Imaginings of Sand

by Andre Brink

  I put on the light and pick up the book from my bedside table; the Stephen Hawking from the library. A spell of reading should gather the footloose thoughts. But it is heavy going at this time of the night. I admire Jacob Bonthuys for his dedication. I try to concentrate. Relativity. It seems that in the mysterious region of space-time one can travel into the future or into the past, and through the journey change what has been or may yet be. One can go back there and kill one’s parents before one is even born, cancel oneself, switch roles, try out other possibilities. O brave new world. But somewhere must be that limit Jacob Bonthuys spoke about. No, not a limit, the book explains, it’s more of a membrane, a one-way membrane, the event horizon that surrounds a Black Hole and which means that you can fall into it but not come out, ever. Abandon all hope, ye who enter. Says Hawking; said Sandile.

  Can it really be so bad?

  SIX

  Event Horizon

  1

  NOT THE BEST way of starting a day; and such a day. It is the nurse who tells me, when I look in to see how Ouma is doing, ‘They said on the radio there’s been a big bomb at Jan Smuts airport, Miss.’

  ‘How serious was it?’

  ‘Oh, very bad, Miss. Lots of people killed, many of them seriously.’

  ‘You must be sorry you’re not there. To help, I mean.’

  ‘Well, actually, Miss –’ She stops to look at me suspiciously; but the news is too hot to suppress, and she launches into an account of the bloody event.

  And this, I think wryly, is supposed to be the day everything is going to change. After all the last-minute accords, the appeals from the leaders of warring factions, the efforts to heal the wounds, the oil on troubled waters, after every cliché in the book, this is Election Day. Even here in our own out-of-the-way district there has been no lack of excitement. On Monday night there was the meeting called by Mongane Yaya and his delegation – Abel Joubert came round yesterday to give me an eyewitness account – with fiery speeches from all parties, followed by quite spectacular shaking of hands and embracing of erstwhile opponents (Casper, I learned, did not attend, although several of his commando members did; I presume he had more pressing business at home); yesterday, Tuesday, following dramatic appeals by Thando and by Sam Ndzuta, the youngsters arrested for setting fire to this house were granted bail. In the afternoon Trui went to the black township to visit Happiness Tsabalala: I offered to take her, but she refused to go in the hearse; and besides, she said, it wouldn’t be safe for me, a white woman, to go there. But there’s peace now, I argued. She shook her head. What she really meant, I knew, was that this was a matter between mothers.

  I was left behind with Ouma. She was having a bad day. There was a brief flicker of life when the doctor visited her in the morning with the news that old Piet Malan the undertaker had died suddenly of a stroke in the night. She reacted with an extraordinary show of delight. ‘That’ll teach him,’ she exclaimed, her glee untempered by the merest hint of guilt or remorse; but what, exactly, the lesson involved I could not quite make out. The very excitement soon proved bad for her, and she had to be kept under sedation for most of the day.

  Later in the afternoon I was surprised, where I sat at the big dining table bringing my notes up to date, by Jacob Bonthuys. I heard what sounded like a polite cough, and looked up, and there he was in the doorway, clutching the Langenhoven.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked, alarmed to see him about.

  ‘No, no,’ he assured me. ‘If Miss doesn’t mind I just thought I’d come out for a while. I need to stretch my legs a bit. It’s good to get some air again. And daylight. It’s hard on the eyes reading down there all the time.’

  ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘It’s good to read it all again. This Loeloeraai gets better every time one reads it. I mean, not only going to the moon, but going right inside it.’

  With a touch of mischief I asked, ‘Do you think it is all true?’

  ‘It’s hard to say, Miss,’ he says seriously. ‘At the end Mr Langenhoven says it’s just a story, but then he describes everything that happened to him and his own wife and daughter. If it wasn’t true, do you think his wife would have let him write it?’

  ‘Perhaps she understood what he meant. Women know about such things.’

  He smiled with what might have been relief. ‘Even if it isn’t true it’s a blarry good story, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  ‘It’s like that other one of his. When Mr Langenhoven gets fed up with all the nasty, ordinary people in his little town and he just goes off with his family in a tram drawn by an elephant. Herrie. There, too, I wasn’t always sure whether he was telling the truth or just lies. But in the end I decided it didn’t matter, you know. Because in a way it is true. You can say I also went away on that tram with that elephant. It’s like another life Mr Langenhoven gave me. Many other lives.’

  Almost in a reflex I said, ‘“He who lives more lives than one, More deaths than one must die.’”

  He frowned. ‘What was that, Miss?’

  ‘Sorry. Just something written by another man who told good stories.’

  He shrugged, and smiled again. ‘Anyway, now I’ve also been to the moon.’ His smile broadened. ‘It’s good to go to the moon when life gets hard.’

  ‘You’ve had a hard time in this place, haven’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so, Miss. But it gives one time to think.’

  ‘You know, you really needn’t stay down there any more, Mr Bonthuys. There are many other rooms you can move into.’

  ‘Ag, I’m sort of used to the place now,’ he said. ‘And what’s a few days more or less? I mean, a man like Mandela was in jail for – how long? – twenty-seven years, and look at the man. It makes one ashamed to complain, is that not so, Miss?’

  ‘Do you think the elections are going to turn out all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Ai, Miss. We must maar hope for the best. Anyway, we’ll know soon, won’t we? And if it works out all right, Miss can then tell Abel Joubert and I can go home. But I must first make sure,’ Adding hastily, ‘If Miss doesn’t mind? Miss has already done so much for me.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ve helped me more than I could ever help you, Mr Bonthuys.’

  ‘Ag, that’s mos nothing.’ He seemed embarrassed.

  ‘Are you going to vote tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet, Miss. I feel a bit scared. What if those people recognise me?’

  ‘I don’t think you need to worry about them any more, Mr Bonthuys.’ I told him about Casper’s meeting with the ANC delegation.

  ‘Then I’ll think about it, Miss,’ he said. And soon returned to his dark quarters, once again clasping his book to his chicken chest.

  Today we shall start finding out. By tomorrow – what will we know then? Will there be, after all, some lost little ray of light escaping from our own confining horizon?

  Almost inevitably, as the day drew to its close, I sought comfort in Ouma’s presence. How quickly this had become a habit, an act of contrition, a necessary resolution of whatever had gone before.

  2

  SHE LOOKED AT me when I came in: that special look she has, neither accusing nor questioning, simply to acknowledge that I am there; a look that makes me conscious of my own presence, a look which can be both reassuring and disconcerting. I took up my seat. She began to speak. It was a story I had heard before, in one form or another, when it had still been a story, a diversion, not yet gathered into our history. It was shorter than most of the others, but not any less disturbing. She spoke. I wrote. And the following was gathered into my past:

  After their mother had been changed into a tree, and carried off by the birds, Kamma’s children remained with their tribe for some time. I’m not sure how many there were of them, four or five as far as I could make out, most of them indistinguishable from the Khoikhoi around them. But there was one, the oldest, a girl, who looked quite different, tall and slender, with long fair hair.
She certainly did not take after her father, Adam Oosthuizen, the red-bearded giant; but perhaps she was a throwback to his mother’s family. Or perhaps, some of the Khoikhoi speculated, she was the result of a union between her mother and some exotic bird. Whatever the reason for her outlandishly beautiful looks, if these were initially the cause of veneration among the members of her adopted tribe, they also brought about her downfall; some might say her salvation, but that depends on one’s point of view. Certainly they were the cause of the tragedy that befell the tribe, commencing with a visit by a small party of boers from the further reaches of the Dutch colonial settlement at the Cape. More and more of these trekking groups were by then moving into the interior like packs of scavenging dogs spreading civilisation and the gospel; the country was shrinking, it seemed, its space contested, penetrated, appropriated, tamed, the whole shameful story.

  Whether this handful of boers, led by an impressive and respected man called David Hartman, had arrived in the deep interior, like others before and after, on a hunting or bartering expedition, or on a journey of reconnaissance, whether they were one of the last desperate groups lured by the legend of an ever-receding fantastic empire of gold in the heart of Africa, or whether perhaps they had heard specific rumours, passing through concentric circles of outlying settlements, about the presence of a white girl in the wilderness, no one can say for sure. What matters is that they arrived at the spot where the tribe was then living, near a magic pool of black water so deep it was said to have no bottom, and there saw the girl.

  Some attempt was made to find out who she was and how she’d got there. But although she was fluent in Dutch, having learned it from her mother Kamma, she was very reticent; and the members of the tribe, scared of being found in the wrong no matter what they said, preferred not to discuss the business at all. So the godfearing strangers rapidly concluded that the girl must have been abducted from her parents in her infancy; and before anyone in the settlement could prevent it, she was simply swept up and carried off on one of the galloping horses. It was all so sudden that it appeared, in retrospect, like a dust devil that had descended on them from the sky at great speed, and withdrawn again, whirling her away in its dizzying current. Not even the guardian spirit of the tribe, a huge she-snake that lived in the black pool, carrying a diamond on its forehead – a gem that shone so brightly that whoever looked at it was turned to stone on the spot – could intervene.

  The tribe sent out men and women in search of the girl, ever further, but they could not find her. And deeply troubled, because ever since Kamma had been carried off by the birds, they’d felt a grave responsibility towards her remaining family, they now resolved to leave the spot they had come to regard as cursed.

  But this was not to be. Because just as the tribe was preparing to break up their huts, the boers returned, led by the same David Hartman; this time they were no mere handful but a huge commando, a righteous crusade sent to wreak vengeance on a tribe of miscreants that had dared to hold captive in their midst a girl from the master race. There was nothing left of the settlement when at last the boers withdrew: not a man or a woman or a child, not even a long-tailed sheep, a goat, or a long-horned ox. Contrary to their habit of driving off whatever cattle they could lay their hands on, this time their fury was so great that everything in their way had to be annihilated. All trace of the settlement had to be obliterated from the earth, to make sure that no one among the Khoikhoi would ever again have the temerity to lay hands on a white girl.

  This was the story with which the girl was brought up by the Hartmans. As yet she had no name; if she had, it would of course have been a Khoikhoi name, but she never divulged it to anyone – except perhaps much later to her long-haired daughter Samuel, to whom she entrusted her story and her mother’s; but if so, Samuel forgot what it was, or else it was lost further along the line of mothers and daughters – and the name by which she came to be known in the white community that had rescued her, as they insisted, was Lottie.

  From her mother she had heard accounts of the lifestyle of the frontier farmers – the roughly built houses overrun by chickens and snorting pigs, the open hearths, the crude handmade furniture, the copious meals, the stone or thornwood kraals filled with cattle, the domestic occupations of the women, the hunting and roaming habits of the men – and with her rudimentary knowledge of Dutch (proof, to her rescuers, that she had been nurtured by civilised people) she soon adapted to their ways. What she enjoyed most was the single shard of mirror cherished by David Hartman’s wife Hermina. And when asked about this fascination she told Hermina of her mother’s magic mirror in which she’d seen, as a small child, the captured reflections Kamma had brought back from her sojourns on the Oosthuizen farm – although she was careful never to divulge any names or further particulars. Amused, Hermina treated the confidences like the imaginings of a too original young mind; and from the description of the ornate mirror she deduced that Lottie must have belonged to an affluent family of some social standing. Constant efforts were made to enquire in the environs of Cape Town (the part of the colony where such a wealthy clan was likely to have resided), but no trace could ever be found of a family who had lost a daughter in a raid by marauding Hottentots. The only conclusion to be drawn from this was that at the time of the abduction all her people must have been massacred; which served to justify, even more than before, the total revenge meted out to the heathen villains.

  Lottie, always a secretive girl – whose strangeness and otherworldliness was readily explained by the tribulations and deprivations she must have suffered in captivity – never tried to correct the speculations about her origins; she owed it to her mother’s memory, she confided later to Samuel, to guard as a secret what Kamma herself had obviously chosen to keep from others. And after the initial attempts to probe the darkness so evidently concealed within her, she was left in peace, to the generous if almost smothering ministrations of Hermina Hartman who, having lost all her own children through miscarriage or other more obscure causes, cared for her with all the possessiveness of a mother animal.

  As a result the girl never wanted for anything. About twelve or fourteen at the time of her rescue, she soon began to grow into womanhood; but her figure remained slight, and she retained her waif-like appearance, a child of the wind, fleet-footed and shy. She was extremely bright and soon was taught to read and write by Hermina, whose mother had originally come from a prosperous Batavian family – merchants who’d prided themselves on their refinement and culture. The difference between Hermina’s love and the diffidence with which her husband treated the foundling must have confused Lottie; but she never enquired into other people’s affairs or histories, so what Hermina did not volunteer Lottie never discovered. In return, she found her own secretiveness duly respected.

  There was one curious trait about her that never ceased to perturb her foster family. It was in fact the only thing she ever complained about: that she’d been swept away by the commando on their horses so swiftly that her shadow had remained behind. It wasn’t just something she’d made up. Hermina herself discovered, one late afternoon when she went out to call Lottie in from the veld, that the child had no shadow: she was coming home with the setting sun right behind her – from even the slightest shrub a long black shadow stretched across the earth – but Lottie walked as if her feet did not really touch the ground, and her slight body cast no shadow at all.

  It was eerie, and Hermina preferred to keep the knowledge to herself. But from that day there was a shift in her concern for the child: she became more cautious, almost timorous, as she had to deal with the knowledge that this one lived on borrowed time. There were other discoveries, too, the Hartmans found unnerving, most of which had to do with Lottie’s habit of roaming about in the veld on her own. It was wild country, high up in the Cold Bokkeveld region, and predators were not uncommon; stray sheep or goats were regularly killed by foxes, lynxes, leopards, occasionally even by a lion. Yet nothing could restrain Lottie; and David Ha
rtman’s dire mutterings about God’s wrath were very effectively smothered by his wife’s protective instincts.

  Hermina was the only one in whom the girl confided her reason for these wanderings. Very simple, she explained: she was looking for her shadow. She could never come to rest before she’d found it, so she had to leave messages everywhere. What kind of messages? Just messages, said Lottie. And when Hermina insisted, the girl reluctantly showed her: at first sight it seemed like writing, but it was no ordinary human script. The codes she used sometimes resembled the trails of snakes or lizards on the sand, or at other times the tiny tracks of ants, or birds, or fieldmice, or meerkats. All day long she would write these messages for the small creatures of the wild to convey to her shadow: signs inscribed on the leaves of succulents, the bark of trees, the mottled surfaces of rocks, or on tracts of sand.

  It didn’t bother her that these were invariably effaced again – by the wind, by the rarity of rain, by the fierce alternations of heat and cold, by the slow curve of the seasons, the migrations of the creatures of the veld. She would always return, her patience as inexhaustible as her resourcefulness, attempting every time to contrive new languages in the hope that sometime someone would understand and would transmit the messages. And if no one ever understood? asked Hermina. Even then, said Lottie, smiling, it wouldn’t ultimately matter. As she had no shadow any sign she could leave of herself, of her whereabouts, of having been there, would do.