Imaginings of Sand

by Andre Brink

  The next morning the Oosthuizen men set out with the Khoikhoi, accompanied by Kamma – since without her it would be impossible to make themselves understood to each other. Many evenings she spent with the Khoikhoi at their camp fire, and from a distance the Oosthuizens would watch and listen to her talking and revelling with them till the small hours. It killed Adam. He could swear she was colluding with the strangers. But whenever he tried to confront her, she would avoid the direct questions and assure him that the men were strangers to her too. Adam should stay out of it, she warned him, because it was important to retain the goodwill of the tribe.

  Here one can turn a long trek into a short story. The journey ended in a battle in the land of the enemy Khoikhoi who naturally proved helpless against the gunpowder and bullets of their attackers. Two of the Oosthuizens were killed and a couple more wounded; but among the Khoikhoi few escaped unscathed. With a vast herd of captured cattle the victors returned to their own settlement, seven days from there, in a narrow kloof between tall outcrops of rock. There they rested for several days. The honey-beer flowed like water; below the moon at night there were celebrations that lasted until daybreak; everything was covered in dust.

  After prolonged discussion the cattle were divided into two herds, one for the Khoikhoi, the other for the boers. The negotiations took a whole day; at sunset everybody was satisfied, and the Oosthuizens announced that they would be leaving at first light the following morning.

  That night Kamma once again spent in celebration with her people – inasmuch as they were her people; but blood is thicker than water – while the Oosthuizens retired to have a good rest before their long journey. They awoke at daybreak from the unnatural silence surrounding them.

  Can you believe it? There was no sign of the settlement in the kloof. Men, women, children, all gone. Not a hair or a turd left of cattle and sheep. Worst of all, as far as Adam Oosthuizen was concerned, was that most of the cattle allotted to his family – including by far the best animals – had disappeared as well.

  He was all set to go in pursuit and reclaim what was his. After all the trouble, after months of trekking, of war, after losing two of his sons! But there were no tracks they could follow. He swore that Kamma was to blame; he was ready to murder her. Lodged in the recesses of his mind a dark suspicion had taken root that she was not to be trusted, that all that talk about having been rejected by her people had simply been part of an elaborate ruse to avenge herself on him for that unforgettable and terrible night of years ago. At the same time he was besotted with the woman. Certainly, for the time being, there was nothing he could do. He had the unnerving hunch that raising a finger against her would mean that he and his sons would never reach home again.

  16

  BARELY A MONTH later the farm was attacked, out of the blue, by what must have been a whole locust swarm of Khoikhoi, arriving on a moonlit night without making a sound, and disappearing again with every hoof of cattle the Oosthuizens possessed. No doubt about the identity of the raiders: they could only have been the recent enemy, probably in league with a host of other tribes, bent on avenging their defeat in the deep interior. This was exactly what Adam Oosthuizen had feared, and the reason why he hadn’t wanted to get involved in the first place. Now he was as poor as Job, without a cob to scratch his arse. But he had no choice: it was clearly the will of God that he should go back into the land to avenge his male honour. And Kamma had to go with them as guide and interpreter, knowing the country as she did like the pale palm of her narrow brown hand.

  Initially she was reluctant, but Adam had his ways of persuading the obstreperous. He and his sons rode down the coast, at least as far as Saldanha, rounding up all the boers they could find – most of them required little persuasion – and soon the awe-inspiring commando rode off to the north-west across the uninscribed plains.

  Three more of Adam Oosthuizen’s sons were buried in the hard land on that journey, as well as ten or twelve of the other farmers. This was no ordinary war, man to man, the Khoikhoi were much too sly for that. A sudden attack, an ambush, a nocturnal raid, luring them deeper and deeper into the wasteland. Worst of all was a skirmish one rainy day among bare mountains: Kamma had been sent out the previous day, as usual, to reconnoitre; and she’d come back with a bedraggled collection of Khoikhoi eager to make peace. The discussions were protracted for hours. Then the rain came down. And without warning the delegation grabbed their bows and arrows and kieries and attacked the unsuspecting commando. The boers instinctively reached for their guns, but these were useless in the rain, as if the Khoikhoi had known it in advance.

  A bitter campaign followed, that lasted many months and wore out the men. But in the end law and order triumphed, when God is with you no one can withstand you; and at last the commando turned back, encumbered with enough cattle and sheep and ivory and feathers and hides to ensure a lifetime of prosperity.

  Except that, less than a year later, while Maria was gone on one of her solitary wanderings, everything was taken once again.

  This time, when Adam Oosthuizen saw her approaching from afar, he went out to meet her at the farmyard gate. Delighted as he was to see that reed-like figure with the dancing apron, with a shadow of finches overhead, there was a heaviness in his heart as well. He’d had time enough to think, something which in the best of circumstances did not come easily to him. But slowly, trickling through the dull grey folds of his brain, a lump of thought had coagulated: why had the raid happened while she’d been away? why was she the one who’d brought the first group of clients to the farm? how had the Khoikhoi known so accurately that the boers’ ammunition would be useless in damp weather? why this? why that?

  He didn’t beat her. He merely blocked her way with his massive body and told her to go; for good. He couldn’t trust her any more. He never wanted to see her again.

  She was crying when she left.

  She didn’t speak a word. She couldn’t. Her tongue had been cut out.

  17

  NO ONE WILL ever know for sure. Was it Adam who’d done it, to punish her for her betrayal and ensure that she would never carry gossip to the Khoikhoi again? Or was she already tongueless by the time she arrived at the gate – in which case the Khoikhoi would have been the perpetrators, to prevent her telling the whites their secrets and the location of their herds and watering places?

  She herself couldn’t tell. So we shall never have an answer: had she devoted her whole life to avenging herself on the Khoikhoi for rejecting her? Or on the boers for what Adam Oosthuizen had done to her?

  Not that this was the end of the story yet.

  Adam Oosthuizen stood looking after her until she’d disappeared in the distance; then, with hanging shoulders and heavy tread he went back home. As he came past the mirror in the voorhuis he stopped. What he saw there was, surely, impossible. Yet there it was: Maria’s face. Kamma’s. Not clear and sharp like his own, but a vague smudge, as if she was looking at him from very far away, like a face seen under water, but unmistakably hers.

  With a groan he took the mirror from the wall and carried it to the outer room where he’d used to lie with her. More and more, as the months dragged by, he withdrew into that small room. Surly and glowering, Adam Oosthuizen isolated himself from his brood, dangerous as a lone elephant bull. He refused to speak to anyone.

  At last loneliness got the better of him. He brought out the strongest ox from his kraal – by that time his sons had acquired a small new herd – and rode off into the wide land. In a large knapsack he’d made himself from well-cured wildebeest hide he carried the mirror. As time went by the image began to fade, but it was still visible. And when he stopped at night to rest, he’d take it out to stare at her face. He held long conversations with her. But of course she never spoke back.

  Whenever he reached a Khoikhoi settlement he enquired about her, the thin young woman who moved like a shadow across the veld. And when the people couldn’t understand he took the mirror from his knapsack to show the
m her image. Invariably it caused pandemonium. But curiosity tended to get the upper hand as the frightened people thronged for a closer look. In the end, however, they all shook their heads and indicated that they knew nothing about her at all.

  He must have searched for years. Gradually he turned grey, but that might have been from suffering; and his body, once as proud and tall as a tree, became gnarled and shrunken like driftwood. On and on he travelled on the back of his ox, knapsack on his shoulder, enquiring as he went. But no one would help him.

  Except, one day, a honey-bird. Exhausted with hunger, he’d been following the little creature for a day. It had come upon him when he’d been sitting in a spot of shade staring at the remains of that faded image in his mirror; he’d heard the excited twittering, looked up, saw the bird, then started following it. What he hadn’t realised, of course, was that the bird had recognised the image. And so the journey brought Adam, not to a hoard of honey, but to a straggling group of Khoikhoi huts.

  From a distance he recognised her. And when he saw the children with her – a motley group they were, but the oldest girl, who must have been thirteen or fourteen years old, was startlingly fair – he immediately realised that they were hers: the children of which she’d deprived him year after year.

  According to the story he started crying into his unkempt beard; but all he could do to express his feelings was to raise high above his head his sjambok, that vicious buffalo penis with which he’d ruled his world, as he uttered a bellow like the sound of a wounded bull. How could anyone tell if it was an expression of rage or delight?

  Surrounded by her children, Kamma jumped to her feet when she heard that roar. She recognised him and started to tremble. She couldn’t call out to warn the people as she had, of course, no tongue. The only sound she uttered was an anxious moan.

  And then, all of a sudden, she changed into a tree, a small thorn tree, with ample space for birds in her branches, and shadow below for her two mahems.

  Adam raced towards her as fast as he could. Beside himself, and most likely without realising what he was doing, he started flagellating the tree with his sjambok. The tree began to cry, its tears running down the trunk like gum. Then all the birds in the wide-spread branches started flapping their wings, and in front of Adam’s eyes they flew off with the tree, past the horizon, gone; the two mahems followed on the ground, racing with their spindly legs. And Adam, too, followed, on the back of his ox, but he didn’t get very far.

  His skeleton was found many years later, bleached on the plains. It was only through the mirror in his knapsack that he could be identified.

  And then an elephant came and blew the story away.

  FOUR

  The Coffin

  1

  ADRIFT IN THE present. Thoughts on waking: how disconcerting to discover that there is nothing real about the present, that it can be grasped only after it has already slid into the past. From moment to moment it eludes me. I write: I get up, I look through the window, the shadows of clouds move across the landscape. But what I ought by rights to be writing is: I write that I get up, look through the window; I write that the shadows of clouds move across the landscape, and even as I write it is no more. Sooner or later I shall write: Ouma is dying – but she will already be dead. I write: Today we’ll have to bring the coffin down. I really don’t like the idea at all, but for once there may be some practical sense in Ouma’s instruction, not mere whimsy. If there is anything to be done to make the coffin serviceable again after so many years, today is as good a time to start as any.

  It is Sunday. There will be fewer demands from the outside world. (I prefer not to think about tomorrow yet, in case, as has happened so often, I’m disappointed. So I shall write down Sandile’s name, but not dwell on it.) It is already a week since I arrived. So much has happened; nothing has happened. An existence in suspense, somehow, in which, curiously, Ouma’s stories seem almost more real than the events surrounding me – even though I’m still not altogether sure why she has felt this urgency to tell all before she dies. At the same time I cannot ask; she will not answer, this has always been her way. The cryptic remark, the look askance, the indulgent little smile. You’ll get there; don’t worry, you’ll get there. Before she retreats into her inner desert again, that place of moving dunes that shift position from one day to the next, ceaselessly rewriting their landscape and redefining their space.

  Before I shower I go through yesterday’s clothes, a quick check on each garment to decide which to fold and stow, which to discard (I must find time for doing some washing today). I presume I do it every day, unconsciously, second nature, a measure not so much of hygiene as of atavistic animality; but this morning I suddenly catch myself in the act of holding up panties, a bra, a shirt, a sock against the light, then sniffing it. What surprises me is not the recovery of a faded yesterday – lotion, eau de toilette, deodorant, body, me – but the fact of doing it, the need it suggests of having to check on myself like this, reassure myself, acknowledge my physicality, locating myself in time, in space. The discovery is disturbing (why?), and almost irritably I cut short the sorting.

  After my shower I choose a dress for today. Even though I’ve brought only some very basic clothes along, it takes a while. The sense of colour, texture, smell, establishing relationships. Back home, in London, Michael invariably watched, from the bed or the bathroom door, as I went through these processes of selection in which I tended to lose myself – a ritual which, depending on his mood, would either amuse, or arouse, or exasperate him; yet it was not, or only rarely, a show put on for his benefit. Much more important was the need to find, to appropriate, a self for the day, going through elaborate motions to work my way through open possibilities until something gelled and the day became, if not predictable, at least more graspable. This day I find difficult to assess, to move towards. My period has begun, catching me, as usual, unawares (I must have a tampon or two, somewhere, but a remedy will have to be found before long). Also, it is Sunday, a day on which I always feel somewhat displaced, and today it is worse because I also have to please Anna who has invited me to lunch: I do not relish the prospect, especially not with Casper there, but I owe it to her.

  Having laid out the dress on the bed I put on the gown Anna has insisted on lending me and first set out on a morning round, checking on Ouma (who is emerging, with an unnerving series of muffled moans and gasps, from sleep), discussing the prognosis with the nurse (who appears in a hurry to clear her preliminary duties out of the way so that she can return to her glossies), tracking down Trui to plot the broad outlines of the day, even descending to the cellar to make sure Jacob Bonthuys and Langenhoven have had a satisfactory night (Langenhoven seems in good form, but Jacob Bonthuys looks feverish and weak). At last I return to the bedroom, where I decide against the dress laid out in favour of a long skirt and blouse, which I put on briskly and with a feeling of efficiency.

  There is considerable resistance to overcome, I find, when after breakfast (I’m beginning to feel bloated from Trui’s elaborate farm breakfasts; I shall have to persuade her, without hurting her feelings, to reduce these to the single slice of bread and the fruit I’ve become used to) I muster the available forces to fetch the coffin upstairs. The nurse, justifiably, finds the exercise premature and in bad taste. Trui refuses point blank. ‘That’s a second-hand thing, Kristien. It’s bad luck.’ Even the reminder that it is Ouma’s own wish will not sway her, and the way in which she sets about scrubbing the kitchen floor, which I saw her do half an hour ago, makes it clear that her mind is made up. This leaves Jeremiah and Jonnie; and perhaps the tone of voice in which I round them up – resolved to lug the bloody thing down the stairs myself if they refuse – does the trick. Having first emptied it of its mouldy contents, and with some cautious footwork down the narrow unsteady steps from the attic, we carry the heavy dust-covered coffin to Ouma’s room where I spend an hour dusting, wiping and polishing it. The nurse has moved her chair to the window, ostensibl
y for more light on her lurid reading matter, but really, I’m convinced, to distance herself more visibly from my activity. Ouma, on the other hand, is watching contentedly, even avidly.

  In spite of scuff marks and scratches and even burns (in our childhood we surmised the coffin had been retrieved from hell), in spite of dents and chips of indecipherable origin, the wood begins to show up beautifully, with the patina of great age. But the lining is a different story. The silk has decayed and turned yellow; it is torn and frayed in places, and irreparably stained, not just by the feathers and dried fruit and the bird and bat droppings it has housed for what must be more than a hundred years, but by mud and water and mould, and, who knows, blood, that have marked it like a dirtier version of the Turin Shroud.

  ‘The others were in better condition,’ I say. ‘What’s happened to them?’

  ‘People have a habit of dying. I helped out when I could. Your mother got the last one.’ At the window the nurse sniffs pointedly.

  ‘When we were small you told us that this one was second-hand.’

  ‘Yes.’ A brief clutching motion of her hand. Then it relaxes again.

  ‘Is it?’ I prod her. The nurse is pretending not to listen, but I can practically see her pointed ears prick up.

  ‘Does it matter?’ asks Ouma. An almost inaudible chuckle. ‘I used to enjoy getting news of everyone who died,’ she goes on, clearly not concerned with whether the connection makes sense or not. ‘It’s one of the few remaining satisfactions when one gets old. Especially when the people who die are younger than yourself. But of course it catches up with one, sooner or later. That’s why I kept this coffin out.’