by Willem Anker
He tells of berserk elephants breaking trees. He hears stories of a few young bulls attacking a rhinoceros and mounting it and then killing it. He says an elephant servicing a reluctant rhinoceros is a sight nobody should have to witness.
Heed my words, he says. The animals are becoming ever more bestial as the child of man becomes ever tamer.
Aunt Catharina shakes her head and serves calves’ cullions and belly and jacket sweet potato.
After the meal Uncle Jacob starts rummaging for old clothes in a chest. He says I must take the stuff that is too large for him nowadays. He says he’s shrinking away. I thought my uncle was strong when I saw him, but when I look through his old clothes, I see how big he used to be. The jackets he produces hang loose on my shoulders. While he’s making me try on a pair of trousers or such, I make him tell his story. He was a legend in our house, even though my people didn’t speak of him. The horse’s mouth always adds flavour to a story. He tells eagerly and gets thirsty quickly. We move back to the kitchen, where the karrie awaits us. When my aunt starts grumbling, it’s to the stoep, where the sun is starting to wester.
Jacob and his Katrien were hardly married or they fled Granny Elsje’s domain. Uncle Jacob says his mother was a hellcat, they were at each other’s throats ever since he could reach her neck. He and Aunt Catharina in due course returned to the family farm, with his mother observing their farming methods with a snide sneer. One day they had another altercation. He walked out and tied a Hottentot’s hands to a rafter and his feet to the chimney posts and lashed the living daylights out of the dumb creature. While the labourers were carting the body away, Granny Elsje snarled across the yard:
There, that’s good, that’s how you should all be treated!
Shortly hereafter she moved in with Uncle Petrus. Even years later, when she was ill and harmless on her deathbed, Uncle Jacob kept his distance.
I was more terrified of that woman and more furious than at any host of Caffres, he says.
Granny Elsje was a harridan, but Uncle Jacob was himself not the easiest man to get along with. His neighbour, old Matthys Zondagh, apparently one day climbed into him with a dropper, after a dispute over a deserting labourer. In 1772 Uncle Jacob and his friend Van Staden go and lodge a complaint in the Cape about the violence inflicted upon them by the Swellendam landdrost. The bailiff has them arrested there and then. Apparently the landdrost had in the meantime written to the Cape and said that the two farmers had sworn at him and abused and pushed and shoved and hit him. That Jacob had threatened him with a loaded gun. The two so-called dangerous subjects are locked up, without a trial. Two years later Uncle Jacob is so weakened and sickly that his wife has to go and nurse him in the Castle.
Unexpectedly, he guffaws and tells how the Cape people were always looking for dead dogs to dig into the soil when they wanted to plant a new tree. Apparently made the tree grow more quickly. He spills karrie on the stoep and curses and laughs.
Whenever somebody started digging a hole in front of his house, all that was dog kept its distance. Because a dead dog isn’t always to be found, says my uncle. Then you start looking out for the neighbour’s dog that yaps non-stop.
For two years and seven months he and Van Staden were detained and then released without a trial or a blush or a by-your-leave. He was exempted from quitrent on his farm for the period, but when he returned to De Lange Cloof he was ruined. Aunt Catharina had had to manage the farms and the Hottentots on her own and on top of it had had to go to the Cape herself to nurse him. Ever since, any field cornet or heemraad or landdrost or clergyman or goddam pen-pusher has had to cajole or threaten with the Cape artillery before my uncle would allow him anywhere near his house.
When I rode away that evening, with him standing on his stoep shouting drunken benedictions after me, I knew I had no need to see him again. We had talked our talk; we could now muck on each to his own little pile of stones.
You can go and check in the books and you’ll see that the old devil became a member of a church for the first time in 1815, more than a year after our visit, after I’d left all Cape borders well behind me. Had his courage forsaken him at the last at the prospect of braving the Lord on his own and without the benefit of clergy? He could actually have postponed the churchgoing for a while longer; tares tarry on. He survived his wife; goddammit, the old scoundrel survived me. He only went to the tall trees in 1826, at eighty-nine, in all probability wielding a dropper.
With all the commotion around the house the birds have cleared out. Apart from the voices and the bang and clatter you hear only the cicadas. If you listen well, you can follow their tune. They don’t sound just one note. But that you only hear after many hours of sitting and listening. They say you lose the seed of freedom when you can no longer be bored. If freedom is to be measured by boredom, I’m the freest man in the Couga.
They say that at Tierkloof there’s a mummy nestled in a cave. They say it was a Hottentot king. His biltong-body is covered with honeybush and waxberry. They say he has beads made of seashells around his head. Two funerary stones with ochre paintings by his corpse. The old ruler is dead and desiccated, but apparently as whole as the day he submitted his spirit to his strange god. That is what the Couga does to a man. It wraps you up and dries you out and embalms you here for ever in your cave, on your farm, in your body.
For eleven years I whistled the same tune when going to the cows in the morning for the milking; for eleven years another tune when walking back from the fields. Eleven years the same weaverbirds in the tree above my head, the same noises of the night. Eleven years I studied the routines of the veldt and animals and people around me and in the end got ensnared in them. To be embalmed in this way is not always unpleasant. My house was not only what happened between its walls. It was also the sounds of the outside: the tunes of the region, the shouting at each other and laughter and sometimes the singing of my wives and children; my out-of-tune whistling in the veldt. A man can feel at home in refrains.
Listen, the wondrous tinkling of Elizabeth’s dinner bell as she carries the crate full of household goods past me. Imagine, my wife and I and our two lads, Gabriël and Michiel, assume our normal seats around the table in the dark, cool dining room. I say the prayer I recited every day, at lunch and dinner. Gawie teases his brother Midge and we tuck in. Chine, pumpkin and samp, steeped in the gravy that I sound her out about every time and that she smiles chastely about every time and says a woman does not deliver up her secrets. A man can come to love refrains.
The porcupine quill in Aletta’s hair catches the sun as she takes down the last of the laundry from the line. I remember a day, two years or so ago, when I, Coenraad Buys, went and committed myself to a refrain that I was all too fond of, the meals that three times a day descend from nowhere upon my table. The sitting down to the tables laden with pots of meat, the leading in prayer and the licking clean of the dishes, especially the lying down after the meal, every melody of this I know well. But the false notes in a kitchen are an obscure business.
My children left for the veldt in the early morning to trap something meaty. They return with four porcupines and a hare. Porcupines don’t dig holes, they dig pits. To get the thing out of there is always a pother if you can’t smoke it out. Jan’s arms are red when he dumps the creatures on the kitchen table. A porcupine can’t walk past a bush without gobbling a mouthful; stay away from its belly, it’s too bitter to eat. If you have stomach trouble, then you dry that belly, grind it up and infuse it over boiling water like herbs.
Believe me, never offer to help a woman in the kitchen. She’ll first of all make you stand around like a fool and yell at you, and when you no longer know where to stand or what to say, then she’ll put you to work.
Close your trap, dammit, it’s fly season. And pass me that knife, says Maria.
She allows nobody else to take a knife to her meat. She grabs the knife from my belt and cuts out the arseholes. She believes a porcupine arsehole shouldn’t come any
where near a flame, it spoils the flavour. On commando we were never so fussy. We ate everything, arsehole and all, but nobody was ever lauded for culinary skills. She hangs the carcases over the flames. She stuffs the knife into my hand.
Come on, Buys, if you want to be useful, deal with those quills.
I wait until the quills are on fire and then scrape them off. She pretends to be chopping vegetables, but when I look around, I catch her, hand on the hip, supervising me. The last quill is done. I pass her the meat.
Pick up the quills, the whole ones can go to the daughters for the hair.
I bend down and start picking up the quills.
Come on, like that you’ll be here all day tottering like a heron.
She shoves me out of the way and is down on her knees and scrapes together all the quills and passes them to me.
The broken ones can be chucked out, the whole ones to your daughters. Get on with it, then!
I clear out and first stand outside swearing and chuck the broken ones down next to the house and give the rest to Aletta.
Buys! I’m waiting for you!
She’s standing in the doorway with a bucket.
Go and bring the water to the boil.
She disappears into the house again; I stoke the outside fire. When I go back in with the boiling water, the meat is lying in a bowl, steeping in vinegar. The backs of the porcupines have been flayed open. She calls this the mealies – with the quills removed, the flesh looks just like a dark-coloured mealie. She pours the boiling water over the mealies and scrubs them white. She stuffs the porcupine mealies into my hand.
Go hang them against the breeze, she says. And don’t let them get bruised.
I go hang the lumps of meat like laundry and get myself out of there.
By four o’clock I hear her approach from a distance. The backs can be taken down. I bring in the meat and have to chop beans and peel potatoes while Maria is preparing the pot. She throws in the porcupine ribs and tails. The mealies are the best meat. Those she will fry with the hare when the pot meat is almost done. I throw the vegetables into another pot.
That’s not nearly enough, Buys. How many mouths do you count?
I didn’t count. I start peeling again. She throws a few unpeeled potatoes into the pot. When the tails are done, the mill appears on the table and I have to mince tails. The half-cooked ribs go onto the coals along with the hare and the mealies.
Before the meal is dished up, there’s yet another story. Every offshoot gets his own plate of food. To serve a meal is apparently quite a complicated business. This one is short of more meat than that one, that one more beans than the other. Dirk is cutting teeth and gets only soft meat. Jan is too thin and must get an extra bit of hare. I’m too stout and don’t get any ribs. Aletta’s stomach is playing up, she gets bread and black tea. The unpeeled potatoes are for the daughters: peels are said to make your hair shine. I start mumbling something about the suckling pig’s coat that isn’t exactly blinding.
Shut up, Buys! Go and call your children, the food is getting cold.
No man can conquer the wilderness and the kitchen.
Uncle Jacob and I are not the only ones to get ourselves into trouble. Our whole family has problems with bosses. My big brother Johannes, too, had to go and see the Batavian landdrost because of the curses and slaps he levelled at Veldt Commandant van Rooijen. So it’s probably understandable that the neighbours weren’t too pleased when yet another Buys – a Caffre lover and Caffre copulator at that – moved into the district. Buyses should be sown as sparsely as possible. As soon as there’s a whole clump of them in one place, the strife and court cases start up.
Under my neighbours, whom, the Lord knows, I never loved as myself, I was known, in those first years in the Couga, as Outlaw Buys. They won’t let me buy on credit and don’t want me in their homes. The Ferreiras of Elandsfontein especially slander me every chance they get. Long Piet makes no secret of the fact that he thinks I’m something sticking to the sole of his shoe. His cousin and wife Martha is one of the local bitches who refer to me behind my back as King of the Bastards. Behind her back everybody calls her Mad Martha; that lady is impossible to get on with. When I have to call in at Elandsfontein, she receives me cordially, serves her universally celebrated milk tart, asks interested questions. Piet and I settle our business as soon as possible in order to be spared the sight of each other, but Martha insists on offering another cup of coffee. I feel like a child in her sitting room, as if between slurps of coffee she’s waiting for me to break something. As if she’s deliberately placed her most precious saucer in my hands, because she knows my hands are too rough for porcelain. The saucer cracks in my hand. She smiles at me.
If that rabble want to tattle on about my colourful clan, then that’s all right by me. I’m not ashamed of my family. But all the talk about the price on my head is starting to irritate me. I’m a free man, dammit. Not free as a bird, but free like these accursed burghers around me who are born free and in all freedom expire on the same plot of borrowed ground. May the very stones cry out my citizenship and if not the stones then at the very least the goddam landdrost. I ride to Swellendam, only to be informed that I have to ride to Uitenhage if I wish to speak to my landdrost. Swellendam has washed its hands of the red Couga clay. I collar a scrivener and make the man sit down so that he can write. I dictate a charming letter to the authorities to make sure that I can bestride my farm as a free man. The fellow has to rewrite the thing three times before I am satisfied with my petition:
I shall not elaborate upon the causes of my general decline, the ruinous tendency of my many households. I shall also not bore you with the adversities with which I have had to contend in the last decade. I am furthermore not vengefully inclined towards those who were the cause and engine of my adversity. I am only thankful that Providence has granted me the strength to endure it all, as well as the blessing, after so many years under the Heathen nations, to be allowed to return to the land of my birth under the rule of those who have been appointed over me by the Batavian government.
Were I, however, to remain peaceably among my countrymen, I beg to inform the Commissioner-General that during the dominion of the English I was declared an outlaw, and a hundred rix-dollars offered for my body dead or alive. I have long since forgiven this murderous onslaught on my life, but it would greatly please me if my pardon were to be announced in as public a manner as my being declared an outlaw. Let it be proclaimed that I returned to the Colony with the full knowledge and permission of the highest authority at the Cape, here to end my days as a peaceful and obedient Burgher under the aegis of the laws of the land.
Find enclosed herein a copy of the Notice of 14 February 1789 declaring me an outlaw.
The Burgher Coenraad Buys.
The bureaucratic machine reports back that my pardon was included in the general amnesty declared on 1 March 1803, to everybody arraigned by the English for political misdemeanours. My return to the Colony occurred not only with the knowledge of but in express instruction from the governor, and I would be permitted to lead a free and unhindered life among other inhabitants as long as I behaved in a respectable manner. The decree of outlawry is hereby officially rescinded. A copy of this resolution will be sent to me so that I can have it registered at any drostdy as may prove necessary.
Do you also smirk when you read how the terrorists of one authority are accorded amnesty and declared freedom fighters by the next succession of wigheads? Do you also want to cry out: The past is not dead, it’s not even past?
For the rest of the Batavian rule I keep my trap shut and make myself small and grant my fellow human being his terrestrial happiness. I have a few children baptised and do my best not to commit adultery, nor to kill anybody, nor to steal, nor to bear false witness against my neighbour and also not to covet my neighbour’s house, his wife, his manservant, his ox, his ass and not even his ever so comely maidservant.
In 1806 the focking English overrun the Batavians
. We had all remained hopeful that the Cape would become Dutch again, as soon as peace was declared in Europe. But believe me, Couga-Coenraad’s world was small. The Bushmen who now and again filched a sheep were more of a nuisance than the Bushmen-of-the-Sea.
When in that year I once again had a yowling child in my lap and had to be told how the Ferreira snot-noses execrated my brood for outlaw half-breeds, I’d had enough of Mad Martha’s cinnamon-sugar reign of terror. I got to hear stories of how Martha assaulted her housemaids. Stories that she’d thrashed a few of them to death. Some of them had previously been Kemp’s catechumens. I write my old friend a long account, in the hope that he can engage his power as colonial spokesman of the Lord to harrow the Ferreiras. I hear nothing from him, till five years later I am summonsed to testify against my neighbour’s wife.
I sit apart at my daughter’s wedding. 5 August 1809, Swellendam. Mists swirl about the town. Bettie is marrying Johan Sowietsky. A bland and blond fellow; wouldn’t harm even a mosquito. Not very many of the groom’s people have turned up. The few who have made it into the pews gape at us open-mouthed when we walk into the church. The Sowietskys are a pallid bunch, the older generation’s Slavic accents still weigh down their words. The father and mother know what their son is letting himself in for. They came to exchange pleasantries soon after Jan came to beg me for the hand of my daughter. It’s the rest of the family that’s sitting there muttering and mumbling under their breath and smirking at my colourful little tribe filling up the pew behind me. The minister drones his drone and the church choir wauls worse than the yard cats in August. Bettie and Jan mutter a few little nothings at each other. She’s looking lovely. Elizabeth and Nombini helped Maria to stitch the dress together. My wives are a band apart. Then the ring is on my daughter’s finger. Not one of my wives wears a ring. There is a ceremonial shaking of hands such as I last witnessed at Avontuur and then a drinking of tea such as I have never witnessed. The tea is weak and lukewarm, but this crowd fling it down their gullets as if it were the abundant streams of nectar or virgin piss or whatever of the New Jerusalem. The tarts are not inedible. I have to dissuade a few of the younger offspring from the cake tables with the flat of my hand. You’d swear I never fed the rascals. After the cake and tarts have disappeared, my children play in the dust. The older sons stand with me and smoke. The eldest and Elizabeth’s little ones I know well, but the lot in the middle, I don’t really know about them. Piet and Aletta and little Maria and Windvogel the younger. I wasn’t at home much when they arrived. They didn’t pick up my scent while they were still lying shut-eyed squealing and shitting. I am the husband of their mothers; I am not their father. Nombini stayed for as long as she had to; there she is now, walking down the street on her own, on her way out of town. We’ll pick her up when we head home. She doesn’t last long among people. She has the two children by Langa but they steer clear of me. Then there’s Windvogel’s lad, who is now my lad. But nothing of our own.