Devil's Valley (38 page)

“What about Henta? Wasn’t she born in a rainstorm too? She’s just made to be dipped in honey.”

“You hold her, I’ll do the daubing,” cried someone else.

More voices joined in. But there was an edge of hysteria to the false exuberance. Until Tant Poppie elbowed her way through the crowd and suddenly swung a blow with her fist which felled one of the men in the dust as if he’d been struck by epilepsy. It was Petrus Tatters. The jeering and tittering died away abruptly.

Jurg Water spoke up behind Tant Poppie: “Leave him to me.”

He let go of Piet Snot, his two long arms like hyphens on either side of his massive frame. It took a great effort from Lukas Death and several others to hold him back while Petrus Tatters scuttled off, slobbering in fear and shame.

After the commotion had died down, Hans Magic took up his interrupted ceremony where he’d left off. Meekly, and without a squeak, Piet Snot allowed his father to drag him forward. He was twisting a bit in the big man’s grip, but without uttering a squeak.

“Take off your clothes, Piet,” ordered Jurg Water. He turned to the crowd: “Where’s the honey?”

“Pa,” moaned the child, almost inaudibly.

Jurg Water raised his hand for a slap. I tensed up. God be my witness, I thought, if he…But he didn’t. We all looked away energetically while the spindly little creature was peeled from his clothes. His body was as white as chalk, veined with blue. The criss-cross pattern of bruises and weals didn’t bear looking at.

Someone approached with a tub of honey from one of the nearby homes. Like fucking bees the people converged on the child. For minutes on end they thronged and hummed and buzzed and bustled. Then Piet emerged from the writhing mass like a thin strip of sticky flypaper, his little monkey face smeared with snot and honey. He didn’t cry. Only dry sobs racked his body from time to time. One by one the people filed past him and laid their hands on his sticky head, then moved on. I didn’t want any part in it. Emma was standing beside me. I noticed Hans Magic leering at us, but just stared back.

“Now you go right up to the dry riverbed, Piet,” commanded Hans Magic. “Make sure you go deep into the mountains and wait there. Before it’s dark we’ll come and fetch you. By that time, if all goes well, it will be raining.”

Miserable and sticky, the boy began to scuttle away. The two bony wings of his shoulder blades looked terribly vulnerable. Only once he stopped, as if he couldn’t bear the idea of going on alone. He half-turned back to us. Among all the people his eyes singled me out.

“Isn’t Oom going to help me?” he asked.

“It’s just until tonight, Piet,” I stammered, too fucked-up to look him in the eye. I felt Emma’s fingers on my arm. It was as if I’d just condemned him to death.

And for all I knew I had.

T
HE NIGHTWALKERS were not visiting me any more. Perhaps they’d found out about Emma. Or perhaps the havoc in the settlement had simply become too much for them. Whatever the reason, it suited me. Emma and I needed, not days and nights, but months and years to catch up with all we had to talk about. Two lifetimes, hers and mine; everything we’d been saving up and which now had come out, a need as urgent as Brother Holy’s fucking itch.

In her room, or mine; in what remained of Smith-the-Smith’s rickety shed; under the deserted lean-to where bits and pieces of Tall-Fransina’s broken still now lay abandoned; in the schoolroom Lukas Death had built on to the side of his house and which was now standing empty during the hectic days as the children toiled with their parents to repair the storm damage.

Only the mad and the feeble still came and went as always, slobbering and yawning and dribbling and pissing themselves. And of course Henta and her gaggle of girls who couldn’t be contained by any natural or unnatural disaster: at unpredictable intervals they would still come hurtling past like a delinquent dust-devil, here one moment and gone the next, leaving behind only the improbable imprint of their bare feet and their smell of darkness and forbidden games.

Otherwise we met behind the windblown tatters where the ostrich pen had been, or in the bluegum wood, or up in the mountain at the Devil’s Hole, the one spot where we felt truly secure and remote—until we discovered that more and more of the settlers were secretly visiting the place, in spite of all the public doubts and prohibitions, to fill their pails and barrels with water against the drought. And once, on the afternoon of the day little Piet had been sent off into the mountains, dripping with honey, tears and snot, we went back to the rock pool where I had first seen her in her dream. If it had been a dream, if it had been her. Emma brought a small threadbare flour-bag with her, stuffed with food: a chunk of bread, a few dried apricots, a handful or two of raisins, a small jar of lemon syrup. Only after we’d left the pool behind, well out of earshot of the houses, we started calling his name. But there was no answer.

“He’s hiding,” I said, trying to convince myself. “He won’t come out, he’s mad at me.”

Overhead there were once more clouds scurrying past, sending hurried, restless shadows across the narrow kloof; but I no longer set any store by them.

Emma called out again, then listened for a response, every muscle in her body tense, as if she wished to force an answer from the bloody mountains. Then again and again. But it was absolutely silent, that ancient unsettling silence of a birdless world.

“I’ll leave it here for him,” she said at last. There was an obstinate set to her mouth. It was as vital for her as it was for me to believe that he was just hiding somewhere.

Talons and Claws

Where the dried-up bed curved in a wide, easy bend, she left the bag on a large flat rock where it could easily be seen. I took her hand. We went back to the dry pool, jumping from rock to rock. All around us trees blown over in the storms lay upended, large clusters of roots sticking up like hands with broken fingers. Here and there deep furrows had been gashed open as the roots were torn loose. Even their tips showed not the slightest sign of moisture. Curiously enough the ancient, half-charred wild figtree which had been split by lightning so long ago, Ouma Liesbet Prune’s Paradise Tree, still stood intact, its long sinewy roots reaching across rocks and boulders, like the goddamn talons and claws of a huge animal that had burrowed in there, never to let go again.

“Just as pigheaded as the people in the settlement,” I said wryly.

“You’re no different, Flip.” She took one of my hands in both of hers. “I can’t understand why you want to stay here. The rest of us have no choice. But you do.”

“There’s nothing I’d love more than to get out of this place,” I said. “But you know I can’t bloody well leave you here.”

“I’m not holding you here.”

“That’s not how I mean it. It is my own choice. I don’t
want
to leave you here. I’m responsible for you now.”

“No, you’re not. I’m still me, you are you.”

“It’s no longer so simple.”

“Then it’s you who are making it difficult. You’ve got to be sensible, Flip.”

It isn’t easy to retrace all the meanderings of the conversation we had that afternoon. Because it wasn’t only one conversation either. Every time we met, all the old arguments were taken up again. It was like some fucking kind of undergrowth in which we’d become entangled: and in what I’m trying to recall here of what was said that afternoon several other conversations are mixed up. It’s like Gert Brush’s paintings, with the ghosts of lost faces looming up through all those layers.

Pack of Hyenas

Almost every time—and that afternoon too, I’m sure—I’d end up saying something like, “I can’t throw you to a pack of hyenas.”

To which she would reply very calmly, but very firmly, “I can manage. I always have.”

“It’s too damn dangerous, Emma. You said that yourself, the very first time we spoke.”

“I said they wouldn’t let me go. That’s something else.”

“But now I’ve complicated things for you. There’s nothing we can take for granted.”

“I know them, I’ll survive. You’re the one who doesn’t know where to step. You’re in danger, Flip. They told you their stories, and that gives you power over them. They can’t allow it.”

“If we leave together, we have a chance. And the sooner the better.”

“No, they’re counting on it that neither of us will leave without the other. As long as they see I’m still here they won’t suspect anything. Flip, it’s the only chance you have.”

“Then I stay here.”

“I want you to go.” Her eyes were fixed urgently on mine.

“Not without you.”

She changed her angle of attack: “There’s nothing for us outside. You just lost your head because…”

“Because I love you.”

“Don’t ever say that. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Once we’re outside you’ll soon see that it was a mistake. I’m too young for you, Flip, too stupid, too everything. Before we’ve been there for a month you’ll get tired of me. And that will be worse than anything that could happen here.”

“Don’t you believe me then?” I asked, stung.

“It makes no difference whether I believe you or not.” And with the kind of stillness which had so often surprised me in her, she said, “Perhaps it would be even worse if I believed you. I couldn’t bear the thought of waking up one day.”

“This isn’t a dream, Emma.”

“Are you sure?” For a moment she pressed her forehead against mine, and gave a small laugh, but a bitter one; then turned away. “Don’t you remember the day you first came here?”

“That was different,” I said.

She shook her head.

Without Warmth

Her hair had fallen forward, exposing the nape of her neck. I put my arms around her from behind.

“Emma.”

After a moment, with a slight but decisive movement, she freed herself. Not without warmth, but as if from far away, she said, “It would be better to forget about me, Flip.”

“Then at least give me something to forget!” I stormed, unreasonable. “I can’t accept that my only memory of you must be the way you once looked like in a dream.”

“No one here can ever survive in the world you come from.”

“You’re different, you spent time there. You told me yourself how much you miss it.”

“One only really misses what is impossible.” She took my face between her hands. “I’m a freak,” she said with intensity. “Like any of those poor creatures with waterheads or harelips or webbed toes that walk these streets. We’re all marked. And that is why you must go back. One day you’ll only remember me as a nightmare from which you woke up just in time.”

I pressed my face against her to reassure myself of the lean hard presence of her body. I could smell her, a smell of life and warmth and woman and desire, everything that was real and that mattered at that moment.

“
This
is the difference between dream and reality,” I said in a wave of fucking sentimentality. “I can’t go on without you.”

“You can. You must. And I without you. You can’t allow this place to swallow you too. Don’t you understand? My life is cut off already. It’ll help me just to know you’re
there
, your life is going on.” Adding more softly, an afterthought. “And knowing perhaps that there’ll be something you remember.”

“You can’t give up like this.”

“It’s not giving up. Don’t you think I also want to live?” She moved away. “We must go back. There’s another storm brewing.”

I looked up. The clouds were billowing overhead as before. If only the blasted rains would come, I thought. That would change everything. The people would come to rest. There would be a semblance of bloody normality again.

T
HIS TIME THE storm wasn’t quite as godawful as before, but perhaps we were becoming blunted. At any rate it didn’t last for more than an hour or so. But the problem was that the damage done in the previous storms had not been repaired yet; the roofs, especially, had been so badly weakened that it didn’t take much for several of them to cave in altogether. At least, thank God, this time round there were no casualties. And in the late afternoon, after the last fierce gusts had died down and the sky had cleared, people cautiously stepped outside again to inspect the ravages and to start, once again, clearing up the mounds of rubble that marked the passage of the hurricane.

The most important thing to do now was to bring little Piet Snot home. After the unsuccessful trip Emma and I had made up the dry riverbed in the early afternoon I was very worried. I would never forget that last look he’d given me, and his pleading, accusing words,
Isn’t Oom going to help me?

A few of us—Lukas Death, Isak Smous, Gert Brush and I—took the footpath to Hans Magic’s hut. Incredibly, the rickety little structure had survived all the storms; even the thatch on the roof was undamaged. Perhaps the thicket surrounding it had protected it, but it didn’t seem too farfetched to guess that even the elements were taking no chances with the old devil.

He was in no hurry to come with us. First he insisted on stuffing his calabash pipe with dagga.

“Why are you pressing me?” he asked. “There’s more than enough time before dark.”

“It was a bad storm for a child to be in,” I told him angrily.

“There’s enough shelter in the kloof, he’ll be all right.”

“He didn’t have a shred of clothing to protect him.”

“Children are used to running around bare-arsed.”

“It’s easy for you to say.”

“Don’t aggravate the man, Neef Flip,” Lukas Death stopped me with a look of concern. “Hans knows his time.”

I took umbrage at that, but after what had happened to Brother Holy I was anxious not to bring another of Hans Magic’s feelings over him; so I swallowed my irritation until his pipe was drawing to his satisfaction. Only then did he shut the door which hung unsteadily on leather hinges, and join us outside where we’d chosen to wait in the open air.

At first sight the settlement appeared to be going about its normal late-afternoon business: the old ravens in the cemetery, the afflicted in the streets, Bettie Teat in the doorway of the church, people in their backyards or chicken runs or parched orchards and vegetable gardens, poultry scratching in the dry earth, goats grazing among the scraggly bushes. But after three storms the place looked chewed to the bone.