Half of One Thing

by Zirk van den Berg

  Dare he go home?

  He lived in the town of Bethlehem with his wife and two daughters. He had settled there simply because, as a new arrival in Africa, it was the first town he came to that didn’t already have a general store. He made a success of his business and married a local girl with porcelain skin and unsettling passion. There were some murmurings from her family at first, but the couple were happy together and eventually it seemed everyone was won over. The one with the doubts now was he, Sol himself. After he had left for the war, Francine had started to complain about how hard it was to keep the household going without a man to help. Then she took in a lodger, a downy-cheeked Irish schoolmaster who decided to react to this awkward war by pretending it didn’t exist. Matzdorff was uneasy about this from the start. Just before the British established a base in Bethlehem, he went for a visit and it felt like he, and not the lodger, was the guest. In the months since then, it started to bother him that he was so much older than Francine. Was eleven years too much? Then there was the religious divide. The Irishman was Catholic rather than Protestant, but at least headed for heaven along with Francine, her family and all the other Christians. The teacher was much taller than him too.

  He wanted to go back home. More than that, he wanted to go back to a time before the war.

  Before he left the camp that morning, he told the Dutchman, who seemed to be the only other outsider in the commando, that he was going to look for a guinea fowl to shoot – he was sick of beef and mutton. He wasn’t a fussy eater and had not tried to be kosher since leaving Eastern Prussia, but enough was enough. To be fair, he did keep his eyes open for a guinea fowl, thinking that spotting one would help him decide which way to go. If he didn’t see one, he’d push on and maybe go home, lay down his arms and sign the oath of allegiance to the British. Kick that teacher out of his house. Open the shop again. Make a fortune out of the Khakis. Get a deep enamel bath for Francine. She would see where her bread was buttered.

  The horse was getting restless. They had been motionless for a long time. Or was there something else?

  Matzdorff stood up in the stirrups, listening and looking. There was someone. A single horse …

  He recognised the girl with the honey-coloured hair. He had seen her in his shop many times, remembered her as a child wandering among coarse bags of rice, finer ones of flour, with the smell of animal feed and spices, between saddles and enamelware and wheelbarrows, eyeing the bottle of candy sticks and knots of liquorice on the counter.

  This must be a sign, he decided. He won’t desert, not today.

  When Matzdorff and Esther Calitz crested the ridge, most burghers had a rifle in one hand and a saddle not too far away.

  ‘My God, it’s a woman!’ whispered one of the men. ‘Look at that!’

  She was in men’s clothing, but there was no mistaking her gender. The riders had slowed to a walk. ‘I found her a few miles away,’ called Matzdorff. ‘She wants to see the commandant.’

  Jacob Eksteen watched the two riders approach, wondering if the one on the left was who he thought it was. Or was it just wishful thinking? Sometimes he didn’t know why he had picked these parts as the commando’s base; was it because he knew the area or because of who he knew in the area? He touched his eye patch to make sure it was on properly.

  ‘Esther.’

  She brought the horse to a halt and returned his smile. ‘Jacob.’

  ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘There is a war on.’

  ‘I forget.’ With a weary smile that belied his words.

  Esther slid off the horse. ‘The Khakis came.’

  Jacob towered over her, the sun on his bony forehead, fingers raking his beard. She was only one step away, Esther who used to tease him that his eye was the colour of tree gum. He’d pretended to be upset. Mock anger was possible then. Now he understood that she wasn’t just sharing news. She wanted him to retaliate, to right the scales of justice. It wouldn’t change the outcome of the war, perhaps nothing would, but it would make it possible to live another day or week or month with self-respect. As the Boer fortunes in the war got worse, Jacob had withdrawn into himself more, kindling the fires of frustration. He wanted to do something terrible, to cause damage, release this awful pressure. He’d love to storm into a British camp and kill and burn. If he could go do it in the heart of London, even better. The powerlessness was unbearable. So, if there was a lone British column not far away …

  From the top of the ridge, the sentry bellowed: ‘Smoke, north-north-west.’

  Jacob turned to Matzdorff. ‘Go tell him to keep an eye out for dust. That’s what we want to know now, where the Khakis are going.’

  A group was forming near them. The commandant spotted the Dutchman and called him over. ‘Cheesehead!’ Give the man a task to test him, he thought. But not this task. The Dutchman hadn’t taken six steps when Jacob spoke again. ‘No, maybe not you …’ He looked around and saw the boy who had temporarily forgotten to guard the hanging kudu haunch against flies. ‘Steyn! Get over here!’ Addressing Gideon, he explained: ‘We need a local for this.’

  Jacob watched the Dutchman walk away in that gliding way of his that seemed to deny the unevenness of the ground, as if his joints were elastic. Gideon Doncker had arrived here with lofty talk about the Boer cause, but to these tourists, the Boers’ survival struggle was an adventure, a story to impress the folks back home. Still, the Dutchman never complained and was handy enough in a fight. If the man could scare a few Khakis or, better still, stop a bullet meant for a Boer, that was fine with Jacob.

  ‘Yes, Commandant?’ The boy was flushed after the run in the outsize boots he had taken to wearing when his father had no more use for them.

  ‘I want you to go with Miss Calitz to the Lost Lamb. You know where that is?’

  The boy shook his head, no.

  ‘Esther, will you show him? … Go with her and when she’s with her people, you come straight back here. If we’re not here, you wait for us. Don’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘Yes, Commandant.’

  ‘Go get your horse and be quick about it.’

  It was comical watching him run, as if those boots had a life of their own and the boy was struggling to stay on top. The effect was made worse by the fact that his pants were a good four inches too short. He had grown a lot in the last two years. He should’ve taken his father’s pants and not just the boots, but robbing a corpse of its trousers was not even something to contemplate. Take his shoes, yes, but don’t let him go to his Maker in underwear.

  ‘He’s a good kid, shoots almost as well as you,’ Jacob told Esther.

  ‘I beat you that last time, the Sunday before the war.’

  ‘I was aiming with my other eye that day.’

  ‘You’re just a sore loser.’

  She said it in jest, but he wouldn’t have minded if she were serious. To his mind being a sore loser came with the will to win, two sides of the same coin. He couldn’t think of anything to say in response. It used to be so easy being around her. He was ten years older and felt protective towards her from the first time they met, but that started to change as she grew into a woman. Even before the war he noticed something new in the way she looked at him, as if she dared him to do something, expected it even. He had that feeling even worse now. Where was that damned boy, what was taking him so long?

  ‘Will you excuse me, I have to go organise the men … It was good seeing you, even under the circumstances.’ Jacob strode away, his hands pushing at the air around him.

  Gideon stood to the side, pretending to adjust the leather sling on his rifle, looking at the woman from under the brim of his hat. He didn’t like it when the commandant called him a cheesehead. Most of the men seemed to think the insult was the height of wit. He didn’t want to be their friend anyway. The day would come when he’d betray them and everything would go back to being the way it should. But first there was the woman. He couldn’t hear what she had said to Commandant Eksteen, but th
e way she stood so close to the Boer leader told its own tale. Gideon found it hard not to stare at her – wide-set, almond eyes, high cheekbones, thin beak of a nose and full mouth. This was clearly someone unusual, not to be toyed with, he thought. God wouldn’t waste features like these on the weak willed. She took her hat off, pushed her fingers through her hair. The thing that struck him wasn’t her beauty, but her strangeness. She looked like she belonged to a different race consisting of one person only. The hat went back on, obscuring her face in shadow. Gideon wished he could look at her some more, just hold up that face to the light and study it from different angles. He had that sensation you have when you get a whiff of a smell that strongly reminds you of something you can’t immediately identify; it escapes your grasp and is gone forever. She was familiar and elusive at the same time.

  Her gaze drifted sideways and met his. Gideon pretended not to notice, that there was something going on behind her that had his attention: a butterfly, yellow grass trembling in the breeze, rocks lodged in the earth.

  Steyn pulled at the reins of a large, wayward horse. The boy had problems. His boots and horse wanted to go in different directions and he was strung out between them.

  ‘Look at Klein Steyn,’ he heard someone say.

  As if it wasn’t hard enough already, this struggle, without people watching and judging him. There wasn’t this pitiless scrutiny when his father and brother died. Klein Steyn had got to know death. Still, he was excited by life. When it confronted him in the shape of a young woman, it was almost more than he could handle. For one thing, he didn’t know how to address her. If she was just a girl, he’d ask for her name and call her that, but if she was grown up, he was supposed to call her tannie, auntie. He was nearly there and he still didn’t know. She was probably only a few years older than him, but on the other side of the indefinable but definite divide between children and adults.

  In the end he just avoided addressing her altogether. ‘We can go,’ he said, got on his horse and waited for her to get on hers. Her face reminded him of those Indian women he once saw in Bethlehem, on their way from Natal to Johannesburg. It was the first and last time he’d seen people of that race, as they weren’t allowed to remain in the Orange Free State for more than a day. The girl with the Indian features swung into the saddle. Even if she didn’t look completely white, Steyn decided, one day he’d like to have a girlfriend just like her.

  They rode out together, watched by every man in the commando. It was easier to keep the flies off that kudu meat, the boy thought – you just had to shake a leafy twig at them – but these eyes crawled all over you.

  ‘Better behave yourself!’ one of the older men shouted.

  Steyn recognised Field Cornet Du Plessis’s voice. The man always made him feel silly and boyish. ‘Can we go a bit faster?’ Steyn asked.

  ‘Don’t mind them,’ Esther said. ‘Anyway, my horse is tired.’

  They went around some trees and then the men couldn’t see them any more. If he was going to have to protect this woman he’d better be wide awake, Steyn realised. You wouldn’t want a snake, leopard or Khaki to surprise you. If anything was going to happen to her, he’d just keep on riding, he decided, all the way to Delagoa Bay and not stop once, get on a ship and sail to where Jacob Eksteen couldn’t get to him. The commandant could be vengeful. Steyn wondered what it was like in the East Indies. Once or twice he had tried to talk about it with that Dutchman, but the man just kept saying that as far as you can tell other people, it’s the same as everywhere else; you have to be there yourself to understand how different it is.

  ‘We have to go down here,’ Esther said. They steered their horses through an opening between trees and a small rock face. ‘What’s it like on commando with him, the commandant?’

  Steyn didn’t know how to answer her. Being on commando was practically the only life he remembered. Two years before, when they were winning, when their clothes were new, when there was enough food and they hadn’t yet lost half their men, it hadn’t been too bad. Now, scrounging for food and ammunition, sniping away at the heels of British columns … What could he possibly say? Besides, he hadn’t spoken to a girl or a woman for two years.

  He had said goodbye to Puleng, the Sotho woman who had been his nanny since birth, and ridden off to join the Boer fighting force with his father and brother. She had stood outside the closed front door and kept on crying noisily as they drew further away. Out in the veldt, over supper that evening, his brother had said Puleng was probably still out there, crying. Steyn had thrown his head back with laughter, but saw the stars shifting in the heavens. Still, at night, he looked at the sky and tried to fix it the way it had been, trying to remember all the bits that got lost.

  ‘It’s not too bad,’ he said. ‘The commandant knows what he’s doing.’

  Back at the camp, Jacob Eksteen drew lines in the sand, explaining his plan of attack to his field cornets. A small group of burghers would attack the British column from the east just before sunset. When the enemy had turned to face them, the bulk of the commando would get at them from behind. The Khakis would have the sun in their eyes if they wanted to shoot back.

  ‘Not if it clouds over. There could be a thunderstorm.’

  Jacob knew that the first objection would come from Du Plessis. The man was elected as a field cornet early on, when his self-important demeanour had fooled some into taking him for a man of substance. It was something he was going to have to address soon, as Du Plessis commanded no respect and without that you can’t command anyone. There was the oft-repeated story of the time Breytenbach, a man of some wit, saw Du Plessis heading into the bushes clutching his stomach. He loudly admonished the field cornet to make sure that the right turd came back … That’s not the kind of man you want for an officer.

  Jacob shifted his feet. ‘If there’s a storm, we pray they think our shots are lightning.’

  The men nodded. They had done this many times before. The only thing that changed was doing it with fewer men every time.

  ‘I was looking forward to some barbecued kudu,’ said Liebenberg. ‘I hope it’s not biltong by the time we get back.’

  Liebenberg was trying to lighten the mood, Jacob realised. The man was a good soldier, a tiger when fighting the enemy, but he hated conflict among his own people.

  ‘You’ll have it for breakfast,’ Jacob said. ‘When it’s dark, we’ll make our way back here. We only go down there if they’ve abandoned equipment or we can drive them off it.’ He stood up. ‘I want everyone clear on what they have to do and in the saddle in twenty minutes.’

  Gideon was going to be part of the larger force, under Commandant Eksteen’s direct command. Hopefully he could use the opportunity to impress the man, to win his approval. Eksteen wasn’t the approachable type. Some burghers resented the gaunt, one-eyed man’s sullenness and what they saw as his superior airs. Most, though, were so impressed by the force of his personality that they were happy to leave decisions up to him. Anyway, it was near unthinkable that he would accept anyone else’s lead. He gave the impression of great moral stature or, cynics said, of being a law unto himself. It would take something special to gain his confidence.

  Gideon saddled the big horse he had brought over from New Zealand, a beautiful animal that could outrun most others in the commando. Most Boers had Basotho ponies, ugly little things with their short muzzles and not the fastest of runners, but they were hardy as anything and could seemingly live off dew and dust. Major Bryce had insisted that Gideon take a good horse, in case he had to make a quick getaway. They had the animal rebranded to obscure its military origins, quite unnecessarily as it turned out, as a couple of Boers rode stolen army horses anyway. Gideon wondered what the horse made of this country, so different from the soft paddocks of the Waikato that had been its home. He still found the strangeness of the landscape intriguing, the harshness of it, the way yellow, orange and blue dominated. By contrast, Auckland was grey, green and white. This was like a different
planet, sun-baked by day and bone-chilling at night. Even the ants and bees looked different.

  The Jew, Matzdorff, was putting the saddle back on his horse, having taken if off just minutes earlier. ‘I thought we were going to have a few days’ rest,’ he said.

  Gideon had picked up that the man was an outsider and therefore to be avoided. It was important for his mission to be trusted by the men, to be part of the mainstream of the commando. Despite being nothing more than civil to the man, Matzdorff had evidently decided he had found a friend in Gideon.

  ‘You can’t even sneak back home the way we used to. The British are carving this country into a chessboard. The blockhouse line goes all the way from Ficksburg to Bethlehem and there’s barbed wire all over the place. The veldt is crawling with Khakis.’ Matzdorff stood closer to Gideon. ‘I don’t know what it is we’re trying to achieve any more. The Khakis have all the big towns and railways and telegraph lines, the hospitals and shops and banks. The schools. You look at that and wonder what is this freedom we’re fighting for. I want the freedom to go home.’

  Was this a trap, a test of his loyalty? Gideon had to play it safe. ‘Don’t let the commandant hear you say such things.’

  ‘I trust you.’

  Gideon wanted to punch the man. Idiot, don’t you know? ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘They’re waiting for us.’

  The commando left two slightly injured men behind – one with his left arm in a sling, the other nursing an infected cheek that made his eye swell shut – as well as Dik Frik Swiegelaar, whose weakening eyesight rendered him useless in battle but who wouldn’t hear of leaving the commando. The rest set off at a stiff trot, heading towards the faint column of smoke in the distance. It was getting close to midday, so hot that the shadows sought refuge under rocks and clung to hat brims and the bellies of horses. Hooves rapped on hard ground, stirring up puffs of dust. Gideon couldn’t help but feel excited, intoxicated by the company of men bent on action. Riding here now, lulled by the movement and the noise, it was easy to forget which side he was on; it seemed beside the point. Military force was an expression of will, imposing your immediate superiority over others, the opponents staring at each other through open gun sights. Nothing that was more than firing distance away had any bearing at all.