The Covenant

by James A. Michener

  To the left of the preacher, in a similar collection of pews, sat a much younger group of men, also dressed in funereal black with the same type of white shirt and white tie. They, too, followed the predikant with intense interest, but their special function did not become clear until toward the end of the service, when they rose en masse, moved to the foot of the pulpit, and took heavy wooden plates in which to gather the collection. As the choir sang, the young men moved briskly along the aisles, and when Saltwood saw how big they were he thought: I’d hate to tackle that gang on a rugger field. He smiled, then looked at the older men: Or try to pass a law that they didn’t approve of.

  The service ended with a brief, sweet prayer of consolation and reconciliation, and when Saltwood started for the exit he concluded: This could be the finest church service I’ve ever attended. He sensed that it had been a community affair, a gathering of like-minded persons who sincerely sought the message their predikant had to offer, and whose voices were raised in unison to give thanks to God for once more having demonstrated His benevolence and concern.

  He was thinking in this manner when he felt his arm taken by a firm grasp, after which a strong voice asked, ‘Aren’t you Philip Saltwood, from the diggings?’

  ‘I am,’ he said, and turned to see a stalwart man in his forties, obviously Afrikaner, although why Philip thought so he could not have explained. The man smiled the warm greeting which Afrikaners always extended to strangers visiting their churches.

  ‘I’m Marius van Doorn. We live just west of here, and we’d be honored if you’d take dinner with us.’ With this the speaker reached back, clasped the arm of his wife and brought her forward, and she, in turn, reached for the hand of her daughter, and Saltwood saw to his delight that this was the girl with the Saxon braids who had been laughing at him.

  ‘This is my daughter Sannie,’ the man said.

  ‘Susanna van Doorn,’ her mother explained, and they headed for Vrymeer.

  The original invitation had been for one dinner, after church, on one Sunday afternoon. It was extended to drop-in meals whenever Saltwood could detach himself from the diamond explorations, and whenever he drove the few miles from Venloo to Vrymeer and came over that last hill, his heart beat faster to see the white-faced blesbok grazing quietly. They seemed like unicorns of legend attending the lovely young woman waiting in the farmhouse.

  Because of the shape of the Van Doorn house and the way the road twisted, visitors were attracted automatically to the kitchen stoep, as if aware that here life centered. The front door was rarely used, and this was understandable, for at the Van Doorns’, the family usually gathered in the big, inviting rear room. It contained a long plank table, two comfortable carver chairs, one for the master, the other for any honored guest, and nine sturdy chairs of lesser dignity. Against one wall stood shelves of Ball jars containing canned fruits and vegetables; opposite was a collection of old copperware. There was a big glass container, too, but only rarely did a guest learn of its contents: all that remained of the old brown-and-gold Dutch crock that had been in the Van Doorn family for generations. At the far end of the kitchen an electric range had long since replaced the old coal-eating monster, but the servants who had tended that area were still present: an older Nxumalo woman and two young girls. Most of all, the kitchen exuded a sense of warmth and home, as if here innumerable meals had been eaten, vivid topics discussed.

  Sannie did not try to mask her pleasure in having the American geologist as an unannounced suitor; when he came to the farm she ran to the stoep to greet him, extending her two hands and bringing him into the kitchen, where hot coffee and cold beer were waiting. By the end of his second month at the dig he had begun to think of Vrymeer as his headquarters; he even took his telephone calls there. It was a constantly rewarding experience, for not only was Sannie a charming young woman, but her parents were helpful and instructive. Mrs. van Doorn was English and represented the thinking of that large segment of the population, but her husband was a true Afrikaner, and from him Philip derived his insights into the thinking of the men who directed the country. Debate in the Van Doorn kitchen was apt to be heated and prolonged, and as Saltwood listened to the conflicting points of view he realized that he was sharing a privileged introduction to South African life: the Afrikaner view; the English view; and in Sannie’s bold opinions, the view of the new breed who represented the best of the two older stocks.

  Like all visitors, Philip was astounded by the freedom with which the citizens of South Africa discussed their problems. The expression of ideas and the exploration of alternatives were totally free, and what was not said in the kitchen debates was spelled out in the very good English-language newspapers. This was no dictatorship, like Idi Amin’s Uganda or Franco’s Spain; within fifteen minutes of meeting the average Afrikaner family, a stranger was sure to be asked: ‘Mr. Saltwood, do you think we can escape armed revolution?’ or ‘Have you ever heard anything more stupid than what our prime minister proposed yesterday?’ What with his intense work at the diggings, where he was in contact with all types of South Africans, and his discussions at Vrymeer, Philip was learning much about this country.

  But of course his real purpose in visiting the farm was not to gain an education; he was falling in love with Sannie van Doorn, and he had reason to believe that she was most seriously interested in him. In the third month, with her parents’ obvious consent, she accepted his invitation to visit the diamond claims, and then to drive over to Kruger National Park, where they would spend two days watching the great animals.

  At the diamond camp she asked, ‘Philip, what is it you’re doing?’

  He showed her where they had found traces of diamond, and when she saw how minute the specks were she gasped: ‘Why, they’re not worth anything!’ And he said, ‘They’re pointers, and diamond experts all over the world are thrilled that we’ve found them.’

  ‘Pointing to what?’ she asked, whereupon he honored her with a graduate seminar on diamonds. She understood only the highlights, but when he reinforced his lecture with a rough diagram, she grasped what he was up to.

  ‘This is the Swartstroom, the little river we’re exploring. It’s yielded diamonds, so we know they exist. Our problem is “Where did they come from?” They didn’t originate in this stream, that we know. It merely carried them here. But from where? This branch of the river is Krokodilspruit. After we finish here, we’ll look there. Maybe they were carried down that stream. We’ll look everywhere.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The pipe. My life is spent looking for the pipe.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘About a billion years ago, give or take a million or two, one hundred and twenty miles straight down, somewhere near here, a kind of subterranean cave or area developed. We know its characteristics completely: twelve hundred degrees Celsius, pressure sixty-two thousand times greater than here at the surface. In that environment, and there alone, carbon transmutes into diamonds. In some circumstances down there this carbon becomes coal; in others, graphite. In ours it becomes diamonds.’

  ‘But what’s the pipe?’

  ‘The diamonds form in a kind of blue clay, and when everything is just right, that clay, carrying its diamonds with it, roars upward through one hundred and twenty miles of intervening material and bursts loose, something like a volcano.’

  ‘I still don’t know what the pipe is.’

  ‘The channel it leaves on its upward journey. Lined with that blue clay and sometimes diamonds. We call the blue clay kimberlite, after Kimberley. And my job is to find that pipe, lined with kimberlite, carrying diamonds.’

  ‘Where do you think it might be?’ Sannie asked, and he said, ‘For this year I torment myself with only two questions: “Will Sannie van Doorn marry me?” and “Where in hell is the pipe that produced these diamond fragments?” ’

  ‘Where could it be?’

  Returning to the diagram, he said, ‘You can see that it can’t be down at Chrissie M
eer. Those mountains would prevent this river from coming this way. That region up there is too far north. It can’t be over at Vrymeer, because those two little hills …’ He paused in some embarrassment.

  ‘You mean Sannie’s Tits?’ she asked demurely.

  ‘You damned Afrikaners are very careless with words. We better get over to Kruger Park.’

  At the close of their first long day with the animals they stopped at a camping site, whose manager asked routinely, ‘One rondavel?’ and Sannie said promptly, ‘Two, if you please.’

  So that night they slept apart, but on the second day of viewing animals they came upon a glade where giraffes were resting in shadows, some seventy of them, and two were in the courting mood. It was an extraordinary sight, these tall, ungainly animals, preserved by some freak of nature from ages past, standing under trees facing each other and twining their necks in the most lovely, slow, poetic way, as if they were weaving dreams. It was their love dance, unmatched in nature.

  As they watched, Sannie moved closer, until at the conclusion of the giraffes’ exquisite performance the human beings were duplicating the animals, touching and kissing and moving apart, then rushing together again. That night when they approached the same camping ground, it was Sannie who suggested: ‘Let’s drive to the other one. It’ll be less embarrassing.’ And when they reached the alternate and the caretaker asked, ‘One rondavel?’ she said, ‘Yes.’

  In succeeding weeks Sannie and Philip took excursions to various sites in eastern Transvaal—north to Waterval-Boven to see the cog railway, south to Chrissiesmeer to see the site of the concentration camp—and on one weekend they drove to Pretoria to see the capital, and the rugged beauty of this veld city was a surprise. Philip was excited by the imposing statue of Oom Paul Kruger in the center of town, with four handsome statues of burghers ready to ride forth on commando.

  ‘It’s heroic—the way a patriotic statue should be,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Wait till you see the Voortrekker Monument!’ she cried, pleased that he was respectful of her treasures. And again she was right. This great, brooding pile atop its mountain, this amazing echo of Great Zimbabwe, was such a perfect evocation of the Afrikaner spirit that he was almost afraid to enter. ‘Do they allow Englishmen in here?’

  ‘They’re not welcome,’ she joked, ‘but I’ll tell them you’re my Afrikaner cousin from Ceylon.’ When they went inside and Philip saw the fiercely patriotic bas-reliefs depicting Blood River and the other victories of the Afrikaner tribe, he was struck by the strangeness of a nation’s having as its principal monument a memorial in which only a small segment of its population would feel welcomed. There were no blacks here, no Englishmen at ease, only Afrikaners reveling in their hard-won victories.

  ‘How many people are there in South Africa?’ he asked as they sat on stone benches in the lower crypt.

  ‘About thirty-one million, all told.’

  ‘And how many Afrikaners?’

  ‘Let’s say three million maximum.’

  ‘Less than one-tenth of the total. Doesn’t it seem odd to you, Sannie, to have your major national monument restricted to one-tenth of the population?’

  ‘It’s not restricted. On certain days, at certain times, blacks are allowed in.’

  ‘Would they want to come? A monument dedicated to their defeat?’

  She drew away from him for a moment, then said stiffly, ‘We’re a nation in laager and we cannot deny our past. It’s from the scenes in this building that we derive our strength.’

  From this vast, awesome structure they went back to the residential areas of the city, and it was here that Philip received his major shock, because whole avenues and scores of broad streets, reaching as far as he could see, were lined with jacaranda trees bursting with purple, not hundreds of them but thousands upon thousands, until the entire city seemed a bed of flowers. He had never seen anything to compare with this explosion of purple elegance, and when they slipped into bed that night he whispered, ‘ You’re a blend of monument and jacaranda—fierce durability and soft elegance.’ When she said nothing, snuggling closer to be kissed, he asked, ‘Shall we be married?’ but then she drew away, for she was not yet prepared to make such a commitment.

  Wherever they went on their brief excursions she provided him with new revelations of her country. After they had visited some dozen little towns, each with its statue of some minor Boer War general, they returned to Pretoria, where she took him to the fine figure of General Louis Botha in front of the government buildings. Behind it stood a somber, handsome memorial to the 2,683 South African soldiers who had lost their lives in a single battle.

  ‘Wasn’t Delville Wood, back in 1916, the most important battle your troops ever engaged in?’ Philip asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said grudgingly.

  ‘All those men lost …’

  ‘It was the wrong war, fought on the wrong continent, by the wrong troops.’ After reflecting upon this curt dismissal, she added, ‘It was an English affair that played no part in our history, an incident well forgotten.’

  He was struck by the exposed beauty of South Africa, the endless veld, the treeless reaches of landscape, the wonderful little flat-topped hills, the enclaves with elephants, and white rhinoceros, and eland, and the great blazing sky. ‘Your roads, you know, are much better than those in the United States,’ he told her once as they were driving across a far stretch of veld on a roadway that contained not a ripple.

  Most of all he liked the little towns with their public squares, their low white-walled buildings and their jacaranda trees. He became familiar with a dozen other blossoming trees whose names he did not know: ‘This is a land of flowers!’ And of all those he saw, better even than the jacarandas, he liked the protea: ‘You must have a hundred varieties!’

  ‘More, I think.’

  They were able to take these excursions because of his schedule at the dig: three weeks of dawn to dusk, then a week off, and once when he was entitled to a break she said, ‘We have a remarkable village which you really must see,’ and when he took out his map she said, ‘You will find it as Tulbagh, but we like to call it by its old name, Church-Street-in-the-Land-of-Waveren.’

  ‘What a delightful name!’ and they drove two days to an enclave among tall hills where in a closed valley stood this remarkable thoroughfare, as beautiful as any in the world. It had been founded as early as 1700, one long street with a church at one end, a parsonage about half a mile away, and some fifteen houses connecting the two. As the centuries passed, the low houses seemed to settle close to the ground, and the place might have been remembered only as a fading echo of past times, except that on 29 September 1969 an earthquake shattered the area, knocking down some of the dwellings and damaging all of them.

  ‘What happened,’ Sannie explained, ‘was that some energetic men and women, Father among them, got together and said, “This is a chance to rebuild the street as it was in 1750,” and believe it or not, Philip, that’s just what they did.’

  When they approached the village, Philip saw a church of stubborn beauty and in the distance a stately parsonage, but what captivated him was the row of stark-white houses, all cheap adornment erased, standing pristine as they had two centuries earlier. It was as if a magician had waved a wand and restored patterns of living long since vanished. They stayed that night in one of the houses, whose proper owners were distressed at the idea of Sannie’s traveling with a man to whom she was not married:

  ‘What would your grandmother Maria Steyn have said?’ The wife had clippings of Maria’s famous altercation over the nude statue in Pretoria, and Philip guffawed at some of the statements the old lady had made: ‘If the Israelites could destroy the statues of a golden ass, we women of South Africa can destroy this statue of a naked woman.’ She had also told one newspaper: ‘A naked man is not much better than a naked woman, but he’s easier to fix.’

  ‘Times change,’ Sannie said, but the woman would not allow the couple to share th
e same bedroom. Late at night, in the darkness, Philip tried to reach Sannie’s room, only to find that buckets had been placed across the hallway. He made a terrific clatter, at which the man of the house came out with a flashlight to be sure he returned to his own quarters.

  As soon as breakfast was over and they were driving north, he said, ‘Sannie, we’ve got to get married. I can find a good job almost anywhere in the world, and I need you.’ But again she held him off.

  He supposed that this was because she loved her own country too much to leave it, and he had to admit that it was magnificent in a great, brutal way, unlike any he had previously seen, but an observant traveler had to spot three grievous problems which warranted attention: ‘Sannie, as a geologist I see one hell of a lot of your country is desert, and according to old maps, it seems to be spreading eastward.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she conceded.

  And whether in the countryside or in the small towns, he became increasingly aware that whites and blacks occupied two radically different worlds. The separation was constant, universal and severely enforced. Philip was by no means a liberal; as a practical engineer, he knew that separation was sometimes advisable: ‘I was never much for interracial dating. I observed that the men in my class at college who dated girls of other races—Chicanos or blacks or Orientals—they were all alike. Aloof, bad complexions, and wrote letters to the editor advocating the abolishment of fraternities.’

  ‘Here it would be intolerable,’ she agreed.

  ‘But I’ve also noticed that countries which support a cheap supply of labor always impoverish themselves.’

  ‘We’re certainly not impoverished,’ she protested.