The farm has a name already, and I don’t mess with it. De Brakkerivier, The Brackish River, lies over the first ridge behind Ezeljacht, but here the soil is already of a different kind, harder, barer. It’s a part of the world that changes its nature like day and night every half-hour’s ride on horseback. The coastal forests are not far behind me; beyond the Kammanassie Mountains in front of me a semi-desert lies far and wide. Look: slangbos, thorn trees low to the ground, slate and a few ostriches pecking at the stones. We outspan and instantly form part of the background.
The wattle-and-daub hut that we devise with frames of lathing covered with clay merges with the ridge. It’s a stronger and bigger construction than the nest in which Maria and I have been living for the past few years. Windvogel and Maria help and scold and eventually take over the building when I start nesting again instead of building. I stand watching them, how nimbly their hands work, how they can plait reeds and plaster clay. I rub my hands, scratch at the calluses, but the fingers remain blunt and stupid.
A month or so later a few runaway Hottentots arrive who beg for work and they also build huts for themselves and herd my cattle and slaughter a sheep as needed. I sit and smoke and contemplate the limits of my world and do absolutely nothing.
In summer I’m thirsty all the time. I wander into the veldt and return with a skin pouch full of honeycomb, some larvae still in the comb, and a body swollen and red from bee stings. I chuck the lot into a dish and go and sweet-talk Maria to make karrie. She puts water on the fire, pours lukewarm water on the honey. She comes to sit outside with me against our reed house like an upside-down basket. She takes the clay pipe from my hand and smokes. I try to smile with my swollen face. She takes a strong puff before returning the pipe.
You must build us some walls, she says.
What for, come winter we’ll be gone again.
For what do we have to trek along with the sheep? Can’t we just send the shepherds? Settle down here good and proper?
You come and sit here. I can’t stare at those accursed kopjes year after year.
I press her to me and we kiss and I let her go and I scratch at the bee stings on my cheek. Her skin is tight over her belly again. I stroke the oiled stomach. Look how those forearms squeeze out the honey into the bowl. Look how the point of her tongue sticks out while she’s straining the karrie must through a gauze cloth into a flask.
Do you want to go for a walk? My feet need to get out.
I scratch at the blisters.
I’m waiting for the karrie.
The stuff has to ferment for days, Buys.
I’ll wait.
She walks into the veldt and disappears over the ridge, buttocks tight with umbrage. The naked child comes out of the hut. My daughter is two years old and has her mother’s mouth and her mother’s rare slave name: Elizabeth. She never cries, hasn’t really started talking yet. I try to pick her up, but she struggles free. She sits down in the dust and looks at me. Later she moves closer into the shadow of the house. Now and again she looks round and smiles; as soon as I get up and come closer, she runs into the house.
When the karrie is ready at the end of the week, Windvogel and I start drinking in the morning and by the afternoon we are racing around on two wild ostriches until Maria comes to harangue us.
But good God, Buys! Get down from there! You look like you’re sitting on a chicken! You’re going to break the bird’s back!
I jump down and chase her around a bit, then I launch an attack on the child. I fall down in the dust. She comes to stand over me and laughs with a little hand over her little mouth. I pick her up and she wriggles free. Then I’m after her again with a roar. She makes for her mother, cackling. I throw Maria over my shoulder and drop her on our bed of hides. After a while we become aware of Elizabeth peering at the two tussling, groaning bodies. Then she sees a gecko by the door.
By dusk I’m coming to my senses on the bench in front of the door. Against the waves of golden fire on the horizon the silhouette appears of an ox wagon without a canvas hood. Five withered mangy oxen trudge on, the front one without a yoke, hitched up with leather thongs like a draught horse. Two Hottentots, one in front of the oxen, the other on the wagon chest. A raggle-taggle preacher in what remains of a top hat and tails is standing on the back of the wagon loudly lamenting his depraved soul. He plucks off the last of his buttons to show me his breast, roasted red. The vagabond missionary clings to the flaps of the dilapidated wagon and shouts imprecations in German and High Dutch about rivers that will run with blood and dark men in dark nights with long knives and the spattering spit seems to dry instantly to the raw blisters on the God-crazed fool’s mouth. The Hottentots gesture feebly in my direction with flaccid arms while lashing the oxen listlessly and driving them along the road. The man scratches at his breast and becomes quite spirited when Maria appears from the reed door. The wagon is still halfway down the road when the stinker starts performing elaborate curtseys. He wishes me a prosperous harvest. He introduces himself under some or other Germanic surname. He enquires after the way to Swellendam, while the oxen plod on to Couga, further and further away from Swellendam. I smile at the man and proclaim that they are following the strait and narrow road, that it’s long and hard and overgrown with thistles, but that it is indeed the right way. The man, already bereft of his senses and now also of his destination, gesticulates grandly in my direction. He bows again before starting to curse the Hottentots for their laxity and warning them that the laggard will never attain the Joyous Jerusalem. The wagon creaks to a halt. The emaciated emissary of God jumps downs; his knees buckle under him. The flies feast undisturbed on the blisters of the babbling salvager of souls, nor are they swatted away from the cheeks of the Hottentots. He gathers a fistful of sand, kisses it and proclaims his love of this prospect and the quality of the soil and asks in a highly convoluted manner if he can help me with the harvest in exchange for a blanket and a sweet potato twice a day.
Does it look as if I plant anything?
He looks around him and sees the arid bushes and the aloes and low kopjes and the cattle way over there and the few Hottentot huts hardly distinguishable from the veldt or from my hovel. I splutter at his confusion.
You can harvest just what you like, my dear fellow.
The preacher starts orating about how the Lord nourishes each one of his creatures and how for weeks he’s been preparing meals from the Garden of God. I have an elephant rifle in my hand and I march towards the man. He grabs the whip from a Hottentot and lashes out clumsily at the oxen.
I am going, good Sir! I am on my way, the narrow way, as indicated by you! he shouts at me.
I take aim and riddle the back of the wagon with the gravel with which I’ve loaded the gun. The oxen trudge on. While reloading, I bethink myself, put the gun down, run after the wagon, jump on. In a great voice I start preaching at the dumbfounded missionary and his Hottentots. I proclaim long stretches of fever dreams from Revelations that Geertruy taught me to recite. I shout:
And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast! And it said, Come and see! And I looked! and behold! A pale horse! And his name that sat on him was Death! And Hell followed with him! And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth! To kill with sword! And with hunger! And with death! And with the beasts of the earth!