Who Killed Piet Barol?

by Richard Mason

  The Great Founder had chosen his quick-witted granddaughter Nosakhe to be the Keeper of this knowledge, and of a great deal more besides. Nosakhe had hoped to do the same with her daughter Mandisa, but the child was a sweet foolish thing, quite incapable of the discernment required of a sangoma.

  When Mandisa’s fits started, Nosakhe had at first entertained hopes that spirits were visiting her daughter—though gradually she had understood that if this were the case, they were wicked spirits. On no account did Nosakhe wish Mandisa to become a vessel for the reincarnation of Za-Ha-Rrell, the King of Evil, which was a grave risk for all those who rarely think for themselves. The day her daughter had a fit that left her unconscious, one part of Nosakhe’s brain was convinced that this was final proof she was a dark witch; the other that perhaps a Strange One’s medical opinion should be sought. A visit to King William’s Town, which had cost a good portion of the Zini family fortune, had resulted in a diagnosis of epilepsy, and packets of expensive white pills. These banished the fits and it became clear to Nosakhe that her daughter was not—and never would be—the vessel of any spirit, good or ill. When Mandisa died—bitten by a snake, while bathing on the rocks with her husband—Nosakhe had felt furious sorrow.

  She loved Mandisa’s child with all the fierceness in her, and had gone to pains to provide Ntsina with the practical experience he would need if the spirits came calling.

  Nosakhe kept Ntsina away from his father, and was jealous of his love. It was cruel of her, and Sukude sought refuge from the pain of her cruelty by gradually caring less for his son. Privately, he thought the boy effete and sentimental, too much in his grandmother’s aura. But she had a witch’s power, that woman, and he did not dare cross her. So he lived out his life as the prince consort of the village—the necessary man at rituals when only a man could perform the rites, but with very little else to do.

  Nosakhe would not permit Sukude to sully her daughter’s memory by taking another wife, much less a concubine. In these circumstances, Sukude’s thoughts strayed to sex. For years he had sex thoughts about almost every woman he saw—each had something to focus on as he imagined fucking them. Breasts, bottom, the faint appearance of underarm hair on a woman with a plain face, a big wide nose. But he lacked the courage to take a mistress.

  Since his son’s departure for the mines, Sukude’s desires had focused on one object: the beguiling Bela Jaxa, just entering the first flush of womanhood.

  There was a gentle quality in her grandson that made Nosakhe believe Ntsina might be a vessel for Good Magic, if only he could hear it. On each of their journeys into the forest she had taught him to listen. She had waited to send him to the mines until he was well trained, and in truth it was not so much the paying of the hut tax that concerned her. She, Nosakhe Zini, did not doubt her ability to stand up to a British inspector, should one call, and in any case the forest was thick and full of leopards and there were few safe tracks through it. She had sent Ntsina into the heart of the earth because purity untested is not a strong purity. She did not have total certainty—such as she experienced upon other matters—that her grandson had the qualities required of the next Keeper of the Knowledge, and she wished to be sure. She was too honourable to pretend that personal desire is the same as divine inspiration.

  Ntsina’s departure was his father’s opportunity to execute a plan he had long nursed, and for which he had sought and received the sanction of three sangomas in King William’s Town. Only by obeying the strictest interpretation of the law of his ancestors could he get his own way with Bela Jaxa, and he was determined to give his mother-in-law no grounds for objection. No one could condemn Ntsina marrying, nor his father for beginning the bride-price negotiations in his absence. Were the negotiations to be concluded, and should Ntsina fail to return (as so many young men failed to return), then the ceremony might be conducted in absentia. This would bring Bela into Sukude’s homestead, and under his power. He would have the right to sex her if his son did not do so within three months of the marriage. This explained his haste to agree to her father’s bride price, to avoid protracted haggling.

  When Sukude told Nosakhe that he had negotiated the marriage of his son to the most desirable young wife for many miles around, Nosakhe knew that Sukude had a dark intention; but he had handled himself so well she could not thwart him. Instead, she laid a Charm of Return upon the pile of hair and toenail clippings that allowed her to operate on Ntsina’s body at a distance, and she woke every morning hopeful that he would enter her hut.

  But so far, he had not.

  —

  HE WAS CLOSER, however, than she guessed: barely three days’ distance, hacking to pieces a young steenbok he had killed that morning with a hard stone, flung at its head, and then a knife at its throat. Piet watched the twitching animal and repented all the flesh he had eaten in his life. But he also felt brave, a man in touch with harsh realities; and he made himself look as Ntsina sawed the creature’s limbs off, with a sharp knife Piet had bought in Cape Town which nevertheless, though Ntsina was too polite to say so, was a blunt, useless thing by comparison with the knives of Gwadana.

  Luvo, having grown up on a farm, knew how to skin a beast, and applied himself to it with accuracy and skill. It pleased him to show Ntsina that he could handle himself in the wild, and he trimmed the fat with great delicacy. They made a fire and cooked the steenbok over it, watched by many enquiring eyes—for the scent of a steenbok goes a long way in a forest, and many creatures had come to see what they might share.

  It was Piet who suggested adding herbs, and Ntsina who found them, hacking his way through the jungle to scare off the hyenas. When he returned, he was carrying several slender mushrooms, tinged with blue—a treat he had learned from the older boys in the village, not from his grandmother. Piet did his best to eat the steenbok, for he was hungry. But it was tough and gamey and smelt of luscious blood and he could not stomach it, used as he was to meat served in restaurants, prepared in kitchens. He thought longingly of the kudu biltong the leopard had stolen. He did not quite believe the story of the leopard, thinking it much more likely that the boys had scoffed the biltong while he slept. He had brought a few tins of soup, but forgotten a tin opener, and did not fancy his chances of opening a can with a knife. Nor would his pride permit him to ask Ntsina for assistance.

  So he watched as the young men tucked in, at once hungry and revolted, feeling light-headed and cold. It was a grey, overcast day. For the first time since setting off he felt despondent, and began to see the difficulties of his scheme. The mahogany was of good quality, but a long way from anywhere he might make a piece of furniture; and after all he was a white man among darkies, who in extremis would cheat him of all they could.

  “Why does the Strange One look so sad?” said Ntsina to Luvo.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Luvo had his own grievances. He would have preferred it, he thought, if Piet had not affected equality with them. He would then at least have known what to expect. Piet’s friendliness on the bus, however, his insistence that he be addressed as “Piet” and not as “baas” or even “sir,” had made Luvo think that he was an mlungu like the von Rankes. Piet’s total unconcern with domestic duties, his unquestioned sense that it was Ntsina and Luvo who should lay the fires and skin the animals, that he was going beyond the call of duty simply by carrying his own pack, made Luvo resentful. He felt he had been tricked into affection, then shown for a fool.

  Sensing the tension in the group, Ntsina thought of the mushrooms. They were used in certain secret ceremonies, and strictly controlled; but the older boys defied convention and ate them for sport. Ntsina realized, as he ripped the steenbok meat from the bone, that though his name meant “Laughing Boy,” he had not laughed in too long.

  “I have something that will cheer us,” he said, and reached for the mushrooms in his pouch.

  Luvo was skeptical, and asked many questions which Ntsina refused to answer. All he said was: “These will not harm you.
But you must make your own choice.”

  When the fungi were shown to Piet, they looked much more edible than the steenbok. His spirits revived at the prospect of a new anecdote to tell at the bar of the Mount Nelson Hotel.

  “Tell the Strange One he should eat no more than three, and chew them well,” said Ntsina.

  Luvo hesitated. He had so far been a wholly faithful translator. “Might they kill a man if he has too many?”

  “No, they won’t kill. But the consequences can be frightening.”

  Ntsina went off for a piss, and Luvo, moved by a rare spirit of vengeance, said: “He advises you to take ten.”

  —

  PIET WAS CHEWING THEM by the time Ntsina returned. They tasted vile. Acrid and bitter, with an undertone of a flavour he had never encountered but would never thereafter forget. There was a challenge in their vileness, and Piet was a man who responded to challenges. He kept his face straight and chewed, and saw that Ntsina was impressed that he should make no complaint. In the forest, Ntsina’s expertise had begun to reverse the race superiority Piet had taken as his natural right, and Ntsina’s respect had become worth winning. He chewed for three minutes, until Ntsina made a swallowing gesture.

  Piet swallowed.

  Nothing happened.

  Ntsina selected three mushrooms and chewed them too. Luvo refused, having given too many lectures on the dangers of intoxicants to abandon his principles on so small a provocation.

  “We must move away from the meat,” said Ntsina, “so the animals may have it and leave us alone.”

  They resumed their walk through the forest. The cold of the morning had eased, and the trees protected them from the stinging wind. The canopy had kept some of the heat of the day before, and the air was humid and caressing. Ntsina found them a pleasant spot on the banks of a stream.

  “Teach me some isiXhosa,” said Piet.

  Luvo, unwillingly, guided him through the phrase for “What a beautiful home.” At first Piet caught the jumble of sounds quite well, but as they went on a certain slackness descended on his jaw, and then his tongue. The sun was glinting through the trees, in a halo of red. The red intensified, began to spread. Piet’s hunger lifted, was replaced by a tingling sensation in his limbs. Ntsina smiled at him, and then they both began to laugh. Piet could not say what was funny. Perhaps it was the shape of Ntsina’s lip, or the crookedness of his teeth. An insuperable hilarity bubbled from within, and the look on Luvo’s face stimulated it. The more disapproving Luvo became, the more Piet and Ntsina laughed, Luvo’s disapproval sparking the flint of untapped merriment deep within them.

  Piet’s head, usually so full of words, became gloriously empty. He who thought so much lost all consciousness of not thinking. The fabric of the universe began to stretch and billow. His hunger ceased.

  Piet had now reached the level of intoxication achieved by the three mushrooms Ntsina had prescribed. Ntsina, in the same place, felt a strong affection for this risk-taking mlungu, an affection like the one he had felt for his dearest boyhood friends when they, too, had sneaked into the forest and hunted for the mushrooms with their slender, blue-tinged stems.

  But Piet had not eaten three mushrooms. As his stomach broke them down, their key ingredient raced towards his brain—where it caused glorious mischief. He had rarely drunk to excess and had no experience of the white powders his friends took from tiny golden spoons in the bathrooms of nightclubs. The fabric of the universe began to undulate like curtains billowing in the breeze, and then the breeze became a hurricane and he began to be afraid.

  Luvo, watching him, felt a different kind of fear clamp his spine. It was clear that he had unleashed in the Strange One something beyond anyone’s capacity to control, and Ntsina’s assurances that these mushrooms would not kill had surely, he reflected, been constrained by the number ingested. To his horror, Piet’s face twisted from mirth, through mystification into terror, and then tears formed in his eyes.

  The sight of an mlungu weeping pricked Luvo to the quick, and he began to offer fervent prayers for Piet’s recovery. Piet’s vulnerability made him see that he did not hate him, that Piet had tried, in his own way, to be kind; and that if he had failed to treat his employees as equals, the roots of his failure were anchored in a wider malaise that was not of his making.

  Piet tried to rouse himself, but his strongest efforts resulted in his raising his head barely an inch from the ground. His body had grown unresponsive. Only his mind was alive, and it was flooded by sensation. The trees had lost their shape. Their bark was shimmering. He began to sink into the ground and as he sank certain feelings rose through him, in opposition to the downward movement, and chief amongst them was Love. Love for his wife. Love for his son. Arthur’s voice came to him, the flash of sunlight on his golden curls, the weight of his body as he fell asleep against Piet’s chest. Piet grasped for this Love. It was the only thing he trusted, and as it floated above him, fusing with the red ball of the sun, flooding the clearing with multi-hued light, he felt Ntsina’s arm slip round him, after which Luvo’s voice, very soothingly, said: “We have you safe, Piet. This will pass.”

  It did not pass. The universe swirled and shifted. Beneath his love for Arthur came scenes from a house in Amsterdam filled with exquisite furniture and all manner of sensual delights. These brought with them the sharp cut of cruelty, as he remembered Louisa Vermeulen-Sickerts’ stinging distrust of him, and then this sweetened—for she had crossed the world to say sorry. He sank down and down into the ground, into the shouts and cries, the smell of fields, of Leiden, where he had spent his youth. A grumbling of his father, the heaviness of his tread, his ghastly snores rumbled across the forest. And then—it was this that made him cry—his mother’s kindness, the sound of her voice as she sang and told him she loved him, and missed him, and sent him money and forgiveness and a kiss.

  Ntsina found a sweet, sharp fruit and squeezed it into Piet’s mouth, and the sensation was a jolting joy. Piet drank what he was given, and another, and another, and after an eternity the universe’s billowing grew gentler. His descent into the ground slowed and he began to float upwards, towards the light, the sky, the kind expressions of his companions. In this wordless state Piet understood emotion only. The look on Ntsina’s face, Luvo’s concern, communicated more powerfully than words could have done that they wished him well, that they waited for him in the world he had so recently shared with them. As the bark on the trees began to etch itself into a myriad embroidery, an answering feeling rose within him and solidified as a bond of deep affection and trust.

  When Piet could move again, because the drug had subsided, he sat up—but he had no words, and through the trees the sunlight spun radiantly. The sounds of the forest were brighter, and he heard meaning in the squawks and croaks and hisstles and creaks. Two birds were calling to each other. He understood that one was inviting the other to follow, that the second was coyly resisting, with every intention of yielding in the end. Luvo was so glad Piet was going to live that he found in himself all the joy in domestic duties that had made him the Rankes’ most beloved pupil. He made comfortable rest places for his friends, and then Piet and Ntsina lay down side by side and stared at the sky.

  “I will introduce this man to my Ancestors tonight,” said Ntsina to Luvo, a long while later. “He is prepared for them now.”

  They stood and went on, led by Ntsina, whose mortal powers were returning. Piet walked through the forest in silence, his mind still malleable. The hallucinatory power of the mushrooms had subsided with the sweetness of the juice, but his heightened perception remained. He moved slowly, smoothly, almost in a trance. He felt at one with this natural world, a creature descended from apes, and the lifting of language revealed deeper, wordless responses to the rhythms of the forest that evolution had etched in his brain. He was alive to the scents in the air and the communications of the beasts.

  The going by the stream was difficult and rocky. Seeing that Piet was in no state to navigate this terr
ain, Ntsina led them away from the water and into the network of avenues made by the forest elephants. Nosakhe had taught him their geography, and he found that his sojourn in Johannesburg had not robbed him of the knowledge, and this made him sure that he had escaped the Bad Magic before it was too late. He thought with distant horror of the mines and the falling platform, the shattered bones of the men he had known. These memories had taken on the quality of a nightmare. With every step he felt woken from it.

  The mlungu’s vulnerability, and then his quietness, and Ntsina’s own consumption of a potent hallucinogen, had cleansed his feelings towards Piet Barol. The bowing and scraping of the blacks in Johannesburg, which had so injured his dignity and made him sorrowful for them, even as he was grateful for the welcome Mrs. Mafuduka had given him, were irrelevant in the forest. With each step they took Ntsina grew more certain that it was time to honour the summons of his Ancestors.

  There was only one place in which to do it.

  —

  THEY CAME to the grove of the Ancestor Trees as the sun began to dip. The creeping cold of approaching night was held at bay by the insulation of the leaves. The elephants’ paths led to it, for it was their meeting place too.

  The trees to which the villagers of Gwadana gave the name ninyanya, or Ancestor, predated their arrival by two thousand years. They had been alive before the amaXhosa became distinct from the Pedi and the amaZulu, their reputation as cattle thieves and fine hosts not yet won. The trees had been alive when the great mlungu Jesus Christ persuaded the few who had bread and fish to share what they had, and so fed five thousand on the dry plains of Galilee. Their root systems had explored the soft soil of the forest, and then the clay beneath it, and then the fissured rock that was the forest’s foundation, throughout the great dramas of Rome, the stabbing of Julius Caesar on the Senate steps. They had grown towards one another and fused, sharing the water and the nectar that could keep weaker ones alive through a harsh season, or restore those struck by lightning and wounded by fire, while in Africa wars raged and in Europe men set out on fragile vessels to conquer worlds they described as “new”—but which were as old as any world. The grove was almost a single being, so bound were its member trees to one another, and yet each was wholly individual. They had grown together from saplings and forged a union without conflict, free from betrayal and viciousness. In their crowns were gardens of fertile soil, several inches deep, dropped over centuries by passing birds. In these gardens earthworms wriggled, grown distinct from those that churned the forest floor. Their branches began thirty feet above the ground, and this refuge from predators made them desirable residences for all sorts of creatures that relished distance from the great cats. Monkeys lived in them, and frogs, and squirrels that had learned to fly between them, leaping from branches and spreading their tails. Beetles toiled diligently and laid their eggs in cracks in the bark; but the wood was impenetrable to them, hard as metal. They were so far from the forest floor that the arrival of three hairless apes caused little consternation.