Down the narrow passage, hardly room for a decent pair of shoulders, but the celling vanishes here and a man like me can keep his head upright between the roof trusses. To the right the two bedrooms. Keep going. Inside are hide rugs and cots strung with thongs and hide. For the rest you have no business here.
You are standing in the front room, the front door next to you. Do you see how my wife has decorated the threshold with peach pips? The rifle above the door. The broom in the corner. The mattresses against the wall, stuffed with shrubs and klipspringer hair.
Open the front door. I couldn’t have made these wooden hinges. Allow me to flick the termite off your arm.
See, the great white stinkwood with the branches and twigs that ramify and ramify out of sight. When in the bare winters I sit under the tree and gaze heavenward, the delicate branch-deltas make the sky seem like a sheet of crazed glass.
Look around you. Before you lies the bare yard. The turf walls that used to surround the homestead six feet from the house, the stone turrets with the loopholes on the four corners, those I all flattened when I moved in here. In these kloofs there’s no point in barricading yourself against the Caffres and the Bushmen. If they come, they come. Nobody’s going to hear you screaming here. All that the barricades do is trap the creatures invading your home and make them more bloodthirsty. No, your house must have a clear prospect. If you go out by the front door and you’re still not outside, there’s something amiss. Build your house in the open, so that you can see what’s happening around you. If Omni-I am nostalgic for these kloofs, I like reading about how other people lived here: As you build your temple, says one Couga sage, so your gods will be.
Walk around the house. Careful, you’ve almost stepped on the lizard. My wife keeps the animals outside, but the chickens and ducks and pet lamb roam not far from the back door. You wouldn’t say so to stand here looking at the place, but the house grew out of the soil. The sandstone from the hills and the clay from the earth. Go and have a look at the stone kraal. Whoever built it knew that stone has a grain like wood; he knew the stone’s propensity. A stone reveals itself under the hammer. The Couga is the breeding ground of stones, say the Hottentots. But the house no longer has any dealings with nature. It’s the whitewashed – yes, washed whiter than driven snow – homestead of the legendary Coenraad de Buys, citizen of the Colony, married, father, grandfather, rent-payer. You can laugh, go on. Like a hermit crab did I move into another man’s house, did I withdraw from the world. Every house is a shell. A rectangular house on a surveyed and measured farm. Without marker stones there will no longer be a Colony and to the devil with the Colony. But without boundary markers also no farm, no house, no room, no bed with a pillow resting against a solid, whitewashed wall. Limestone is dead animals. Crushed, desiccated animals; desecrated shells. Shells that have been pulverised, ground, puddled by the subterranean violence; by the fearsome heat of the earth’s innards. Dead, compacted animals, I, Omni-Buys, read the other evening in a book of French verse. Truly, sometimes when I think back to this place, my throat constricts, words fail me and I am reduced to echoing the words of others.
You’ve been through my house, the inside and the outside I have shown you, but you have not found me there. The house over there belongs to Maria and her children and that other one is Nombini’s shack. The one further along is where my flame-haired daughter Bettie lives with her white husband and my whitewashed grandchild. I managed to defend her honour against Ngqika’s attentions until we left Caffraria behind and she could marry Jan the Christian. Jan the most boring man on this earth. Jan who will cherish her. Jan who, unlike me and Ngqika, is content with one wife; Jan, for whom she is all women. In any case. Go and see for yourself by all means, those little houses are smaller and perhaps not so tidy; if you’ve seen one house, you’ve seen most of them. In those houses, too, I am not to be found. The huts you see against the western hills are where the workers live; it’s far from the homesteads, but over there they catch the morning sun in the cold winters.
This yard will be coming to life soon and then you’ll have to stand aside. Come and stand here by my shoulder, here where I’m sitting at my table under the white stinkwood on this already sweltering day. Come and stand at the table that I made, almost eleven years ago when I moved in here. The table with the crooked joints and the uneven top of mountain cypress. I went and chopped down the cypress tree myself. Almost sixty feet high that giant towered. Sawing it up and hauling it back was a business. One of the legs is a stinkwood beam, another of yellowwood and the other two are ironwood beams. This table that I built for my family, big enough for all the children and their mothers and their appendages. The table that, come hell or high water, refused to go in by the door. The table that has been standing under the tree for almost eleven years and is rotting gradually from beneath and is being devoured from the inside by the termites that do not tolerate any kind of structure in these kloofs. Under this table there is no floor, just the soil, the sand and stone ground down by my own feet. Here next to the tree I picked up a fossil, a shell, slumbering in its own shape. Come stand here by my side and watch the proceedings.
See, my wagon is standing ready for its team. Twenty or so rifles, munitions, six elephant tusks, hides, a tin full of beads, anything to barter with there where money loses its value; the necessary coffee, sugar, corned meat, sweet potatoes. Brandy. My little trunk of clothes. I’m ready to shake the Couga dust off my feet.
Pack your bags and be gone, Buys! Long Piet Ferreira sneered at me the other day at the cattle sale.
My other neighbours shuffled their feet and looked the other way and offered no demur. Sometimes your enemies have a point. The last thing I was to do as citizen of the goddam Colony, the act that would sentence me to the desert, was when at the beginning of last year I went and spoke the truth about my neighbours.
In front of me on the table the mad traveller’s book is lying open. Next to it a loaded musket. I sit still. The rasping of the termites in the table top audible under my hands for a moment. Two of my lads come running across the yard. The baboons in the hills are demented, yell at the children and thump their chests and the stones with human fists. The big one’s mouth is foam flecked. Gawie is barely six and trips yowling over his feet. Windvogel’s half-grown cuckoo-child, Windvogel the younger, wakes up under the lean-to of the cookhouse. He looks up, rubs across the downy clumps of his first beard, shouts at the boys to fall flat. He shoots and kills the foaming ape and sits down again on his arse, hat over his eyes. I shoot another one that’s trying to abscond behind the rocks.