by Andre Brink
Before they left the girl went to her parents. “You need not send anything with me,” she said, “except for the Buffalo from the Veld, the big black one that watches over our tribe.”
They spoke this way and that, for what would they do without the animal? If he were to die the whole tribe would die with him. But the girl pleaded so passionately, promising to look after the Buffalo with her own life, that for her sake they let the sacred animal go. For how, they thought, would she survive without it? Who could tell what dangers lurked where her new husband was taking her?
The girl said nothing at all about the matter to her bridegroom. And the Buffalo followed them without the young man’s ever discovering his presence. In the bundle on her back the young woman had a bunch of herbs, a knife, a calabash of goat fat.
In her husband’s village she was received by her in-laws with much hospitality, and the very first evening the bridegroom went to show her the fields she would be working on the morrow. She said nothing, but back in their hut the bride pretended she had lost her beads and left to look for them. In the deepening twilight she returned to the fields and found the Buffalo waiting there. Whispering, she told him what he was to do. And from that day on the villagers were amazed by her prowess. Early in the morning when the women went down to the fields hers were already plowed and sown and harvested. When they needed water she would put her pots and calabashes outside in the evening, and the next morning they would be filled to the brim. Only, she never had time to put out food for the Buffalo as her parents had always done at home. And so the animal began to waste away with hunger and thirst. When he could not bear it any longer, he complained to her one evening as she came out with her calabashes. “You may graze in the fields,” she told him. “But be careful, make sure no one notices.”
For a few days everything went well, but soon the villagers began to notice that something was amiss with their crops. And when they went to investigate they found buffalo tracks. Without saying anything to the women the men took their assegais and set out on a hunt. But the young woman happened to be outside and from the anxious twittering of the birds she knew that there was trouble coming. Before her mother-in-law could prevent it she ran out after the men, over the veld and through the bushes. She arrived just in time to see her husband’s assegai piercing the Buffalo’s head behind the right ear. The animal fell down dead. She dared not say a word for fear they would discover the truth. But after they had dismembered the Buffalo she carried the head home in her basket. There she withdrew into her hut, and nicked the Buffalo’s ear, holding a horn ready to catch the blood. As the blood began to run she poured her herbs into a pot of boiling water, and with the brew she bathed the animal’s wounds, singing all the while:
“O my father, Buffalo of the Plains,
They told me you would go through deep waters,
They told me you would walk through the shadows,
You are the green plant among the stones,
You make the earth fertile and cause the trees to bear fruit,
O Buffalo of the Plains!”
And as she sang the Buffalo’s head began to grow a new body, and its dull eyes were quickened with bright new life.
But before he was fully revived the woman’s husband came to look for her, and when his voice was heard outside the Buffalo closed his eyes again and the heavy head rolled over the floor.
For two nights, for three nights, she repeated the spell, but each time her husband arrived before the Buffalo had been restored to life. By then it was too late. On the morning of the fourth day she asked the villagers to leave her alone so that she could bathe herself in a river pool. Shaking their heads about her strange customs, they let her be. And once she had reached the pool she went on walking and walking, over the mountains and across the plains, all the way back to her home, where she told the people what had happened. They sent out messengers to all the surrounding villages, and when the people began to arrive the young woman’s husband was among them.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “You have killed us all.”
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “Please explain this thing to me.”
She gave no answer. All the people thronged around her, and one by one they said:
“You have gone through deep waters.”
“You have walked through the shadows.”
“You were the green plant among the stones.”
“You made the earth fertile and caused the trees to bear fruit.”
And every time, as one of them said this, whether man or woman, the one who had spoken would take a knife and plunge it into his or her own heart. Until all the people were dead. The young bride was the last to die.
The brokenhearted young man turned around and walked away from the carnage, over the mountains and across the plains, back to his own tribe. And there they said to him: “We told you not to look for a bride in a strange land but to choose one from among your own people. Now you have lost your lobola.”
“I have come to you for help,” I told the igqira when he had finished the tale, “and all you can offer me is a story.”
“Bring me the sheep first,” he said with a sigh, as if he found it hard to speak.
Once I had obeyed he seemed more satisfied. “There are two kinds of medicine,” he said. “One is for you, the other for the woman. I will start with you.”
We sent the woman to wait in her hut so that he could first anoint me with the salve he had prepared with his own hands, according to his wisdom. But even before he had finished it began to burn so fiercely that I felt my bird was ready to fly up into the night skies with me. I could not stop myself. Right through the fire I ran—only the next day did I discover the blisters on my feet—out of the door, through the bushes, down to the water. But it was no use. My member was burning like a log. In the end I plastered it thickly with clay to cool it off, but the clay started bubbling like boiling water, and in the moonlight I could see a cloud of steam rising from my loins. Within minutes the whole village was assembled around me to find out why I was bellowing so wildly. But I did not answer. That night I spoke in languages that had not yet been invented.
If only the cure had helped, I would still have regarded it as worth the agony. But I swear that by the following dawn, when the fire finally subsided, the thing had grown even thicker and longer than before.
In the meantime, while I was wallowing in the burning mud, the igqira had set to work on the woman. What cure he tried on her I never found out, but he looked very smug when I saw him again. Only it made no difference. To make things worse, he announced that the cure would have to be repeated many times, both mine and hers. First he would come to anoint my member, and as soon as I was running screaming into a night illuminated spectacularly by that flaming torch planted in my groin, he would set to work on the woman.
Until one night I lost my temper where I sat beside the stream with my smoldering member buried in a huge mound of wet clay. Tears still streaming from my eyes, and steam billowing from my loins, I ran back to the village. The Moon was dead, but the reddish glow emitted by my firebird lit up the night, so that I came home rather sooner than the igqira must have expected me. I found him kneeling above my prostrate woman.
“Now don’t you get the wrong thoughts, T’kama,” he said in a voice choking with fear. “This is very special medicine I’m using on her. There is magic in this root.”
I threw him out the door before he could say another word. This very nearly led to war, because he was the igqira and his people could not bear to see him insulted. But I told them I didn’t care what magic he had in his root, the woman was mine. So every man picked up his assegai; and if old Khamab hadn’t caught me by my glowing bird and dragged me off there would have been blood. Before the morning star was up we had to be gone, otherwise they would have slain us all, man, woman and child. They even set their d
ogs on us.1 Some friends.
1. Would a black tribe at the end of the fifteenth century have kept dogs? It seems unlikely to me. Yet that is how I remember it.
11
On a language lesson in the wilderness
In that year, if that was the year—
the year da Gama discovered the sea route around the Cape of Storms, six years before Hieronymus Bosch painted his “Last Judgment,” the year when Leonardo turned forty-six and Michelangelo twenty-three, six years after Columbus had reached the coast of America and the Moors had been driven from Granada, thirteen years before Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly and nineteen years before Luther’s ninety-five theses, about three-quarters of a century after Mutota had founded the empire of Mwenemutapa (later more widely known as Monomotapa) in present-day Zimbabwe, and about one thousand two hundred years after the first people of the Christian era had settled in the Transvaal, thirteen years after Caxton had printed Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and forty-five years after the fall of Constantinople—
in that year our wandering through the wilderness began.
“It’s all your fault,” old Khamab was quick to tell me. “Why did you have to meddle with their igqira? Am I not good enough for you?”
“Nothing you did could help me with the woman, Khamab,” I reminded him. “You know you’ve tried everything.”
“Then it’s time you realized it cannot go on like this. It’s not just your life and the woman’s, it’s all of us.” Or words to that effect.
“I’ll go through the fire for her, Khamab.”
“You’ve already gone through the fire, and look what happened.”
“I won’t ever stop trying.”
“And what is to become of us?”
“We’ll get through.”
“Is this faith or pigheadedness?”
“Is there a difference?” I put my hand on his bony shoulder. “Just tell us which way to go so that we can get away from this place.”
“You think we can ever escape the eye of Gaunab?” he asked angrily. But without waiting for an answer he turned his back on me and started fiddling with his medicine horn. With deft fingers he maneuvered a strip of leather as thin as a blade of grass into his mixture of grease and herbs, then rubbed two sticks together to make fire and set the strip alight. As soon as it began to glow he cautiously held the horn against the wind to see which way the wisp of blue smoke would go. There was no need of explanation, we all knew the procedure. We set out in the direction the smoke had indicated. Day after day we proceeded like that, on a route that kept us roughly parallel with the coast.
Not that it helped much, for we seemed to carry the evil with us.
In the earliest times, when the first human beings were still fresh from Tsui-Goab’s hands, those people had been much plagued by Gaunab, the Dark One, the Destroyer, who waged unending war against them. Tsui-Goab tried to protect his creatures. In the beginning he was beaten every time by Gaunab, but from every encounter he emerged stronger and stronger. Until there came a day—or a night, to be precise, because it was in utter darkness that Tsui-Goab lay sleeping beside a stream and Gaunab came upon him and the two began to wrestle—when he dealt Gaunab a death blow behind the ear. But as he fell, Gaunab struck out at him one last time and broke his knee. Which is where Tsui-Goab got his name, Lame-Knee.
And so the Dark One had been killed. But for us, if something dies, that does not mean it will be dead forever. Look at Heitsi-Eibib and his graves dotted throughout the wasteland of the interior: every time he came back to life. The same with Gaunab. And from harsh experience I can confirm this, for what was our interminable trek but a continuation of that first war between Gaunab and Tsui-Goab?
From the beginning the signs were there for all to see. That rare sight, stars streaking through the sky and dying in a rain of sparks, now occurring every night. Hamerkop birds perched at dusk in shallow water, treading the soft mud to stir up the spirits of the dead and foretell new deaths. A grasshopper chirping in the thatch of a hut. Whirlwinds chasing us in all directions, sometimes right into the trees. One day an old woman fell from such a tree, directly in the evil thing’s way, and sarês whirled right over her, leaving her dead, every bone in her body broken. And all this to remind us that there was no getting away.
One night while we were singing our songs to T’kaam, the Moon, she was devoured, by darkness right in front of our eyes, bite by bite, until there was nothing left but a dull rind.
And worst of all there was the woman stepping on a mantis in the grass one morning. She of all people. We couldn’t even scream or groan, it was so bad. The people backed off in all directions and kept as far from her as possible. For that was a sure sign that she was carrying disaster with her.
“It’s now or never,” old Khamab warned me that night when we were alone together. “Tomorrow, when we move on, she stays behind. We cannot wittingly carry death with us.”
And I must admit that for once I nearly succumbed. Yet something forced me to persist: “She didn’t see the t’gauab. It was an accident. She doesn’t even know why everybody is so upset.”
“There is no need for her to know. And whether it was an accident or not is immaterial. It happened. That is enough. It is too much.”
I shook my head, but what could I say? What she had done was an unequivocal sign that we were walking through a land of shadows. And the others were adamant. As we rose to set out the following morning there was no doubt at all in the gestures with which they motioned her to stay behind. They left with her a few calabashes of curdled milk, a bag of honey, an ostrich egg, as was the custom of our tribe when people too old or weak to travel had to be abandoned.
“You cannot do this,” I whispered.
“Come on.” That was all old Khamab said in reply. And from the way in which the men took hold of their kieries I could see that they were now past talking.
“Then I shall stay with her.”
“Don’t be stupid,” said my friend Khusab. “You are our chu’que.”
“I am not going without this one.”
He hesitated, but old Khamab urged him on; and soon we could only see the dust of their trek against the early sun.
As I turned back I saw the woman staring at me, shielding her eyes with a hand. The naked fear in her face. But something else as well, which looked like pity.
“I’m staying,” I said, but of course she couldn’t understand.
It was not that she cried: but there were tears running down her face, tracing small furrows through the grease and buchu with which, like the other women, she had smeared herself; clutching the kaross tightly to her body, shrunken into a narrow bundle as if she would like to return to stone, growing back into the earth.
I came to her and pressed my finger to her forehead. “Khois,” I said. And once again: “Khois.”
Without any change in her expression, the tears still running down her face like rain, she took my hand in both of hers and repeated softly: “Khois. Woman.”
I pressed my finger against my chest and said: “T’kama.”
She found it difficult to shape the click with her tongue, but the word she said did bear some resemblance to my name: “T’kama.”
Turning round I pointed to where the last dust was still lingering, and said: “Khoikhoin. People of people.”
She lowered her head and I heard her saying: “T’kama.” This time the click was very clear.
12
In which for the time being the narrative continues without the narrator
“Now you will have to lead us,” old Khamab told Khusab as they descended toward a shallow ford in the first stream they reached, after half a day’s walking. “With T’kama gone, we need a new chu’que.”
“How can I take T’kama’s place?” asked Khusab warily.
“That is how it should be.”
> “Suppose he comes after us?”
“He’ll stay with the woman.”
“This isn’t a good thing at all, Khamab.”
“It’s T’kama who brought it on us. And there is only one way of getting Gaunab off our tracks.”
But how could he, of all people, have expected Gaunab to give up so easily? It started at that very first ford through the stream: a stream so shallow it had been a mere trickle the last few times people had passed that way. That morning, too, it appeared harmless. And heavy-hearted as he was, Khusab began to cross with light feet, hardly looking where he stepped, there being almost no running water between the stepping-stones and slabs of cracked mud. But before he was halfway through there came a growling sound from the water below and it began to bubble as if it were at a boil. Screaming with fear, the people ran back helter-skelter to the bank, where they bundled together. Khusab hesitated for a moment, then began to sprint to the far side. Just in time he jumped clear, for by that time the water was up to his knees. The people were ready to scatter in all directions and that might well have been the end of the tribe if old Khamab hadn’t managed, with much trouble, to calm them down, people and animals all in a scared huddle beyond the reach of the angry water.
It took him a long time to persuade them that the water had stopped growling and bubbling, having subsided once more to a quiet trickle among the flat rocks; and it stayed that way when the old man began to lead the people across in hesitant twos and threes. Only when, after a good while, Khusab deigned to come back gingerly from the opposite bank to lend a hand did the water suddenly start boiling and snarling again, and this time he very nearly did not reach the side. Old Khamab had to bury him in mud up to his waist to appease the burns on his legs. And the sun was already setting by the time the last people and sheep and cattle had finally been brought safely through the ford.