Mafeking Road (14 page)

You can imagine what a stir this created.

“Yes,” Frans Steyn said to us one afternoon, “and when I asked this kaffir whether my daughter Anna should get married to Gert right away or whether she should go to High School to learn English, Mosiko said that I had to ask Baas Stephanus. ‘Ask him,' he said, ‘that one is too easy for me'.”

Then the people said that this Mosiko was an impertinent kaffir, and that the only thing Stephanus could do was not to take any notice of him.

I watched closely to see what Erasmus was going to do about it. I could see that the kaffir's impudence was making him mad. And when people said to him, “Do not take any notice of Mosiko, Oom Stephanus, he is a lazy old kaffir,” anyone could see that this annoyed him more than anything else. He suspected that they said this out of politeness. And there is nothing that angers you more than when those who used to fear you start being polite to you.

The upshot of the business was that Stephanus Erasmus went to the outspan where Mosiko lived. He said he was going to boot him back into the Kalahari, where he came from. Now, it was a mistake for Stephanus to have gone out to see Mosiko. For Mosiko looked really important to have the prophet coming to visit him. The right thing always is for the servant to visit the master.

All of us went along with Stephanus.

On the way down he said, “I'll kick him all the way out of Zeerust. It is bad enough when kaffirs wear collars and ties in Johannesburg and walk on the pavements reading newspapers. But we can't allow this sort of thing in the Marico.”

But I could see that for some reason Stephanus was growing angry as we tried to pretend that we were determined to have Mosiko shown up. And this was not the truth. It was only Erasmus's quarrel. It was not our affair at all.

We got to the outspan.

Mosiko had hardly any clothes on. He sat up against a bush
with his back bent and his head forward near his knees. He had many wrinkles. Hundreds of them. He looked to be the oldest man in the world. And yet there was a kind of strength about the curve of his back and I knew the meaning of it. It seemed to me that with his back curved in that way, and the sun shining on him and his head bent forward, Mosiko could be much greater and do more things just by sitting down than other men could do by working hard and using cunning. I felt that Mosiko could sit down and do nothing and yet be more powerful than the Kommandant-General.

He seemed to have nothing but what the sun and the sand and the grass had given him, and yet that was more than what all the men in the world could give him.

I was glad that I was there that day, at the meeting of the wizards.

 

Stephanus Erasmus knew who Mosiko was, of course. But I wasn't sure if Mosiko knew Stephanus. So I introduced them. On another day people would have laughed at the way I did it. But at that moment it didn't seem so funny, somehow.

“Mosiko,” I said, “this is Baas Prophet Stephanus Erasmus.”

“And, Oom Stephanus,” I said, “this is Witch-doctor Mosiko.”

Mosiko raised his eyes slightly and glanced at Erasmus. Erasmus looked straight back at Mosiko and tried to stare him out of countenance. I knew the power with which Stephanus Erasmus could look at you. So I wondered what was going to happen.
But Mosiko looked down again, and kept his eyes down on the sand.

Now, I remembered how I felt that day when Stephanus Erasmus had looked at me and I was ready to believe that I was a cut-open springbok. So I was not surprised at Mosiko's turning away his eyes. But in the same moment I realised that Mosiko looked down in the way that seemed to mean that he didn't think that Stephanus was a man of enough importance for him to want to stare out of countenance. It was as though he thought there were other things for him to do but look at Stephanus.

Then Mosiko spoke.

“Tell me what you want to know, Baas Stephanus,” he said, “and I'll prophesy for you.”

I saw the grass and the veld and the stones. I saw a long splash of sunlight on Mosiko's naked back. But for a little while I neither saw nor heard anything else. For it was a deadly thing that the kaffir had said to the white man. And I knew that the others also felt it was a deadly thing. We stood there, waiting. I was not sure whether to be glad or sorry that I had come. The time seemed so very long in passing.

“Kaffir,” Stephanus said at last, “you have no right to be here on a white man's outspan. We have come to throw you off it. I am going to kick you, kaffir. Right now I am going to kick you. You'll see what a white man's boot is like.”

Mosiko did not move. It did not seem as though he had heard anything Stephanus had said to him. He appeared to be thinking of something else – something very old and very far away.

Then Stephanus took a step forward. He paused for a moment. We all looked down.

Frans Steyn was the first to laugh. It was strange and unnatural at first to hear Frans Steyn's laughter. Everything up till then had been so tense and even frightening. But immediately afterwards we all burst out laughing together. We laughed loudly and uproariously. You could have heard us right at the other side of the bult.

 

I have told you about Stephanus Erasmus's veldskoens, and that they were broken on top. Well, now, in walking to the outspan, the last riem had burst loose, and Stephanus Erasmus stood there with his right foot raised from the ground and a broken shoe dangling from his instep.

Stephanus never kicked Mosiko. When we had finished laughing we got him to come back home. Stephanus walked slowly, carrying the broken shoe in his hand and picking the soft places to walk on, where the burnt grass wouldn't stick into his bare foot.

Stephanus Erasmus had lost his power.

But I knew that even if his shoe hadn't broken, Stephanus would never have kicked Mosiko. I could see by that look in his eyes that, when he took the step forward and Mosiko didn't move, Stephanus had been beaten for always.

There is a queer witchery about the moon when it is full – Oom Schalk Lourens remarked – especially the moon that hangs over the valley of the Dwarsberge in the summer time. It does strange things to your mind, the Marico moon, and in your heart are wild and fragrant fancies, and your thoughts go very far away. Then, if you have been sitting on your front stoep, thinking these thoughts, you sigh and murmur something about the way of the world, and carry your chair inside.

I have seen the moon in other places besides the Marico. But it is not the same, there.

Braam Venter, the man who fell off the Government lorry once, near Nietverdiend, says that the Marico moon is like a woman laying green flowers on a grave. Braam Venter often says things like that. Particularly since the time he fell off the lorry. He fell on his head, they say.

Always when the moon shines full like that it does something
to our hearts that we wonder very much about and that we never understand. Always it awakens memories. And it is singular how different these memories are with each one of us.

Johannes Oberholzer says that the full moon always reminds him of one occasion when he was smuggling cattle over the Bechuanaland border. He says he never sees a full moon without thinking of the way it shone on the steel wire-cutters that he was holding in his hand when two mounted policemen rode up to him. And the next night Johannes Oberholzer again had a good view of the full moon; he saw it through the window of the place he was in. He says the moon was very large and very yellow, except for the black stripes in front of it.

And it was in the light of the full moon that hung over the thorn-trees that I saw Drieka Breytenbach.

 

Drieka was tall and slender. She had fair hair and blue eyes, and lots of people considered that she was the prettiest woman in the Marico. I thought so, too, that night I met her under the full moon by the thorn-trees. She had not been in the Bushveld very long. Her husband, Petrus Breytenbach, had met her and married her in the Schweizer-Reneke district, where he had trekked with his cattle for a while during the big drought.

Afterwards, when Petrus Breytenbach was shot dead with his own Mauser by a kaffir working on his farm, Drieka went back to Schweizer-Reneke, leaving the Marico as strangely and as silently as she had come to it.

And it seemed to me that the Marico was a different place because Drieka Breytenbach had gone. And I thought of the moon, and the tricks it plays with your senses, and the stormy witchery that it flings at your soul. And I remembered what Braam Venter said, that the full moon is like a woman laying green flowers on a grave. And it seemed to me that Braam Venter's words were not so much nonsense, after all, and that worse things could happen to a man than that he should fall off a lorry on his head. And I thought of other matters.

But all this happened only afterwards.

When I saw Drieka that night she was leaning against a thorn-tree beside the road where it goes down to the drift. But I didn't recognise her at first. All I saw was a figure dressed in white with long hair hanging down loose over its shoulders. It seemed very unusual that a figure should be there like that at such a time of night. I remembered certain stories I had heard about white ghosts. I also remembered that a few miles back I had seen a boulder lying in the middle of the road. It was a fair-sized boulder and it might be dangerous for passing mule-carts. So I decided to turn back at once and move it out of the way.

I decided very quickly about the boulder. And I made up my mind so firmly that the saddle-girth broke from the sudden way in which I jerked my horse back on his haunches. Then the figure came forward and spoke, and I saw it was Drieka Breytenbach.

“Good evening,” I said in answer to her greeting, “I was just going back because I had remembered about something.”

“About ghosts?” she asked.

“No,” I replied truthfully, “about a stone in the road.”

Drieka laughed at that. So I laughed, too. And then Drieka laughed again. And then I laughed. In fact, we did quite a lot of laughing between us. I got off my horse and stood beside Drieka in the moonlight. And if somebody had come along at that moment and said that the predikant's mule-cart had been capsized by the boulder in the road I would have laughed still more.

That is the sort of thing the moon in the Marico does to you when it is full.

I didn't think of asking Drieka how she came to be there, or why her hair was hanging down loose, or who it was that she had been waiting for under the thorn-tree. It was enough that the moon was there, big and yellow across the veld, and that the wind blew softly through the trees and across the grass and against Drieka's white dress and against the mad singing of the stars.

 

Before I knew what was happening we were seated on the grass under the thorn-tree whose branches leant over the road. And I remember that for quite a while we remained there without talking, sitting side by side on the grass with our feet in the soft sand. And Drieka smiled at me with a misty sort of look in her eyes, and I saw that she was lovely.

I felt that it was not enough that we should go on sitting there in silence. I knew that a woman – even a moon-woman like Drieka – expected a man to be more than just good-humoured and
honest. I knew that a woman wanted a man also to be an entertaining companion for her. So I beguiled the passing moments for Drieka with interesting conversation.

I explained to her how a few days before a pebble had worked itself into my veldskoen and had rubbed some skin off the top of one of my toes. I took off my veldskoen and showed her the place. I also told her about the rinderpest and about the way two of my cows had died of the miltsiek. I also knew a lot about blue-tongue in sheep, and about gallamsiekte and the haarwurm, and I talked to her airily about these things, just as easily as I am talking to you.