by Zoe Wicomb
The full moon looks directly at Antjie. Across the high cheekbones the skin is taut, and the forehead is smooth above the severe slant of her eyes. Is she beautiful? Gert Klaassen, the local leader, ordained by Paramount Chief le Fleur himself, has certainly not chosen her for her beauty; it was the serenity, the quiet dignity in so young a woman that drew him to her. That she remains childless does not matter to him; there are enough mouths to feed and besides, God does what God sees fit to do.
There are no traces here of the Old Ones, the Grigriqua ancestors who once roamed these plains and whose spirit the Chief said they would capture here as a new nation. The Old Ones had left the world as they had found it, their waste drawn back into the earth, their footprints buried. In the still evening with the smoke spiralling joyfully to heaven, Antjie hears the pounding of ancient hooves. Her nostrils flare with the smell of goats, the fresh herb of their droppings, and her eyes follow the purple shadow below the ridge. Here she hears again the words of the Chief as they arrived in the Promised Land: Lift the scales from your eyes and look. Where the herds of our forefathers grazed—listen how they stamp the ground—here we will stay where the Lord has given his blessing. And for all the world like a farmer inspecting his invisible flock, he swept his arm across the empty plain, calling, Griquas, take up your shears, roll up your sleeves, and let us work God’s bounty.
Then she blinked and shaded her eyes with the visor of a hand, for the sun scorched mercilessly on that spring day, and blinked again until the heat waves quivered with the sound of hooves. And now, under the swelling moon, she hears once more the stamping of a flock. Which goes some way towards showing what a good Griqua she is turning out to be.
•
Naturally David finds his height, his slim hips, pleasing. He imagines it to be an immeasurable advantage to look another man, of any colour, squarely in the eyes, or even tower over him, so that his voice remains steady, so that his words flow in effortless economy. But he is not vain, as Sally thinks. She creeps up behind him as he stands in front of the mirror trimming his moustache and laughs. Admiring those hazel green eyes? Her laughter is affectionate—there is still much affection between them despite her jealousy—but it is she who admires his green eyes. There is no hint of a Griqua slant in those eyes. They are a soft, feminine green flecked with the pale lights of his fury. Sally will never guess how he hates those eyes, fake doll’s eyes dropped as if by accident into his brown skin.
It is, rather, the mirror that he loves. In the shape of a ship, a three-masted, lateen-rigged galley, the kind of vessel, he imagines, from which Van Riebeeck stepped on to these shores. The sails are divided at the base but curve towards a single point at the top. The galley base, a separate glass, is attached only at the two endpoints of the sails, and behind this mirror, in four parts, the whitewashed wall paints the absence between base and sails, an illusory sea of unimaginable depth. Shaving, David observes himself in four parts.
Ouma Ragel had it hanging above the deal dresser, a place of honour barely in reach of the grown-ups. It had been her mother’s treasure, hung high to discourage vanity, the only object in the house which was not fashioned by their own hands. How had it come to be hers? Ouma Ragel did not know. In her dark front room the mirror sucked at light. Only towards evening did she open the shutters and allow the half-light to rush through the unglazed windows. During the day thin beams burst through the cracks in the shutters; a crowd of dust motes sailed lazily in each silver line.
To keep the place cool, Ouma squealed in her high-pitched voice as she shooed out both light beams and the boy who stole into her parlour to look at her treasures, the ship of mirrors and the glass jars of canned fruits on the dresser shelves. David would help her cut patterns into the edge of newspapers with which to line the shelves. He bit his lip as he steered the scissors, crumpled and tossed the cutout ovals and diamonds into the bin, and admired the absence of paper, which now in the late afternoon light projected its elongated shadow of lace aslant on the wall. In that light the fruit jars, with their heavy metallic lids, turned to jewels: garnets of quince, peaches packed in sickle moons of amber, red plums of ruby, prettily perched on his paper lace edging. When he grew into a man, he would have rows of jewelled fruits shining in the light.
Ouma Ragel dusted her unused parlour every week, the ship and, to the right of the dresser, a photograph of the founding fathers of Beeswater: Paramount Chief le Fleur, Oupas Cloete, Diederiks, Snewe, and her father, Gert Klaassen. And then there is her mother, Antjie, the only woman in the photograph. She looks bashfully at the camera, unprepared for the momentous click that would freeze her forever in the orb of founding fathers. She had been unexpectedly summoned from the kitchen. The broad noose of her apron hangs askew around her neck and above her right ear a short, curved horn of plaited hair escapes from her doek. No doubt awed by the presence of the Chief, she dared not ask for a moment to tuck in her hair or tear off her apron for this, her first and only photograph.
Ouma Ragel claimed that this was the very first photograph taken.
In all the world? little David asked.
In the whole world, she said, her lips puckered with pride.
Great-ouma Antjie stands to the left of the Chief. His face, not quite turned away from her, bears the usual stern expression, the lick of fire in the emerald eyes. The other men look perplexed, disapproving.
The Chief has shouted, just as the photographer ducked under his black shroud, Antjie—wait for Antjie, and the woman, drying her hands on her apron, has dutifully joined them. The Chief offers no explanation, but his eyes flash dangerously. Around them is the vast empty veld, with no landmarks.
Ouma Ragel said that the photograph was taken at the dabikwa tree, on the historic day of the Beeswater settlers’ giving thanks to God. September the tenth. But David now sees that it was taken on the plain, near the houses, some distance from the ceremonial tree; otherwise Antjie would not be wearing her apron. Where had they found a camera and at what cost? Could the stern and pious Chief be guilty of vanity? Whatever the case, the official cameraman arrived by horse cart two days late, the awe of the moment long passed, hence the unusual placement of Antjie as founding father.
David remembers an ancient Antjie squatting in a half-moon cooking hut of reed, mud, and tightly stretched sacking. He remembers the hut blackened with smoke, washed by the winter rain and bleached grey in the sun until it became a dome of indeterminable material, a swelling of the earth, a hemisphere in miniature. There she spent her last years lying in a quiet curve, fragile as a doll. On dark afternoons his head lolled against her voluminous skirts that wrapped round and round, so that drugged with the smell of smoked old age, he fell with her into ancient sleep. The memory is meshed with a figure in the diorama of the Natural History Museum, where a wrinkled Khoi woman squats by a fire. David does not remember Great-ouma Antjie’s death.
He nevertheless imagines the cataracted eyes tracking back time through paths of mote-speckled light that steal through the door, a tucked-back flap of sacking. On the screen of ochred wall, images of the past flicker by. Antjie is a young girl with legs that are too thin to be beautiful. She unwraps a lump of tail-fat and for the first time greases her legs until the ash grey disappears and her skin gleams dark. She settles into her bower of new ghanna bush, protected from the vastness of the world now fully covered with the yearly chorus of Namaqua daisies. Her arms burrow into the red sand, dew-damp and cool. It is still early. She has been out since dawn to move the herd along to better pasture, and now low cloud obscures the sun. She wriggles to accommodate the new protuberance of breast. Above her the glare of the suppressed sun; below the coolness of the earth pressing into her strange new body. Resting on her elbows, Antjie plucks at the twigs of a shrub, surprised at its suppleness. She pulls off the grey skin in strips that curl instantly; underneath, the fibre is moist and bright green, so that she puts it on her tongue, tumbles it in the cavern of her mouth until its saltiness slips through her e
ntire body, and the earth, as she buries her face in the red sand, stirs beneath as if to receive her.
She jumps up, crying, Heitse! and spits out the fibres. What if the bush were to be as poisonous as the tongue of a puff adder? She could die a lingering death over two days—like Oom Willem’s Booitjie, whom they say turned a mottled yellow—as the poison spread through her fingertips, her new breasts, her shiny brown legs to her toes. And then—and she feverishly works up a saliva with which to wash out her mouth—and then, ice cold dead, she would never have loved. She has to know, and so, peeling strips from another twig, she chants with each: I will, I won’t, until the last I will, which brings confusion. She has started too hastily. Does the stripping mean that she will die or that she will love? Or do they mean the same thing? Antjie rises from her bed of sand, shakes the earth from her shift, and chides herself for the sinful fancy of peering into God’s holy plan.
Driving her flock, she sees the flash of a springbok on the ridge, its fawn coat blending with the geel-bush that have not yet come to life, so that it seems as if the bushes themselves, bored with rootedness and last year’s dress, are taking a rebellious leap towards the hills, quick as the springbok. That is what her man would be like. Quick and lithe as a springbok. His whistle will gather a herd and send the sun scuttling behind the western hills. Antjie pulls her kappie over her head, for the sun has started scorching with all the fury of one too long suppressed.
When Gert, dressed in his Sunday clothes, crumpling his hat in both hands, explained in his slow steady voice that he had been called by the Griqua chief, that he needed a wife to accompany him from Ezelsfontein to the new territory in Klein Namaqualand, her heart thrilled at the adventure, at the earnest man who was to be hers. The hardships of the trek were as nothing; the empty land of Beeswater that lay just beyond the yearly outburst of Namaqua daisy, free of baas or overseer, held all the promise of the new, and if the Chief was frightening, he also knew how to keep them working day and night, so that in no time at all a church was built. During the week the building would be used as schoolroom where Miss Rachael taught the children to read and write.
On that first Sunday of worship in their own church they marched solemnly to the riverbank for Thanksgiving under the great dabikwa tree. Then she saw the true magnificence of the Chief, felt a surge of blood as he stretched out his arms to embrace his ragged congregation. Her lips moved along, silently, as if she could see the prayer bursting from his heart, awakening the words that lay dormant in her own.
To give thanks, Almighty Lord, for giving us direction, for leading us through salt pans and sand dunes to this our Promised Land.
We did not know, Dear Lord, who we were; we did not know to whom we belonged; we did not know why we were languishing on this earth in sorrow and degradation. We were a motley, nameless people, discarded until we were shown the way from the desert wastes of Namaqualand, from the shanties of the Cape Flats, from the Boland, the Free State, and from the lands of Adam Kok to gather here today. Never again will we be slaves.
No longer will we stray nameless across the land of our forefathers. Thou has named us. Thou has brought us together under this tree for which on this glorious spring day we thank Thee.
We, the Griqua people, will commemorate forever this tenth day of September.
We will not forget Thy words: Be a nation for me and I will be a God to you.
Amen.
Her heart filled with pride as the task of holding the sacrificial goat fell to Gert, and Andries Abraham Stockenstrom le Fleur, eyes flashing with holy light, slit its throat with a single movement of drawing the knife and twisting its head, so that the blood bubbled and frothed into the dry earth. Through the growing stain Antjie saw right into the centre of the earth, where a tangle of roots and tubers stirred thirstily to receive the blood seeping down from above.
With the thrill of the quenched earth passing through them, they sang, Juig aarden juig, alom die Heer / Dien God met blydskap—Rejoice earth rejoice, around the Lord / Serve God with gladness—and steatopygous Antjie felt the weight of her body melt away until she was pure spirit flickering in the sunlight. That the Promised Land was barren and the shrubs dwarfed with thirst was only proof of God’s mysterious ways.
Ouma Ragel’s stories may not have been as reliable as he thinks. In her cooking shelter, with the boy tugging at her patchwork skirt, she bent over the blackened pots of slow-cooking mealies and beans packed on a marrowbone, which indelibly flavoured the story in the child’s memory. And so, Ouma, and so? he called impatiently, as she told for the millionth time the tale of the Chief’s imprisonment, for sometimes she would remember a new detail. Thus David ought to have seen how truth, far from being ready-made, takes time to be born, slowly takes shape in the very act of repetition, of telling again and again about the miracles performed by the Chief, seasoned and smoked in Ouma’s cooking shelter to last forever—stories that made that much more sense than the remaining fragments of the old man’s own text. Which, as I pointed out to David, only goes to show that people cannot be relied on to tell their own stories.
Having spent her lungs on reviving the fire, Ouma would sit down for a rest on the packed earth floor, her legs stretched out.
My boy, she panted, it is a faith that he worked hard at, a special Griqua faith of our very own; we cannot even think of doing without it. Pointing to the ridge across the Soutrivier, she said, Look, along there he promised a train would run, right here through the veld, an artery that will carry the riches of the land to the ports of the west coast. And believe you me that day will come, for his predictions have never been wrong. To me, he said—he was always tender with me—Ralie, he said, you will hear the train but you won’t see it.
And what about Plettenberg Bay, Ouma?
The beauty of the waves, he said, will be dashed against the rock. They will build a monstrous building, a white tower of Mammon that will scream out its own ugliness and flash its evil glare for miles and miles. And what did the people from the bay tell us at this year’s conference?
They had been full of it, the people from Krantzhoek crammed into a lorry on their tenth September visit to commemorate the founding of the Griqua reformation movement and to re-enact the sacrifice of the first goat under the dabikwa tree. They told of the fulfilment of the prophecy, of the new bay hotel on the rock floating like a castle—no, like a ship—on the lagoon. When the tide was in you had to cross the water, and from the other end of the lagoon there was the cutest little humpbacked bridge which was, of course, only for the white people, the guests. Who danced every night in the hotel, even on Sundays, some whispered, the women half-naked and smoking cigarettes from long holders, the men with wallets bulging like their prosperous stomachs, making lewd suggestions to the Griqua girls who dusted and swept and changed their sinful sheets. And the building itself, the gleaming white concrete hotel, just as the Chief had said, except—there was without doubt admiration in their voices as they described the grand structure towering above the water—the evening sun reflected in each window so that the place was ablaze with a million suns. No, with the fires of hell, Ouma interjected, our children, our young men and women, should not work at such a place.
But, said someone, it was better than being idle in these days of scarce work, and did the Chief not drum into them the importance of work. Then someone else started up the hymn: Juig aarden juig / alom die Heer. Little Davie thought of the marvellous sea he had never seen, of water rejoicing around the hotel, and he wondered, if the white people were wicked enough, would God set alight and sink their ship-hotel? And he saw the cheeky Lewiesa, who had boxed his ears and said that hammer-headed children should not be counting the teeth of grown-ups, saw her tilting wildly on a balcony, arms still aloft as she shook crumbs from a tablecloth, the cloth transformed into a flag of peace, but in vain as the building staggered and the first angles of blazing windows sizzled in the sea.
Now that would have been a miracle, especially if Lewie
sa, who would have learnt her lesson, were to float back to the beach on a rafter, the linen cloth a taut sail in her stretched-out arms and the lagoon resounding with Juig aarde juig in all twenty tunes sung by the famous Griqua choirs. But he did not care so much for the predictions; anyone could predict hotels if there were rich white people around who did not care to stay at home. It was the real miracles he wanted to hear about, the wonderful things that actually happened like the Chief bursting out of prison gates of iron.
But the railway, I ask, through Beeswater? Did that happen?
Oh yes, it comforted Ouma Ragel in the days before her death. She would listen for the sound; she could hear it long before it appeared—but anyway, by then she was blind as a bat. I had to count the trucks for her. Yes, the Iscor line between Saldanha Bay and Sishen was built alright. But of course all that iron and steel works brought not a penny to the Griquas.
And did you always count the trucks? Or did you make it up for her, I ask.
Of course not, never, he says indignantly. Ouma would in any case have known; she had a sixth sense, a little like the Chief himself.
The way in which Le Fleur with his bare hands burst through the iron doors of prison turns out, from the fragments of manuscript, to have been a metaphor, mistaken by an ill-educated scribe for the truth. Those anxious to preserve the volk’s history worried about the newness of the story but the old man, open to grand suggestions, readily adopted it on his deathbed, along with the governorship of Rhodesia, and the scribe, anxious to make a contribution, countered hostile questions by saying that of course he had not been apprehended, that he had not like a common criminal wanted to escape from prison, that he had merely wanted to prove that he was indeed God’s right-hand man and had gathered together the wardens to show them his feat, whereafter he retired meekly to his cell. And that was only a taste of what was to come: the pardon and the release that would make a whole row of prison wardens choke on their wide-brimmed felt hats.