by Damon Galgut
A black woman in a stained yellow dress came out from the kitchen. She carried a notebook and pen. She was ponderous. The man knew what he wanted but he couldn’t speak. He pointed to something on the menu and she wrote in her notebook. She took the minister’s order too. Then she went back into the kitchen.
They sat in silence, waiting for their food. The man was looking down at the table. The minister sat back and his eyes, which were molten and dark, flickered all the time on the face of the man. What he thought was never spoken.
‘Here’s the food,’ he said at last.
The same ponderous woman brought it in. She carried it on a tray and put their plates down in front of them and went out. The minister had ordered a cup of coffee. The man was having a full breakfast.
He ate with a voraciousness and speed that were frightening. Still nothing was said. There was the clash of the knife and fork and the sound of his chewing and the old woman behind the counter sat glaring, venting on their strangeness all the insidious fury that she’d gathered up to herself in her life.
When he had finished he pushed back from the table.
‘Can I have some more?’
The minister half smiled. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, waving one hand listlessly.
The man signalled to the old woman, who spoke peremptorily sideways into the kitchen. In due course the other woman came out, carrying on a plate the same breakfast, identically arranged. She put it down in front of him and went out.
This time when he’d finished he again sat back and watched the minister sipping at his coffee. The light that came in through the window had moved on a little and dust motes were visible around them.
‘Are you feeling better?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Much better.’
‘Do you want to…?’
‘I don’t want anything,’ he said.
They sat there for a bit.
‘You wouldn’t have a razor and some soap I could borrow?’
The minister took the car key from his pocket. He gave it to the man. ‘In the cubby-hole,’ he said.
He got up and went out. The garage was deserted except for the pump attendant who was reclining on a cement island with the blue cap of his uniform pulled down over his eyes. The man opened the car and took a small black toiletries bag out of the cubby-hole. He looked again at the minister’s frock that was so carefully draped across the back. He shut the door and on his way around the car surreptitiously looked down at the registration. It was a number from a town the man didn’t know.
The toilets were behind the tea-room. On his way past the window he glanced in at the minister, who was still sitting at the table. They looked at each other through the glass as though they’d never seen each other before.
In the little alley-way next to the tea-room there was a large red motorbike parked. There wasn’t any sign of the rider, but when he got into the bathroom he saw that one of the cubicles was occupied. He filled a basin with water and removed from the black bag the intimate tools required for shaving. He felt weak and as he looked at himself in the foggy mirror it struck him that this activity was ludicrous. He laughed shortly, then stopped.
While he shaved and looked at himself in the glass he thought about everything that had happened. He dried his face and was about to brush his teeth with his finger when he thought what the hell and used the minister’s toothbrush instead. He combed his hair with the minister’s comb, which had strands of the other man’s hair woven into the teeth. He took off his shirt and washed himself and used some deodorant that made him smell like the other man. Then he put all the things he had used back into the bag.
He was about to go out when he caught sight of his hand and saw traces of blood on it. He didn’t know where the blood had come from. Then he remembered the barbed wire and turned the tap on and washed off the blood.
The toilet in the cubicle behind him flushed and a man came out. He was about thirty-five years old with black hair cut very short and a manicured moustache. A plump mouth with pink lips, prominent front teeth. In the centre of his forehead there was a round perfect mole. He carried a motorbike helmet. They nodded at each other in the mirror.
‘Warm,’ the newcomer said. He had a high, thin voice.
The man grunted. It was only now that his mind went back to the tea-room and he remembered a pay-phone hanging on the wall. It occurred to him that the minister might be using this phone at the present moment. But when he was back in the car-park he could tell at a glance that the minister hadn’t moved from his place at the table.
He put the bag away and looked again at that frock, that garment, on the seat. He touched it with one finger, then shut the door and walked back into the tea-room.
3
The minister’s name was Frans Niemand. He was forty-three. He’d come to the church only later in his life, seven and a half years before. Prior to that he’d worked as a clerk in government offices in Paarl. It wasn’t, he said, ‘the sort of work to make you happy’.
The man watched him. ‘Being in the church makes you happy?’
‘Do you find that hard to believe?’
‘I’m not very… religious.’
They were sitting in their places as they had been before, opposite each other at the low plastic table. Against the glass beside them fat black flies were bashing at the pane. The minister was smoking a cigarette.
The man was thin but not slight. He did not make unnecessary movements though he was clearly capable of speed.
The minister offered him a cigarette. He shook his head.
‘So where are you going to now?’
The minister said the name of a town.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Further up the coast. The middle of nowhere. I’m replacing the minister at the mission station there.’
‘I didn’t know they still had mission stations.’
‘Oh, ja. Everywhere.’
The woman in the stained yellow dress was back now, standing over them and breathing audibly. A name tag pinned skewly across her bosom said that her name was Beauty. Beauty put down their bill on the table-top and spoke the amount out loud. The minister took the money from his pocket and gave it to her and she counted it and went back into the kitchen.
‘Thanks.’
‘That’s okay.’ The minister looked around. ‘Shall we go?’
The man nodded but for some reason neither of them moved. The only sound in the room came from a television in the corner. He glanced around and at one of the other tables he saw the man who had come out of the cubicle in the toilets. The motorbike helmet was on top of the table next to him. He was staring intently into space.
He became aware that the man was looking at him and he turned his eyes.
The man looked at the minister. He watched him. He felt the minister wanted something from him.
‘Where are you going to?’
He thought for a second. He said, ‘north,’ and started playing with a plastic spoon on the table.
‘On foot?’
‘Yes, on foot.’
‘Where did you start from?’
‘You want to know a lot.’
‘I answered your questions.’
‘Shall we go?’
The minister gave a high, girlish laugh. He dabbed at his mouth with a napkin.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
They got up from the table and walked across the room while the old woman at the counter who had yet to do anything to justify her presence glared at them with that viciousness that bordered on ebullition. They went out. The petrol attendant was still sleeping outside and a dog was nosing at a bin and they went back to the car and got in. They drove out and back on to the dust road and carried on driving north.
They came to a town half an hour later. They drove down the main street with its leaning lamp-posts and newspapers blowing and its quality of granular light. At a traffic light they stopped and both looked to the right and there was a policema
n on the corner. His uniform was blue with noticeable buttons and his face made from some clotted clay. He looked at them and they at him and then both of them looked at each other. The light changed and they drove on and presently left the town behind. The road was close to the sea still and the water stretched immensely away. There was fynbos on either side of the car and a light, sour breeze made the branches tremble.
4
Later they came to a fork in the road. The right fork went inland and up to the border. The left went to the minister’s destination. They went left. Now the road was colourless and thin as it had been when the man was walking on it. It travelled on within sight of the sea on the left. There were no more houses now and no more people and the sky pressed vacantly down.
It was early afternoon and the sun was hot as they drove. They passed the carcass of an animal next to the road on which three black crows were feeding and one of them flapped up ahead of the car and lumbered off over the veld. The road went through a salt pan that was cracked like a mirror and in which there was nothing alive. There were river beds that were dry. Boulders glistened occasionally from side to side with that fulsome pinkness of flesh.
They came to a quarry on the right that had been mined for chalk but was now abandoned and disused. Ahead of them the road mounted a rise. The minister pulled over. There was an acre of gravel at the edge of the quarry with bunches of scrub growing nearby. The minister parked here, facing away from the road, and switched off the engine. There was silence again, broken only by the faint buzzing of some insect. Then even that fell silent.
The minister took a map out of the cubby-hole. He spread it out across his lap. ‘I think we’re almost there,’ he said. He rolled the map up again and put it away.
They didn’t talk for a while. The sun was just past the vertical and it cut hotly into the car. Dust swirled in a sudden complex eddy and faded softly again. The road behind them was deserted and silent. The man could not imagine he had ever walked on it.
‘I thought we might have a little drink,’ the minister said.
‘A little drink of what?’
The minister gave again that leering smile and reached into the back and took out a bottle of wine that was supposed to be used for communion. He opened it with a corkscrew and took a long swallow and handed it to the man. The man sipped too.
‘I saw a helicopter this morning,’ said the minister.
‘Oh, yes,’ the man said. He didn’t look interested.
‘A police helicopter.’
‘Yes?’
There was a pause.
‘I saw some police cars on the road too. Maybe they were looking for somebody.’
‘Maybe,’ said the man. He drank from the bottle.
‘Who knows?’
‘Who knows?’ the man said. He gave the bottle back to the minister. He was looking outside the car.
‘But that was a long way back,’ the minister said.
‘Yes.’
A silence fell. The minister leaned towards him and put a hand on his arm.
‘You can talk to me. You can tell me everything.’
‘You do a lot of that, minister? Listening to people confess?’
‘People tell me a lot, yes. It’s part of the job.’
Without looking down, the man took the moist hand from his arm.
The minister was sweating. He emitted again that high, awful laugh and he took the bottle and drank. The hole in front of them went down into the earth and there were striations in the rock that had been made visible and the two men who were bound together by some intimate and private communion of their own that neither understood although each believed he did and that would kill both of them in time passed the bottle between them and took sips from it and became gradually drunker as the afternoon went by. They sat with their feet up on the dashboard. Several hours passed in this way. Then the sun had moved on and the shadows of things were stretching along the ground. In the little white car at the edge of the vast hole the two men had finished the first bottle of wine and had opened a second one and the minister was smoking a cigarette that sent lines of smoke across his face. A bird flew over the quarry and for an instant its shadow was cast in bizarre configuration across the scarified ridges of rock, monstrous and segmented and flawed.
The minister put out his cigarette. His eyes were bloodshot. In a hoarse voice, whispering, he said:
‘Why don’t you give up?’
The man looked at him. The minister’s hand was back on his arm now and he could feel its heat.
‘Give yourself up. Whatever you’ve done. They’ll find you. In the end.’
Now the minister’s hand was fumbling across his chest and was plucking at buttons and breath was roaring in his ear. The minister smelled like milk slightly off and his face was distended on some inner hunger. The man opened his door and got out. He walked to the edge of the quarry. He stood there, looking down. In his arms he carried the second bottle of wine, nearly empty. His shoulders were shaking badly. His face was bloodless and haggard. He said something inaudible. Then he raised his head and spoke aloud:
‘They’ll get me,’ he said.
Just that. The words were simple and heavy. He looked down again. There were boulders at the bottom of the quarry and trees warped into crazed curious shapes and what appeared to be holes in the earth. He could see no clear path down and it was a wonder to him how men had ever mined this hole.
The minister got out of the car too. On bowed unsteady legs he came lurching over to where the man was standing. He enfolded him from behind in a slovenly embrace and started tugging at his buttons again.
The man pulled the fingers from his chest and prised open the arms. He turned.
‘You owe me,’ the minister said.
‘I don’t owe you.’
‘I bought you food. I gave you a lift.’
‘And so?’
The minister looked wildly at him, his face blurred with misery and liquor. ‘All I want,’ he said, ‘all I want… is a little… ’
He didn’t finish.
‘I can’t help you,’ the man said.
The minister’s face sealed whitely like a clam. ‘I could tell them,’ he said. ‘When I get there.’
The man was looking down, into the bottom of the hole. Very flatly, he said: ‘Will you?’
The minister swallowed. He wet his lips with his tongue. ‘No,’ he said.
‘No?’
‘No. I know what it feels like. To be desperate.’
The man smiled, bitterly and privately. He was still looking down.
‘Come on,’ the minister said.
‘All right,’ the man said. He said it softly and was talking to himself but the minister understood him wrongly. He looked at the man and with his hands stretched out stepped forward to touch him again.
The man was holding the bottle by the neck and he raised it to one side and brought it down with force on the side of the minister’s head. He fell sideways, twitching. The bottle broke in mid-air where the minister’s head had been and the wine exploded redly, like blood. Or perhaps it was blood. Then the man bent and picked up a rock that had lain untouched here till now and brought it down on the skull of the man below him and stove it in.
The minister was quite dead then. He lay transfixed by an extremity of stillness and only the dust bore witness to his final convulsion in an etching of scuff-marks and lines. The man straightened up as if after long labour and put one hand on his back. He looked around. The sun was almost on the horizon and it had cooled into a red coin but of what currency or what value the man didn’t know and he walked to a log nearby and sat. He bowed his head into his hands again and hunched forward and seemed about to cry. But he didn’t cry.
5
The landscape around him was lit in a strange unearthly glow and the sky had the quality of metal cooling.
From far back on the dust road there came the sound of an engine. It drew gradually closer. He took the minister unde
r the arms and started to drag him backwards on the ground. He was heavy. His heels bounced. He pulled him behind a termite hill that rose with stalagmitic elegance towards nothing and propped him up like a doll.
The motorbike went past without slowing. The man was also crouched down behind the termite hill, but he could see a flash of red in passing and a leaning figure poised above it. He straightened up. The motorbike went over the rise ahead and the noise of the engine faded. Its dust hung thickly over the road, drifting. He bent down and took the minister under the arms again and dragged him.
He went to the edge of the quarry. A rock slide had made a treacherous slope here and he began to go down. It wasn’t possible any more to drag the minister behind him and he gathered him up to his chest and tried to walk sideways, stepping from stone to stone. A rock turned underfoot and he collapsed backwards suddenly, grazing his shoulder. He cursed and struggled upright again, wrestling with the minister. He was staggering downward, downward.
He came to the bottom of the slope. He was covered with sweat by now, and shivering, and weeping a little. He laid the minister down gently across a stone and ran a little way to one side to see how to go on. He made out a vague track that ran like a weal down this side of the quarry and like a man possessed ran back to his charge and dragged him again.
His arms hurt. He followed the track but after a while he couldn’t go on. The track disappeared down a vertical face and he stood at the top of this drop and looked out. There was no way to do it except by jumping from one boulder to another but he couldn’t jump with the minister on his back. He sat down to think about this. Then there didn’t seem another way and with a sort of appalled despair he hauled the body to the edge and dropped it.
It plunged in a white rush and vanished. He heard the sound as it landed. He followed by jumping from one rock to another. He came to the last rock and slid down on his back. He walked down a bank overgrown with weeds. He went through a narrow defile and emerged into a subterranean garden. It was dank and cool here, profuse with random growth. He stood for a while, just breathing.