by Andre Brink
Brother Holy began to move beside me: a curious, rhythmic bending and stretching of his knees as if he was preparing to jump. But by now I had the congregation in my hand. The feeling of power was delirious.
“Ouma Liesbet asked me to convey a message to the Devil’s Valley on this sad occasion.”
And from there, if I say so myself, I launched into an inspired address about how her lifelong desire to ascend to heaven had been cut short by murder most foul. She had shown me the fatal wound on her head. I had no idea, I told them, of what had become of her, but she had promised to lead me to her grave during today’s ceremony. I could not guarantee success, I was a stranger in their midst, but with God’s mercy and Ouma Liesbet’s help I was prepared to do my best. If they would so permit me. With these words I produced my divining rod from under my windbreaker.
Emma stood staring fixedly at the ground before her as if she meant to look a hole right into it. Tant Poppie had her hands full with the young widow and her children. But the others were agog with excitement.
Brother Holy next to me had finally found his voice again, and a fine voice it was. In a fucking stentorian rage he began, “Brothers and sisters…”
But he was drowned out by the crowd.
“Thank you, Brother,” I said, looking through the assembled people. “Do I have your consent?”
Whether the clamour signified yes or no, I didn’t bother to find out. Like a weathered water-diviner, with the slow, measured steps I’d seen Jurg Water taking on his rounds every day, I started pacing through the cemetery, concentrating like hell. And the whole crowd, except for Tant Poppie and her pathetic little group on the precariously tilted stone, followed me at a safe distance. I stretched the process for as long as I could. Up one row, down the next, then up again, and down again. The white stick, stripped of its bark, pointed straight ahead. I could only hope that the sweat on my brow would be interpreted as a sign of effort, not of trepidation. Because behind all the bravado I knew only too bloody well what was at stake.
Donkey Stallion
Just before I reached the tombstone inscribed with the question mark, the stick actually began to swivel in my hands. I was concentrating so furiously that it began to feel as if the forked stick had a life of its own. Like the dong of a donkey stallion it swung up with such a force that it nearly hit me between the eyes. Then down again. And then it started whirring in circles. With this kind of show I could soon qualify as a drum majorette. The first movement of the rod had caused a collective intake of breath, the second a reverberating groan. By the time the rod was swivelling over the unknown grave the crowd went fucking bonkers.
I stopped dead. “Here,” I announced, quite unnecessarily. “Ouma Liesbet wants us to dig right here.”
“But,” interposed Brother Holy.
No one paid any attention to him. The people were totally carried away. They swarmed around the grave, trampling one another for the best view. Right at the back, pale and unmoving, stood Emma.
“Are there any volunteers to do the digging…?” I asked respectfully.
The spades with which the men had been slaving away the day before still stood against the wall near the two graves. There was a stampede in that direction. Four or five men started digging furiously, nearly severing whatever feet got in the way. Thank God they were all wearing shoes today.
“Slowly, slowly,” I warned them. “We can strike something at any moment.”
“Perhaps it’s water,” suggested Lukas Death in a hopeful voice.
“This man knows nothing about finding water,” growled Jurg Water. I didn’t like the look he gave me.
Dull Thud
In spite of my warnings the digging proceeded furiously. Until, suddenly, there was the sound of a dull thud as the first spade struck the roll of blankets. Everybody fell quiet. The diggers dropped to their knees and began to scrape away the soil with their hands. I remained standing with the forked stick in my hands. As they exposed the blanket, the rod swung up for the last time. The crowd fell back in awe.
I don’t know whether he’d been in the throng all along, but I hadn’t noticed him before the men raised the dusty bundle from the hole and laid it beside the fresh mound where they folded back the flap. Only now did I see him among them, blinking his weak, watery eyes in the daylight. Ben Owl.
In the stunned silence I said, “Ben?”
“Why are you talking to me?” he asked aggressively, his voice breaking into falsetto.
“What do you think happened here?” I asked.
“Perhaps the Good Lord dropped her,” he said.
“It doesn’t look like a fall to me,” I replied. “It looks more like a blow to the head.”
“Perhaps she tried to resist when the Lord came to fetch her,” he stammered. “So he had to whack her with a spade.”
The crowd did not seem impressed. But now they were turning to me for an answer, and I had no wish to be drawn too deeply into it.
“Ouma Liesbet only asked me to find her body,” I said. “I’m sure we can safely leave the rest to Lukas Death’s capable hands.”
He approached hesitantly, looking quite unprepared for the task that lay ahead.
“Don’t you think the body should be taken to your place?” I suggested.
He made a helpless gesture. “Let us not be too hasty,” he said. “We must first find out what the people think.”
But nobody could come up with a practical suggestion; they were still too stunned.
In my hands the divining rod made another twisting movement. There was an outcry from the front row. I knew I was taking a hell of a risk, but it might be my last chance before I left in the morning.
“I’m not sure at all,” I announced, “but the rod is still pulling down. Perhaps we should dig deeper.”
There was no shortage of volunteers. And within seconds the digging was resumed.
Delicate Carving
From here the soil was much harder, and it was bloody heavy going. But the men took turns. No one wanted to miss out. Whenever they appeared to slack down I gave another jerk to the stick. It did wonders. The only one to stare at me unflinchingly, his eyes blazing, was Jurg Water. I doubted whether he’d ever forgive me this intrusion on his professional territory. But there was only one more day; after that I needn’t worry about him again.
I had no idea myself of what to expect next. At least it was a relief to see someone else do the dirty work.
In the background Emma still stood like a kind of caryatid, both her fists pressed to her mouth, chewing her knuckles. I knew what was at stake for her. If only I could go to her, put an arm around her. But of course that was out of the question.
“Do you really think there’s something here?” asked one of the diggers. Their faces were coated with a crust of grime. The hole was about man-deep.
“Ouma Liesbet wasn’t very clear on this point,” I said. “You must remember she was very weak. All I could make out was, “You must dig deep, boetie, you must dig deep.””
At that very moment, as if fucking destiny itself had taken things in hand, one of the spades struck wood. The rod in my hands turned several somersaults.
A coffin became visible through dust and gravel and dry lumps of earth. A very old, very decayed coffin. Even so, the delicate carving on the lid was still visible.
Immediately after the men had lifted the coffin from the hole, Jos Joseph kneeled beside it to trace the pattern with skilled fingers.
“This is my grandfather’s handiwork,” he said. “I’d recognise it anywhere.”
A few of the older men nodded in agreement. Tant Poppie also made her appearance, having temporarily left the widow and her children in Dalena’s care.
“Ja, this is Ouma Liesbet’s coffin,” she announced without a moment’s hesitation. “It used to stand in her voorhuis. I remember it well. But one night it disappeared, we all thought it was stolen. The whole of the Devil’s Valley spoke about it. Nobody ever saw it again,
and Ouma Liesbet refused to have a new one made. It was from that moment that she started talking about going up to heaven. Now, is that true, Ben Owl, or isn’t it?”
He shrivelled under the stare from her darting black eyes. “It’s true, Poppie,” he mumbled, and tried to back away, but fell over the mound of earth piled up behind him.
“Ouma Liesbet told me she’d given her coffin to a woman called Maria,” I said sternly.
The name made waves through the crowd. I couldn’t look directly at Emma, but from the corner of my eye I could see her coming towards us like a sleepwalker.
“Perhaps we should open it,” I said. My jaws were tight.
The men beside the coffin hesitated.
“This is sacrilege,” exclaimed Brother Holy.
Then Lukas Death spoke up behind me, “No, open it up.”
Took Some Doing
But the mystery had to remain a mystery for a while longer, because before anything could be done about Lukas Death’s order there was an interruption: Tant Poppie jostled the people surrounding the coffin out of her way to demand that Bart Biltong and Alwyn Knees be laid to rest without more ado so that the suffering widow could be taken home.
That gave Brother Holy an opportunity to salvage some of his lost dignity, although Tant Poppie’s threatening presence prevented him from opening the taps of his eloquence too widely. Also, his congregation had become so restless in the presence of all the riddles waiting to be solved, that he deemed it wise to cut the rest of the ceremony down to more manageable proportions. From the way he punctuated his oratory with smouldering glances in my direction it was very clear that he held me personally responsible for the disturbance of his sacred duties; but to hell with him.
The last amen still hovered overhead like a cloud of dust when Tant Poppie and Dalena-of-Lukas helped the widow and her wretched family from the half-capsized headstone and escorted them away through the cemetery. Seldom, I was convinced, had two graves in the Devil’s Valley been filled up so quickly. Everybody was in a hurry to get back to the third hole. The stone with the question mark on it lay to one side, in silent reproach, next to the insignificant human bundle under the dirty grey blanket. But even Ouma Liesbet Prune was temporarily forgotten in the general excitement to see what was hidden in the half-decayed old coffin.
There was yet another delay when Jos Joseph insisted on first fetching the proper tools from his shed before getting on with the delicate task of removing the lid without damaging his grandfather’s carvings. There was something like pride in one’s handiwork, he argued.
But in only a few minutes he was back, carrying a long box filled with chisels and wedges and hammers and screwdrivers of various shapes and sizes, and the rest of us stood back in due respect to watch a dedicated artisan go about his business. The man had poetry in his rough hands. The way in which he dislodged those rusty screws and severed the perfect joints that held the mouldering boards together, took some doing.
But in the end it was a bloody wasted effort, because when at last, with endless patience and precision, he removed the lid, the coffin was empty.
Moth and Rust
It said something for the quality of the work done by Jos Joseph’s grandfather that the upholstery inside showed almost no sign of decay. Moth and rust had been kept at bay with a dedication that apparently caused even death to think twice. Several of us squatted down for a closer look. The white silk upholstery was stained here and there with faded brownish marks of a kind that made a crime reporter suspect the fucking worst. But I said nothing.
After a long time Lukas Death rose to his feet again, wiping his hands on his sides as if to rid them of invisible stains.
“The coffin,” he announced solemnly, “is empty.”
It took a while for his finding to sink in.
“But how can this be?” he asked. “We’ve dug up graves more than once in the past, and there’s always something left behind. Not pleasant to look at, but something. And in this coffin there is nothing.”
“But who would bother to bury an empty coffin?” asked Brother Holy.
“There are marks,” I said, pointing at the stains.
“What exactly did Ouma Liesbet tell you?” asked Lukas Death.
“All she said was that the woman called Maria was buried in her coffin.”
“Who did the burying?” asked Jurg Water, as if I was the one accused before them.
I preferred to stay out of this post-mortem shit: and to my relief Lukas Death took charge. “Ben Owl?” he asked.
It Was Dark
Everybody turned towards the unhappy man standing well apart from us, his two wings drooping.
“I must go to bed,” he complained. “This is not the time to bother me.”
“Did you or didn’t you dig this grave?” insisted Lukas Death in a relentless tone of voice I hadn’t expected of him. Not a man to be underestimated, I suddenly realised.
“What else could I do?” whined Ben Owl. “Ouma Liesbet told me to.”
“And did you put a body in the coffin?”
“Ouma Liesbet told me to.”
“Whose body was it?”
“I couldn’t see, it was dark.”
“You always see in the dark.”
“No!” protested Ben Owl with unexpected vehemence. “In those days I was like everybody else. It was only afterwards that I started walking about in the night. Because I couldn’t sleep in the dark any more, you see. I was afraid of the ghosts.”
“What did you do then to make you so afraid?” demanded Lukas Death.
“Nothing. I saw nothing.”
“Then why would the ghosts haunt you?”
“I don’t know anything,” whimpered Ben Owl. “I swear.”
“But you did bury somebody in this coffin?”
“Ouma Liesbet told me to.”
“Where did you find the body?”
“In Ouma Liesbet’s bedroom. On the floor.”
“How did it get there?”
“I just found it there.”
“And she ordered you to bury it?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Did you always do whatever she said?”
Ben Owl shut his red eyes and didn’t answer.
“You were a big strong man,” Lukas Death went on relentlessly. “She was a frail old woman, at least fifty years older than you. Surely you could have refused if you wanted to.”
“I couldn’t. She said there were stories she would tell if I didn’t obey.”
“What stories?”
“Stories she made up. Everybody knows what a liar Ouma Liesbet was.” He turned his eyes back to me. “She lied to this man too.”
“What lies did she tell me, Ben?” I asked.
“She lied to you. That’s all I know.”
Mills of Justice
“Was it because she lied that you smashed in her head?” I asked sharply. Our crime reporter as public prosecutor.
I wasn’t sure whether the murmur from the crowd signified shock or indignation.
“Now be careful,” warned Lukas Death. “Nothing has been proved yet.”
“Why should I bash in a poor defenceless old woman’s head with a spade?” asked Ben Owl.
“This is the second time you talk about a spade,” I pointed out. “No one else has mentioned it. Why do you harp on it?”
“Pick or shovel or spade, it’s all the same,” he mumbled.
I looked at Lukas Death and shrugged.
Perhaps he was shrewder than I thought; perhaps he was merely helpless. Either way, all he said was, “Go home, Ben Owl. Go to sleep. We’ll discuss it again later.”
“Do you think it’s safe…?” I began.
“We do things our way,” snapped Lukas Death. “The mills of justice grind slowly.”
“What about Ouma Liesbet?” I asked.
“Well, she is here, and her coffin is here. We’re all of us here. We may just as well bury her.” His eyes wandered across the crowd.
“Will some of the men lend us a hand to place her in the coffin?”
“Shouldn’t you examine the body first?” I asked.
“We all saw what she looked like,” he answered. “What more do we need to know? We owe the dead some respect.” He looked up. “And there’s a storm coming.”
In all the drama I had never noticed, but he was right: there were indeed dark clouds gathering. And gusts of wind. Perhaps God had finally succumbed to the threats.
Heartbroken Widow
ANNIE-OF-ALWYN, as the heartbroken widow was called, was still in Tant Poppie’s voorhuis when I came home from the cemetery; but she was preparing to leave. And when she saw me she became even more ill-at-ease.
“There’s a storm coming,” she said in panic. “I must get home.”
“You can lie down on my bed for a while,” proposed Tant Poppie like a clucking old mother hen. “You need rest.”
But she was adamant. “I bothered you long enough. You already did too much for me. And I must put the children to bed.”
“I’ll walk you home,” I offered. Not for entirely unselfish reasons, I should add; a crime reporter never rests. Fucking swine.
“No, no.” As if I’d made an obscene proposal.
But Tant Poppie unexpectedly supported me. “Now come on, let Neef Flip go with you. You can’t walk out in this wind alone. And he’s just in the way here.”
Thanks for nothing, I thought. And with the woman still rigid with fear, perhaps resentment, I picked up two of the children—the smallest clung to Annie-of-Alwyn like a baby baboon to its mother’s belly—and stepped out on the stoep.
All the way to her home she didn’t say a word. Only when we reached it, in the bottom row and set far back as if shy to be seen with the others, she stopped and glanced at me through her dishevelled hair. “Thank you for helping me in the graveyard. I nearly passed out.”
“I can’t understand why those bastards didn’t move a finger to help you.”
“It’s every man for himself now,” she said wearily as she opened the door and stood back to let me pass with the two children. “I think they know that what happened to Alwyn can happen to them next, as the water runs out. They’re all scared to die.”