Half of One Thing

by Zirk van den Berg

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘An adventurer, then. Looking for some excitement in a far-off country.’

  Gideon turned his hat in his hands. Tell them what they want to hear, Major Bryce had said. Reflect their own opinions back to them. Adding a bit of idealism wouldn’t hurt either. ‘You’re a perceptive man, the adventure is probably part of it. But I’m inspired by your cause. The British story about protecting the foreigners in the Transvaal is just an excuse. They say they’re fighting for civilised values, but it’s more about valuables, isn’t it? They just want your gold. Yours is a just cause, worth fighting for if a man is to live with himself in this world.’

  ‘And you realise this fighting calls for great personal sacrifice. Life in the veldt isn’t easy. From time to time you’ll get shot at. You may even be hit. You could die here, for a cause that isn’t yours.’

  In this regard it was different to fighting for the Empire. ‘I know that.’

  ‘That’s what they say. That’s what we all said. But can you shoot at a man to kill him?’

  Gideon knew he could do it, but Mr Doncker of Java wouldn’t have had the opportunity without committing murder. What he didn’t know is if he could shoot at someone who was on his side in this war. Major Bryce said if it couldn’t be avoided, he had to do it to maintain his cover. ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

  ‘How many rounds do you have for your rifle?’

  ‘Two dozen or so.’

  ‘That’s not going to get you far. We’ll have to find you a Lee-Enfield. Those are the only rifles we have enough ammunition for. The Khakis drop the rounds wherever they go and we pick them up to shoot them with. Idiots, arming their enemies.’

  This was something he’d bring up with Major Bryce next time, Gideon decided.

  Eksteen held up the pistol. ‘Not much call for this sort of thing at the ranges we usually fight at.’

  ‘I got the impression officers carried hand weapons.’ The start of a scene Gideon and Major Bryce had played out many times.

  ‘In this army, you won’t be an officer, no matter how rich or important you were back in Java.’

  ‘No … The thing is I expect I’m going to need some help early on, just until I find out how to look after myself from day to day in the veldt. I brought the pistol not for me, but as a gift, payment, for not being–’

  ‘And who were you thinking of giving it to?’

  ‘Whoever’s in charge. You, I suppose. It’s yours.’ The idea was to get on the commandant’s good side as soon as possible. Who wouldn’t want a weapon like that?

  The commandant turned the pistol over and over in his hands, took the grip, aimed at a pebble.

  ‘It’s called a broomstick Mauser, because of the handle. A C96, brand new.’

  ‘It’s so ugly it’s beautiful.’

  ‘I told you you can have it. It’s nothing less than fair.’ Gideon undid his belt and slipped the holster off. ‘Here, this goes with it. Unfortunately I don’t have many bullets, but … as you said, there probably won’t be much occasion to use a weapon like that.’

  Eksteen looked at the volunteer with his one eye, a frozen stare that chilled Gideon’s insides. ‘You can stay for now … Anyone can talk. The day I see you shoot a Khaki is the day I’ll trust you.’

  27 October 1901

  Having pretended to be just like others for most of his life, Gideon slipped into his new role with ease. He had been with the Boers for just over a month. In the first weeks, he had the boy Klein Steyn and Triegaardt assigned as his minders, but any doubts the Boers may have had about him evaporated when they saw Gideon shoot at their enemies. A man willing to kill for your cause must be willing to die for it too, they assumed, and who can ask for more than that?

  The commando was camped at the foot of the Drakensberg, where the Free State’s famous plains crumple and fold into a web of valleys and ridges, presided over by a tiered array of kopjes and peaks. The main mountain range rose in the east, outside this war, in Basutoland, looming over everything, looking from here like half the world. The men were in a hollow on the spine of a ridge, allowing them to see any oncomers from a distance while remaining out of sight themselves. There were only about forty of them, many having slipped off to go see if their homes were fine. Gideon was amazed by this, but being a citizen army with elected leaders, the Boers did not have traditional military discipline. The remaining men were mostly town dwellers and those whose farms had already been burnt down. A few of them clustered around the blacksmith, who was reviving horseshoes or fashioning nails from broken buckles and shards of artillery shells. Some scratched mud from their blankets or tried to sew together the tatters they were wearing; a few played cards; others lay chewing on biltong, grass stems or persistent thoughts. One man had washed his only shirt and draped the threadbare cloth over a bush. He stood with crossed arms, hugging his shoulders. He had an unusual scar on his back, caused by a lancer in one of the battles on the Tugela River in the early months of the war. While bullet wounds were worn with pride, a lance wound was a reminder of a terrible insult. The Boers considered the use of medieval weaponry against them intolerable.

  Gideon found the Boers a strange lot, Old Testament people armed with modern guns. Their base nature – their inclination to indignation, their self-righteousness, crassness and even cruelty – was coupled with an overt piety like two donkeys harnessed at an angle. They blundered on with obstinacy, occasional stumbles and, in moments of grace, genius. They were God’s fools, equally capable of holiness and horror. They were devoted to an obvious and therefore simple cause. They were fighting an enemy who had come to invade their land. The fact that they had themselves invaded this land fifty years earlier was glibly overlooked. They were, after all, white men and, in their own estimation, God’s people.

  The backdrop to their lives, both geographically and historically, was grandiose. Still, the everyday business of life continued, as it always does. There were periods of hardship, moments of violent terror and fleeting triumph, but it always returned to this – food, clothing and rest.

  Even while engaged in a struggle between nations, petty squabbles flared up among the fighting men. The day before, Gideon witnessed a bizarre ritual. Someone had accused the Jew Matzdorff of stealing a cooking pot. A summary field trial decided the culprit had to ‘ride the hide’. They took a hide of an ox that had been covered in blood, now hardened on the hair side. Poor old Matzdorff was made to take off his clothes and sit on the stretched hide, which was held around the edge by other men. They then proceeded to toss the Jew into the air repeatedly by alternately slackening and pulling on the hide. Matzdorff screamed, though it wasn’t clear to Gideon if it was from exhilaration, fear or the chafing of the coarse hide on his bare skin. The whole scene struck him as primitive and perverse.

  Imagine the face of Imogene Ballard if he told her that story over a cup of tea, in the shade of a pohutukawa tree. But of course he couldn’t. As far as the people back home were concerned, he was out mapping the veldt … Pramberg, elevation six-thousand-five-hundred feet, with a rocky outcropping in the middle, like a nipple. God, he’d been away from civilisation too long. Many of the kopjes around here were shaped like female breasts, pointy with a cylinder of pale apricot sandstone sticking out on top. Gideon had seen smaller hills with this shape near Rotorua once. There he had assumed the tip was the solidified core of an ancient volcano, but the colour seemed wrong here and he didn’t know anything about the geophysical forces that had shaped this part of the world.

  Something was happening at the shallow end of the hollow, behind a clump of scraggly trees. You could see the heads starting to turn. One or two men got to their feet. A strange thing appeared, a black octopus waddling along. Gideon looked through the binoculars. It was two horses walking side by side with a dead kudu strapped between them. The antelope’s hooves dragged and its spiralled horns lay over one horse’s back. A man led the horses, with another walking alongside, moving the kudu’
s horns away from the horse’s neck from time to time. The kudu’s throat was cut and the animal appeared to have been gutted already.

  ‘Von Waltsleben got it up in the kloof this morning,’ the one leading the horses announced when they reached the waiting men. Tromp didn’t identify which ravine he meant, it didn’t matter. There were untold folds in the mountains. Tromp enjoyed the attention, something that only came his way when he happened to ingratiate himself with someone more noteworthy than himself. Behind him, Von Waltsleben held on to the horns without looking up. He was known to be the best shot in the commando. At the siege of Ladysmith, Von Waltsleben famously dropped a townsman at eight-hundred yards, as the unfortunate man left the post office, having posted letters that could not get through the Boer lines anyway. People can cling to normality like they cling to life itself. It didn’t help that man, Gideon thought; the heart cannot do its job once it has been torn. The hunters brought the bounty close and everyone gathered around. It was a magnificent bull. ‘Look at the size of the thing. We couldn’t get one horse to carry it back and we didn’t want to slaughter it up there. There were some Sothos about who didn’t look too friendly.’

  There were enough volunteers to help with the slaughter in the hope of sharing the spoils. Provisions, like everything in this supposed army, were dealt with informally and by common agreement. The men undid the straps and ropes that held the kudu and the animal collapsed, frightening the horses. They were not gun-shy, but this was something new. ‘There’ll be plenty of meat here.’ The men rolled the carcass onto its side and the knives came out.

  Gideon stood back, watching them cut through the skin and then hack the hide loose from the meat. A couple of gorged ticks got flicked away and stepped on, bursting with purple blood. The men helping would probably share in the feast tonight.

  The morning smelled of raw meat. Blowflies were swarming around the carcass. The men cut off one hind leg and carried the shuddering bulk to one side, strings of soft yellow fat dangling from it. They tied it to a branch to dry out in the wind and ordered a boy to keep the flies off it. Someone had dug out the kudu’s organs. The heart was set aside for tougher times, the liver and kidneys put straight into a black three-legged pot.

  Gideon went back to his spot and unwrapped a cloth with some beskuit in it. The Boers loved the lumpy, dried biscuits, but he still tried to get used to it. The taste wasn’t great, but they kept for weeks and held the hunger at bay. When did he last have a proper meal, with vegetables and cutlery?

  A loud whistle from the sentry stopped everyone. He signalled: someone approaching.

  ‘There goes lunch, boys,’ said one of the butchers, wiping his knife on the dusty kudu hide.

  ‘Now you know why I hate the bloody Khakis.’

  ‘There are better reasons.’

  Heat from the wood burner spread through the kitchen, breathing on Esther’s legs as she moved past the open oven door. A chicken ventured in from outside, curious about this place its friends disappeared to forever. Esther shooed it out. Outside, under pale-blue skies, birdsong sounded, a goat bleated and voices murmured from the natives’ huts. Closer, a pail creaked in its hinges, heralding the appearance of a teenage Sotho boy at the corner of the house. He brought the pail of milk into the kitchen, set it on the scarred wooden table. ‘Thanks, Stompie.’ She liked this boy, his ready smile.

  ‘What next, missy?’

  ‘The ewes that have lambed need to be brought to the near field.’ Esther had been running the farm since her father and brother left for the war. Her mother had been unable to change the habits of a lifetime and had confined herself to running the household.

  When Stompie left, Esther decanted the milk into a beaker, then into a bottle. She wasn’t sure what her mother had in mind; there had been talk of making butter. She went through to the lounge, where Stompie’s grandmother was wiping furniture oil on the wood of the harmonium. The old woman had started working for Esther’s grandfather when she herself was only a little girl. The families had lived and worked together for two generations. Esther caught a glimpse of her mother through the window and went out to join the older woman on the stoep.

  Mrs Calitz had been feeding the canaries in a cage that hung from the rafters, but her attention was drawn by something else. ‘What do you think that could be about?’ she asked, pointing down the road to some willows in the distance. There was no alarm in her voice. Mrs Calitz was surprised by every event and yet accepting of all circumstances.

  The farmhouse lay in a wide dale flanked by low ridges, a faint road tracing the lowest contour. When you travel by ox wagon, you want to avoid heights. This was no wagon though, but a boy on horseback, riding like he had the devil on his heels.

  Esther strode out to meet him. She grabbed the reins and held them while he tried to get his breath back. He was from the next farm over, the Naudés, but the message had been relayed from further away.

  ‘Did the Khakis come?’

  He nodded wildly. ‘They’re on Leliefontein.’

  Leliefontein was three farms over, so they should have some time, depending on the route the Khakis took. Esther had known it was a matter of time before the enemy came to burn their farm. She had the intelligence to recognise the military justification for this, but felt morally outraged. She was capable of incisive thought, but did not allow that to complicate her decision-making. Thinking could be a frivolous game, one she indulged in deliberately and knowingly at times, but she kept it in its place. There were truths more important than any argument, values that supersede reason, and for these she needed no justification. Love and loyalty guided her. She lived in a world of certainties, arrived at by experience and intuition. The earth informed her and heaven inspired her.

  Her self-assurance was obvious and people latched on to that. Even among neighbouring farms, it was tacitly understood that Esther Calitz knew what was best. She had given them a plan. When the Khakis came to burn their farms, they would hide and not be herded off to concentration camps. Over many months, she had been preparing a place for them, in a secluded ravine locals called the Lost Lamb, because if you couldn’t find livestock, that’s often where they were, a rift in the earth’s crust that surprised those who stumbled upon it. You could be virtually upon it and not know it was there. By midwinter, she had the Lost Lamb ready, stocked with tents, blankets and food essentials. It had a spring for water and grazing for enough livestock to provide them with meat and milk. On half a dozen farms, the women, children and workers were ready to leave for the Lost Lamb at the first sign of approaching enemy troops.

  Esther hoped that boys like this one had carried the message far and wide. Hopefully the other families would get away in time.

  She rushed back to the house. ‘Get everyone together, we’re leaving! You all know what you have to do!’

  The wagon had been packed with everything bar fresh food. She organised for meat, milk and vegetables to be loaded and got Stompie to round up the oxen. ‘Go, go, go! We have to be gone before the Khakis come!’

  Less than an hour later the trek set off, one wagon, some pack animals, a few chickens in a cage and the dogs. When they were a good distance away and the house was about to disappear from view, Esther steered the Basotho pony she’d been riding off to the side. The animal was too young to have been requisitioned by fighters from either side yet. She waved at her mother, then set off southwards. She didn’t know exactly where the commando was, but expected to run into them in the broken country closer to the mountains.

  Sol Matzdorff had left the commando that morning, meaning to desert. For him, the war that had started out as a rather lofty act of defiance had by this time become a pointless test of endurance. He had joined the commando because he had thought it would be a short war. How long could twenty- or even forty-thousand civilians withstand the military might of the greatest empire the world had ever known? The Boers would lose, and quickly. He wasn’t one of them, but they were his customers and he wanted to m
ake sure of their continued support after the war. That, as much as anything, made him sign up. It had long gone past the point where that seemed a sensible or even a defensible decision. He had endured enough.

  The hide-riding the day before was the final straw. The blood-clotted hide chafed his skin raw in many places. Being naked, there were the expected comments on his being circumcised. Akkerpiel, they called him – acorn dick. What hurt worst was the humiliation and the injustice of it. Yes, he had taken the damn pot. His had inexplicably gone missing and there was scarcely a man in the commando who didn’t owe him money. When the war started and everyone urgently needed equipment to go off to war, he had let them have almost the entire contents of his store on credit. Du Plessis had come in there and stocked up like there was no tomorrow. Even now, the bastard still had more pots than he needed. When Matzdorff couldn’t find his pot, he told Du Plessis he’d write off his entire debt in exchange for one pot, but Du Plessis acted as if that was the craziest thing he’d ever heard, as if commercial agreements had lost all meaning. So Matzdorff made a unilateral agreement. He absolved Du Plessis of his debt and walked off with the pot. Next thing they were crowding him, shouting abuse and carrying on.

  For more than two years, he had ridden and fought with these men; they had suffered fear and hardship and joy together. For their cause, he risked his life and ended others. He carried a piece of shrapnel in his wrist, a blue mark under the skin. Still they could not get past the fact that he was a heathen, a Jew, and not one of them. At least in the shtetl everyone was in it together. Pogroms did not break their unity. In all his childhood he had never felt as abandoned as he did now, a grown man of forty-six years.

  He was a short, broad man, tough as anything. Dark skinned and greying at the temples. Sitting on his horse, he breathed hot, dusty air, writhing to get his raw skin away from the seams in his clothing. Around him, the veldt shimmered in the heat.