An Instant in the Wind

by Andre Brink

  “Are you sure we can’t go on tonight?” Elisabeth asks, eager but hesitant.

  “But where will I stay for the night, Madam? I go no place in the Cape.”

  “We can walk from here,” says Adam next to her. “We’re near enough. If you want to.”

  “I don’t know.” Suddenly she feels bewildered. “It's so close. All the way I couldn’t wait to be here, but now…”

  “I know. But we can’t stay here in the open either.”

  She looks up at him, questioning him with her eyes. He makes a gesture with his head, indicating the sea. She does not immediately understand what he has in mind, but accepts his decision. Her limbs are numb, there is a heavy lump in her stomach, she feels nauseous.

  “I can take Madam in if you want me to,” Januarie offers patiently.

  “No,” she says, “We can walk.”

  “Will Madam find her way? There's many houses.”

  “I’ll be all right.” She smiles briefly. “You forget: it's my home town.”

  “Yes, Madam.” He rummages in the things in the box under his seat and takes out a piece of biltong. “You take this for the road. To chew on. It is farther than Madam think and you may feel hungry.”

  “Is there anything left for you?” she enquires.

  “No. But it don’t matter. I can eat at the market in the morning.”

  “I’m used to being hungry,” she says. “You keep it.”

  “Madam is a woman.”

  “Keep the food, Januarie. We’ll manage.”

  The old slave bows gratefully.

  They start walking. This time they aren’t carrying anything at all, not even a bundle or a kaross. They need nothing. Without speaking they walk in among the milk bushes. Suddenly they are alone again.

  From here I left an eternity ago, with two tent-wagons each with ten oxen, and twelve extra, four horses, eight dogs, fifteen chickens, six Hottentots; with Hermanus Hendrickus van Zyl and Erik Alexis Larsson. And here I arrive again, alone. Poor Erik Alexis Larsson.

  Poor Hermanus Hendrickus van Zyl. Neither of you could outlast a woman. Is it a curse I’m carrying with me?

  The town itself is very regularly built and quite small, about 1000 toises in length and breadth, including the gardens and orchards, by which one side of it is terminated. The streets, cutting the quarters at right angles, are broad, but not paved, this being unnecessary owing to the hard nature of the soil. Many of them are planted with oaks. None of the streets have names, excepting the Heerengracht, which runs alongside the large plain opposite the Castle. The houses, mostly uniform in style, are handsome and spacious, two stories high at the most: the greater part of them are stuccoed and whitewashed on the outside, but some of them are painted green: this latter color being the favorite color with the Dutch. A number of the best houses have been built from a peculiar sort of blue stone hewn by prisoners from the quarries of Robben Island. A great part of the houses are covered with a sort of dark-colored reed (Restio tectorum) which grows in dry and sandy places. It is somewhat more firm than straw, but rather finer and more brittle. The popularity of this thatching in the Cape must be ascribed to an effort to avoid the grave accidents which may result from heavier roofing being ripped off by the notorious “Black South-easter” winds raging in this region.

  As soon as the wagon had disappeared behind the milk-bushes they swerved to the right, leaving the open road behind, towards the sea. Over them the dusk was deepening. A swarm of flamingoes came past, a rosy cloud, in the direction of the marshes beyond Devil's Mountain.

  Back on the beach where I was born the night the sea washed me out with the wreckage. You said: One had to complete the circle. You said: Come what may.

  The tide was out, the small waves sighing on the wet sand, smelling of seaweed and bamboo. They walked in the shallow water, leaving no traces, following the curve of the bay. It was getting darker still. There was no moon. The stars came out. First Khanoes. Then the sky was covered with them. The Milky Way, The Cross, the six lights of Khoeseti.

  At last they arrived directly below the town, in the open, walking hand in hand. The water came lapping over their feet, icy cold in spite of the balmy evening. One could see the yellow specks of lights, dull window patches lit by lamps. Was that music, on the border of audibility, pulsing somewhere in the night? Perhaps a ball at the Castle, officers in full regalia, ladies in hoops, poudre de riz, roses, slaves carrying silver trays and crystal bowls, the best imported burgundy. It might be a hallucination. The only certainty, here, was the moist sounds of the sea; tiny shells crackling under their footsoles.

  This was close enough. They walked out on the beach, still holding hands not to lose one another in the dark, and sat down higher up where the sand was dry and soft, and warm with an afterglow of the day's hot sun.

  Do you remember the night of the lions, and how infinite the world lay brooding round our tiny shelter? And then, driven by insane hunger and disregarding the thorns and the fire, they came bursting through the fence, trampling everything, sending the oxen stampeding into the night; devouring one. These stars were above us then.

  They sat close together. There was no need or urge to speak. The silence was dumbfounding.

  Remember the day at the river when I came upon you where you swam and you came out to me, naked? You forced me to look at you, to acknowledge you. I feared you and desired you; I feared myself. Always this incalculable thing in myself, this secret unexplored interior.

  And the day of the bullfight at the Castle, opened with a prayer. He was so full of life, rippling with muscles; and then all blood and dung. And purified of all passion I went home.

  Now we are stripped bare like the skeleton of a snake.

  It was she who started caressing him, so quietly that there was no discernable transition from their stillness to the slow and subtle movement of her hands on him. When he became aware of it he whispered:

  “Take off your clothes.”

  They could not see each other at all. The night was absolute. But they were naked again, the unfamiliar clothes removed. He held her against him, her hands resuming their gentle exploration. After a time she pushed him over on his back, pressing his searching hands down on the sand. Comprehending, he acquiesced. In a strange way it seemed obvious that he had to be passive, submitting to her lovemaking.

  Love? Nearness and night.

  Through their subconscious the sea rose up as her caresses grew more intense and wild. I want to store up everything about you inside me forever. Whatever may happen in the future, this is ours; it will last.

  It is so beautiful to die.

  “Aob,” she whispered against his cheek.

  Lying so still together, we are traveling more intensely than ever before.

  Who are you? I have never known anyone better. Yet you are altogether strange to me.

  In the early dawn they ran into the water, washing each other, gasping for breath in the shocking coldness. Shivering they ran out on the beach again and dried themselves in the sun. Then they dressed and went to the lower slope of the Lion's Rump, entering the bushes where he was to wait for her. She would go on ahead to arrange everything. And then return for him. It would be so easy to confirm the freedom already gained.

  In our winter cave a small buck came to shelter from the cold or from a beast of prey. And you killed it: you also killed the dog; our child. One has to learn to live with betrayal. You said: it was meat, it was food, we would die without it. At first I didn’t want to. But in the end I ate with you. Without it we would not have survived, I think. You were absolutely right.

  One can imagine him waiting there in the bushes with their semen smell in the sun, for hours. Watching the movement of the indolent clouds approaching over the Mountain, and the hood forming on the summit. One can imagine the wind starting up, increasing, tearing at the branches of the bushes where he crouched.

  And later he would hear, within the fierceness of the wind, the sounds in the distan
ce, coming nearer. He would get up now, eager and anxious.

  Then he would see them coming towards him from the distant town, with the high Mountain behind them, in the wind. He would search for her among them, but in vain. For a while he wouldn’t comprehend. But then he would realize, and accept it. He would not even consider an alternative any longer: it had been given from the beginning.

  He would stand up in that wild wind, his arms folded serenely on his chest, waiting for them to come and get him: all those men, the soldiers with their horses and their hounds.

  It would have been very still in him as he stood there waiting for them to ask, like her in the beginning: Who are you?

  Come, he would think, breathless in the wind. The land which happened inside us no one can take from us again, not even ourselves. But God, such a long journey ahead for you and me. Not a question of imagination, but of faith.

  September 1973—June 1975

  Thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature and twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, André Brink is one of South Africa's eminent novelists. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction, many of them written during the years when apartheid dominated his country. His first openly political novel, Kennis van die Aand (1973), became a cause celebre; it was banned a year after its publication under new censorship laws applied for the first time to an Afrikaans writer. Brink later translated the work into English under the title Looking on Darkness (1974). A prolific literary critic and dramatist, Brink has also translated works such as Mary Poppins and the Shakespearean plays into Afrikaans. As an academic, he has inspired and challenged social reformists for more than forty years. André Brink, now 72, is an outspoken recorder of South Africa's turbulent history, from the days of apartheid to the present.

  Also by André Brink

  The Ambassador

  Looking on Darkness

  Rumors of Rain

  A Dry White Season

  A Chain of Voices

  The Wall of the Plague

  States of Emergency

  An Act of Terror

  The First Life of Adamastor

  On the Contrary

  Imaginings of Sand

  Devil's Valley

  The Rights of Desire

  The Other Side of Silence

  Mapmakers (essays)

  A Land Apart (A South African Reader), with

  J. M. Coetzee

  Reinventing a Continent (essays)