you find some of the loveliest pastures on God’s earth. This verdant grass is deadly. In summer it offers excellent grazing, but in winter the cattle start dying. The Zuurveld Caffres and the frontier farmers know that in winter you have to move your cattle to the sweet veldt in the gorges that are perennially verdant but cannot support heavy grazing. In summer the cattle move to the sour veldt again. Look, the deckswabs-made-flesh in the Cape draw boundaries on maps in offices. Any cattle farmer could tell them it’s insane, these god-cursed borders that disturb and destroy grazing patterns. The farmers and the Caffres get het up. And by the time I end up here the whole lot is thoroughly pissed off. As soon as my cracked heels step onto my quitrent farm, Brandwacht, my thumbs start pricking like the whole sky crackles before a thunderstorm.
We build a shelter and I go to greet my big brother Johannes. A few weeks later Maria is standing waving me good bye with the baby at her breast. Elizabeth is standing next to her mother and does not wave at me. Accompanied by the few Hottentots who can shoot I venture into the bush. I’m like a child on Horse’s back; I can’t sit still and I babble uncontrollably and order the little troop to go and peer behind every kopje and in every thicket. At night I keep my trap shut next to the fire or I get drunker and louder than anybody else. A week later I return with a herd of Caffre cattle that look a good deal fatter than the few half-dead beasts I drove all the way from De Lange Cloof. I immediately put out of my mind the young Caffre and how he looked at me when I shot him where he was guarding his cattle in the open veldt, that first person I murdered. Later we build a hut and later a proper house. And always, in the distance, the dogs. When we fine-comb the veldt for Caffre cattle, red-brown smudges flash in the corners of our eyes. At night their eyes gleam in the bushes around the house. My Hottentots try hard not to see them. Nobody mentions them, nobody chases them away, nobody takes aim at them; God help the scumbag who dares.
A year later I walk into the wattle-and-daub house. The swallow darts in at the door before me and up to its clay nest under the rafters. We’d hardly moved in or the swallow pair followed and devised their own clay-and-wattle home against the roof. I wanted to clear them out, but Maria insisted that they brought good fortune to any marriage. The little creatures mate for life. I said it’s not as if we were married and Maria said they come and go with the seasons and the rain. Any farmer would thank his lucky stars for a pair of swallows that foretell the weather. The bird-brains twitter all day in their nest but I let them be. They’re not that much worse than the chickens and the suckling pig and the cats and the kids. It’s Maria’s house, I’m not here very often. If she wants to build an ark, it’s her story. The veldt is mine.
The veldt is mine, as it belongs also to my cattle and the Hottentots who look after my cattle and the Caffres who bring their cattle to graze and don’t clear out again. What kind of a Colony is this, where you can’t move your arse at the furthest reaches, as if those who are inside want out and those who are outside want in? And there on the borderline, on the riverbank where the whole lot come face to face, no tribe wants to back down before any other; there’s a chronic butting of heads and a preening like young cocks.
I regularly do my rounds on the other side of the border. No Cape-bred fellow with silk stockings and scented powder in his wig is going to tell me which river I’m not permitted to cross. If the river wants to stop me, the river can stop me, but that is between me and the waters. And the Great Fish is a bugger when it’s in flood. Then that border is a bloody border and you can talk all you like, you’re not going to get across it. But sometimes the Great Fish is no more than a waterhole in a barren riverbank where hippopotami yawn with gruesome teeth. Sometimes it’s narrow and deep, sometimes broad and vague and shallow. Sometimes you can cross by foot. But it is always brown with soil, as if the very sand wanted to get out of the Zuurveld and march down to the sea, the great and eternal boundary where everything flows into everything else and drowns itself and from which all Christians and pen-pushers emanate. In no place and on no day does the eastern border look the same. Nobody steps into the same Fish River twice.
Barely an hour’s trek from where we struck camp this morning, the yellow grass of the plain feels like a long day’s journey away, as if time itself got snagged here in the long thorns that claw and clutch. The water, thick and strong as Maria’s coffee, winds through the kloofs where the thorns grow lush and kudus appear and disappear in tracks that only they can see. In these thickets you could disappear very quickly, for ever if that was what you wanted. To cajole the cattle through this lot is a bloody manoeuvre, even where the water is shallow. There are hiding places aplenty; here everything happens mysteriously. I don’t hear the shell of the tortoise crack under the wagon wheels in the drift, only see the river floating the shards of shell and limbs downstream. This primordial creature that for thousands and thousands of years has been scrabbling unchanged under the indifferent sun. How do I know this? you ask. When I wonder about the soul, I read about vertebrae and magma.
The stream is powerful. It takes what it will. It doesn’t ask before it takes. You have to heed it, even though you don’t heed laws. I frequent the river. I know the river almost as well as the Caffres know it. See, the two groups are standing on opposite banks of the Fish. They don’t look at each other. They are standing on opposite sides of the border watching the border between them coming down in flood and swallowing a sweet thorn and swirling it along and calving a chunk of clay soil into the water. The bartering of cattle and tobacco and copper proceeds without violence. The Christians and the Caffres are wary of each other and joke coarsely among themselves to cover up the tension, but the Hottentots riding with the Christians are taciturn and watch both groups with narrowed eyes.
I pick up words readily as they drop around me. A year or so after my arrival on the border I’m fluent enough to laugh with the Caffres about the Christians who have foreskins and nothing else. If you want to survive here, you buddy up with folks. Farmers of the area who know with whom and how cattle can be bartered. If they turn up on your farm to hear if you want to go and barter cattle with the Caffres, you saddle up and trot along. You must first learn the rules of the game before you can play on your own. Before you can rewrite the rules. Eight or ten armed horsemen are better than one Christian and his gang of Hottentots. This doesn’t mean that you have to strike up bosom friendships. It doesn’t mean that you can’t laugh with the Caffres about the lot on your side of the river. The Christians laugh too, because they see me laughing. I wink at my white pals and I nod at the Caffres.
When both groups have taken from the other what they can and both groups are satisfied that they’ve screwed over the other, they return in opposite directions to their respective wives and children and their just about identical homes of reed and clay.
At home we all sleep next to one another on a pile of hides. The baby is swaddled separately in a hide against the wall. Maria lies in the middle, Elizabeth and I on either side of her, each with the head on one of her breasts. Somewhere in the night Elizabeth crawls over Maria and comes to lie between her parents. The hides don’t cover us properly. I lie awake, uncomfortable with the child half across me. The little body is thin, I feel the skeleton under her skin. I think of how easily the little bones can break. I can’t settle. If I change position, Elizabeth will wake up. Then Maria will wake up. Then all repose will be shattered. I lie dead still and stare at the rush ceiling above me. I listen to the wind buffeting the house, how the rafters gnash and the reed door hammers at the thong tying it down. The wind inhales through every crack and then exhales again in a great sigh as if we’re lying inside an organ of a larger animal of wood and reed and stone. I take one little arm in my hand, lift it up, feel it, the fine frangible bones, the soft flesh, the little hand seeking my hand and clamping a finger. The child huddles up against me, the little head pressed into my stomach, a soft sigh, then a gurgle. Elizabeth has caught a cold. Tomorrow she’ll be ill. The child is weighing down my arm, but I don’t change position. If I were to move now, she’d wake up and start crying and turn around, away from me. She’s never before lain against me like that. Even
