You should have seen me, he says. The sky-blue cloak with the red collar, the gold waistcoat, the first-rate riding boots, the epaulettes, the high fur cap with the magnificent plume.
Yes, I say, so that all the world can see you approach and blast you to pieces from behind the bushes.
That is not how a gentleman wages war, Mijnheer Buys.
Perhaps not, Kemp. But that is how a gentleman cops it in the bush.
For a moment he seems lost in thought, then tells me how as a young soldier he almost drowned under a punt and again a few years later almost drowned in the Thames. He checks to make sure that I’m looking at him:
And for the next sixteen years, Buys, I gorged myself on every blessed godlessness that this world can afford.
In the course of his regular visits to the poorhouse in Leiden the matron introduces him to needy women and he sees to some of their more pressing needs. In The Hague he nails the wife of a hangman. Under the name of Jans he tups one Annie Paardekop, fresh out of prison, and also her friend who’d been locked up in Zeeland as an infanticide. I ask him whether it was one at a time and he says Sometimes; sometimes not. I question him as to how something like that works, who must do what to whom and what must go where, but he turns dour and prefers to enumerate his other excesses. Kemp the rake gambles and boozes and brawls and whores and in those days is convinced that Jesus was just another Jew and Mary much less of a virgin than she would have her neighbours believe. After his mother’s death he steals a perukier’s wife and keeps her in his room in Leiden while he remains in the garrison at The Hague. His father also dies and leaves him a stack of money, on condition that he give up the woman. He refuses and opts instead to impregnate her. She presents them with what he calls an illegitimate miracle, Antje. He drops the woman and keeps Antje. He meets and marries Christina, a wool spinner.
Christina?
Christina, yes.
That was my mother’s name.
Was? My sincere condolences, Mijnheer. Did she pass away recently?
Hope springs eternal.
He hesitates, then drivels on. Christina was Styntje to him, and his and Styntje’s life together was sober and sedate. His marriage to someone from the working classes disgraced him in the eyes of his family and the orange prince. An officer could paddle the lower classes in the dark, but not marry them. His military career was over. He went to Edinburgh to qualify as a medical doctor. He examined the bodies of drowned people to establish exactly how they met their end. At night he wrote a philosophical treatise with the title Parmenides, apparently based on the name and reflections of a dead Greek.
His book maintains that there is far greater difference between God and all his mortal creatures than one thinks. There is no being other than God that has anything in common with God.
I don’t know about that, I understand my God. Well, in the first lot of books I get the idea.
Our Heavenly Father is inconceivable, Mijnheer Buys.
I have in common with him an acquaintance with wildernesses, jealousy and especially, Kemp, wrath.
The missionary smiles patronisingly, as if he and the Lord find me entertaining.
Mijnheer, let us leave this debate for the bright light of the morrow.
Edmonds starts coughing something dreadful in the tent and Kemp goes to succour his brother. A few minutes later he comes and sits down again and continues his narrative. Apparently the VOC wanted to appoint him as major and post him to the Cape to come and share his military prowess with the troops here. He refused the post because he always did and still does abhor the VOC’s policies and methods. I pat his hunched-up back.
The missionary falls silent as Edmonds streaks past us to seek out a bush. Kemp never got ill from eating Caffre food. He did not turn tail when Ngqika gave him such a chilly reception. He seeks inspiration and disquiet, every drop of excitement is squeezed from life. Every blessed impulse is seized upon and driven to its extreme – that one can read in the glittering eyes, sunk deep in the haggard face. He seeks out the wilderness and clothes every frenzy in Biblical language. Edmonds has had it with the Caffres; they are dirty, their food makes him puke, the land is too untamed. He loves nothing here, because everything here can and wants to vanquish him. Kemp the scarecrow is untouchable. For the most part he wears the jacket without a shirt, his feet and head are raw. The more this god-cursed place mucks him around, the more ecstatic it leaves him. He carries on about his shame about his past, but just listen to him holding forth about his days in the dark back alleys of Leiden and The Hague. Listen to the nostalgia driving the self-chastisement, the longing for every whorish cunt, every dram and every punch, every kiss that was a love everlasting while the tongues could carry on their combat. This land isn’t going to get the better of him. His head is indeed like stone, every thorn in his flesh or in his sockless foot is self-inflicted. If the food makes him ill, it’s a test of his mettle that he does not dare fail. Every young woman who brushes up against him is a penance that he has to endure. He can’t get enough. It’s a thirsty land with thirsty people and this Christian is the thirstiest of them all. He is fifty-two years old and older than most people on their dying day. Life is what ages you, not the years. Driven by a divine dementia, he seeks to drink Africa dry. Johannes Kemp is like his namesake the Baptist at home in the wilderness. He will eat locusts and clothe himself in hides as long as the world keeps him enraptured. He feels no pain. Even the godforsaken Bushmen wear sandals. Do you know how hot the rocks sizzle here in summer? Do you know the thorns of this land? I see the smirk on your face at the Christians and their bedtime stories. You’re wondering how I, the savage Coenraad de Buys – the bigamist and murderer and thief and you name it – believe in our Lord and Father when there is only flesh and dust to be seen. And now I’m asking you: Do you know the divine delirium, the glorious frenzy that drives people like Kemp into the wilderness and will one day let him die drained and satiated and with a magnificent smile on his staved-in face?
Kemp falls silent again. I niggle a morsel of dirt out of my ear. He says his grief led him away from medicine and back to theology and cosmology and on to a rebirth and a calling to minister to Caffre souls. I ask him what grief. I can hardly hear him when tells how, on the afternoon of 27 June 1791, he and his Styntje and his Antje went out in a rowing boat on the Meuse close to their home. A sudden and violent wind capsized the boat and his wife and child drowned in front of his eyes. He says he was too scared to rescue them. He says his fingers would not let go of the boat. We do as men do and we keep our traps shut and hold fast to the moment and gaze into the fire.
At daybreak I leave the missionaries at their tent. Edmonds’ stomach has calmed down. The little chap looks a bit lighter and more contented, as if he’d had to vomit out his last little bit of baby fat to adapt here. He’s no longer sweating and is no longer delirious and is his old timid self. His tiny fingers are still fat. I leave the missionaries to their own devices in the hope that Kemp will nail Hobe and get it out of his system and I tell him this.
My dear Buys, did you hear nothing of what I told you last night?
I smile my smile, the one that says I know things he doesn’t know, and saddle my horse.
Jank’hanna! I shout at him as I ride off. Indulge your guilt on top of that little thing! I wish you all the guilt you’re capable of!
On the 3rd of October Ngqika marries for the third time. He can still not decide whether the godbodies may stay or must return to the sea whence they came. I’ve been trying for the last week to wring an answer out of him, but don’t get a chance to talk to my son. I ask Siko to talk to our king. I hear nothing. I look in on Kemp on the wedding day; have they heard anything yet? Apparently Ngqika was there the day before, looked around again but took nothing, offered a milk cow for a few buttons and two old handkerchiefs. Kemp’s faithful Hottentot Bruintjie wants to go back to Graaffe Rijnet; he says things are getting too heated hereabouts. This king has no use for them here; the people are looking at them askance. Edmonds also wants to push off, to Bengal.