by Andre Brink
“Morocco?”
“No, Africa. My home is farther to the south, Nigeria.”
“We’re from Africa, too.”
“It’s not good to be away from it.”
That was the full extent of our conversation. But through it, for the first time in my life, I really became aware of Africa: that continent linking me to so many generations of men, past homo sapiens, millions of years back to homo habilis: my land and that stranger’s.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be too harsh in my judgement of the mine mob. How could they have been expected to cope with a life behind barbed wire, in single quarters, in a compound – after the huts and mealie lands and hills of Transkei or Lesotho, women working in the lands, gourds of sour milk, dagga pipes, circumcision, dancing, goats and cattle?
I myself hadn’t known how to operate a lift before going to university. If Bernard or I had suddenly been uprooted from the villages of our youth, what would have become of us? It was difficult enough for us as it was.
Consequently I have a duty to explain to the Court the views I hold, how I came to espouse them, and why, in the course of time, I felt compelled to act as I did.
At the outset I must emphasise that I was born from a family who had proved their loyalty to the Afrikaner cause through their share in the Anglo-Boer War, the Rebellion of 1914 and even the underground activities of the Ossewa-Brandwag during the Second World War. Until about my twenty-fifth year I was a Nationalist by conviction. Like many young Afrikaners of my generation I grew up on a farm. Like them, I was lonely in many respects, having no brothers, only four sisters, all of them much older than myself. In the southern Free State where we lived the farms were large and far apart. Except for the neighbouring children who attended the farm school with me, my only constant companions were the Black children of our farm. There was one especially whom I still regard as a dear friend. (Or perhaps I should say that after many years we rediscovered our friendship.) Unfortunately I cannot refer to him by name here as the mere mention of it may create problems for him. For years we were, when I was not at school, always in each other’s company. We roamed the farm together, we hunted meerkats and hares, raided birds’ nests, modelled clay oxen and swam together; often I ate putu porridge with his family, from an iron pot in front of their red-clay hut. And never can I remember that the colour of our skins affected our fun or our quarrels or our close friendship in any way. I don’t think we were even aware of the fact that one of us was Black, the other White. Only later, when in my twelfth year I was sent away to boarding school in town, did I.…
In my final year at university Bernard took me home with him for the Easter vacation. I have good reason to remember that fortnight! We went to the Free State by train, reviving memories from my earliest childhood: the smell of the green leather upholstery; the rattling on the door whenever the conductor or the waiter came on their rounds; lowering the narrow table over the tin wash-basin to have a meal: slices of mutton, eggs, tomatoes, biltong, brown read; the Jeyes’ Fluid in the toilet. Upon our departure Bernard had a stomach problem and at the very last minute he had to run off to the station toilet. I was scared he’d miss the train. When he reappeared in the nick of time, I couldn’t understand why he was grinning so broadly.
“What’s so funny?” I asked as I gave him a hand to board the moving train.
“Just had the most expensive shit of my life,” he said.
It appeared that he’d been in such a hurry entering the toilet that there hadn’t been any time for looking round; only after he’d finished did he discover the total absence of paper. The only solution was his cheque book. And being Bernard, he first wrote out three cheques for one thousand pounds each before using them.
The stomach complaint was referred to again on the journey, in the course of an argument on religion (which had just begun to become problematic to me). When he grew tired of it, Bernard stretched himself out on the upper bunk and said, smiling: “Even when it comes to religion you mustn’t forget what Sartre said about thinking and experiencing things in situation. I mean, one’s concept of the hereafter is influenced to a large extent by the condition of one’s stomach. If I had too many prickly pears, or if I’m forced to suddenly start writing out cheques like this morning, I lose much of my certainty about what may happen after death.”
At three or four o’clock in the morning we were bundled out of our compartment by the conductor who’d promised to wake us in time and then overslept himself. Before we properly knew what had hit us, we were standing on a dark platform in our pyjamas, clutching the suitcases the old man was heaving through the window, his bald head glaring through sparse but tousled grey hair (he hadn’t even had time to put on his cap). While I was still trying to stack the luggage, the whistle blew and the train pulled off into the night.
It wasn’t even a proper station, just a siding in the veld. A patch of tarred platform; a narrow red-brick building with a row of empty fire buckets on the side; a small waiting-room with two brown benches and an old-fashioned black stove; a Ladies and Gents to the left, under a pepper tree; and on the other side of the tracks a corrugated iron structure for Blacks.
There was nobody to meet us, not even a station foreman. A postbag flung from the train was lying limply at the far end of the platform. Close by stood a row of milk cans, probably awaiting the arrival of a goods train.
We dressed in the waiting-room – not without some hilarity when we found that one of Bernard’s shoes had remained on the train. Giving the foul-smelling toilets a wide berth to have a pee under the pepper tree, we went round the station building and installed ourselves on the front step.
There is something incredibly serene about such a night. (I’m beginning to discover why writers are seduced by scenes like this.) We’d shed the last lingering drowsiness of sleep; we were out of reach of the toilet’s fishy stench; the rumbling of the train had died down in the distance. It was very quiet, except for an occasional rustling of wind in the frayed branches of the tree; cocks crowing sporadically; a dog barking. The stars appeared incredibly large, as if they were so low one could pluck them from the sky. The village, Bernard had said, was at least two miles away, hidden by a row of hills. There wasn’t the slightest hint of a light to be seen. Nothing at all.
We didn’t speak. After a long time – perhaps it was only fifteen minutes or so, but it felt much longer – a light appeared in the distance; after a while a spluttering, chattering sound could be heard.
“Must be Pa coming to fetch us,” said Bernard.
An ancient upright Austin stopped beside us and the engine was left running as the driver got out. A tall, impressive old man, much older than I’d expected, possibly seventy, with a wild mane of grey hair, a pipe clenched between his strong teeth, a face covered with a cobweb of wrinkles caused by worry and laughter, and two amazingly youthful eyes which appeared to be staring right through one.
“Well!” he said after he’d examined me in silence for some time. “Where were you hatched?”
“This is Martin Mynhardt, Pa,” said Bernard. “I wrote you all about him.”
“You only said you were bringing a friend home for the vac. And with you one never knows whether that means male or female.” Turning his eyes back on me: “Looks all right to me, but one can’t be sure these days. Anyway, hop in, let’s go.”
Gnashing the gears he pulled away at great speed. Most of the way he drove on the wrong side of the road (thank God it was too early for traffic), while he carried on an interminable inquisition at the top of his voice, to make himself heard above the noise of the car.
“What you doing for a life?”
“I’m in my final LL.B. year, Uncle Ben.”
“Hm. Another law man. Another farm down the drain.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You all going off to the cities looking for money and fun and tail, leaving the farms to the Devil.”
“I’m not just leaving the farm,” interrupte
d Bernard. “Sis and her husband are going to take over, aren’t they?”
“What’s the use?” He spat through his open window, spraying me on the back seat. “Nothing wrong with that husband she’s married, but he isn’t a Franken.”
I soon discovered that the old man really felt very proud of his rebel son; and, much to Bernard’s annoyance, his mother couldn’t stop talking about his achievements at school and university, proudly showing me, in spite of his angry protestations, all the framed diplomas which she’d hung on her bedroom wall.
The cocks were crowing more persistently when we reached the farm and drove recklessly round the house accompanied by a pack of yapping dogs and just missing a broken-down old wagon in the backyard. The gauze door slammed like a gunshot as a tiny old lady emerged from the kitchen carrying a gas lamp in one hand. She kissed her husband; then Bernard picked her up in his arms as if she were a little girl.
“Not in front of people, Bernard!” she protested, embarrassed and panting.
“It’s not people, Mum, it’s only Martin.”
“Hello, Martin. We’ve been waiting a long time to meet the boy Bernard keeps on writing about. Come in, you must be thirsty. Coffee is waiting.”
Coffee and rusks at the scrubbed table in the kitchen, in front of the black stove which, even at that ungodly hour, was already blazing like a furnace, while three or four Black women moved about soundlessly on their bare feet, like cats, stoking the fire and scrubbing and topping up the water pail. The old man wanted us to go out with him straight away, but Bernard’s mother objected. Frail and mild as she appeared, I soon discovered that she ruled her household, including her husband, with an iron hand. In the unfamiliar night, where I still felt lost ever since I’d been bundled out of the train, she led us through the back door to the outbuilding where Bernard’s room had been prepared for us. Strange how vividly it all comes back to me now. The two iron bedsteads covered with crocheted spreads; the porcelain pitcher and basin on a washing table behind the door; the soap dish decorated with violets; the smooth dung-floor cool under one’s feet; flypaper against the doorframe. The walls were covered with model aeroplanes and a few cars skilfully fashioned out of wire; there was a collection of stones and skulls on a long shelf (birds and hares, a monkey, sheep, a horse): the room of the boy Bernard, obviously untouched through the years. A cool night breeze blew through the room from the gauzed window to the wide-open door; on the threshold a fat farm-dog flopped down and, sighing deeply, went to sleep; outside, shattering the silence, the cocks were crowing.
That is what I remember most readily: the way in which, in front of my very eyes, Bernard changed into a boy again. The brilliant lecturer, the persuasive orator, the nimble dancer, the irresistible ladies’ man: all of that was suddenly, disarmingly, reduced to dutiful son: Yes; Pa, yes, M.m. All right, Pa. I agree, Pa.
Especially during the Easter weekend I continued to be amazed and even startled by it. At university I’d become accustomed to see him as the relentless opponent of Christianity, the Church and everything smacking of tradition: he had been the one, in fact, to first sow the seeds of doubt in me. But back on the farm he submitted obediently to the routine of his parents: morning prayers, evening prayers – reading from his father’s Dutch Bible, singing, kneeling at the riempie chairs until one’s knees were aching – saying grace at mealtime: he regularly took his turn, praying like a clergyman. Over the weekend we attended each one of a seemingly endless series of church services. We drove in to town on the Thursday afternoon (still on the wrong side of the road: but the inhabitants of the district all seemed to be used to it, giving the old man a wide berth as soon as they saw him coming – even if it meant driving through the veld). Early that morning a foreman had been sent in with a trailer loaded with produce for the Co-op, taking with him a small army of servants to air and clean up the family’s town house for the occasion; and by the time we arrived in the afternoon, everything was ready. Most of the servants were transported back to the farm by the foreman, leaving only two to look after us. The next day the church took over. Morning service on Good Friday. Two preparatory services on Saturday. Morning and evening on Sunday (missing only the children’s service in the afternoon). That left us with Monday morning’s exuberant sports meeting on the square before, saturated by religion, we returned to the farm. And Bernard took it all without a hint of protest or embarrassment. In fact, when I glanced at him in church from time to time, he sat there with as pious an expression as any deacon.
To me the weekend was the beginning of something quite different. I first noticed the girl on Sunday morning, and immediately scolded myself for not having been more observant during the services on the previous days. Tall, darkish blonde, her head held erect in an attitude both of independence and defiance. And as I sat gazing at her she looked back without flinching, such a cool and calculating stare that I dropped my hymn book; when I looked up after retrieving it her clear, steady eyes were still watching me, now, I thought, in irony. In the maddeningly slow motion of the throng following the service I lost her; and I felt so disappointed that I even snapped at Bernard when he innocently spoke to me. When I saw her again, at the sports meeting the next morning, I was overjoyed. Instead of the sober costume and gloves and wide-brimmed white hat she’d worn to church, she was barefoot now, in a summery dress. Seated on the log rigged up for the pillow-fights she dislodged one opponent after the other with swift and deadly accurate blows, and her laughter could be heard to where I stood. Before I had time to react, Bernard had left my side and turned up beside her. The next moment he straddled the log opposite her. And in a second he sent her tumbling to the ground in a cloud of dust, her dress whirling, revealing for the briefest of moments her long, bare, tanned legs.
I could have expected it of Bernard. In games or courting he was as fast on the draw as any bloody cowboy from the West. And I knew immediately that, with him around, I stood no chance. But for once I was mistaken. He wasn’t interested in this blonde girl – at least, not in the way I’d feared.
Just after he’d unseated her from the log he brought her up to me, her face still smudged with dust, a few strands of hair clinging wetly to her cheeks and temples.
“This is Martin,” he said. “Elise.”
“I saw you in church yesterday,” I said.
“I remember, you dropped your hymn book. I was looking at Bernard when I saw you.”
Bernard. Of course. Same old story. While in my state of elation the previous day I’d thought—
I tried to cover up by explaining limply: “I never expected a girl like you in a backwater like this.”
“I thought you’d have met her in Stellenbosch,” said Bernard.
“What are you doing in Stellenbosch?” I asked her, in surprise.
“Training College. I’m not as lucky as you are.”
She’d wanted to go to university, I learned, but her father – none other than the vicar who’d dominated our weekend! – had objected: Stellenbosch was too far away and much too dangerous for an innocent young girl. When she insisted, he grudgingly relented, but on the condition that she only went to college, not to university.
“Aren’t you coming round to our place, Bernard?” she asked after a while. It was obvious she had eyes only for him.
“We’re off to the farm this afternoon,” he said. “I come home so seldom that my folks insist on their pound of flesh.”
“It’s so boring in town,” she complained with obvious disappointment. “There’s just nobody to talk to.”
“I’d bore you just as much,” he teased her. “An old goat like me.”
“You’re not old! You’re not even thirty yet!”
“In your eyes I must be positively hoary with age,” he said, turning to me: “When her parents first arrived here she was only twelve or something. And I was twenty. She called me ‘Uncle’.”
“I’m not twelve any more.”
“You don’t look much older.”
Shrugging, he kissed her, like a brother, on the tip of her nose.
We still talked for a few minutes. When we said goodbye, she suggested, almost in exasperation: “Listen, Dad’s going out to your place next Sunday for the service. Would you like me to come with him?”
“Fine,” said Bernard. “We’ll spread the carpet. Just wash your feet before you come.” Pointing at her bare, dusty toes.
With that he shrugged her off. Perhaps it was in self-defence. For there was something quite shameless in the way the farmers’ wives in the district found any conceivable pretext to bring their nubile daughters over to the farm while Bernard was there. Most of these daughters wouldn’t survive closer scrutiny: even I, younger and more libidinous than Bernard, could see little hope for some of them. But there were others who were not only attractive, but ripe and more than ready to be bruised. Yet with superb diplomatic skill Bernard succeeded in getting through the ordeal without either giving offence or getting involved.
Elise came the next Sunday. The service was held in the large front room where some forty farmers from the outlying parts of the district were assembled. Afterwards we had coffee on the stoep and under the trees, while children ran havoc all over the place chasing chickens and pigs and dogs. Most of the visitors left after coffee; and when those who’d stayed for Sunday dinner had gone, Bernard’s parents and the vicar and his wife turned in for an afternoon nap. The three of us remained on the stoep – without the devotional literature forced on us on Sunday in my childhood, but with the same feeling of drowsiness and boredom.
It was Bernard who finally suggested a stroll. We left our ties and jackets on the stoep; Elise kept on her hat as the sun was scorching, and she even retained her gloves in case it would upset her parents to see her without them. Lazily, with nothing much to talk about, we ambled through the farmyard in the April sun. The broken-down wagon, rusty ploughshares, unrecognisable parts of old engines, a meat-safe with torn shreds of gauze still tacked to it, an upside-down wheelbarrow, everything strewn about in friendly confusion. In the barn we sat down on some lucerne bales, under hundreds of pigeons cooing and making love on lofty beams and ledges; outside, a hen was cackling behind some shrubs, and muscovy ducks waddled and hissed in a dirty puddle near the door. And all the time I remained disturbingly aware of her, so curiously out of place in her staid Sunday outfit.