The Covenant (26 page)

“No.”

“You’re like the others.” When Van Doorn looked bewildered, the energetic little commander took him by the arm, led him to a parapet from which the valleys lying at the foot of Table Mountain were visible, and said with great enthusiasm, “This soil can grow anything. But sometimes we approach it the wrong way.” He winced, recalling one early disaster. “From the start I wanted grapes. I brought with me the seeds, but our gardener planted them the way to plant wheat. Scattered them broadside, plowed them under, and six months later harvested weeds.”

“How do you grow them?”

“Rooted vines, each one separately. Then you make cuttings …”

“What are cuttings?”

Patiently Van Riebeeck explained the intricate proceedings whereby tiny plants imported from Europe turned eventually into
casks of wine headed for Java. “Why do we bother?” Willem asked, for he saw that fruit trees and vegetables would flourish.

“Java’s demanding wine,” the commander said sharply. Hustling Willem back to his rude office, he pointed to a large map that showed the shipping route from Amsterdam to Batavia: “Every vessel that plies these waters wants wine. But they can’t fetch it from Holland, because that wine’s so poor it sickens before the equator and reaches us as vinegar. Your task is to make wine here.”

So Willem van Doorn, now thirty years of age, was settled upon a plot of ground belonging to the Compagnie and given nine basketfuls of small rooted vines imported from the Rhineland. “Make wine,” Van Riebeeck said peremptorily, “because if you succeed, after twenty years you’ll be free to head for Holland.”

“You also?” Willem asked.

“No, no! I’m here for only a brief time. Then I go back to Java.” His eyes brightened. “That’s where the real jobs are.”

Willem started to say that he preferred the Cape to either place, but since he had never seen Holland, he concluded that this might be presumptuous; still, the fact that Van Riebeeck thought well of Java made him more attractive.

For a man who had never done so, to make wine presented difficulties, but Van Riebeeck showed Willem how to plant the precious roots, then provide them with poles and strings to grow upon, and finally, prune them along the lines required. He learned how to use animal fertilizer and irrigation, but most of all, he learned to know the howling southeast winds that blew incessantly in some seasons, making the high ground near the mountain a grave for growing things.

“It didn’t blow like this when we were here before,” he complained, but the Compagnie gardeners laughed at him, for they were weary of hearing his constant recollections.

“We were up there,” he said, pointing some nine miles to the north, where the winds had been gentler. The men ignored him, for in their opinion there could be no spot in this forlorn land where the winds did not howl. But they showed him how to plant trees to give protection, if they survived, and offered other encouragements, for they, too, needed wine.

Willem realized that he had been handed an unrewarding assignment in which failure was probable, but it gave him one advantage which he prized: everyone else at the Cape lived within the fortress walls in cramped, unpleasant quarters, while he enjoyed the freedom
of living in his own hut beside his vines. True, he had to walk some distance for food and companionship, but that was a trivial price to pay for the joy he found in living relatively free.

But his freedom accentuated the slavery in which Deborah lived, and often at night, when he would have wanted to be with her, he was in his hut and she in the fort, locked in the guardhouse. The Malayan slaves had been thoughtfully placed by Van Riebeeck: “One man and woman will work for my wife. The strongest man will work the ships. The other woman can do general work for the Compagnie.”

Deborah was the latter, and as she moved about the fort, Van Riebeeck saw that she was pregnant. This did not trouble him, for like any prudent owner, he hoped for natural increase, and since Deborah was proving the cleverest of his slaves, he assumed that she would produce valuable children. But he was distressed that the father of the unborn child was Van Doorn.

“How did this happen?” he asked Willem.

“On the ship … from Malacca.”

“We need women. Badly we need them. But proper Dutch women, not slaves.”

“Deborah’s a fine person …”

“I’ve already seen that. But she’s Malay. She’s Muslim. And the Bible says—”

“I know. The captain read me the passages. ‘Thou shalt not take a wife from the Canaanites. Thou shalt go to thine own country and find a wife.’ ”

“Excellent advice.” Van Riebeeck rose from his desk and paced for several moments. Then threw his hands upward and asked, “But what shall we do here at the Cape? At last count we had one hundred and fourteen men, nine women. White men and women, that is. What’s a man to do?”

He wanted to bar Van Doorn from visiting with his slave girl, but he refrained because he knew that to exact such a promise in these close quarters would not be sensible. Instead he warned: “Keep marriage out of your mind, Van Doorn. What happens in Batavia will not be encouraged here. The child will be a bastard and a Compagnie slave.” Van Doorn, suspecting that what was law now would be altered later, bowed and said nothing.

But when he saw how far with child Deborah had come, he felt a pressing desire to stay with her and make her his wife, even though his experience in Java should have taught him that these marriages
often turned out poorly. Such memories were obliterated by his recollection of those exceptional marriages in which Javanese women had created homes of quiet joy, half-Christian, half-Muslim, in which the husbands relinquished all dreams of ever returning to a colder Holland and a more severe society.

Deborah, to his surprise, seemed unconcerned about her future, as if the problems of pregnancy were enough. Her beautiful, placid face showed no anxiety, and when he raised questions about her status, she smiled: “I’m to be a slave. I’ll never see my village again.” And he supposed that this was her honest reaction, that she did not prize freedom the way he did.

“I want to care for you,” he said.

“Someone will,” she said, and when his emotion flared, tempting him to steal her from the fort, she laughed again and said that when the time came, Commander van Riebeeck would find her a man.

“Will he?”

“Of course. In Malacca the Portuguese owners always found men for their slave women. They wanted children.”

“I’ll be that man.”

“Maybe you, maybe someone else.”

As the time neared for the birth of their child, Willem endeavored to visit with Deborah as much as possible, and it became known to everyone that he was the father. She walked with him sometimes to the vineyard, thinking with amusement of how a Portuguese grandee at Malacca would have scorned any fellow countryman who dipped his hands into the earth. But she was acquainted with growing things and said, “Willem, those vines are dying.”

“Why? Why do they die?”

“The rows run the wrong way. The wind hits them too strong.” And she showed him how, if he planted his vines along the direction from which the winds blew, and not broadside to it, only the lead plants would be affected, while the sun would be free to strike all the vines evenly.

She was at the vineyard one day, singing with that extraordinary voice, when Van Riebeeck came to inspect the German vines, and he, too, saw that they were dying: “It’s the wind.” And he added grimly, “No wine from these plants,” but he assured Willem that replacement plants were on their way from France. He was determined to produce wine for the Compagnie, even if he had to import new plants constantly.

When the women of the fort led Deborah to her confinement, Willem was overwhelmed by the realization that he was about to become a father, and this had an unexpected effect: he wanted to recover his Bible so that he could record in it the fact of birth, as if by this action he could confirm the Van Doorn presence in Africa. Since he had a hut apart from the others, it would be safe to produce the book without being required to offer explanations as to how he had acquired it. So in the evening after his son was born he slipped along the beach till he came to that ancient cave, and when he was satisfied that no one was spying, he entered it to claim his Bible.

A few days later Commander van Riebeeck appeared at the vineyard, said nothing about the birth of the boy, but did ask for Willem’s assistance on a knotty problem: “It’s this Hottentot Jack. They tell me you know him.”

“Jack!” Willem cried with obvious affection. “Where is he?”

“Where indeed?” And the commander unraveled his version of duplicity, stolen cows, promises made but never kept, and suspected connivance with the dreadful Bushmen who had edged south, enticed by Compagnie sheep and cattle.

“That doesn’t sound like my Jack,” Willem protested.

“The same. Nefarious.”

“I’m sure I could talk with him …”

The complaints continued: “When we arrived in the bay, there he was, uniform of an English sailor, shoes and all.”

“That’s Jack,” Willem said.

The commander ignored him. “So we made arrangements with him. He to serve as our interpreter. We to give him metal tools and objects.”

“He spoke English rather well, didn’t he?”

“But he was like a ghost at twilight. Now here. Now gone. And absolutely no sense of property. Whatever he saw, he took.”

“Surely he gave you cattle in return.”

“That’s what I’m here about. He owes us many cattle and we cannot find him.”

“I could find him.”

At this confident offer the commander placed the tips of his fingers together and brought them carefully to his lips. “Caution. We’ve had killings, you know.”

“Our men shot the Hottentots?” Willem asked in amazement.

“There were provocations. It was this sort of thing Jack was supposed to—”

“I’ll go to him,” Willem said abruptly. So Van Riebeeck arranged for three trusted gunners to accompany him in an exploration of those villages which Jack and his people had occupied when the
Haerlem
wrecked, but Willem refused the gunners: “I said I’d go. Not with an army.”

That was the beginning of his difficulties with the Compagnie. Those in authority refused to believe that an unprotected Dutchman would dare to move inland, or survive if he did, but Willem was so confident that he could reach Jack and settle differences with him that he persisted. In the end he was ordered to accept the three gunners, and after strong protest which irritated everyone, he complied.

He had been right. When the Hottentots spied the armed men coming after them, they retreated into the farther hills, driving their sheep and cattle before them. In nine days of wandering, Van Doorn spoke with not a single Hottentot, so perforce he started homeward, but as the four men marched, one of the gunners said, “I think we’re being followed,” and after extra precautions had been taken, it was agreed that some brown man—or men—was keeping to the mounds and trees, marking their progress.

“It’s got to be Jack,” Willem said, and when they came to those slight rises from which the Cape settlement could be seen—the point at which a prudent enemy would turn back—he told the three gunners, “I know it’s my friend. I’ll go to meet him.”

This occasioned loud protest, but he was adamant: “I’ll go without a gun, so that he can see it’s me, his friend.” And off he went, holding his hands wide from his body and walking directly toward the small mound behind which he knew the watcher waited. “Jack!” he called in English. “It’s me. Van Doorn.”

Nothing moved. If the person or persons behind the rise were enemies, he would soon see the flight of deadly assegais, but he was certain that if anyone had the courage to track four well-armed men, it must be Jack, so he called again, loudly enough for his voice to be heard at a far distance.

From behind the hill there came the soft sound of movement. Slowly, slowly, a human form emerged, that of a Hottentot, unarmed and wearing the uniform of an English sailor. For several moments
the two men faced each other, saying nothing. Then Van Doorn dropped his empty hands and moved forward, and as he did so, little Jack began to run toward him, so that the old friends met in a forceful embrace.

They sat on a rock, and Willem asked, “How did these wrongs come to happen?”

It was too difficult to explain. On each side there had been promises unkept, threats that should never have been uttered, and petty misunderstandings that escalated into skirmishes. There had been killings; there would be more, and any possibility of reconciliation seemed lost.

“I don’t believe this,” Willem said. His affection for the slave girl Deborah had intensified his attitudes, making it easier for him to look at this Hottentot as an ally.

“We talk too much,” Jack said.

“But we’re going to stay here, Jack. Forever. A few now, many later. Must we live always as enemies?”

“Yes. You steal our cattle.”

“They tell me you steal our tools. Our European sheep.”

The Hottentot knew that this countercharge was true, but he did not know how to justify it. Enmity had been allowed to fester and could not be exorcised. But one charge was so grave that Willem had to explore it: “Did you murder the white soldier?”

“Bushmen,” Jack said, and with his nimble fingers he indicated the three-part arrow.

“Won’t you please come with me?” Willem begged.

“No.”

There was a painful farewell, the little brown man and the big white, and then the parting, but when the two men were well separated, with Van Doorn heading back to his gunners, one lifted his weapon and shot at Jack. He had anticipated such a probability, so as soon as he saw the gun raised, he jumped behind a mound and was not hit.

On a fine February morning in 1657 nine gunners and sailors assembled outside Van Riebeeck’s office, and all in the fort stopped work and moved closer to hear an announcement that would alter the history of Africa: