by Willem Anker
Ik heb, u heeft, jij hebt, zij heeft, hij heeft, het heeft, jullie hebben, she says, I have, you have, thou hast, she has, he has. Wij hebben, zij hebben. We have, they have.
I repeat after her, make a few mistakes so that the lesson can carry on as long as possible. Only she and I. We have each other and are of each other. Hebben and zijn, to have and to be. The house and the other people are over there. I shuffle closer to her, try wriggling myself in under her armpit.
When do I zijn, when do I hebben? I ask.
You use zijn if you are talking of something that is on its way, to somewhere else, but a particular somewhere else. From here to there. In a direction. Verbs that speak of something that is moving, changing.
Oh, I say, and understand not a whit of it.
Coming, beginning, dying, shrinking, seeming, preventing, staying, looking, appearing, touching. And becoming, she says.
Becoming?
Yes, everything that becomes.
What does not become? I ask.
She is silent, looks up into the body of the tree, the branches above us as thick as crocodiles.
Zijn for departing, she says. Zijn for jumping in, for walking past, climbing up.
My teeth are chattering. I fiddle with the kaross, put my arm around the dog.
Coen, she says, note well. We say verbs are words of working, because words can work hard if you yoke them properly like willing oxen. Words are tools. You must learn to use them like a saw or a hammer. Come, think of more words that take a zijn.
Falling? I ask. Sinking?
Yes, she says. Always zijn.
She presses me against her, strokes the kaross.
Remember, Coen, what you are must be more than what you have. Most verbs need a hebben, but don’t forget the zijn. Zijn is how you grow from the inside. One day when you are old, you’ll see how your zijn, your being, has grown, big and strong like this tree. As long as you’ve given it enough water. Hebben is what you can count, everything you’ve accumulated.
What do you mean, Geertruy?
She pretends to be hearing something near the house.
I hear the baby crying, she says.
Wij hebben elkaar; wij zijn van elkaar. We have each other; we are of each other.
Damnation David flattens me with a blow one evening when I correct the head of the household’s pronunciation of the Dutch God’s High Dutch Word, and he thrashes me half to death when I drive the cattle into the kraal too late, and he beats the shit out of me when I sit too still in the house and look at him and smile.
I don’t want to bore you. A year after I ran off, I walk over to Mother’s homestead. Ore follows me at a trot. Mother is still pretty and the first Jacob is still alive behind his milky gaze. Mother is yelling at the Hottentots. She kicks a suckling pig that’s forever under her feet. She sees me coming, goes into the house and comes out with her hair under a bonnet. She awaits me at the door.
And to what do we owe this honour?
Good day, Mother.
Yes, good day. You’re thin. Don’t they feed you?
We stand and talk at the door and she doesn’t ask me why I ran away and I don’t ask her if she misses my father. While we talk, she directs the affairs of the farm with hand gestures and biting commands. I start to say good bye; she tells me to wait. She goes indoors and returns with the clothes that I left there and that are now too small. She says if they don’t fit me any more, I can pass them on to Geertruy’s offspring.
It’s a girl-child, Mother.
What is that to me.
I walk back to David Dunderhead’s house. On the way I chuck the clothes into the rhinoceros bush. A cloud of thistle seeds puffs up. I watch the sun setting. See the mountains grimacing with golden teeth. The kloof turns into a flared-open snout. If you live here, you wait for the clamping shut of these jaws you call home, you wait for the gnashing to commence.
Not far from the homestead Ore comes to a standstill. He listens to the distant barking of other dogs somewhere in the veldt behind us. The barking sounds different to that of the yard dogs. His tail creeps up between his legs. He comes to stand against me, he sniffs the air. Yowls and growls stick in his throat. The barking dies away. Ore trots on ahead, anxious to reach his own yard.
Sometimes I go back and talk to Mother. Sometimes she rubs my shoulders and says I’m going to grow tall, tall as my father, one day perhaps taller. Sometimes I touch her cheek and then I feel a little muscle contract when she clenches her jaw. She and Helbeck will move away shortly after my fourteenth birthday and I’ll never see her again.
With my father’s inheritance I buy two cows and a dozen sheep. David Dimwit lets them graze on his part of the farm and they multiply. At eleven I am taller than my brother-in-law; at thirteen I’ll be more than six feet tall. During the day I herd cattle with Saterdag, a Bushman child, perhaps a year or so older than I, but younger of body, named, for no particular reason, for the sixth day of the week.
David Donkey-dick caught Saterdag’s mother before his birth. Fortified with brandy and the singing of a few hymns, Demon David and the surrounding farmers ventured into the veldt that day to hunt Bushmen. Saterdag’s mother told him about that day’s hunt: the Hottentots lure the Bushmen out into the open and the Christians await them with flintlock muskets. The farmers’ lead runs out and they pour stones into the barrels and carry on shooting. They round up the surviving men and cut their throats, since they’ve run out of ammunition. The creatures don’t know this. The empty rifles pointed at them make them submit completely. They stand awaiting death with their eyes already fixed on some other destination. The women with babies and children younger than six are divided up between the farmers and taken to the farm and made to live among the Hottentots. The women are given to Hottentot men and the children to Hottentot women to raise, so that their savagery can be tamed. When another Bushman tribe is noticed in the district, Saterdag’s mother disappears one night, leaving him on the farm, her child who no longer was her child, but from an early age had taken after the farm hands among whom she was held captive.
I play with the Hottentot and Bushman children, we throw claystick and stones, we fish and steal eggs and fight. I play with the children but I don’t befriend them. It’s only Saterdag who keeps following me around. The Christianised children call us David and Goliath. When they pelt us with stones, David hides behind Goliath, the biggest and smallest whippersnappers on the farm. No stone is going to make this Goliath fall upon his kisser. I’m not the goddam farmer’s godforsaken son. I’m more at home among the huts than near the homestead. The children don’t treat me like a Christian. I don’t anger easily and I put up with the teasing, but sometimes something cracks and then for weeks only Saterdag dares come close to me. My clothes are forever either too small or too big. When in one year I outgrow three pairs of shoes, Geertruy gives up trying to shoe me. At the homestead I am on my own. Saterdag doesn’t venture into the yard. He remembers what his mother told him about the Christians and their guns and how a horse shod with iron can trample a Bushman to shreds.
One fine day in my twelfth year David Deathshead wallops me a last time. I hit back. He picks up his tooth from the ground and the next day he breaks a Hottentot’s collarbone with his fist.
That afternoon I spy on him to see how one skins a leopard. Geertruy comes walking up. My swine-syphilis godfather’s arms are dripping blood and fat up to the elbows.
I can’t chase him away, David.
You must do what you have to do. I’ll pay him a wage, but that savage is no child of mine.
He is a child.
Did you see how he hit me? Have you seen how he looks at me? How he laughs at me.
He’s not laughing at you.
He laughs.
One of the farm workers knocks me awake where like every night I am still lying under a kaross in the living room. Ore grumbles in his sleep. There were wild animals in the sheep kraal, says the herdsman. Three ewes have been bitten to death.
I’m the man of the house. The braggart-boss of this poxy farm is on his way to the Cape with a wagonload of butter and hides. I run to the kraal, Ore enjoying the game, snapping at my heels. The toothmarks are all over the bodies, the innards have been lugged out and have caked dry, the blood a crust on the dry grass. I am twelve years old and have been herding cattle for years and know that their lives are my life. My mouth gushes gob and I retch. Ore licks up the vomit. I go to fetch gun and ammunition from the house. I clamber up a chair, grab the muzzle-loader lying above the door over the plastered-in kudu horns and for the whole goddam day I follow the tracks. The yard dog sniffs at every bush we walk past. The further we walk, the more uneasy he becomes. By late afternoon I find two abandoned Hottentot huts next to a third that was burnt down years ago.
The ground around the huts was once cleared, the stones of the fireplace are still arranged in a circle, but today everything is overgrown. Grasses tendril in between smashed earthenware bowls. The bones of the erstwhile inhabitants lie scattered and half-sunk into the ground. I pick up a long thighbone and examine the toothmarks. I step on a half-buried skull. Ore yelps, leaves a puddle and skedaddles into the bushes. I call after him, but he’s gone. In the biggest hut I find two little skulls. I pick up one. A lead pellet rattles in the echoing cupula.
I look around me: they are everywhere.
A pack of dogs surrounds me. Ruddy-brown hair in ridges on the back, like jackals with longer legs, the younger ones born after the skulls had long been empty, the whole lot of them gone feral years ago. One of the oldest gasping in between the growling. The ancient dog’s fur is mostly scuffed bare, a thong with a few beads still around the neck. Did the gnawn thighbone lying over there belong to the person who plaited the thong? They encircle me on nimble paws. I’m twelve and I’m pissing my pants. The young dogs are strong and lithe and beautiful. Just when I think I can track their circles, one ricochets hither and thither on some freakish impulse in defiance of all pattern. The foremost dog’s muzzle swivels close to the ground, a hairy fin across his back. He is redder than the others, larger. His teeth are bared, his eyes are alert and his growl is soft, so soft. It’s the bitch behind him, the one I can’t see, that lunges for my throat. I throw her off me. She hits the ground. I stamp with my foot until the ribs break. A male with a gash across his snout is on top of me already and the butt of the gun slams into its head just in time. I pull the trigger, the next dog’s lower jaw disappears in a spray of blood and bone. The thunderous crack, the dogs berserk, snap at each other, retreat into the bushes foaming at the mouth, strong streams of piss. I am out of breath, I have been shouting without being aware of it. I have time to reload before they approach once again from the bushes. After every shot they retreat, then attack again. I shoot three dogs, one after the other, before the red dog stands his ground and the others fall back. The dog leaps the gun out of my hand. We are on the ground and at each other’s throat. He bites me in the arm, the blood spurts out instantly and blinds him. I grab hold of him and kick him to one side and pick up the impossibly heavy gun. The red devil is on top of me again, the even redder butt connects him in a soft spot. I get to my feet, the other dogs are on top of me. There are bite wounds all over my body and the blood is flowing freely. I ram the barrel down the gullet of the nearest dog and pull the trigger and the creature explodes from the inside out, all over the others. The gang disappears into the thickets. I sink back into the sand, crawl into the nearest hut. In front of me stands the red dog; in the dusk he growls contentedly. The gun is not loaded. The only bullet is rattling somewhere inside the skull of a child. The teeth are bared, slaver drips onto the ground, dust puffs up from the trampling paws. I am on all fours in the entrance. The dog is standing under the hole in the centre of the roof, as if trapped in a pillar of sunlight. I am on my knees, grab hold of the branches around the entrance and drag them down to the ground. One side of the hut collapses. There is no way out any more. I crawl towards the dog. He growls and barks and snaps at the air. He is young but fully grown. On my hands and knees we are of a height. I carry on crawling. I can feel his breath on my cheeks. The beast starts backing off. It snaps. The jaws smack in the air, echoing under the domed roof. I creep forward. The dog retreats until it stands cornered against the grass wall. I glower at him, the dark eyes in which I am reflected. For a moment we are deathly silent. Then I bark. I bark as loudly as I can, till my throat is raw. Just listen to the yells and barks and everything in me exploding out of my belly and lungs, out through my teeth. Somewhere amidst the racket the dog is upon me and I bite and tear and bark till my voice and teeth and jaws give in. I open my eyes. The dog is lying against me, on its back, tail folded up over its pizzle in a pool of foaming piss that drains away into the soil. See: Coenraad de Buys gets to his feet and spits out the ear of the dog.
The dog is motionless, except for the waves of breath rippling through its body. I am dizzy, my shirt and trousers heavy with blood. I walk backwards, lift the reeds, and carry on walking backwards into the full sunlight. Only when I reach the bushes do I turn my back on the hut and the dog inside. I walk back to the farm, my legs and arms covered in bruises and bite marks. The blood prickles and pumps in every lesion, separately and simultaneously. The sun grows cold and small behind the mountains, but I am still far away from the homestead. I make a fire in the clearing before the moonless dark prevails. I scrabble the soil loose so that I can lie softer, scatter sand over myself. The sand scratches my wounds, but it is warm. I hear a rustling outside the firmament of firelight. I see the glowing eyes of a dog in the bushes. Ore? I murmur. I want to get up but can’t. The red dog comes closer, sits down just outside the circle of fire. I lie back and then I see nothing more behind the thousand eyes of the flames.
By milking time I’m back in the yard and collapse and the maid rinsing bowls by the house screams and a Hottentot runs out of the kraal and carries me into the house and I hear Geertruy exclaiming and I only wake up the next day. For days on end my godmother follows me around, watching for signs of rabies. I see her looking. I don’t tell a soul about me and the dog in the hut. I am not rabid, but note well, I now move differently. The stronger I grow, the lighter my step. Do you see how I sniff the morning air, my noise raised like a snout? How I perk up before anybody else hears anything? At night I no longer open the door to that yard dog. The wounds do not fester, but blood is blood and blood has mingled. Listen to Geertruy talking to the house maid:
The child’s been bitten badly. He’s caught something from the animals, but what, Mientjie, that I couldn’t say.
Two weeks later I’m in the veldt again with the cattle. The cattle look around uneasily; then I notice the red dog with one ear. He doesn’t come any closer, but makes sure that he is seen. This time the rest of the pack are with him, in the underbrush behind the red one. The one-eared male ventures out of the trees on his own and stands in the long grass and gazes at me before once again slinking into the dusk.
I grow bigger and stronger. The house also grows. The more the Senekals realise they’re not going anywhere, the more cramped the little house feels with its four-foot walls and its reed roof. Pasturage is not bad here, they say, water not scarce. A new, bigger baking oven is in due course added to the house. A room is built on and yet another later on.
At the age of fourteen I move out of the Senekal homestead. I build a hut on the edge of the yard. I steal a few planks from Duffer David. Reeds and clay from the river. Rocks that I go and hew out when I feel the urge to beat up somebody. Geertruy is starting to show again with a second child. Klein Christina, named for her grandmother the runaway bitch, has turned six and is all over the house, already with the Buys bloody-mindedness. My hut is full of bulges and eruptions like the pimples on my face. The rocks and planks form straight lines; intersected by the arches of reed and tumid clay. A house it is not. Geertruy says I haven’t grown into my long fingers yet. Dim David says I’m a carpenter’s arse. He’s right: I can shoot and climb mounta
ins, but hammers and nails are dumb and dangerous in my paws. I am ill at ease in the homestead; ill at ease in my body. On horseback I have a good seat, but even in my own hut I am antsy. As soon as I’m inside, I want out, and as soon as I’m out, I miss my den. Every few weeks I demolish part of the hut, build a new section and another bit collapses. I can never decide where the window should go. Every day or two I bash another window hole into the reed-and-branch wall facing onto the rocky hills. After three months I break out the whole wall and plant a thick wagon-tree trunk to take over the load-bearing function of the wall. Now I can see what I want to see. In the hut is a low table of leftover planks at which I can sit cross-legged on the ground. I dig a hollow in one corner in which I cover myself with hides at night.
I’m forever fiddling with the framework of the hut. The roof sinks ever lower. A cracking sound at night, a few thin branches snap. An almighty crash, the whole lot shudders, and a portion of roof settles on the ground. Geertruy replaces the hide blinds in front of the homestead windows with wooden shutters – unglazed, but more in keeping with the standards of the neighbours. Before the onset of winter I plaster the outside of the hut with clay to keep the heat inside and the rain outside. At the homestead the door opening makes way for the chimney shaft of stone. The door moves to the side of the house. Inside the hut I’m forever digging away at the hollows to make them deeper. Dipshit David builds his walls higher, plasters them, whitewashes them. I visit the homestead less often; it turns into more of a permanent residence by the day. Officials journey past and they inspect and record and approve.
The Senekals’ house arises in the course of months, inconspicuously and prudently the thing burgeons and bulges like a whitewashed anthill. The walls whiter by the day, until one morning you could swear that there were two suns rising, one on each side of me; my hut sinks ever deeper to the level of a jackal lair.