by Peter Rimmer
"I don't have a wife. Let's go and make lunch on the other side of the kopje. We’ve fired at them. Nothing more till sunset. You think the British army are really coming up to fight Cronjé?"
"Just another rumour."
"The last one was right. General Buller is a famous soldier. Cronjé calls himself a general but he's a burgher like us. Rumour has it his wife's with him in the supply wagons. You ever heard of a war where the general has his wife to hand to cook his breakfast? Now Kruger, he was a general but he's the President. Why we fighting this war?"
"You want to be told what to do by the British? Make you speak English, man. Tax you and send your money to England. The British win, you take your hat off to an Englishman. We win they take their hats off to us."
They walked back over the kopje and looked down at the crater made by the De Beers’ shell.
"Tomorrow, man, I'm digging me a trench," said Karel into the silence.
"That gun could kill us," said a man.
Karel Oosthuizen, nephew of Tinus Oosthuizen whom he had never met, was twenty-five and already as big as his uncle. He could play the game of tossing a two hundred pound mealie sack back and forth over a flat wagon with his elder brother and laugh at the force of the sack hitting his chest. A fat smack from his flat hand could send a man clean off his feet. To keep up his strength on the farm he ate six pounds of meat and twelve eggs every day of his life. His mother's full-time job was feeding her husband and her seven sons, the poor woman never having had a daughter to help her with the chores. And now all her men, including the fifteen-year-old, were out on commando and she was left with ten natives to run the farm further back down the Vaal River: thirty years before the Oosthuizens had fought the natives for the land and Karel worried about his mother, a woman of five foot two inches with only her tongue to keep control. When they all rode off to the call they had thought to be back by Christmas. Smuts had suggested giving the Uitlanders the vote after five years of residence in the Transvaal. Five years was a long time. Five years would make them think like burghers. Then the war would be over and Karel could go home to the farm to look after his little mother and maybe look for a wife. The farm which his father had taken by riding round the perimeter as fast as he could in one day, was big enough for all the brothers and there was more land to be had to the north across the Limpopo where Rhodes had opened the hinterland. He was going to find himself a wife just like his mother and breed himself a family, a very large family.
He had forgotten about Sarie, Frikkie's woman, the one son in the family older than himself. Sarie was pretty in a funny kind of way but she was a poor white from the slums behind Pretoria and Karel's mother treated her just like a black. The two little girls had not even been entered in the front of the big family Bible that had come up on the Great Trek. They were not married, Sarie and Frikkie, Karel knew that. The great sin and Sarie were never spoken of and Karel's mother had never yet spoken to the poor girl, even when the girl was giving birth to the twins not six months after coming on the farm. Sarie was a brave girl and put up with everything for the sake of the twins: they were five now but Sarie had had no more children: something about a breech birth and Sarie nearly dying when the twins were born but it was never talked about so Karel never knew. Rather like his grandfather Martinus who had married a Scot and gone to live in Graaff Reinet in British Cape Colony even though his father, Karel's great-grandfather, had been on the Great Trek. There had been talk in the Transvaal branch of the large Oosthuizen family that the Scots woman taught her children English before the children learned the Taal.
Karel's brothers and father were with General Cronjé and his army who had gone out to block General Buller and his British generals from entering the Transvaal. There were many burghers with Cronjé and a detachment of the State artillery, the only professional soldiers in the whole Boer army. Karel had been hunting far north of the farm with three blacks and when he came back with the meat the men had already gone out with the local commando. Karel rode off alone to war and when he reached Pretoria they sent him down to Kimberley to lay siege to the diamonds town. There was his mother and Sarie and the two girls on the farm with the blacks and all over the Transvaal it was the same and he wished the war would be over and life back to normal.
Taking his large pot of stewed meat and mealie meal away from the others he sat on a rock and looked again at the large shell crater in the ground and it made him think. Families who fought with each other were always the one's that destroyed themselves. Were the Englishmen in Kimberley really his enemies? Only by killing each other would they make each other enemies for a very long time. Karel shivered in the heat and finished his pot of food, spooning up the mush into his large mouth and dripping the gravy down his rich brown beard. High above them all, caught on the thermals that had drifted the birds away from the Vaal River fifteen miles to the north-west, a pair of African fish eagles were crying their desolate call, eight foot wing span open to lie on the warm current of air, the kwee-kwee cry, a last lament in the great blue sky dotted with puffs of white cloud, the birds oblivious of man's insanity down below. Karel watched the great black and white birds, the tails white and shifting to keep the birds right with the thermals, the white heads calling with pain and joy to each other and he watched them for a long time as they turned and drifted north back to the river when he could hear their calls no longer, he was sad.
Sarie Mostert was twenty-two and the mother of the twins, Klara and Griet. For all of her life the world had been hostile and the only weapon she had found for survival was her flashing eyes that once past fourteen-years-old and directed at a male went deep into his soul and then straight down to his genitals. In clothes, mostly dirty, that covered everything except her toes, the brown, soft eyes were the window to the body under the bodices and skirts.
In the slums of Pretoria, away from the near single-storeyed houses with the hospitable stoeps, it was common to find white people poorer than the blacks as when the blacks ran out of money they went back to their kraals to grow mealies and pumpkins round their thatched huts and run cattle in the endless bush or hunt. The whites had nowhere to go and no skills to live in the bush and sometimes the missionaries took pity on them but not always. Good upstanding whites resented their poor relations for showing a bad example to the blacks and hoped they would go back to the slums of Europe.
Sarie could neither read nor write and from the age of six had learned to steal her food and clothes and share them with no one. Her mother had died of influenza when she was eight when the virus decimated the overcrowded and underfed slums and Sarie's father had disappeared soon afterwards for which she was thankful. All she had ever received from her father was a hard, flat hand and a rough tongue. No one had cared about him or Sarie's mother and no one had cared about the little girl with the flashing eyes. Survival was the only force Sarie understood and the need was so strong, stretching back to her primal forebears high in the forest trees that disease passed her by and blind cunning brought her the bare necessities of life.
In the bitter cold nights of winter, newspaper provided the means for her survival, wrapped around her body, her feet and around her face, the lump on the ground tucked into a corner away from the highveld wind ignored by all but the scavenging dogs. The dogs were her best and only friends and she had them lie down next to her, sometimes a mangy dog on either side whimpering from the cold but slowly giving each other the warmth of their bodies and then they slept, woken by the cold cruel morning of another day when the scavenging started all over again, the little girl, dirty, smelly and hungry followed by two, three, sometimes four dogs, the dogs’ skin and ribs. From the dogs she learnt eyes talked better than words, a whole world of soft expression and understanding. Her dogs spoke to her of sympathy, of guilt, of hope and when she stroked them gently on their muzzles they looked at her with the purest love to make their struggle all worthwhile. They were her family.
In the spring and autumn she and the dogs lef
t the slums early in the mornings, past the silent streets of the other world, the snores of comfort rumbling from closed-door houses, barked at but left alone, out into the country, barefoot Sarie trotting with the dogs. Ten miles into the veld, the dogs foraged for rats, big, fat, grain rats that skinned out the size of a rabbit, the dogs instinctively hunting in a pack, flushing and running down the bush rats. Sarie used a stick on the guinea fowl, waiting for the birds to go up in the sparse trees to roost at dusk, softly climbing the trees to the sleeping birds and knocking down as many birds with the swift sharp sweep of her stick, the dogs full of rat, content and away from the bird hunt. In the falling light of day the small girl made her fire and roasted the birds and ate till at last her tummy was full. Then, with the fire piled high to keep away the predators she slept curled up next to the dogs only waking to feed the fire. In those days and nights she could reach out and touch happiness, at night look at the stars and smile, in the day dream by the side of a stream. Sometimes she sang, a beautiful sound and the dogs' ears pricked up to hear the music and all their eyes were smiling.
Every day when the sun was high and hot, she searched the fur of each dog for ticks, their ears and eyes, back and legs and rolling them over scratched their bellies as she looked. When man, black or white, came close, the dogs bared their teeth, circling the girl with protection. When she swam naked in the small rivers and streams that watered the highveld, the dogs lay flat on their stomachs, their snouts stretched forward watching her their eyes full of amusement. None of the dogs swam however much she called. They were the sweet, warm days.
Sarie watched where the monkeys and baboons had eaten berries from the trees and only then did she eat, her knowledge a deep instinct in her genes like her fear of snakes. The years went by full of feast and famine until the girl grew into a woman and the eyes of men grew hungry. She had made some human friends in the slums and some of the farmers, black and white, waved at the dog-girl even if they kept their distance from the hounds. She was part of their world like the veld and sky.
Billy Clifford was twenty-two when he first saw Sarie Mostert. He had woken with the dawn and gone out on the stoep of his father's house in Church Street, the main road that ran through Pretoria. The Cliffords rented the small house while his father, a railway engineer from Dublin, helped build the railway line from Pretoria to Delagoa Bay to give the Boers access to the seaport without going through British territory. Shaun Clifford, Billy's father was a patriot and knew the pain of being forced to live under British rule. Any native who wished to stay free of the British was a friend. Billy was in the Transvaal to visit his parents, having graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, with a degree in English when the dog-girl walked past in front of the stoep, silent on bare feet, flanked by her dogs and carrying a tall, thick stick. He stood up to get another look at the strange sight in the African dawn but the dogs growled and he sat back down again. Billy was bored, there being little to do for a young, Catholic Irishman in the heart of Boer Calvinism. His mother was with the Catholic nuns most of the day doing her good work and his father was off in the swamps of Portuguese Mozambique building his freedom railway line for the Boers. Billy's mother was happy to have his father out of Ireland: Gladstone's Home Rule was not enough for Shaun Clifford. Independence for Ireland with the English, all of them, back over the Irish Sea, nothing less; and he'd fight for it and die for the cause if that was what it took.
Every morning, Billy rose with the dawn and sat in the big wicker chair on the stoep and looked for the dogs and the girl, afraid to go inside and make himself a cup of coffee. It was something to think about, something to do. All the neighbours spoke not a word of English and Billy had no Dutch. He had promised his long-suffering mother to stay for six months and was trying to start his writing but nothing came, only bad copies of the writers who had gone before him, the ones he had so avidly read for his degree. The two girls were married with children of their own and the big brother had left long ago to make a fortune in America and no one in the family knew if he was alive or dead. Billy's brother had never been a man of words and used his fists to inflict his will. Billy feared the worst but kept his thoughts from his doting mother whose life had gone out when her oldest child had sailed out of their lives without even a look back over his shoulder. So the days dragged by and his mind stayed blank and by the end of his third week in Africa, he did not even wish to read. After a week of fruitless early mornings, Billy gave up and listened to his boredom made worse by having no idea what to do with the rest of his life other than to write which he couldn't, his mind as blank as the white pages, his imagination stuck in the nub of nothing. And to make it worse he had no money, Irish nationalism being far more important to his father than allowances for a workshy son.
"You should have been an engineer like me, Billy my boy. Told you that. You can't make anything with words a man can eat." And then he had gone off into his swamps and left Billy with his mother.
Alone, always alone, Billy rode his father's horse out into the African veld, the animal unable to go with his father down into the lowveld for fear of the tsetse fly that killed domesticated animals. Alone he rode each which way the horse would go, caring nothing for the journey. Billy rode fast and well, happy to have the boredom beaten out of his bones and just before the stallion lathered Billy would bring the horse back to a canter and then to a trot and with the slower rhythm the boredom would creep back onto the horse next to him when even the wild animals were no distraction.
The dogs, used to zebra and buck running away from them across the veld, had heard the horse but kept their heads down looking at Sarie naked in the cool water of their stream. The old dog that had been with Sarie nine years was fast asleep under a tree, occasionally yelping at his dreams. A pair of crows lifted out of the tree and flew off downstream before calling back at the interruption, the crows having seen the man on the back of the horse. And when Sarie came out of the water clean and fresh, her nipples hard and pointing, she climbed up the bank of the little stream and looked up into the green eyes of Billy Clifford high up on the stallion's back. While Sarie kept looking at him, the dogs rose up as one with their hackles and the horse shied, dancing a full circle before Billy brought the animal back under control.
The surprise for Sarie was not her nakedness but the reaction of her pack of dogs. Sliding off the stallion's back Billy turned his attention to each of the dogs ignoring her. Without a snarl they lost interest and went back to their own pursuits.
"Have you got your clothes on?" asked Billy with his back to her after the dogs were pacified, with his right hand on the stallion's neck gentling the horse he repeated the question. Then it dawned on him: she spoke no English and he spoke no Dutch. Then he heard the giggle and they laughed out loud together and Billy's boredom flew away high up into the sky. A week later without using one word with each other they were lovers and the dogs took up the habit of trotting behind the big stallion, Sarie perched on its rump, legs astride, her arms clinging round her lover, her face pressed to his back.
The perfect happiness lasted six weeks. Shaun Clifford, returned from the malarial swamps for a short visit to his wife, was not a man to spend money on a son to have a girl in rags from the slums of hell as a daughter-in-law. The scandal, to which the lovers remained oblivious, was presented to Shaun by his wife the moment he returned and sent him into a blind temper. Billy had been away one night and had left Sarie by their river to return to his mother and found his father and two of the neighbours on the stoep in Church Street. The neighbours left quickly without a word and Billy's world crashed around him. A man without money was at the mercy of his father. Whatever he might have thought of as a future, which was nothing as each present moment was all they wanted, came to bear no flower, to have no life of its own.
On the third day of their terrible separation, Sarie, barefoot, walked back through the town with her dogs, past the stoep in Church Street, past Billy wordless in the grip of his father's arm
but their eyes met and hers smiled at him, the treasure for his years to come and for the first and only time Mr and Mrs Clifford saw the mother of their granddaughters. The train left with Billy the next morning on the start of his journey back to Ireland and what appeared to him as the rest of his lonely life.
On the 28th November 1899, when Koos de la Rey and three thousand five hundred burghers opened fire from slit trenches for the first time in warfare and decimated General Methuen's British soldiers advancing over open ground towards the Modder River ten miles south of Kimberley and the fearful ears of Karel Oosthuizen, his youngest brother, Piers, fifteen-years-old, was riding onto the family farm up river to make sure his mother was safe, permission having been given by General Piet Cronjé for the boy to leave the Boer army that was moving down from Mafeking to confront Buller's generals. Sarie was the first to see the lone horseman. For a moment she watched, thoughtful of it being her man, Frikkie, until she recognised Piers. The twins kept close to her as they waited. Elijah came out of the barn and was the first to talk to Piers. Quietly, Sarie took her daughters inside to the room they shared behind the house, a small shed built by Frikkie as near to the main house as his mother would allow. Next to her shed were the servants' sheds, bigger than Sarie's with vegetable gardens and extra rooms for the black children, the children that were not allowed to play with the twins.
Sarie listened from behind her thin walls as Piers told the mother his news. Only when she heard that Frikkie was alive and well did she relax as without her benefactor she knew the old woman would throw them out onto the open veld. In her hostile world she had learned how to protect her babies, the treasure of her life. The war, she no more understood than the world itself, was coming closer. The following morning Piers was gone. Sarie sighed and smiled at her children: whoever won the war would make no difference to Sarie Mostert. Even the blacks had a better status than a poor white with no husband and two illegitimate children. Again she smiled to herself: life could be worse. There was a roof over her head and food every day for the three of them and the girls were full of health and energy green-eyed like their father.