by Willem Anker
I plant the torches in the ground around me, light one from the other. See, here the Buyses come walking up across the yard. My family, my Buys clan, laughing, their faces glowing when they enter the circle of torchlight. The stuck-up neighbours can chase us away like rogue dogs, but we won’t cringe and roll over, we won’t bare our bellies to anybody. A lizard scuttles away before their feet, into a stone crevice, to stay behind and to live on tomorrow as if we’ve never been here. Oh, the indomitable lizards of this land.
One last story I want to share with you, so that I can exorcise the accursed book once and for all, is the one where our Flatus friend recounts his experiments with a leguan. He tells how he caught a medium-sized leguan, about two feet long of body and three of tail, along with her two young at Agter-Bruyntjeshoogte. He grabs the leguan behind the neck so she can’t bite. It’s a tussle to keep control of the animal. He wants to kill the specimen as soon as possible without mutilating the body. He takes a darning needle and stabs the thing repeatedly in the heart and the head. The leguan waddles off. The scientist’s Christian host undertakes to polish off the animal. He grabs hold of her and squeezes her hard by the chest a few times, ties her legs together and hangs her by her neck. Two days later the leguan is gone from the gallows, but lingers about the farmyard, apparently exhausted after her tribulations. The traveller and the farmer now devise another plan. The traveller has a cask full of brandy in which he keeps other specimens like snakes and smaller creatures. They catch the leguan again, once again tie up her legs, so that she doesn’t lacerate the other specimens with her sharp claws, and dump her into the brandy. The Mijnheer Vocis tells how he holds her under with both hands, how she struggles in the brandy and doesn’t suffocate in the spirits as he’d expected. How she after a quarter of an hour is still showing signs of life, still refuses to be analysed, and then gives up the ghost. You must descend to hell, Christina and Martha and all your kind! Unless you drown me in brandy, I, Coenraad de Buys, Khula the Great, shall also not perish.
Toktokkie takes a torch from me and walks up to the only home she’s ever known.
6
Fire can never be wrong. The flames sing as they devour. Two houses on fire, with us in the centre of the yard, between the two altars that are also sacrifices, to nothing and nobody; my children’s eyes sparkling. Each one of the fires an animal that consumes everything that was once born; the fires grow until everything has been devoured and then start consuming themselves. It shines like a paradise, it burns like hell. It is plenty and pain. It is a feast and an apocalypse. The fire lives fully in sparks and sudden flickerings. It is weightless and the arch-enemy of gravity. See! See the houses burn! If we must vanish, let us vanish completely! Let us destroy our life here with a fire without measure or equal! That obliterates all tracks! That annuls citizenship! That wipes land tenure off the face of the earth! That extinguishes surety to the end of goddam oblivion!
The Couga existence finds its consummation in this moment when the roof timbers come crashing down. In the fierceness of the destruction I see the one and overriding proof that I have indeed been here, did indeed try to live like other people. At this moment when the roof collapses on the floor and the flames leap up from the ground to far above the walls, I relive every day of eleven years.
Maria’s house is burning. Elizabeth’s house is burning. Nombini said her house would not burn, the veldt had to claim it. I went to help her remove the window frames and doors so that everything that walks and crawls and flies can nest there when we’re gone. Bettie persuaded Jan to come along, but when he heard of the house-burning he said we’d at last taken total leave of our senses. He is standing here next to me with my flame-headed daughter in his arms. I can see in his eyes reflecting the heat that he now understands.
After the Swarte Ommegang, the Circuit Court, the last of my friends turned their backs on me. Mad Martha had two milk tarts delivered. I fed the things to the suckling pig. I was sure the tarts were poisoned. The pig rooted around in it with its snout and snorted and planted a huge turd in it. Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
In August the Cape is surrendered to the English. Every time the mob up there start shooting at one another, our Colony is passed around like an orphan between guardians who can’t bring this unruly child to heel. Under the focking English I shall not abide. Among these Christians I shall not abide.
It’s simple: If you have to leave, you have to leave. There are fewer choices in life than you think. To be honest, if you’re not welcome in your neighbourhood, you can forget about feeling at home. For eleven years I tried. Fifty is behind me; if I’m not a citizen by this time, I’m not suddenly at eighty going to be greeted with open arms and unpoisoned tarts.
It’s grown late, but even the little ones are still awake with excitement. In front of us the houses are still smouldering. I’ve made a fire; the women are preparing the last meat that must be eaten before we leave tomorrow. In the light of the fires the aloes against the incline come to life. They are standing sentry or surrounding us for the onslaught, who can tell. In front of me De Mist is lying asleep, almost in the embers. Stray sparks scintillate in his coat. The strong spirits in my belly still my insides. The boys around me all hunker around the fire, elbows on knees, heads in hand. Nobody taught them to sit like this, that is how children have sat by fires from always and into all eternity. I smoke my pipe. Ruminating by a fire you find that the frailest twig reddening and furling up recalls the volcanoes and pyres of old. The blade of straw blowing away on the wind shows us the way to our destiny.
Toktokkie comes to sit next to me with her straw doll and the Flatus Vocis.
Father left this in the house. I rescued it from the fire.
Thank you, Tokkie, but I gave the book to the fire. It’s yours if you want it.
Thank you, Father.
She grabs me around the neck, lets go quickly to get to the book. She tears out pages and folds animals that she arranges around the fire. One by one they catch fire, the elephant, the buck, the duck, the horse, the lion, the little men. A folded-up page falls from the back of the book. She folds it into a flower and hands it to me. I put it to one side and discuss arrangements for tomorrow morning with Hannes and Dirk and Windvogel. Toktokkie is back with a pin and fixes the folded flower to my chest. She comes to sit on my lap and soon gets lost in dreams that make her little feet kick out. I sit with my children around and on top of me; my wives are lying in a bundle on the other side of the fire. Far away I can hear the red dogs calling. It is peaceful around the fire with my sleeping people. Peaceful at last, now that I know it’s all coming to an end. I sit drowsily watching the wind blowing the soot from my houses into the veldt.
Like friends, the game has also got scarcer by the day. In September of this foul year of our Lord 1814 the hunting laws have become so strict that you must go and kowtow to the landdrost for every damned rabbit you want to shoot.
Authorities draw lines on maps, because authorities need farmers, not hunters. As soon as you own land, you surrender several years of your life. There is too much at risk. You have too much to lose. You invest too much in the land. Over the seasons you tame her, you harrow her into fertility. You have too much to kill for, too much to die for. Hunters live longer than farmers.
I take my sons along when I have the chance to go hunting. You learn to know nature through hunting. You can walk around and collect and take notes, but you don’t learn as much as when you walk the veldt with a gun. The source of knowledge is desire, and hunting is an overpowering passion. If you want to get to know a klipspringer, you must taste it. You become as one with every potato and sweet potato you eat. Even God had to be made flesh the better to be able to taste. And the better to be able to hunt. God is constantly hunting us. He is the great collector. We hunt as we are hunted.
The Caffres say the day does not break twice. There are no new beginnings. But there are places that have not seen me. As soon as I settle down on the wagon ch
est, a wind escapes me. I swallow deep; I feel dizzy. How it stinks, the blockage that made a responsible citizen of me. I erupt: it is exhilaration. I crack the whip. The oxen come into motion. We trudge through the kloofs towards the open spaces. My view shall no longer be occluded by mountains and by trees. My eyes are seeking an uninterrupted prospect; I want to see the earth unfolding to the horizon. A landscape that you cannot fence in, cannot break up into smaller divisions, cannot divide up into manageable gobbets of sense. An expanse in which you can’t make yourself at home. I’m letting go, I grow smaller in a breadth that grows greater. I want to range far until I become a dot and vanish.
The last stars are still hanging in the sky when the sun starts showing itself. The paper flower drops from my chest. I squash a last termite underfoot. I hand the whip to Maria next to me on the wagon chest. I fold open the paper. It’s a last map. Or, at least, parts of the scrawlings look like little bits of map. The folds of Toktokkie’s flower draw new boundary lines on the ink lines. I fold in the four corners, trying to reassemble the flower. When the points meet in the middle, I see a meticulous map of Swellendam. Like the wanderer’s first maps, fine and precise. I fold the corners over once more. The surface now much smaller, with a next map appearing, this one of the whole Colony. Once more I force the corners together, decipher the traveller’s last riddle. Now I see the whole of Africa. It becomes more difficult to fold in the corners. The scrap of paper gets smaller and my hands struggle to hold it. After the next folding over there is a small terrestrial globe. When I fold the corners in once more, the little block of paper now almost as thick as it is wide, a tiny die lies in my hand, on each face the dotted stars of the firmament.
1814 –
1
Beyond the border of the Colony everything is always only outside. Even in your wagon tent at night the dew and wind shudder through the chinks, the cold cuts all the way into your rheumatic bones. Nothing can be stitched up close enough to keep the outside out. After a few weeks you smell like the veldt, you curl up at night like an animal. If you sit on horseback for long enough, you sometimes hear sounds streaming over your lips from deep down in your throat. On the trek time functions differently. Yesterday is just as clear and impossible as tomorrow. Today an infinite succession of fainting spells, flashes and compulsions. The force of the world obliterates you.
Look into the compound eye of the fly on my arm. The whip cracks; the fly zooms away over the plains. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Your books, reader, speak of a primal bang, that first crack of the whip, the first wrathful bellow. See, a jagged lightning bolt; the zigzag route of a fly; the world appears.
The first crack of the whip, and the cosmic oxen lurch forth into the furthest reaches. Things start stirring. Dense and warm and close beyond all measure, with lightning-swift expansion and cooling down. The cosmos explodes out and open.
Elementary particles start burgeoning. Sweltering; the particles buzz unpredictably. That which is and that which is not collide ceaselessly until there is more that is than what is not. More dust than nothing. The Transorangia or the beginning of time? You might well ask.
Criss-cross through time and space, Fly. Look with all your eyes. Make your lenses arc into infinity. The whole conglomeration grows older and colder. Flitter your wings until you become a blur of motion. Can you feel things starting to attract one another? How glutinous gravity descends on creation? How it wants to put an end to all the flying around? Your wings grow sticky and heavy as you acquire mass. Gaseous clouds congeal and become stars and constellations and milky ways. Be careful where you flutter, the universe is filling up.
Everything was closer together in the past. Close to the hearth of the universe it is colder and slower. I see you smirk: the universe or old Coenraad Buys? But see out there at the extremities! There the cosmos itself scatters. Flitter your wings! Far away from where things float loose and lone, far beyond the silt of gravity, stars shoot apart. The farther away, the faster they shoot. They tear away from one another because the distance between them expands. The space, the nothing, between them grows, without the stars themselves moving. Sometimes it is distance that moves, not us. Fly away, impossible Fly!
And God said: Let there be light! and there was light. You, Fly, speed through time, faster than light, but we here on the wagon, our light is not fast enough to catch up with that which is ever shooting faster and further away from us. The future we will never see. And also the light of primal things has not reached us yet. Heavenly fires long since extinguished will still shine forth tonight. We live in the light of dead stars.
You glide forth, but slower; movement becomes more arduous. The primal bang and everything fires up, but ever since then everything is a tying up, tidying up and dividing up. Shoot into a rocky crevice. See how things down here mutter and sputter until they grow gravid. Whoosh up, away from the iron core, up from out of the molten magma, through the melting amniotic fluid of fire, the semi-stone semi-flame slowly solidifying, away, upwards, through time and rock formations. Shoot over the waters, the substratum that arises from under you and dries out, over sand and stones, over the earth’s crust where continents slowly tear apart and collide.
See, everything finds its place and name. And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night. The pinnacle of the Great Tying-up: the organisation of organs into organisms. Ha! The particles and gases congeal into creatures, later mutate into humanoids. The life that chains you to the soil, so fast that you no longer want to let go. Your wings carry you further through time until you have to dodge rocks fatally plummeting to earth. Ice and dust fall into the sea from the backs of meteorites and the spark of life flames up. The tails of creatures start to twitch. In that small warm puddle full of salt and light and currents God breathes his breath into us. His breath stinks of ammonia.
Everything that lives and breathes is a stranger on this blue clod. Earth tolerates life, but she did not give birth to it. No wonder you can’t settle down. No wonder you never feel at home. No wonder you’re forever wanting to fly up and away. Go then, ascend and survey the wide expanses: you’ll find no fatherland. There are tracks in the sand and stories about the tracks and for the rest only longing and wind.
Careful, old Fly: God – or the focking governor, through whichever of your multiple eyes you care to look – sets nets around the chaos. The compressed nothing has exploded in time and space and ever since God and governor have tried to reclaim every cubic foot and moment. If you want to get away from gravity, you must trek across the Gariep. Not even the gulls can get airborne in the Cape any longer. Begone, World!
See, a fly settles on the third-last ox. The whip cracks. Fly across the Gariep.
Shoot through the eighteenth century, across the rust-brown plains beyond the Great River. Sheer across the vague spider’s web of light in the night. Little clusters of people around fires; the fires far apart. Sometimes knotted together like the nodes in shallow roots. Nomads extend themselves across the plains, they cling to openness.
Rush on, to the second half of the century. Do you see the dens of robbers down there, how patiently they wait to attack suddenly? Are you also thinking of the flicker-fast tongue of the lizard? Do you see the plains devouring and growing in all directions? It’s the freebooters that make the open spaces grow: as soon as you kick off your shoes, they’re on top of you. The robbers create the open spaces as the plains create them. Fly lower and see how the grass and bushes burgeon after sudden rains. Do you see how the shepherds on the open plains migrate, following the sprouting of green grass tufts? It is not a country, it is mere soil. Something to wedge your feet into.
Fly where you will and see how everything becomes and decays. See how innocent. See, it’s all a game on a level board. Create and destroy; becoming, outward, eternally. The robbers and the plains. Do you see the lovely tension? Like that of a bow, a lyre.
Settle on any living body in any
year and see the deserters and the runaway slaves and failed farmers and freebooters and Hottentots and Caffres and Bastaards stream across the border and see them screw each other senseless and into new incarnations. Settle on any jacket and see how the Colony’s rags and tatters and gunpowder and lead and ways of doing have already begun to sully also this soil.
Circle the valleys beyond the Gariep and see the raids intensify, how the looters band together in ever larger gangs and flatten settlements, hundreds by hundreds of marauders with enough lead for the whole damned Africa. Take care not to be swallowed by a vulture. Fly higher and see the plundering causing a flood of refugees to well up and stream eastward, all along the great Gariep that Christians are now starting to call the Orange, after the colourful name of a royal house.
You’ve been flittering since for ever and you will know: The Colony has always been there. It starts up anywhere if you don’t guard against it. The Colony burgeons from nowhere, always already in full bloom where yesterday there was nothing, like a poisonous flower in the Karoo.
The Colony’s borders explode, blast open in the direction of the Transorangia, there where the nomads roam and rob and shoot off into the cosmos at their own speed and at the dictates of their own desires. Fly in between these roilings and ructions and reports and silences all the way to the day when the Second Colony traps the drifters in the crucible called Klaarwater, the place of clear water. Settle with your proboscis on the shoulder of a missionary and smell in him the fetid fused power of church and state. Do you feel how his chill breath cools and congeals everything that boils and bubbles and battles?