1998 - Devil's Valley

by Andre Brink

  One last time I checked the contents of my rucksack. The provisions. The tape recorder and notebooks and ball-point pens. The two cartons of Camel, four hundred, plus a few loose packets stowed in my pockets. Enough for ten days, if I rationed myself carefully. The White Horse safely ensconced in the box containing Little-Lukas’s pinkish-grey ashes.

  Now here I was at last, and behind me a voice was saying, “So there you are.”

  Usual Places

  IT’S DAMN HOT here in the dry riverbed where I’m crouched waiting. There is still time, but not much. If she doesn’t come soon, I’ve had it. And there’s such a lot still to untangle in my mind.

  The others are about their business among the ruins. In my mind I fit them into their usual places, the way things were before the bloody catastrophes began. Grandpa Lukas, as they call him here, among his mottled goats on the mountainside, chewing or sniffing his strong tobacco. Brother Holy pacing up and down his rows of vegetables, hands behind his back, preparing his sermon of fire and brimstone for next Sunday, while Smith-the-Smith furiously hammers a white-hot horseshoe of pure gold into shape on his anvil for a horse he’ll never see. The sprinkling of old people in the cemetery, sweeping the aisles and dusting the headstones and cleaning the little beds of succulents on the graves as they chat to the dead and pass on all the news from the living in exchange for tidings from the other side. Tant Poppie Fullmoon with her bag of herbs, waddling on her small round feet to bring a new baby into the world or strangle another. Jos Joseph planing boards for coffin or bed or doorpost, his mouth bristling with wild-olive nails, one of which he occasionally swallows when he becomes excited. Jurg Water loping behind the forked stick he uses as a divining rod, up and down the dried-up slopes where no drop of subterranean water remains to set the stick twirling in his huge paws. Henta Peach and her gaggle of barely nubile furies twittering among bright shafts of light in some dark shed, ample warning that at moonrise tonight they will be cavorting naked among the bluegum trees again. Hans Magic accompanied by his perennial cloud of flies like a fucking halo around his filthy head. The randy old shoemaker Petrus Tatters pretending to be hard at work while everybody knows his thoughts are with Criel Eyes’s widow who he’s planning to screw tonight. Gert Brush among the paintings never finished because he keeps on adding new faces to the ones hovering in the layers of paint below. Isak Smous counting the money he’ll never spend. Job Raisin at his stands of drying tobacco and raisins, branch in one hand to chase away the birds that disappeared from the Devil’s Valley a century ago. Tall-Fransina bent over the tip of the coil from her still, surrounded by her innumerable cats as she awaits the blessed moment when the heart of the run can be cut from the heads. Peet Flatfoot, the dwarf I’d christened Prickhead on my arrival, hiding in the thickets beside the dried-up water-holes to spy on the naked girls who have long stopped swimming there. Ouma Liesbet Prune huddled with her small tin trunk on the roof of her little house, waiting for the skies to open so that the Lord can sweep her up to heaven, while her distant nephew Ben Owl lies snoring down below until nightfall when he will get up to prowl in the dark on his club-foot. Bettie Teat and her brood in the sun on the doorstep of the church, a child at each bare breast, waiting for Brother Holy to descend from the cabbage patch to castigate her for the sins of her voluptuous flesh. Also Lukas Death, somehow appointed as my guide and mentor during this stay which is now over and not yet over: he occupies the biblical position of Judge in the Devil’s Valley, a combination of justice of the peace, and mayor, and field cornet, besides doing his job as teacher and undertaker.

  And then Emma, Emma in church, Emma here in the dried-up riverbed, Emma at the Devil’s Hole, Emma in the cemetery at night, Emma’s laughter and her silences. Emma bearing the mark of the Devil on her breast, Emma.

  She is the one I’m waiting for now. But the one who showed up that late afternoon, among the tangled bushes beside the dried-up pool, was Lukas Death, saying “So there you are.”

  Screwed Up

  I swung round quickly: one can only take so much on any given day. In front of me stood a thin man in a quaint black linen suit, with a wispy ringbeard resembling old photographs of Paul Kruger. Undertaker, was my first thought, which turned out to be not so wrong after all. But on closer inspection he appeared too scruffy for the job: collarless shirt, the sleeves of his jacket frayed and much too short, so that his hands protruded like gnarled, brown sweet potatoes; and barefoot, carrying two heavy veldskoens over one shoulder. In this place, I was to discover, people tend to save their shoes as much as possible. A pretty seedy sight, all told, and rather peed-upon. Judging from the way he screwed up his eyes below the unkempt eyebrows as he stared at me, he was short-sighted too.

  “You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost,” he said.

  “For all I know I have,” I was still too fazed by what had just happened. “I saw a girl in that hole a moment ago. Clear as daylight.”

  “It must have been that Emma,” he said with what looked like suppressed rage. “There’s no stopping her when she gets the urge.”

  “But the hole was full of water.”

  “That one will squeeze water from a stone,” he said, his lips white with disapproval. “And I’m afraid Little-Lukas backed her up.”

  The name hit me in the guts. “I knew Little-Lukas,” I blurted out.

  He nodded as if he knew all about it.

  “Little-Lukas died,” I announced.

  “Indeed, yes.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d heard the news.” I felt quite out of my depth. “I brought his ashes with me.”

  He shrugged, his face closed like a mussel.

  “Well, that’s that then. I wasn’t sure if he still had relatives around here.”

  “I’m his father.”

  This was getting a bit too much. I put out a shaky hand, what else could I do? “Mr Lermiet…”

  “They call me Lukas Death. We all have private handles here.”

  “I guess the old man up there on the mountain, Lukas Lermiet, is also a relation?”

  “All of us in Devil’s Valley are related. When we go abroad we’re all Lermiets, but down here it’s just the private handles. And you must be Flip Lochner. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  Tampan-Ticks or Whatever

  Just like when I faced the old man of the mountain, only more so, I stood gawking like the chickens my mother used to dose with fat-and-pepper pills against tampan-ticks or whatever.

  “I hope I’m not putting you out in any way?” I asked. For the time being, I thought, the ashes should remain in my rucksack; they were clearly not welcome here.

  He didn’t sound very encouraging: “That is as may be. I suppose if you’ve come all this way you may as well stay.” Adding, as if it were relevant, “It’s a bad year for man and beast, what with this drought and all. Look at this riverbed. Even the wells are drying up. It must be because of Little-Lukas. God has lost patience with us.”

  “Isn’t it almost time for the winter rains?”

  “Last winter God skipped a season,” he said, making it sound like a death report. “And he’ll keep on chastising us until he’s had enough.” He sighed. “We can only hope that he had some hidden purpose sending you here. His ways are higher than ours, you know.” Like the old man up there he spoke with an antiquated Dutch accent. I interposed some apposite grunts from time to time, but he paid scant attention to me. Once again I tried to steer the conversation to Little-Lukas, finding it imbloodypossible to understand how the boy’s own father could so stubbornly avoid all discussion of his death; but he ignored it as pointedly as before. It was obvious that in some obscure fucking way they’d already learned about the event; and the gloomy man made it clear that as far as he was concerned the matter was closed. So to hell with it. If necessary, I would scatter the whisky-soaked ashes myself when the time came, in some hidden spot when no one was looking. So rest in peace, poor Little Lukas L-Lermiet.

  Lukas Death so
on ran out of conversation. For a while we simply stood there; it was as if he felt I needed time to adjust, while I decided to keep my questions to myself for the moment. He waited patiently. I suppose a man who makes a living from the death of others has no need to move his arse.

  At last he said, almost apologetically, “Well, if you’re ready we can go.” And I followed him, stepping out to meet my history.

  Settlement

  As we proceeded further into the valley the settlement unfolded in front of us. Probably thirty or forty houses altogether, arranged in two uneven rows, all of them whitewashed and built to the same basic plan: long and narrow, with a stoep in front, a hump-backed hearth at the rear, and on one side an outside staircase leading up to an attic under a steep thatched roof. Some were more dilapidated than others, as I’d noticed before, but they were all pretty solid, with thick walls built to withstand the ravages of time and perhaps even the odd earthquake. Every backyard had its shed and its haystack and a longdrop, while most sported an old·fashioned stone well. Among the houses were small thickets of trees, presumably brought in as saplings from outside, as none were indigenous: bluegum and willow, even a few oaks. Some distance above the top row of houses was a whole bluegum forest. On the opposite slope stretched a patch of prickly pears, some late fruit still blazing red or yellow among the bluish leaves.

  The two rows of houses were interrupted, on the near side, by a large open space surrounded by a low white wall, enclosing the church with its squat tower topped with a wooden scaffolding which presumably housed the bell. At the back stretched the cemetery in which I noticed two old people in black working among the graves.

  Against the back of the churchyard wall was a large pile of stones as if at some stage a monument had been planned and then abandoned; unless the stones had simply been cleared from the fields beyond. I tried to ask Lukas Death about it, but he turned a deaf ear.

  The plots were large, unmarked by hedges or fences or boundary walls, each running unhindered into the next. There were chickens and geese and muscovy ducks everywhere, even turkeys. In several yards I noticed large trays and scaffoldings on which raisins and peaches and stuff were being dried. Higher up lay the patchwork of fields and gardens I’d noticed before: vines and tobacco and pumpkins and beans, and peach and apple orchards, and a sizeable stretch of citrus, everything visibly afflicted by drought. Most of the plots had pigsties at the back, and small flocks of goats; but I could see no sign of sheep or cattle. One could hear the chattering and screeching of children among the fruit trees or behind haystacks and sheds.

  On one roof sat an old woman in a long black dress, her back pressed against the chimney.

  Here and there in the fields and orchards bearded men were going about their work, but as we approached they stretched their backs to watch our passing. Higher up on the slope a bulky farmer stood with a forked stick in his hands, keeping an eye peeled on us. And in the doorways of the various sheds and lean-tos others appeared to stare at us, each clutching an instrument or a tool of his trade: a top-heavy man with short bandy legs was holding a horseshoe in a pair of tongs; presumably the smith. A man with narrow shoulders emerged with a bundle of planks under one arm. Another held a pitchfork, yet another a wooden spade or a hatchet—like the emblems of bloody medieval guilds. There was something outlandish about the scene, although it took some time to register. Only much later, like the sight of a star that reaches the eye long after it’s already expired, did I discover what it was: nowhere in the Devil’s Valley was there any sign of a black or brown labourer. It might have been somewhere in Central Europe, or on the moon, anywhere but in the South Africa in which I’d been living all my life.

  Faces

  On some stoeps clusters of women stood talking, all in black dresses and large bonnets, and all of them barefoot; as we came past, they too fell silent to stare at us. The noise of the children dried up as dirty faces peeped through doors and from behind haystacks and through the withered creepers of beans. And behind the small windows of most houses one could make out the blurred movement of human figures. Faces everywhere, eyes, eyes, following us every bloody step of the way. If the silence had weighed on me up in the mountains, it was much worse here. Even the poultry stopped scratching, and on the thresholds of front doors chickens appeared to gaze suspiciously at us, with puffed-up feathers and accusing red-rimmed eyes and necks stretched out.

  What little wind there was had died down. Now it was just the two of us, and all the eyes staring with unsettling knowing looks that lay heavily on me, as if all except me knew exactly where we were heading, and why. The only sound I could hear was that of my own footsteps, because the man beside me moved soundlessly on his two bare feet, like a stick-insect. And so we made our way past all those staring houses, each window bearing its collection of eyes like talismans strung up against the panes.

  In front of the stoep of the very last house my companion announced, “This is Tant Poppie Fullmoon’s place.” He offered me one of his gnarled sweet-potato hands. “Well, goodbye for now.”

  Coffins

  THE FLOOR OF Tant Poppie Fullmoon’s voorhuis, where it was visible through all the chests and boxes and jugs and bags and other containers, was of peach stones, with a patina of many years. Here and there the skin of a buck served as a mat. There were no curtains in front of the windows. The small thick panes were bare, and the windows could not be opened as they were built into the wall. The furniture was sparse but serviceable, clearly handmade: a long riempies-bank, a dining table with legs as solid as Tant Poppie’s, some chairs, two kists. And no fewer than three coffins covered with embroidered cloths.

  “Handsome, aren’t they?” she asked when she saw me looking at them. “Especially this one. It was a wedding present from my first husband. In those days it was still a narrow, dainty little thing, but over the years I’ve asked Jos Joseph to make it bigger and wider. I had my last fitting only a month ago.”

  “A wedding present?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Ja, it’s our custom. When you get married, the groom gets a handsewn suit and the bride a coffin. Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “It sounds eerie.”

  “We have other customs with the coffin too,” she said with a chuckle, causing the many bulges of her enormous body to tremble like a pink church-fete pudding. “The first night, after the guests have gone out to dance outside, the bride and groom try it out. If you get my meaning?”

  “I think so,” I said uneasily. “But isn’t it rather uncomfortable?”

  “Oh no.” Trembling indignation. “It’s stuffed like a feather mattress. After all, it’s meant to make you sleep in comfort for all eternity.”

  “And the other two coffins?”

  “I was married three times. But these two are rather ordinary, like the men who gave them to me. I’m just keeping them for in case. The first one is by far the best.” A naughty grin. “It also gave me far more pleasure than the others.”

  It was the first hint I had of what I think was to become the most disturbing discovery of my stay in the Devil’s Valley: the way the pious, even the macabre, co-existed with the outrageous. And that was still quite mild compared to some of the things that happened later. But I mustn’t get ahead of my story. There’s a fucking time and a fucking place for everything, as the nun said when she met the priest with the five pricks.

  What was quite out of place in that house was the assortment of containers that took up most of the voorhuis, all of them as far as I could make out filled with sticks and twigs and dried leaves and roots and ground powders, a veritable witches’ sabbath of herbs and doepa. The mixture of smells and odours that wafted through that house was enough to make a strong man wobbly in the knees.

  She must have noticed how the stuff affected me.

  “Medicine,” she explained, covering the whole room with the kind of gesture God must have used to divide land and water. “It’s the will of the Almighty that I must look after th
e people. In my own way.” She stressed the last point, and rightly so. God might provide the blueprint, but what happened in this place was clearly up to Tant Poppie.

  It was important for my immediate future to gain her confidence, and preferably her support and approval. I can’t say that she was overly friendly. There was something diffident about her attitude, a kind of brooding, ominous goodwill, which warned me to watch my step. The problem was that I had no idea of what was right and wrong in her two button-spider eyes, set black and beady and seriously out of alignment among the folds and lobes of her huge face. Mene mene tekel.

  To the left of the narrow voorhuis, and opposite her own bedroom, my room was already waiting: an old-worldly Boer bedroom with a solid bedstead of polished dark wood and a low wash-stand with pitcher and ewer; also, below the small curtainless window with its uneven hand-rolled panes, a sturdy little table with a wax candle and a tinder-box—‘For your writing’, she explained, as if it had been agreed upon before I came.

  Apostle

  After I’d unloaded my rucksack, she made me sit down at one end of the huge dining table.

  “An apostle?” It was a statement, not a question. And the tot she poured from an earthenware jug into a sizeable tin mug filled it to the rim. It was as clear as rainwater. Her own was just as big. She sat down opposite me, with the large dusky space between us. The place was still heavy with the ungodly odours from her home pharmacy.

  Tant Poppie raised her mug and said with great solemnity, “God Almighty.”

  I mumbled something and took a swallow. I staggered back. And never spared another thought for my dear departed White Horse. For if whisky weighs in at 43% alcohol, Tant Poppie’s so-called apostle must have been close to 80%. It seared down my throat like a fucking naked flame.

  “Jesus Christ!” I spluttered.

  She nodded approvingly, as if it was the expected response to her toast. “To drink this witblits it helps to be a child of the Lord, otherwise the Devil will steal your soul from right under your eyes,” she said, smacking her lips, before raising her mug to empty it in another draught. I followed at a more cautious pace, but did nothing to stop her when she offered to refill my mug. By which time she was already on her third.