Red Dog

by Willem Anker

  In front of me on the table the mad traveller’s book is lying open. Next to it a loaded musket. I sit still. The rasping of the termites in the table top audible under my hands for a moment. Two of my lads come running across the yard. The baboons in the hills are demented, yell at the children and thump their chests and the stones with human fists. The big one’s mouth is foam flecked. Gawie is barely six and trips yowling over his feet. Windvogel’s half-grown cuckoo-child, Windvogel the younger, wakes up under the lean-to of the cookhouse. He looks up, rubs across the downy clumps of his first beard, shouts at the boys to fall flat. He shoots and kills the foaming ape and sits down again on his arse, hat over his eyes. I shoot another one that’s trying to abscond behind the rocks.

  Father, those teeth! It wasn’t us, Father! Dirk shouts as he runs.

  Gawie clings to me. I release myself. I scold them. Dirk is eight already, he should have known better. He must go and fetch the cane. They know very well one doesn’t tease baboons. When the two have calmed down and have done with admiring the welts on each other’s backsides, I send them bustling to round up the Buys clan.

  I reload the gun. Even the baboons are going berserk in these kloofs. The rampant boredom. I thank the Lord for my wives. A bored man feels lonely very quickly. Here among the kloofs there are quite a few old bachelors. And on the frontier women were not always to be found for the asking. There were stories in the more remote areas of a gentleman or two who took tips from the baboons and sometimes anointed a sweet melon as wife. Like the baboons these Lotharios, according to report, also ate the evidence afterwards, either from shame or hunger. And in those parts there was a farmer – not to name names – but they say that he never took a wife. Never even a bit of up and over on the sly. Visitors started remarking that the little orphaned baboon he’d adopted was prancing about the yard sporting a starched white bonnet.

  The book is lying open on a map of the interior. I know it’s a map, because I’ve seen the previous ones. Saw how the landscapes with each successive map dematerialise further into hallucinations. The maps of somebody who should rather have stayed at home.

  The hassle with my neighbours was merely the spark in the powder keg under my butt. My arse had been itching for a long time to trek. It’s as if my guts and my arsehole throb along with all the world; the contractions and then the expulsions, the coil and release. The whole world breathes in and out and I along with it; I can no longer hold my breath. How can a man sit still if the peristalsis of God’s creation makes his rear end crawl with all the cramping up and letting go? My houses, my farms, my citizenship of the Colony, all of it frames the wild wide chaos out there. The stone markers at the corners of my farm, the house walls of my families, the beds of my wives – all frames. You stake out the boundaries of your house so that you can have a view of the stars. Provisionally. Until one day the frame of the house explodes with the movement it cannot contain.

  This morning I call a meeting of all my people.

  I’m trekking tomorrow morning at daybreak. Those of you who want to come along, stow your stuff on the wagons if there’s space for it.

  Where are we going, Father?

  We’re blundering north, my child.

  I sit at the table and watch the yard starting to teem. Around me at first the botheration and altercation; then my people start scurrying to get their belongings onto a wagon. I write letters to my comrades to go with me, into the wilderness. It is the year 1814. Eleven years is a long time, but at times it feels no longer than a sweaty morning.

  My wife comes walking towards me. She comes to stand in front of the table, her hands and eyes on the table, then she walks around to where I’m sitting and comes to stand next to me, doesn’t make a sound. I get up. She presses me to her.

  Are we coming back?

  No.

  My wife’s name is Elizabeth. She wears a white woman’s frock. I love my wife. We are married. Yes, I, Coenraad de Buys, two years ago went forth to get married in Swellendam in the sight of the Lord our God and the minister and congregation. I gave her a name and recorded the name in the register: Elizabeth born 1782 in the land of the Makina, behind the Tambookies. She has a way of looking at me. Her mouth and eyes and rounded blushing cheeks compose in a way that makes her at such moments the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Oh, her mouth.

  You’ve not missed all that much in these eleven years. When Kemp decamped for Graaffe Rijnet I went back to Ngqika to sort things out between us. In Caffraria rumours arrived, roundabout and richly embroidered, that the Christians who had lived at Ngqika’s place with me had once again become a nuisance in Graaffe Rijnet. Once again the stories that I and thousands of Caffres were planning to drive the English into the sea. My son, the king of the Rharhabe, received me with open arms; his mother was less overjoyed to see me. I wasn’t sure whether we were still married; I wasn’t sure whether she hated me or whether I was merely nothing to her. I went to sleep with her one night, and we performed sexual acts because there was nothing to be said. Her arms were even fatter than when I’d last laid eyes on her. She sat on top of me and her upper arms flapped like the wings of a wounded bird and she was thinking of other things. I don’t think she noticed when I spurted in her. It was all over between us. Even that night I was jealous. I had been Maria’s first and only. Nombini had from time to time had to lie down under old Langa and had also treated herself to Windvogel. But those two pricks I’d known and those I had brought to account. My women were my women. The other little Caffre maidens over the years had been mere lumps of tender flesh. Yese was as old as I and she lusted as strongly as I and she lay with whoever she wanted to lie with, as I did. I can never forgive her.

  My people and I left the place with the blessing of the king. We trekked eastward for weeks as far as the Mambookies behind the Tambookies, and there I saw Elizabeth. She then had another name; don’t ask. It’s her name. Let it be. She played with my children as if she were a child again herself. I was in love. She immediately made friends with my Bettie and she constantly said her name: Elizabeth. Elizabeth. She liked the way the z and the th tickled her succulent red tongue. I spoke to her father and cast before him beads and cattle and tusks and hides and everything his wrinkled heart desired and took his daughter and named her Elizabeth. I moved back to my son, the one and only king of Caffraria.

  When my shaft is inside my Elizabeth and her hands claw at my back, I whisper that first name of hers. The sounds throb like sighs and sobs in my throat, as if her name could only be sounded from the mouth of somebody who is coming.

  What do you want to do with the stuff that doesn’t fit onto the wagons? Elizabeth asks.

  Not my worry.

  We must burn it. We must burn it all down. It will look so beautiful.

  Oh, her mouth.

  While gathering my stuff before daybreak and loading it onto the wagons, I once again come across the traveller’s book at the bottom of a wagon chest. Fish moths have been eating at it. Something wet has leaked onto it and permeated it. The pages are swollen like carcases in summer. I set the book aside and finished packing.

  The first few pages cling together. I carefully ease them apart. On the first page is the title, Het reizen door het binnenland … Travels in the Interior. The rest has been scratched out, and underneath it, where the name of the author would have been, something seems to have gnawed a hole in the paper. At the top of the page a second, later title has been written in large, hurried letters: Flatus Vocis. I wish Kemp had been here to translate. When I’m not writing letters, I page through the scribblings of the madman while my family is packing and carting out furniture.

  The book is full of maps. The first few are meticulously drawn. Around the Cape the scale is accurate, the mountains and rivers traced in different-coloured ink, every name of town and landmark written in and the red line of his route dotted eastward. The road ahead is white and empty. It must be difficult drawing a map of a region belonging to no one. The rivers sti
ll floweth where they listeth. They don’t yet bear names: they only make noise. On the dotted line a small figure on horseback, the traveller himself also part of his own map. Further along in the book the maps become fewer and stranger. The man is travelling up his own arse; on the later maps, north is always ahead of the little horseman, no matter which direction he’s travelling in.

  I page on. My eye falls on a female thigh. On this map dragons and piles of skulls proliferate instead of rivers and mountains. In the top right-hand corner is the pelvis of a woman sitting with legs spread as if arising from the map. He draws so well that I start drooling. Her right leg frames the top edge and her calf caresses Mozambique. From the colossal cunt like a sublime black sun slithers the serpent’s tail on which, between the pale scales, is written Gariep. The traveller didn’t know how rivers flow, because this Gariep serpent is slithering up into her. If you look closely, you see a little forked tongue peeking out of her navel.

  Maria comes waddling over the yard. I press her to me, my little old wife, nowadays even shorter, all belly and dugs. She struggles free with her knotty arms, punches me in the chest and rages on, scolding and scuffing. When she calms down, I ask her whether she’s coming along.

  Where else am I supposed to go if not following you, Buys?

  She shakes her head and regards me with her hide-and-seek eyes and grabs me around the waist, her head in my belly. She stuffs a yellowed sheet of paper into my hand.

  There, you’re going to have to pin this to your hat so the Christians don’t shoot you.

  My pardon, the rescindment of my outlaw status; my citizenship. It is from this piece of paper that I now want to escape. Maria is a cunning vixen. She’s handing me this thing so that I should reflect on what it’s cost me to be able to squat here in peace for eleven years. Maria does not throw the bones of my fate, but packs them out all too neatly and then persuades me that I’ve done the throwing myself.

  It was like that wayback time again, she says, when we were living by the sea and you just lay around. You’re not lazy, not a bit. When you get like that, then you play dead, like a thing lying in its hole waiting to bite.

  She is my first wife. She’s known me from always. I’ve long since ceased to have any defence against her. I look at the paper in my hand. Yes, I fought a long time for this sheet calling me Citizen. But in the end it cost nothing more than sitting through a long goddam meeting.

  2

  I was with Ngqika when the Batavians took over the Cape in 1803. I was shouting at and shrinking from my wives when the letter from Lieutenant-General Janssens arrived on one fine day in June. The new governor asks me to meet him in Algoa Bay. Apparently I can be of great help in the negotiations with Ngqika’s indigenes. Janssens flatters as only a bureaucrat can. He appeals to my help as a friend of my country, the Dutch colony in South Africa. Would like to ask the man in what sense a colony is a country; more of an anthill, if you’re asking me. He writes that he’s convinced that I’ll rush to his aid – since I suppose that the welfare of the Country in which you were born and in which you spent the greater part of your life will always be dear to you.

  He had a point there: I do flatter easily. I send a Hottentot back and inform him that I’ll meet my honoured governor at such-and-such a drift on the Fish River on the agreed-upon date. I tell Ngqika that if we can win over the new authorities, they may well be less of a nuisance than the focking British. Ngqika is not having any.

  I saddle my horse, along with three Polish deserters from the ninth Jägers battalion, an English deserter and a few of Ngqika’s strongest captains, and go and pay a visit to the governor at the drift border crossing, where he’s been dismounted for a few days. On 14 June Janssens’ uniform is without a wrinkle, his buttons buffed that morning. I’m sure he’s been rehearsing his welcoming address every morning to the little ears of the few hippopotami that haven’t been massacred yet.

  Janssens is as friendly as he is strict. He has a firm handshake and looks me in the eye more squarely than any landdrost or official that I’ve yet come across. He has either nothing or plenty to hide. He’s almost of my height, but his shoulders are less stooped than mine. His nose and neck are long, the corners of his mouth permanently turned up, as if he finds the world amusing. I ask him to meet my son and king in five days’ time at the Kat River. The king feels threatened by his enemies and doesn’t want to venture so far from his home. Janssens surveys the bunch of deserters with me. I plead on behalf of Ngqika that the deserters will surrender themselves, but that the king would regard it as a great honour to himself if they could be pardoned. Janssens orders them to be manacled and sent to the Cape to be tried there.

  The governor tells me that he has met the other Caffre chiefs and what a cock-up it was and how they stank. He says that they refuse to move across the border before Ngqika surrenders me. They say Ngqika is a thief and a murderer and they think he is under my thumb and furthermore also in cahoots with the Colony. I say that Ngqika for his part has gripes about the rebel chiefs who steal from him and the annoying offensives they launch against him. We reach an agreement that I’ll try to persuade Ngqika to make peace with the rebels and that I’ll clear out of Caffraria if it will bring about peace among the Caffres. Janssens presents a few gifts to Enno, Ngqika’s son-in-law, the biggest of the strongest captains, and we decamp back to the Great Place, the Poles and the Englishman with pale faces and fettered feet watching us leave.

  The wagons fill up quickly. My family scurry around, rinse bowls, fold clothes, wrap crockery in cloths. My stuff has been packed, I can say good bye to the Couga in my own time. I page through the Flatus Vocis, look at the pictures of unicorns. He writes that he saw the unicorns in the caves where the Bushmen danced. He says that if it was drawn, there must be such creatures; Bushmen have no imagination. He hears stories of an animal the size of a gemsbok, with the spoor of a zebra and a single horn on the forehead. Here, too, in the Couga, there are many stories meandering around in circles, unrecognisable when they return to source. Here, too, in the Couga, there are Bushmen paintings. In the open caves of the Braam River, in the deep ravine, there are many paintings. If you want to see them, you have to swim through pools between narrow and high rock faces, as if you were being born again.

  Ngqika’s messengers go and request Janssens to send soldiers to meet the king with a wagon or cart for his fat mother who wouldn’t be able to manage such a long walk. Janssens sends the cart and a few officers and on 22 June they await us in the road. Ngqika rides out ahead of us on an unsaddled horse. The stallion stops when it sees the colonisers, inspects them. Ngqika asks me and the advisers whether it’s safe. He whistles and his retinue of more than a hundred and fifty comes into motion. Yese clambers into the cart. Ngqika and I remain on horseback and the rest follow on foot.

  Janssens meets us with all the pomp and circumstance he could rustle up. In a clearing between the bushes, on the lush grass next to the river, with dense forest and rock faces around us, there he meets us. The neat rows of soldiers’ tents on the grass plot with the Batavian flag fluttering in front of the big tent of the governor. The wagons and goods concealed against the background of brushwood.

  On one bank of the Kat River the lines of white tents in the green grass with all the showy formality, discipline and complacency of Europe. The Waldeck infantry is drawn up in a rigid rank. Their blue coats like a wave threatening to break; the blinding line of bayonets fixed to the muzzles of muskets towering over so many shoulders. From somewhere at the back the cannon salute erupts, then the beat of the drum binding every boot to the measure of the drill. On the opposite bank the prancing horses and the sign language of flashing sabres raised aloft in the fine-boned hands of officers. Here in the narrow pathway, between the sabres, the governor awaits the king of Caffraria.

  My Xhosas: tall, naked, red cloaks floating free; the assegais shinier than bayonets. They walk ceremoniously, sombrely. A different discipline, dictating that you skewer your foe
face-to-face, not mow him down at a distance.

  Ngqika rides at the head, his advisers walk behind him, and behind them my Yese in a white robe. She has descended from the cart for the arrival and walks out in front of the horses. She’s sweating. I can see her nipples shining through the cloth. She licks the moisture from her lips.

  To one side a little chap sits sketching the whole story. Perhaps you know the painting, may even know the painter’s name was Paravicini. Well, it was hot that day and nobody stood still and he wasn’t looking everywhere equally attentively. The occasion was, for instance, not at all such a dour affair as his sketch suggests. As soon as the two groups sniffed each other’s horse shit, the officers immediately greeted the young king, and jokes were soon exchanged. We streamed into the camp like a lot of rowdy sons whose mother has summoned them in to supper.

  In the camp the king dismounts, swallows his smile and is conducted to the governor’s tent. When he meets the Dutchman, my son extends his hand and with great dignity shakes the hand of the governor, as I taught him. The governor and his officers can’t keep their eyes off the Caffre king. My king enjoys the attention. You have to laugh, reading how that lot describes Ngqika. As if they’re singing songs of praise with both his balls in their cheeks.

  The king, Yese and two of his wives are ushered into the tent. The Dutch find it hot. The side flaps of the tent are thrown open. Promptly the tent is mobbed by the officers and Christians gawping at the proceedings. They stay away from the far end of the tent where Ngqika is standing, because behind him, beyond the boundary of the tent poles, stand his advisers and captains and behind them, in a semicircle, sit his hundred and fifty warriors in their blood-red mantles with assegais at their feet. One of the officers strums a mandolin and another sings a folk song. The king talks to the Dutchmen. Everybody laughs and nods and carries on shaking hands.