The Sun Between Their Feet (30 page)

Well, it was Sunday, and no bars open. I took a last look at the beetle, the black thorn through its oozing middle, waving its black legs at the setting sun, and I said: ‘Back home, Hans, and to hell with Esther, we're going to get drunk.'

Esther was in the kitchen, putting out cold meat and tomatoes, and I said: ‘Esther, you can take the evening off.'

She said: ‘Master Hans, I have had all the Sunday afternoon off talking to Sister Mary.' Hans looked helpless at me, and I said: ‘Esther, I'm giving you the evening off, good night.'

And Hans said, stuttering and stammering. ‘That's right, Esther, I'll give you the evening off. Good night, Esther.'

She looked at him. Then at me. Hey, what a woman; hey, what a queen, man! She said, with dignity: ‘Good night, Mr Johannes; good night, Mr du Preez.' Then she wiped her hands free of evil on her white apron, and she strode off, singing All Things Bright and Beautiful, and I tell you we felt as if we weren't good enough to wash Esther's
broekies,
and that's the truth.

Goed.
We got out the brandy, never mind about the cold meat and the tomatoes, and about an hour later I reached my point at last, which was, what about the poems, and the reason I'd taken so long I was scared he'd say: ‘Take a look at Blagspruit, man, take a look, is this the place for poems, Martin?' But when I asked, he leaned forward and stared at me, all earnest and intent, then he turned his head carefully to the right, to see if the door into the kitchen was shut, but it wasn't; and then left at the window, and that was open too, and then past me at the door to the veranda. Then he got up on tiptoes and very carefully shut all three, and then he drew the curtains. It gave me the
shriks,
man, I can tell you. Then he went to a great old black chest and took out a Manuscript, because it was all in the beautiful black difficult writing and gave it to me to read. And I sat and slowly worked it out, letter by letter, while he sat opposite, sweating and totting, and giving fearful looks over his shoulders.

What was it? Well, I was drunk, for one thing, and Hans sitting there all frightened scared me, but it was good, it was good, I promise you. A kind of chronicle of Blagspruit it was, the lives of the citizens – well, need I elaborate, since
the lives of citizens are the same everywhere in the world, but worse in Suid Afrika, and worse a million times in Blagspruit. The Manuscript gave off a stink of church and right-doing, with the sin and the evil underneath, it had a medieval stink to it, naturally enough, for what is worse than the Kerk in this our Land? – but I'm saying this to you, remember, and I never said it, but what is worse than the stink of the Kerk and the God-fearing in this our feudal land?

But the poem. As far as I can remember, because I was full as a tick, it was a sort of prose chronicle that led up to and worked into the poems, you couldn't tell where they began or ended. The prose was stiff and old-fashioned, and formal, monk's language, and the poems, too. But I knew when I read it it was the best I'd read in years – since I read those poems of his ten years before, man, not since then. And don't forget, God help me, I'm an editor now, and I read poems day and night, and when I come on something like Hans's poems that night I have nothing to say but –
Goed.

Right. I was working away there an hour or more because of that damned black ornamental script, then I put it down and I said: ‘Hans, can I ask you a question?' And he looked this way and that over his shoulder first, then leaned forward, the lamplight shining on his pate, and he asked in a low trembling sinner's voice: ‘What do you want to ask me, Martin?'

I said, ‘Why this complicated handwriting? What for? It's beautiful, but why this monkey's puzzle?'

And he lowered his voice and said: ‘It's so that Esther can't read it.'

I said: ‘And what of it, Hans? Why not? Give me some more brandewyn and tell me.'

He said: ‘She's a friend of the Predikant's cook, and her sister Mary works in the Mayor's kitchen.'

I saw it all. I was drunk, so I saw it. I got up, and I said: ‘Hans, you're right. You're right a thousand times. If you're
going to write stuff like this, as true and as beautiful as God and all his angels, then Esther mustn't read it. But why don't you let me take this back with me and print it in
Onwards?'

He went white and looked as if I might knife him there and then like totsi. He grabbed the manuscript from me and held it against his fat chest, and he said: ‘They mustn't see it.'

‘You're right,' I said, understanding him completely.

‘It's dangerous keeping it here,' he said, darting fearful looks all around.

‘Yes, you're right,' I said, and I sat down with a bump in my
rimpie
chair, and I said: ‘Ja, if they found that, Hans …'

They'd kill me,' he said.

I saw it, completely.

I was drunk. He was drunk. We put the manuscript
boekie
on the table and we put our arms around each other and we wept for the citizens of Blagspruit. Then we lit the hurricane-lamp in the kitchen, and he took his
boekie
under his arm, and we tiptoed out into the moonlight that stank of marigolds, and out we went down the main street, all dark as the pit now because it was after twelve and the citizens were asleep, and we went staggering down a tarmac street that shone in the moonlight between low dark houses and out into the veld. There we looked sorrowfully at each other and wept some sad brandy tears, and right in front of us, the devil aiding us, was a thorn-tree. All virgin it was, its big black spikes lifted up and shining in the devil's moon. And we wept a long time more, and we tore out the pages from his manuscript and we made them into little screws of paper and we stuck them all over the thorns and when there were none left, we sat under the thorn-tree in the moonlight, the black spiky thorns making thin purplish shadows all over us and over the white sand. Then we wept for the state of our country and the state of poetry. We drank a lot more brandy, and the ants came after it and us, so we staggered back down the gleaming sleeping main street of Blagspruit,
and that's all I remember until Esther was standing over me with a tin tray that had a teapot, teacup, sugar and some condensed milk, and she was saying: ‘Master du Preez, where is Master Hans?'

I saw the seven o'clock sun outside the window, and I remembered everything and I sat up and I said: ‘My God!'

And Esther said, ‘God has not been in this house since half past five on Saturday last.' And went out.

Right. I got dressed, and went down the main street, drawing looks from the Monday morning citizens, all of whom had probably been watching us staggering along last night from behind their black-drawn curtains. I reached the veld and there was Hans. A wind had got up, a hot dust-devilish wind, and it blew about red dust and bits of grit, and leaves, and dead grass into the blue sky, and those pale dry bushes that leave their roots and go bouncing and twirling all over the empty sand, like dervishes, round and around, and then up and around, and there was Hans, letting out yelps and cries and shouts, and he was chasing about after screws of paper that were whirling around among the dust and stuff.

I helped him. The thorn-tree had three squirls of paper tugging and blowing from spikes of black thorn, so I collected those, and we ran after the blowing white bits that had the black beautiful script on them, and we got perhaps a third back. Then we sat under the thorn-tree, the hard, sharp black shadows over us and the sand, and we watched a dust-devil whirling columns of yellow sand and his poems up and off into the sky.

I said: ‘But, Hans, you could write them down again, couldn't you? You couldn't have forgotten them surely?'

And he said: ‘But, Martin, anyone can read them now, don't you see that, man? Esther could come out here next afternoon off, and pick any one of those poems up off the earth and read it. Or suppose the predikant or the mayor got their hands on them?'

Then I understood. I promise you, it had never crossed
my domkop mind until that moment. I swear it. I simply sat there sweating out guilt and brandy, and I looked at that poor madman, and then I remembered back ten years and I thought: You idiot. You fool.

Then at last I got intelligent and I said: ‘But, Hans, even if Esther and the predikant and the mayor did come out here and pick up your poems, like leaves, off the bushes, they couldn't understand one word, because they are written in that
slim
black script you worked out for yourself.'

I saw his poor crazy face get more happy, and he said: ‘You think so, Martin? Really? You really think so?'

I said: ‘Ja, it's the truth.' And he got all happy and safe, while I thought of those poems whirling around for ever, or until the next rainstorm, around the blue sky with the dust and the bits of shining grass.

And I said: ‘Anyway, at the best, only perhaps a thousand or two thousand people would understand that beautiful
boekie.
Try to look at it that way, Hans, it might make you feel better.'

By this time he looked fine, he was smiling and cheered up.

Right.

We got up and dusted each other off, and I took him home to Esther. I asked him to let me take the poems we'd rescued back to publish in
Onwards
but he got desperate again and said: ‘No, no, do you want to kill me? Do you want them to kill me? You're my friend, Martin, you can't do that.'

So I told Esther that she had a great man in her charge, through whom Heaven Itself spoke, and she was right to take such care of him. But she merely nodded her queenly white-doecked head and said: ‘Goodbye, Master du Preez, and may God be with you.'

So I came home to Kapstaad.

A week ago I got a letter from Hans, but I didn't see at once that it was from him, it was in ordinary writing, like
yours or mine, but rather unformed and wild, and it said: ‘I am leaving this place. They know me now. They look at me. I'm going North to the river. Don't tell Esther. Jou vriend, Johannes Potgieter.'

It is dark inside the hut, and very cold. Yet around the oblong shape that is the doorway where a sack hangs, for the sake of comely decency, is a diffusing yellow glare, and through holes in the sack come fingers of yellow warmth, nudging and prodding at Jabavu's legs. ‘Ugh,' he mutters, drawing up his feet and kicking at the blanket to make it stretch over him. Under Jabavu is a reed mat, and where its coolness touches him he draws back, grumbling in his sleep. Again his legs sprawl out, again the warm fingers prod him, and he is filled with a rage of resentment. He grabs at sleep, as if a thief were trying to take it from him; he wraps himself in sleep like a blanket that persists in slipping off; there is nothing he has ever wanted, nothing he will ever want again as he wants sleep at this moment. He leans greedily towards it as towards a warm drink on a cold night. He drinks it, guzzles it, and is sinking contentedly into oblivion when words come dropping through it like stones through thick water. ‘Ugh!' mutters Jabavu again. He lies as still as a dead rabbit. But the words continue to fall into his ears, and although he has sworn to himself not to move, not to sit up, and hold to this sleep which they are trying to take from him, he nevertheless sits up, and his face is surly and unwilling.

His brother, Pavu, on the other side of the dead ashes of the fire which is in the middle of the mud floor, also sits up. He, too, is sulking. His face is averted and he blinks slowly as he rises to his feet, lifting the blanket with him. Yet he remains respectfully silent while his mother scolds.

‘Children, your father has already been waiting for you as long as it takes to hoe a field.' This is intended to remind
them of their duty, to put back into their minds what their minds have let slip – that already, earlier, they have been awakened, their father laying his hand silently first on one shoulder and then on another.

Pavu guiltily folds his blanket and lays it on the low earth mound on one side of the hut, and then stands waiting for Jabavu.

But Jabavu is leaning on his elbow by the ashen smudge of last night's fire, and he says to his scolding mother: ‘Mother, you make as many words as the wind brings grains of dust.' Pavu is shocked. He would never speak any way but respectfully to his parents. But also, he is not shocked, for this is Jabavu the Big Mouth. And if the parents say with sorrow that in their day no child would speak to his parents as Big Mouth speaks, then it is true, too, that now there are many children who speak thus – and how can one be shocked by something that happens every day?

Jabavu says, breaking into a shrill whirl of words from the mother: ‘Ah, mother,
shut up!'
The words ‘shut up' are in English. And now Pavu is really shocked, with the whole of himself, not merely with the part of him that pays tribute to the old forms of behaviour. He says, quickly, to Jabavu: ‘And now that is enough. Our father is waiting.' He is so ashamed that he lifts the sacking from the door and steps outside, blinking into the sunlight. The sun is pale bright gold, and quickly gathering heat. Pavu moves, his stiff limbs in it as if it were hot water, and then stands beside his father. ‘Good morning, my father,' he says; and then the old man greets him: ‘Good morning, my son.'

The old man wears a brown blanket striped with red, folded over his shoulder and held with a large steel safety-pin. He carries a hoe for the fields, and the spear of his forefathers with which to kill a rabbit or buck if one should show itself. The boy has no blanket. He wears a vest that is rubbed into holes, tucked into a loincloth. He also carries a hoe.

From inside the hut come voices. The mother is still
scolding. They can hear scraping sounds and the small knock of wood – she is kneeling to remove the dead ash and to build the new fire. It is as if they can see her crouching there, coaxing the new day's fire to life. And it is as if they can see Jabavu huddled on his mat, his face sullenly turned away from her while she scolds.