Dusklands

by J. M. Coetzee

  I gathered the pus-knob between the knuckles of my thumbs and readied myself for the violation. With growing might I pressed, bearing down with the full fury, more or less, allowing for posture, of an adult male in the pride of his years, through climax after climax of pain and even through the first whispered consolations of failure. “It is the diet”, said the whispers. I called off. A tocsin of revolt beat in my crushed tissues. I was divided between pride in my offspring’s stubbornness and a prayer that for a brief while my heart would stop. Cold sweat stood out on my face. My bowels had turned to water again. I scrambled up and squatted over the stream. A paroxysm of yellow ooze drifted downstream. I washed and readied myself for labour anew.

  The skin must have been weakened by my exertions; for at once, with exquisite surprise, I heard, or if not heard felt in my eardrums, the tissues give way and bathe my fingers in a spurt and then a steady dribble of wet warmth. My body relaxed, and while I continued to milk the fistula with my right hand I could afford to bring my left hand up to the sense-organs of my face for the indulgences of inhalation and scrutiny. Such must be the gratifications of the damned.

  It was during the postlude, while I was dipping my buttocks in the running water and enjoying the cool, that the interruption came. Boys, those detestable boys who had lost no chance to taunt the stranger in their midst, raced screeching out of the undergrowth from which they had been spying on me and whipped my clothes from the bank where they lay. Shocked out of my idyll I stood straddle-legged in the water like a sheep while they pranced up and down waving my trousers, daring me to recover them.

  If they had calculated that surprise and shame would leave me impotent, that they could count on a morning’s healthy fun being shambled after, when he was not picking thorns from his feet, by bloody-bum hairylegs smiling unhappy smiles and uttering jocular entreaties, they had miscalculated. Roaring like a lion and enveloped in spray like Aphrodite I fell upon them. My claws raked welts of skin and flesh from their fleeting backs. A massive fist thundered one to the ground. Jehovah I fell upon his back, and while his little playmates scattered in the bushes and regrouped, I ground his face on the stones, wrenched him upright, kicked him down (with the ball of my foot, lest I break a toe), wrenched him up, kicked him down, and so on, shouting the while in the foulest Hottentot I could summon conjurations to his mates to come back and fight like men. This was imprudent. First one and then the whole pack returned. Clinging on my back, dragging at my arms and legs, they bore me to the ground. I screamed with rage, snapped my teeth, and heaved erect with a mouth full of hair and a human ear. For a moment I was all-triumphant. Then a wooden blow fell on the point of my shoulder and numbed my arm. I was borne down again. Like a great beetle I lay on my back and warded off knees and feet from my vulnerable abdomen. Through the whirling limbs I glimpsed what had hit me. It was a stick held by a newcomer, a fullgrown male, and he was circling the mêlée waiting for another opening. There were more protectors too. I had lost. There was nothing to do but survive.

  I was subjected to indignities, dragged to my feet and thrown down, buffeted from hand to hand, showered with dust and grit. I offered no resistance, and thereby turned their anger into clinical spite. They were determined on a final degradation. I was determined on preserving myself. To adversaries ignorant or contemptuous of the principle of honour these aims were not incompatible. We could both be satisfied yet.

  Naked and filthy I knelt in the middle of the ring with my face in my hands, stifling my sobs in the memory of who I was. Two children raced past me. The rope which they held between them caught me under the elbows, under the armpits, and hurled me on my back. I huddled in a ball protecting my face. Long stillness, whispers, laughter. Bodies fell upon me, I was suffocated and pinned to the ground. Ants, ants raped from their nest, enraged and bewildered, their little pincers scything and their bodies bulging with acid, descended between my spread buttocks, on to my tender anus, on to my weeping rose, my nobly laden testicles. I screamed with pain and shame. “Let me go home!” I screamed. “Let me go home, I want to go home, I want to go home!” I ground away pitifully with the never hitherto exerted muscles of my perineum and achieved nothing.

  A claustral despair came. Someone was sitting on my head, I could move not even my jaw. The pain became trivial. It occurred to me that I could suffocate and die and these people would not care. They were tormenting me excessively. Surely they were tormenting me excessively, surely anyone could see that. But they were not doing it in a spirit of evil. “They are bored”, I said to myself. “It is because their lives are so desolately empty”. And then: “That which is not felt by the criminal is his crime. I am nothing to them, nothing but an occasion”. Beyond rage, beyond pain, beyond fear I withdrew inside myself and in my womb of ice totted up the profit and the loss.

  The ear I had bitten off was not forgotten. “Go. Leave us. We cannot give you refuge any longer”.

  “That is all I want. To go”.

  “Have you no children of your own? Do you not know how to play with children? You have mutilated this child!”

  “It was not my fault”.

  “Of course it was your fault! You are mad, we can no longer have you here. You are not sick any more. You must go”.

  “That is all I want. But I must have my things back first. My things”.

  “Your things?”

  “My oxen. My horses. My guns. My men. My wagon. The things that were in it. You must show me where my wagon is”.

  I addressed my men: Klawer, Plaatje, Adonis, the Tamboer brothers.

  “We are leaving now. We are on our own again. We must find our way back to civilization. It will not be an easy journey. We have nothing, no wagon, no oxen, no horses, no guns, nothing but what we carry on our own backs. Everything has been stolen from us. You see what kind of people we have been living amongst. You were too innocent when you trusted them.

  “Collect your things. Collect as much food as you can, particularly our kind of food from the wagon, if there is any left. Collect water-skins. But nothing too heavy. We have hundreds of miles to walk and I am a sick man, I cannot walk easily, I cannot carry things. We will have to live from the veld like Bushmen”.

  Adonis swore obscenely. I stepped forward and slapped his face. Too intoxicated to evade me, he lunged forward and clasped my shoulders. I struggled but he would not let go. His face was on my breast. No doubt he was drooling. Over his bent back loomed Plaatje, Plaatje the newly articulate. Plaatje repeated the obscenity. I judged it better to face him upright with my hands at my sides, ignoring Adonis. “Master can go”, said Plaatje, “master and master’s tame hotnot. We say goodbye, master, goodbye, good luck. Only master, watch out who you hit next time”. With an index finger he chucked me lightly under the chin. “Watch out, master, see?”

  Next time, hotnot, next time.

  So I was left with Klawer.

  “Well, you heard what I said, go and fetch our things. I am not waiting”.

  “Yes master”.

  He took a long time. Good faithful old Klawer: a good servant but not very smart. He was having difficulty wringing food out of them. I listened to the birds, the cicadas, a faroff baby with the gripes. People were watching me, having nothing better to do with their time. I paid them no heed, standing easily with my hands behind my back. I am among you but I am not of you. I felt calm and exhilarated. I was leaving. I had not failed, I had not died, therefore I had won.

  Klawer came back with a blanket-roll and the provender: a little gathering-bag with biscuit and dried meat, and not waterskins but two strung calabashes, ridiculous womanly things that bumped as one walked. “Go back and get waterskins”, I told him, “we can’t use these things”. “They won’t give us skins, master”. “What about our own water-skins?” “They won’t give them back, master”.

  “Have you got a knife?” “Yes, master”. “Give it to me”. We were going i
nto the wilds with a knife and a flint. I smiled.

  We set off, heading south-east to the Leeuwen, I walking ahead, jaunty for appearance sake, Klawer bumping along behind. There was no farewell though there were plenty of watchers. The children, who might previously have run up and down beside us, were wary. I had taught them a lesson. The four renegades watched us too, without shame. What kind of life did they imagine they could lead among the wild Hottentots, I wondered.

  We reached the Leeuwen River the next day. There was an abstract pleasure in eating into the finite number of miles that would take me home, so I pursued my straddle-legged hobble in good spirit. Where the going was particularly hard I asked Klawer to carry me, and he did so a stretch at a time without murmur. I had a healthy stool. We slept together for the cold.

  We established ourselves on the Leeuwen for some days to recuperate for the journey south. Our supplies went, but we lived adequately on roots and on nestlings which we baked in mud and ate a dozen at a time bones and all. I made witgalkoffe and enjoyed it. I cut myself a willow bow and with arrows tipped in giftbol spent the mornings lying in wait for animals coming to drink. I shot a buck which Klawer trailed all day but failed to catch. I shot another which he did catch. Lacking salt we could not preserve the meat, so we gorged ourselves rather than waste anything. We were living Bushman lives. I repaired my shoes.

  Leisurely we made our way down the river. My buttock was healing, I was confident that my bow could keep us alive through the spring.

  I was casting off attachments.

  We arrived at the ford on the Great River. The river was in spate after the first spring rains. We camped two days on the bank but the waters did not abate. I determined to try the crossing.

  We tied ourselves together as best we could. The ford was a quarter of a mile wide and the water ran swiftly over the shallows, though nowhere deeper than our chests. We made slow progress, step by step. Then Klawer, who was in front feeling out the bottom with a stick, unaccountably missed a hippopotamus hole and lost his footing. The violence of the current at once snapped the knots that bound us and swept Klawer over the shallows into deep water. With horror I watched my faithful servant and companion drawn struggling downstream, shouting broken pleas for help which I was powerless to render him, him whose voice I had never in all my days heard raised, until he disappeared from sight around a bend and went to his death bearing the blanket roll and all the food.

  The crossing took all of an hour, for we had to probe the bottom before each step for fear of slipping into a hippopotamus hole and being swept off our feet. But sodden and shivering we finally reached the south bank and lit a discreet fire to dry our clothes and blankets. It was late afternoon, there was a treacherous breeze, and, fearing illness above all else, I took care to skip about and keep my joints warm. Klawer on the other hand, having spread our clothing, squatted dismally before the flames clutching his nakedness and toasting his skin. To this mistake, and the mistake of donning wet clothes, I attribute his sickness. He could not keep warm that night but pressed himself against me in fits of shivering. In the morning he had a fever and no appetite. Lacking any herbal skill I filled him with hot water and kept him bundled up. But the fire gave no inner warmth and again he shivered through the night. Heavy dew fell too, diffusing a subtle damp. He coughed harshly and interminably. I was disappointed to see no faith in his eyes. If he had believed in me, or indeed in anything, he would have recovered. But he had the constitution of a slave, resilient under the everyday blows of life, frail under disaster.

  I judged that in the damp nights of the Great River valley he could only decline. Before all strength should desert him I therefore roused him from his hopelessness and urged him to begin the steep southward ascent. With frequent halts we covered half the distance. Then fierce coughing brought him to his knees. I allowed him an hour to rest and tried to persuade him to take nourishment. This halt was another mistake, for his muscles stiffened and gave him too much pain to move. I found a little cave in the hill-face and settled him in it, building a fire in the mouth against the night-winds to which we were now exposed. I slept outside and tended the fire. In the morning Klawer was paralyzed. He seemed dully to understand my orders but could not execute or even respond to them. From his mouth came slow, heavy vocables. I dragged him up, he collapsed. “Klawer, old friend”, I said, “things are going badly with you. But never fear, I will not desert you”. I spent the morning looking for food and found nothing. When I returned he was more lucid and, he said, stronger: “Let us go, master, I can walk”. Alas, no friendly Hottentots appeared with a litter. We ascended slowly through the hot afternoon. Under the dying fire of the sun we reached the crest and looked out over the endless red rock desert. “No, master”, said Klawer, “I cannot do it, you must leave me”. A noble moment, worthy of record. “Klawer”, I said, “we must be realistic. Both of us could die here. Whereas if I go on alone as fast as I can, and come back by horse from the Khamies, I can bring you help within a week perhaps. Shall I go? What do you think?” “Yes master, you go, I will be all right”. “I will stay to see you through tonight, Jan, and we can collect food in the morning. I will leave water”. Thus was our pact closed. I did all for him that was necessary. I threw a windbreak, I collected firewood and whatever edible growths I could recognize. “Goodbye, master”, he said, and wept. My eyes were wet too. I trudged off. He waved.

  I was alone. I had no Klawer to record. I exulted like a young man whose mother has just died. Here I was, free to initiate myself into the desert. I yodelled, I growled, I hissed, I roared, I screamed, I clucked, I whistled; I danced, I stamped, I grovelled, I spun; I sat on the earth, I spat on the earth, I kicked it, I hugged it, I clawed it. Every possible copula was enacted that could link the world to an elephant hunter armed with a bow and crazed with freedom after seventy days of watching eyes and listening ears. I composed and sang a little ditty:

  Hottentot, Hottentot,

  I am not a Hottentot.

  It was neater in Dutch than in Nama, which still lived in the flowering-time of inflexion. I bored a sheath in the earth and would have performed the ur-act had joy and laughter not reduced me to a four-inch dangle and helpless urination. “God”, I shouted, “God, God, God, why do you love me so?” I frothed and dribbled. There was neither thunder nor lightning. I laughed till the muscles that cribbed my skull ached. “I love you too, God. I love everything. I love the stones and the sand and the bushes and the sky and Klawer and those others and every worm, every fly in the world. But God, don’t let them love me. I don’t like accomplices, God, I want to be alone”. It was nice to hear this come out. But the stones, I decided, so introverted, so occupied in quietly being, were after all my favourites.

  I threw off my clothes and swaddled myself in blankets. My feet rubbed each other in ecstasy, my thighs lay together like lovers, my arms embraced my chest. I contemplated the miracle of the heavens and slid into a dream in which a slow torrent of milk, warm and balmy, poured out of the sky down my eager throat.

  There is a little black beetle, to be found near water, of which I have always been fond. If you lift the rock under which he lives he will scuttle away. If you block his path he will try another path. If you block every path, or if you pick him up, he will curl his legs under his body and feign death. Nothing can trick him from this pretence; hence the lore that he dies of fright. You may pull his legs off one by one and he will not wince. It is only when you pull the head off his body that a tiny insect shudder runs through him; and this is certainly involuntary.

  What passes through his mind during his last moments? Perhaps he has no mind, perhaps his mind is extraverted as mere behaviour, as they say of the praying mantis (hotnotsgod). Nevertheless, in a formal sense he is a true creature of Zeno. “Now I am only half-way dead. Now I am only three-fourths dead. Now I am only seven-eighths dead. The secret of my life regresses infinitely before your probing finger. You and I could
spend eternity splitting fractions. If I keep still long enough you will go away. Now I am only fifteen-sixteenths dead”.

  Under the Hottentot captivity I had not failed to keep the Zeno beetle in mind. There had been legs, metaphorical legs, and much else too, that I had been prepared to lose. In the blindest alley of the labyrinth of my self I had hidden myself away, abandoning mile after mile of defences. The Hottentot assault had been disappointing. It had fallen on my shame, a judicious point of attack; but it had been baffled from the beginning, in a body which partook too of the labyrinth, by the continuity of my exterior with the interior surface of my digestive tract. The male body has no inner space. The Hottentots knew nothing of penetration. For penetration you need blue eyes.

  With what new eyes of knowledge, I wondered, would I see myself when I saw myself, now that I had been violated by the cackling heathen. Would I know myself better? Around my forearms and neck were rings of demarcation between the rough red-brown skin of myself the invader of the wilderness and slayer of elephants and myself the Hottentots’ patient victim. I hugged my white shoulders. I stroked my white buttocks, I longed for a mirror. Perhaps I would find a pool, a small limpid pool with a dark bed, in which I might stand and, framed by the recomposing clouds, see myself as others had seen me, making out at last too the lump my fingers had told me so much about, the scar of the violence I had done myself.

  I continued with my exploration of the Hottentots, trying to find a place for them in my history.

  Their failure to enter more deeply into me had disappointed me. They had violated my privacy, all my privacies, from the privacy of my property to the privacy of my body. They had introduced poison into me. Yet could I be sure I had been poisoned? Had I not perhaps been sickening for a long time, or simply been unused to Hottentot fare? If they had poisoned me, had they poisoned me with a penetrating, a telling, an instructional poison, on the principle of to every man his own meat, or, unfamiliar with poisons, had they underdosed me? But how could savages be unfamiliar with treachery and poison? But were they true savages, these Namaqua Hottentots? Why had they nursed me? Why had they let me go? Why had they not killed me? Why had their torments been so lacking in system and even enthusiasm? Was I to understand the desultory attentions paid me as a token of contempt? Was I personally unexciting to them? Would some other victim have aroused them to a pitch of true savagery? What was true savagery, in this context? Savagery was a way of life based on disdain for the value of human life and sensual delight in the pain of others. What evidence of disdain for life or delight in pain could I point to in their treatment of me? What evidence was there, indeed, that they had a way of life of any coherence? I had lived in their midst and I had seen no government, no laws, no religion, no arts beyond the singing of lewd songs and dancing of lewd dances. Aside from their greed for the trash in my wagon, had they exhibited any consistent attributes but sloth and an appetite for meat? And once stripped had I been anything but an irrelevance to them? To these people to whom life was nothing but a sequence of accidents had I not been simply another accident? Was there nothing to be done to make them take me more seriously?