The next morning at Avontuur, the first morning of 1804, I have breakfast with the Zondaghs and De Mist at long tables carried out under the trees. Lichtenstein says he’s keeping busy at the Cape. He writes articles about the anatomy of ostriches and the epidemic of tummy-run in the Cape barracks. He tells me about the map of the Colony that’s he working on. He tells me about the voyages he’s planning, the uncharted regions to which he’s looking forward – trips across the eastern border and perhaps even northwards to the Bechuana. He tells me about ships in bottles. He’s not even a quarter of a century old, quite wise for his years, but blind to the disappointments awaiting him. He knows the plants and trees and game of the country as I know them. The handshaking ensues and Zondagh gives me a package of rusks and peaches to take along.
For the women in your house, he jokes.
I look at Adriana and she looks away. The commissioner-general passes wind when he mounts his horse, on his way further along De Lange Cloof; on his way to pit his freethinking ideals against the everlasting mountains where the echoing crags are mute.
4
Maria bangs a little trunk down on the table and grumbles back to the packing. Old letters that have not been thrown away. Would she have preserved them for all these years? I know nothing about this; I don’t hoard. A few from Christina from years ago. I open one, but before I can read a word, the handwriting makes me keck. I chuck the goddam trunk from the table, get up and trample the whole lot into the dirt. You, who most assuredly have never in your precious life shot a buck, you and your kind curse all that is a man. Just look at the bloodthirst, the callousness and the heedlessly escalating devastation, you say. You raise your sons like the daughters of governors. Listen to me: Rather look at the mothers. Every son with a gun or a spear or a prick in his hand has a mother. Every son sees his mother in that moment when everything blanches white with rage.
A month or so ago I rode across to my uncle Jacob de Buys’ homestead on Diepe Cloof. I was getting ready to take my leave of the haunts of Ferreiras and their ilk. As a child nobody in the house talked about Uncle Jacob the jailbird. By the time he was released, my father was dead already. I met him once or twice, but he and Christina never had much to say to each other. With the Senekals, too, he didn’t mingle. While I was keeping myself scarce here in the Couga, I never saw him. My family had brought it home to me very clearly that my half-breeds and assorted women were not welcome on their doorsteps. Before decamping for ever, I wanted to smoke a pipe or two with my uncle.
Aunt Catharina opens the door, glances over my shoulder to see whether I’ve come on my own. One eye is full of the milk of blindness, but she can still see quite enough. She shows me to the kitchen where Uncle Jacob is sitting with his coffee. He is old, well over seventy, but he’s still sitting up straight and his beard still hangs full. When he sees the calabash of karrie I brought, he empties his coffee out over the half-door and holds out his mug.
Goddam, child! That Caffre porridge has put marrow in your bones. Just look at you. I heard that you’d moved in hereabouts. Thought you might come and show your face.
I’m here now, aren’t I?
He drains the karrie, holds out his mug again.
Pour for us. As I always say, only a Hotnot woman can make karrie. Katrien tries, but she’s too much of a Christian for this devil’s piss.
While we’re sitting with her in the kitchen, Aunt Catharina prepares food. Uncle Jacob is complaining about the people who are all bundling up here on top of one another.
A man can’t move any more, the lot cluster together so much, sometimes six families squatting on a single farm. A few years ago you had to ride an hour or more to see your neighbour, now you can’t sit on your pot in peace, or somebody bangs down your door.
I agree and check to see whether his table is as full of termites as mine. I knock on the table top, the wood feels solid. Uncle Jacob drones on.
The beasts of the field can no longer walk the old trodden ways. Nowadays the rabble shoot at anything that catches their eye. And all this fighting, all the veldt stinks of people. The animals are starting to walk other trails. The pathways are getting fewer and fewer. There isn’t room for us all.
He tells of berserk elephants breaking trees. He hears stories of a few young bulls attacking a rhinoceros and mounting it and then killing it. He says an elephant servicing a reluctant rhinoceros is a sight nobody should have to witness.
Heed my words, he says. The animals are becoming ever more bestial as the child of man becomes ever tamer.
Aunt Catharina shakes her head and serves calves’ cullions and belly and jacket sweet potato.
After the meal Uncle Jacob starts rummaging for old clothes in a chest. He says I must take the stuff that is too large for him nowadays. He says he’s shrinking away. I thought my uncle was strong when I saw him, but when I look through his old clothes, I see how big he used to be. The jackets he produces hang loose on my shoulders. While he’s making me try on a pair of trousers or such, I make him tell his story. He was a legend in our house, even though my people didn’t speak of him. The horse’s mouth always adds flavour to a story. He tells eagerly and gets thirsty quickly. We move back to the kitchen, where the karrie awaits us. When my aunt starts grumbling, it’s to the stoep, where the sun is starting to wester.
Jacob and his Katrien were hardly married or they fled Granny Elsje’s domain. Uncle Jacob says his mother was a hellcat, they were at each other’s throats ever since he could reach her neck. He and Aunt Catharina in due course returned to the family farm, with his mother observing their farming methods with a snide sneer. One day they had another altercation. He walked out and tied a Hottentot’s hands to a rafter and his feet to the chimney posts and lashed the living daylights out of the dumb creature. While the labourers were carting the body away, Granny Elsje snarled across the yard:
There, that’s good, that’s how you should all be treated!
Shortly hereafter she moved in with Uncle Petrus. Even years later, when she was ill and harmless on her deathbed, Uncle Jacob kept his distance.
I was more terrified of that woman and more furious than at any host of Caffres, he says.
Granny Elsje was a harridan, but Uncle Jacob was himself not the easiest man to get along with. His neighbour, old Matthys Zondagh, apparently one day climbed into him with a dropper, after a dispute over a deserting labourer. In 1772 Uncle Jacob and his friend Van Staden go and lodge a complaint in the Cape about the violence inflicted upon them by the Swellendam landdrost. The bailiff has them arrested there and then. Apparently the landdrost had in the meantime written to the Cape and said that the two farmers had sworn at him and abused and pushed and shoved and hit him. That Jacob had threatened him with a loaded gun. The two so-called dangerous subjects are locked up, without a trial. Two years later Uncle Jacob is so weakened and sickly that his wife has to go and nurse him in the Castle.
Unexpectedly, he guffaws and tells how the Cape people were always looking for dead dogs to dig into the soil when they wanted to plant a new tree. Apparently made the tree grow more quickly. He spills karrie on the stoep and curses and laughs.