1998 - Devil's Valley

by Andre Brink

  Lukas Death, from whom I’d have expected some direction, wasn’t up to it either. Actually, I decided, he only wanted peace and quiet; and if anything could be swept under the carpet rather than solved, so much the better. Perhaps there were no solutions any more. The Devil’s Valley was a fucking dead-end. I should never have come to it. And if it hadn’t been for Emma, I’d have been on my way out by now.

  “Lukas, will you take charge of the body?” I asked while he still dithered.

  “There are more important things to do right now,” said Jurg Water. “There’s still yesterday’s damage to clear up. And what I want to know is where are we going from here? It’s clear that God has wiped His backside on us.”

  “All we can do is once again to humble us before Him,” said Brother Holy. “Sooner or later he will hearken unto us. Tomorrow is the day of the Lord. We shall dedicate the service to prayers again.”

  “Your service is as much use as a pile without an arsehole,” said Hans Magic. “It’s time we started doing something on our own without bringing God into it.”

  Collective Fears

  The argument spilled through the front door into the road outside. Those in favour of leaving the matter to God turned out to be the minority—much to Brother Holy’s apocalyptic indignation, as it meant that he was to be swept aside with God. What the people now demanded was a Plan of Action.

  Right there in the road, between Ouma Liesbet’s rickety little house and the church, and without constitution or chair or agenda, a meeting was held. Democracy in the Devil’s Valley, I saw, meant fucking chaos. Those with the loudest voices soon shouted the others into cowering silence. But in the end it was Hans Magic who took control. For what he lacked in volume he made up by playing on their uncertainties, their collective fears, their superstition.

  “Our ancestors had their own ways of bringing rain when nothing else helped,” he said slyly. “It’s time we returned to the example they set.” He glared at Brother Holy. “Seeing that nobody else has been able to do anything.”

  The crowd made more room for him. But whether it was out of respect or just to move further away from his smell, was difficult to say.

  “The ancestors had many ways to make rain,” said Hans Magic. “One remedy they often used…” He moved his eyes from one to the other until they appeared by accident to fall on me. But I was sure he’d long been planning it. “I noticed that Neef Flip always carries a chameleon on his shoulder,” he said. “Now that is just what we need.”

  The crowd opened up around me. Like a lamb at the slaughtering block I stood where I was.

  “Give it here,” said Hans Magic.

  Suddenly there was a sharp cry from little Piet Snot. “Not my chameleon, Oom. Please, Oom, not my chameleon.”

  Jurg Water struck him a blow to the head which sent the child reeling.

  This made me so fucking mad that I didn’t think twice. “Jurg, you lay another finger on that child…”

  He gave a leisurely step in my direction. “And then what?”

  I’m not a fighter. If truth be told, I’m a bloody coward. There have been occasions, in a bar or at a rugby match, under serious provocation and in a state between medium and well-done, when I stood my ground and did my thing. Once or twice I came out of it not entirely without honour; on some of the other encounters I prefer not to dwell. But it’s not my nature. And Jurg Water spelled shit. But I swore by my syphilitic soul that I wouldn’t allow that child to be abused in front of me.

  “You touch him and I’ll fuck you up properly,” I said. All bluff.

  And then, not a moment too soon, Tant Poppie stepped up beside me. “If you’ve never been hit by a woman before, Jurg, then you got it coming to you today. You smack that child again and see what happens.” Before I could recover from my amazement, she turned to me: “Now, Neef Flip, give that chameleon to Hans and let him make his rain. I won’t believe it before I see it, but there’s no time to waste.”

  Meekly, I detached the little green creature from my shoulder, and she passed it to Hans Magic.

  “Ag please, Oom, please,” whined Piet Snot.

  “Piet,” said his father.

  “Jurg,” said Tant Poppie.

  Before everything could start again, a woman like a large bale of wool gently took the child aside and smothered him against her. It must be his mother, I thought, Hanna-of-Jurg.

  With Plagues and With Pestilence

  “Now I need a spade,” commanded Hans Magic.

  As soon as somebody had brought one from the nearest backyard, Hans tripped off to the open space in front of the church, followed by the rest of us. He started digging. The earth sounded as solid as bedrock, but there was no need to go deep, a mere bandwidth or so. He carefully placed the chameleon on its back in the hole, held it in position with one forefinger, and quickly filled the hole up again.

  In the distance I thought I could hear Piet Snot whining again, but it could have been my imagination.

  “A chameleon draws rain like a tick sucks blood,” explained Hans Magic. “As long as the clouds are right, of course. We’ll soon find out.”

  “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore,” chanted Brother Holy.

  But he was promptly interrupted by Hans Magic. “You had your chance, Brother. Now shut up before you scare off the clouds. Today is my turn.”

  “You can’t make anything happen on your own,” snarled the preacher.

  “If you didn’t spend so much time fucking Bettie Teat, God might have taken you more seriously,” jeered Hans Magic.

  “Slanderer!” fulminated Brother Holy, stretching out a trembling skeletal hand. “Antichrist!” And then something just snapped in him. “I curse you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he boomed in a shaking voice. “I curse you with plagues and pestilence, with locusts and worms and gravel and water in your intestines, with gout and arthritis and rheumatism and venereal disease, with lice in your groin and shit in your mouth, with boils and spitting of blood, I curse you and your house and your fields and your vegetables, and rust will slowly consume you and moths devour you, and you will return to your own vomit like a dog, and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. I curse you…” He suddenly broke off just before the climax, his arm still stretched to the heavens. As we all stared, fucking flabbergasted, he turned round and ran into the church on his long spidery legs.

  Nobody quite knew what was happening. Even Hans Magic was left gaping.

  A minute later Brother Holy was back in our midst, clutching in his hands the little box Isak Smous had once shown me, the prize of their relics.

  “…I curse you,” resumed Brother Holy exactly where he had left off and moving straight in for the kill, “with the Darkness of Egypt.”

  I heard Isak Smous exclaim under his breath, but it was too late. Brother Holy tore open the lid and remained standing in the grip of silent convulsions as he shook the box. A few unimpressive grains of dust and a dead moth flurried out, but that was all.

  The crowd uttered a muted lament, but it kind of stuck in their throats.

  This Feeling

  And then Hans Magic asked flatly, “Have you finished?”

  “For the moment I have done,” said Brother Holy haughtily, but his voice didn’t sound altogether firm to me. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m just asking,” said Hans Magic, “because all of a sudden there’s this feeling coming over me.” He began to shake lightly.

  “What sort of feeling?” asked Brother Holy, now openly apprehensive.

  “A feeling that you are going to get an itch,” said Hans Magic, still shaking. “And that you will start scratching and scratching and scratching until you have no nails left, but the itch will not leave you.”

  Brother Holy was drooping visibly, like a candle melting in the sun.

  “You will itch behind your eyeballs,” said Hans Magic in a high droning voice, l
ike a castrated bee; and I could see the crowd slowly edging away from Brother Holy, “and you will itch in your nostrils, and in your ears, and under your tongue, and on your palate. You will itch in your armpits and between your shoulder blades and up your arse. You will itch between your balls and behind your knees and under the soles of your feet. And then you will start itching inside, in your lungs and your liver and your kidneys and your intestines.” He stretched his neck forward like a chicken watching a worm. “Prepare yourself to start scratching,” he concluded. “The rest of us have enough to keep us busy until the rain comes. As soon as the clouds are right.”

  And as the people started moving off in all directions, I noticed Brother Holy surreptitiously reaching a long cadaverous hand up between his shoulder blades to start scratching.

  Old Hottentot Custom

  THE CHAMELEON DIDN’T work. How could it? Yet Hans Magic lost no face in the process, as he blamed it on the clouds which came from the wrong direction. In the night there was another storm, possibly even worse than the previous ones—we were all too bloody shell-shocked to care—but once again without a sign of rain. Three houses were left in ruins. Tall-Fransina’s shed was blown away, and her pot-still with it. It was something of a miracle that she hadn’t been working at the time, otherwise she’d have gone too. Four people were killed; two died under a collapsed roof, the other two simply disappeared without a trace. On the Sunday morning we all gathered outside the church after the morning service to watch Hans Magic opening the shallow grave in which he’d buried the chameleon. It was empty. I had a pretty strong suspicion about who might have spirited the little reptile away, but for obvious reasons I kept it to myself; and Piet Snot didn’t look at me once. Somewhat to my surprise, no one else appeared to have jumped to the same conclusion; perhaps they were too fucking dismayed by the most recent disaster.

  The church service had been unusually short. What should have been an ideal opportunity for Brother Holy to make up some lost ground was squandered in the damn St Vitus’s dance he performed on the pulpit as he tried to scratch himself throughout the succession of prayers and hymns and sermon, so that no one paid much attention to his message. And afterwards, without murmur, they all accepted Hans Magic’s latest proposal to conjure up rain.

  This time the remedy was very simple. Someone born in a heavy rainstorm had to be stripped to the skin, covered in honey, subjected to a general laying-on of hands, and sent off into the mountains, to remain there until the rains came. This, Hans Magic assured us, should happen well before nightfall.

  There were no sources I could consult, of course, but I was pretty sure that it was some version of yet another old Hottentot custom. And if my hunch was correct, Bilhah’s legacy was indeed still running strong in the community. No matter how many little black sheep had been sacrificed over the years to exorcise her spirit, her hold on them was bloody permanent. But it was difficult to say whether the thought was comforting or distressing.

  There was no long prelude to the new ceremony, due perhaps to the general sense of relief at discovering that there was still something they could do, on which to focus their much-distracted thoughts. And Jurg Water was the one who came forward, his huge hand closed like a vice over a cringing little Piet Snot’s shoulder.

  “Piet here is mos a storm-child,” he announced. “We can send him off.”

  “Pa,” the boy whimpered. But one look from Jurg smothered all protest in his throat.

  Turbid Residue

  As if summoned for the occasion, Henta and her flutter of finches came swooping down on us from behind the nearest house, raced past the gathered crowd and headed towards the bluegum wood. In less than a minute they were gone again, and only a cloud of grey dust remained as proof of their passage. Their brief appearance left a turbid residue among the assembled settlers—unless I was merely projecting on them the troubled state of my own mind. But I don’t think so, for almost immediately a loud male voice shouted from the throng:

  “What about Henta? Wasn’t she born in a rainstorm too? She’s just made to be dipped in honey.”

  “You hold her, I’ll do the daubing,” cried someone else.

  More voices joined in. But there was an edge of hysteria to the false exuberance. Until Tant Poppie elbowed her way through the crowd and suddenly swung a blow with her fist which felled one of the men in the dust as if he’d been struck by epilepsy. It was Petrus Tatters. The jeering and tittering died away abruptly.

  Jurg Water spoke up behind Tant Poppie: “Leave him to me.”

  He let go of Piet Snot, his two long arms like hyphens on either side of his massive frame. It took a great effort from Lukas Death and several others to hold him back while Petrus Tatters scuttled off, slobbering in fear and shame.

  After the commotion had died down, Hans Magic took up his interrupted ceremony where he’d left off. Meekly, and without a squeak, Piet Snot allowed his father to drag him forward. He was twisting a bit in the big man’s grip, but without uttering a squeak.

  “Take off your clothes, Piet,” ordered Jurg Water. He turned to the crowd: “Where’s the honey?”

  “Pa,” moaned the child, almost inaudibly.

  Jurg Water raised his hand for a slap. I tensed up. God be my witness, I thought, if he…But he didn’t. We all looked away energetically while the spindly little creature was peeled from his clothes. His body was as white as chalk, veined with blue. The criss-cross pattern of bruises and weals didn’t bear looking at.

  Someone approached with a tub of honey from one of the nearby homes. Like fucking bees the people converged on the child. For minutes on end they thronged and hummed and buzzed and bustled. Then Piet emerged from the writhing mass like a thin strip of sticky flypaper, his little monkey face smeared with snot and honey. He didn’t cry. Only dry sobs racked his body from time to time. One by one the people filed past him and laid their hands on his sticky head, then moved on. I didn’t want any part in it. Emma was standing beside me. I noticed Hans Magic leering at us, but just stared back.

  “Now you go right up to the dry riverbed, Piet,” commanded Hans Magic. “Make sure you go deep into the mountains and wait there. Before it’s dark we’ll come and fetch you. By that time, if all goes well, it will be raining.”

  Miserable and sticky, the boy began to scuttle away. The two bony wings of his shoulder blades looked terribly vulnerable. Only once he stopped, as if he couldn’t bear the idea of going on alone. He half-turned back to us. Among all the people his eyes singled me out.

  “Isn’t Oom going to help me?” he asked.

  “It’s just until tonight, Piet,” I stammered, too fucked-up to look him in the eye. I felt Emma’s fingers on my arm. It was as if I’d just condemned him to death.

  And for all I knew I had.

  Threadbare Flour-Bag

  THE NIGHTWALKERS were not visiting me any more. Perhaps they’d found out about Emma. Or perhaps the havoc in the settlement had simply become too much for them. Whatever the reason, it suited me. Emma and I needed, not days and nights, but months and years to catch up with all we had to talk about. Two lifetimes, hers and mine; everything we’d been saving up and which now had come out, a need as urgent as Brother Holy’s fucking itch.

  In her room, or mine; in what remained of Smith-the-Smith’s rickety shed; under the deserted lean-to where bits and pieces of Tall-Fransina’s broken still now lay abandoned; in the schoolroom Lukas Death had built on to the side of his house and which was now standing empty during the hectic days as the children toiled with their parents to repair the storm damage.

  Only the mad and the feeble still came and went as always, slobbering and yawning and dribbling and pissing themselves. And of course Henta and her gaggle of girls who couldn’t be contained by any natural or unnatural disaster: at unpredictable intervals they would still come hurtling past like a delinquent dust-devil, here one moment and gone the next, leaving behind only the improbable imprint of their bare feet and their smell of darknes
s and forbidden games.

  Otherwise we met behind the windblown tatters where the ostrich pen had been, or in the bluegum wood, or up in the mountain at the Devil’s Hole, the one spot where we felt truly secure and remote—until we discovered that more and more of the settlers were secretly visiting the place, in spite of all the public doubts and prohibitions, to fill their pails and barrels with water against the drought. And once, on the afternoon of the day little Piet had been sent off into the mountains, dripping with honey, tears and snot, we went back to the rock pool where I had first seen her in her dream. If it had been a dream, if it had been her. Emma brought a small threadbare flour-bag with her, stuffed with food: a chunk of bread, a few dried apricots, a handful or two of raisins, a small jar of lemon syrup. Only after we’d left the pool behind, well out of earshot of the houses, we started calling his name. But there was no answer.

  “He’s hiding,” I said, trying to convince myself. “He won’t come out, he’s mad at me.”

  Overhead there were once more clouds scurrying past, sending hurried, restless shadows across the narrow kloof; but I no longer set any store by them.

  Emma called out again, then listened for a response, every muscle in her body tense, as if she wished to force an answer from the bloody mountains. Then again and again. But it was absolutely silent, that ancient unsettling silence of a birdless world.

  “I’ll leave it here for him,” she said at last. There was an obstinate set to her mouth. It was as vital for her as it was for me to believe that he was just hiding somewhere.