The Graaffe Rijnet summers are long and a man gets thirsty and bored. I and a few familiar faces carry a table and chairs out into the street. We load the tables with the last flagons of brandy and genever and glasses and jugs from the drostdy and start whiling away the long hot afternoon. When Bezuidenhout starts target practising on the house across the street, the owner of the house comes running out and lambasting us. My mates first look him up and down and then apologise for our conduct. We ask him what he has that would be in order for us to shoot at. The man instantly makes for his house, but before he can shut the door, we’ve crossed the threshold. We rummage in the house, but don’t find that many targets. Then we hear the bantams crowing in the back yard.
Half an hour later a row of fowls are dotted across the street, buried up to their necks. We take turns to blast off the little heads with their red combs. The man and his sons stand ready next to the street and as soon as one of the little heads explodes, one of them runs up and reclaims their chicken from the ground to go and cook it so that the loss won’t be total.
I take aim. Before I can pull the trigger, a shot cracks over my head. See, the chicken-neck fountain. I turn around and Bresler approaches with a smile and a gun. He is thirty, his wig just as powdered as that of any other pen-pusher, but his eyes have more of a spark.
What does Mijnheer prefer, a thigh or a breast? I ask.
What is one without the other? Bresler asks.
I’m the only one who laughs, the others look at one another, uncertain what the landdrost wants.
I don’t want to interrupt your feast, says Bresler.
It’s not a feast, it’s just what we do. You must visit more often, Bezuidenhout ventures into the conversation and comes to stand next to me.
While he was sleeping off his hangover, someone plaited his beard like a girl’s hair with a ribbon at the far end. He left it just like that and has been using it all day as a stalking horse for increasingly dirty jokes.
And what is a pirate doing so far from the sea? Bresler asks.
The men gape at him, uncertain whether they’re being mocked, praised or swindled. He puts a hand on my shoulder.
Buys, we haven’t spoken yet.
Can I pour you something?
Please. This heat…
He rubs his red neck. We go and sit at the table while the pirates carry on beheading the chickens.
How can I help?
I’m just coming to shake your hand. Seems to me nobody can administer the law here without your blessing.
I look down at him. He looks up at me, but in a way that doesn’t feel like looking up. My height bothers him not at all. I take a swig from the flagon, Bresler swigs as well. I fill two bowls. I drain mine, Bresler his. Bowl for bowl is drained and Bresler doesn’t twitch a muscle as the liquor swills down his throat swig after swig.
The goddam law is ruining this country, I say.
I thought you were the law… you, the Patriots?
Am I imagining things, or do I see a smile?
The Company was a joke, I say. I could have taken this town on my own. But the English, I hear they’re worse than the Bushmen and the Caffres combined. The Company didn’t govern any goddam thing, they just kept the books. I hear the English guns in Algoa Bay can blow a man off a flagpole in Graaffe Rijnet.
The fucking English yes. They don’t talk, they shoot. That’s why I want to come and talk to you.
The what kind of English?
Fucking. Fuck. The only useful word in the English language. It’s like a good knife. You can use it for everything.
What does it mean?
It refers to something which you fornicate or mess up.
Is it the English for a fokkery? To fok animals, to breed them?
The same word yes, but the English take it out of the stable into the house. Into the bedroom, says the landdrost.
The focking English.
Just so, says Bresler.
He takes the bottle and pours us both a shot. He looks up at the yells of the men. Another bantam has bitten the dust.
Buys, he says, while filling two more bowls: I’m told the Portuguese girls in Mozambique are as pretty as ever and getting prettier all the time.
I look at Bresler and Bresler looks at me.
Aren’t you growing stale hanging around here, Buys? Perhaps a year so on the East Coast won’t be such a bad thing.
I smile at him. We look at each other. Another two bowls of brandy go down. I load my rifle.
Buys, can I talk straight?
Never thought I’d hear such words from the mouth of a landdrost.
The government wants you gone from the Colony.
Are they telling me or are they asking me?
I’m asking you. They’re telling.
I take aim and blast the head off the last chicken.
Goddammit, Buys! Van Rooijen bellows.
Bresler doesn’t look up from his brandy.
And as soon as the English have got their act together, I’m going to have to make you move.
What does it feel like, to sell your soul to the English? The focking English.
It feels as if times have changed.
Times maybe. Not me.
Bresler gets up, drains the bowl and slams it down on the table.
Stay, I say, the bottle is hardly half.
I don’t drink, says the landdrost and walks to his office.
Why are you fidgeting so uncomfortably? Of course it never happened. The truth is never like anybody’s gaudy fantasies, it’s always greyer: Bresler confronted me in the street and said I’d better get out or he was going to have to lock me up – something along those lines. I kept on walking and immediately put the conversation out of my mind.
Doctor Woyer wanders around town in the afternoons and jumps on every soap box in sight and proclaims that a fleet of Dutch and French ships is on its way to the Cape. At the next meeting, on 22 March, the Patriots tell Bresler that we’ll negotiate, but on our terms. Bresler sits listening to the conditions and then he starts cleaning his nails. He pours himself some of the genever on the table. While one Patriot is elucidating his insights into the future of Graaffe Rijnet – phantasms distilled from Woyer’s revolutionary babblings, drunken ramblings with his friends and his hatred of Caffres – Bresler gets up and walks out. Three days later Bresler and the minister are on their way back to the Cape.
Gert Rautenbach and I and a bunch of obstreperous Patriots think it’s nonsense that the Swellendammers caved in so easily before focking Britain. We decide to go and liberate Swellendam on behalf of us and ourselves and nothing comes of this except stirring speeches, an evening’s piss-up and a few bruises.