Mafeking Road (15 page)

But, of course, it was the moonlight that did it. I never knew before that I was so good in this idle, butterfly kind of talk. And the whole thing was so innocent, too. I felt that if Drieka Breytenbach's husband, Petrus, were to come along and find us sitting there side by side, he would not be able to say much about it. At least, not very much.

 

After a while I stopped talking.

Drieka put her hand in mine.

“Oh, Schalk,” she whispered, and the moon and that misty look were in her blue eyes. “Do tell me some more.”

I shook my head.

“I am sorry, Drieka,” I answered, “I don't know any more.”

“But you must, Schalk,” she said softly. “Talk to me about – about other things.”

I thought steadily for some moments.

“Yes, Drieka,” I said at length, “I have remembered something. There is one more thing I haven't told you about the blue-tongue in sheep – ”

“No, no, not that,” she interrupted, “talk to me about other things. About the moon, say.”

So I told her two things that Braam Venter had said about the moon. I told her the green flower one and the other one.

“Braam Venter knows lots more things like that about the moon,” I explained, “you'll see him next time you go to Zeerust for the Nagmaal. He is a short fellow with a bump on his head from where he fell – ”

“Oh, no, Schalk,” Drieka said again, shaking her head, so that a wisp of her fair hair brushed against my face, “I don't want to know about Braam Venter. Only about you. You think out something on your own about the moon and tell it to me.”

I understood what she meant.

“Well, Drieka,” I said thoughtfully. “The moon – the moon is all right.”

“Oh, Schalk,” Drieka cried. “That's much finer than anything Braam Venter could ever say – even with that bump on his head.”

Of course, I told her that it was nothing and that I could perhaps say something even better if I tried. But I was very proud, all the same. And somehow it seemed that my words brought us close together. I felt that that handful of words, spoken under the full moon, had made a new and witch thing come into the life of Drieka and me.

We were holding hands then, sitting on the grass with our feet in the road, and Drieka leant her head on my shoulder, and her long hair stirred softly against my face, but I looked only at her feet. And I thought for a moment that I loved her. And I did not love her because her body was beautiful, or because she had red lips, or because her eyes were blue. In that moment I did not understand about her body or her lips or her eyes. I loved her for her feet; and because her feet were in the road next to mine.

And yet all the time I felt, far away at the back of my mind, that it was the moon that was doing these things to me.

“You have got good feet for walking on,” I said to Drieka.

“Braam Venter would have said that I have got good feet for dancing on,” Drieka answered, laughing. And I began to grow jealous of Braam Venter.

The next thing I knew was that Drieka had thrown herself into my arms.

“Do you think I am very beautiful, Schalk?” Drieka asked.

“You are very beautiful, Drieka,” I answered slowly, “very beautiful.”

“Will you do something for me, Schalk?” Drieka asked again, and her red lips were very close to my cheek. “Will you do something for me if I love you very much?”

“What do you want me to do, Drieka?”

She drew my head down to her lips and whispered hot words in my ear.

And so it came about that I thrust her from me, suddenly. I
jumped unsteadily to my feet; I found my horse and rode away. I left Drieka Breytenbach where I had found her, under the thorn-tree by the roadside, with her hot whisperings still ringing in my ears, and before I reached home the moon had set behind the Dwarsberge.

 

Well, there is not much left for me to tell you. In the days that followed, Drieka Breytenbach was always in my thoughts. Her long, loose hair and her red lips and her feet that had been in the roadside sand with mine. But if she really was the ghost that I had at first taken her to be, I could not have been more afraid of her.

And it seemed singular that, while it had been my words, spoken in the moonlight, that helped to bring Drieka and me closer together, it was Drieka's hot breath, whispering wild words in my ear, that sent me so suddenly from her side.

Once or twice I even felt sorry for having left in that fashion.

And later on when I heard that Drieka Breytenbach had gone back to Schweizer-Reneke, and that her husband had been shot dead with his own Mauser by one of the farm kaffirs, I was not surprised. In fact, I had expected it.

Only it did not seem right, somehow, that Drieka should have got a kaffir to do the thing that I had refused to do.

The berries of the kareeboom (Oom Schalk Lourens said, nodding his head in the direction of the tall tree whose shadows were creeping towards the edge of the stoep) may not make the best kind of mampoer that there is. What I mean is that karee brandy is not as potent as the brandy you distil from moepels or maroelas. Even peach brandy, they say, can make you forget the rust in the corn quicker than the mampoer you make from karee-berries.

But karee mampoer is white and soft to look at, and the smoke that comes from it when you pull the cork out of the bottle is pale and rises up in slow curves. And in time of drought, when you have been standing at the borehole all day, pumping water for the cattle, so that by the evening water has got a bitter taste for you, then it is very soothing to sit on the front stoep, like now, and to get somebody to pull the cork out of a bottle of this kind of
mampoer. Your hands will be sore and stiff from the pump-handle, so that if you try and pull it out yourself the cork will seem as deep down in the bottle as the water is in the borehole.

 

Many years ago, when I was a young man, and I sat here, on the front stoep, and I saw that white smoke floating away slowly and gracefully from the mouth of the bottle, and with a far-off fragrance, I used to think that the smoke looked like a young girl walking veiled under the stars. And now that I have grown old, and I look at that white smoke, I imagine that it is a young girl walking under the stars, and still veiled. I have never found out who she is.

Hans Kriel and I were in the same party that had gone from this section of the Groot Marico to Zeerust for the Nagmaal. And it was a few evenings after our arrival, when we were on a visit to Kris Wilman's house on the outskirts of the town, that I learnt something of the first half of Hans Kriel's love story, that half at which I laughed. The knowledge of the second half came a little later, and I didn't laugh then.

We were sitting on Krisjan Wilman's stoep and looking out in the direction of Sephton's Nek. In the setting sun the koppies were red on one side; on the other side their shadows were lengthening rapidly over the vlakte. Krisjan Wilman had already poured out the mampoer, and the glasses were going round.

“That big shadow there is rushing through the thorn-trees just
like a black elephant,” Adriaan Bekker said. “In a few minutes' time it will be at Groot Marico station.”

“The shorter the days are, the longer the shadows get,” Frikkie Marais said. “I learnt that at school. There are also lucky and unlucky shadows.”

“You are talking about ghosts, now, and not shadows,” Adriaan Bekker interrupted him, learnedly. “Ghosts are all the same length, I think, more or less.”

“No, it is the ghost stories that are all the same length,” Krisjan Wilman said. “The kind you tell.”

It was good mampoer, made from karee-berries that were plucked when they were still green and full of thick sap, just before they had begun to whiten, and we said things that contained much wisdom.

“It was like the shadow of a flower on her left cheek,” I heard Hans Kriel say, and immediately I sat up to listen, for I could guess of what it was that he was talking.

“Is it on the lower part of her cheek?” I asked. “Two small purple marks?”

Because in that case I would know for sure that he was talking about the new waitress in the Zeerust café. I had seen her only once, through the plate-glass window, and because I had liked her looks I had gone up to the counter and asked her for a roll of Boer tobacco, which she said they did not stock. When she said they didn't stock koedoe biltong, either, I had felt too embarrassed to ask for anything else. Only afterwards I remembered
that I could have gone in and sat down and ordered a cup of coffee and some harde beskuit. But it was too late then. By that time I felt that she could see that I came from this part of the Marico, even though I was wearing my hat well back on my head.

 

“Did you – did you speak to her?” I asked Hans Kriel after a while.

“Yes,” he said, “I went in and asked her for a roll of Boer tobacco. But she said they didn't sell tobacco by the roll, or koedoe biltong, either. She said this last with a sort of a sneer. I thought it was funny, seeing that I hadn't asked her for koedoe biltong. So I sat down in front of a little table and ordered some harde beskuit and a cup of coffee. She brought me a number of little dry, flat cakes with letters on them that I couldn't read very well. Her name is Marie Rossouw.”

“You must have said quite a lot to her to have found out her name,” I said, with something in my voice that must have made Hans Kriel suspicious.

“How do you know who I am talking about?” he demanded suddenly.

“Oh, never mind,” I answered. “Let us ask Krisjan Wilman to refill our glasses.”

I winked at the others and we all laughed, because by that time Hans Kriel was sitting half-sideways on the riempies bench, with his shoulders drawn up very high and his whole body seeming to be kept up by one elbow. It wasn't long after that he moved
his elbow, so that we had to pick him up from the floor and carry him into the voorkamer, where we laid him in a corner on some leopard skins.

 

But before that he had spoken more about Marie Rossouw, the new waitress in the café. He said he had passed by and had seen her through the plate-glass window and there had been a vase of purple flowers on the counter, and he had noticed those two marks on her cheek, and those marks had looked very pretty to him, like two small shadows from those purple flowers.

“She is very beautiful,” Hans Kriel said. “Her eyes have got deep things in them, like those dark pools behind Abjaterskop. And when she smiled at me once – by mistake, I think – I felt as though my heart was rushing over the vlaktes like that shadow we saw in the sunset.”

“You must be careful of those dark pools behind Abjaterskop,” I warned him. “We know those pools have got witches in them.”

I felt it was a pity that we had to carry him inside, shortly afterwards. For the mampoer had begun to make Hans Kriel talk rather well.

As it happened, Hans Kriel was not the only one, that night, who encountered difficulties with the riempies bench. Several more of us were carried inside. And when I look back on that Nagmaal my most vivid memories are not of what the predikant said at the church service, or of Krisjan Wilman's mampoer, even, but of how very round the black spots were on the pale yellow of
the leopard skin. They were so round that every time I looked at them they were turning.

In the morning Krisjan Wilman's wife woke us up and brought us coffee. Hans Kriel and I sat up side by side on the leopard skins, and in between drinking his coffee Hans Kriel said strange things. He was still talking about Marie Rossouw.

 

“Just after dark I got up from the front stoep and went to see her in the café,” Hans Kriel said.