Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  Without being asked, Donald drew the waggon up outside a large strooidak church, with an elegant white Dutch façade and a graveyard surrounded by a low whitewashed wall. Simon de Koker eased himself down from the seat, and entered the churchyard through the wrought-iron gates at the front. Barney watched him standing silently amongst the cypress trees, his hat in his hand. After a while, he came back, and climbed up on to the waggon again.

  ‘I used to have a wife,’ Simon de Koker said, as the waggon clattered downhill between rows of young cultivated pear trees. ‘Seven years ago, that was. I was going to settle down, and start farming. I married her here, in Paarl. That’s where she used to live – see that loft house across by the wall there?’

  Barney waited for Simon de Koker to tell him more, but the guide seemed to be finished with his explanation. They jiggled around on the ox-waggon’s seat in silence until they turned at last into the gateway of a tidy little fruit farm, where chickens clustered in the front yard, and a big blonde woman was hanging up sheets on a washing-line. The hillside all around was planted with rows of apricots and oranges, their leaves rustling in the wind like hushed applause.

  Simon de Koker stepped down. ‘It was a bird snake,’ he said. ‘Adaleen’s first trip out to the bushveld. We were collecting sticks for the campfire, and she picked it up. Bird snakes look like dried-out branches, you see. Well, it bit her, and there wasn’t anything I could do to save her. I brought her back to Paarl only two weeks after we’d left.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Barney.

  Simon de Koker looked at him expressionlessly. ‘You can’t be sorry, man. If the people of this country ever stopped to be sorry, then it would never survive, and neither would they.’

  Henk Jeppe came up to greet them, a short scarlet-faced man with cropped prickly hair and a handshake that was solid meat. ‘How are you keeping, Sy?’ he asked Simon de Koker. ‘And what’s this, a Jewish fellow?’

  ‘Barney Blitz,’ said Simon de Koker. ‘He’s off to Oranjerivier to find his brother.’

  ‘If I were you, man, I’d be careful,’ advised Henk Jeppe. ‘There’s plenty of hard-cooked customers out by the Orange River who don’t take kindly to Jews, or even Catholics, for that matter.’

  ‘I’m an American, Mr Jeppe,’ Barney told him. ‘And my parents travelled just as far as any of your Boer farmers to get away from persecution. The Boers and the Jews seem to me to have a great deal in common.’

  ‘Well, have it your way, man,’ said Henk Jeppe. ‘But that’s just a friendly word. A hard country breeds hard people. Do you know where your brother is?’

  Barney shook his head. ‘I’m just going to have to ask around until I find somebody who knows where he went.’

  Henk Jeppe glanced at Simon de Koker and said, ‘Dit is een krankzinnig idee.’

  ‘Misschien,’ shrugged Simon de Koker. ‘Dat weten we pas wanneer we het proberen.’

  Barney said to Henk Jeppe, ‘You’re asking Mr de Koker if I’m crazy?’

  Henk Jeppe, embarrassed, raised his hands in a gesture that seemed to mean, ‘What can you expect?’

  Their waggon was waiting for them in the back yard of Henk Jeppe’s farm. It was covered with a hooped canvas top, like a Conestoga waggon, and packed with six barrels of water, two cases of biltong, dried apricots, fresh oranges, bacon, cheese, and gunpowder. The four oxen which Henk Jeppe was going to hire them to draw the waggon were lazily swishing at the midday flies in a nearby kraal.

  ‘Another word of advice,’ Henk Jeppe said to Barney, his beefy hands propped up on his hips. ‘Get yourself a decent hat. One with a wide brim. Otherwise you will go krank.’

  That night, Barney and Simon de Koker were guests at the Jeppes’ supper table. There was casseroled beef with fresh vegetables, sugar-roasted ham (which Barney politely refused), and little pastry envelopes of cheese and peppers which reminded Barney of his mother’s kreplach. Under the light of the oil lamps, the long table was lined by Henk Jeppe’s three big, ruddy-faced sons, his two well-built daughters, his nephew, his wife’s white-haired father, and his taciturn, wrinkle-faced foreman. An ‘at-home’ lantern burned in the dining-room window, to show passers-by that the Jeppes were willing to receive guests.

  After dinner, Henk Jeppe read from the Bible, while his family sat around him in respectful silence. Simon de Koker yawned.

  ‘We’re off at dawn tomorrow, Barney,’ he said, at the foot of the spiral yellowwood staircase, as Barney went up to bed. ‘In a couple of days, you’re going to get your first look at the Great Karoo.’

  Their lonely trek across the Great Karoo had a profound effect on Barney that eventually brought him closer to God, but detached him from his Orthodox background like the silky seed of a South African stapeliae flower, which floats away on the wind as soon as the sun opens the seed pod.

  The landscape was arid, dusty and endless, with pale broken hill formations on either side of them – the Swartberge to the south-east and the Nieuweveldberge to the north-west – and nothing ahead of them but a flat, heat-misted horizon. The ox-waggon creaked and jolted across the baking plains of silt and volcanic ash for hour after hour, its wheels flattening the scrub and the Bushman grass, and Barney sat under the shade of the canvas cover sleeping or reading or simply staring at the barrels on the other side of the stifling interior. Simon de Koker smoked his pipe and said very little. The pungent smoke was blown away by the wind.

  Barney thought about his mother, and his father, and about the words of the Torah. The Children of Israel had trekked across the desert like this, seeking the fulfilment of a promise, and they had doubted God again and again. Faced with such limitless tracts of desolate land, whipped by whirlwinds, scorched by the sun, it was natural to doubt. Yet the uncertainty that Barney felt as he crossed the Greak Karoo was not that the Lord did not exist. The evidence of His existence was everywhere – in every range of hills, and every mile of scrub – and if anything, Barney felt nearer to the reality of the Lord out here in the bush than he had in the synagogue on Clinton Street.

  What he was beginning to question were the dogmas of his Orthodox upbringing. His childhood studies had prepared him well for a life in the Jewish ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side. But it had left him open and unprepared for the hugeness and drama of the Lord’s earthly creation when it was confronted in the raw. The shimmering landscape of the Great Karoo was far more convincing proof to Barney of God’s eternal plan than a whole snowstorm of pages out of the Teitsh-Chumash. He began to feel that if he learned to live in this country, and to adapt himself to the ways of the people who lived here, he was far more likely to understand God’s purpose than if he slavishly recited schachris, mincha, and mairev every day, and kept his nose in the Talmud.

  Years later, he wrote, ‘I was brought up in the ways of a religion that was preoccupied with struggle and survival. Yet, in New York, where was the struggle? We were poor, yes. We had to work hard. But your mother’s oven going out on the Sabbath, and spoiling the kugel, that’s a struggle? For that you have to learn to survive, life or death? In Cape Colony, I saw for the first time what struggle and survival actually meant – and, at that age, the struggle and the survival themselves meant more to me than any religion I had ever been taught.’

  On the third day out of Paarl, as their wagon bumped across the hooyvlakte, the hay flats which grew from the rich silt around the Ganka River, Barney climbed out on to the waggon’s wooden seat wearing a wide buff bush hat. Simon de Koker glanced at him, but did not remark on it.

  ‘There are sheep here,’ said Barney. ‘Are we close to a township?’ He pointed across the flats towards the distant grey dots of a grazing flock.

  Simon de Koker knocked his pipe on the waggon’s stinkwood brake handle. He had been driving for the past two hours, while Donald slept in the back, his long spidery legs dangling over the tailgate. The desert felt ancient and vast, which it was. Under its layers of deep volcanic ash were compressed the fossils of thousands of p
rehistoric creatures, 270 million years old; and the previous night, as they gathered sticks for the campfire, Barney had picked up a stone scraper that dated from the times when primitive Bushmen had lived on the Great Karoo.

  ‘We’re coming close to Beaufort West,’ explained Simon de Koker, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Those sheep over there are part of Arthur Kinnear’s merino flock. You’ll see more, as we get closer to town. They make their living from wool around here. Wool, wool, and more wool.’

  ‘It looks too dry for sheep,’ commented Barney.

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised,’ Simon de Koker told him. ‘There are plenty of underground springs around here. I’ve come here after a heavy rainstorm, and the green grass has been springing up, and the cosmos flowers, and it looked just like the land of milk and honey. The Hottentot call this land “the Koup”, which if you translate it literally means “sheep tail fat”. That’s how they describe prosperity.’

  They travelled on for an hour or two, until they reached a low promontory overlooking the town of Beaufort West. Simon de Koker reined back the oxen, who turned their heads and stared back at him with brown rolling eyes, and let out a chorus of frustrated meeerrrms. Through the thorn bushes, at the foot of the rise on which Simon de Koker had drawn the waggon to a stop, the red and brown rooftops of Beaufort West were spread out in a wide valley. Barney could see the lantern-shaped belltower of the town hall, and the grandiose grey stone frontage of the municipal buildings. But he could also make out the modest, well-kept farmhouses and homes amongst the almond, acacia, and cypress trees. Beyond, to the north-east, in the direction of Three Sisters and Victoria West, there was nothing but a hazy skyline.

  From where they stood, they could hear faintly the fussing of chickens and the laughter of two men who were thatching a roof nearby. Someone was banging a hammer, and the echo fell flat across the veld, as flat as the shadows of late afternoon.

  ‘You took off your little cap,’ said Simon de Koker.

  ‘My yarmulka? It wasn’t really practical.’

  Simon de Koker nodded, as if he understood everything. ‘The only practical equipment on the Great Karoo is a good wide hat, a team of healthy oxen, plenty of water, and a good rifle. There are still quite a few lion and leopard around.’

  ‘You don’t think that a Bible is necessary equipment?’ asked Barney.

  Simon de Koker pulled a face. ‘If you go in winter, sure. It can get frosty at night, and you can’t always find enough wood. A friend of mine burned his Bible page by page, just to keep warm out on Kompasberg one night. The pastor forgave him, because he started at Revelations and worked backwards.’

  They spent the night at the home of a sheep farmer called Alf Loubser, who lived in a T-shaped hand-built cottage with a riempie-thonged ceiling. Loubser and Simon de Koker sat outside together on the verandah and drank oily Dutch gin, washed down with lager, while a pressure-lamp hissed on the table, and the last light of the day glowered grudgingly behind the peaks of the Nieuweveldberge. Barney sat a little way away, feeling grimy and exhausted. Loubster’s daughter Louise, a shy blonde seventeen-year-old in blue gingham and wooden clogs, kept bringing him glasses of sweet white wine and little home-made zwiebacken.

  ‘You’re not happy?’ she asked Barney, as she sat cross-legged on a cushion and watched him eat.

  ‘Happy?’ he asked her. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘I don’t know. You haven’t smiled, or laughed.’

  He looked at her. She was pretty, in a milchedig Dutch way, with blue eyes and an upturned nose. The pressure-lamp, just behind her, crowned her with glowing, dancing moths.

  ‘I guess I feel a little strange here,’ Barney told her. ‘A little homesick. It’s winter in New York, where I come from. There should be snow.’

  It was dark now, and up above the Koup the southern stars were glittering. A dry, hot evening wind was blowing from the north-west, from the Kalahari.

  ‘Do you have a wife?’ asked Loubser’s daughter.

  Barney shook his head.

  ‘I often dream about a husband,’ the girl told him.

  He reached out and held her hand. She wore a thin silver ring on her third finger, set with an opal.

  ‘Nils Groenewald gave me this ring,’ she said. ‘He said it should be a keepsake, until he came back. He went to Bloemfontein to work on a cattle farm. One day, he said, he will have a farm of his own. Then he will come back and marry me.’

  Barney said gently, ‘You’re in love with Nils Groenewald?’

  ‘He’s very upright. Very stiff. My friend Attie says he’s a real Boer with an upper-case “B”. But, I like him, yes.’

  Mevrouw Loubser came to the screen door of the farmhouse and called, ‘Louise! Come and help me wash the plates! Then you must go to bed!’

  Louise stood up, brushed her apron, and then, spontaneously, bent forward and kissed Barney on the forehead.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she whispered. Her breath smelled of cloves, from her mother’s apple cookies.

  Simon de Koker looked around at Barney over his shoulder. His expression gave nothing away, but Barney could guess what he was thinking. On the other side of the table, Alf Loubser was finishing off a mug of his home-brewed pils. He was ruddy and squat, Alf Loubser, and handsome as a well-bred pony. He sensed that something had passed between Simon de Koker and Barney, but he missed the meaning.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’d better turn in. I’m up at five tomorrow.’

  Barney had been given a small whitewashed room at the side of the house, next to the wood-store, where aromatic cords of pearwood and yellowwood were stacked in readiness for autumn. There was a plain Dutch bed in there, as well as an upturned fruit-box which served as a side-table, a jug of water and a bowl. Barney stripped off his shirt and his trousers and slowly began to lather his body with green household soap.

  Outside his shuttered window, a wide-spreading coral-tree flickered in the moonlight.

  There was a hesitant knock at his door. He frowned, and said, ‘Wait a moment, please,’ and reached for his towel. The door opened straight away, and it was Louise. She quickly closed the latch behind her, and stood in the candlelight with her eyes sparkling and her hand held breathlessly on her chest.

  ‘Louise,’ said Barney. ‘You can’t come in here.’

  ‘Why not? I often sleep here, in the summer. Especially when we have guests in the house.’

  Barney tugged his towel a little tighter around his waist. ‘Come on, Louise – supposing your father finds out you’re here?’

  ‘Why should he? You wouldn’t tell him, would you? Nils Groenewald never did.’

  Barney glanced towards the bed. ‘You and Nils …?’

  ‘I love Nils. I love you, too. Won’t you kiss me?’

  ‘Louise, I hardly know you,’ Barney protested, but softly.

  She came closer and put her arms around his neck. ‘Then I shall have to introduce myself to you. My name is Louise Stella Loubser. I am seventeen years old. I live with my mother and my father in the middle of nowhere at all. I used to pretend that I wasn’t lonely, when I was younger. I had my dolls to talk to. But now dolls aren’t enough.’

  Barney whispered, ‘I have to move on tomorrow. I may not ever see you again.’

  Louise kissed him on the lips. Close to, she felt very soft and arousing. ‘That’s why,’ she told him.

  She unfastened the top button of her blue gingham dress. Barney looked at her, and felt as if he were drunk or dreaming. He had kissed Naomi Bernstein in a furious collision of closed mouths when he was fifteen; and at the age of seventeen he had walked out with a tall pretty girl from Cherry Street until she had given him up for a goyish messenger-boy with a wave of blonde hair like a cockatoo’s crest. But he was still a virgin; and even though his father had carefully explained to him the facts that a young man should know and the sacred duty that a young man should remember in his relationships with young ladies, this encounter with Louise was making him feel hot an
d inexperienced and giddy with need.

  She took his wrist and placed his hand gently on her breast. He stared at her, at the half-moons of candlelight that shone under her eyes. Her eyelashes were so fair that they seemed to be sparkling. He leaned forward, slowly, and kissed her.

  ‘Sometimes I ask my dolls to tell me how to be happy,’ Louise murmured. ‘They never answer me. They never tell me what I should do.’

  The second button of her dress, Barney twisted undone himself. Then the third, and the fourth. Louise, open-mouthed, watched Barney’s expression with childish but proprietary interest as he slipped his hand under her bodice and cupped her bare breast in his palm. He felt her nipple rise.

  ‘You look so serious,’ she said. ‘But you’re very beautiful. I love your curly hair. You’re such a beautiful stranger.’

  Barney retreated towards the bed, tugging Louise after him, and sat down. He wrestled the towel away from his waist, so that it dropped on to the earthenware tiles on the floor. Louise stood over him and bunched up her gingham skirts, raising them high, revealing to Barney the sturdy curves of her white thighs, and the albino blondeness of her pubic hair. His chest tight with anticipation, his mind locked fast with lust, Barney ran his fingers down the sides of her bare legs, and whispered, ‘Louise Stella Loubster …’

  She climbed on him, coughing once or twice, her dress tucked under her elbows. Then straight away she started bouncing up and down on him, as if she were churning butter. Her small white fingers clutched the short curly hair at the back of his neck, and she pressed his face forward into the folds of her gingham bodice. Her nipple was pushed right into his eye. She bounced harder and harder, and he felt as if he were being forced to run 500 metres down a dark drainpipe in a crouching position.

  ‘In Godsnaam,’ Louise panted.

  Barney didn’t know whether to throw her off his lap or push her down harder. But at last – at last – he was gripped by a spasm that swamped his discomfort, and flodded his guilt and his inexperience, empty kegs on an ebb tide, and in the last shaking moments he gripped Louise Stella Loubser so tight that she cried out, ‘Ah! Ah!’ for air.