Devil's Valley (45 page)
Authors: André Brink
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary, #Contemporary Fiction, #Literary
All I know is that I came here, that I tried to trace a history, and that I’m now on my way back, alone. Less than I was, or more.
Crude Capitals
This is the Bushman Krans. So I’m still on the right track after all. The colours of the rock paintings are surprisingly bright, as if they were done yesterday. The eland, the few elephant, the wildebeest, the small male figures with their silly little pricks. And chiselled right across them, the inscription in crude capitals: STRONG-LUKAS. The hero of his tribe, the one who wiped out the enemy commando. Somewhere below these very cliffs must lie the bones of the girl he shrugged from his back when they no longer needed her. To keep their honour and their pride intact, for all the generations to come. It is as if I can hear Ouma Liesbet Prune’s little cricket-voice chirping again, “Lukas Seer begat Lukas Nimrod, and Lukas Nimrod begat Lukas Up-Above, and Lukas Up-Above begat Strong Lukas, and Strong-Lukas begat Lukas Bigballs, and Lukas Bigballs begat Lukas Devil, and Lukas Devil begat Lukas Death, and Lukas Death begat Little-Lukas.”
All of it as improbable as the skeleton of a whale in the mountains. And yet I was there, I saw it, I crumbled a piece of bone to dust between my fingers. Does that mean anything? Or am I beginning to grow into my own story like a toenail? Would Tant Poppie have a remedy for that?
Is The Last
For the moment everything is focused on a single point. To get out of here. And I’m well on my way. The day is almost over. For how many hours I have been going I cannot calculate, but it’s been a fucking long time. Just a short distance more. Our crime reporter is returning with a story after all. Perhaps this time he’ll meet his deadline. It may not turn out to be publishable, but that is neither here nor there. What counts is that the rat will have been fed at last.
Here are the two grey boulders, speckled with lichen, with fire inside. One of them has been split in two and lies broken on its side. The light is fading. Dusk has fallen. A thin little breeze is rustling in the brittle grass. Summer is over. It is autumn now.
Less than a hundred yards to go and I’ll be out.
Then something hits my burning breath right out of my fucking lungs.
In the distance, on a small outcrop of rocks, at the ridge of the rise, exactly where Mooi-Janna would have met the men, sits the almost transparent figure of the shrunken old patriarch, his piss-stained beard tangled in the breeze, the two crutches beside him. His flock of mottled goats are grazing in mock-tranquillity to one side. He is staring into the distance, away from me.
I can hear my heart thudding in my ears. All I still have to do is to get past him. This is the last ordeal.
And then I hear him say, without looking at me, “I been sitting here waiting for you.”
| ag | oh well |
| agterryer | batman, (Coloured) aide |
| baas | master |
| bantom | quartz-like pebble, fool’s diamond |
| bergie | Cape Town vagrant |
| biltong | strips of dried salted meat |
| blue-train | methylated spirits |
| boetie | sonny (literally: little brother) |
| bredie | stew |
| buchu | fragrant herb, often used for kidney complaints |
| bywoner | tenant farmer, usually poor-white |
| Cape Smoke | nineteenth-century husk brandy made in the Cape Colony, notorious for its potency and pungency |
| christmas-worm | accordion |
| Comrades | ANC-supporting activists in black townships in the 1980s |
| dagga | South African marijuana |
| dassie | rock-rabbit |
| doepa | medicine, usually with a connotation of a magic potion |
| droewors | dried sausage |
| dwaal, in a | dazed (literally: to wander) |
| duiker | small antelope |
| eland | large antelope |
| fynbos | scrub, shrubbery, undergrowth |
| geelslang | yellow-snake, extremely poisonous species of cobra |
| ja | yes |
| kappie | old·fashioned bonnet |
| karie | strong beer brewed from honey |
| kaross | blanket or bed-cover made of animal skins |
| Khoikhoi | indigenous inhabitants of South Africa, known (pejoratively) as ‘Hottentots’ |
| Khoisan | collective appellation of related indigenous peoples (“Hottentots’ and ‘Bushmen”) |
| kierie | stick, cane |
| kist | large chest |
| klipspringer | small antelope in mountainous habitat (literally: rock-jumper) |
| kloof | ravine or narrow valley |
| koppie | rocky hill |
| krans | cliff |
| leguan | iguana |
| lobola | (African) bride-price |
| maar | but; just |
| mebos | sugared dried apricots |
| meerkat | ground squirrel |
| meid | (pejorative) black or ‘Coloured’ woman |
| mooi | pretty, beautiful |
| mos | indeed; as you should know |
| muti | witch-doctor’s potion |
| naartjie | tangerine |
| nagmaal | holy communion |
| necklacing | lynching by burning tyres, often performed by anti-government activists on suspected pro-apartheid informers |
| neef | cousin or nephew; also familiar form of address for a man roughly the same age as the speaker, or younger |
| Newlands | rugby stadium in Cape Town |
| Ossewa-Brandwag | extremist right-wing Afrikaner movement which resisted the effort of the South African government under Prime Minister Jan Smuts in support of the Allied forces against Hitler in the Second World War (literally: Ox-Wagon Guard) |
| oom | uncle; also familiar form of address for older man |
| ouma | grandmother |
| oribi | small antelope |
| padkos | traveller’s provisions (literally: food-for-the-road) |
| pandoer | Khoikhoi or ‘Coloured’ soldier in nineteenth-century Cape Colony |
| predikant | Dutch Reformed preacher |
| Rebellion | 1914–1915 uprising of Afrikaners against the decision of the South African government to support Britain in the First World War |
| riem(pie) | leather strip, thong |
| riempiesbank | bench with thong seats |
| samp | stamped maize kernels |
| sjambok | horsewhip |
| skinder | gossip |
| smous | pedlar, itinerant trader |
| steenbok | small antelope |
| stoep | veranda |
| Swartberg | Black Mountain, a range in the Little Karoo |
| tant(e) | aunt; also familiar form of address for an older woman |
| veldskoen | rough handmade shoe |
| voorhuis | front room |
| wagon-tree | tree-protea, the hard wood of which was used to make the fellies of wagon wheels |
| witblits | home-distilled alcohol, moonshine (literally: white lightning) |
| witdoek | black vigilantes in cahoots with police during riots in the Cape Town area in the 1980 s (literally: white-cloths, from the distinguishing scarfs they wore) |
| witgat (coffee) | acrid brew made from an indigenous root |
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