My hands cramp me awake. I tie up a few karosses in a bundle, take two bows, the two quivers of arrows, the extra strings and tie the whole lot to a pack ox. I hug Maria and Elizabeth and a few of my children and kiss one or two here and there. Elizabeth gives me a tied-up parcel with biltong and herbs for the rheumatism. Maria sighs and mumbles something and Nombini is nowhere to be seen.
I get onto the ox and head north by east and go in search of the country of the Ngwato.
My body aches too much to sleep and every day I ride for as long as the ox responds to the quirt. Alone on this endless plain a man thinks too much. Your thoughts wander far afield and return and then start chasing their own tails. I sniff at my hide attire. My sweat regenerates the sweat and blood of the previous owners of the hides. Am I my skin or do I have my skin?
In the long nights my red dogs howl around me. I catch sight of them every now and again. They keep their distance, wary in the wake of this hairy thing that looks like Buys, but smells like an uncouth concoction of creatures.
Next to my little fire I look at the stars, I look at the black bushes in front of me, I think back a long way. As soon as I try to think ahead, it’s just the flames and the bushes. I must go further, forward, to the horizon. But the horizon remains the border. There is no ultimate haven to look forward to. After every horizon another arises from the plains. Three days later I no longer think of anything. I hear my breath, I feel the belly of the ox beneath me rumbling, I smell the sand the hooves dislodge. The white sky and the anthills under trees. When of an afternoon the ox tires, I don’t walk on. My bare paws are not callused enough for this seething sand. I taste the melon and the last tobacco. See, I poke my prick into the moist and warm nostril of the ox.
After eight days, not far from the Tswapong hills, I find the Ngwato and their kraal. I get back onto the goddam ox and ride back ten days to Kolobeng and fetch my people and load the wagon and trek north and east back to the Ngwato.
A day’s journey from our new hosts the wagon wheel breaks, smashed to accursed smithereens. We drag brushwood in under the wagon and haul the ramshackle thing until the people spot us and help us along the last stretch to their huts. As we trek with the broken-wheeled wagon and the Heathens pushing and pulling and pothering at the overladen waddling house, the whole contraption breaks up more and more until towards the end of July 1821 we limp in between the fires of the Ngwato with a heap of firewood and splinters on two wheels and Chief Kgari comes to meet us laughing and shaking his head.
I want to get to the Portuguese, to Inhambane, to the land of linen and gunpowder, but with this wagon we’re going nowhere. The women like it here and complain when I talk of trekking on. While my sons and I try to fix the wagon, I tell the Hartenaars to devise a house in the meantime. Wattle-and-daub houses are no more than square huts and the Ngwato don’t take much notice of the building activity, but a house on wheels remains an oddity for them all. For the first week or three we work on the wagon every day. The thing has to be rebuilt from scratch. After a month we get to the wreckage hardly once a week. When we hammer away at the wagon there’s always a crowd of curious lookers-on. Sometimes they’re already sitting waiting for us around the wagon wreck when we come walking up with our hammers and saws.
The Ngwato call me Kgowe, the first mohibidu, red man, they lay eyes on. Vyfdraai says Kgowe means To peel with a knife. My skin is sunburnt and sore, yes, I’ll grant them that. Where the hides don’t reach it does indeed look like flayed flesh. I have been stripped of skin and name. No longer white, red. No longer Coenraad, Kgowe. Whoever I am, I am at home here. For a month or so, I totally forget to rebuild the wagon. But still I want to get away, out, further. Inhambane I call my distant horizon. That far, I know by now, I’m not going to make it. But if you want to drag a whole lot of people with you into oblivion, you’d better give the nothingness a name for them to cling to.
I go hunting and overnight at a Birwa kraal. I lie with a young woman who carries on as I’ve never seen before. I let her do her thing for as long as I can hold out, which isn’t long. The next morning I can hardly get back into the saddle and she waves me good bye and her people stand staring at me sourly and silently until I’ve vanished over the ridge.
My sons start itching to trek. We hammer away at the wagon with renewed vigour until it’s standing on its own four wheels. Everything that needs to turn we lubricate with all the fat and all the oil we can find. A month later an old Caffre and the young woman and a few assegais come to visit us. The old man is her father and wants cattle from me because his daughter is pregnant. He is sent on his way with three heads of cattle and the daughter cries with joy and hugs me and I shove her away and go and pitch another damn tent.
Elizabeth is also pregnant again and full of nonsense. When she says she’s feeling flu-ish I go off to find something for my hands to do rather than listen to the whingeing. She says her head and throat are sore. Maria says Elizabeth is feverish, she must lie down flat. I leave her in the cool house to feel sorry for herself. In the blazing sun I go and make the last adjustments to the wagon.
A day later she can’t get up at all. She says she feels every muscle in her body because every one has a different kind of pain. She starts puking and shitting. The sorcerer says she has the yellow fever. I sit with her through the night and try to cool her with wet cloths. Nombini and Maria take over when I drop off to sleep. We keep her moist, but she gets hotter and hotter. What is water and what is sweat we can no longer tell. Her body is like fire in my arms and then she starts shaking with cold shivers. My wife turns yellow. I am red and she is yellow and never are we the same.
The sun is hardly up, or the wagon is loaded with Elizabeth in the back, wrapped under the softest hides and karosses. She is delirious and talks nonsense and cries and sleeps and dreams. I go to say good bye to Kgari and we hug each other and he wishes me strength. He says Come back when your wife is hale again and your son has been born and may it be a son. I say Till we meet again and here are some cattle for your trouble. I go to find Vyfdraai to tell him we’re on our way. He is nowhere to be found. Realise only then that I haven’t seen him for days. The immortal kudu has already found his own way.
The young Birwa woman comes to the wagon to say something and I don’t understand a word of it. I think she’s saying that the child’s name will be Mmegale, but what do I know and what do I care. I shout senseless nothings from the wagon that the waving people hear as farewells and we ride into the rising sun.
My Omni-head spins when I read how the missionary Wheels Willoughby is later to allege that I died of the yellow fever in the Tswapong hills. You should see those hills. It’s a piece of Eden in the midst of this wilderness. East of Palapye the world rears up, forty miles by ten. More than a thousand feet above the plains the lushness luxuriates. The mountain range is wise and silent with antiquity. They say it’s been standing like that since the Creation. The hills fold and frown with the deep and rich countenance of sandstone, quartz and iron.
I can see how my wife and I, overwhelmed with the feverish yellow and hallucination, help each other off old Glider at the foot of the hills. We fold back the dripping branches, step into the forest, clinging together to keep each other upright. I see how we’re too hot for clothes. Alone and forlorn we strip each other of our last rags. Our feet in the crevices step on the cold shards of vanished people. See how in the dusk we scrabble open antique foundries. We stoke a smoky fire with the wet branches of the trees above us. She speaks in hushed tones to her hallucinations; I snarl listless insults at mine. Fragments of copper melt anew and form rivulets among the coals. Sputtering sparks shoot up. The red-ochre drawing on the overhang lights up and cools down and vanishes. We no longer speak. We share a fever dream with resigned smiles and tears, eruptions of laughter and rolling around in the damp grass. Branches break in the thickets as buck take fright at our exuberance. A leopard calls comfortingly from its tree. In the morning we are weaker and the world hazy and who knows whether we are really seeing the parrots. Their green bellies and the yellow markings on the wings and foreheads against the lead-grey bodies. I hold my wife’s hair as she vomits against a tree. I wipe her mouth and give her water from a stream and kiss her long until overtaken by dizziness. We wake in the late afternoon with the butterflies around us. She grinds her teeth as they touch down upon her. I chase away the riot of colour from her. On the forest floor around us the wandering shadow of the spread wings of storks. We taste the waterfall on our lips before we see it. I sink down and she pulls me up. When the green curtains open, we shower together for a last time. Dassies lie in the splashes of sun on the stones. I hold my wife tight while she murmurs nonsense and hearing and seeing fade out. I wake up next to the lagoon. She is dead in my arms and cold as water, her eyes distant and clear as the river stones. The frogs are deafening, then suddenly silent. I do not get up again. The green closes in around me. My body becomes heavy and somewhere I hear a black eagle call. My mouth for a last time on her unanswering lips.