Dusklands

by J. M. Coetzee

  From the snug pupa of my blankets I stretched my arms toward the sun. We were approaching that moment in the morning when skin and air are at the same temperature. I slid out and stretched my wings. For a minute I indulged myself in a blurring of boundaries. My toes were enjoying themselves in the sand. I walked a few steps, but stones were still stones. Shoes I could not give up. The Namaqua, I decided, were not true savages. Even I knew more about savagery than they. They could be dismissed. It was time to go. Clad only in shoes and my glorious manhood, my clothes in a bundle on my back, I began the plod southward.

  I had been set a task, to find my way home, no mean task, yet one which I, always looking on the brighter side of things, preferred to regard as a game or a contest. About tasks there is always something dreary, the taskmaster and the taskmaster’s alien will; whereas games, my games, I played against an indifferent universe, inventing rules as I went. From this point of view my expulsion by the Hottentots was merely the occasion for a contest in which, primitively equipped, I was required to walk across three hundred miles of scrub. The selfsame occasion might at another time initiate an entirely different contest between myself and the circumjacent universe in which I might be required to call up an expeditionary force and return in triumph to punish my depredators and recover my property. According to the prescription of a third possible game I might, in the course of my explorations, have to fall into the hands of strange Hottentots and survive abuse, degradation, betrayal, and expulsion. According to a fourth I might have to suffer torments of hunger and thirst until finally I curled up in the shade of a thornbush and died.

  In each game the challenge was to undergo the history, and victory was mine if I survived it. The fourth game was the most interesting one, the Zenonian case in which only an infinitely diminishing fraction of my self survived, the fictive echo of a tiny “I” whispered across the void of eternity. My present enterprise, example one, getting home, held the peril of monotony. My retrogression from well set up elephant hunter to white-skinned Bushman was insignificant. What was lost was lost, if it was irretrievably lost, for the time being. Even the white skin could go. What dismayed the heart about those three hundred miles was the same road back, the old footmarks, the familiar sights. Would I be able to translate myself soberly across the told tale, getting back to a dull, decent farmer’s life in the shortest possible time, or would I weaken and in a fit of boredom set out down a new path, implicate myself in a new life, perhaps the life of the white Bushman that had been hinting itself to me? I must beware. In a life without rules I could explode to the four corners of the universe. Doggedly I set one foot in front of the other. To keep my mind fed I computed all the denominators I could think of. The biggest were as usual the best: the number of paces in three hundred miles, the number of minutes in a month. I allowed myself hunting adventures, the kind that befitted a patient bowman crouched in the lee of a bush or trotting on a bloodspoor. A snake leaned down from a branch and tapped me on the cheek. A sharp-pronged buck belied its character and wheeled on me. But neither in these stories nor in the busy calculation of percentages could I ignore the element of obligation. I filled up time with hunger and thirst, two more duties of the traveller in the desert; but I pined for novelty. A thin figment of my earlier fat self, I plodded on, searching diligently for food and drink, devouring the miles, rubbing my skin with the body fat of dead beasts against a sun which humoured me to pink and red but would not bring me to brown.

  Only on the borders of settlement did I revive. At the first sight of docile hulking beeves dotting the grassland new life gushed into my heart. With hunter’s cunning I crept up on a straggler and knifed it. Then from a skulking-place in the long grass I planted a neat arrow in the thigh of the herder. With whoops and stones I stampeded his charges. I glutted myself on a day of bloodlust and anarchy whose story would fill another book, an assault on colonial property which filled me out once more to a man’s stature and whose consequences were visited on the unfortunate heads of the Bushmen.

  On 12 October 1760 in the evening I reached the markers of my own land. Unseen I donned my clothes and buried my bow. Like God in a whirlwind I fell upon a lamb, an innocent little fellow who had never seen his master and was thinking only of a good night’s sleep, and slit his throat. From the kitchen window shone a warm domestic light. No faithful hound came to greet me. Bearing the liver, my favourite cut, I burst open the door. I was back.

  Second journey to the land of the Great Namaqua [Expedition of Captain Hendrik Hop, 16 August 1761—27 April 1762]

  We descended on their camp at dawn, the hour recommended by the classic writers on warfare, haloed in red sky-streaks that portended a blustery afternoon. A girl, a pretty child on her way to the stream with a pot on her head, was the only soul about, though the voices of unseen others stirred the still air. She heard our horses, looked up, whimpered, and started to run, still balancing the pot, a considerable feat. A shot, one of the simple, matter-of-fact kind I have always admired, took her between the shoulder-blades and hurled her to the ground with the force of a horse’s kick. That first clear death on the ground, its unassuming lack of echo, will yet roll hard and clean as a marble from my dying brain. I will not fail you, beautiful death, I vowed, and we trotted down to where the first amazed figures stared from the doors of their huts. Fill in the morning smoke rising straight in the air, the first flies making for the corpse, and you have the tableau.

  We emptied the village, the huts across the stream as well as the main camp, and assembled everyone, men, women and children, the halt, the blind, the bedridden. The four deserters were still among them: Plaatje, Adonis, the Tamboer brothers. I nodded to them. They bowed. Adonis said “Master”. They were looking well. My stolen guns were recovered.

  I ordered my four men to step forward. They stood before my horse, cringing somewhat, and I delivered them a brief sermon, speaking in Dutch to indicate to the Hottentots that my servants were set apart from them and relying on one of the Griqua soldiers to translate.

  We do not require of God that he be good, I told them, all we ask is that he never forget us. Those of us who may momentarily doubt that we are included in the great system of dividends and penalties may take comfort in Our Lord’s observation on the fall of the sparrow: the sparrow is cheap but he is not forgotten. As explorer of the wilderness I have always thought myself an evangelist and endeavoured to bring to the heathen the gospel of the sparrow, which falls but falls with design. There are acts of justice, I tell them (I told them), and acts of injustice, and all bear their place in the economy of the whole. Have faith, be comforted, like the sparrow you are not forgotten.

  Over them I then pronounced sentence of death. In an ideal world I would have waited the executions for the next morning, midday executions lacking the poignancy of a firing squad in a rosy dawn. But I did not indulge myself. I ordered the Griquas to take them away. The Tamboers went without protest, nonentities swept away on the tide of history. Plaatje looked at me, he knew he was dead, he did not bother to plead. Adonis however, whom I had always suspected I would one day despise, wept and shouted and tried to crawl to me. From this endeavour he was restrained not only by the Griquas but by the kicks and blows of his new Hottentot friends, who called out, “He’s a bad fellow, master! Take him away, master, we don’t want him!” Adonis panted at my feet: “I’m just a poor hotnot, master, only one more chance, my master, my father, I will give master anything, please, please, please!” Dejection and enervation settled over me and I moved away from him. For months I had nourished myself on this day, which I had populated with retribution and death. On this day I would return as a storm-cloud casting the shadow of my justice over a small patch of the earth. But this abject, treacherous rabble was telling me that here and everywhere else on this continent there would be no resistance to my power and no limit to its projection. My despair was despair at the undifferentiated plenum, which is after all nothing but the void dressed
up as being.

  The sun was high and no one was warmed. Our horses edged right and left and right. The only sound was the cold whistling of images through my brain. All were inadequate. There was nothing that could be impressed on these bodies, nothing that could be torn from them or forced through their orifices, that would be commensurate with the desolate infinity of my power over them. They could die summarily or in the most excruciating pain, I could leave them to be picked by the vultures, and they would be forgotten in a week. I was undergoing nothing less than a failure of imagination before the void. I was sick at heart.

  I made my way to the Golgotha I had indicated, the village midden-heap, where the four thieves were waiting for me with Scheffer and their guards. Behind me the first hut began to smoke and burn. The Griquas were doing what I had told them: collect all the cattle, wipe the village off the face of the earth, do what is fitting with the Hottentots. Screaming began. I reached Scheffer and the prisoners. We were too near the village for privacy. I ordered them to march further. A man, a sturdy Hottentot, began running after us clutching an enormous brown bundle to his chest. A Griqua in green jacket and scarlet cap came chasing after him waving a sabre. Soundlessly the sabre fell on the man’s shoulder. The bundle slid to the ground and began itself to run. It was a child, quite a big one. Why had the man been carrying it? The Griqua now chased the child. He tripped it and fell upon it. The Hottentot sat up holding his shoulder. He no longer seemed interested in the child. The Griqua was doing things to the child on the ground. It must be a girl child. I could not think of any of the Hottentot girl I might want except perhaps the girl who had fallen so straight forwardly to the first shot. One could always stroke oneself with an irony like that.

  We reached the crest of a slight eminence and stopped to look back and smoke a pipe. The wattle and hides of the huts smoked and no doubt stank. The Hottentots, watched over by three idle-looking soldiers, sat packed together some distance from the village. They seemed quiet now. I could make out two men, Roos and Van Nieuwkerk or perhaps Badenhorst, on horseback. The others were presumably occupying themselves. I began to shiver, long shivers that came every minute or two, though I was not cold. I was calmer. My mind bobbed in my body like a bottle on the sea. I was happy.

  I looked at Plaatje. His eyes were fast on mine. He knew he was my man. His whites were clouded with yellow. We feasted on each other’s face. The wind, so slight I had not noticed it, wafted his fear-smell to me, fear and perhaps a little urine. I took a sliver of dried meat from my pouch and held it out to him. He did not take it. I stepped nearer and pressed the meat to his lips. They were dry, they did not open. I was patient. Time was on my side. I held the meat there, and in the end the lips cracked, a dry tongue came out, the meat stuck to it and was withdrawn. I waited. The jaws moved once, twice, three times. Now all that remained was to swallow. I nodded to him. His throat muscles hollowed. It was done. But then—behold—a spasm erupted all the way from his belly, his mouth opened, his tongue re-emerged, and he retched, a tidy dry retch that stranded the soggy red meat on his chest. His eyes apologized like a dog’s. I was not upset. He was coming along.

  The Griquas set about tying their hands. Someone in the village was screaming loudly enough for the screams, thin, boring, one after another, to reach us across half a mile. I tried to listen to them as one listens to the belling of frogs, as pure pattern; but the pattern here was without interest. I wished the screams would go away.

  The prisoners too were being boring. We should have descended the hillock to the pleasant little hollow behind it. But the two Tamboers lay back heavily on their guards and would not walk, while Adonis, pulled to his feet, fell back summarily to the ground. Only Plaatje stood ready and willing, watching my eyes. I motioned him down the hill and told the Griquas to bring the others by whatever means. One took Adonis’s ankles and dragged. With his hands tied behind his back he could not protect himself from the rocks and began to shout repentance. He was allowed to stand. Again he refused to march. He was hysterical. “Master, master, my beloved master”, he babbled, “master knows I am only a stupid hotnot, please, master, please”. Above all I did not want him to disturb my calm. “Pull him by the arms”, I said. The Griqua gripped him by the thong that bound his wrists. He fell, his arms were wrenched above his head, and he began to scream in pain. “Cut it”, I said, “you are breaking his arms”, and cut the thong myself. The Griqua began to pull him downhill by one arm. He was no trouble, he slid along on his buttocks and kicked with his heels to help himself along. The Tamboers began to follow. One was walking, his head was down, he had given up. The other walked too, but under pressure from behind, leaning back, giving nothing. At the foot of the hill he broke into a funny little trot with his head down and his hands stretched out behind like a running hen. He trotted across the hollow and, more slowly, picked his way among the rocks of the next incline. “He is escaping, master”, said the Griqua next to me, “must I get him back?” The others were laughing and shouting derision. “Let me have a shot”, said Scheffer. “Shoot”, I said. The boy was now perhaps fifty yards away, moving at the pace of a walking man. Scheffer shot him and he lay down on his side. The Griquas brought him in bleeding heavily from a haunch wound. His face was green. “Pietje”, said his brother. “No”, I said, “I am not going to have this, shoot him, finish it”. Scheffer reloaded and shot him through the head. “Is he finished?” said Scheffer. “He is finished, master”.

  Adonis was giving trouble again. He slumped to the ground and would not stand. I thought he might have fainted, but his eyes were open, staring back at me, though focussed perhaps somewhere behind my head. “Stand up”, I said, “I am not playing, I’ll shoot you right here”. I held the muzzle of my gun against his forehead. “Stand up!” His face was quite empty. As I pressed the trigger he jerked his head and the shot missed. Scheffer was smoking his pipe and smiling. I blushed immoderately. I put my foot on Adonis’s chest to hold him and reloaded. “Please, master, please”, he said, “my arm is sore”. I pushed the muzzle against his lips. “Take it”, I said. He would not take it. I stamped. His lips seeped blood, his jaw relaxed. I pushed the muzzle in till he began to gag. I held his head steady between my ankles. Behind me his sphincter gave way and a rich stench filled the air. “Watch your manners, hotnot”, I said. I regretted this vulgarity. The shot sounded as minor as a shot fired into the sand. Whatever happened in the pap inside his head left his eyes crossed. Scheffer inspected and laughed. I wished Scheffer away.

  “Can’t you get these people to stand up?” said Scheffer. “Stand them up”, I told the Griquas. Both stood without any trouble. The Tamboer boy did not know what he was doing. Plaatje was being brave. The Griquas stood aside and Scheffer and I backed off. “You take the one on the left”, said Scheffer, and shot Tamboer stone dead. I fired and lowered my gun. Plaatje was still standing. “Fall, damn you!” I said. Plaatje took two steps forward. “You, kill him, he’s not dead!” I shouted, pointing at the Griqua who stood nearest him. “Yes, yes you: use your sword: in the neck!” I slashed the air with edge of my hand. The man swung his sabre at Plaatje’s neck; Plaatje fell on his face. We crowded around him. There was a blue ridge at the base of his skull where the blow had taken him. “Turn him over”, I said. The bullet wound was in his chest, high up below the throat. His face was composed, he was conscious, he was looking at me. “Well”, said Scheffer, “I’ll leave you now, I want to see what’s going on over there”. He left.

  As a child one is taught how to dispose of wounded birds. One takes the bird by the neck between index and middle fingers, with the head in one’s palm. Then one flings the bird downward, snapping the wrist as if spinning a top. Usually the body flies clean off, leaving the head behind. But if one is squeamish and uses too little force the bird persists in life, its neck flayed, its trachea crushed. The thin red necks of such birds always awoke compassion and distaste in me. I revolted from repeating the snap, and untidier
modes of annihilation like stamping the head flat sent rills down my spine. So I would stand there cuddling the expiring creature in my hands, venting upon it the tears of my pity for all tiny helpless suffering things, until it passed away.

  Such was the emotion reawoken in me by him whose passage from this world I had so unkindly botched but who was on his way on his way. He opened his lips and bubbled uncomfortably through the blood flowing inward to his lungs and outward in a red sheet over his chest and on to the ground. So prodigal, I thought, I who had been more miserly of blood than of any other of my fluids. I knelt over him and stared into his eyes. He stared back confidently. He knew enough to know that I was no longer a threat, that no one could threaten him any more. I did not want to lose his respect. I cuddled his head and shoulders and raised him a little. My arms were lapped in blood. His eyes were losing focus. They had turned the colour of wine-dregs. He was dying fast. “Courage”, I said, “we admire you”. He understood nothing. A muscle worked in my jaw. He saw nothing. I laid him down gently. Deep inside him, as though lost down a well, his lungs still bubbled. Then his diaphragm contracted and from his chest he sneezed, an explosion that sprayed me with blood, water, and for all I know scraps of his innards. Thus he perished.