Half of One Thing Page 8

  ‘It’s just me,’ she whispered. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  Steyn mumbled assent and lay back.

  Esther led the pony until she was out of the ravine. By this time she could see where she was going. She got on the horse and the animal let out a groan. ‘C’mon, you’ll see where we’re going.’ Oh, if there was something left at home that she could save …

  After a while, she started recognising not only landforms, but trees and the evidence of her father’s labour. It was all so familiar, except for the smell of burning. Then she saw the house. Its blackened shape looked smaller than the home she knew. The roof was gone, but it was something else, as if the building had shrunk. Everything seemed a little too small, at the wrong scale for the surroundings. The horse noticed the smells too, home and horror. Its gait got nervous and Esther had to pull on the reins. The animal stopped. The only things that moved were moved by the breeze. Two of the fruit trees had caught alight too and now stood black and bare of leaves. She dismounted and walked towards the house, leading the horse towards the trough where it had drunk so often before. The silence was overwhelming, so different to how it had been only twenty-four hours before – the crowing of cocks, stirrings in the kitchen to get a fire and breakfast going, the bleating and lowing of livestock, birds in the trees … No, those were still there. The birds had not been evicted. They sang as if everything was still the same, as they had for aeons – look, the sun is coming up, a glorious day awaits if you’re happy to eat worms.

  She left the horse, which had started to nibble on clumps of grass, and made her way towards the front door, or the opening where the front door had been. She stepped inside. The remains of the roof had fallen inside the ruin and she had to step over the charred beams, slowly going from room to room, her hands pressed to her breast so she wouldn’t touch anything and the things that touched her would hurt her less. There was nothing but destruction. What wasn’t burnt was broken. In the lounge, the harmonium was recognisable but could never be used to make music other than primitive drumming. The few enamel bowls that remained in the kitchen had bullet holes in them. The stove, which was built to withstand fire, could be salvaged, she supposed. It was too heavy to take to the Lost Lamb though. In her parents’ room, the big bed looked as if someone had sacrificed an elephant on it. The legs were broken and the mattress had been hacked to pieces. Her brother’s room, which had become a shrine since they had the news that he had fallen in battle, would no longer welcome the ghost of its former occupant. Her own bedroom was empty: everything had been thrown out the window, tearing half the window frame from the wall in the process. Near the floor, she saw a mark she had scratched in the wall as a little girl, one that had earned the ire of her mother. The evidence of that wilful act had survived, the crocheted cloths of diligent hours had not. There was nothing, nothing she could pick up and take to her mother and say, ‘Surprise, look at what we thought we had lost, but we hadn’t.’

  The sky had turned blue above the remaining rafters. There was no use hanging around any longer.

  She left with the feeling that everything had aged a lot, except the landscape that had always been there. When she walked out of what had been the house and looked beyond the yard to the hills, she saw things as they had been the day before and long before that.

  Down where the road rounds the weeping willow, a horse appeared, very much like the day before. It occurred to her that perhaps the last twenty-four hours had been a dream, that she would turn around and her mother would be there on the stoep, tending the canary. But how then to explain all these memories, this exhaustion, the smell of smoke? And the fact that the horse down the road wasn’t carrying a Sotho boy. It was plodding with a man, a fat scarecrow, no two men, on its back. The horse’s head bobbed up and down as if it were dragging an invisible load and the surface of the earth was uphill all the way. Esther watched the quaint spectacle. She was not afraid enough to hide and too intrigued even to leave. The man in front slumped in the embrace of the one behind. The rider pulled in the reins when he saw her.

  She recognised the man in front and went towards them, the second time in less than a day. ‘Mr Matzdorff?’

  ‘I don’t think he can hear you.’

  The shopkeeper was held by that Dutchman, Esther noticed, the one from the commando who seemed to look at her and past her at the same time. With all that had happened, she hadn’t thought about it before, but seeing him again brought it back. The day before she had thought there was something very strange about him, like he knew too much and cared too little. But here he was, holding a bleeding man to his bosom, and in his underwear for God’s sake. ‘How did you get here?’ She meant more than that; she meant why too.

  ‘There was a counter-attack. Our men fled and we got left behind … He needs help. I’m taking him to the commando.’

  Esther took hold of Matzdorff’s wrist. ‘His pulse is uneven. Get him off the horse.’

  ‘If we get off, we won’t be able to get back on.’

  One look at the man convinced her he was speaking the truth. ‘I don’t think you’ll make it to the commando … You’d better come with me.’

  When the riders arrived at the Lost Lamb, it brought the inhabitants of the ravine to their feet. Esther rode in front, followed by a big, well-fed British army horse carrying two of their own, never mind that one wounded man was Jewish and the other, supposedly, Dutch. Klein Steyn had identified them at a distance. He felt strangely proud in front of the women and children, for they knew he was really part of that group, the fighting men. At the same time, seeing these two haggard and bloodied creatures shocked him. After a day of enjoying the kindness of women, he could almost start believing in normality again. He was still lethargic after eating a massive breakfast of sausage, eggs and bread.

  Esther stopped near the tent she shared with her mother and grandmother. ‘We have to help them.’ They owed these men who fought to avenge the burning of the farm. And she owed it to herself to save them, for that seemed to be the only way to evade the dreaded ambush of hopelessness and helplessness that awaited. She got her mother to help and together they stood next to the large mare, arms outstretched to guide the two men to the ground. They moved as one, the Jew and the Dutchman, as if their bodies, not just the soaked fabric of their clothes, had fused together. The women helped Gideon land on his feet and then they tore Matzdorff off him, each ducking under one of the wounded man’s arms and staggering towards the tent like punch-drunk front-rowers looking for a scrum. Gideon’s knees buckled and for the second time in just over twelve hours he fell to the ground.

  The white people stood in a semicircle around the fallen man. The blacks stood apart, watching the white people watching the wounded.

  ‘This one is shot too,’ said one of the children. This precipitated an outbreak of opinion.

  ‘No, it’s just blood from the other one.’

  ‘His arm’s hurt and his head as well.’

  ‘Why is he in his underwear?’

  Mrs Naudé told the kids to shut up and she spread her shawl over the prone figure. You don’t want the young ones looking at his manhood. Where it wasn’t form-hugging, the material gaped dangerously.

  At that moment, Esther appeared from the tent. ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He just keeled over.’

  ‘He must be dead from exhaustion. Steyn, come help me get him to the tent.’

  ‘He does seem to have some injuries …’ Mrs Naudé let it go. Esther had taken charge.

  Klein Steyn and Esther each took hold of a shoulder and dragged the unconscious man to the tent, his boot heels scraping along the ground.

  ‘He’s from Java,’ said Steyn.

  Steyn had found the rhythm of the horse and was relaxed in the saddle; his stomach was comfortably full; the sun shone and he was surrounded by some of the most beautiful scenery in God’s creation, stupendous green mountains with cliffs of gold. He had been born not three hours away, not much more than six
teen years ago. He was physically strong and growing stronger. Despite the war and all he’d lost and suffered, he believed there would be diamonds to discover on his path through life – brilliant, flawless stones waiting to be claimed, treasured and displayed. So why was he jealous of those two wounded foreigners who lay in that tent, gasping for life and lucidity? Was it because they were men and didn’t have to prove it to anyone? Because their wounds were badges of honour, medals of blood for choosing to risk life and limb in defence of truth and justice? Because they had lived more and seen more of the world than he had? Or because they received the attentions of that unworldly, but oh so flesh-and-blood woman?

  He didn’t understand his own feelings and recognised them as unbecoming, but the self-awareness he enjoyed. His inner life was a newly discovered, guilty pleasure, indulged in in discreet portions. He wondered if everyone had thoughts like these or if he was special, chosen by God to live life in hitherto hidden ways. Was that why he was stripped of all close relatives at such a young age, to prepare him for a life of singular distinction? He couldn’t recall ever looking forward to the future with such anticipation. Only those two men in Esther’s tent dampened the outlook. He had to go tell Commandant Jacob Eksteen about them. Already he could see the ridge that hid the camp.

  He had stayed at the Lost Lamb all morning, helping to put up a new shelter for the three generations of Calitz women. Esther decided not to risk moving Matzdorff again. (‘He’s been jostled enough, I don’t want to add the last straw.’) For his troubles, Steyn got another hearty meal of leftover bean stew, rice, pumpkin and almost-fresh tomato. Esther’s mother kissed him when he left, but she kept referring to her dead son and he felt a bit awkward. The grandmother just waved and Esther shook his hand. She did give him a wondrous smile though.

  ‘Ah, the prodigal son is back!’ someone called as he rode into the camp.

  ‘We didn’t expect you back at all, the way you were looking at that girl,’ Du Plessis chimed in. ‘I thought maybe you’d been shot … Cupid’s arrow makes the worst wound of all – it never heals.’

  Steyn knew he was supposed to respect his elders, but this man made it hard. ‘Where’s the commandant?’

  ‘Just over the hump there, on the far side.’ They pointed and Steyn steered his horse that way.

  Jacob Eksteen sat on a flat rock, a Lee-Enfield across his knees while he whittled away at the stock, carving a tableau of the blind leading the blind. His old Mauser had borne the relief of a landscape, willows lining a stream, with a family crest on the other side, but he broke it when he ran out of ammunition and switched the German rifle for an English one. The carving would help make this rifle his own, he felt. By work we assert our mastery over things, by sweat our proprietary rights. This is how his people came to own this land, by working it. On the other side of the stock, he was planning to put an image of the scales of justice and, then, at the top, right there where the wood meets the steel, one unblinking eye to complement his own single oculus. He used his thumb to rub the fine woodchips out of a new groove, then blew on it. He tried not to think, because his thoughts frightened him.

  He still had three men missing – Triegaardt, Matzdorff and the Dutchman – plus two lightly wounded and one who had the medic worried. Only Triegaardt’s body had been seen, his skull ripped open. There was a chance the others were still alive. A year or two ago this was the kind of death toll they’d have after a major battle, not a relatively small skirmish like this. The Boers were not like the bloody Khakis, letting themselves be shot at. Hiding or retreating to fight another day was far more sensible, and ultimately better for the cause than charging into bullets. Yesterday’s attack was stupid, a knee-jerk reaction not planned and executed to the normal standards. It was probably easy for the Khakis to spot the commando at their heels. Maybe they even deliberately picked a campsite that gave the commando obvious places to attack from, places the Khakis could then target for their counter-attack. He felt like he had walked into an ambush. It was his fault, for being so damn frustrated that he couldn’t resist fighting, for being so affected by Esther Calitz. God, the sun on her smooth, peachy cheeks … Did he fail?

  The knife slipped and pricked his finger, drew blood. He sucked it. He hated doubting himself, it distorted the whole world. He needed one solid point of reference, an unwavering certainty to support the constructs of reality. Of course, if there had been a traitor, everything would be explained by the failings of another. Maybe one of the two who hadn’t returned went off with the Khakis, that pot-thieving Jew or the Java man. Something about the Dutchman didn’t add up. He was too controlled. Jacob had never seen him just laugh with abandon or get angry or anything. One of those two … If he ever caught a traitor he’d make him regret his birth, Jacob thought, that’s for sure. He had heard that De Wet himself told his men to ‘shoot the motherfuckers’ when they had captured the traitors Morgendaal and Wessels. Triegaardt was a good man and if he had died because of some treacherous bastard, vengeance would be well justified.

  Jacob shifted his bony behind into a less uncomfortable position on the rock. A fly buzzed about, seemingly fixated on something on Jacob’s face. He batted at it.

  ‘Commandant?’

  Jacob got up. It was the boy, Steyn, holding his hat in front of his stomach, two fists on the brim. It occurred to Jacob that the boy may have had the opportunity to go to the British. ‘Where were you all the time?’

  ‘Sorry I took so long, Commandant. They wanted me to help them set up camp and to help with the wounded.’

  ‘What wounded?’

  Steyn told him the story of how the Dutchman had gone and stolen a horse from under the Khakis’ noses and how he brought Mr Matzdorff back, despite being wounded himself. ‘It’s quite heroic, actually.’

  Jacob exhaled violently through his nose to blow the pesky fly away. ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘He was so exhausted, he collapsed right there, after Esther … Miss Calitz took Mr Matzdorff away.’

  ‘So, she’s looking after the two of them?’

  Steyn nodded.

  Jacob felt a pang of envy, standing there in the veldt, his boots among rocks and grasses, wind about his ears. ‘I’ll go check on them tomorrow, find out if they know anything that might explain how the Khakis knew we were coming.’

  28–29 October 1901

  That night, Esther and Gideon took turns to watch each other sleep.

  She stayed up for Mr Matzdorff, sitting on a small folding chair between the two men’s bedrolls. The shopkeeper was going through a struggle – groaning, sweating and wrestling with unseen demons. Esther wiped his brow, trickled water between his lips, propped him up with pillows, as he seemed to breathe easier when not lying prone. She tried to stay awake, but drifted off for short periods, letting her head rest on pillows she hugged to her knees. Sitting like that, she could see the Dutchman. Sometimes, when he dozed off, she stared at his hollow cheeks and tousled hair. For Esther, adult men in anything but warrior mode had been scarce for a few years, certainly at this level of intimacy. And the idea that this man had come from foreign shores imbued him with exotic allure. She remembered the first time she saw him. She had been telling Jacob about the Khakis coming, yet the Dutchman’s look penetrated through all that into a compartment in the back of her mind from where she could retrieve it to examine it from all sides, dusting off and rearranging the memory as she did so. Did that look have any meaning beyond curiosity? He had looked through her at something only he could see. Perhaps he had spotted something of her true nature, the essence hidden from others.

  Matzdorff groaned again, demanding her attention. She lay a damp cloth on his forehead. She didn’t know if this did anything medically, but at least it reassured him that he was not alone in his struggle. His was a face she had known since childhood and it was set grim-jawed in a fight for survival. Yet her thoughts and her gaze, like rain trickling down a window pane, kept shifting to the Dutchman on the other bed.

>   There is no pretence in a sleeping person, no conscious acts to colour your perceptions. Lying there like this, the man was a blank canvas for her fantasies. She could imagine him to be any way she wanted, assign to him the qualities of character she valued, invent a history that hinted at a noble nature. It was a fertile bed for the flower of romance. She even flirted with images of those bony wrists, those supple hands, reaching towards her, imagined that he would intuitively understand what she was about, that he would know and appreciate her, admire her and, while holding her hand, lean forward and lightly brush his lips against her neck … These were not thoughts like recognising the hand of God in creation, that one and one makes two or you should respect your elders – not solid like that. They were ephemeral, reflections of a butterfly’s flight on running water. But who says lives cannot turn on dreams such as these?

  With the sole exception of Jacob Eksteen, she had always felt herself to be in some way above the local boys, more than a match for them in anything. Perhaps it could be different with this man.

  Gideon, between fits of sleep, watched the woman tending to Matzdorff. A candle on the ground was a faint footlight to her silent activity. He enjoyed looking at her without being looked at himself. This way, he needn’t think about what she thought of him. He had had a strong reaction the first time he saw her, when she was talking to Commandant Eksteen. Her unusual appearance, her forthright manner, had set his heart aflutter. That girl bringing the koeksisters in Bloemfontein was probably prettier, but this was beauty of a different order – otherworldly and utterly individual. Lying there, he was closer to her than he had been to any woman for goodness knows how long. Yes, she was a Boer and therefore the enemy and he had to keep his distance. But wasn’t he a man before he was an Englishman? His body told him yes.

  In the morning, her face was the first thing he saw, matching the dream he had been having.