Solitaire

by Masterton, Graham

  In the early months of the diamond rush, Barney walked along the banks of the Orange River near Derdeheuwel a few times; and occasionally crouched down to sift the gravel through his fingers. But he found nothing that looked remotely like a diamond, and not long after, the tree-lined river banks where he took his evening walks were staked out by diamond diggers. Once or twice, out of curiosity, he went down to watch them sieving mud through kitchen sieves, and separating pebbles with their wooden scrapers. They hardly ever talked to him, though, these bearded men in their cheap work shirts and their clay-stained trousers, except for a suspicious ‘good day’. They sat over their wooden rocker-tables for hour after hour, winnowing out the tiniest of diamonds from the huge heaps of mud and gravel which their Kaffir labourers dug out for them. Barney thought that diamond prospecting looked like some kind of fairytale punishment, like spinning a haystack into golden twine.

  Soon the pink and white cosmos flowers were blooming on the grasslands, the heralds of winter. It rained mercilessly hard for two weeks, which was good for the farmers. The Afrikaners always said cheerfully, ‘The weather looks fine’, when the stormclouds started to gather. But the rain was miserable for the diggers, especially when it grew colder, and the tracks and the excavations became rutted and rimed with frost, while the sun shone weak as an opal through the clouds. Still, diggers continued to arrive from Capetown and Durban, in their hundreds, in jolting waggons or on tired horses, and they were always ready to toss up their hats and cheer when they reached the willow-shaded banks of the Vaal, and always ready to pitch their makeshift tents wherever they imagined they could find diamonds.

  Some struck it rich almost immediately. One young digger was kneeling in a church to pray, and he found a diamond pressed into the earth floor. One English digger gave up his claim in disgust, having hacked away at it for weeks and found nothing; but the man who took his claim over only had to dig down six inches before he came across a diamond of nearly thirty carats, which he sold for £2500.

  Barney found that business at Derdeheuwel farm picked up. Oranjerivier was not so close to the first diamond diggings that its fields were invaded by would-be millionaires, or its fences and barns torn down for firewood. But it was close enough for Barney to be able to send one of his Griquas along each day with a waggonload of milk, eggs, and fresh water, and sell them to the prospectors at prices which improved Derdeheuwel’s balance-books dramatically. Milk, 1s 6d the bucket; water, 5d the bucket; eggs, 2d each. Expensive – but where else could the diggers go? Barney even set up a kind of employment agency for kaffir labour, using Donald as a translator and a go-between with the local dikgôrô, or native communities; and although he charged £3 5s 3½d the month for each kaffir, which was a good deal more than anybody else, many of the diggers preferred Barney’s labourers to the usual scallywags who hung around the diggings, simply because they were reasonably honest. If any of Barney’s kaffirs were tempted to take revenge on their masters for beatings or bad treatment by pocketing or swallowing any of the diamonds they came across, Donald would make sure they were given a first-class thrashing. ‘A few teaching smites,’ he called it, rather biblically.

  ‘Shortly, the diamonds will all be gone,’ said Monsaraz one night, as they sat at the dining-table, eating Donald’s bobotie. ‘Then all these human earthworms will leave us alone.’

  Barney looked at Monsaraz over the leaning flames of the candelabrum. Monsaraz’ face was white from Dutch gin and lack of sun, and there was a sharp muscular spasm beneath his left eye.

  ‘I’d rather they stayed,’ said Barney carefully, reaching for his wine. ‘They’ve been very good for the farm. We made fifty-eight pounds profit this month.’

  Monsaraz pushed his plate away. ‘Why does he always cook this Malayan muck?’ he asked, under his breath. He poured himself a tumbler of gin, which he swallowed in three steady gulps.

  Barney said, ‘Life is going to change around here, Mr Monsaraz. You have to accept it. They found a seven-and-a-half-carat diamond along by the river this morning. Give them a couple of years, these prospectors, and they’ll have built themselves a whole city at Oranjerivier, with a townhall, and a courthouse, and a –’

  ‘A courthouse?’ bristled Monsaraz. ‘You think that’s amusing? A courthouse??’

  ‘I simply said that –’

  ‘I suppose that’s your Jewish sense of humour? A courthouse? I suppose you think that’s funny, to torment me like that?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Barney. ‘All I said was that –’

  ‘You know damned well what I’m talking about!’ Monsaraz shouted. ‘You know damned well what I’m talking about!’

  He stood up, staggering twice to find his balance. ‘You know damned well what I’m talking about,’ he repeated. ‘Damned well.’ Then, with his mouth stretched open and his throat swelling and contracting like a bullfrog, he vomited half-chewed meat and vegetables all the way down the front of his white suit. Barney closed his eyes, and said a prayer.

  There were many times during the following two years when Barney felt like leaving Derdeheuwel altogether. But Monsaraz was rarely so offensive again, and the simple fact was that, short of sailing all the way back to New York, Barney had nowhere else to go. He still believed that Joel must be living in Cape Colony or the Orange Free State somewhere, and he took to leaving Donald in charge of the farm and riding in a small horse-drawn surrey as far as Hopetown, Jagersfontein, and even up to Klipdrift. He often loaded the back of the waggon with dried meat, cheese, and dried fruit, which he sold to the diggers he met along the way. Sometimes the diggers paid him in colonial pounds, but more frequently they paid him in small diamonds. As winter flourished into spring, and spring gave way to a harsh, hot summer, Barney got to know the diggers well, and how they worked, and which were the most profitable claims. He also made the acquaintance of some of the diamond buyers who had followed the prospectors out to the diggings.

  His favourite buyer was Harold Feinberg, whose office was a small wood and corrugated iron shack not far from the Vaal River at Klipdrift. Feinberg had come out to South Africa from London’s East End, leaving his father’s cigar-making business because of his health. He was thirty-six years old, round and asthmatic, and always wore a white pith helmet, even indoors. Whenever Barney came by to see him, he would invite him in to the firerce heat of his little back room, and they would sit in riempie armchairs and drink black tea, while Harold Feinberg pushed diamond after diamond across his desk and explained to Barney what the qualities of each one were, and what kind of a price he expected it to fetch.

  ‘This one here, for instance … seven and three-quarter carats, perfect, but glassy. This one here … twenty-one carats, but flawed … you just have to learn what to look for.’

  From Harold Feinberg, Barney learned all about illicit diamond buyers … the men who camped out on the edge of the diamond fields and paid spot cash for diamonds regardless of where they came from, or who brought them in. It was to these unlicensed buyers that most thieving kaffirs brought the diamonds they had pilfered from their masters’ claims, and on whom dishonest diggers would offload the stones they had omitted to tell their partners about. But, on the whole, the diamond diggings were quite lawful and orderly. A stern-faced Englishman called Stafford Parker had appointed himself landdrost and local governor of the Klipdrift area, and president of the Diggers Protection Association. Drawing on his hair-raising experiences of the violence of the California gold-rush, Parker made every incoming digger read, sign, and obey a long list of rules and regulations, and he appointed ‘magistrates’ on daily duty to hear any complaints or disputes. Thieves were punished by flogging, or by being dragged backwards and forwards across the stony bed of the Vaal River a few times behind a galloping horse.

  In 1870, Stafford Parker even went as far as declaring the diamond fields to be a Diggers’ Republic, of which he was the first president. Barney met him twice – the first time outside Dan Evans’ tent at Go
ng Gong. The local Griqua chief Jan Bloem was there, too, sitting by the campfire on a small folding stool, in the loudest yellow-checked suit that Barney had ever seen. Bloem’s umbrella, tightly-rolled, had been stuck into the soft earth beside him.

  Stafford Parker turned out to be white-bearded, small, and tanned to the colour of a roasted chicken. He shook Barney fiercely by the hand, and said, ‘Digger, are you? No, you can’t be. Hands aren’t callused enough.’

  ‘I’m a farmer, sir, at Oranjerivier.’

  ‘You don’t look like a farmer. You don’t sound like a farmer.’

  ‘I was in business in New York, originally,’ said Barney. ‘A tailor.’

  Stafford Parker eyed him sharply. ‘Tailor, hey? Jewish?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, make sure you don’t get yourself into the diamond-buying business. There are too many kikes in that already.’

  Barney coloured. ‘Too many what, sir?’

  ‘Kikes,’ replied Stafford Parker, in a crisp voice. ‘That’s what they call you fellows, isn’t it?’

  ‘Some people who are too ignorant and abusive to do otherwise call us kikes, yes, sir.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ replied Stafford Parker. ‘And I’m afraid to say that by a loyal Englishman’s lights, being ignorant of those fellows who crucified Our Lord, or being abusive towards their descendants – well, those failings hardly count as anything but justifiable.’

  Stafford Parker had sauntered off, stiff-legged, and Barney had been left taking deep, angry breaths. From across the other side of the campfire, Jan Bloem had been watching the exchange with an interested smile.

  ‘The English have a way of upsetting everybody they meet,’ he said, after a moment or two. ‘They’ve been practising it for generations. Henry the Fifth, Sir Walter Raleigh, George the Third, and now Stafford Parker. You must let it roll off you, like the rain off your umbrella.’

  Barney had looked at him. The voice that had come from the black man’s savage-looking face, with its flat glistening cheeks and its tight-curled beard, had been extraordinarily civilised. Two hooped earrings shone gold under the black man’s tall stovepipe hat.

  ‘You must come to my village sometime, and talk about Judaism,’ the Griqua went on. ‘We Griquas have very strong Christian beliefs, and a great love of religious music. I would be most interested to hear about your points of view on the Bible.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Barney. He did not know what else to add. For the first time in over eighteen months, he had been obliged to defend his Jewishness, and it was a disturbing experience, particularly since he had let so much of his observance slide, apart from saying schachris, mincha, and mairev every day, and resting over Shabbes. Now, an odd-looking halfcaste actually wanted to discuss the Talmud.

  ‘I’ll – I’ll, er – be back this way in a month or so –’ Barney had told him. ‘I’ll ask my foreman to show me how to get to your village.’

  ‘Well, I’ll look forward to that,’ said Jan Bloem, and lifted his hat.

  Back at Derdeheuwel, as the cosmos flowers flourished again to greet the oncoming winter of 1871, Monsaraz grew steadily gloomier, and drunker, and more introspective. Since Barney had first met him, he appeared to have aged five years, and his hair was already wild with white. He started shouting in the night, long unintelligible tirades; and sometimes he would lock himself in his room for days on end. Other times, though, he would seem quite himself, and he would take dinner with Barney on the verandah if it was warm enough, and restrict himself to a few glasses of pinot chardonnay.

  Once, just once, he sent Barney one of his girls. She knocked at his parlour door one evening in June 1871, when Barney was sitting at his desk in the long white cotton robe that Donald had found for him at the kaffir market. It had wide sleeves, this robe, and was printed all around the hem with red shapes like springbok horns.

  ‘Master?’ said the girl, opening the door. She was small, and handsome, and very black. Her hair was twisted into small pigtails, each of which was decorated with a circle of beads. She wore a simple toga of brown-dyed cotton, under which her big firm breasts swayed with obvious nakedness.

  Barney looked up from his writing. He laid down his pen. His eyes were beginning to feel strained these days and he had been thinking of sending to Durban for some spectacles.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked her. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Master Mont-harry tell me come.’

  Barney stood up. ‘I see. Did he give you a message?’

  ‘He say you all alone, master. I come to make you not alone.’

  ‘You mean he sent you to come share my bed?’

  The girl nodded.

  Barney examined the letter he had been writing. ‘Dear Sir, I have for some years been attempting to trace my brother Joel Blitz or Barker, and I wonder …’ He picked up his pen, and snapped it sharply in half, tossing the pieces back on the table.

  The black girl stared at him in wonder. ‘Efidile,’ she said.

  Barney knew what the word meant. ‘It has died.’ The Bantu believed that household articles were possessed of spirits, and if they broke a plate or a cup, they always said ‘efidile’, just as if a man had died.

  The next morning, over breakfast, he and Monsarez had a fierce argument. Monsaraz was still drunk from the previous evening, and he kept coughing up blood-streaked phlegm.

  ‘I don’t want you to send me any more of your black girls!’ Barney shouted at him.

  ‘I was doing you a service!’ Monsaraz retaliated. ‘God, you’re a priggish, ungrateful bastard! I thought you were human enough to want a woman, that’s all, and so I sent you one!’

  ‘I’m human,’ said Barney. ‘But when I find a woman, it will be a woman of my own choosing. Not one of your disease-ridden rejects!’

  ‘That wasn’t a disease-ridden reject!’ retorted Monsaraz. He had to stop for almost a minute while he coughed and coughed and coughed. Eventually, he took a mouthful of gin, gargled with it, and spat it on the floor, and he was able to continue. ‘That was the girl I call Zanza. She’s a Tswana. I call her Zanza because she plays like a musical instrument. One of those xylophone things they make out of iron.’

  ‘I didn’t want her,’ said Barney as steadily as he could manage.

  ‘Well, that’s all right by me,’ Monsaraz told him. ‘But it just makes me wonder how you can keep your head screwed on straight. All work and no women. Do you Jews have saints? No? Well, you ought to, because you’ll qualify, for sure.’

  The same afternoon, Barney rode out to the north-east corner of Derdeheuwel on one of the five horses he had bought in Hopetown. He enjoyed riding, although he did not ride well. Monsaraz said he looked like a side of beef being bounced in a blanket. He reined in his horse on top of a small kopje and looked out over the sloping fields which led back to the white-painted farmhouse. It was a cool, windy day, and he wore a tweed jacket which he had cut down from an overcoat.

  Monsaraz, however coarsely he had put it, had been right. He needed a woman. More than that, he needed a wife. Someone who could live with him as a lover, and a friend, and a sharer of secrets and responsibilities. He realised, not for the first time, how painfully lonely he was. He was twenty-two years old, and yet apart from his casual acquaintances among diggers and farmers and diamond-buyers, he was almost completely friendless. He went fishing with Donald sometimes, but Donald’s garrulous bursts of that half-Afrikaans dialect that the Griquas spoke, were usually incomprehensible to Barney, and in the end Donald’s company became childish and irritating.

  He felt inside him enormous warmth towards people, even Monsaraz, and deep reserves of emotional strength. He knew he was good at business, and at organising the farm. Yet there was some greater ambition on the edges of his consciousness which he unable to grasp – an ambition that was as dark and tense as the hour before a summer storm. Only when he clearly understood what this ambition was, would he be able to express his feelings out loud – because unti
l he understood what he wanted out of his life, he would not know who he was or what he was, or what destiny had brought him here.

  Most of the local farmers quite liked him, although not many of them could understand his Jewish gentleness, or the comparative sophistication of his New York manners. The Boers were direct people, frank to the point of rudeness; and having trekked 700 miles to escape British domination, they had every right to be. Some called him ‘Yid’, right to his face; but then genially slapped him on the back until he was winded, and invited him to take a look at their new-born calves. They knew that his farm was neat, and the black fellows seemed to enjoy working for him, and as far as anybody could tell, he was turning a profit. What was more, he was an American Jew, not British.

  None of them knew what he felt when he went to bed at night in the narrow yellowwood bed with the carved fruit-and-flowers headboard, exhausted from a day on the farm. None of them knew how often his dreams were visited by his dead father, sorrowful, hard-working, but ultimately ineffectual in that he had never taught his wife or boys to live without him. None of them knew how often he squeezed his hands into fists, and then slowly opened them again, expecting to find his mother’s blood in the creases of his palms.

  Those who liked him a lot called him ‘the Jewish Boer’, and he was often invited around to their homesteads for dinner. Pik Du Plooy, whose farm bordered Derdeheuwel to the east was a special friend, a real bread-and cheese Boer with a fiery face and white-blond hair. So was Simon de Klerk, a square little man whose farm on the opposite bank of the Orange River was called Paddagang, which meant Frog’s Walk. All the same, as much as they liked his company, Barney was still an Uitlander, a foreigner, and a Jew; and whenever one of their daughters showed too much obvious admiration of his boxer’s good looks, there would be testy silences, or loud and pointed remarks about how tough he was going to find it, poor fellow, to meet a nice Jewish girl all the way out here on the Orange River.