The Quarry (8 page)

They came to the dirt road that went out of the township. They rode south. The white town rose in front of them and they passed through it and went on. Then they were on the road that had
brought him to the town. Objects approached at speed and smeared back past them and away and the road rushed below them like a river.

They came to the quarry. They went past it but the policeman slowed almost immediately and made a sweeping turn in the road. The sky was clear, untouched by cloud, and starred with static points
of light. A meteor fell flaming and was gone.

The acre of gravel looked metallic in the night. They rode lightly across it and parked. In the silence that followed the minister looked around. There was the termite hill and the bunches of
scrub and the dark waiting brink of the hole.

They got off the bike. The minister’s hands felt stiffened with cold. His skin was tingling and glowing. He walked away, his feet crunching softly on the gravel, and came to the edge of
the quarry. He stood there, looking down.

Captain Mong came up next to him. Their breath was vaporous on the air. There was silence.

A cold wind blew in from the west, carrying the smell of the sea. A creature called out somewhere with a thin, plaintive cry. A night animal of some kind, predator or prey. The policeman shifted
slightly on his feet.

‘When I first heard your name,’ he said, ‘I was expecting somebody else.’

The minister watched him and waited. It was a time before the policeman spoke again.

‘I was expecting a coloured man.’

The minister smiled. ‘We all are. By now. In this country.’

‘No,’ said the policeman. ‘We’re white.’

There was a silence again. The policeman put his hands in his pockets. He looked acutely uncomfortable. He was staring down into the depths of the quarry where indeterminate shapes were
conjoined.

‘Did you hear what happened here?’ he said.

The minister ran his tongue around his lips. ‘Everybody heard,’ he said.

‘But I got them.’

‘I heard that too.’

‘
Dominee,
’ he said. ‘They’re saying things about you.’

The minister crouched down. He picked up a handful of gravel and ran it through his fingers. When there was one pebble left he held out his hand and he dropped it. It fell swiftly below them
without sound.

‘I’m a man of God.’

‘I know that,
Dominee.
I believe you.’

They looked at each other. Somewhere beyond the horizon there was a distant throbbing of lightning and each of them saw the face of the other, momentary and blanched. The silence went on and
went on. The minister dropped his eyes.

‘And this is the body you want buried?’

‘
Ja,
’ said Captain Mong. ‘It’s the one. Do you mind?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s my job.’

From the quarry a sudden squall of bats erupted and fanned out, seared into silhouette by lightning in a pattern esoteric and exact as though exhaled by the earth. The man stood up. As if by
agreement they walked back slowly together across the gravel. It was cold. They got on to the bike. They rode back together to the town. The minister held on the whole way and he could feel the
policeman’s heart beating under his hand.

The graveyard was at one edge of the township some distance away from the church. It was not like any graveyard he had ever been in before. There was only a fence to mark the
edges of it and the graves were mounds of earth with wooden crosses pegged into them and names burned into the crosses and weeds grew up between the graves.

At the one end there was a man with a spade. He was sitting on a flat rock, smoking a cigarette. He watched the minister. The minister walked towards him. He was wearing the black robe again and
carrying a bible.

A little way from where the man was sitting there was a mound of raw earth and stones. He went to it and at the bottom of a rectangular hole the long wooden box was lying. It was made from pine
planks that fitted neatly together and he could see patterns in the wood.

The grave-digger was watching him. He could feel his eyes. He opened the bible. He looked down at it but the words on the page were opaque and meaningless and he closed the book again and stood.
He started to tremble and his shoulders were shaking and he walked over to the man with the spade. He sat down on the flat rock next to him.

The man looked surprised. He was a black man with a face aged from work. He took a box of cigarettes from a pocket in his overalls and tapped one out for the minister. Then he put away the
cigarettes and from another pocket he took a box of matches and lit it for him. They sat side by side on the rock in the sun and smoked and looked out on the graves.

‘What’s your name?’ the minister said.

The black man shrugged expansively, turning his broad palms outward. It was clear that he didn’t understand.

‘Your name,’ said the minister, and gestured.

‘Jonas,’ the black man said.

‘Jonas,’ said the minister. ‘Good name.’

They sat there smoking, not talking. The sun was warm on their skin and there were sounds from the veld. When he had smoked the cigarette down the minister stubbed it out and flicked the butt
away. He stood up.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Jonas.’

The other man nodded and smiled.

He walked back to the open hole in the ground and stood at the head of it and looked. The box was no different to before. He looked at it and at the earth in the hole that had been prematurely
bared to the light. Then he bent down and picked up a clod and threw it down on the wood, it could have been in benediction or dismissal. He turned and walked back through the graveyard. By the
time he came to the gate he could hear the sound of the spade in the ground and the noise of soil hitting wood but he didn’t turn around or look.

He sat for most of that day in his room. The curtains were drawn and the light was dim inside and if sounds carried in they were distant and distorted, like noises made
underwater.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands clasped and elbows resting on his knees. He didn’t move. Only his eyes moved sometimes.

Later he got up. The window behind the drawn curtains was closed and the air was stale and dense. He stood for a long moment again. Only his eyes were shifting in his face but they saw nothing
there in that room.

He went out and down the passage. At the end of the passage was the kitchen. The woman was sitting at the table, painting red lacquer on her nails.

It was a tiny room with grease ingrained on the walls and formica inlaid on the dressers and table-top and a strip of flypaper dangling in the corner. A single raw bulb hung down.

She looked up at him, startled.

There was silence. He was leaning forward over the table as if some support inside him had broken and he started suddenly to cry.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

His mind was filled with words but there was no syntax to them and he went out into the plaza. It was late afternoon and the shadow of the police-station stretched towards him over the concrete.
The wall of sandbags was laid across his path. There was a policeman with a gun.

‘I want the Captain,’ he said.

The policeman pointed. ‘Where they’re putting up the tent.’

The minister lurched back across the plaza, in the direction that had been pointed out to him. The woman was in the doorway of the house. She was gesticulating and saying something to him, but
he went on.

In the open tract of land between the township and the town there was a crowd of people gathering. They stood in groups and little clumps among the wind-burned grass. As he drew closer he saw
that there were caravans parked in a circular formation and an expanse of canvas lying on the ground. The canvas was limp. There were men in overalls holding ropes in their hands. He saw all this
and recognized it but it was random colours and movement to him and he passed through the commotion without interest. He was looking for the policeman.

He walked towards the caravans. He stopped. There was a cage nearby with straw inside it and a group of children taunting something through the bars. He turned around and went back. He passed
two dwarves who were running hand in hand and there were feral odours on the air. Then he saw Captain Mong. One hand on his hip and his cap pushed back on his head.

The policeman waved a hand at the tent. ‘Every five years or so they come.’

‘Captain –’

‘I can’t hear you,
Dominee
.’

The crowd was cheering and calling. The men with the ropes in their hands were pulling and the canvas hung alive for a moment and then it died and descended again.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘The trial…’

‘
Ja
?’

‘I have to speak to you,’ he said.

‘Not now,
Dominee
. All right?’

Ho took hold of the policeman’s arm. His voice rose suddenly like the sound of glass being rubbed. ‘It mustn’t happen,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The trial… It… I…’

He was desperate for words.

The policeman leaned towards him and took his hand off his arm. He held the minister’s hand as he spoke. He talked clearly, distinctly, each word exact:

‘Not now,
Dominee
. All right?’

He let go his hand.

The man stood trembling, alert, his body enclosed by a nimbus, his mouth open to speak. Then he suddenly went slack. He was one moment full and the next moment empty, as if the contents had been
scooped out of him. He was tired. The words that had been leavening in him receded now. He stood there and though there were people all around him it felt as if he stood alone on a hilltop. The sun
came down whitely and there was no sound and he was alone on a hill.

He turned and walked back towards the township. When he came to the edge of the grass he stopped. The crowd was larger than before and other people were streaming out from the houses with
expressions of delight on their faces. There was a surge of movement. The ropes tautened and the canvas rose up over the crowd like a kite and there were cheers and small bursts of applause and
this time the tent didn’t fall.

He walked away over the grass, going in the direction of the sea. He walked quickly, going at speed, and soon he left the crowded place behind. The township receded and the spires of the town
and then he was stumbling through marshland.

He came in time to the sea. The water stretched away in a flat grey immensity and waves ran up on the sand. He took his shoes off and walked and he could feel the granules on his feet with a
heightened and almost painful awareness and there were rocks here and there and pools in the rocks and things grew and lived in the pools. Tiny fish the colour of rust and fronds that had the
texture of flesh. He walked with his shoes in his hand. The shore was desolate and cold. The sun was going down and he was a solitary traveller tonight. There was kelp and flotsam lying scattered
on the sand and crabs moved like small armies dancing.

After a time he came to a headland that thrust out into the water. He walked to the end of it and sat. The headland was made of rocks, haphazard and black, and nothing grew here except mussels.
There was the sound of water. Salt accreted on his skin. He sat, crouched over like an old man or a baby, as the last light went out of the sky and the stars began to flicker overhead. The darkness
was strong and he couldn’t see the horizon and he sat there as if waiting for something. A ship went slowly past far out in the water like a burning city floating out to sea.

When he got back to the house the woman and Captain Mong were sitting in the kitchen. There was another man with them. This man was the doctor.

They took him to his room. ‘You’re sick,
Dominee
,’ they said. ‘You must rest.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

‘You must get into bed.’

‘You’re not well.’

They helped him undress and he got into the bed and their faces were above him like the faces of gods and they looked down from a great height on him.

The dimensions of objects would not remain constant and they waxed and waned in constellations. They appeared between interstices of sleep and he experienced them as textures
or as qualities of intensity and only later did they resolve themselves, sometimes quite suddenly, at other times by degrees, into a coherence that he could name: desk window chair floor wall

The woman was there too. Once she helped him to use the bedpan. He said to her

I’m sorry.

It doesn’t matter, she said. She smiled at him.

It was hard to tell as he lay there whether it was day or night or what time of day or night it was. He could feel the mattress under him and he seemed always to be tangled up in the sheets but
then sometimes he was not in bed at all but outside lying on the ground under the branches of a huge spreading tree Why have you brought me here he said why have you she laughed at him I
didn’t bring you she said you came

At other times he was in chains. He could not move his arms or legs and he raised his head to see he saw that he was not chained but was floating in a vast expanse of water that spread around
him, saline and green, upholding him warmly from below fish nibbled at him and the sun went down redly over the sea and he saw that he was not after all in water but drifting through a darkness a
space and it came to him that that was what nothing was the absence of shape but how can that be he said I am a shape

Then the doctor came and touched him on the forehead, the wrists the fever is bad he said i must inject him again the doctor brought pain and after the pain he felt cooler again the room began
to coagulate around him, he saw the crucifix hanging over the desk, he saw the grain in the wood. Then Captain Mong came. He sat next to the woman at the side of the bed and he touched at her with
his hands. The woman went. The Captain was alone next to the bed and he tried to speak to the Captain, i have done something he said if you have done something Shh said the Captain Shhh