by Damon Galgut
An arm, a shoulder were apparent.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ Small said.
He went faster and faster. Then he stopped. He leaned against the side of the hole and covered his face with his hand.
A pebble hit Small on the arm. He looked up. It was close to dusk now and the sky was dark blue in colour but it was still possible to see in outline against it the forms of three men looking down. They were at the top of the quarry. It was Captain Mong and two others. They were standing very still and in their uniforms and caps they were like models of men. They stood there, looking, not moving.
19
In the night there are torches moving and voices calling out in the dark. In the open gravel area at the top of the quarry there are cars parked with their headlights shining and radios playing and men standing waiting and there are men at the bottom of the quarry, moving with lights among the trees and the boulders. Most of the torches are around the hole in the ground. There are people in the hole, picking amongst the rocks, shouting out to each other. Photographs are taken. Yellow tape is tied.
At some point a stretcher is carried down the side of the quarry and assembled at the bottom. Then men in plastic gloves with cloths tied over their mouths and noses lift the white form from the base of the hole and raise it hand over hand and lay it down on the stretcher. It is faceless, sexless, no longer human. It’s covered with a blanket. Then two men take the stretcher and ascend with it, stopping every little while to rest. They come to the summit in time.
The body is placed in the back of a van and the van is driven away.
Some of the men stay behind.
When dawn breaks everybody has gone except for a solitary policeman who loiters at the bottom of the quarry. He is tired and bored and he slouches against a rock with his cap pushed back on his head. He yawns and scratches himself and goes wandering around again, whistling to himself.
He stops for a while at the edge of the hole and peers into it. Rocks lie tumbled at the bottom and a few flies buzz aimlessly around. Something has happened here but he doesn’t know what and he doesn’t particularly care. He has been left to keep watch.
20
In the café in the town the proprietor leaned on his dirty fridge while he counted change into the till. Late afternoon sun came in through the door. There were people standing at the counter.
‘In the quarry?’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘A white man?’
‘That’s what I heard.’
‘I heard a black woman.’
‘And they found him there? Burying it?’
‘Digging it up.’
‘Why would they dig it up?’
‘It’s what I heard.’
There was shuffling and shaking of heads. Someone else came into the shop.
‘Why did they kill her?’
‘For money.’
‘How many of them?’
‘Two.’
‘Four.’
‘Five,’ the proprietor said gravely.
‘Was it a white that they killed?’
‘These people. Jesus. These people.’
‘They should let them know how it feels.’
21
He stood behind the curtain in his room and watched the policeman at his bike. Captain Mong was shirtless again. He had his back to the man. He was crouched down on the concrete, a soiled cloth in his hand, polishing. He worked with small violent motions, sweat oozing out of him like wax.
Then he stopped very suddenly, as if an idea had come to him. At first he sat very still. He leaned forward and breathed on the steel and brought the cloth up and rubbed where he had breathed. He stood slowly and turned. He stayed there quite still with his arms at his sides, looking across the concrete to the house.
The man moved back behind the curtain with his spine to the wall. He was rigid and shivering and his eyes were opened wide. He stood like this without stirring. There was no sound from outside.
After a while he knelt down at the window and lifted up the bottom of the curtain. The policeman was polishing again. He was crouched as before with his back to the man, his hand moving in those small violent circles.
22
A mattress had been thrown down on the floor and Small sat on it, cross-legged, waiting. It was late afternoon. He got up and went to the door and looked out through the bars into the passage. He couldn’t see anything. He came back and sat down on the mattress again.
He spoke to himself and he answered.
‘They taking a long time with him.’
‘Same as with me, broer.’
‘Is it the same?’
‘It’s the same, man.’
Then silence. Small lay back on the mattress. A fly was buzzing near the ceiling somewhere and the sound was thin and persistent. Small pulled at his hands and touched twice at his hair.
‘It’s not the same,’ he said.
There were footsteps in the passage outside. Then a jangling of keys. Small sat up on the bed and he was as stiff as an idol. The door opened and Valentine came in and the door closed behind him again. The footsteps, the metal keys receded.
Valentine stood there. He was looking down at the floor. Then he went to the edge of the bed and sat down. His hands hung down between his knees.
Small took one of Valentine’s hands. Valentine pulled it away. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said.
In appearance the two brothers didn’t look like each other beyond the eroded blue tattoos on their arms. Small was a tiny man with a hairless freckled body and a high voice that came out of his nose. He moved in an agitated way. Valentine was the elder by almost ten years and his complexion and his manner were darker. Pale scars ran across one cheek but otherwise his surface was intact.
‘Did you tell them?’
‘Ja, I told them.’
‘What?’
‘I told them everything that happened.’
Valentine lay back on the bed with one arm across his face. His feet were still on the floor.
Small also lay down.
The fly was buzzing near the ceiling still, its drone like a voice without words.
Small started to cry. His sobs were high-pitched and muffled with a thin edge of hysteria to them. He cried like a child. Valentine turned his head to look at him, then rolled his head the other way.
Small stopped crying. ‘Who is he?’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘That man, that minister man.’
Valentine sat up. ‘He’s not a minister,’ he said.
23
He stood at the front of the church and waited for the congregation to file out. He was wearing the black robe with the holes burned into it and he had a bible in one hand and he stood next to the altar, waiting for the church to be empty.
Then everybody had gone except for a single figure near the door. It was dark in that corner and only when he stirred and stepped forward could the minister see who it was. He looked at the policeman.
‘How long were you watching?’ he said.
‘Ten minutes or so.’
He nodded. The church was lit with candles. He moved from one to the other, blowing them out as he went. Thin trails of smoke rose up behind him. When he came to the last one he picked it up and walked with it towards the policeman. His face was lit in orange from below.
‘Did you want to talk to me?’ he said.
The policeman nodded. ‘Ja,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to ask you.’
They stood there for a long moment. The minister watched the face of the policeman. Then he blew out the candle and set it aside on a chair.
The policeman said: ‘I’ve got a body in my care. It must be buried.’
‘Yes?’
‘Will you do it?’
‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘Yes. Is that all?’
‘Ja, that’s all.’
They continued to stand without moving. They were very close to each other and the man could feel the breath,
the heat of the policeman. He moved a little away.
They went out of the church together. He closed and locked the wooden doors behind them. The red motorbike was standing in the centre of the plaza, burning silver in the moonlight, and both of them stood staring at its shape.
The silence went on too long and neither of them had moved.
The policeman said, ‘Do you want to go for a ride?’
They walked towards the motorbike in tandem, their heels striking simultaneously on the concrete.
‘Where are we going to?’
‘Just for a ride.’
He waited for Captain Mong to get on. He turned the key and kicked down and it started.
He got on to the seat behind him. He had his bible down the front of his shirt. He put his arms around the policeman and pressed his chest to his spine and enclosed in this unlikely embrace the two men moved forward together. The bike went across the plaza and out at the southern end and they rode without speaking through the dark streets, between the houses.
They came to the dirt road that went out of the township. They rode south. The white town rose in front of them and they passed through it and went on. Then they were on the road that had brought him to the town. Objects approached at speed and smeared back past them and away and the road rushed below them like a river.
They came to the quarry. They went past it but the policeman slowed almost immediately and made a sweeping turn in the road. The sky was clear, untouched by cloud, and starred with static points of light. A meteor fell flaming and was gone.
The acre of gravel looked metallic in the night. They rode lightly across it and parked. In the silence that followed the minister looked around. There was the termite hill and the bunches of scrub and the dark waiting brink of the hole.
They got off the bike. The minister’s hands felt stiffened with cold. His skin was tingling and glowing. He walked away, his feet crunching softly on the gravel, and came to the edge of the quarry. He stood there, looking down.
Captain Mong came up next to him. Their breath was vaporous on the air. There was silence.
A cold wind blew in from the west, carrying the smell of the sea. A creature called out somewhere with a thin, plaintive cry. A night animal of some kind, predator or prey. The policeman shifted slightly on his feet.
‘When I first heard your name,’ he said, ‘I was expecting somebody else.’
The minister watched him and waited. It was a time before the policeman spoke again.
‘I was expecting a coloured man.’
The minister smiled. ‘We all are. By now. In this country.’
‘No,’ said the policeman. ‘We’re white.’
There was a silence again. The policeman put his hands in his pockets. He looked acutely uncomfortable. He was staring down into the depths of the quarry where indeterminate shapes were conjoined.
‘Did you hear what happened here?’ he said.
The minister ran his tongue around his lips. ‘Everybody heard,’ he said.
‘But I got them.’
‘I heard that too.’
‘Dominee,’ he said. ‘They’re saying things about you.’
The minister crouched down. He picked up a handful of gravel and ran it through his fingers. When there was one pebble left he held out his hand and he dropped it. It fell swiftly below them without sound.
‘I’m a man of God.’
‘I know that, Dominee. I believe you.’
They looked at each other. Somewhere beyond the horizon there was a distant throbbing of lightning and each of them saw the face of the other, momentary and blanched. The silence went on and went on. The minister dropped his eyes.
‘And this is the body you want buried?’
‘Ja,’ said Captain Mong. ‘It’s the one. Do you mind?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s my job.’
From the quarry a sudden squall of bats erupted and fanned out, seared into silhouette by lightning in a pattern esoteric and exact as though exhaled by the earth. The man stood up. As if by agreement they walked back slowly together across the gravel. It was cold. They got on to the bike. They rode back together to the town. The minister held on the whole way and he could feel the policeman’s heart beating under his hand.
24
The graveyard was at one edge of the township some distance away from the church. It was not like any graveyard he had ever been in before. There was only a fence to mark the edges of it and the graves were mounds of earth with wooden crosses pegged into them and names burned into the crosses and weeds grew up between the graves.
At the one end there was a man with a spade. He was sitting on a flat rock, smoking a cigarette. He watched the minister. The minister walked towards him. He was wearing the black robe again and carrying a bible.
A little way from where the man was sitting there was a mound of raw earth and stones. He went to it and at the bottom of a rectangular hole the long wooden box was lying. It was made from pine planks that fitted neatly together and he could see patterns in the wood.
The grave-digger was watching him. He could feel his eyes. He opened the bible. He looked down at it but the words on the page were opaque and meaningless and he closed the book again and stood. He started to tremble and his shoulders were shaking and he walked over to the man with the spade. He sat down on the flat rock next to him.
The man looked surprised. He was a black man with a face aged from work. He took a box of cigarettes from a pocket in his overalls and tapped one out for the minister. Then he put away the cigarettes and from another pocket he took a box of matches and lit it for him. They sat side by side on the rock in the sun and smoked and looked out on the graves.
‘What’s your name?’ the minister said.
The black man shrugged expansively, turning his broad palms outward. It was clear that he didn’t understand.
‘Your name,’ said the minister, and gestured.
‘Jonas,’ the black man said.
‘Jonas,’ said the minister. ‘Good name.’
They sat there smoking, not talking. The sun was warm on their skin and there were sounds from the veld. When he had smoked the cigarette down the minister stubbed it out and flicked the butt away. He stood up.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Jonas.’
The other man nodded and smiled.
He walked back to the open hole in the ground and stood at the head of it and looked. The box was no different to before. He looked at it and at the earth in the hole that had been prematurely bared to the light. Then he bent down and picked up a clod and threw it down on the wood, it could have been in benediction or dismissal. He turned and walked back through the graveyard. By the time he came to the gate he could hear the sound of the spade in the ground and the noise of soil hitting wood but he didn’t turn around or look.
25
He sat for most of that day in his room. The curtains were drawn and the light was dim inside and if sounds carried in they were distant and distorted, like noises made underwater.
He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands clasped and elbows resting on his knees. He didn’t move. Only his eyes moved sometimes.
Later he got up. The window behind the drawn curtains was closed and the air was stale and dense. He stood for a long moment again. Only his eyes were shifting in his face but they saw nothing there in that room.
He went out and down the passage. At the end of the passage was the kitchen. The woman was sitting at the table, painting red lacquer on her nails.
It was a tiny room with grease ingrained on the walls and formica inlaid on the dressers and table-top and a strip of flypaper dangling in the corner. A single raw bulb hung down.
She looked up at him, startled.
There was silence. He was leaning forward over the table as if some support inside him had broken and he started suddenly to cry.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’
His mind was filled with words but ther
e was no syntax to them and he went out into the plaza. It was late afternoon and the shadow of the police-station stretched towards him over the concrete. The wall of sandbags was laid across his path. There was a policeman with a gun.
‘I want the Captain,’ he said.
The policeman pointed. ‘Where they’re putting up the tent.’
The minister lurched back across the plaza, in the direction that had been pointed out to him. The woman was in the doorway of the house. She was gesticulating and saying something to him, but he went on.
In the open tract of land between the township and the town there was a crowd of people gathering. They stood in groups and little clumps among the wind-burned grass. As he drew closer he saw that there were caravans parked in a circular formation and an expanse of canvas lying on the ground. The canvas was limp. There were men in overalls holding ropes in their hands. He saw all this and recognized it but it was random colours and movement to him and he passed through the commotion without interest. He was looking for the policeman.
He walked towards the caravans. He stopped. There was a cage nearby with straw inside it and a group of children taunting something through the bars. He turned around and went back. He passed two dwarves who were running hand in hand and there were feral odours on the air. Then he saw Captain Mong. One hand on his hip and his cap pushed back on his head.
The policeman waved a hand at the tent. ‘Every five years or so they come.’
‘Captain –’
‘I can’t hear you, Dominee.’
The crowd was cheering and calling. The men with the ropes in their hands were pulling and the canvas hung alive for a moment and then it died and descended again.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘The trial…’
‘Ja?’
‘I have to speak to you,’ he said.
‘Not now, Dominee. All right?’
Ho took hold of the policeman’s arm. His voice rose suddenly like the sound of glass being rubbed. ‘It mustn’t happen,’ he said.
‘What?’