Up Against the Night Read online

  Looking back, I realise that the farm practised a form of slavery; as far as I can remember, the only form of payment was maize-meal, a mud house, a ration of milk from the cows, after the rich cream had been separated, and a small plot for each family to keep a few sheep and grow some maize of their own. There was nowhere these black workers could go without the consent of their white farmer bosses. When they ventured into town, the police waited to see the passes provided by the farmer; without the farmer’s permission they could be thrown into jail and fined. They had no money, but sometimes more generous farmers would pay the fine when they were arrested.

  To my mind these farm workers – mostly Tswana or Sotho – were very resourceful: they played a game that involved indentations in the sand, with stones or seeds as counters, a version of mancala. In Africa this game is widely played, sometimes on pieces of wood that have been intricately carved and decorated. The children made little wire-frame cars to push around the farm; they ran behind, using a long steering wheel to guide the car. They were also expert in making catapults and they showed me how to make them, with a branched stick, some inner tubes, and a patch of leather from the shoemaker in town. With the catapult I tried to kill mouse birds in the apricot trees. The children also showed me how to find ant lions; I spent hours feeding ants to them and in the process I became intimate with the baked and exhausted earth. Ant lions are vicious little creatures, like miniature crabs. They dig a funnel-shaped hole, and throw up very fine sand, so that when an ant wanders innocently down into one of these holes it cannot get out. At the moment it slips back into the vortex of the funnel, the ant lion seizes it with its pincers and drags it under the sand. The pincers contain a toxin.

  My Tannie Marie was a gentle person, perhaps even a timid person, and sad stories in books caused her to weep. I also cried easily as a child, probably because of the anxieties of my beloved mother’s absences and early death, and this tendency has followed me into adulthood. Even now as I remember the room and my aunt sitting very close, reading Pinocchio to me – the moths committing discreet suicide – tears seep into my eyes. I think that Tannie Marie knew more about my mother and my grandmother than she let on. She had her own memories and disappointments to contend with, and her face, which was deeply creased, despite her regime of sun avoidance, would collapse into even deeper disarray. She would reach for the handkerchief she kept up her sleeve, snuffle once or twice, and dab her eyes. The skin of her arms hung down loosely, like the dewlaps of the cattle. She was enveloped in a slightly musky but not unpleasant micro-climate, scented with lavender.

  I think that it was Tannie Marie’s brothers and their harum-scarum sons who moved cattle in and out after they had bought them in the sales. There were always sales, some of them of household furniture and ploughs and tractors and harrows, as farmers left the land. The cattle, long-horned Afrikanders, stood about morosely – big, glossy, humped animals, favoured by their namesakes, the Afrikaner people. These cattle had a secondary role, as symbols of Afrikaner persistence and singularity. In their own way they were totems.

  The cattle were fed teff – local hay – and dried lucerne to fatten them up before they were driven to the abattoir, in Afrikaans die slaghuis, literally the slaughterhouse. Afrikaans is a very direct language; maybe the original Dutch and Huguenots had difficulty describing their overwhelming surroundings, so they named rivers and farms and mountains without poetry and perhaps in too great a haste. For instance the local river was called Mooirivier, Beautiful River.

  I have wondered if the drift to cruelty and violence was the effect of living in a harsh and unfamiliar land. Nelson Mandela once made this point: he said that the first Afrikaners were frightened by Africa and learned to hate black people out of fear. As memories of Holland and France faded, it may be that these Afrikaners became hardened in their fears of imminent danger, die swartgevaar, the black peril. Over the years, their names changed: Retief was originally a Huguenot name, Retif, from the banks of the lower Loire. The French was transliterated into Afrikaans, so that the pronunciation would remain the same.

  It may have been her brothers and their sons who kept my aunt on the farm, to live uncertain of her purpose or her future, in the old tin-roofed house which faded from red to washed-out pink as the sun rose higher; every day before the cool winters arrived, she would sit on the stoep for her tea. She spoke Afrikaans to the women servants. These women were privileged; they were allowed to enter the house while the men had to wait outside the kitchen to be heard or to receive instructions. There was a threshold and they were never to cross it. I could see that these black people liked my aunt. She had an especially gentle way with the three women, who were known collectively as meide, maids, whatever their tasks. They were dressed at all times in aprons and kappies – little bonnets – which were worn and frayed but always clean. There was no money to go to Berman’s General Supplies, the Jewish store in town, which my aunt described as an Aladdin’s Cave. There in the profusion of iron pots and soap and buttons and brushes and buckets, Berman’s General Supplies had bales of cloth for dressmaking, which my aunt liked to caress, but was never able to buy. The Jews had arrived after the Boer War. Everyone said they were good at business.

  The younger maids walked with a slow sliding action, their bare feet dragging along the old Oregon pine and red-cement floors, so that I could hear them coming, making a noise like a gentle wave on a beach. I can hear it now. I am sixty years old.

  At my house near Cape Town, close to the sea, I wake every day to the pounding of the waves. Sometimes it is wild, at others it is no more than a soothing whisper; from my bedroom I can judge the strength of the waves by the resonance carried on the south-easter. I have been entranced by the sea and its forces. If the weather was stormy, we sang a hymn in the school chapel for those in peril on the sea. I wondered how this plangent hymn was going to help as the waves flowed over the decks of fishing boats and the engines cut out. I have read that the Haida people of the western coastline of Canada regard the sea as more benign than the land. In their minds, the dangers and betrayals of the landlubber’s life are far more treacherous and unpredictable than life on the ocean, which is subject to elemental rules.

  Now that I look back across all those years, I wonder why Tannie Marie chose to read to me from Pinocchio. Pinocchio was written by Carlo Collodi in the 1880s and, in an old tradition of children’s writing, it had a moral message: the message was that Pinocchio, if he was brave, truthful and unselfish, could become a real boy rather than a wooden puppet. Maybe Tannie Marie saw herself as my Geppetto, my creator. And in a way she was, because it was she who started me reading.

  Outside, as she read to me, the sheep would be hanging their heads low, their blue-tinged tongues listlessly feeling out the dry paddocks – camps – for grass or sticking close to the wind pump with its lifeless sails. We called these pumps ‘windmills’ but they did no milling. When the wind blew it set the mechanism in motion; at first there was a harsh clanking and a reluctant crashing of gears before a trickle of cold, life-giving water appeared from a pipe that led directly into the tank, creating a minor turbulence. There was always a sense of relief when water was flowing again. Where the water overflowed, there was a small swamp, full of tadpoles and the occasional frog that was waiting for its moment to move on and escape the cattle egrets. I found it hard to believe that tadpoles turned into frogs and toads, and I was amazed when I saw the small froggy legs appearing on their sides.

  In fact the dam was a round cement structure built on the ground, nothing more than a large tank. I was allowed to climb up a ladder to swim in an inflated inner tube, even though the water was destined for the house. In the afternoon the body of water would be warm and greenish.

  Fascinated, I watched the water being directed into the furrows that irrigated the vegetable gardens before being directed, by pulling up one sluice gate and closing another, to the parched fields planted with maize and pumpkins. The first tongues of the water wo
uld roll down the furrows, gathering strength as the workers guided the water to the fields, the lande. I was watching a sort of parable, a demonstration in miniature of how to make the desert bloom. As the red soil was inundated, the water would itself become tinged with red. Sometimes frogs appeared from nowhere, rejoicing in their new domains, so I thought. Dragonflies would swoop over the inundated fields, snakes would flee, and white egrets would follow to see what had been made homeless and vulnerable. The land was thirsty; it sucked up the water greedily. As with the Mesopotamian marshes, which were drained and re-flooded, there was inescapably something biblical about the return of water to parched lands. In Africa, documentary film-makers often indicate the onset of the rainy season by filming the first trickles of water aggregating to become a flood.

  There were other dams on the farm, hollowed out by tractors and small bulldozers and by gangs of black men with shovels; I saw the white contractors sitting under a lone pepper tree keeping an eye on the workers. Sometimes these workers were convicts, wearing shorts and a kind of shift; then a white man holding an old .303 rifle would keep watch on them. I saw one of these men beating a convict with a sjambok, a thick rhino-skin whip. When I told my aunt what I had seen, she said, Yes, I know, it’s terrible but what can we do? They are not our people. Onse mense. Was she referring to the policemen or to the black people? I didn’t ask.

  Later my father, who was the editor of a campaigning newspaper in Johannesburg, revealed that, all over the Transvaal, warders in the Prison Service were renting out convicts very cheaply to their farmer friends. On a potato farm not far from Potchefstroom, my father’s reporters discovered that five convicts on loan had been beaten to death by farmers. That’s the way it was then. My father was accused of being a communist for this exposé. A dead dog was delivered to his office as a warning. He liked dogs, and his concern was for the dog rather than for himself.

  I was full of eager anticipation when the windmills cranked up in response to the dry wind which arrived on a whim from nowhere and the water began to flow. I wondered where the water came from, and how it rested deep in the baked soil and how water diviners – usually drunks, I seem to remember – employed a cleft stick to find water. They would walk haphazardly about, following their dowsing rods, made from the branches of a tree with an affinity to water. I wanted to know why the water was so clear if it had soaked through the thick layer of cow dung that carpeted the kraal. It was from aquifers, deep down in rock, I was told. The black people used fresh cow dung to make the floors in their houses; it was spread flat with a plank from a fruit box, and allowed to dry hard and smooth. When dry it was odourless.

  In many ways, I understood, the black people lived in their own, inscrutable, universe, one that existed almost unrecognised at the heart of the Afrikaner world. Nothing that black Africans did or said or believed was given a moment’s consideration by the whites. It was as if what the black people wanted, or thought, or believed was of less than no consequence; it should all be forgotten, purged. It was also believed that black people were innately childish: all they wanted was food and a roof over their heads and a Christmas box or a bottle of cheap sherry. Even then I could see that these were self-serving beliefs. Strangely, some white farmers would go to the local sangoma, the witch doctor, for remedies. The sangomas could offer good luck, or remedies made from plants or cures for impotence.

  I have more or less lost touch with my family in Potchefstroom, but I find that my days on the farm – how many days in all, I wonder – have left their mark on my mind, as though fifty years ago I was given a private viewing of another world.

  One day my father appeared unannounced, bouncing down the farm road in his Dodge. Its suspension was designed for American highways. He said we were going home. My aunt packed my small case quickly and she cried as I left. She reached into the car to touch my face. I knew something catastrophic had happened. It was on the drive back to Johannesburg that my father told me my mother had died. It was difficult to take in.

  ‘Daddy, you said she was getting better.’

  ‘There were complications.’

  ‘What are complications?’

  ‘Things went wrong in the hospital. The doctors did their best. She fought bravely. Mummy said that you would always be her little man, and that she would watch over you from heaven.’

  My father was an atheist but he was prepared to give up his principles to comfort me, and, out of bottomless desperation, I wanted to believe that my mother was in heaven, keeping an eye on me, her little mannetjie. I never saw my Tannie Marie again; I think now that my father decided we would have nothing more to do with my mother’s family, as if they carried a kind of contagion, although he would never have said anything that harsh; he believed passionately in good manners. He wept in the car, and I was shocked to hear a grown man sobbing. I saw on his face, which was running with tears, just how serious the situation was, now that my beautiful mother was dead, and this disturbed me deeply. Through the tears my father could not see where he was going. We had to stop on the endless brown flatlands to gather ourselves. It was the first time my father had ever hugged me. He almost squeezed the life out of me in his demonstration of solidarity, so that I had to tap him on the shoulder with my free hand, like a wrestler conceding. In my mind’s eye I seem to recall that we, entwined like figures by Rodin, were watched by two imperious blue cranes, the country’s national bird – elegant and supercilious creatures, with a stiff, fastidious gait, as if they were not wholly at ease with their surroundings and were treading cautiously.

  Gradually my memories of my mother faded, although sometimes in the night I would be woken by an image of her diving into the green water. She was just thirty-three when she died.

  3

  Not so long ago, I was idling in my house in Notting Hill, when I saw an extraordinary clip on YouTube. Somewhere in the sea off the coast of South Africa, a man was swimming, wearing a head camera and carrying a spear gun. He was filming and describing what he was doing. Suddenly he became agitated. Oo, vok my, Jissus nee, vok-of jou poes. Loosely translated, he was saying, ‘Oh, fuck me, Jesus, no, fuck off, you cunt.’

  A great white shark, on an outing from the age of the dinosaur, was approaching him smoothly. In his distress, his Afrikaans probably seemed more apt than English, more effective against shark-attack anyway, because of its rich vocabulary of imperatives, honed over the centuries of instructing the brown and black peoples. When he broke the surface I recognised the voice: it was my much younger cousin, Jaco Retief, who I hadn’t seen for nearly twenty years. He was now a man of about thirty-five, I calculated. As he swam, whooping hysterically, his voice was aerated by bubbles and his giant fins flailed away like windmills behind him.

  But now the great white was coming back for a second look at Cousin Jaco and, to give him credit, Jaco dived and turned towards the shark – very bravely, I thought. The shark was as big as a house. Its face was inscrutable and cold, in the way that mass-murderers are always said to be emotionless. It was impossible to tell if the shark was hungry or just curious. Jaco held his flimsy spear gun with its puny harpoon, which was supposed to be propelled by a gas canister. This canister looked more like a can of beans than an offensive weapon, and now he pointed the spear gun at the shark as it came steadily closer with its smooth, suave face, that revealed two rows of huge teeth and what could have been mistaken for a smile.

  Jaco was shouting at the oncoming horror: Vok-of jou poes, vok-of! But now the great white was approaching. Jaco turned towards the shark instinctively. He pointed his spear gun at the shark. The shark came steadily closer, suggesting that it might well be preparing to eat Jaco. When it was less than a metre away, Jaco prodded the shark with his spear gun, perhaps hoping to stab it in the eye. The spear gun barely dented the shark’s skin, but –miraculously – it turned away and glided off into the murk. Jaco swam fast for a few minutes and climbed onto what was probably a paddle ski; I couldn’t see clearly because he was creat
ing a lot of turbulence. As he turned to see what it was up to, the shark surfaced very near the boat for a last assessment of Jaco’s potential as a foodstuff, before turning and diving.

  I remembered one of Carlo Collodi’s stories about a giant shark swallowing first Geppetto and then Pinocchio; it looked as though my Cousin Jaco was about to suffer the same fate, although it seemed unlikely that Jaco would survive inside a shark, as Geppetto and Pinocchio had. It didn’t occur to me immediately that the shark would have swallowed the head camera as well as Jaco. And of course then there would have been no YouTube record.

  Jaco paddled frantically for the shore, and when he got there, still gibbering and shaking, he described to the camera what had happened: ‘There I is looking for kabeljou or a steenbras and suddenly this fucking huge shark come towards me. I’m shitting myself. This is a monster, true’s God, and I think I am fucked, for certain this huge fucker is going to eat me.’

  In the middle of this piece to camera Jaco began to laugh. The laughter was not born of merriment, but hysteria. It was very disturbing. ‘Every time what this fucker dives and I doesn’t see him I’m thinking he’s going to come up from under me at fifty kilometres an hour and chop me in two or come up to my paddle ski and then bite me and the boat in one hap. True’s God, I am sure I am fucked.’

  Now, bizarrely, he made a confession, weeping. He was seized by the idea that this was some sort of payback for neglecting his native religion, the Dutch Reformed Church.

  I saw Jaco a few months later at the funeral for Tannie Marie, who had died aged ninety. The last time I had seen Cousin Jaco, he was on a school rugby tour of Britain and he came to visit me. He needed some money: he couldn’t believe how fucking expensive London was. In return I went to watch him play rugby at Eton. To my mortification, he provoked a number of fights on the field. There was something about floppy Etonian hair and soft pale skin that enraged him, perhaps summoning in his mind images of the Boer War. After all, around nine hundred Boers, most of the women and children, had died in the British concentration camp at Potchesfstroom alone, not much more than a few miles from the farm. The following week Jaco was sent home after he punched a barman in Kent, where his team had just won a match 97–3. The three points were the product of a penalty awarded after Jaco stood on the opposing prop’s head. He was on a mission of retribution.