Home?
Back to the Colony? A farm in De Lange Cloof?
Home? I must go home. My days with Ngqika are numbered, that I know. Everybody knows it, except the king. I say I would like to go back to De Lange Cloof if it suited them. Janssens says it suits them exceptionally well. He wants me to go and tell his commissioner-general, one De Mist, what the Caffres are all about. I can see him making a mental note to warn his pal against me as soon as I’ve left. Later, as Omni-Buys, I’ll read the letters of this fellow with the flapping epaulettes, how he, shortly after our conversation, calls me, Khula, the most dangerous man in the Colony.
How does one go home, I wondered that day and am wondering again today. Nombini is standing next to the nearest wagon. Look how pretty: she in the hand-me-down dress that Maria has made her wear these last few years – Godalmighty, woman, cover yourself. Can’t you see the place is full of half-grown boys? She who stands on her toes, the calves showing. Under the dress her breasts still hold their shape, those majestic nipples spring to attention for the breeze. She is ageing beautifully. She is quieter, keeps herself to herself, and still, after all these years, doesn’t know how, when I gaze at her, the world around us ceases to exist. She places her birdcage on the wagon, carefully packs it between two crates, wrapped in a blanket. She plaited the thing years ago for an orphaned weaver bird that she raised. She looked for a long time at the weaver nests hanging from the trees in the yard. She plaited her cage in the calabash shape of the nests. So that the little one should feel at home, she said. When the bird grew up and escaped, the cage housed other little birds that had fallen out of nests or broken their wings. In the last year or so the cage has been hanging empty in her house. The revolving shadows of the straw lattice form patterns against her walls.
Each one of my wives’ homes looks different. Nombini doesn’t often allow me into her house. She says I walk and talk too loudly. Her nest can’t take it. Her house is full of trinkets, delicate little things that she and her children make. If you see the house, you’ll think it’s a hodgepodge, but it contains unfathomable patterns and refrains, as fragile and intricate as the spider’s web spun in every corner. I stay away.
Have you seen how birds build their nests? Humans can do everything except build a bird’s nest. Humans are always less at home in their houses than animals. Birds build nests without tools, it assumes shape from the inside, like a shell. The bird presses and stretches the material with her breast until it becomes pliable. The nest takes the shape of the bird’s body. The female hollows out the nest and eases back the walls constantly until they become soft and warm. The house is her passion. Every blade of perfectly plaited grass in the nest has been pressed back innumerable times with laboured breath, with heartbeats. A pressure from inside, a physical, dominating intimacy. The nest is a burgeoning fruit challenging its limits.
Nombini makes sure that the cage is settled snugly in the wagon. How does one go home? I’m on my way once again, after eleven years during which I dwelled mainly in Elizabeth’s house, sometimes slept over in Maria’s house and now and again could go and lie, pussyfoot, on Nombini’s plaited rug. My shelter, my shack on Shit-face Senekal’s farm, that hole in the ground, was that my home? My first and only home? To that I can’t return; it’s been covered over, the wattle rotten. How I catch myself whistling again the tune that I used to warble in those years while lying in my jackal lair.
I go and stand behind Nombini, my chin on her shoulder, while she’s fitting her plaited and painted knick-knacks in between the guns and flour and powder and sugar. I place my hands on her little pot-belly, which after little Windvogel’s birth has never tightened again. I whistle what I whistled when all those years ago I lay gazing at my wattle roof with unseeing eyes, my prick in my hand, the world small and the stars close by.
The interview is stately, more ceremony than conversation. Ngqika, having shed the uniform and at home again in his little animal skin loincloth and cloak, sits next to his mother and four of the oldest advisers. Janssens sits on his own on the other side of the table. I and the Bethelsdorp Hottentot Platje, who is interpreting for Janssens, are seated on either side of the table. The riempie stool is too low. I have to get up every now and again and walk around the table to stretch my legs. The tent flaps have been opened again, the retinues of both parties are seated outside. When there seems to be no end to the talking, the audience gradually drifts away as the winter sun warms them into drowsiness.
The governor starts proceedings by announcing the reason for his journey: Peace is possible only if each holds to his permitted bank of the Fish, as it pleases the VOC, the focking English, the Batavians and God the Father himself. Ngqika assures him that it is a great pleasure to lay eyes on the ruler of the Colony. He says he’s always been a friend to the Christians. That is exactly why the Caffre rebels are taking up arms against him in hordes, from all directions from which the winds blow and the sun and moon rise and set. Can you hear me sweetening the king’s words with honey so that they can slither sweetly and slickly into Janssens’ bony ear?
By afternoon the interview is still dragging on. Janssens knows only one tune: Ngqika must see to it that all the Caffres move east of the Fish. Ngqika turns to Yese and the elders. When the whispering gets heated, they go and stand in the corner of the tent and talk as if they were alone and the governor far away in the Cape. Ngqika looks at me pointedly and says he has no control over the renegade Xhosas. But since he lives east of the Fish in any case, he himself has no problem respecting the border. Janssens nods, satisfied. What exactly he’s so damned pleased about, heaven alone knows: Ngqika is offering him absolutely nothing.
I can’t believe my ears when Janssens asks whether either Maynier or Bresler ever attempted to incite Ngqika to attack the colonists sheltering with him. My fabrications have actually floated all the way to the Netherlands and back. Ngqika looks at me and then starts to recite the little rhyme that his Khula whispered into his ear years ago. He says Maynier did indeed send him gifts four or five years ago and informed him that if he attacked and wiped out me and a few of my fellows, he could keep half our horses and all our cattle.
Maynier wanted all our sheep, I add and Platje looks at me and looks away. And the king says he’s incapable of betraying his friends, I embroider forth.
Janssens glances askance at me, before, after an eternity, starting to rifle his notes again for a next question.
Janssens is nobody’s fool, he can see I’m interpreting myself and not the king. My ventriloquism makes things dangerous for my son. I noticed during last night’s meal already: As soon as Ngqika starts talking politics with the governor, his words become conflated with my stories and distortions and moods. While the two carry on negotiating, I hold my peace, as far as possible.
The last item on the agenda is me myself. Behold: I am interpreting the negotiations regarding my own future. Ngqika says he is prepared to chase all the Christians at the Great Place to their own side of the Fish; all of them except Khula. I know his country and I know the Colony and he needs me as mediator. Janssens digs in: I must get out of there and back to De Lange Cloof and my legitimate family. I could remain Ngqika’s friend, as long as a river ran between us. I interpret and for the rest keep my trap shut.
On that day I was a few years past forty; I was sick of hiding from the bunch of Christians and Caffres who on both sides of the border wanted to skin me alive. Believe me, a pardon and a plot of land on which I could plant and forage for more than one season did not seem like an unattractive proposition. A house with walls not built of firewood and wattle, not too bad either. Janssens was highly excited to extricate me from under the Caffres. He even promised me an escort, in case Ndlambe or suchlike obnoxious Caffres were to ambush me on my way back to the fusty embrace of the Colony.