Can I get hold of some of the Caffre maps for them?
Are some Caffres the slaves of other Caffres and how do they decide who are slaves?
How are the negotiations between the Bushmen and the Caffres progressing?
How do I see the Christian’s place in Africa?
What I said, I can’t remember. What I wanted to say, was: There is no peace to be made here; there is nothing to be understood here. The only revolution here is that between dust and fire, the only equality the levelling of the land by the elements, the only fraternity a function of a common enemy or a shared disgrace. The only liberty the one that comes from surrendering to your fate.
I give them what they’re looking for, I paint the Caffres as the innocent children of nature that the enlightened gents want to see. The more I keep my trap shut, the more they nod in agreement, fill in my silences with what they want to hear. De Mist cannot understand that our people on the border can’t see the border, that it’s just a river, full of mud, dangerous, or sometimes a parched ditch. I tell him about Caffre politics, who’s quarrelling with whom, last I heard. I add on and leave out; what does it matter; what do I know? Lichtenstein takes minutes. Now and again I catch him looking at me as if he wanted to measure me up and sketch me like a felled giraffe. I smile at him and talk to his boss. I am friendly and unruffled. I push out my chest. I keep my cramping hands under the table. The German records everything. Sometimes I lose the thread of my argument, much more interested in the contours of the carving against the table legs. Whoever carved it can talk to wood as these people can’t talk to Caffres and farmers. De Mist wants to know whether I suffer any remorse over my past.
So far I’ve got away with everything.
You don’t feel guilty?
Those who call me guilty, have to stone me. For their own survival.
I do not understand, Mijnheer Buys.
If I’m not guilty, they will reproach themselves unto their dying day.
Reproach?
Yes, because they never lived, merely farmed and prayed and paid. I am a free man, a noble savage. I sign my own name. I write my own fate. My seed I sow far and wide.
Etcetera all afternoon long. Goddammit, you surely know, even this I don’t believe a word of, but oh, you should have been there. You should have seen what I could see: the way they bought every bun I baked, all this libertarian shit. I am modest and friendly and then, every now and again, I drop a little pearl, something straight from the boudoir of that dissolute marquis of whom old Kemp told me. How they hung onto my every word, how they couldn’t wait for me to shock them with my free spirit. The priceless way in which my audience choked on my choice buns.
When we adjourn, I ask Zondagh who made his tables and chairs. He beckons to a slave and whispers something and the slave vanishes. He says we must wait a while, then he’ll introduce us to a man like no other. The slave returns with his hands full of guns. Then he leaves again and returns with two chairs and a bag full of locks and a leather bag full of tools that he unpacks on the table next to the polished guns. Only then do I see the man standing in the doorway. He is slender and bowed, his skin pale from working indoors. Zondagh introduces the man as Gildenhuys. An elderly woman leads the man into the room and shows him a chair to sit on. He inspects us all, smiles broadly, shakes his head, but doesn’t make a sound. His long fingers move in the air and the woman makes similar movements. The man nods.
Gentlemen, I introduce you to our Gildenhuys, says Zondagh.
Zondagh says Gildenhuys was born deaf and dumb. He developed his own language along with his sister. The two understand each other perfectly, but for the rest he is cut off from the world’s eternal chatter. No wonder he seems so friendly. Zondagh proceeds to display the man’s handiwork to us. The bolts and locks, the breech bolts, the woodcarving. The chisels and hammers, the saws, long and short, each made with the most exquisite care. Craftsmanship such as I have never seen. Zondagh prattles on about the man to whom he continually refers as Our Gildenhuys. Gildenhuys himself shows his handiwork with evident pride. He even performs a demonstration, there in the dining room, in which he engraves an aloe on a piece of yellowwood plank that Zondagh has brought in. Then we are led out to go and inspect his smithy. Elaborate metal carvings are suspended from the walls. I can see Gildenhuys has had to conduct this tour countless times. I realise why he does it with such readiness. Yes, he is Zondagh’s Gildenhuys, the farmer keeps him like a tame monkey to impress his guests with his tricks. But Gildenhuys himself is the main beneficiary of the situation. He can live in the midst of all this wealth on the richest farm in De Lange Cloof, while being free to practise his trade in peace. Apparently he taught himself, an inborn feeling for taste and quality. There is a meagre supply of patterns in circulation in these parts, and most of the shapes and ornaments are of his own creation. A careful and patient giftedness. He plays along with Zondagh’s show, because here he can do whatever his dumb heart desires, in his own time, without the pother of a pot that has to be kept boiling. Without being sized up out there every raging day and having to justify his existence to his neighbours.
The show is concluded with Zondagh’s insisting that his Gildenhuys must show us a few words of his sign language. His sister’s callused fingers talk rapidly with her brother, this man with whom she shares a silent life. She tugs at the heavy dress dragging on the ground. She makes a short speech about her brother’s secret language. How he might be deaf and dumb, but knows no lethargy and boredom in his occluded world. He is indeed a weird fellow; the figurines he carves are all from another world, or on their way to an unforeseeable elsewhere. The gestures he thought up himself also entertain the audience. He makes a horse gallop with the two forefingers of his right hand on the flat of his left palm. But it is his word for Hottentot that makes De Mist roar with laughter: He presses two thumbnails against each other, as one squashes a tick, and then looks up for the expected reaction. Zondagh must have in the past instructed him to keep this gesture for last. Nothing makes the high-ups laugh like the recognition of their own misanthropy in the countenance of an innocent man.
Gildenhuys with his soiled and supple fingers is left behind in the smithy with his sister when we adjourn for a cocktail of genever before the evening’s festivities. Augusta’s little legs are trembling under the silken dress. She says she must lie down, the sun is making her light-headed. I look at her and she looks away.
I remember Kemp’s eruption so many years ago when he rattled off the names of God, how the listing and the shouting exorcised dark things within him. While piling hay around the houses with my children and the labourers so that they will flare up more readily later on, I mumble the Couga things, the Couga names I’m taking my leave of: