by Andre Brink
But before I had time to sort it out, Isak Smous came scampering down the pulpit steps again, bald head gleaming, a triumphant smile on his face.
“Here you are.” He placed a much-used little tin trunk on the long Communion table. “This is what Jacob Horizon brought back to convince the doubting Thomases.”
Darkness
He started unpacking the trunk. Some of the objects didn’t exactly impress me. A pair of battered binoculars as an example of the advances of science in the world outside. A porcelain doll with one arm missing, which he made out to be a child somehow petrified after Herod’s massacre. An object that looked like a large salt crystal, apparently broken from the remains of Lot’s wife in the bloody Jordan valley, but resembling quite suspiciously a stalactite from the Cango caves at Oudtshoorn. A conch shell one could press against one’s ear to hear—cross my heart—the sea of Galilee. A cheap oriental shawl of the kind one can pick up in any oriental bazaar, covered with sequins and gold thread and dragons, which turned out to be nothing less than Joseph’s fucking amazing technicolour dream-coat.
“And now for the real magic,” said Isak, removing a small carved box from the trunk. The kind of trinket box one finds at a flea-market and puts down again. “How do you like this?”
“Not bad,” I said noncommittally.
“What matters is what’s inside, Neef Flip,” he said, his voice down to a whisper as he reverently placed the little box in my irreverent hands. “In this box,” he said, “is the Darkness of Egypt.”
“May I look?” I asked.
He snatched the box from me in horror. “Never! The Darkness will escape,” he said. “Don’t you realise what my great-grandfather suffered to carry this box over the hills and dales of the wide world? He was pursued by enemies all the way. Egyptians, Turks, Philistines, Moors, Jews, Indians, everything. And now it is right here in our church. Can you believe it? One thing I can tell you: as long as it is here no evil can befall us.”
Flies
MUCH OF THE afternoon I spent in my room sorting through my tapes. But I was disturbed by the clanging of the sheet of iron that served as church bell. On a Monday afternoon? Surprised, I sat up. The sound continued to reverberate through the narrow valley, thrown back by the most distant cliffs. It called for closer investigation.
But when I got outside I found little Piet Snot waiting for me on the edge of the stoep.
“Hello, Piet. What’s up with that bell?”
He was too absorbed in his two cupped hands to answer.
“What have you got there?”
He opened a chink between his fingers. A dazed fly tried to crawl out, but he quickly trapped it again. “Flies, Oom. For the chameleon, Oom.”
Lower down in the valley the bell was still clanging away.
“You sure you don’t know what’s going on at the church?”
“No, Oom.” But he wasn’t looking at me.
With a sigh I invited him in and sat down on my bed to watch impatiently as he fed the chameleon a few half-crushed flies. By the time it was done the bloody bell had stopped.
“Right,” I said, getting up. “He won’t look another fly in the eye for days. Off you go.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “I want to stay with Oom.”
More irritably than I’d meant to, I said, “No, you can’t stay here. I want to go and see what’s going on.”
Without warning the boy broke into tears. Not loudly, just a whimpering, snot-drenched wail as if life had become too much for him. It grated my nerves.
“Now come on, man, it’s okay.”
“I’m sorry, Oom.”
“Is there anything you want?”
“No, Oom.”
“Just tell me.”
“Yes, Oom. No, Oom.”
I went down on my haunches beside him, but he stepped back as if he was scared I’d hit him; the poor child was in a fucking state.
“You can tell me if there’s anything, Piet.”
He moved an anxious hand across his face, with predictable results. Not knowing how to show my damn sympathy, I pressed my half-soiled handkerchief in his hand. “Take this. Clean yourself.”
“Yes, Oom.” He withdrew a few more steps and started wiping his face energetically, which only worsened matters. At last he ventured, “Oom…?”
Scabs and Bruises
“What’s the matter, Piet?”
“The other day when I thought Oom was the Lord God.”
“What about it?”
“Oom mustn’t tell Pa what I said, Oom.”
“Of course I won’t. It’s between you and me.” I tried to comfort him, gain his confidence: “What’s up with your father?”
“He beats me, Oom.” Unasked, he suddenly turned his back and pulled down his floppy short pants. His thin buttocks were criss-crossed with scabs and bruises.
I just stared in shock.
“Oom mustn’t tell him, please.”
“What if he does it again?”
He just shook his head, sniffing.
“Does this happen often?”
He made a movement with his head, but I couldn’t make out what it meant. Then he mumbled, “I can take it, Oom. But what he does to my sister isn’t right, Oom.”
“What does he do?”
“No, Oom, I must go now, Oom.” With that he turned tail and fled.
Pig
It was some time before I could face going outside, and down to the church. The dirt road was deserted. Not a soul in sight, except for the odd afflicted individual slobbering or twitching in silent agony; but I didn’t trust the silence. And as I drew nearer I could see the whole community gathered on the square in front of the church. So something momentous was happening after all. But what could it be? Fire? Bad news? Some kind of political meeting? The first few people I tried to speak to were concentrating so eagerly on whatever was happening at the church door that they never even heard me.
It was only when a few deep male voices started shouting from the front and the throng moved back from the door that I caught a glimpse, through and over the heads, of what was going on. At first it seemed like a fucking wrestling match. After a while I could make out that it was a youngish man tugged this way and that by five or six of the others. They were tying his hands to the brass ring on the door, pulling his arms so far above his head that his feet barely touched the ground. A small opening had cleared in front of him. I saw Lukas Death step forward with a knife in his hand. In a few quick slashes he cut the man’s clothes clean from his body: a single stroke caused his shirt to fall back in two halves over his shoulder-blades, another severed his belt, so that his skin trousers slipped down to his ankles.
A wave of sound moved through the assembly, the rumbling and growling of men’s voices, the shrill cries of women. From the crowd Jurg Water stepped forward with a whip in his hands. It looked fucking ferocious. He raised his massive arm and brought it down with a stroke which I’m sure could fell an ox. A welt of blood broke out across the man’s back and he screamed like a pig being slaughtered.
“One!” shouted the crowd.
Jurg handed the whip to someone else, I couldn’t see who it was. All I saw was the arm raised high, followed by the smacking sound of the blow, another scream, and the yodelling of the mob: “Two!”
Once again I tried to find out what was going on, but no one was interested in talking to me. There was a kind of frenzy in them which made me think of the hunt the night before.
“Nine!”
“Ten!”
“Eleven!”
My God, when was it going to end? The man hanging against the church door was bellowing like a bloody animal, while the spectators cheered in exultation, like a rugby crowd during the last ten minutes of a game, with the score equal. It was the same mood I’d witnessed at the necklacing, years before. And these people were not mere spectators: they were trampling each other to get to the front, to be part of it, to take turns with the whip.
&n
bsp; “Twenty-one!”
“Twenty-two!”
“Twenty-three!”
Dog
On what looked like a box beside the church door stood Lukas Death, that meek, pissed-upon person, keeping an eye on the proceedings and waving his arm at every stroke like a conductor. The naked man suspended against the door was no longer so loud as before, and the jerking, swaying movements following each blow were beginning to weaken. Yet each new flogger was still lashing out with every grain of strength he could muster.
“Thirty-three!”
“Thirty-four!”
“Thirty-five!”
“He’s never going to get out of this alive,” I protested to a large woman in front of me. “Someone should stop them.”
“You stay out of this!” she yelled at me, elbowing me out of the way.
I tried to push through the crowd but was blocked by a solid mass of bodies.
“Forty!”
“Forty-one!”
“Forty-two!”
The man in front was now hanging with his full weight from his tethered wrists, no longer trying either to resist or to dodge the blows. Each new stroke caused a mere shudder to run down his bleeding body, like a dog twitching in its sleep.
“Forty-six!”
After Action
The people were getting more and more frantic in their efforts to grab the whip. It was like a fucking orgy. One young woman close to me was screaming uncontrollably, plucking out her hair, tearing her clothes. Unexpectedly, she swung round and got hold of me, her eyes wide open in a blank stare, but clearly unaware of me, as she began to weep convulsively. Even at her bloody worst Sylvia had never been like this.
“Forty-nine!”
And then, in a long, last breathless scream, “Fifty!”
There it stopped. Suddenly it was quiet. And in the silence Lukas Death stepped from his podium with quiet dignity, took out his knife once again and cut the thongs from the man’s wrists. He crumpled in a small bundle on the threshold. Brother Holy opened the door. Three or four men picked up the body by the arms and legs and dragged it into the gloomy darkness inside. The man’s legs were streaked with blood and piss and shit. He was still uttering small whimpering sounds, like a young puppy. Brother Holy closed the door after them.
The crowd began to disperse. No one spoke. After action satisfaction.
Shamgar and Deborah
I felt like throwing up. (Jesus, I thought, what’s our crime reporter coming to?) My face was cold. Must have been the sweat drying. In a dwaal I went across the open square to where Lukas Death was still standing, pensively stroking the wrinkles from his black suit.
“Lukas!”
He looked up with an almost apologetic smile, on his face a shy expression that unexpectedly made him look like Little Lukas. “So you came too?”
“What’s going on?” I asked, furious. “Why for fuck’s sake didn’t you stop them?”
“Stop them?” He clearly didn’t get it at all. “I’m doing my job, Neef Flip.” He stooped to pick up the object he’d been using as a podium; only now did I notice that it wasn’t a box at all but the great leatherbound copy of the High Dutch State Bible which usually sat on Brother Holy’s damn pulpit.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, the Water Council met. And then the Council of Justice met. My duty is to see that their decisions are carried out. I’m their Judge, as surely as Othniel, Ehud, Shamgar and Deborah were Judges of the people of Israel.”
“That man could have died.”
“He deserves no less.” Nothing ruthless in his voice, a simple statement of fact. “Without law and order we will be nothing.”
“But what in God’s name did he do to deserve such punishment?”
“He stole water.”
I gaped at him in disbelief.
“In a drought like this it’s the worst of all crimes,” he explained. “Don’t you understand?”
I felt like I’d been kicked in the bloody stomach. “And what’s going to happen to him now?”
“Three days.”
“In the church?”
“In jail.” He pointed. “It’s up there in the tower. Very secure. No windows a man can escape from.”
“But Lukas, Jesus, surely…”
“Don’t worry, Neef Flip. We know what we’re doing. I told you mos the Lord rejoices in law and order. Also, that man needs time to think about his sins. When he comes out Brother Holy will work on him. Three days in the dark, without the distractions of food and water, does wonders for the soul.”
“You can’t do that to a human being.”
“Did he think about other people when he stole that water? It’s life or death for all of us here.” He sighed. “If Wednesday’s prayer meeting doesn’t work things will be getting even worse.”
“But the man needs help.”
“What he needs is redemption, not help. You just stay out of this, Neef Flip.” He was still talking in his hesitant, apologetic way, but there was an unmistakable undertone of warning.
Not Yet Out
Soon after supper with Tant Poppie—the usual pious toasts over the apostles, the blessing, the soup and bread, the thanksgiving—I went out on the stoep again as my room was too bloody stuffy and the fumes in the house made my head spin. God knows what this place must be like at the height of summer. It was almost May, but the heat still pressed down on the valley like a heavy blanket. But outside it was better. Very dark, as the moon was not yet out, but the stars were bright enough to see by. After the day’s violent sun the mountains were giving off their fragrance in the dark. Buchu and rosemary, goats, dassie-piss, mimosa flowers, all the nameless smells of the night. Through it all, the smell of dust, the smell of drought. But in the dark even that was no longer quite so bad. Whatever had happened during the day now felt remote and unreal.
Most of the houses were dark already, as the people didn’t like wasting candles. All the naked windows staring into the night and exposing themselves to stares from outside. Perhaps others had stared through my own window like this before, while I was reading, or washing myself in a spoonful of water, or beating my meat, brushing my teeth, making my notes. A sudden little shiver ran down my spine. In the end, no matter how tough you may be, you remain bloody vulnerable.
The Oldest Form
As I came past one of the dark, quiet houses on my way I saw an angular shadow slipping from the front stoep and dissolving in the night like a lump of sugar in a large cup of black coffee. From the flapping coattails I knew it was the shoemaker, Petrus Tatters. My first impulse was to call out a greeting, but I changed my mind. It wasn’t his house and his stealthy manner made me think that he might not wish to be recognised. If I remembered correctly, Tant Poppie had once mentioned that the widow of the late Giel Eyes was living there. In his lifetime Giel had been a difficult customer and no one had mourned his loss. So who could blame her for having her fucking cat pinched in the dark?
Ouma Liesbet was still up on her roof, but she had someone with her. Probably Ben Owl. They were chatting quietly, outlined against the stars splashed across the sky like spilt milk over which it was useless to cry. On some of the other stoeps there were also small clusters of people. Smith-the-Smith was in the lean-to behind his house working at his furnace. I greeted him in passing but he didn’t seem to hear me; perhaps he didn’t want to. He was working with such dedication that I stopped to watch.
After a while I went on my way. The valley was invaded by an almost unearthly bloody tranquillity. And yet I had the distinct feeling of not being alone, as if the whole night was filled with invisible marauders. And with sound as well, sound impossible to locate or define, but which might be the smothered cries and moans and writhings of the oldest form of human congress in the world. It was particularly noticeable near the graveyard, but only when I was walking, with the dull thudding of my footsteps and my heartbeat in my ears; because the moment I stopped to listen it would be quiet again,
with not even the rustling of a leaf.
As I moved beyond the thin line of houses up the slope, the hint of sound went on all around me, but always just out of reach. In and behind sheds. On and under haystacks, among cabbages and withered pumpkin shoots, even behind the hedges of aloes and branches; and later in the bluegum wood. The moon was just coming out as I walked in among the trees, but as usual the white disc remained behind the edge of the mountain; it would be well past midnight before it drifted free. In the meantime I was alone in the forest, among the black trees and even blacker shadows. Everywhere the suggestion of a fucking murmuring, fumbling human presence persisted. Every few yards I stumbled over something, and I’d swear it must be a couple fucking, but whenever I tried to go nearer on all fours it would turn out to be only the stump of a tree, or a rock, or a heap of earth, or a bloody bag of manure.
Then back again down the decline, past the ostrich pen. There I was stopped by an unearthly muted roar. Must be the booming of a male ostrich, I tried to convince myself, but no matter how I pricked up my ears the sound was not repeated. I started to walk on, but stopped again. This time it was unmistakable, but it was a different kind of sound altogether, like a muted clamour of voices. They were heading towards me. I ducked behind a tree.