by Andre Brink
Until at long last a girl younger than myself (I must have been ten or so, she nine), provided the answer. She was a friend of my sister Elbie. Her name was Maureen. Her father was the bank manager. Impeccable credentials. During a game of hide and seek Maureen and I were behind a sofa in a bay window in the house of her parents while our mothers were outside on the stoep and all the other children were scouting about in the garden. I put the Question. And without blushing or fidgeting or looking at all uncomfortable – for which I shall remain beholden to her until my dying day – she said: ‘Yes, of course I know.’
‘Well? What’s it mean?’
‘It’s not so easy to explain,’ she said, quite frankly. ‘But if you want to, I’ll show you.’
‘Okay, then show me.’
‘I can’t really show you here,’ she said. ‘We don’t want the others to catch us.’
I could sense that I was on the verge of a momentous discovery.
‘Then where shall we go?’
‘Can we go to your house?’
And so we went the few blocks up the road. I knew that my mother and sister were still at Maureen’s and that my father would not come home from his office until much later.
In the bedroom I shared with Elbie we solemnly faced each other.
‘You sure you know about vry?’ I asked in some trepidation. The moment was almost too much to handle.
She nodded.
‘How do you know?’ I croaked.
‘Because my sister Daphne told me. And one evening after last Christmas she showed me. We went down the passage to my parents’ bedroom and the door wasn’t quite closed and we looked. And I saw.’
Proof doesn’t come much more convincingly than this.
And so I meekly followed her example in taking off my clothes. Nothing remarkable in itself. My sister and I had grown up together and shared all our baths. But at the same time it was amazingly, and delightfully, different: it was like that day in the garden when I’d first discovered the texture, the very differentness of words. The world had just been reinvented.
But that was only the beginning. For Maureen proceeded dutifully, and very meticulously, to show me, as she had promised. Not an altogether successful exercise, I’m afraid, as I was so overwhelmed by the discovery that I did not exactly rise to the occasion. But I certainly knew at least one meaning of vry after that.
There was one more aspect to this event and this discovery. The end of our exploration is hidden in a cloud. For the life of me I cannot remember whether my father came home from the office earlier than expected, or whether we were so carried away by our explorations that we became oblivious of time passing. So I simply do not know whether he caught us in the act if act it was. But I cannot help thinking that the terrible feelings of guilt concerning all things sexual that obscured my whole youth cannot be explained simply by the devastations and corruptions of Calvinism but must have been caused by something very specific and traumatic that turned the unmitigated joy and wonder of that summer’s afternoon into a shameful memory. Whatever it was, it remained forever entangled with language, with the never-ending search for the meaning of words.
Those times, that day, remain in a secret place in my mind. A discovery of the magic of sex. And, through the telling, the magic of words.
Of course not all the discoveries of words through other people were traumatic. One of them concerned the Dwarf. And it happened during my school years at Douglas, in the arid north-west of the Cape Province, in Griqualand West, near Kimberley. This was between my eleventh and my sixteenth year, when I spent many weekends and holidays on the farms of friends. My favourite farm belonged to the parents of my friend Theuns. One of the reasons for the hold the place had on me was the pretty girl from the neighbouring farm. Her cheekiness. And the attempts by Theuns’s two big brothers, both already in matric, to persuade her to pull down her panties for them. And how she refused and put out her wet little red tongue and left them high and dry. Another reason for the fascination of the farm was the signs of early peoples in the veld: the cairns erected by long-disappeared Khoi – or ‘Hottentot’ – tribes who had marked the graves of the hunter-god Heitsi-Eibib whose many deaths had been followed by as many resurrections, incomparably more wondrous, I secretly thought, than the biblical rebirth of Jesus. There were also flat stones marking the more ordinary graves of Griqua and Koranna tribesmen. And one afternoon Theuns led me, without prior warning, across several of those flat rocks. Only afterwards, brimming with malicious glee, he told me that I should watch out as the dead who lay buried in those graves had the unsettling habit of coming in the night to take revenge on whoever had desecrated their resting places.
‘Well,’ I retorted with some bravado which came easily in the hot afternoon sun, ‘then they’ll be coming for you too. We walked over the graves together.’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I took great care not to step on the graves. Only you did.’
I felt a sudden contraction in my throat. But in the excitement of the rest of the afternoon the incident was soon forgotten; we found a geelslang, or Cape cobra, slipping into a hole and quite impulsively Theuns grabbed it by the tail and pulled it out. What followed was a terrifying comedy which involved dashing across the veld in large circles, clutching the snake by the tail, and taking turns to duck through boundary fences and handing the furiously wriggling creature from one to the other while keeping up such a pace that the snake couldn’t bend over to bite the hand that held it. In the end, reaching the farmyard where his father and some labourers were stacking a stone wall, Theuns managed to pass the geelslang on to one of them and the latest incarnation of the Devil was duly stoned to death.
In all this activity the ominous trespassing on the graves was forgotten, until Theuns brought it up at supper. The whole family joined in with dire predictions about the wrath of the ancestors, so I felt none too easy by the time we took our candle and went to bed. We spent some time with a perfunctory brushing of teeth and reminiscing about the day before we prepared to turn in. I had just blown out the candle and was on the point of restoring the chamber pot to its rightful place, when a devilish commotion under the bed scared me witless. With the most unearthly yelling and screaming some apparition came dashing out from under the bed and tried to grab me. As it happened, I emptied the chamber pot on the apparition’s head, which mercifully subdued it on the spot. Theuns managed to light a match, and the impostor turned out to be none other than Theuns’s older sister, who had been making my life a misery over the past few days with constant teasing, and cornering me in dark places in the sprawling farmhouse to grab me between the legs, which seemed to amuse her hugely.
This put an end to her exuberance, but for several nights I had the most awful nightmares. It was in these circumstances that Theuns’s father told me about the Dwarf who lived in a hole on the farm. It seemed that for long periods he would mysteriously disappear, only to resurface at unexpected moments. This was one of those moments, and I was invited to visit the little creature. I didn’t know what to expect, but to some extent my image of the Dwarf must have been shaped by Walt Disney, whose Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first movie I had ever seen.
Nothing could have been farther off the mark. The Dwarf on Theuns’s farm was indeed very small, barely a metre tall, but he was very black. One of the last remnants, I was told, of the nearly extinct Koranna tribe. Only recently it occurred to me that my memory of the Dwarf must have prefigured Cupido Cockroach in my mind when I came across his story almost half a century later and started plotting Praying Mantis.
At first I was scared of the little man. He was unspeakably filthy, and smelled of death and dead things. The hole in which he lived, and which he used to cover with an old sheet of corrugated iron, was littered with bones and peels and dirty tufts of sheep’s wool and patches of snake skin and little pouches stuffed with god knows what. The black labourers on the farm gave him a wide berth and were, I learned, horribly cruel to him. Th
e whites also treated him with suspicion, and Theuns approvingly told me that at irregular intervals, without any particular reason, his father would go into the veld and thrash the little man with a sjambok more violently than the occasion could possibly have warranted.
But there was something about the Dwarf – whose name I never learned – that fascinated me no end. I could not stay away from that filthy hole. At least once a day I would find an excuse to wander from the farmyard, pretending to go off in a completely different direction, and then follow a long circular route to the hole. It was always covered with the iron sheet when I approached. But he seemed uncannily to sense my approach, and as soon as I came within a few metres, the sheet would be pushed away by a small, gnarled black hand with long, yellow, horny nails. With a hideous smile of welcome, and without any preamble or warning, he would plunge into the telling of a story that I could barely follow – because not only did he tell it in a frightful mix of Afrikaans and, I suppose, the Koranna language, but he also suffered from some speech impediment. Perhaps for that very reason, I could not tear myself away. Story would follow story, and I would remain sitting on my haunches until just as suddenly as he’d started he would pull the iron sheet over his shrivelled grey head again and stop talking.
All I could recall of those stories was a hotchpotch of half-sentences, images, obscenities, funny flashes, cackles of laughter, short bouts of crying. But what made it impossible to stay away, was the impression of a whole other world, existing perhaps parallel to the one I knew, but magically different, a strange subterranean world presumably linked to the deep jagged hole in which he lived. Some of the stories I recognised, many years later, from old Khoisan myths – about the great snake that lives in a fountain wearing a diamond on its forehead, or of a first man and a first woman emerging from the bole of a big tree, or of the Devil assuming the form of a whirlwind to track down sinners who had something to hide … But many of them I could not trace; and, of course, at the time I didn’t think of writing them down. They were just stories. Part of the vast net of stories that covered the whole world like a web, and to which some individuals who knew where to look, and how to reach for them, and how to prepare themselves for the encounter, would have constant access.
When I went to the farm again, some months or a year later, the Dwarf was no longer there. Nobody was sure what had happened. Perhaps he’d just died. Perhaps he’d gone off on one of his journeys and didn’t bother to come back. Perhaps he had permanently returned to his own secret story world. Perhaps Theuns’s father had killed him.
The intimation of that world persisted inside me. But for many years it was to remain dormant. Other stories, other forms and conventions of storytelling took over. Like too many other white people of my own tribe, I came to undervalue, if not to despise, whatever intimations I had gleaned in childhood of the black world. And only later, but thank God not too late, did I rediscover those wellsprings of storytelling to which I’d had access as a boy.
By the time, towards the end of my adolescence, I really became serious about writing, a rather broad foundation had been laid. The trigger, towards the end of my school years and the beginning of university, was my sister Elbie’s breakthrough into publishing her stories in grown-up magazines. This was unbearable. She was, after all, three years younger than myself: there was something unfair about a universe that allowed such an inversion in the natural order. But for the time being all I could do was to gnash my teeth, and pray to God, and put in more hours of writing. Until, towards the end of my first year, the Almighty hearkened unto me and restored justice to his world.
A few hundred magazine stories saw me through university. But I knew the process would only begin to make sense once I had seen my name on the cover of a book. Several attempts – much more ambitious now than the heart of darkness in Nigeria and the Congo – had to be abandoned, after five or eight or twelve rewritings. Then, in my sixth year, in some desperation, I sent off to a popular magazine a novella I’d written in a day. It soon came back. But this time it wasn’t branded ‘too erotic’: what the editor found was that it was ‘too literary’. Which it certainly was, and not in the best sense of the word. Titled Die Meul Teen die Hang (The Mill on the Slope) it was the rather heavy-handed account of a cripple arriving in a small village in the Eastern Transvaal, who is ostracised by the community, befriends a little girl who comes to his sawmill every day and then is killed by an electric blade. At the inquest he is found not guilty, but the whole white community turns against him. There is serious racial strife in the area and one night violence breaks out among the black labourers at the mill. The sawyer hobbles into town to warn the inhabitants, but no one is prepared to listen to him. On his way home he sees his mill going up in flames.
Not much of a literary event. But it was a beginning. And in retrospect it was perhaps significant that racial tensions lay at the heart of the story; and that a very subdued kind of eroticism once again stirred under the surface. I was still very much the conventional Afrikaner boy; but even without being really conscious of it, I may have been beginning to turn to writing, no longer as escape or diversion, but as a way of coming to grips, however limply and tentatively, with some of the real tensions underlying my seemingly placid, untroubled, terribly conventional world.
But there was so much more to learn. What I had begun to acquire at the time of that first book was an awareness of language and of its specific functioning in storytelling. The marvel of Hamlet’s words, words, words. But there was another major step ahead. It was one signalled by a philosopher friend in a discussion about truth – truth in fiction, truth in general. ‘As I see it,’ he said, ‘you can approach truth from two opposite directions. You can see it as something that has been said so many times that it crystallises into a final and definite shape. For this, language is indispensable. But you can also see truth as only that which can not be said. Not ever. In no word. That which eternally eludes the word.’
Today it seems to me that truth – at least the truth of fiction, of writing – does not lie in either of these extremes, but in their interaction. Neither in the word nor in silence, but in the tension between them. It was Calvino who showed me that what is said, ultimately, can only be said by virtue of what remains forever unsayable.
AWAKENING TO BLACK AND WHITE
HOW COULD ANYONE, I often wonder, how could I, not see what was happening in the country, what was going to happen? I grew up among black people. The small white villages of my childhood were always enclaves surrounded by blacks. I must have seen. I must have known! There must have been an unbearable tension, all the time, day after day, day and night.
But perhaps tension itself becomes normal after a while. It is the benchmark by which one judges everything. And at the core of it all was the simple – simple?! – fact of black and white.
Black and white, black and white, all the time. Shorthand for the full complexity and all the problems it poses to South Africa.
Yet we did not face it as a problem, not then, not when I was a child. It was simply the way we lived, the way God had ordained it. Or was it?
Nowadays, particularly at times of near despair about the uncertainty that lies just under the skin of the new South Africa, I reach for the kind of faith that informs a small incident which happened a few years ago to a good friend in Cape Town. At the age of five, his son had just started preschool. And much to the delight of my friend, who is white, his son very quickly became close friends with a black boy. It was no ordinary friendship. The two were quite inseparable. Then, after a few months, one afternoon, the white boy was present when his black friend was picked up from school by his father. The little white boy gawked in amazement. And very early the next morning he was at school to await the arrival of his friend. The moment he saw him, the white boy ran to the gate, breathless with excitement. ‘You never told me,’ he cried, ‘that your daddy was black!’
There is much that is still not working in our new system of e
ducation. But if this is what it does to perceptions of race, we must be doing something right. It is an anecdote which I trot out time and time again, whenever I encounter sceptics about the significance of the changes that have been happening in South Africa. And obviously one such tiny swallow cannot make a summer. But something is happening! And it is enough to make one want to weep for all the lost chances of the past. How different, how devastatingly different, the world was when I went to school, when black and white moved in completely different orbits.
We had contact, naturally. But in the home, at work, at school, everywhere we met on the most superficial level imaginable, emerging from our alien, different worlds, and returning to them after every fleeting encounter.
There was even, in our youth, something that might pass for friendship. During the weekends and holidays I spent on the farms of friends, we experienced a natural, unquestioned and unquestioning affinity among all the boys, black and white. We would spend whole days playing together, fashioning clay oxen at the river, hunting birds with catapults, staging wars with kleilatte – long switches, usually cut from quince trees, with small balls of wet clay affixed to the tips, a hit from which could sting like a wasp. We would scour the veld for tortoises, or the sloughed papery skins of snakes, the whitened skulls of long-dead cattle, or duikers, or meerkats, or hares. We would brag about our biceps, and some of the boys would compare the size and shape of their pricks, we would hide behind the outdoor privy to raise the flap covering the bucket to spy, with fiercely suppressed giggles, on whoever came to squat on the grainy seat inside, or invent jokes or postures that would send us into fits and howls of laughter. But as the daylight faded, we would disperse and go to our different homes: we, the white boys, to the sprawling homestead of the farmer, the black boys to their huts and hovels. This was never discussed. It didn’t even occur to us to do so. It was how the world functioned, according to the same immutable laws that governed the rising or setting of sun and moon, the slow reeling of the constellations of stars overhead at night, the way poultry and dogs and cattle and sheep followed the habits of their kind. God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.