she doesn’t know what she’s doing, it’s something that must last as long as possible. I don’t move. I listen to the child and watch the little body slowly inhaling and exhaling and now and again twitching in a dream. We lie like that till the sun rises. I get up stiff and sore, and the day begins.
They pay me almost a year’s rent to supply wood for the new extensions in Graaffe Rijnet. In 1787 I borrow a few wagons and load them with yellowwood planks – more than a thousand-five hundred feet of wood – and five Hottentots and two Caffres and trek to the settlement that the Cape periwig-pansies transmogrified a few months ago from farm to town. Word is that they offered one Dirk Coetzee a shit-sack of money for his woebegone farm in a horseshoe bend of the Sundays River and baptised the place Graaffe Rijnet, for the bibulous governor and his wife who between them pour and cram the contents of the Company’s coffers down their gullets.
As we travel, the mountains multiply slowly, one calf at a time, like elephants. The dogs turn up the day after I leave Brandwacht. The red dog takes up position by my side and trots next to my horse. The rest of the pack spread out around the wagons, at a distance from the wagon trail, glimpsed only here and there and now and then. The dogs make the Hottentots uneasy. They are used to the phantom dogs that always hover somewhere around me in the veldt, but normally the dogs keep their distance. This trip is different. We are far from home and from any habitation. By the time we outspan, the dogs are around the camp, usually eight or ten of them, sometimes as many as fifteen. They lie around the camp in groups of two or three. A few venture as far as the fire, where the one-ear is lying by my feet. I don’t touch the dog. He doesn’t snool for attention like tame dogs. The dogs gobble up the bones that are thrown in their direction, but for the rest keep their distance. It is as if the dogs are traversing the same territory as us, but in a different sphere. As if they’re moving across the same veldt, but in a different time, and would canter straight through you like ghosts if you didn’t get out of their way in time. A day before we reach Graaffe Rijnet, the dogs disappear: I wake with the first light, tightly wrapped in my kaross. The red dog is lying gazing at me. He trots along next to Horse till late in the morning and then suddenly swerves east and is gone among the low shrubs.
We cross the shallow river, the wagons creaking and screeching over the rock shelves. The trampled strip of soil would seem to be the street; the huts and clay hovels sporadically on either side then presumably the town. Horses stand tethered in front of the houses, here and there smoke drifts out of a chimney, more often out of doors and windows. The geese in the street heave and hiss at the oxen. Some curs trot up to the wagons and try to piss on the turning wheels. One of the thatched roofs is on fire. A few bystanders in the street are watching the inhabitants carrying out their possessions and dousing the roof with buckets of water. I ride past a wagon smith, a carpenter, advertising their trades and skills on the street. After the journey across plains that extend as far as the earth’s warping like rotting wood, it seems as if the town is huddled up against the mountainous mass emerging from the soil like a wall. As if you would sleep more soundly with a mountain at your back. Overripe quinces lie on the ground in front of a scanty hedge. Goats gnaw at everything they see. I ride past what I’m told was once Coetzee’s stable and shed, apparently now the jail and church and school. My wagons have to pull up when a Hottentot drives a herd of oxen along the street, heading out of town. A falcon sits on a roof tearing at a thing with a tail that is still quivering.
I park my wagons next to the drostdy, the converted homestead of the Coetzee family. Part of the thatched roof collapsed with the conversion. Two Hottentots are thatching the roof with reeds. From what I can make out the poor dumb sot Woeke was sent to come and lord it over the wilderness and keep the peace from here to Swellendam. I start undoing the thongs securing the wood. A man walks past in the street. He looks me straight in the eye. He bothers me. His face is long, his beard is trimmed and his hair cut short. He is big, almost as tall as I, but slimmer. His bearing is that of a rich man, even though his clothes are old. Where the material has been scuffed through, it’s been neatly patched. Tears have been darned with a meticulous hand. His shoes are worn but clean. He stops, gazes at the clouds massing around the mountain. His nostrils dilate and contract as he sniffs the air. He nods at me, lifts his hat. I don’t return his nod. He walks on. His footfall is light. Only in antelopes have I seen such ease in a body. He doesn’t look around again. Who does this upstart think he is?
Somebody comes running from the drostdy, a puny little fellow in a too-large uniform, ironed and clean as far as the knees, muddied all the way further down as far as the just about invisible shoes. I regard the fellow. We’re both about twenty-five, but to me the man looks like a child. To the pipsqueak I must, I suppose, look as all the border farmers look to the Cape-coddled powder puffs: bloody-minded, brutish and feral, garbed in leather and hides with the regulation long beard and longer hair. Do you think he wonders where the hair ends and the pelt starts? I square my shoulders and tower over him. I introduce myself.
I ask the soldier who the man is who walked past a moment ago. He says it’s Markus Goossens, the new schoolmaster.
That smug little snob and his little attitude won’t last long on the border, I say.
The soldier looks at the retreating schoolmaster. I ask him where I should dump the wood. The soldier directs me to the back of the buildings where construction is already under way. My workers start unloading the wood. I stoop at a fire, rake out an ember and light my pipe. A tallish man, prematurely bald, with a body soft as a woman’s, comes to stand next to me. He puts his pipe in his mouth and glares at the fire at his feet. He stoops to the flames and staggers. I rake out an ember from the flames for him. The man is neatly dressed, his waistcoat embroidered in more colours than I’ve ever seen on a single piece of cloth.
You’re not from here, I say.
The man tries to talk while clenching his pipe between his teeth. A drooling of slobber dribbles down his chin.
Stellenbosch. I’ve been in the Cape and Stellenbosch all my life.
What does it look like there?
Greener. Mountains. People don’t eat with their hands.
The man laughs. He takes a metal flask from his inside pocket and offers it to me. I swallow the genever. It’s too sweet, but I don’t say no when it’s proffered again. The soldier from earlier fusses around us again. He whispers something in the man’s ear. The man says he’s busy, he can’t be disturbed now. The man taps me on the arm, starts saying something. When the soldier interrupts him again, he turns around too fast. He has to clutch the young man’s shoulder for a moment to keep his balance. In my ear he slurs something about the singular qualities of a Caffre cunt. The whippersnapper clears his throat, embarrassed on behalf of his boss. I accompany both gents into the drostdy. Behold: Landdrost Moritz Hermann Otto Woeke with his arm around the neck of Coenraad de Buys, cackling. I sit the landdrost down in his chair behind his oaken desk and the little soldier ushers me out as quickly and politely as possible, with an extra rix-dollar in my pocket for my loyalty to the Company and their seventeen lousy lordships and my sealed lips.
We pitch camp outside the town. There are plenty of dry thorn trees around to lug together into a makeshift kraal for the oxen. Towards evening fires are lit and my Heathens hunker down, each lost in his own dream. I saddle Horse and ride into town. I ride down the main street and peer into lighted windows and sometimes a hand waves at me. Horse carries me past dark vegetable patches with trailing shadows. When I pull up I hear water dripping from the leaking canal into the parched soil. I’ve heard many stories of the carousing in the Cape, but in this Colonial backwater only the treetops dance in the breeze. I stop a passer-by and ask him if there are women to be found anywhere in this town and the man says Nothing to rent, here you have to marry or buy,
