‘How long has this been going on?’
‘I don’t know, but it wasn’t the first time, according to the Sotho.’
The moth flew into the candle and died sizzling.
‘Go get him … Not you, uhm, Doncker, you stay.’ Jacob waited until the others had left before he spoke again. ‘You remember our discussion up at the Lost Lamb. Do you think Matzdorff could be the leader, that there are more of them?’
‘Commandant, of course I could be wrong but I don’t think Matzdorff has anything to do with this. I spoke to him and as far as I can tell he is as committed as any of the men here. Tromp may be the only one, all along. With traitors, it only takes one.’
‘I suppose … Are you all healed up?’
‘I’m fine, but I’m not sure how much good I’ll do. I don’t have a weapon.’
‘We’ll find one. Your horse came back. It’s a fine animal. A couple of men probably had an eye on it in case you didn’t return.’
Jacob got the pipe going. ‘How are things at the Lost Lamb?’
‘They’re all settled in. Miss Calitz seems pleased enough.’
‘She’s always been very determined.’
‘I can’t say I know her that well.’ Gideon felt disloyal saying that, but he decided what passed between him and Esther had better remain private, especially since she seemed to have some history with Jacob Eksteen. He sent her a quick prayer: Sorry, love.
Jacob changed the subject. Interested as he was, he wasn’t going to discuss Esther with a stranger. Better deal with the matter at hand. ‘I don’t understand this Tromp business … How could anyone betray his people like this? How could you live with yourself?’
Gideon didn’t think the question was rhetorical. ‘It must be hard to lie all the time.’
‘I mean, the principle of the thing.’
‘It’s difficult for me to imagine. I’m a foreigner. In a way, this war is much simpler for me than for you people. I look at it from outside and it’s clear to me who’s in the right. I don’t have personal attachments to cloud things over. Justice is easy if you view things from a distance.’
Jacob liked the sound of the Dutchman’s last statement. Distance … That’s what you need. Keep your distance. Shoot at them from far away, like in the early months of the war. The Mausers had greater range than the British rifles. If they could keep far enough from the Khakis, they could pick them off one by one. A bit like they were doing now, staying away from the enemy and hitting isolated units. The principle held for so many things – warfare, thoughts and emotions. Those were the three things that defined his life. They were like those metal rings magicians have that hang together this way and that, and sometimes one slipped loose.
Liebenberg parted the tent flaps again. ‘Commandant, we’ve got Tromp tied up. He was going to bolt.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘We’ve tied him to a wild olive tree. Steyn is watching him.’
‘That boy’s been in the saddle all day. We can’t expect him to stand guard too.’ Jacob got up, bending forward. ‘Go organise a couple of men to take turns watching Tromp. Doncker, you come with me. Let’s go hear what that scoundrel has to say.’
Clouds blocked out patches of the glittering night sky. Dry grass crackled under their feet. Liebenberg pointed the way for them to go.
Though the commando was almost constantly on the move, there was a certain permanence about their sleeping positions relative to each other. Particular groups of men tended to stick together, and groups maintained regular neighbours on all sides. The details fluctuated – some men preferred hollows and others heights; some liked some sort of shelter around, a bush or rock, while others wanted to be able to see what was coming on all sides. Still, the overall pattern was fairly predictable, night after night. Gerrit Tromp was in one of the outside groups. He had attached himself to the circle of Chris Boshoff, a foul-mouthed character, but cunning and brave. Boshoff had all the makings of a criminal. In war, he thrived. Tromp was a fringe member of the group held together by Boshoff’s dynamism, but which also had roots in a mutual background. These were not men with land – they were town dwellers, hands for hire. The farmers who constituted the elite of the commando were suspicious of them, or at least that’s what Boshoff thought.
The men in the vicinity had noticed the upheaval around Tromp, and had come to look. They kept a safe distance, not wanting to be associated with someone who might be in trouble.
Gideon could barely see their starlit outlines, shifting at the edge of his vision. He kept half a step behind Commandant Eksteen, who walked in his usual way, stepping high and using his arms for balance. The commandant moved like some other kind of creature trapped in the body of a man, a heron perhaps. A bubble of silence accompanied his passage. Men stopped talking and insects paused.
Tromp looked up. He was sitting flat on the ground with his legs straight out, ankles bound together. His hands were tied behind his back, with the thong looped around the trunk of the bush.
‘Tromp.’ The commandant stood over him, tall as the gallows. ‘Where did you go this afternoon?’ The question dangled a noose in the night air.
‘Out hunting.’
‘Did you meet anyone?’
Tromp shook his head, no.
‘That’s not what I hear.’
‘I don’t know what you hear.’
‘I hear you met a man and gave him something.’ Jacob unfolded the scribbled map in front of Tromp’s face. ‘How do you explain this?’
Tromp stared at the paper for a long time. Then his voice burst forth, pitched high. ‘How do you explain this blasted war? You tell me why I should fight! I was poor before the war and I’ll be poor after. What do I care who I have to beg from, who despises me? The English, you … It’s all the same to me. Why should I fight so you can live like a lord? The Khakis give my family money. My kids can eat because of them. What have you ever done for me?’
Jacob Eksteen filled his lungs with more air than he needed. ‘This is treason.’
‘It was between your cause and my family … I had to betray one or the other. For two years, I’ve been running round the veldt, living like an animal for you and your damn war. Enough! Let’s end it. Give the English what they want, so we can go back to our usual misery.’ Tromp hung his head, muttering, ‘I don’t care, I don’t care.’
Jacob raised his voice. ‘I need five volunteers to come at dawn and relieve this bastard of his life, seeing it’s so unbearable.’ He held up his hand, fingers spread. ‘Five volunteers for the firing squad … And you, mister, you’re sitting on your grave. Better get digging if you don’t want the crows to peck out your eyes tomorrow … Someone give him a shovel.’
That night, the sound of the shovel scraping dirt and clinking against stone kept more than just the guards awake. For Jacob Eksteen it was the sound of justice, each scoop shifting the scales ever so slightly towards what is right. Gideon listened to the traitor chipping away at the earth, imagining himself in that man’s position. He had been so focused on deflecting suspicion from himself, so intent on gaining the commandant’s trust that he never really considered what would happen to the traitor. The inevitable retribution had been an abstract thought, nothing as real as an anguished man slaving through the night to later protect his mortal remains from scavengers. From time to time, Gerrit Tromp lay down in the grave to see if it would fit, if it was deep enough and comfortable. Everyone listened to the digging and tried not to hear. They had been at war for two years; they had shot enemies and had seen friends killed. They had seen machines made to deal death on a scale the world had not known before – machine guns, cannons and bombs. They had seen homes and animals set on fire. But they had not experienced anything like this, this slow gnawing at their conscience. Tromp had been one of their own. Men remembered little interactions with him – not fondly, for he was not the type. They sought significance in those mundane moments. Of course there was none – these were just everyday i
ncidents, though now accompanied by the imagined strands of a melancholy string section, courtesy of the imminent tragedy.
The digging stopped an hour or two before dawn. Some men sank into sleep. Others eyed the eastern skies, waiting for the first frosty light to end this horrid night. Gerrit Tromp sat up, trying to cling to consciousness, though his body, exhausted, wanted nothing more than rest and oblivion. He wanted to live and be aware, not waste a moment of the time he had been granted. He asked for and was given paper and a pencil. He wrote the date and his wife’s name, then sat looking for words and came to his senses a while later. How long had he slept? No time to waste. He had to say … What? He loved her? He did, but could go days without thinking of her. He loved his children, but feared for their weaknesses and did not expect them to lead lives of great achievement. He loved beer. He loved sex. He loved cooking. He could roast a leg of lamb that got people smacking their lips and licking their fingers. He loved his mother, more than anything, but she had gone dilly, kept thinking he was his father who’d been dead for decades … Somebody had got up already! What was the time? What to say? And should he be writing, or would it be better to listen how the sounds of night subside and those of dawn rise, the crickets falling quiet and the bulbuls and bokmakieries starting to chirp? Should he concentrate on the touch of wind on his cheeks? On the smell of grass, bushes and fresh, dry earth? Should he drink all of this in, the wonderful world around him? Or should he think, perhaps find some enlightening insight to leave as a testament? Make peace with God perhaps? Did Judas have peace with God? Is God busy in the palaces of China, Russia and Europe and does He have time or does He even care about one Gerrit Tromp, no-good, poverty-stricken father of four, traitor to his country about to be dispatched to the afterworld? All he could think was: this is wrong. If he could only live to tell the tale. He could tell it now. My dear Mariana …
Did he doze off again?
13 November 1901
The men rolled up their blankets, got breakfast fires going, rounded up the horses. When Commandant Eksteen appeared from his tent, fully dressed and ready for the day, as he always did, and walked over to the condemned man, less than half the men followed. ‘Good morning,’ he said to Tromp, by force of habit.
Nobody commented when a dark, wet patch spread on the traitor’s trousers.
Jacob Eksteen took up position at the foot of the grave. ‘You have been fairly condemned to death according to the laws of warfare.’ He took out five Lee-Enfield rounds from the pocket of his jacket and held them up in the cool morning light. Only one of them still had the bullet in it, the others having had the projectile wrenched out and the tip of the cartridge crimped. ‘We’re going to do this properly. I’ll load these rounds into five rifles and the chosen men will each take a rifle at random. You will never know if you fired a blank or a bullet. It’s the best we can do.’ A small barn owl, late to get home, rushed overhead. ‘Who will do this?’
It was a like a photograph. The men did not move, not even to shift their weight from foot to foot.
‘Doncker, you found him.’
Gideon knew he couldn’t be part of the execution, not when he himself was betraying these people. It would be worse than murder. ‘It should be his own people,’ he said. ‘I’ve done my part.’
The man had a point. Jacob turned to the others. ‘C’mon, who will it be?’
Field Cornet Liebenberg spoke up. ‘Can’t we just leave him? We ride off and when someone finds him or he gets away … What does that do to us? And if he dies here, it’s God’s will.’
Once again, Jacob was amazed by other people’s lack of imagination. Don’t they ever think beyond the obvious? Can’t they see what could’ve happened and what would happen? ‘If we didn’t catch him, this place could’ve been crawling with Khakis. Many of us could’ve died, the rest taken prisoner. Tromp did not think about sparing your lives. Why should you want to spare his?’ What Jacob also thought, but didn’t say, was that if they let Tromp go it would only make it easier for the next burgher to waver, to sell them out to the enemy. He had to make an example of this man.
‘Is there really none of you who’d pull the trigger to send this traitor to hell?’
Tromp looked up, hopeful for the first time in twelve hours. These men are not like the commandant. They have hearts. They will let him live.
‘Do you want to stand or lie down?’
The commandant’s single eye bored at him.
‘Wait! Don’t I get to say anything?’
‘Tromp, you’ve never had anything worthwhile to say. Why would it be any different now? You can come stand here or you can lie down in the grave already.’
Tromp got up, caught himself when his knees wobbled. The other men stood back. A red line appeared on the horizon. ‘Forgive me,’ said Tromp.
The commandant took his pistol from the holster, that odd-looking broom-handle Mauser he had received from the Dutchman. It would’ve been more poetic to use his rifle for the execution, the one he had decorated with the scales of justice, but sometimes one had to let practicality win out over poetry. ‘Men, I’ll never ask anything of you that I’m not willing to do myself. Treason is punishable by death.’ He realised that what he was doing would not be popular, but that couldn’t be helped. It’s better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not. He cocked the pistol and pressed the barrel to Tromp’s forehead. ‘This is all I can do. The rest is in God’s hands.’
Tromp’s head shook as if to say no. A flat crack sounded and his body crumpled into the grave while the shock of the shot still echoed in bystanders’ ears. He fell with his feet outside the grave, displaying scabby ankles above his veldskoens.
‘Cover him up. We’re leaving in twenty minutes.’ Jacob picked up the ejected cartridge. ‘Doncker, you take his rifle, and anything else you want.’
Gideon nodded. He did not trust himself to speak. Had he seen his own future? He stepped around the grave. There was a folded piece of paper on the mound of sand, next to the indentation where Tromp had sat. Gideon took it and the Lee-Enfield by the man’s bedroll. He couldn’t bring himself to take anything else, though there was a serviceable blanket and cooking pot. He pushed the springbok-hide cap aside with his foot. The man had been stupid to wear such a distinctive hat if he didn’t want to be recognised. Whatever Tromp’s failings, it didn’t warrant this cold-blooded killing. Gideon unfolded the letter. It had a date and salutation, a woman’s name. The rest was blank.
14 November 1901
The chafe marks on Mr Matzdorff’s body puzzled Esther. The raw patches had mostly healed, but their traces were still clear on his shins, knees, thighs, buttocks, shoulders, elbows and forearms. The remarkably symmetric grazes did not seem to have anything to do with the wound he had received at the hands of the British. When she had asked Gideon about it, he had said she’d better ask the man himself. In a quiet hour she saw Matzdorff absently scratching at one of the remaining marks on his forearm and thought it opportune to ask, until she saw the look on his face. The shopkeeper was transported somewhere more pleasant than this, and she didn’t have the heart to call him back.
He was in what they thought of as their kitchen: just a cart propped on rocks, a heavy chest and improvised shelving in a shelter of stretched canvas. If he ignored the backdrop, Matzdorff could imagine these things in a shop – the enamel pitchers, the pots, the packaged food. They may not all have come from his shop, but he had stocked similar items. He knew the prices of each, wholesale and retail, and who had made it and who the suppliers were. He imagined the smells and sounds of two years ago, the feelings that had been possible then. He had been, in his way, important. The things he sold became part of people’s lives, be it in the shed or dining room. Children would one day treasure memories of a milk jug their parents had bought from him. He never cheated anyone, giving and taking in equal measure. He missed his balance scales. He loved the idea that they measured things exactly and what was a pound today woul
d still be a pound tomorrow and was the same all over the world. It was an instrument of order and fairness. If only you could measure claims and desires and grudges that accurately, balancing the one against the other to find the true measure of things, who owed what to whom. You wouldn’t have these wars and woes … He waved away a fly.
With the trance evidently broken, Esther felt free to speak. ‘Mr Matzdorff? I was wondering if I could ask you what had happened to your arm, there, and other places, those scrape marks.’
‘These?’ Matzdorff touched his finger to a faint mark on his arm. ‘I was punished for stealing a pot.’
‘Stealing?’
He nodded. ‘It’s amazing, the things you do.’
‘I find it hard to believe you’d steal.’
‘The commando seemed to find it easy.’ He didn’t explain to her the things he had been thinking, about how men, isolated in an authoritarian environment, could make or accept the most outlandish assumptions. Common consensus in the commando fluctuated on the flimsiest of pretexts – who was trustworthy, brave, a barrel of laughs; who was a bad egg, turncoat or whinger; if the war was going to last many more years or if peace was imminent, with one side or the other on the verge of surrender. Rumour and supposition fuelled strident beliefs that overtook one another between breakfast and lunch. The only consistent truth was going without – without enough food, shelter, warmth and comfort. This was what awaited him again, now that his wounds seemed to have healed up sufficiently. ‘I like these pots,’ he said.
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I’d better count them then.’
The light-hearted moment was interrupted by irate voices. Esther left to attend to a row between Mrs Van Wyk and the Bredenkamp boy, over the supposed illicit milking of a goat. Once Mr Matzdorff left, it was going to be hard to deal only with these petty issues. Nursing the two wounded men had given her a goal that felt worthwhile, doing something constructive to help the war effort.
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