The Covenant (50 page)

“You’ll be the farthest east,” he said in a high, wheezing voice.

“How’d you get over the mountains alone?” Hendrik asked.

“Partner and I, we broke the wagon down, carried the parts over.”

“Where’s your partner?”

“Took himself a farm. Down by the ocean.”

“How you getting back to the Cape?”

“I’ll sell the things. I’ll sell the wagon. Then I’ll walk back and buy another.”

“You plan to come back this way?” Johanna asked.

“Maybe next year.”

“This’ll be a nice place then,” Hendrik said. “Maybe I’ll build us a real house.”

No one believed this. Four years on this farm, a drought or two, a more fertile valley espied on a cattle drive, and the Van Doorns would all be impatient for a move to better land. But now there was food at hand, and a few rix-dollars to pay for it, so the entire family joined in fingering through the old man’s stock.

“I’m not eager to sell,” he said. “Lots of people on the way back want my things.”

“How many people?” Hendrik asked.

“Between here and the mountains … ten … twenty farms. It’s becoming a new Stellenbosch.”

Johanna saw to it that they bought prudently, but at the end of the bargaining she said, “Bet you haven’t had a good meal in weeks.”

“I eat.”

“If you let us have some of that dried fruit, some of those spices, my husband will make you the best bread pudding you ever tasted.”

“That one?” The old man looked almost contemptuously at Hendrik, but when Johanna pressed him on the exchange, he began to waver.

“You got any mutton? Just good mutton?”

“We do.”

“Mutton and pudding. I’d like that.” So the barter was arranged, and while Johanna and Hendrik worked inside the hut, the old man sat on a rickety stool by the entrance, savoring the good smell of meat. Trekboers liked their meat swimming in grease.

It was a gala meal, there at the farthest edge of settlement, and when the meat had been apportioned and there was much surplus, Adriaan said, “I’d like to give Dikkop some.” No one spoke, so he added, “Dikkop and me, we’re going on the walk, you remember.” So it was approved that the Hottentot could come to the doorway of the hut while Adriaan passed him a tin plate of mutton. “Stay here,” he whispered.

Now Hendrik brought forth the crock with no handles, placing it before the old man: “You first.”

This was a mistake. The old fellow took nearly half the pot; he hadn’t had a sweet in ages, and certainly not one with bits of lemon rind and dried apples. The Van Doorns divided the remainder evenly, but Adriaan split his portion in two. “Whatever are you doing?” Johanna asked, and her son said, “I promised Dikkop a share,” and he passed it quickly out.

Their journey was planned for November, when protea blossoms
were opening like great golden moons. Dikkop, brown and barefooted, nineteen years old and well versed in frontier living, would be in charge. Adriaan, well clothed in rugged leather vest and moleskin trousers, and exceptionally informed regarding animals and trees, would be the spiritual leader. They would head for a wild terrain with lions and hippos and elephants and antelope unnumbered. And in the end, if they survived, they would wander back with nothing whatever to show for their journey except rare tales of cliffs negotiated and rivers swum.

In the late spring of 1724 they started east, carrying two guns, two knives, a parcel of dried meat and not a fear in the world.

It was a journey that could rarely be repeated, two young fellows heading into unexplored land without the least concept of what they might be finding, except that it would be an adventure which they felt confident of handling. Dikkop was an unusual Hottentot, skilled as a carpenter, like a Malay, but also beautifully adapted to the wild, like many Hottentots. He had a sense of where danger might lie and how to avoid it. He dreaded physical confrontations and would travel considerable distances to escape them; he was, indeed, something of a coward, but this had helped him stay alive in difficult surroundings and he did not propose altering his philosophy now.

Adriaan, in the wilderness, was a remarkable boy, afraid of nothing, confident that he could confront any animal no matter how big or powerful, and alive to all the sensations about him. If his grandfather Willem had been the first Afrikaner, he was the second, for he loved this continent more devoutly than any other child alive at that time. He was part of it; he throbbed to its excitement; he lived with its trees and bushes and birds; and if he could not read books, he could certainly read the documents of nature about him.

They had no tent, no blankets. At night Dikkop, drawing upon knowledge ten thousand years old, showed Adriaan how to form a declivity in the earth for his hip and then to place bushes against his back to break the breeze. They drank whatever water they came upon, for none could be polluted. They ate well, of ripening berries, nuts, roots, an occasional river fish, grubs and abundant meat whenever they wanted it.

They climbed trees to survey distant areas, guided themselves by the stars, keeping a middle path between the mountains to the north,
the ocean to the south. Occasionally they spied Hottentot clans, but they preferred to avoid them, for this was an adventure they did not want to share with others. In this way they covered more than a hundred and fifty miles due eastward. On the banks of one river, where all things seemed to be in harmony—grass for cattle had they had any, flat fields for seed, good water to swim in, fine trees for timber—they remained two weeks, exploring the river north and south, testing the herds of game. In later years Adriaan would often remember that river, and would ask Dikkop, “What do you suppose the name of that river was? Where we stayed those weeks doing nothing?” But they could never deduce what river it must have been: Groot Gourits, Olifants, Kammanassie, Kouga, Gamtoos. It was a river of memory, and sometimes Adriaan said, “I wonder if it was real. I wonder if we dreamed that river.” It was statements like this, heard by practical men, that gave him his name Mal Adriaan: Mad Adriaan. Daft Adriaan. Crazy Adriaan who sleeps in trees.

Thus the great journeys of boyhood mark a man, showing him possibilities others never see, uncovering potentials that stagger the youthful mind and monopolize an entire life in their attaining. A boy of twelve, sleeping in a tree, looks down upon an alien landscape and sees a lioness, lying in wait to trap an antelope at dawn, and as he watches in silence, a zebra moves unconcernedly into the arena, and the antelope skips free when the lioness leaps upon the zebra’s back, breaking its neck with one terrible swipe of claw and snap of teeth. Mal Adriaan, the boy who knows how a lion thinks.

At the midpoint of their journey, when it was about time to turn back with enough stories to fill a lifetime of evening recollections, an accident occurred—nothing of great importance and no harm done—which in its quiet way symbolized the history of the next two hundred and sixty years in this region. Adriaan and Dikkop, white and brown, were traveling idly along a swale that showed no sign of animals, when suddenly Dikkop halted, lifted his head, pointed eastward and said, with some concern and perhaps a little fright, “People!”

Instinctively the two boys took cover, fairly certain that their movements had been so silent that whoever was approaching could not have detected them. They were right. From the far end of the swale came two young men, shimmering black, hunting in an aimless, noisy way. They were taller than either Adriaan or Dikkop, older than the former, younger than the latter. They were handsome fellows,
armed with clubs and assegais; they wore breechclouts and nothing more, except that around the right ankle they displayed a band of delicate blue feathers. They had apparently failed in this day’s hunting, for they carried no dead game, and what they intended eating this night, Adriaan could not guess. However, on they came at a moderate pace which would soon put them abreast of the hiding watchers.

It was a tense situation. The newcomers might pass on without discovering the two boys hiding, but then the problem would be how to skirt either north or south to avoid them. More likely, the newcomers would soon spot the strangers, and then what might happen no one could foretell. Dikkop was trembling with apprehension, but Adriaan merely breathed deeply. Then, without preparation, he spoke loudly but in a gentle voice, and when the two blacks turned in consternation, he stepped forward, holding his empty hands forth and saying in Dutch, “Good day.”

The two blacks automatically reached for their clubs, but now Dikkop moved out, his hands before his face, palms out with fingers extended: “No! No!” The two blacks continued their movements, held up their clubs, brandished them, and faced the strangers, whose hands were still extended. After a very long time, while Dikkop almost dissolved in fear, they slowly dropped their clubs, stood looking at the unbelievable strangers, then moved carefully forward.

In this way Adriaan van Doorn became the first of his family to meet blacks inhabiting the land to the east. Willem van Doorn had landed at the Cape in 1647, but it was not until 1725 that his greatgrandson stood face-to-face with a South African black. Of course, from the early days at the Cape, men like Commander van Riebeeck had owned black slaves, but these were from Madagascar and Angola and Moçambique, never from the great lands to the east. Thus the Van Doorns had occupied the Cape for seventy-eight years before this first contact, and in those fatal generations the Dutch had become committed to the policy of Europeans in whatever new lands they encountered: that whatever they desired of this continent was theirs. During all those years they had paid scant attention to reports from shipwrecked mariners and Hottentot nomads that a major society existed to the east. Because of arrogance and ignorance, the impending confrontation would have to be violent.

“Sotopo,” the younger said when the matter of names was discussed. He came, he said, from far to the east, many days travel,
many days. The older boy indicated that they, like Adriaan and Dikkop, had gone wandering at the end of winter and that they, too, had been living off the land, killing an antelope now and then for food. But this day they had been unlucky and would go to bed hungry.

How did they say this? Not a word of the black language was intelligible to the farm boys, and nothing that Adriaan or Dikkop said was intelligible to the other pair, but they conversed as human beings do in frontier societies, with gestures, pantomime, grunts, laughs, and incessant movement of hands and face. The problem of talking with these strangers was not much different from the problem of talking to strange slaves that the Van Doorns would buy from time to time. The master talked, and that was it. The slave understood partially, and that was enough. What really counted was when Dikkop tried to tell them that with the stick he carried he could catch them an antelope for supper. They were too smart to believe this. A witch doctor could do many things with his magic, but not to an antelope. So the four boys crept quietly to the edge of the swale, waited a long time for animals, and finally spotted a herd of springbok drifting along the veld. Very patiently Dikkop moved into position, took aim at a healthy buck, and fired. When the noise of the gun exploded, the two black youths exclaimed in fear, but when the springbok fell and was collected by Dikkop, they marveled.

The canny Hottentot, aware that this night would probably be spent in the company of these two, used many gestures to warn them that if his stick could kill a springbok far away, it could certainly kill them close at hand. And he further showed them that even if they stole the stick, they would not be able to kill the white man, because they would not have the mystery, which he was not going to explain. They understood.

Onto the embers of the blazing fire went the springbok meat, and as it roasted, the four young men made careful calculations of their situation, each pair speaking freely in its own language, assured that the other could not understand whatever strategies were proposed. Dikkop, who was terrified of the situation, suggested that as soon as they finished the evening meal, he and Adriaan should start back toward the distant farm, relying on their guns to keep the blacks at bay should they attempt to follow. Adriaan laughed at such an idea: “They can run. You can see that from their legs. We’d never escape.”

“So what we do, Baas?” Dikkop asked, almost impertinently.

“We stay here, keep watch and find out as much as we can.”

To Dikkop such a strategy seemed irresponsible, and he said so, sternly; the compromise that evolved was ingenious. As Dikkop explained it, “We sleep in that tree, Baas. With our guns. You sleep first and I keep guard. Then I waken you, you keep your gun trained on them. Shoot them down if they try to kill us.”

But after they had eaten, the strangers licking the antelope fat from their fingers, Adriaan and Dikkop were astonished to see that the blacks headed immediately for a tree, disposing themselves so that they were protected should the two young men try to kill them in the night. Adriaan, as he hollowed out a place on the ground from which he could aim his gun at the tree, noticed that they had taken their warclubs aloft with them.

And so they spent the night, two above, two below; two awake, two asleep. Only when daylight came did the blacks climb down out of their tree.

They were together four days, with Dikkop in a state of near-exhaustion because of the fear that gripped him. The blacks were so much bigger than he, so powerfully muscled, that he could not avoid imagining them swinging their clubs at his head, so that even at the moment when he fired his gun to bring down another antelope, he expected to be brained. He was not unhappy when the accidental partnership showed signs of breaking up, the blacks explaining that they must return eastward eighteen days walking, Dikkop saying with relief that he and Adriaan must go westward their thirty days. He told Adriaan, “About same distance, Baas. They move much faster.”

The parting involved no great emotion, but all felt it to be a pregnant moment. There was no shaking of hands, no
abrazos
in the Portuguese style, only a moment of intense quiet as the two pairs looked at each other for the last time. Then, as if to epitomize the unfolding history of these racial groups, Sotopo thrust out his hand to grasp Adriaan by the arm, but the Dutch boy was frightened by the unexpected movement and drew away. By the time he recovered his senses and wanted to accept the farewell touching, Sotopo had stepped back, mortified that his gesture had been rejected. Dikkop, the Coloured man, merely stood aside and watched, participant in nothing.