An Instant in the Wind Read online

  “In the Cape I used to walk for miles,” she goes on. “Whenever my mother turned her back. She always wanted to send a sedan chair along. Once I even climbed the Mountain, all the way.” She waits for him to react. “I often went up the Lion's Rump, of course, and the Head too. But I climbed the Mountain only once. It's strange, the way it looks all flat from down below, while it's so uneven up there, isn’t it? All rocky and craggy and covered with shrubs. There's a sort of fruit, like small pine-cones, with a springy feeling if you press it in your hand.” She is still pale, but with color slowly seeping back into her cheeks. When the men went up, they always brought some of the fruit back and asked us to close our eyes and open our hands. All the screaming and giggling and coy laughter, I couldn’t stand it.

  There was wind up there. And the mottled grey cuffs all the way down to the sea. It seemed to stretch out to the ends of the earth, that blue sea. A peculiar sensation standing there, a feeling of recklessness, as if one might do anything one would never dare to do otherwise. I might have taken off my clothes if I had been alone.

  She opens her eyes, almost startled to find him there; annoyed.

  “I know the Mountain,” he admits grudgingly. “I went up many times.”

  “You also looked at the sea?”

  “I saw it, yes.”

  “I didn’t want to come down again.” Why is she talking to him like this?—with all the breathlessness of a Cape girl at a ball, trying to hold the attention of some young officer from a visiting fleet, some official on his way to or from Patria, by blowing up, out of all proportion, her small adventures: picnics and excursions, the flurry of letter-writing and preparations when the cannon booms over the bay and the flags go up and the tavern women start diluting their wines with water.

  “We used to fetch wood on the Mountain,” he continues, still reluctant, resentful. “Then we stayed out all day and only brought back our bundles at sunset.”

  “It must have been hard work carrying the wood.”

  “Not at all. We rolled the bundles downhill, then tied them to poles and carried them like that.”

  Her eyes are inscrutable. “You’re a slave,” she says.

  “I’m not!”

  The water is boiling.

  “You can come and fetch your tea,” he says, in sullen antagonism.

  “What did you come to the wagon for?” she asks with renewed suspicion. “What do you want of me? I’ve got nothing.”

  “Why should I come for anything? I just saw the wagon in the bushes and came to see.”

  “You were spying on us. You stole his clothes. You lured him away from here.”

  “You said he was following some bird.”

  She leans back again, avoiding his eyes. “You’ll have to take me home,” she says. “I must get back to the Cape.”

  “The Cape?” he asks. “Why should I go back there?”

  “I can’t stay here, can I?” She holds the cup tightly between both hands. “I must find people. I can’t…”

  “There are bands of Hottentots that way.” He points.

  “What use are they to me?”

  He glares at her in silence. Why should I pity you? I should have stayed clear of the wagon altogether. Don’t think because I’m here…

  “I’m on my way to the sea,” he says, averting his eyes. “Perhaps we’ll find a farmhouse or a trek on the way.”

  The sea, anywhere near the sea, rather than this endless undulating land.

  “But we can’t go before we’ve found him,” she protests. “He must have hurt himself or something. Suppose he comes back and finds I’m gone?”

  “He left you.”

  “No, he didn’t. He was only following a bird. He’ll come back.”

  “Will he pull the wagon for you?”

  “He’ll know how to get us out of here. After all, he's a man.” Resenting herself for saying so. Hearing again the cry of the new-born baby behind the door as her father came out with hunched shoulders, stopping as he saw her. “Where have you been?” she asked in quiet accusation. “Why do you want to know?” he replied. She could feel her face burning: “Is that another of your bastards? And what's going to happen to him?” “Mind your tongue, Elisabeth,” he said. “It's none of your business.” She snapped at him in rage: “You think a slave is nothing but a woman!” Thinking: and a woman no more than a slave. The impotent anger in his tired eyes. “Go up to your room, Elisabeth, and stay there till tonight.”

  “We have to stay here,” she insists. “In case he comes back. Afterwards, all right.” Oh God, the sea.

  He thinks: In summer, the warm semen smell of the milkbushes on the beaches of the Cape. All that I’ve given up. And now, after all these years.

  Dusk has begun to fall. Down in the valley the hadedas are crying, coming up over the hills.

  “Why do they cry like that?”

  “Why not?”

  “It's terrifying. Like a scream of death.”

  He laughs derisively.

  “Where do you live?” she asks on a sudden impulse.

  “Nowhere.”

  “I want to know why you’ve come here,” she demands with some vehemence. Continuing, as he remains silent, “I know you’re just trying to catch me off my guard.” She gets up nervously and begins to rearrange the guns and pistols on the wagon. “You’re waiting for a chance. But I warn you, I’m watching you. And if ever you dare… Even if I have to kill myself…” She swallows back a sob choking her voice. “You understand? You have no right. I’m pregnant. And you’re just a slave.”

  He watches her in silence. A small twig snaps in his hand. The short sharp sound hits her like a gunshot. He is breathing deeply, trying to control himself before he replies.

  “Slave,” he says after a while, “slave! That's all you can say. But I’ve had enough of it now, you hear? ‘No right’!”

  You may have the right to chop off my leg. But then to tell me I have no right to walk straight—that I won’t allow. Watching her, he sees her trembling. Then he turns round abruptly and walks off towards the opening in the fence.

  “You can’t go away now!” she says. “It's getting dark. You can’t just leave me here like this. You’ve got to take me home, you’ve got to. Come back.”

  Adam looks round. “You scared?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  You’re trying to order me around because you’re shit-scared, because you have no say over me. Not much authority you’ve got here. Suddenly he feels almost sorry for her.

  “You want eggs for supper?” he asks clumsily. “I robbed some nests in the kloof.”

  The day of the loft. Where we always went after the day's work or games, Lewies and me. The other children of the Baas were too small for us. Long days of summer, naked in the cold mountain stream beyond the silver trees and the newly planted oaks. Riding on the wine-wagon to the Company's shed in town. Setting snares for the small grey buck trampling the wheat and barley in the early morning. Bareback riding on the calves behind the farthest wall of the kraal, tumbling in dust and dung. And then, always, up the wooden stairs to the high loft with the sweet smell of raisins we’d helped dry in autumn, from the bursting-ripe hanepoot grapes. Squatting in the fragrant dusk among processed hides and piles of bush-tea and the two yellow-wood coffins, ever ready, crammed with dried fruit, telling him all the remembered stories of my grandmother. At first he’d always accompanied me to the backyard to listen to her telling them, stringing the musical names on the threads of her memory, Tjilatap, Palikpapan, Djocjacarta and Smeroes, Padang and Burubudur; but after her hands had grown gnarled with arthritis and useless for any work, the Bass had freed her and she’d gone down to town, to a little shack of wood and clay and grass high up on the Lion's Rump. And since then it was I who had to retell her stories to Lewies sitting up there in the loft eating our sweet raisins. There was nothing secretive about it; the loft had never, like the cellar, been forbidden to us. It was part of our day's routine, with its
smells of cinnamon and buchu and salted fish and dried fruit, of wild sour-figs and tanned hides. That was why I couldn’t understand it all, that day Lewies had gone to Hout Bay with his father and a stranger from Patria: towards four in the afternoon, coming from the mountainside where I’d been robbing birds’ nests, I felt hungry, so I went up to the loft and took some raisins; and on my way down the ladder the Madam stopped me.

  “What have you got there, Adam?”

  “Raisins, Madam.” I showed them to her.

  “Where did you get them?”

  “Up there, Madam. In the loft, Madam.”

  “Who gave you permission?”

  “But, Madam!”

  That was all I could say to him, too, when the men returned at sunset and she gave me up to them:

  “But, Baas! But, Baas!”

  “Won’t one ever get this streak out of you people?” he said. “Well, then you’ll have to learn the hard way.”

  I still didn’t understand what was happening, not even when two slaves were called to spread me over the wooden wheelbarrow and tear the clothes off my body. I began to cry as the thongs round my wrists and ankles gnawed into my skin.

  “But, Baas, I always went up there with Lewies for raisins!”

  He turned round to Lewies who was still holding the horses. “That true, Lewies?”

  “It's a lie, Pa.”

  That's what he said, my inseparable pal of the mountain stream and the wine-wagon and the calves behind the stone wall. It's a lie.

  “You’re still young, Adam, and you’ve got a lot to learn. So we’ll make it only one pipe.”

  And then he sat down on the bottom rung of the loft ladder and lit his pipe, watching detachedly while the two yard-slaves used the good hippo-hide sjamboks to cut my thighs and buttocks and my back with blow after blow, as neatly as if a knife had done it, causing the warm ticklish blood to run down my sides. Afterwards the Madam brought the small brown box to rub salt into the cuts, while I screamed and pissed into the wheelbarrow.

  “But, Ma, it's him,” I sobbed that night, shivering with cold-fever on my heap of skins while she tended the wounds with gentle herbs. She wasn’t crying, not she. She was as calm as always. “It's Lewies who always took me up there with him, Ma. He never said I mustn’t. And now he told the Baas I lied. It's not right, Ma!”

  “How do we know what's right?” she said soothingly. “Look at me. I was born a Hottentot, by rights I should be free. But the Honkhoikwa, the White men with smooth hair, they know better. It's them what decide, it's us what got to listen.”

  “No, Ma!”

  “You better listen, ’fore you got no skin left on your arse.”

  “But I don’t understand, Ma.”

  “Who is us to understand? Quiet now, Aob. Shh. The Baas said you must start early in the morning.”

  Aob. That was me. That is my name. The one she gave me, the one not known to anybody but her and me. Adam to the world—but Aob to us while her hands are soothing my body in the dark, Aob when she tells me about her people roaming free in the wilderness over the mountains, following their cattle and their fat-tailed sheep as the seasons come and go, stopping at the many stone graves of the great Hunter Heitsi-Eibib scattered across the land. And Aob here, now. But to her I said: Adam Mantoor.

  And that was the day when, for the first time, I discovered the difference. There was one I for the Honkhoikwa; another secret I for myself and my mother: that name she brought with her from that nameless land across the many mountains.

  “I can suck the poison of the snake out of you,” said the old woman who found me beside the anthill; spitting it out over my shoulder. “That's easy. But there's nothing I can do about the poison of the Honkhoikwa.”

  “Your eggs are ready,” he announces.

  She is sitting on the wagon. Behind her, under the arched canvas roof, hangs the lantern; her face is as dark as his own. Stiffly, proudly she comes to fetch her plate at the fire, hesitating just as she is about to turn back.

  “Listen,” she says. “I didn’t mean to… When I said… It's just that I don’t know what's going to happen any more. I felt so sure we’d find him today.”

  “Tell me about the Cape,” he interrupts her brusquely.

  “What do you want to know about the Cape? Why do you ask?”

  “That's what I’ve come for.”

  “But there's nothing I can tell which you… It's so long ago we left, I can hardly remember. When I do think back it's of long ago, childhood things.”

  “I want to know.”

  She sits down. After a while she begins to speak, right past him, as if he isn’t there at all. “Sundays in the big church. Mother always wanted to get closer to the pulpit, but the seats were allocated in a fixed order. And then the Castle. We went to all the receptions. The streets filling up with people when the ships came in. Evenings on the stoop, before supper— the grown-ups with glasses of white wine with a touch of absinthe or aloe, my father sometimes allowed me to taste it. After supper, the women and girls together in one room, talking or playing games; and the men next door, or back to the stoop in summer, with the slaves taking them pipes and tobacco and arrack and sopies. I always tried to slip out to watch them and listen to them. Their great voices booming outside in talk or laughter, so much more interesting than the women with their dainty little coffee-cups and their Moselle with sugar or aqua seltzer.” She looks away, the way she did before when she forgot about his presence; as if she hasn’t spoken for a long time and finds it impossible to control herself any more. “Once there was a bullfight at the Castle, it was a Sunday afternoon. They partitioned off the courtyard and chased in a bull, an enormous animal, all black, with great shoulders and wild horns. I can still remember the muscles moving under its skin, it was like hares running. And how it snorted and kicked up the dust and stormed the partition with the sound of wood splintering and women shrieking. And then they chased in the dogs and they charged the bull. As soon as they grabbed him by the nose he would fling them into the air like old rags. But there were too many of them, they attacked him from all sides. His shoulders, his thighs, his belly, his tail, his nose, everything. The noise was quite deafening, all that barking and yelping and bellowing. Once he stumbled and fell down. Some of the dogs tore pieces of flesh out of him. It was terrible, and the people seemed to go mad. Then he got up again. His nose was all torn and bleeding. But he kept on swiping at them. Once or twice he caught a dog on his horns; their guts were wrapped around his head and there was blood pouring into his eyes. I wanted to leave, I simply couldn’t bear to look any longer, I thought I’d be sick any moment. But my legs were too lame to carry me. I began to cry. They were all shouting and screaming so much that nobody even heard me. And when I looked again, after a long time, the bull was on the ground and they were fighting one another and tearing him to pieces. There was nothing left of his beautiful black skin and all those moving muscles, everything was covered with blood and sand and dung. I never knew dying could be so sordid. And so unnecessary. He’d been so powerful, his muscles had moved so. But in the end it was just a mess, that dung and sand and blood, nothing beautiful, nothing strong, just a horrible mess.” She has started crying. Her hands are grasping the plate so tightly that he is afraid it may break.

  “Why did you tell me all this?” he asks, bewildered.

  She shakes her head. Slowly she recovers, and blows her nose. For a long time she sits looking down at the food on her plate. You don’t even know the worst, she thinks, depleted. This, that when we went home I was no longer feeling upset or depressed. There was a wonderful lightness inside me as if I’d resolved everything that had ever troubled me. I felt quite dizzy, like the few times my father had offered me a sip of arrack. It was as if I’d been involved in something very beautiful.

  Her eiderdown lies spread out on the grass. On it, one side held in position by jars of brandy containing lizards and a couple of small snakes, the other pressed down by her knees, sh
e has opened the large map drawn by Erik Alexis Larsson—the map with its narrow segment of lines and signs and detailed inscriptions surrounded by a white expanse bearing only the tentative information suggested by Kolb and De la Caille and elephant hunters, and Hottentots bribed with copper or beads, brandy or a few lengths of chewing tobacco. This and this I know for sure, look, it is drawn and inscribed very precisely; there is no doubt at all about this river's course; that mountain range with all its foothills I have explored and noted; on these plains the summer rainfall is low. But the rest? There may be literally anything, Monomotapas, regions inhabited by white men with long smooth hair, fabulous animal kingdoms, gold, Africa.

  “Come here!” she calls, and he approaches. She smoothens a crease on the map. “Show me the way to the sea from here,” she says.

  “The sea?” He turns back and motions with his arm, that way, very far, to the right of the morning sun.

  “No, I want you to show me here,” she says impatiently. “On the map.”

  He kneels down opposite her, frowning, studying the map with suspicion and curiosity.

  “This is where we are.” She points. “Here is the curve of the sea. But what route are we going to follow, in which direction?”

  He shakes his head, rises on his knees and repeats his gesture to the south-east.

  “Haven’t you seen a map before?”

  He looks at her suspiciously, sullenly.

  “This is the Cape,” she explains tensely. “Here are the Hot Springs. Then Swellendam. These are the Outeniqua Mountains. This is the way we came. Now show me…”

  “Why do you ask me?” he says fiercely. “You call this your land?” He grabs the map and pulls it from under the jars; a couple are overturned and start leaking into the grass. He flings the map down again and spits on the ground. “You can crumple it and throw it away. You think it makes any difference to the land out there?”

  “Leave my map alone!” she says sharply, amazed by his sudden explosion, by the unexpectedness and the violence of it; shocked by it; threatened. But she will not be intimidated. She has never allowed it before, why should she now? Her father often said, and in spite of their occasional flare-ups he was closer to her than anyone else, “I don’t understand you at all, Elisabeth. You should have been a boy.” For she had that in her which others easily mistook for a sign of “masculinity”: nothing hard or angular, but a core of silence inside her, an untouchable quality behind her unassuming gentleness of manner; a fierce will to be left in peace and to preserve for herself what she regarded as her own.