Red Dog

by Willem Anker

She hunkers on my chest and starts undoing the soup bones from the red-and-grey beard. I say, Let it be for a while. Her arms shoot out above her head; an unearthly cooing and clucking and growling emanates from under her ribs. She falls on me and kisses me all over on my peeled cheeks and forehead. I erupt and grab her and turn her over and then everything functions as it should. My wife and I, we are a series of eruptions. I explode, I vibrate on my own, like a sound that’s lost its tune. I stir, buffet, calm down, come back, vanish, with no more pattern than the flight of mosquitoes.

  My old and raddled body is no longer mine; if she touches me there, if I touch here, our bodies become a single thing, more absolute, more separate than ever. Our bodies become a place, a place of touch, a smooth place of a thousand bodies. We are one and we become many. We fold until only skin remains. Nothing remains of man and woman. Everything is real and useless. The one thing and the other touch and swerve here on the verge of the inside-out, the I-you, the verge where one skin touches the other, where pain winks with pleasure, where the whole body becomes hide, no deeper organs; nothing is penetrated. We are invulnerable, we are for ever. I love her. There is no love without making love. And every hard shaft demands an infinitesimally small measure of love. Here where everything that can open and shut in our bodies folds open and slides shut, here the frontier of what I am and where I am trembles, before I transmute into something else.

  A few thrusts, then I spurt, an eternity later. It is as if my heart contracts, my blood pours out and fills up again. I am still Buys, I become Buys, without returning to Buys. I overflow. She smears my seed over her stomach and pulls me down on top of her.

  See, Buys clambers off her, gets up to get rid of a cramp. He sits down in front of her, grabs her feet and opens her legs, sidles closer, the little hairs on her calves against his old man’s saddlebags. He rubs over her thighs and gazes at the folds of her sheath. He stares and stares and sees an exact and absolute vision of death, a perfect yearning that cannot be fulfilled without blasting bodies apart and with that this vision. His eye cannot settle; it slides along the swerves and lines and niches and follows the farewells and retreats. She wants to cover herself, awkward with being examined like this. He wrestles her hands away, says what he has to say to calm her down. He gazes and gazes. He sees how she smells, how she tastes, how she sounds. There is nothing here to understand. Everything is exactly what it is and unstable. She does not move, but it feels as if what he sees vanishes between two blinkings of his eye.

  Listen to me carrying on. Please pardon this old varmint. She is the first woman who can talk to my body, the first one who can cajole this convulsing carcase and patiently invite it to talk back. All my life I’ve been blindly pursuing my prick, until at long last the here and now of her. But see, tomorrow I’ll see a bobbing pair of never-seen-before buttocks, and believe me, then I’ll butt in again, searching for something I’ve found already.

  Can’t get to the bottom of this business. And it’s then, as old Kemp said, that the long lists ensue: poking pairing pushing mating, frigging, banging, coupling, covering, fertilising. Loving. Hunching humping jumping bumping banging bonking. Sleeping with, making love. Flipping binding bundling screwing scrubbing shagging shtupping; penetration fornication copulation, coitus congress carnal knowledge; deflowering, dallying; tupping treading shafting nailing ramming ramping rumping pumping rooting rogering. Oh, what the hell.

  Gunpowder and clothing run out if you’re in hiding. The Colony, after all, is closed to me till the goddam Second Coming. I lift up mine eyes unto the kopjes in the east, from whence cometh my help if not from the Portuguese. Arend and I talk and draw maps in the sand. I decide that Arend and Coenraad Wilhelm will go and look for gunpowder in Delagoa Bay. They’ll cross the Drakensberg at the Olifantsvallei and they’ll find the Portuguese town of Inhambane that I’ve been looking for for such a long time and they’ll return with gunpowder and clothing and riches. I and a few men travel with them as far as the Molopo River and somewhere in March 1819 I shake the hands of my son and Arend and trek on to the Hurutshe capital Karechuenya in the Tshwenyane hills. The Bastaards with me say that Karechuenya is at least as large as the Cape and much cleaner. They say Karechuenya is the richest of all the Caffre kraals. If a portion of their riches could find their way into my pocket, that wouldn’t come amiss. Sefunelo isn’t going to make me rich. Perhaps my horsemen and guns, my name, could be worth more at Karechuenya than at Thabeng.

  See, all the veldt is aflutter with brown butterflies. They cluster on us like flies. I take off my hat, flap them away, the grey horse under me shivers its mane. The one nameless mount follows the other until it, too, is speared or arrowed or simply dies like all tamed animals in the interior. I press my hat back onto my head. Then the tapping on the inside of the sweat-moistened leather, the scrabbling in my hair. I lift the hat and a butterfly erupts.

  The sand is dark red, the dust kicked up by the hooves, rusty. The people we travel past seem calm and long-suffering, as if the soil has been saturated with blood and has nothing more to demand from those who set foot on her. The grass is yellow, the trees lush and green and the sky so bright it scorches my eyes.

  We approach the settlement from the east. Peaked huts like the armour of a lizard extend over the surface of the two highest hills in the area. A colony of kraals on the kopjes, and in the low-lying areas wild olives and marula and tambotie as far as the eye can see. See, the gigantic wild plum tree on the slopes of the steepest peak, the teeming southern peak of Karechuenya.

  This is the Caffre city of cities. Such a multitude of people I could not have imagined. Some people say there are sixteen thousand souls living here, others say twenty thousand; I don’t try to count them. The Bastaards say Karechuenya means See, here be baboons; apparently used to be a colony of apes before people started piling up the rocks.

  I trek through their pasturage, the herdsmen wave at me. Their flocks like an undulating brown sea over the hills as far as an old man can see, and then the unknown expanse. Every few yards the veldt looks different, but mainly overgrown and impenetrable. You have to watch your step or you fall into one of the fountains that spring up here as only stones can in the rest of this vast expanse. A one-eared dog keeps running in under my horse’s hooves, the dumb creature excited to the point of peril. I take a gulp of water from the knapsack, spit.

  The Hurutshes walk to meet us. They say chief Senosi lives on the southern peak in the kgosing, the royal district. Chief Diutlwileng lives on the plateau, the northern district where the biggest cattle kraals are situated. Both are children of the daughters of the deceased king. Both rule over their own people, each on his own hill. Senosi lives on the royal hill and we must meet him first. I have the wagons outspanned at the foot of the southern hill. The town’s children descend upon us. I unsaddle my horse and walk up the hill with the welcoming committee. See, the women here walk with their shoulders thrown back, their breasts like soft battering rams.

  The northern district is not visible from Senosi’s hill. What one can see from the hill is a plain bordered by hills extending in front of me for a hundred miles. Between the high stone walls people are teeming. The stonework is the best I’ve ever seen, square and strong but fine and artistic; no hole for a louse in between any of the cut and stacked stones. The neighbourhoods are divided up into wards, each ward with the divisions of ten or so families, each division a ring wall as high as I myself on my toes. In every camp is a large hut for sleeping, as well as one or two smaller huts. Above a foot-high stone base, which keeps out the wind and the crawling creatures, the residences are of wood, the roofs of reed. Large man-height monoliths in front of some of the kraals and in front of the huts of the most prominent residents. Each camp has its own grain store, ten feet high, raised from the ground on stones and with a thatched roof. Stone mills and fireplaces in front of the huts, generally also with a small kraal where the slaughter animals are kept. Most of these yards are enclosed with a low stone wal
l. Here and there even a narrow and upright stone doorway in front of a hut. The door rests in a groove cut into the flat stone on the threshold. In the evening the door slides shut and in the morning the door slides open. Large spiders spin and descend and ascend in every tree. Never have I seen so many leopard skins. The people wear and drape the skins as I use cattle hides. Large skins. In this area the hunters are more plentiful than the prey.

  I meet Senosi at the kgotla, the meeting place compacted by many feet. He is large and serious. He jokes when it’s expected of him, but without conviction. We shake the necessary hands and he invites me and his closest advisers to his hut for beer and kudu. He listens with one ear and rubs his arms and chest with both his hands, so that after a while I look away.

  Was he merely caressing his oiled arms, or was it fate that he felt prickling on his skin? Could he have guessed then that this gigantic town and all its people would be razed to the red ground barely three or four years later? That his arms and his walls would not be able to withstand the hordes of the difaqane?

  A high wall with large upright white rocks at its entrance encloses Senosi’s yard. Inside are four huts, a large one for him and his arms, two smallish ones for his wives and a fourth small one for storage. His wives are pretty, but Senosi is more concerned with the bulging of the veins on his forearms when he balls his fists. His beer is good and strong, and as the afternoon lingers on, his wives get prettier and prettier. The kudu meat is young and succulent. To stop staring at the chief’s muscles and especially his wives – who giggle archly when the calabashes they’re bearing spill beer on them – I enquire with feigned interest after the white and polished stones. The oldest adviser says the white quartz is scarce. It is the colour of the place where the spirits dwell. Only he with the requisite importance and daring to chat with the dead and the spirits, plants a stone like that at his door. While I live will I praise the Lord, just to be allowed to slurp up the foaming beer from between those breasts.

  The wagons blunder around the slope of the hill and down into the kloof. Around us the vegetable gardens and lands, and forges burning all day. We outspan and start clearing a plot of land next to a spring. The Hurutshes take one look at my kraals of branches and a few days later there’s a whole gang in the camp building stone kraals for my cattle, and five huts for me and the men with me.

  Two or three weeks after I’ve moved in between the wild figs and the umbrella thorn, the sorcerer comes to call. Wrapped in a kaross cloak stretching to his ankles and with his woolly headdress the man looks as if he’s expecting snow at any moment. His eyes are milky and peer into another world. He’s come to bless me and to safeguard my camp against the worst of the evil spirits. He lives on the hill with Senosi so that he can be with his ancestors. The ancestors, he says, live in a cave on the south side of the hill. He says the chiefs also go to the cave to discuss the urgent affairs of the day with the ancients of spirit. He says the ancestors like giving advice, but you have to beware of the snake with many heads that also lives in the cave. The lights that one can see at night close to the cave are the eyes of the snake gleaming in the moonlight. He says there on that hill you feel the nature spirits and the ancestors in your blood. This place is holy. The sorcerer strikes the nearest log with his stick. The nature spirits roam all over, he says. He says you can’t see them with your ordinary eyes, but they are in every stone on the hill and also here in the forests of the kloof. He says one of the thickets on the hill is his alone to enter. That is where he dances for rain, where he pleads for rain with the god he calls Modimo. He says he dances up there where it’s high so that the ancestors can hear him. But it’s by the waters here in the kloof that the real holiness dwells. Every blessed drop of every fountain and waterfall and pool and puddle here is holy and can heal. He says I’ll see yet, every day there are sick and careworn people who come to seek out the waters here near my camp. I walk with him to the nearest pool so that he can collect his rain medicine. He says that what the water spits out is the medicine against the drought. He fills his bag with the scum that the water vomits out on her banks – twigs, leaves, moss, mud and a whole school of tadpoles. I take off my boots and soak my sore feet in the water. Today only one kind of holy water is going to be of any use – the kind you find in a flagon or a vat, not in any holy puddle.

  In the course of the next few weeks I get to know the mighty city of Karechuenya very well. I go to explore the northern district of chief Diutlwileng. This district is divided into two neighbourhoods with a narrow clearing between the two. The northern section is slightly smaller, but more densely populated. Diutlwileng’s dwelling is surrounded with other largish huts, the kgoro, where the chiefs reside and near to them the other nobility. A large cattle kraal, the lesaka, easily two hundred and fifty by a hundred and fifty feet, occupies the centre of the settlement. In the evenings they drive some five hundred cattle into this stone kraal next to the kgotla. The construction here is not of the same quality. A different kind of stone here, but it also seems to be newer, as if Senosi’s dwelling had been built by an earlier breed of people who had a better understanding of the secrets of stone.

  If you’ve seen one kraal you’ve seen them all. Even stone walls are not a rare sight. It’s the sheer size of this place that amazes me. I wander around for days with a dropped jaw and a toe protesting against the long-distance walks. I’ve never been to the Cape; the largest town I know is Swellendam. How so many people can live together in a single heap and not tear each other to pieces passes my humble understanding. See, from the kloof I gaze up at the hills at night and at their fires like stars.

  I go and bother the smiths and their forges. The cone-shaped forges encircle the neck of the hill like a string of beads. The clay ovens are more than six feet high, twelve feet or more wide. The tunnel on the surface that runs into a fire and then shoots up into the chimney. The blowpipes on the sides to keep the flames alive. Over the fire an earthenware bowl has been fastened, filled with iron ore, charcoal and quartz sand. I squat next to the smith and light my pipe and scratch myself and regard this lot until the iron appears from the crucible of the earth oven, gets thrown into a bowl of water, and sinks. Grains of cold purity.

  The next day I’m back and the day after that. I watch the man melting and beating and shaping copper and iron. I barter beads and ivory for copper earrings and necklaces for my wives who are far away. One morning the man turns up at my tent where I’m sitting grinding coffee. Morning, I say. Moro, he says. He takes out something wrapped in hide out of his bag and puts it down in front of me and steps back and waits. I abandon the coffee and pick up the bundle, open it. I pick up the long cleaver with the wooden haft, cleave the air a few times, thank the man, who laughs broadly and walks off.

  Go hunting, walk to the camp, go chatter with the elders, walk back to the camp, walk, walk, walk. Walk past the lion house: the pit dug deeper than a white man’s grave, the wall, higher than a white giant like me, stacked around the pit, the observation tower on wooden stilts behind the pit. The warrior with his assegais and his chameleon eyes guarding over the caterwauling kids in the pit. The women leave their little ones in the lion house when they go to the lands. Here the warrior guards them against the lions and leopards and golden eagles. See, the sweet thorn, see, another camel thorn. I sit down and take off my shoes and there’s nothing there to salvage. I fling them into the tree and the thorns grab the laces and there they dance to their own tune free of the weight of my damned feet.

  Amazement also has its limits. Even immensity gets boring in the long run. My chronic ailments do though allow me to mount a horse often enough and to go and shoot a few beasts. The elephants develop a taste for lead and make for my guns like moths to a candle. It is truly a land of milk and honey and copper and meat and even vegetables if it must. I am quite happy here and the young girls quite accommodating. But my gunpowder is running out, my rifle oil has run out and my only shirt is a discarded leopard skin with holes for the arms and
a thong around the paunch. I sit next to my wagon and pick the peeled skin from my toe. What was it that that pen-pusher wrote about me? A very distinguished Character among the Disaffected on the frontiers. Focking English. Disaffected. I know affected. My heart is not stone, after all. But disaffected. If something no longer affects you, I assume. But more than that? Dissatisfied? Dissatisfied because it no longer affects you? Focking English. Focking disaffected. I look up at the hill and its majestic city. Focking disaffected. The stone kraals and my cattle. The open-hearted people who walk past and wave. Focking disaffected. The necklaces, the panga, the pile of ivory here next to me. The fly on my breeches. Focking disaffected. My blue swollen toe and its peelings. Focking disaffected.

  Arend and Coenraad Wilhelm find me still encamped at Karechuenya. On this winter’s day I’m sitting on the kgotla with a few Hurutshes making hunting plans. I’ve wrapped a large kaross around myself. The wind blows through the holes in my leopard skin. Arend picks up a pack of linen from the wagon and tosses it at my feet.

  There, we almost got killed for that. Cut yourself a cute goddam gown.

  Arend has a different story every day, but today he seems serious and his black eyes don’t let go of mine. He sits down and makes Coenraad Wilhelm sit down. While Arend is telling about their journey, Coenraad Wilhelm chews vigorously at a blade of grass and nods and grunts affirmatively and looks at the ground. Arend tells that way beyond the Vaal they came across a lot of Bokwena who live to the east of the Kwena-Modisane. The people were welcoming when they heard that Arend and Coenraad Wilhelm are also on friendly footing with the Hurutshe. Their elders fed them bowls of milk and told them all about a community of Macuas, white people, on the coast, just a bit further away, about two days’ journey. They drew their own maps in the sand, pebbles and twigs were mountains and rivers and kraals. They said that the whitish people live on the far side of a wide water that they cross on floats. Arend believes that they were talking of Delagoa Bay which lies on the other side of the big Matola River. He says the Bakwena sold them the linen.