Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  And Jokshan begat Sheba, and Dedan. And the sons of Dedan were Asshurim, and Letushim, and Leummim.

  The little red bead keeps spinning in the empty bowl, deafeningly, I can’t hear myself read.

  And the sons of Midian; Ephah, and Epher, and Hanoch, and Abidah, and Eldaah. All these were the children of Keturah.

  Maria shifts around on her chair and sighs exaggeratedly.

  Was Nombini worried when the Christians and Langa and his captains congregated in a close circle, the talking growing softer, more urgent? Did she see how I towered over them all, my beard, my mane? I remember she screamed when one of the Caffres staggered back. He was big, that Caffre, one of Langa’s strongest captains. Had he talked to her and gone for long walks with her before Langa took her to wife? Do you think she did things with him as well? How far can a little Caffre girl go with a man if she still wants to marry intact? Was his rod in her mouth? Did she allow him access to her hindquarters? His brow was bleeding. Had she seen what happened, heard the blow? I know she saw when I strode towards him, stood astride him, pulled him up and threw him to the ground. The other Caffres stood still. I let the Caffre go, spat on him and entered the circle again. I’m not proud of it, but what does she know of bartering cattle and taking back stolen cattle? You have to make yourself felt in the first minutes. What does she know? I said something to Langa and shoved him. Where was she then? Did she see and what does she see in the little red bead that is rotating ever more furiously in the bowl?

  And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac.

  Could the little girl see how her Caffres fought back, how blows from fists fell and whips cracked and the blade of an assegai flashed? How we Christians, dammit, also took blows and lost blood, until somebody cocked a rifle? Does the little creature here at my table know that they were our cattle, Christian cattle, that we drove out of the kraal? Well, most of them. Quite a few of them seemed familiar. In any case, I went to talk to her husband again and then the old bugger wasn’t laughing any more. Did he, there with me, seem older to her than that morning in bed?

  But unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country.

  I pointed at her. She looked down. I see once more how I and two Hottentots walk towards her. She looks prettier the closer I get to her. A few of her husband’s young men follow us, hands clenched around assegais. One of the Caffres runs ahead and takes up position between her and me, I the evil blond giant. The Hottentot to the left of me shoots the Caffre in the chest and he stays down and his blood pumps out of him. For a moment it looks as if there’s going to be a massacre. One warrior hurls an assegai, but it lands between two farmers. A Hottentot fires but misses. A Christian lashes a warrior with a sjambok. Langa shouts at his warriors to stand back.

  They weren’t the only ones who were scared. We weren’t looking for bloodshed, dammit. Could the girl see, there where she was standing, how this big Christian’s hands were trembling by his sides?

  And these are the days of the years of Abraham’s life which he lived, a hundred threescore and fifteen years.

  The farmers and their tame Hottentots looked around in confusion. I took off, my hands now fists, made for the nearest Caffre between her and me. The wretch was hardly fully grown, probably as old as she. I start thrashing him. He is down on the ground and is holding his frizzy head. I don’t stop. Somewhere somebody shouts something and then there are hands trying to drag me off him. I let go of the Caffre and hit out at the Hottentots trying to hold me back. All three of the creatures. Did she join in the laughter? I heard them laughing, the Caffres roaring with laughter at the crazy white man laying into his own Hottentots. Did she look away then? You’re also going to want to look away. Go ahead and try. Try to turn your head when I get up with blood around my mouth. Try to look away when the Hottentot staggers to his feet, pulling his hands from his face as if they’re stuck to it. She did see. Just look at the way she regards me. The poor Caffre girl beheld it all and understood nothing. I am not ashamed. For what? She knows nothing. The Hottentot looking up with the white bone where his cheek used to be.

  Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people.

  I wiped my hands on my trousers. Walked up to her. She looked at me and didn’t move. She mustn’t come and act the victim here. Didn’t she, when I bent over her, lick that little hand, the one that’s now making such a fuss about the damned little bead? And didn’t she wipe clean my bloody beard and lips with that same little hand? Yes, girl, what are you looking at? You know that right there in the dust, among your Caffres, with that gentle, slow wipe across my mouth, you gave yourself to me. You wanted to be the wife of the wildest among the wild. You were scared, but you couldn’t keep those little kudu eyes off me. Now you’re still looking. But with a different look.

  And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre.

  Maria pushes her chair back and I stop reading. She doesn’t get up. Nombini’s little bead is lying still in the bowl. She puts the dish down on the table. The Lord alone knows what a woman thinks when she looks at you like that. Does she remember how I hoisted her onto my horse? How her old husband spat on the ground and did nothing more? How her people glared at her? How we loaded two more girls on the horses of the Hottentots? How the other two put up much more of a fight and scratched Van Tondere’s face? How we rounded up the cattle? How one of the young Caffres stood in our way and was taken apart with our rifle butts and sjamboks? How we rode off and nobody followed us? I’m sure the girl remembers it all. Now I am sorry that I covered her eyes when I looked back and saw Langa’s Caffres descending upon the cheekless Hottentot who had fallen off his horse and killing him with stones and assegais.

  The field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth …

  I see how Maria is looking at me; I lose my place.

  That night I went to lie with her and made her mine. I told her my name is Coenraad. But why would the girl think of that now, if there is so much she can reproach this Christian man with? Does she remember how gentle I was with her? Oh no, if she thinks at all of our first lying together, she’ll think I was like a goddam pipsqueak when I touched her, uncertain and hesitant without her assent. That she had to reassure and encourage me before I could mount her properly. That I looked mighty proud of every gasp I could squeeze from her. Why would the girl think that it was a long day for me too? Why would she remember how I lay behind her all night long? Would you believe it, the next morning the girl tells me that I muttered and sobbed in my sleep. Just what a man wants to hear on his honeymoon. Should have left her right there in the veldt for the hyenas. As it happened, we chased the other two girls into the veldt with sjamboks that morning. But my little princess remained seated next to me. She could have run off with them if she’d wanted to. Why would I want to stop her, haven’t I got a wife? But she remained sitting and now she’s sitting here and glares at me and doesn’t want to let go of the little bead. I seize her hand and force it open and grab the thing off her palm and put it into my mouth and chew it fine and swallow. She remains sitting. I find my place in the verse:

  There was Abraham buried and Sarah, his wife. Here endeth the Lesson tonight.

  Maria gets up, takes the porcelain dish from Nombini’s hand again, this time more politely, and puts it on the pile of plates.

  Is the whore going to help me wash up, or am I Hotnot to both of you now?

  Maria, don’t be jealous. You’re my wife.

  I wish I was, Buys.

  You are, that I promise, my beloved dear Sarah. Weren’t you listening to what I was reading?

  She walks away, sighs, then turns around:

  Jealous, Buys. I wish I was jealous.

  The lightning flashes and outside the whole world scintil
lates. In the bright glare of the lightning nothing remains hidden and we lot at the table see each other as we are and the surface of everyone’s countenance is illuminated for an instant and reveals no depth and is wholly unknowable and then it is dark again and the shadows drape soft comforting masks over our faces.

  On this night the house is steamed up with the breaths of human and animal. It is as if the air itself turns to smooth and damp walls. The rain has stopped but the dripping carries on. The house is full, even the pig has to sleep outside and the pig never sleeps outside. The house feels empty. The house feels big and endlessly known, endlessly repetitive. As if there are passages and halls into all eternity, as if every drop dripping into the bowl has to resound. But nothing sounds in this house.

  I lie next to Nombini in the front room and listen to the faraway thunder and Maria’s snoring even further away.

  The next morning the clouds have gone and the air is translucent. I yell at the Hottentots. The jackals have been at the sheep. I take Nombini to the labourers’ huts and tell them they have to build her a hut as the Caffres build their huts and she’ll stay among them and they will listen to her because she is my wife. The Hottentots talk among one another and look at the young woman who remains standing there when I walk back to my house. The young girl who doesn’t look back – as I look back – to see where her man is going. She remains standing, alone and with two children on her arms, and looks at them.

  At dusk two days later I ride to her. I twist Glider’s reins around a branch and sling the roll of hides over my right shoulder and the two guns over my left and I don’t stoop low enough to enter the hut. I curse and she laughs from her beautiful belly. That evening she and I sit by a fire in front of the hut and the labourers coming from the fields greet us cordially and walk on. Towards the end of the week I saddle my horse and go hunting elephants and don’t find a single one and come back home.

  It is still autumn, but see, I’m hibernating. I sleep till afternoon, then walk up and down in the house wrapped in hides, go and lie down again. If I go far enough, all the way to the end of sleep’s labyrinth, I find silence. The house is bigger than any I’ve ever stayed in before, but the longer this winter sleep lasts, the more the house shrinks around me. As if the reeds on the roof and the clay on the walls are compacted around me like a nest and then, weeks later, as if the walls turn sticky and soft and enfold me like the membrane of a chrysalis.

  My people soon learn to leave me alone. For the most part I don’t hear them and if they do make me aware of them, I roar at them before spinning myself into my chrysalis again. I curl myself up in my karosses and bedspread that I’ve thrown down in the corner of the room. Maria sleeps on the bed. She says my groaning keeps her awake. She says I am welcome to go and lie with my Caffre girl. I remain lying in the corner.

  I concentrate on keeping as still as possible, every movement is considered before it’s executed. I know the soul of every muscle. Late in the afternoon of a day of which I do not know the name I lie staring at a snail trailing across the floor. I look at the fury with which the snail crawls out of its shell. Just see the horns slowly unfurling.

  The children are buzzing around Maria like blowflies and ask after their father.

  He’s lying in wait, I hear her say.

  For what? they ask.

  She sends them out. She is a mother, she knows about withdrawing into shells, the preparation of a passage out. Her mouth twists when the child kicks inside her. Do you think that when she’s standing like that looking at her Coenraad lying on the ground under his hides, do you think she sees me and thinks of snakes in their holes? Or do you think she remembers how her father in their hut at the Senekals paced up and down every night?

  In the late afternoons I disappear. Then I go to the sea. On the plain the wind blows without cease. You can’t hear the sea from the house, but it’s not far. I hold the shell and turn it over and touch it, careful not to break it. I lick at it. While I’m looking at it and holding it, the shell’s shape makes absolute sense to me, and as soon as I think of it again under the heap of hides, it becomes wholly incomprehensible.

  How could I have known that twilit afternoon that the shellfish excretes its own house? Who could possibly have told me that the building material seeps through the creature, how it distils its miraculous covering according to its need? I press the shell to my eye and see darkness; I press the shell to my ear and hear the sea. I could not then put it into words, can still not do so, but what I saw was something of an eternal shaping and reshaping without cease.

  Back at the farm I do put two things into words to two people. The first is Windvogel, to whom I say: Count your blessings, friend. You live alone. The second is Nombini to whom, when I am sure she’s asleep, I whisper: In a shell you don’t need a door or a gate, everybody is too scared to enter.

  I owe six years and five months’ worth of quitrent on Brandwacht, one year and eleven months on De Driefonteinen and one year and five months on Boschfontein: a total of two hundred and twenty-four rix-dollars. The Caffres stream over the border and murder Christians. The Christians blame me because I look for trouble with the Caffres and have dealings with their women and then on top of that smuggle them weapons. Why smuggle guns to the Heathens who rob me and whom I rob? To strike up alliances on both sides of the border? Not to chuck all my eggs into one Christian basket? Simply to make the game more interesting? Indeed. Inter alia.

  Farmers start abandoning their frontier farms and moving west, back to civilisation. Nobody believes me when I lay charges against the Caffres who steal my cattle, because who would trust such a totally depraved creature? No Christian’s wife opens the door to me, no Christian calls at my farm. My own family no longer knows me. The landdrost and his lackeys don’t bother me with my debts, as long as I stay out of their way and keep my trap shut and eke out my miserable existence on my godforsaken stretch of sand that through all the ages has been washed into the sea by the Sundays River.

  The drought returns, and the locusts and the migratory buck devour and trample everything that remains, and the Christians who haven’t yet trekked west now trek west.

  On 21 January 1793 the French chop off the head of their king and on 13 July Marat is murdered in his bathtub by a woman with a kitchen knife and later in that year Langa, whose wife is now living with me, takes all my cattle and burns down my farms and my house and everything in it and leaves me adrift in poverty.

  4

  Note well, the silent and lurking Coenraad on his farm is not the terror-inducing De Buys on the frontier. I am both of them and neither. Nombini says my eyes change as violently and suddenly and unobtrusively as the seasons. But Maria always mutters the same refrain:

  You’re just like all the other men I know.

  Officer Barend Lindeque is taciturn and compact and tough. His arms are tanned sinews and his eyes blink too fast, as if the sun is always too bright. He has a wife and children, but he’s that kind of man who feels the Lord is spying on him when he’s with a woman. When the wanting takes hold of him, he has to go on commando or go hunting or commit violence against his neighbour because the Lord is all-seeing. Barend Lindeque covets his neighbour’s house and his neighbour’s manservant and his ox and his ass, but above all he covets his neighbour’s wife and maidservant. At the meetings about the Caffres he sits in the corner with folded arms and listens and utters no word. One day he says to me:

  Nobody is going to do anything until somebody does something.

  Early in 1793, while I was still a man with a house on a farm, he sees a little Hottentot girl bathing in the river and the water shimmers like stars on her skin and he leaps onto his horse and charges to my remote homestead and says to me:

  Get your guns. We’re going to hunt Caffres.

  Maynier is a prick and he prattles and prattles and it’s not going to scare any Caffre off our cattle. Ndlambe also has his knife in for the Caffre rebels who loll around this side of the river and don’
t bow to his authority. I regularly go and barter cattle and guns with the chief and we understand each other and he receives me in his hut. Lindeque and I and a whole faction of farmers gather some fat cattle and travel across the Fish to the milk and honey and unfamiliar thighs of Ndlambe’s Great Place. We ride into the kraal. The Caffres are cautious and Lindeque and the other farmers have to wait with the armed warriors. I ride on to the big hut. Ndlambe’s greased belly gleams in the sunlight and the leopard skins and beads judder with every movement. He welcomes me, this rare Christian who brings him guns for cattle. Ndlambe seats himself on the ox skull in the clearing before his hut and I seat myself on the rock under the lion skin. We talk and we laugh as the Hottentot interpreter translates the universal humour of dirty jokes. The chief’s advisers do not laugh at our jokes and keep a wary eye on the farmers at the entrance to the kraal. I switch to Xhosa and the chief dismisses the interpreter. We devise war plans. We get up and shake each other by the hand as the Heathens do it and then as the Christians do it. Ndlambe presses me to his breast and offers me and my comrades all the creature comforts of the kraal. I take two young girls and the other farmers select young girls and we stuff ourselves with the meat and porridge and whey around the big fires and watch the dances and go into their huts and do unto the young women as men do with subject women. Everybody, except Lindeque who all through this night is assuredly wide awake and blinking and pacing up and down in an empty hut.