by Andre Brink
If only I could explain to her: but the woman couldn’t speak. Then I remembered the birdlike sounds her Beard Men used to utter, and that set me thinking about birds. What with those exorbitant colorful clothes they had worn, and she too when she’d been with them, they resembled birds more than any other live thing I had seen. Which was why I hatched the thought that perhaps one could tame her by following the example of her kind. Only, they were gone by now, so how would I discover their rituals of mating? I had seen them naming the women they had acquired from us before coupling with them, and that I was prepared to do, but would it be enough?
As I wandered along the narrow winding path where the day before we had attacked the strangers with our arrows, I came upon the hat of one of the k’onkwa in a white-thorn bush. Yesterday I’d forbidden my people to lay their hands on a single bead or hair or feather of the intruders; but this was a different matter. I tore the hat from the bush, and dusted it, and twirled it on my hand to study it from all sides. The shiny buckle, the frivolous tail plume. And it occurred to me that if I put on that hat I would resemble the men of her own kind, and that might persuade her to go down and turn her docile tail to me the way female birds do to their prancing males.
The others drew back when they saw me coming into the opening in the bush, not recognizing me at first. But in a moment they did. By that time the cattle skins had already been peeled from some of the huts and rolled into bundles, leaving the bare latticework like unfinished or abandoned nests.
“Good,” I said. “The sun must not set on us in this place again.”
“We’ll be on our way before the sun is high,” said old Khamab through the bluish fumes of his dagga pipe. He made a motion with his gray head to draw me closer, and asked softly, out of earshot of the others: “But what about the woman?”
“What about her?”
“You leaving her here, or what?”
“How can I leave her here? She is mine. She is coming with.”
“The people will complain. She is not one of us.”
“It is my woman. They’ll get used to her.”
“You haven’t even managed to kwekwa her yet.”
“How do you know?”
He grinned, baring his toothless tortoise gums, turning his watery eyes to the sun. “I know everything.”
I squatted down beside him. “Khamab, there’s no need for you to worry. Before we leave this place it will have been done.”
“It’s high day.”
“If one unrolls the doorskin of a hut closed it is night inside.”
He clicked his tongue. “The things of day and night must be kept apart.”
“There’s time enough. I’ll ask the women to prepare her.”
He said nothing, but the way he blew out smoke was eloquent enough. He was still sitting there when I came back from the women, turning round to watch them as they entered the hut where the smooth-haired woman was kept. I knew the ritual. They would grease her body with goat fat from head to toe; then rub fragrant buchu powder into her limbs, in every fold and cranny. That was our custom. And while they were busy inside the hut—one could hear the murmuring of their voices, occasionally broken by a sudden shrill burst of laughter—old Khamab helped me to prepare myself. I was resolved to make an unforgettable impression. The plumed hat I drew down over my head, almost covering my eyes, so that I had to walk with my head thrown back in order to see. Then flowers. Plastered into the grease with which I had thickly covered my whole body. Small blue and yellow and white ones, covering every square inch of my skin. And into the coarse hair at the bottom of my belly I plaited the blood-red petals from aloes. What with all this activity and thinking about what lay ahead, the thing was already standing up mightily again, and that gave me the idea of tying to it the biggest, whitest, most beautiful ostrich feather I could find among our bundles. You should have seen that feather quivering with every step I took. The flowers kept on falling off as I moved about, but there were enough of them left. What woman could refuse a man like that? Look at the birds: weaver birds, and finches, paradise birds, hornbills, swallows: it is always the male that is most brightly plumed.
Behold the man: here I come.
The women have left the hut. I enter. Everything has become deadly quiet outside and I know they are drawing together in a tight circle around the hut to listen. Inside, too, it is absolutely still, not a breath of sound.
It takes me a long time, standing motionless, to get accustomed to the dark. At last I can see her clearly, in a small curled-up bundle opposite me, her back turned to me, anointed with smoothness, shining in her nakedness, all woman, and with that long hair.
“Khois,” I say, my voice choking in my throat, and the feather shaking on its trembling mast.
I dare to come closer, shedding petals with every move, strutting in small stiff steps like a ground hornbill, following the lead of my plumed staff.
“Khois,” I say again, surprised at the strangeness of my own voice. “Here I am.”
A small movement of her head. Hands covering her face. But at last I see the fingers part.
I bow before her, but that causes the hat to drop right over my eyes, so I can see no more. I stamp my right foot on the dung floor to make sure she will not miss the fluttering plume. Thinking in my mind: Heitsi-Eibib, Tsui-Goab, People of the Shadows, of yesterday and tomorrow, behold me now, I feel a great thing coming.
And then she bursts out laughing.
If she’d started screaming again in fear like the first day, fine; even if she’d shouted at me in rage, or sworn at me, or begun to cry. What I would have liked best was a sound to say, “Come here.” But any other reaction, even of revulsion, I could have handled. Except her laughter. And once she’d started she couldn’t stop again. It was so violent that she toppled right over on the floor, and it went on for so long that it began to sound like sobbing, but it was laughter, so totally uncontrollable that her whole body was shaking.
Nothing brings a man down as quickly as laughter. In a moment that whole great proud feather was drooping limply on its bough. And still she went on laughing.
“Hurry up,” I curtly told Khamab when I came outside. “We’re leaving. What are you staring at? We’ve got a long road ahead. Haven’t you ever seen a feather before?” I tore off the damn thing and trampled it into the dust; and the hat I threw whirring into the euphorbias.
And so we set out on our trek of years and droughts. And if I think back now of everything that happened before we returned to that place, my hand is almost too heavy to shape another word.
8
In which an attempt is made to reconstruct on a modern map the route presumably followed by the narrator and his tribe during their years of wandering before at last they returned to Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth), which might have been the place they had set out from
9
On the growth of all manner of things
The first time we really became aware of the thorns must have been the third or fourth day of our trek. The reason for not noticing them before might well have been our eagerness to get as far away as possible from that evil place: we were on the move almost constantly, calling a halt only after sunset and setting out again before sunrise in the morning. So it is quite possible that the thorns had been growing from the very first night without our discovering the fact. When we camped in the dark in what seemed like a clearing, only to find ourselves surrounded by dense thornbushes when we woke up, it was natural for us to assume that in the falling night we simply hadn’t taken proper notice of our surroundings. But on that particular day it was impossible to ignore the phenomenon.
The day before we had been so exhausted that we’d made a stop quite early beside a stream where the parched sheep and cattle could drink and graze their fill; and we’d been unanimous about allowing ourselves a day of rest. When at last we crawled from our bedding of gr
ass and scrub, the sun already high in the morning sky—which was hardly our custom, as we believed that a person should be up and about before the sun can cast a shadow on one’s sleeping place—we found the whole clearing densely overgrown with thorn bushes. Where there had been a wide-open space the day before these bushes were now growing, taller than any one of us. The path to the drinking place, where we had been moving freely to and fro a matter of hours before, was now invisible through the undergrowth, as was the way we’d planned to go from there, and the way along which we had arrived.
“What’s this?” I asked old Khamab, knowing that he was the only one among us likely to come up with an explanation.
“Never seen such a thing,” he mumbled angrily. “Perhaps we didn’t look properly yesterday.”
“You know as well as the rest of us that this place was quite bare yesterday.”
“Perhaps it’s just a very fertile spot.”
“Yesterday morning and the day before we also had to break our way through the thorns, but then we thought it was because of going to bed in the dark and rising before dawn.”
“There must be something trying to prevent us from going on,” he said, staring morosely at a line of ants urgently carrying off all the seeds and eggs from their nest.
“What could it be?”
“Don’t know. Ask the land.” With his sandy eyes he swept a broad swath of the landscape around us—the dull green hills billowing like buttocks, the thickets in their folds—before turning them on me, staring unblinking against the sun. “You think it may be because of the woman?”
“There’s nothing wrong with the woman.”
“Have you succeeded with her yet?”
“I tried, but it was the wrong time. She’s t’nau.”
“All we can do is pack up and move on.”
“But we decided to have a day of rest. The people are exhausted. So are the animals.”
“It’s up to you. You’re the chu’que. But my advice is to pack up. Look, even the ants are moving on.”
Which was what we did. But it took all our strength to hack our way through that tangle of thorns and shrubs; the branches actually seemed to sprout out rapidly behind us as soon as they had been lopped off. The sun was already coming down to roost by the time we’d crossed the stream and moved uphill to a barren height. Heavy clouds were gathering overhead. Strange yellowish clouds they were, an unholy color, like blood or pus filtering through darkness. And we had our hands full with the sheep and cattle, which kept on breaking back downhill toward the stream and the thickets of thorn. By nightfall we were missing several of them, so we decided to leave off until the morrow.
But that night a storm broke out, which was most unusual, for the rainy season in those parts was still months away as we knew from generations of experience. Lightning running through the sky like flaming cracks, thunder rumbling like mountains sundering or cliffs crashing. Rain pouring right through us where we sat huddled together, scared to death, on that bare slope without any shelter. Even so we were lucky, as we discovered when the rain stopped two days later and we broke out of our tangled huddle, soaked to the bone and streaming red with mud, shivering in the thin sunlight: below us, where we had camped before, there was nothing left. In an elbow of the little river the stream had burst its banks, flooding the plains, and only small tufts of bush were visible here and there above the swirling muddy water. The sheep we’d lost had disappeared entirely. Before the day was out two of the smallest children among us and an old woman had also died of exposure, and we had to bury them under mounds of stones to keep the predators away before we could continue on our trek.
The woman was still with us, covered now from head to toe with a kaross of rock-rabbit skins the other women had given her, otherwise the cold would undoubtedly have carried her off too. We were all of us dumbfounded and depressed. It had been a bad start to the trek. And it didn’t get any better either. Those growing thorns continued to haunt us: every evening we would select an open spot for our encampment; the next morning when we got up it would be overgrown. Perhaps the most unnerving aspect of the situation was that no one ever dared to discuss it openly. Except for Khamab and me, when we were alone together, all pretended that nothing out of the ordinary was going on. It was simply too dangerous to throw open the flimsy kraal of our fears and allow words to come in.
Also my shoulder was playing up badly because of the cold. Old Khamab tried everything he could. In due course the visible wound was healed, but the muscles remained tense, with a dull ache lodged in them, which was to stay with me all my life.
The woman never complained. She withdrew completely, not only into her kaross but deep into herself. After her t’nau time had passed, when the women had washed and cleansed her again, and rubbed herbs and goat fat into her and prepared her, I made several more attempts to take her aside in the night: the others would all be asleep by then, except for old Khamab, who never slept, sitting unblinking beside the fire like an ancient owl. In all the years I knew him he never slept: that was because in his youth he had once passed a water hole in the veld and dared to look into the eyes of the Great Snake with the shiny stone on its forehead.
The woman never protested or resisted when I took her aside. There were no more tears left in her, I think. Nor laughter, after that first time. I never tried to bedeck myself with feathers and flowers again. Yet it never worked. It is a shameful thing to confess, but I was simply too big for her. We tried in all imaginable ways, from above, from below, from left and right, from the side, with her lying on her back or astride on me, or on hands and knees, or standing, any imaginable way. But it was like those thorn bushes: every time my kierie came near to where it so urgently desired to introduce itself, it seemed to start growing, an impossible club, a tree trunk too large and unwieldy to enter anywhere. I had the impression that the woman was actually beginning to feel sorry for me, because that wild bird-thing was growing into proportions no human being could believe. And every time I so vainly tried to enter her, it grew some more in size, in girth, in length, until I had the feeling that it was no longer I who carried it with me but that I had become a mere appendage to my bird. I had to walk with legs astride to allow it space to stand or dangle.
This was how things stood with us, and even worse, by the time we’d crossed the first series of rivers and with our
cattle and our fat-tailed sheep we came across another tribe of people.
10
In which the story of a buffalo is told and a firebird takes flight
They were people we had met before, on earlier treks when we’d passed through their territory; on some occasions we had spent several moons with them before moving on. Ever since Heitsi-Eibib’s time our people had been wandering through the land, following rains or the sun, in search of grazing fields or water. But those people had more or less settled in one place with their huts and their cattle and their lands, for as far back as anyone could remember. Xhosas. We usually got along well together and we understood enough of their language, they of ours, to be friends.
By the time we reached their territory they had also, they told us, become acquainted with the strange Beard Men from the sea and had bartered cattle. Naturally they were most surprised to see the white woman among us and hear her story. (But our story, mine and hers, was just beginning.) We spent the winter months with them, which gave us enough time to talk and discuss and ask or give advice, and speculate about the k’onkwa and the future.
There was one man among them, not quite as old as Khamab, but old enough, thin as a stick, a witch doctor. It wasn’t I who sought him out, for I knew well that Khamab would disapprove; but I presume he himself, being an igqira, must have noticed that there was something wrong with me. He called me aside.
“From the day you first came here,” he said, “you have been losing weight every day. You must have a problem.”
“I
won’t deny it.”
“Show me your problem.”
I took out my problem and showed it to him.
The igqira whistled through his front teeth. “This is really a big problem.” He motioned in the direction of the women. “Is it because of that woman?”
“It is.”
“Tsk, tsk.”
“Do you have a remedy for me?”
“It will cost you two fat-tailed sheep.”
“I’ll give you three, and willingly, if you can help me.”
“There’s nothing I cannot help you with. I am the best igqira there is.”
“Then help me.”
“I shall tell you a story.”
“It’s advice I need, not a story.”
“There’s no problem in the world that cannot be solved by a story.”
“Then tell me.”
“Listen.”
And he told me what had happened in the time before time, before his people had arrived in that place, when they had still lived much further to the north and east. In those days, he said, there had been a young man in the tribe who said to his father and mother: “I want to find myself a wife, but not from our tribe.”
It was a reckless, unheard-of thing to do, and they were deeply perturbed about it, but because they loved him dearly they let him go. He gathered his lobola cattle and set out with them, over mountains and plains, far, far away, until he reached a place where he found a number of young girls pounding grain in tall hollowed tree trunks, and one of them caused his heart to jump. Without more ado he approached the old men of the tribe and asked their permission to marry the girl. They first demanded to know when his parents would come over to discuss the matter as was their wont, but he told them that he had all his lobola with him, and he was in a hurry. And even though their hearts were heavy with misgivings, they accepted the cattle and allowed the two to go.