Ngqika signs the document of their agreement. They agree that Ngqika will recognise the Fish River as border. The acknowledgement that he just happens to live on the other side of the river apparently affords Janssens great joy. Ngqika is given more presents. Tobacco, knick-knacks, ornaments. For later delivery there are European cloth, cloaks, a horse with a fancy saddle and bridle and a two-wheel cart. The king distributes whatever he doesn’t want among his subjects. He gives the governor four magnificent oxen. In the late afternoon he sets off on his own to bid the governor farewell. The coxcomb king struts through the ranks of the soldiers, his red cloak fluttering, his assegai glittering and the tricorn hat with the white plume firmly and dapperly displayed on his head. The two of them shake hands and embrace and shake hands again and neither can get enough of the other’s backscratching. Janssens sets off for Graaffe Rijnet, there to be told that France and the English are once again at war. I trek away with the Caffres, back to the Great Place for one last time to set my house in order before settling down in the long kloofs from which I tore myself away so many years ago.
I was proud, yes. Of myself. The governor, the king, the soldiers and warriors, they were all in my hands. I was the only one there who could speak decent Dutch and Xhosa. I knew the fears and perplexities and purposes of both sides like nobody else there or since. The Dutch wanted me there as interpreter and that was what I would be to them. When they sounded me out about my relations with the Caffres, I was as vague and hazy as a Lange Cloof morning. As soon as you realise you’re being used, the game gets interesting.
That sketch of Paravicini is quite charming and not too badly botched, except for two things: Ngqika was on horseback. And I was there, there in the midst of it all. My voice was the voice of both sides. I talked with myself, negotiated my freedom and my confinement with myself in two languages.
A week or so later Cornelis Faber returns from Graaffe Rijnet, where he’d gone to barter two wagonloads of timber. The authorities stopped him in the dusty main street and told him that if he or any of us dissidents put as much as a foot in the Colony without having bidden Caffraria a last farewell, we would be arrested on the spot and dispatched to the Castle.
Come September Ngqika still does not want to let me go. He says it’s unsafe for me to trek back to the Colony past Ndlambe’s hordes with my womenfolk and children. I’m in no hurry. The Colony is delivering angry letters; Ndlambe and the other Caffres on the Colony side of the Fish don’t want to move back over the border before I’ve left there. The rumours I hear about myself make it difficult for me to look in the mirror and see anything. In Caffraria I am Khula, a man with wives and children and cattle, like all the other Caffres. In the Colony I’m a ten-foot monster with eight arms who makes the earth quake when I break wind. Four Christian friends turn up at my house with a wagon and a lot of guns and help me to move back to De Lange Cloof.
Yes, I took a proper leave of Ngqika. We talked for a long time, I embraced him like the son he was to me. He cried. I took leave of Yese too. With a formal handshake and a bow like the gentleman I am. My jaw was clenched; she looked past me.
At Bruyntjeshoogte Faber and the English deserter Jan Naader and I come across Captain Alberti, the commander of Fort Frederick. We assure him that there are now only Caffres left in Caffraria. He starts asking questions and I can see the man is not going to be fobbed off with the usual commonplaces. But too many stories, and not all of them equally true, are even more useless than platitudes. I talk a heap of shit and somewhere inside I hide nuggets of truth. Do you see how he looks me up and down for tokens of honesty, while I’m betraying Bentley and Bezuidenhout and the Lochenbergs? How I blab out everything about their plans to flee to Delagoa Bay? How they’re only waiting for powder and bullets from the Cape? To the devil with them. If I have to behave myself, if I have to go and strap myself into demure good-neighbourliness, how come they get to go and savour succulent tropical women? And as is the wont of his ilk, Alberti all too laboriously records the absolutely nothing that he is the wiser:
I must admit that in this matter I was discomfited. Coenraad de Buys is too little to be trusted to enable one to make use of anything he says, and who knows what moved him to tell all the above.
I’m sweating. See, the demented wanderer also has maps of the heavens in his Flatus book. One with all the Christian constellations – Orion, Leo, the Southern Cross and suchlike – daintily traced out with the names attached. Then there is also a map of the constellations of the Caffres and the Hottentots and the Bushmen, as told to him: Orion’s belt here becomes three dogs chasing three pigs. A crocodile with a star in its jaws. The seven sisters become a man with a spade. Things like that. And then a map with the stars, only stars, no lines connecting them to form an animal or a story. Hundreds, thousands of bare dots spread over two pages. Underneath the first of these dot-speckled pages is written: Make an object that only becomes visible after you’ve looked at it for a while. At the top of the next page: Go into an empty room and make a list of its contents.
In 1803 we trek through the extremities, back through the Zuurveld, back to De Lange Cloof. Farmlands are on fire. Houses are on fire. Almost half the farms have been devastated, a third of the Christians have moved away already. Orchards and vineyards are gravid with rotten fruit. Maize fields have been trampled and are still smouldering. Corpses hang from blackened trees. Everywhere the vultures and the crows and everywhere the dogs. The fleeing farmers are on their way, God knows where to, in battered half-empty wagons. Torn cloth fluttering like white flags where it no longer covers the wagon’s bamboo ribs. Smoke and wrath, stubble, dust and emptiness.
3
In the Couga, at the back of the Attaquas Cloof, farms are named after heart’s desires. I settle on d’Opkomst, the arising, my gift from the authorities, my thirty pieces of silver. My Uncle Jacob lived here in the 1770s, after that his brother-in-law, then my big brother Johannes, up to more or less 1790, they say. After that the place was in a Scheepers’ name for a few years. And now I. We. This farm’s gates, too, are now locked to you, reader; this land, too, is in your time, in the time of Omni-Buys, a game conservation area. The traces of ruins can still be seen in the grass, but it smells of baboon piss.
D’Opkomst is a frontier farm. On the edge of the Couga, the furthest east of the farms. When I moved in here, the farm was in the Swellendam district, a year or so later in Uitenhage, and nowadays, apparently, I’m living in George. New borders for new districts with new names of new bureaucrats are forever moving the farm around, even though I don’t exactly feel the earth moving here under the tree.
On Brandhoek next door lives Doors Minnie, Christina’s grandson, my step-nephew. We don’t talk much. Especially not after the fellow went and married a Ferreira a few years ago. To the other side lies the kraal of the selfsame Stuurman who caused the Colony so much shit with his rebellious Hottentots who fought alongside the Caffres. He was apparently also given a few morgen to put a stopper on his gun and his big mouth. Seems to me the Batavians post everybody who gives them a hard time to the Couga; in these kloofs you can go ahead and swear and shoot and nobody will be any the wiser. If the black hole in the Castle is full, there are always more remote farms to be distributed. Here where sight and sound vanish without a trace.