by Willem Anker
I get onto the ox and head north by east and go in search of the country of the Ngwato.
My body aches too much to sleep and every day I ride for as long as the ox responds to the quirt. Alone on this endless plain a man thinks too much. Your thoughts wander far afield and return and then start chasing their own tails. I sniff at my hide attire. My sweat regenerates the sweat and blood of the previous owners of the hides. Am I my skin or do I have my skin?
In the long nights my red dogs howl around me. I catch sight of them every now and again. They keep their distance, wary in the wake of this hairy thing that looks like Buys, but smells like an uncouth concoction of creatures.
Next to my little fire I look at the stars, I look at the black bushes in front of me, I think back a long way. As soon as I try to think ahead, it’s just the flames and the bushes. I must go further, forward, to the horizon. But the horizon remains the border. There is no ultimate haven to look forward to. After every horizon another arises from the plains. Three days later I no longer think of anything. I hear my breath, I feel the belly of the ox beneath me rumbling, I smell the sand the hooves dislodge. The white sky and the anthills under trees. When of an afternoon the ox tires, I don’t walk on. My bare paws are not callused enough for this seething sand. I taste the melon and the last tobacco. See, I poke my prick into the moist and warm nostril of the ox.
After eight days, not far from the Tswapong hills, I find the Ngwato and their kraal. I get back onto the goddam ox and ride back ten days to Kolobeng and fetch my people and load the wagon and trek north and east back to the Ngwato.
A day’s journey from our new hosts the wagon wheel breaks, smashed to accursed smithereens. We drag brushwood in under the wagon and haul the ramshackle thing until the people spot us and help us along the last stretch to their huts. As we trek with the broken-wheeled wagon and the Heathens pushing and pulling and pothering at the overladen waddling house, the whole contraption breaks up more and more until towards the end of July 1821 we limp in between the fires of the Ngwato with a heap of firewood and splinters on two wheels and Chief Kgari comes to meet us laughing and shaking his head.
I want to get to the Portuguese, to Inhambane, to the land of linen and gunpowder, but with this wagon we’re going nowhere. The women like it here and complain when I talk of trekking on. While my sons and I try to fix the wagon, I tell the Hartenaars to devise a house in the meantime. Wattle-and-daub houses are no more than square huts and the Ngwato don’t take much notice of the building activity, but a house on wheels remains an oddity for them all. For the first week or three we work on the wagon every day. The thing has to be rebuilt from scratch. After a month we get to the wreckage hardly once a week. When we hammer away at the wagon there’s always a crowd of curious lookers-on. Sometimes they’re already sitting waiting for us around the wagon wreck when we come walking up with our hammers and saws.
The Ngwato call me Kgowe, the first mohibidu, red man, they lay eyes on. Vyfdraai says Kgowe means To peel with a knife. My skin is sunburnt and sore, yes, I’ll grant them that. Where the hides don’t reach it does indeed look like flayed flesh. I have been stripped of skin and name. No longer white, red. No longer Coenraad, Kgowe. Whoever I am, I am at home here. For a month or so, I totally forget to rebuild the wagon. But still I want to get away, out, further. Inhambane I call my distant horizon. That far, I know by now, I’m not going to make it. But if you want to drag a whole lot of people with you into oblivion, you’d better give the nothingness a name for them to cling to.
I go hunting and overnight at a Birwa kraal. I lie with a young woman who carries on as I’ve never seen before. I let her do her thing for as long as I can hold out, which isn’t long. The next morning I can hardly get back into the saddle and she waves me good bye and her people stand staring at me sourly and silently until I’ve vanished over the ridge.
My sons start itching to trek. We hammer away at the wagon with renewed vigour until it’s standing on its own four wheels. Everything that needs to turn we lubricate with all the fat and all the oil we can find. A month later an old Caffre and the young woman and a few assegais come to visit us. The old man is her father and wants cattle from me because his daughter is pregnant. He is sent on his way with three heads of cattle and the daughter cries with joy and hugs me and I shove her away and go and pitch another damn tent.
Elizabeth is also pregnant again and full of nonsense. When she says she’s feeling flu-ish I go off to find something for my hands to do rather than listen to the whingeing. She says her head and throat are sore. Maria says Elizabeth is feverish, she must lie down flat. I leave her in the cool house to feel sorry for herself. In the blazing sun I go and make the last adjustments to the wagon.
A day later she can’t get up at all. She says she feels every muscle in her body because every one has a different kind of pain. She starts puking and shitting. The sorcerer says she has the yellow fever. I sit with her through the night and try to cool her with wet cloths. Nombini and Maria take over when I drop off to sleep. We keep her moist, but she gets hotter and hotter. What is water and what is sweat we can no longer tell. Her body is like fire in my arms and then she starts shaking with cold shivers. My wife turns yellow. I am red and she is yellow and never are we the same.
The sun is hardly up, or the wagon is loaded with Elizabeth in the back, wrapped under the softest hides and karosses. She is delirious and talks nonsense and cries and sleeps and dreams. I go to say good bye to Kgari and we hug each other and he wishes me strength. He says Come back when your wife is hale again and your son has been born and may it be a son. I say Till we meet again and here are some cattle for your trouble. I go to find Vyfdraai to tell him we’re on our way. He is nowhere to be found. Realise only then that I haven’t seen him for days. The immortal kudu has already found his own way.
The young Birwa woman comes to the wagon to say something and I don’t understand a word of it. I think she’s saying that the child’s name will be Mmegale, but what do I know and what do I care. I shout senseless nothings from the wagon that the waving people hear as farewells and we ride into the rising sun.
My Omni-head spins when I read how the missionary Wheels Willoughby is later to allege that I died of the yellow fever in the Tswapong hills. You should see those hills. It’s a piece of Eden in the midst of this wilderness. East of Palapye the world rears up, forty miles by ten. More than a thousand feet above the plains the lushness luxuriates. The mountain range is wise and silent with antiquity. They say it’s been standing like that since the Creation. The hills fold and frown with the deep and rich countenance of sandstone, quartz and iron.
I can see how my wife and I, overwhelmed with the feverish yellow and hallucination, help each other off old Glider at the foot of the hills. We fold back the dripping branches, step into the forest, clinging together to keep each other upright. I see how we’re too hot for clothes. Alone and forlorn we strip each other of our last rags. Our feet in the crevices step on the cold shards of vanished people. See how in the dusk we scrabble open antique foundries. We stoke a smoky fire with the wet branches of the trees above us. She speaks in hushed tones to her hallucinations; I snarl listless insults at mine. Fragments of copper melt anew and form rivulets among the coals. Sputtering sparks shoot up. The red-ochre drawing on the overhang lights up and cools down and vanishes. We no longer speak. We share a fever dream with resigned smiles and tears, eruptions of laughter and rolling around in the damp grass. Branches break in the thickets as buck take fright at our exuberance. A leopard calls comfortingly from its tree. In the morning we are weaker and the world hazy and who knows whether we are really seeing the parrots. Their green bellies and the yellow markings on the wings and foreheads against the lead-grey bodies. I hold my wife’s hair as she vomits against a tree. I wipe her mouth and give her water from a stream and kiss her long until overtaken by dizziness. We wake in the late afternoon with the butterflies around us. She grinds her teeth as they touch down upon
her. I chase away the riot of colour from her. On the forest floor around us the wandering shadow of the spread wings of storks. We taste the waterfall on our lips before we see it. I sink down and she pulls me up. When the green curtains open, we shower together for a last time. Dassies lie in the splashes of sun on the stones. I hold my wife tight while she murmurs nonsense and hearing and seeing fade out. I wake up next to the lagoon. She is dead in my arms and cold as water, her eyes distant and clear as the river stones. The frogs are deafening, then suddenly silent. I do not get up again. The green closes in around me. My body becomes heavy and somewhere I hear a black eagle call. My mouth for a last time on her unanswering lips.
Those green hills are not granted to me. I lash the oxen to bleeding, but faster than their fastest they cannot go. Here behind me in the wagon my wife shudders with cold in the sweltering summer. Too weak to chase off the flies caking around her encrusted mouth. Next to her Maria and Nombini have fallen asleep. So many nights of caring and waking. How far away could the Portuguese be with their miraculous medicine? Arend said they were barely two days away from where he and Coenraad Wilhelm had to turn around. We should have been there by now. Where and when does this accursed continent end? Where are the boats and the breakers beyond all this dust? I must go on, forward through the red sand and thorn trees, to the trackless Portuguese, or at least the river. Any godforsaken puddle in which to bathe my wife.
6
The Limpopo flows wide; the hippopotami yawn. The crocodiles snap at one another with listless violence. We trek for five days along the bank and try to keep Elizabeth cool and to break the fever. She has a miscarriage. The wagon is covered in blood. I scrub the planks clean. I find clots of what could have been my child. Life drains from her through her womb. She is no longer yellow, but grey. Her scream freezes the blood of everyone except her own and then she is dead.
In the midst of the night noises of the veldt I lie on my back and look at the stars. I must have slept, because I wake up. All of creation staggers before the sun that scorches over the world. When I reach the camp Nombini offers me a bowl of water. I must have drunk it, because suddenly it is empty. I call the boys. We cover her, tamp down the soil, haul river stones and pile them on top of her.
How long have we been sitting here on our arses? Days? Weeks? The veldt is flat, the soil is red, the grass yellow, the bushes green, the trees bear thorns, the horizon is white, the sky blue and deep and so godfor-etcetera. Strange nests like plaited yellow whirlwinds hang from the branches. Thump the tree and you hear the Babel of twittering from the dark tunnels, but the residents never appear. Anthills clamber up the trunks. Nombini. Cracked clay of a watering hole. Maria. Children, all the children. Baobabs quiet as palaces. Eland. Buffalo. Snores. Herds. Stampedes. At dusk the distance flames up. I imagine mountains in the mist.
My people are asleep. I’m sitting on my own, stoke all the fires in the camp with new wood. I sit. The six fires surrounding me flare up high, the camp as bright as day. Above me the black velvet night, the white holes in the canvas flicker like stars. The undergrowth creaks. Then: a herd of eland charge through the camp, in between the fires, the sweat on their flanks, every fold and muscle illuminated. The sacred antelopes in the daylight here with me with above us the pitch-black night, as if they sheer outside time and season and reason and between worlds and through all reality and dream. Behind me the undergrowth creaks again to admit the eland.
On a morning like all the others Maria shakes me awake in the wagon. She wants to know what’s the story with Nombini and me.
How should I know, I say. Is she haranguing me again where I can’t hear?
Maria says Nombini disappeared in the night. Maria says she woke up to the sound of crying when Nombini said good bye to her children. Then she was off with a little bundle of food under her arm. I ask why Maria did not stop her. She says I know very well there’s no arguing with that Caffre woman:
You try to stop her once she’s got an idea into that head of stone.
Maria says Nombini mumbled something about a godalmighty nest she wanted to go and build, that she wanted to climb trees before her toes are blunt with walking. I fall back onto my bed. At the back of my head something rattles like a bead somebody is spinning at the bottom of a porcelain dish. I lie and wait till Maria takes umbrage and stalks out.
The ants march in a line to the grubs, pick them up and haul them to the shoulder-high anthill here next to me. I carefully pick up an ant, put it down some distance from its comrades. It scurries back at once to the file and falls in. I bend over to pick up another ant: my breeches tear. The arse-end of my mole-rat breeches in tatters. My beloved breeches, you stinking scoundrel! Oh godless traitor! I tear off the breeches and leave them to the ants to drag into their subterranean kingdom. To the devil also with breeches. I walk back to the camp to devise a loincloth for the ridiculous and crumpled bell clappering between my legs.
When the next morning I wander into the veldt with my bow and arrows and a kaross around my shoulders, hat on the head and a buckskin around my hips, Maria and the children grin at Buys the Bushman.
You must hope and pray you don’t bump into your pals today! Maria shouts after me. They’ll sell you to the nearest farmer!
I walk on, too angry to shout back. The sun scorches my lily-white legs. It’s only later that afternoon when I’m doing battle with a thorn in my ankle that I realise how long it’s been since I’ve thought of shoes. Then I think of Kemp, of spotted breeches and mad maps. And I wonder how the nest is progressing of the woman who never was mine.
A day, a week later. I walk to the wagon. Whence the headache? For months now not a drop of liquor over my lips. Something smells of burnt feathers. My heart thumps my chest to pieces. The world reels. I stand still, hands on knees. Puke. My legs give way under me. I try to get up. I fall and have a fit. An outcry:
What in godsname, Buys?
Somebody slaps me. An eye flutters, opens. Maria offers me water. The water tastes wrong; it spills on me. I bite my tongue and it bleeds.
They stand around me. Mealtime before the wagon. Baba touches my face.
Why did Father’s face droop like that? Is his face going to drop off, Aunt Maria?
Let be, child, says Maria. Come on, stop it.
Baba wipes the snot off his lip, sits down to one side.
Can you feel if I touch here? Maria asks. Lift up your arms, Buys.
I lift them above my head. I keep them there. The left arm floats down, even though it feels as if I’m keeping it up. Maria makes me sit up. A big plate of food in front of me.
Come, eat, you’re sick with sadness.
I’m hungry; the food drops into my lap. The left hand doesn’t want to function.
What are you saying? Speak properly.
She feeds me. Swallow, dammit, swallow. Around me the chattering of children. My understanding slips in and out.
Shh, now. Chew. There you go. Swallow.
She wipes my mouth. She pulls the bespattered kaross over my head. The left arm gets stuck in the hide. She jerks. It tears. She cries. She’s gone. The children prattle. She’s back, plonks down a mirror in front of me.
There, see. See what you look like now.
A face lies before me on the table. Dirty beard. Red and grey. The skin red and peeling. The left side sags down, the mouth gapes open to the left. The left eye half shut, the eye looks the other way. I smile. The mirror smiles on the right side, on the left everything droops undisturbed, a string of drool hovers in the beard.
They don’t leave me in peace. If I get up, there’s a child or a thing under my slack-side armpit to support me. Windvogel the younger gives me a baobab crutch. Beautifully carved and oiled, but goddammit! Are you wishing me dead now, bugger, I berate him. He understands not a word I say and hugs me and says it’s a pleasure. God damned in every blessed heaven! At mealtimes it’s a great entertainment for everybody to feed me. At night Maria lies curled up under my armpit – such a t
hing hasn’t happened in years and years. She snores. I sit more than I lie. The swallowing doesn’t work when I’m lying flat.
They wash me, even though I’m not dirty; they cart me around, even though I’m perfectly at home where I am. If I object, they pretend not to understand. If I hit out at them, they think I’m having a fit. Then the bunch of them really pity me.
Wake up one morning with the wagon shaking under me. I struggle upright and peer out of the tent flap. Maria is sitting on the wagon chest cursing the oxen on their way. She stops the wagon when she sees I’m trying to shift in beside her. When she’s satisfied that I’m securely settled, she cracks the whip again. A fly settles on my cheek. The wagon stops on a rise. You can see far in every direction. With the help of Jan, the wagon leader, she gets me off the wagon and sits me down on a flat rock.
I’ve been mucking along behind you for a lifetime, Buys. And you just can’t sit still and stay there. I get old and grey and all that I could hope for all these years was to sit with you. To sit and look at the world.
She settles herself next to me.
Now you will sit on your arse. So keep your trap shut for a change, then we look to see the end of the bloody road.
No end, I say.
What?
I practise the word with my tongue before I speak. I speak slowly, take my time with every sound until it’s lined up right to climb onto the breath from my lungs.
No end. Never ends. Always another.
Lordgod, Buys.
She slaps my shoulder. We sit peering into the distance: trees, bushes, anthills. The yellow grass.
You’d better not leave me with the children of your lost Caffre women. I’ve walked after you too far. So don’t go and commit some godimbecile stupidity now.