Devil's Valley (19 page)

“Have you never thought of running away?”

“Of course,” she said with pent-up anger. “I tried. But Hans Magic fetched me back and Tant Poppie gave me such a hiding I couldn’t sit for days. She has a heavy hand.”

I tried not to think of what lay behind her simple words.

“And then?”

The large black eyes in her pale face looked straight back at me. “I just had to accept what I never wanted to. They can’t forgive me for not really being one of them.”

“But you were born here.”

“Yes. But my mother brought me in from outside.”

“I don’t understand.”

Equally Naked

“It’s not necessary to understand.” She swung out her legs and got up. Without looking at me she began to walk away. But she didn’t go far. She bent over and broke off a dry reed, and remained standing with her back to me, stripping away the papery leaves. Then, with an angry gesture, she threw the reed into the rock pool which had been full of water once, where she’d used to swim, the pool she’d dreamed; then turned round slowly and came back to me. “Why do you want to know?”

I looked at her strong, narrow, naked feet, then up at her face, equally strong, equally naked. The too-much in her eyes.

“I don’t know why, so don’t ask me. And if you find it bloody impertinent of me, then please forgive me. But I do want to know more about you.”

“What makes you think I want to be known about?”

“Because a moment ago you wanted to leave, but then you came back.”

“I only came back because I saw you in my dream.” Her eyes looked into mine as if I was the one being tested.

“Is that reason enough?” I asked.

“It couldn’t have been an ordinary dream. Not if you saw it too. Something like that happens for a reason.”

“And that’s why you came back?”

An unexpectedly light, defiant laugh. “No. It’s because of the chameleon on your shoulder.”

“What difference could that make?”

“I can see he isn’t scared of you. So perhaps one can trust you.”

“Little Piet Snot gave him to me,” I said reflectively.

“Poor little chap.” She sounded relieved to change the subject. Our real conversation, I thought, was happening behind the words we used.

“I got the idea his father is very hard on him.”

“Not just on him. Oom Jurg Water is a pig.”

“Piet said something about a sister too.”

“What chance does a girl like Henta have?”

The name struck me like a blow from a whip. “Henta?”

“Didn’t you know?”

Twisted Her Lip

“There’s something terribly wrong with this place.” I was really too upset to talk.

“I know. It got my mother too.”

“Who was your mother? What exactly happened to her?”

She came to sit down beside me, but still looked past me, up the mountain. “My mother was Isak Smous’s sister. Half-sister, really, for she had a different father. In this place they don’t keep strictly to husband-and-wife.”

“I’ve noticed. And I’d like to find out more about that too. All these bloody righteous people, and yet…”

A brief gesture. “That’s not important now.” She went on, “I was told that my own grandfather came in from outside, he and my grandmother got to know each other”—she twisted her lip—“and then he left. But on the way out he fell to his death. The sort of thing that often happens here. Perhaps he was the one who planted the bug in my mother’s blood, because when she was just eighteen she left with Isak Smous on one of his trips and stayed there for a year. Then Lukas Death fetched her back. Not many of our people survive out there.”

“And was there trouble when she came back?”

“What do you think? She was pregnant.”

I nodded slowly. “I think I’m beginning to understand.”

“You don’t understand anything!” she stormed. “If a girl in the Valley falls pregnant it needn’t be the end of the world. Tant Poppie gets rid of just as many babies as she brings into the world. As long as it happens in the dark and no one sees, that is the only rule. But my mother wanted to keep me, and so here I am.”

Curse On It

“And your mother?”

“After she died Tant Poppie brought me up. Deep down she has a soft heart, and she never had children of her own.”

“What about your mother?” I asked again.

“Tant Poppie was like a mother to me.”

“What I want to know is…”

“What happened to my mother.”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want to know?”

The directness of the question, and her quiet way of asking it, unsettled me. “I’m sorry. I know I had no right to ask. In my work…”

“What do you do?”

“I work for a newspaper.”

“Tell me about it.”

“There isn’t much to tell.”

“Tell me anyway, tell me everything.”

I was hesitant at first. I didn’t want her to sidestep the question so easily. Also, I had no wish to talk about myself. What was there in my life that could possibly interest her? Sylvia never listened, it bored her to death; and the children got irritated, I’d never been much of a role model, as Marius made only too fucking clear. But Emma seemed set on it, so I started raking up randomly whatever I could. Small episodes, anecdotes, things I didn’t even realise I had remembered, began to come back to me. She listened intently, a few times she even laughed. A laugh so dark and so bloody beautiful that I went out of my way to dramatise incidents and invent new ones, just to hear it again. Jesus, I hadn’t spoken about my work to anyone in this way for years. But in the end that was also what made me stop.

“You can’t possibly want to hear more,” I said, suddenly self-conscious. “How can it mean anything to you?”

“Do you know what it’s like to live in the Devil’s Valley?” she asked as before.

“There’s nothing special about my life, Emma. It all turned out so different from the dreams I had when I was young. In those days I still had ambition, there was nothing too big to attempt. Most of all I wanted to be a writer, a historian.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Never had the chance.” I reconsidered. “Perhaps I simply wasn’t good enough.”

“Don’t say that!”

“One sheds one’s illusions. Then it becomes easier.”

“I also thought I wasn’t good enough to go out and study,” Emma said tensely. “But that’s not true, you know. One mustn’t believe what others try to tell you.”

In different circumstances her seriousness might have amused me, but the restrained passion with which she spoke scorched each separate word into my mind.

“It’s too late for me now,” I said, as evenly as I could. “But not for you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ll never get out of this place alive.”

“Now please don’t turn on the drama.”

“You won’t ever understand. You’re a stranger.”

I could feel something momentous building up in her. I’d give anything to help her open up, but I didn’t know how to. I’ve never been able to handle that kind of situation. Out of sheer bloody clumsiness I put an arm round her shoulders. “Emma,” I heard myself say, “don’t you want to tell me?”

She just shook her head. No, no, no. After a long time she said almost inaudibly, “There is a curse on me.”

To Her Throat

From way back something returned to me. At first I hesitated to say it out loud, but then decided to risk it. “Tant Poppie says you have the mark of the Devil on you.”

Once again the unsettling straight gaze of her eyes below the thick straight eyebrows.

“What kind of mark is it?”

It was an improbable moment, a moment outside of time, with something that tautened and pulled between us, a moment that could bloody well decide everything for us.

With a small, slow gesture, as if she was barely conscious of it herself—and yet she was, I could see it—she raised her hands to her throat, to the top button of the long, long row, just like the night before: but then she hadn’t been aware of me, and now she was.

Would she really—dared she—undo those buttons? I still don’t know, here where I’m crouching at the rock pool waiting; nor did I know then, as I sat on this same spot opposite her. All I could do was to place my hand on hers to restrain her.

“There’s no need,” I said. “I’ve seen it already.”

I could see the question rising in her eyes, like a moon or something.

“I saw you when you came to swim here in your dream, remember?”

“Are you sure of what you saw?”

“Absolutely sure.” My hand remained on hers for an unbearably long time, on the spot where her collarbones formed their little hollow and where I would have been able to see her heart throbbing if I hadn’t stopped her.

“If they find out about the mark, if Tant Poppie ever says anything, it will be the end,” she said. “Because she’s the only one who has ever seen it.”

“Except Little-Lukas.”

“He never saw it.”

“But I thought the two of you…”

“That’s what they all think,” she said calmly. “But that doesn’t mean it’s so.”

“But Tant Poppie said…”

A little wryly she said, “I am still whole. He was too shy.”

“You loved him though,” I said clumsily.

No Birds

Just as directly as before she said, “What does ‘love’ mean? The way I see it now, I only held on to him because he stood between me and them, it made me feel safe. Since he died I’m not sure of anything any more.”

“What makes you think they’ll turn against you?”

“They’re already against me. They’ve been against me from the very beginning, because of my mother, and now it’s even worse. Before the time they held back, first on account of Tant Poppie, then on account of Little-Lukas, because he was Lukas Death’s child after all and that counted for something, even if Lukas Death always tried to keep us apart. But now it’s changed. That dirty old Hans Magic has been waiting for a long time to get at me. He says I humiliated him. And there’s Ben Owl too, all the way from my mother’s time. Because she humiliated
him
. Now the hunt is open. For the moment I can still keep them off while I’m in mourning. But it won’t last long.”

“When all is said and done, what can they really
do
?”

She looked away and said nothing.

“Tell me,” I demanded. “What can they do to you?”

“They stoned my mother.”

I felt the blood throbbing in my temples.

“She lies under the heap of stones against the churchyard wall.”

There was no sound around us, not even the wind. A silence louder than a scream. That was when for the first time I realised what was missing in the Devil’s Valley: there were no birds, nowhere, none at all.

“H
ow CAN YOU be sure?” I asked Emma.

“I just know.” Her eyes did not waver. “Tant Poppie told me, from the time I was little. Everybody knows it.”

“When did it happen?”

“The day after my birth. They were just waiting for it. If it wasn’t for Tant Poppie they’d have killed me with my mother.” For the first time she showed signs of bitterness. “When my mother got pregnant outside, I’m sure she could have chosen to get rid of me before she came back. Or even afterwards. No one would ever have known. But she decided to keep me, even when she knew they were going to kill her. It’s hard to live with a thing like that on your conscience.”

“But it wasn’t your doing, Emma. Blaming yourself won’t get you anywhere.”

“It’s easy to talk if you’re not the one.”

“Only a very special woman would have done what your mother did.”

Once again that ambiguous shrug.

“I’m going to help you find out exactly what happened to her,” I said.

In her eyes I could see that she didn’t believe me, and why should she?

But I insisted: “I’m going to find her for you. I promise.”

She nodded, but said nothing.

There wasn’t much time left. In my mind, on the way back to Tant Poppie’s place, I calculated: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Only three more days, because at dawn on Saturday I’d have to set out to keep my appointment with Koot Joubert at the beacon up on the mountain. There was so little I’d achieved so far. For each step ahead, it seemed I was sliding back two.

Soft Fleece

Or three, I thought, that night. Because nothing could complicate an already pretty screwed-up situation more than what happened next. Heaven knows, there was enough to keep me awake as it was. But I barely had time to sort through my thoughts. Because for the third time in as many nights a female visitor came to my room. It started with a sound outside, like the hooting of a barn owl, only more eerie. I sat up. There was a shadow at my window. I got up to look. Outside everything was deserted. But as I stood at the window I saw a figure skulking across the backyard on four legs. Its slanting gait and bent tail were unmistakably those of a baboon. But since when did baboons venture abroad at night? Something caused the hair on my body to stand up. But by that time the creature had gone and I returned to my bed. I had barely settled in under the kaross again when I heard the door open. In the dull shimmering of the moon I distinguished a woman. Even if I hadn’t seen her I would have smelled her. And some atavistic signal beyond my control immediately caused my prick to jump to attention.

Like the others before her she deftly pulled the kaross from me; like them, she was naked. What set her apart was the soft fleece that covered her whole body. Her back and buttocks, her stomach, her arms and legs, even her two breasts: not a thick coir that like mine, but a fine down. Which made me stand like a fucking pick-handle. And yet I tried to fend her off. Don’t ask me why. I mean, Emma had no fucking claim on me, nor I on her. Jesus, I was there for a few days only, any possibility of getting involved was out of the question. If I felt anything for her, it was more like compassion, how shall I put it, a kind of paternal concern to care for her, nothing sensual at all. Or was there? I simply didn’t know. I don’t want to know. All I knew then was that this woman complicated my life no end. But hell, I’m flesh and blood. And she was, like her sisters, a female animal that stopped at nothing.

Right, so I didn’t want to. But at the same time I tell you I wanted nothing else. And when at last she’d wrestled me to the ground—quite literally, as we’d taken a tumble from the bed and did the rest of our cavorting on the floor—she broke away from me and, with a deep, dark, laugh, scrambled to her feet and fled. And when I tried to light the candle, still panting and trembling, the bloody lighter packed up. By the time I produced a spark from the primitive tinderbox Tant Poppie had provided it was already too late. Or not quite. For in her hurry to get away she’d not had time to grab her clothes.