the day it was blood-red, and at night, people said, it glowed in the dark as if it was lit up from inside. No wonder that Adam Oosthuizen was relieved to leave his wife to the care of his many daughters while he took his sons along with him.
Hunting and bartering as they went, the group of trekkers moved ever deeper inland. Maria behaved herself very well. But once they’d crossed the Gariep, she unceremoniously stripped off her demure dress and reverted to wearing only the minuscule apron of long ago. Adam remonstrated with her, not because it displeased him, but because of the way the other men looked at her. However, no one ever dared to go beyond looking, they were all too scared of the giant.
In due course they reached frontline settlements of the Khoikhoi. Strange, distant tribes who had never encountered whites before and spoke no comprehensible tongue. That was where Adam’s design in bringing the young woman along became clear. Even the boers who had resented her presence (for whatever obscure and troubling reasons) discovered that she was worth more than coral or rubies or whatever it was the wise Solomon had once spoken about. Khoikhoi who at first sight appeared sullen or suspicious changed their manner the moment Kamma – who had shed her white name together with her European dress – addressed them in their own tongue. Whether they all spoke the language with which she’d been brought up no one could tell; but she seemed at ease with any sound a tongue could produce. And it turned into the most lucrative bartering trip ever.
Kamma even went further than was strictly expected of her. If they reached a settlement where the cattle looked scrawny and not worth a second look, she would surreptitiously warn Adam, ‘These sickly oxen and sheep were brought here to deceive you. The good cattle are all kept behind those hills until you’re out of the way.’
Then Adam would send his men round the hills to drive out the good cattle. There were times when the discovery of their ruse so angered the Khoikhoi that they threatened to make war, only to be shot to pieces with the boers’ guns. This ability to kill from a distance was enough to persuade the Khoikhoi that they were dealing with sorcerers; and in this way the boers got away with murder.
‘How come you don’t mind betraying your own people?’ Adam once confronted Kamma.
‘These are not my people.’
‘They may not be your tribe, but they’re Khoikhoi.’
She only shrugged. But when Adam persisted she explained, ‘My people disowned me. After I’d kwêkwa’d with you they didn’t want me back.’ One would never have expected such a meagre body to harbour so great a grudge.
Adam never pressed her for more.
15
UPON THEIR RETURN there was a new grave behind the farmhouse. Johanna had passed away. At night the red eye still smouldered on the pillow of the bed she’d slept on; the rest of her was underground. Adam solved the problem by avoiding the room and moving in permanently with Maria. If his conscience felt uneasy it was amply outweighed by his elation at discovering that Maria was pregnant. The baby was due in midwinter, the seventh winter of her stay on the farm.
But in the late autumn, about two months before the baby was due, Maria disappeared. When they woke up one morning her chintz dress lay neatly folded in the kist in the voorhuis; and the mirror was missing from its peg.
Adam called up his host of sons and set out on horseback in search of her, each galloping off in a different direction. They searched all day, to the horizon and beyond, but there was no sign at all of her. She might just as well have changed into an anthill or a rock or a tree or a bird; and perhaps she had. Adam Oosthuizen was convinced that he’d lost her for good, and his mourning was fearsome to behold.
Yet six months later she was back, blithely wearing the small apron and carrying the mirror in her arm
s. Without saying a word to anyone she came past them all, went into the house, took her dress from the kist and put it on. The mirror was hung in its old place. Then, as if nothing had happened, she asked whether anybody wanted coffee.
Even Adam was so overwhelmed that it took days before he ventured to enquire about the child. Maria shrugged. And that was the only reply she ever gave.
From then on she made a habit of going away towards the end of every summer, sometimes pregnant, sometimes not; returning six months later all alone and as bare as my finger. Then she’d put on the dress that had been stowed in the kist, and resume her life among the Oosthuizens as if there had been no interruption at all.
And the mirror? As far as Adam could make out, after many interrogations, she’d taken it with her so that the Khoikhoi she encountered could be shown in it the reflection of the Oosthuizens who had adopted her. But whether it really worked that way remained a mystery. Certainly, when she tried to show Adam the reflections she’d brought back from the people she had been visiting there was nothing but his own face in the mirror.
The third or fourth time she returned – by then Adam Oosthuizen and his brood knew better than to ask any questions about her whereabouts – she brought a small band of Khoikhoi with her, loaded with elephant tusks, ostrich feathers, gazelle skins, tortoise shells and other wares. What was the meaning of this, asked Adam. This was a different tribe from any of those the boers had had dealings with before, Kamma explained. They had come for help. There had been war in the interior and all the tribe’s cattle had been driven away by other people from far away. They wanted Adam to reclaim their property.
Adam Oosthuizen felt no inclination to get drawn into other people’s quarrels. But Maria, still pale with the dust of her long walk, took him aside for a long and serious discussion. These were important people, she explained. If he could win them over to his side the whole interior would open up to him. He and his sons could accompany the tribe on a campaign against the malefactors, and this would make him the most important cattle farmer of the hinterland.