by Willem Anker
We never see a shadow or a spoor of a Bushman, but at all times we are aware of the little yellow eyes on us and the little fires in the middle of nowhere that burn low every night and the next night a little nearer until one night a few of the creatures come and create havoc among the cattle and we shoot at them. Windvogel wounds one and leaps up from his station and starts crowing about his first Bushman and an arrow lodges itself right next to him in a branch and he pisses himself and starts crying.
We trek past more trees festooned with people like decorations, the rotting flesh, bits of copper on the swinging skeletons reflecting in the sunshine. We trek past lovely mirages. As we trek, the cattle drop dead one after the other, heaven knows why and who’s going to halt to find out, and we trek past trees next to the road of which the bark has been stripped for food or in vengeance or in bloodthirsty delirium and then we’ve crossed the sorry couple of pools the people around here call the Bushman’s River.
So that’s how we end up in the Zuurveld, this expansive battlefield. Zoom up into the heavens with Omni-Buys and survey the Great Fish from above. See how the stream on its way to the sea takes a sharp turn to the east so that for a while it runs along the coast, before it swerves again and debouches into the sea. This right-angled swerve and concurrence with the sea creates a rectangular arena in which various groups of people all at the same time seek to graze their cattle and where between the ocean and the Fish and Bushman’s Rivers they will be clamped and crushed as in a vice measuring fifty by eighty miles. Welcome to the Zuurveld, the land of sour grazing.
The banks of the rivers traversing the Zuurveld are overgrown with trees and thorny shrubs, dense and impenetrable to the uninitiated. As soon as you climb out of the gorges, you find some of the loveliest pastures on God’s earth. This verdant grass is deadly. In summer it offers excellent grazing, but in winter the cattle start dying. The Zuurveld Caffres and the frontier farmers know that in winter you have to move your cattle to the sweet veldt in the gorges that are perennially verdant but cannot support heavy grazing. In summer the cattle move to the sour veldt again. Look, the deckswabs-made-flesh in the Cape draw boundaries on maps in offices. Any cattle farmer could tell them it’s insane, these god-cursed borders that disturb and destroy grazing patterns. The farmers and the Caffres get het up. And by the time I end up here the whole lot is thoroughly pissed off. As soon as my cracked heels step onto my quitrent farm, Brandwacht, my thumbs start pricking like the whole sky crackles before a thunderstorm.
We build a shelter and I go to greet my big brother Johannes. A few weeks later Maria is standing waving me good bye with the baby at her breast. Elizabeth is standing next to her mother and does not wave at me. Accompanied by the few Hottentots who can shoot I venture into the bush. I’m like a child on Horse’s back; I can’t sit still and I babble uncontrollably and order the little troop to go and peer behind every kopje and in every thicket. At night I keep my trap shut next to the fire or I get drunker and louder than anybody else. A week later I return with a herd of Caffre cattle that look a good deal fatter than the few half-dead beasts I drove all the way from De Lange Cloof. I immediately put out of my mind the young Caffre and how he looked at me when I shot him where he was guarding his cattle in the open veldt, that first person I murdered. Later we build a hut and later a proper house. And always, in the distance, the dogs. When we fine-comb the veldt for Caffre cattle, red-brown smudges flash in the corners of our eyes. At night their eyes gleam in the bushes around the house. My Hottentots try hard not to see them. Nobody mentions them, nobody chases them away, nobody takes aim at them; God help the scumbag who dares.
A year later I walk into the wattle-and-daub house. The swallow darts in at the door before me and up to its clay nest under the rafters. We’d hardly moved in or the swallow pair followed and devised their own clay-and-wattle home against the roof. I wanted to clear them out, but Maria insisted that they brought good fortune to any marriage. The little creatures mate for life. I said it’s not as if we were married and Maria said they come and go with the seasons and the rain. Any farmer would thank his lucky stars for a pair of swallows that foretell the weather. The bird-brains twitter all day in their nest but I let them be. They’re not that much worse than the chickens and the suckling pig and the cats and the kids. It’s Maria’s house, I’m not here very often. If she wants to build an ark, it’s her story. The veldt is mine.
The veldt is mine, as it belongs also to my cattle and the Hottentots who look after my cattle and the Caffres who bring their cattle to graze and don’t clear out again. What kind of a Colony is this, where you can’t move your arse at the furthest reaches, as if those who are inside want out and those who are outside want in? And there on the borderline, on the riverbank where the whole lot come face to face, no tribe wants to back down before any other; there’s a chronic butting of heads and a preening like young cocks.
I regularly do my rounds on the other side of the border. No Cape-bred fellow with silk stockings and scented powder in his wig is going to tell me which river I’m not permitted to cross. If the river wants to stop me, the river can stop me, but that is between me and the waters. And the Great Fish is a bugger when it’s in flood. Then that border is a bloody border and you can talk all you like, you’re not going to get across it. But sometimes the Great Fish is no more than a waterhole in a barren riverbank where hippopotami yawn with gruesome teeth. Sometimes it’s narrow and deep, sometimes broad and vague and shallow. Sometimes you can cross by foot. But it is always brown with soil, as if the very sand wanted to get out of the Zuurveld and march down to the sea, the great and eternal boundary where everything flows into everything else and drowns itself and from which all Christians and pen-pushers emanate. In no place and on no day does the eastern border look the same. Nobody steps into the same Fish River twice.
Barely an hour’s trek from where we struck camp this morning, the yellow grass of the plain feels like a long day’s journey away, as if time itself got snagged here in the long thorns that claw and clutch. The water, thick and strong as Maria’s coffee, winds through the kloofs where the thorns grow lush and kudus appear and disappear in tracks that only they can see. In these thickets you could disappear very quickly, for ever if that was what you wanted. To cajole the cattle through this lot is a bloody manoeuvre, even where the water is shallow. There are hiding places aplenty; here everything happens mysteriously. I don’t hear the shell of the tortoise crack under the wagon wheels in the drift, only see the river floating the shards of shell and limbs downstream. This primordial creature that for thousands and thousands of years has been scrabbling unchanged under the indifferent sun. How do I know this? you ask. When I wonder about the soul, I read about vertebrae and magma.
The stream is powerful. It takes what it will. It doesn’t ask before it takes. You have to heed it, even though you don’t heed laws. I frequent the river. I know the river almost as well as the Caffres know it. See, the two groups are standing on opposite banks of the Fish. They don’t look at each other. They are standing on opposite sides of the border watching the border between them coming down in flood and swallowing a sweet thorn and swirling it along and calving a chunk of clay soil into the water. The bartering of cattle and tobacco and copper proceeds without violence. The Christians and the Caffres are wary of each other and joke coarsely among themselves to cover up the tension, but the Hottentots riding with the Christians are taciturn and watch both groups with narrowed eyes.
I pick up words readily as they drop around me. A year or so after my arrival on the border I’m fluent enough to laugh with the Caffres about the Christians who have foreskins and nothing else. If you want to survive here, you buddy up with folks. Farmers of the area who know with whom and how cattle can be bartered. If they turn up on your farm to hear if you want to go and barter cattle with the Caffres, you saddle up and trot along. You must first learn the rules of the game before you can play on your own. Before you can rewrite the rules. Eight o
r ten armed horsemen are better than one Christian and his gang of Hottentots. This doesn’t mean that you have to strike up bosom friendships. It doesn’t mean that you can’t laugh with the Caffres about the lot on your side of the river. The Christians laugh too, because they see me laughing. I wink at my white pals and I nod at the Caffres.
When both groups have taken from the other what they can and both groups are satisfied that they’ve screwed over the other, they return in opposite directions to their respective wives and children and their just about identical homes of reed and clay.
At home we all sleep next to one another on a pile of hides. The baby is swaddled separately in a hide against the wall. Maria lies in the middle, Elizabeth and I on either side of her, each with the head on one of her breasts. Somewhere in the night Elizabeth crawls over Maria and comes to lie between her parents. The hides don’t cover us properly. I lie awake, uncomfortable with the child half across me. The little body is thin, I feel the skeleton under her skin. I think of how easily the little bones can break. I can’t settle. If I change position, Elizabeth will wake up. Then Maria will wake up. Then all repose will be shattered. I lie dead still and stare at the rush ceiling above me. I listen to the wind buffeting the house, how the rafters gnash and the reed door hammers at the thong tying it down. The wind inhales through every crack and then exhales again in a great sigh as if we’re lying inside an organ of a larger animal of wood and reed and stone. I take one little arm in my hand, lift it up, feel it, the fine frangible bones, the soft flesh, the little hand seeking my hand and clamping a finger. The child huddles up against me, the little head pressed into my stomach, a soft sigh, then a gurgle. Elizabeth has caught a cold. Tomorrow she’ll be ill. The child is weighing down my arm, but I don’t change position. If I were to move now, she’d wake up and start crying and turn around, away from me. She’s never before lain against me like that. Even if to her I’m just a warm object she snuggles up against and even if she doesn’t know what she’s doing, it’s something that must last as long as possible. I don’t move. I listen to the child and watch the little body slowly inhaling and exhaling and now and again twitching in a dream. We lie like that till the sun rises. I get up stiff and sore, and the day begins.
They pay me almost a year’s rent to supply wood for the new extensions in Graaffe Rijnet. In 1787 I borrow a few wagons and load them with yellowwood planks – more than a thousand-five hundred feet of wood – and five Hottentots and two Caffres and trek to the settlement that the Cape periwig-pansies transmogrified a few months ago from farm to town. Word is that they offered one Dirk Coetzee a shit-sack of money for his woebegone farm in a horseshoe bend of the Sundays River and baptised the place Graaffe Rijnet, for the bibulous governor and his wife who between them pour and cram the contents of the Company’s coffers down their gullets.
As we travel, the mountains multiply slowly, one calf at a time, like elephants. The dogs turn up the day after I leave Brandwacht. The red dog takes up position by my side and trots next to my horse. The rest of the pack spread out around the wagons, at a distance from the wagon trail, glimpsed only here and there and now and then. The dogs make the Hottentots uneasy. They are used to the phantom dogs that always hover somewhere around me in the veldt, but normally the dogs keep their distance. This trip is different. We are far from home and from any habitation. By the time we outspan, the dogs are around the camp, usually eight or ten of them, sometimes as many as fifteen. They lie around the camp in groups of two or three. A few venture as far as the fire, where the one-ear is lying by my feet. I don’t touch the dog. He doesn’t snool for attention like tame dogs. The dogs gobble up the bones that are thrown in their direction, but for the rest keep their distance. It is as if the dogs are traversing the same territory as us, but in a different sphere. As if they’re moving across the same veldt, but in a different time, and would canter straight through you like ghosts if you didn’t get out of their way in time. A day before we reach Graaffe Rijnet, the dogs disappear: I wake with the first light, tightly wrapped in my kaross. The red dog is lying gazing at me. He trots along next to Horse till late in the morning and then suddenly swerves east and is gone among the low shrubs.
We cross the shallow river, the wagons creaking and screeching over the rock shelves. The trampled strip of soil would seem to be the street; the huts and clay hovels sporadically on either side then presumably the town. Horses stand tethered in front of the houses, here and there smoke drifts out of a chimney, more often out of doors and windows. The geese in the street heave and hiss at the oxen. Some curs trot up to the wagons and try to piss on the turning wheels. One of the thatched roofs is on fire. A few bystanders in the street are watching the inhabitants carrying out their possessions and dousing the roof with buckets of water. I ride past a wagon smith, a carpenter, advertising their trades and skills on the street. After the journey across plains that extend as far as the earth’s warping like rotting wood, it seems as if the town is huddled up against the mountainous mass emerging from the soil like a wall. As if you would sleep more soundly with a mountain at your back. Overripe quinces lie on the ground in front of a scanty hedge. Goats gnaw at everything they see. I ride past what I’m told was once Coetzee’s stable and shed, apparently now the jail and church and school. My wagons have to pull up when a Hottentot drives a herd of oxen along the street, heading out of town. A falcon sits on a roof tearing at a thing with a tail that is still quivering.
I park my wagons next to the drostdy, the converted homestead of the Coetzee family. Part of the thatched roof collapsed with the conversion. Two Hottentots are thatching the roof with reeds. From what I can make out the poor dumb sot Woeke was sent to come and lord it over the wilderness and keep the peace from here to Swellendam. I start undoing the thongs securing the wood. A man walks past in the street. He looks me straight in the eye. He bothers me. His face is long, his beard is trimmed and his hair cut short. He is big, almost as tall as I, but slimmer. His bearing is that of a rich man, even though his clothes are old. Where the material has been scuffed through, it’s been neatly patched. Tears have been darned with a meticulous hand. His shoes are worn but clean. He stops, gazes at the clouds massing around the mountain. His nostrils dilate and contract as he sniffs the air. He nods at me, lifts his hat. I don’t return his nod. He walks on. His footfall is light. Only in antelopes have I seen such ease in a body. He doesn’t look around again. Who does this upstart think he is?
Somebody comes running from the drostdy, a puny little fellow in a too-large uniform, ironed and clean as far as the knees, muddied all the way further down as far as the just about invisible shoes. I regard the fellow. We’re both about twenty-five, but to me the man looks like a child. To the pipsqueak I must, I suppose, look as all the border farmers look to the Cape-coddled powder puffs: bloody-minded, brutish and feral, garbed in leather and hides with the regulation long beard and longer hair. Do you think he wonders where the hair ends and the pelt starts? I square my shoulders and tower over him. I introduce myself.
I ask the soldier who the man is who walked past a moment ago. He says it’s Markus Goossens, the new schoolmaster.
That smug little snob and his little attitude won’t last long on the border, I say.
The soldier looks at the retreating schoolmaster. I ask him where I should dump the wood. The soldier directs me to the back of the buildings where construction is already under way. My workers start unloading the wood. I stoop at a fire, rake out an ember and light my pipe. A tallish man, prematurely bald, with a body soft as a woman’s, comes to stand next to me. He puts his pipe in his mouth and glares at the fire at his feet. He stoops to the flames and staggers. I rake out an ember from the flames for him. The man is neatly dressed, his waistcoat embroidered in more colours than I’ve ever seen on a single piece of cloth.
You’re not from here, I say.
The man tries to talk while clenching his pipe between his teeth. A drooling of slobber dribbles down his chin.
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Stellenbosch. I’ve been in the Cape and Stellenbosch all my life.
What does it look like there?
Greener. Mountains. People don’t eat with their hands.
The man laughs. He takes a metal flask from his inside pocket and offers it to me. I swallow the genever. It’s too sweet, but I don’t say no when it’s proffered again. The soldier from earlier fusses around us again. He whispers something in the man’s ear. The man says he’s busy, he can’t be disturbed now. The man taps me on the arm, starts saying something. When the soldier interrupts him again, he turns around too fast. He has to clutch the young man’s shoulder for a moment to keep his balance. In my ear he slurs something about the singular qualities of a Caffre cunt. The whippersnapper clears his throat, embarrassed on behalf of his boss. I accompany both gents into the drostdy. Behold: Landdrost Moritz Hermann Otto Woeke with his arm around the neck of Coenraad de Buys, cackling. I sit the landdrost down in his chair behind his oaken desk and the little soldier ushers me out as quickly and politely as possible, with an extra rix-dollar in my pocket for my loyalty to the Company and their seventeen lousy lordships and my sealed lips.