I park my wagons next to the drostdy, the converted homestead of the Coetzee family. Part of the thatched roof collapsed with the conversion. Two Hottentots are thatching the roof with reeds. From what I can make out the poor dumb sot Woeke was sent to come and lord it over the wilderness and keep the peace from here to Swellendam. I start undoing the thongs securing the wood. A man walks past in the street. He looks me straight in the eye. He bothers me. His face is long, his beard is trimmed and his hair cut short. He is big, almost as tall as I, but slimmer. His bearing is that of a rich man, even though his clothes are old. Where the material has been scuffed through, it’s been neatly patched. Tears have been darned with a meticulous hand. His shoes are worn but clean. He stops, gazes at the clouds massing around the mountain. His nostrils dilate and contract as he sniffs the air. He nods at me, lifts his hat. I don’t return his nod. He walks on. His footfall is light. Only in antelopes have I seen such ease in a body. He doesn’t look around again. Who does this upstart think he is?
Somebody comes running from the drostdy, a puny little fellow in a too-large uniform, ironed and clean as far as the knees, muddied all the way further down as far as the just about invisible shoes. I regard the fellow. We’re both about twenty-five, but to me the man looks like a child. To the pipsqueak I must, I suppose, look as all the border farmers look to the Cape-coddled powder puffs: bloody-minded, brutish and feral, garbed in leather and hides with the regulation long beard and longer hair. Do you think he wonders where the hair ends and the pelt starts? I square my shoulders and tower over him. I introduce myself.
I ask the soldier who the man is who walked past a moment ago. He says it’s Markus Goossens, the new schoolmaster.
That smug little snob and his little attitude won’t last long on the border, I say.
The soldier looks at the retreating schoolmaster. I ask him where I should dump the wood. The soldier directs me to the back of the buildings where construction is already under way. My workers start unloading the wood. I stoop at a fire, rake out an ember and light my pipe. A tallish man, prematurely bald, with a body soft as a woman’s, comes to stand next to me. He puts his pipe in his mouth and glares at the fire at his feet. He stoops to the flames and staggers. I rake out an ember from the flames for him. The man is neatly dressed, his waistcoat embroidered in more colours than I’ve ever seen on a single piece of cloth.
You’re not from here, I say.
The man tries to talk while clenching his pipe between his teeth. A drooling of slobber dribbles down his chin.
Stellenbosch. I’ve been in the Cape and Stellenbosch all my life.
What does it look like there?
Greener. Mountains. People don’t eat with their hands.
The man laughs. He takes a metal flask from his inside pocket and offers it to me. I swallow the genever. It’s too sweet, but I don’t say no when it’s proffered again. The soldier from earlier fusses around us again. He whispers something in the man’s ear. The man says he’s busy, he can’t be disturbed now. The man taps me on the arm, starts saying something. When the soldier interrupts him again, he turns around too fast. He has to clutch the young man’s shoulder for a moment to keep his balance. In my ear he slurs something about the singular qualities of a Caffre cunt. The whippersnapper clears his throat, embarrassed on behalf of his boss. I accompany both gents into the drostdy. Behold: Landdrost Moritz Hermann Otto Woeke with his arm around the neck of Coenraad de Buys, cackling. I sit the landdrost down in his chair behind his oaken desk and the little soldier ushers me out as quickly and politely as possible, with an extra rix-dollar in my pocket for my loyalty to the Company and their seventeen lousy lordships and my sealed lips.
We pitch camp outside the town. There are plenty of dry thorn trees around to lug together into a makeshift kraal for the oxen. Towards evening fires are lit and my Heathens hunker down, each lost in his own dream. I saddle Horse and ride into town. I ride down the main street and peer into lighted windows and sometimes a hand waves at me. Horse carries me past dark vegetable patches with trailing shadows. When I pull up I hear water dripping from the leaking canal into the parched soil. I’ve heard many stories of the carousing in the Cape, but in this Colonial backwater only the treetops dance in the breeze. I stop a passer-by and ask him if there are women to be found anywhere in this town and the man says Nothing to rent, here you have to marry or buy, Mijnheer, and he laughs and I ride on as far as the last building and turn around and ride down the road again to the other end from which I came. The moon droops low and depleted.
I’ve just galloped past the last house when I see a small group of men walking into the veldt. In the distance I see fires. I follow the men, join them. They don’t talk much among themselves. They walk fast. They say they’re going to watch the fight. Somewhere in the darkness I hear something that could be singing. Who in God’s name would stand serenading the veldt at this hour of the night? We walk in silence until the singing subsides. Then the conversations start up again. A while later a rider trots past, back to town. By his hat I recognise the damn schoolmaster. I ask the men if our master is coming from the fight. They laugh and say No, Master Markus wouldn’t let himself be caught there. I ask them why the piece of misbegotten misery is so uppity. They look at me askance. They say he’s quite a good sort; he simply keeps to himself. I ask them whether it was he who was caterwauling like that in the darkness. They say they don’t know and what business is it of mine.
Arriving at the kraal, we find a few men waiting next to a wagon with animal cages covered with hessian bags. Fires are burning in the corners of the kraal. Twenty or thirty men are dawdling around, laughing and telling jokes, most of them are drunk. Three men are standing to one side where the fire doesn’t reach. Two bull-baiting terriers, seasoned and raddled fighters, and a massive German mastiff. They are standing well apart from each other. As soon as the dogs come within range, they leap and snap at each other. A man with bandy legs and long arms summons two Caffres. They lift one of the cages from the wagon, haul it over the kraal wall and place it in the middle of the kraal next to an iron pole hammered into the ground. The bandy-legged man drags a chain from the depths of the cage and locks the chain to the pole. One Caffre stays behind in the shallow pit of scuffed mud and straw and sawdust. There’s a shout and suddenly everybody presses up to the kraal wall. The men jostle each other to have a better view. The Caffre rattles the bars of the cage and something grunts and bumps in there. The faces around the kraal seem bizarrely distorted and inhuman in the shadows of the flames. I see the smith and the owner of the inn in his absurd velvet suit and farmers and builders and everybody laughs and drinks and gobs. Somebody tosses the Caffre a spade. He picks up the spade and scrambles onto the cage and knocks out the peg locking the cage and jumps from the cage and swears in his language and runs to the wall. The men jeer at him and nothing happens. Then a big baboon comes walking out of the cage with a chain around its neck. He runs as far as the chain permits, the chain tightens, jerks at his neck and pulls him off his feet. He falls on his arse and the men guffaw and gob. A man with new shoes climbs onto the wall and walks all around it waving his arms and his hat and asking for bets. As soon as his hat is full, he climbs down. As if this were a signal, the men with the dogs climb over the wall. They release the three dogs. The dogs charge the baboon. Creatures human and animal go berserk and blood flows. From the direction of the wagon other shrieks from the throats of what could be baboon and leopard and hyena and jackal and other animals that no human has contemplated for long enough to name.