The Covenant (168 page)

As he moved away from the podium, he felt a pain in his chest; he swayed unsteadily, but reached his chair and sat down. Other speakers followed, with one confining himself to “Triomf over Sophiatown,” but it never occurred to anyone present to ask what it was that
they had triumphed over when they erased this black spot. Over the old women who had worked in white homes for fifty years and hoped for a refuge in which to die? Over young black children who had begun to learn in Father Huddleston’s missions? Over sturdy black workmen who had long manned essential jobs in Johannesburg and who now had to travel many miles to work each morning and back at night? Over the clergymen who had protested the immorality of bulldozing serviceable homes so that favored whites could be spared the sight of black neighbors? Over the good white women, English and Dutch, of the Black Sash who had tried to protect the rights of black mothers and their children? Over the attempts at reconciliation, which should have prevailed in South Africa and didn’t? Over what had Van Doorn’s system triumphed, except the forces of reason?

The pains assailed Detleef again, accompanied this time by a heaviness in the chest which he had to recognize as serious. To the Boer War veteran next to him he whispered, “Damnation! Just as we were getting things truly sorted out.”

He was whisked to a private ward in the Johannesburg General Hospital, and his family was summoned from Vrymeer. When they assembled at his bed and heard his labored breathing they waited for Marius to speak, but Detleef did not want to hear from that one. He distrusted his son, and as older people often will, leaped a generation and extended his shaking hands toward his granddaughter, flaxen-haired Susanna. “Come closer, Sannie,” he whispered, and when he kissed her hands, a gesture most inappropriate from him, the others realized that death must be near. Marius left the room to call Vrymeer, asking that two things precious to the old man be brought in at once.

“Sannie,” the dying man said, “you must always do the thing that is right for your country.” This had been the dictate of his life: the honest move, the just act. He felt that the determination of what was just and honest had best be left to the judgment of men like himself, who were above greed or vanity and who acted solely in the interests of society.

“You’re inheriting a noble country,” he told the girl. “Now that people have been told their place and can rely on just laws to help them keep it.” He noticed that Marius had reentered the room and was wincing at this summary, but he could not understand why. He could not conceive that a son of his might ask, “Who assigned the places? Can such allocations be made without consultation with
those who are being assigned?” Detleef was convinced that since well-intentioned men, attentive to God’s teachings, had made these decisions, to question them endangered the republic. He could not believe that his son would peck like a raven at a fabric so justly woven.

As the afternoon wore on he again began to visualize the enemies who had endangered his land; immortal adversaries, they ranged themselves along the wall waiting for him to die. First were the blacks, who threatened to engulf the nation, cursed offspring of Dingane and stained, like him, with treachery. No! No! First there were the English. Always there were the English enemies, with their clever ways, their superiority of language and class. Two thousand years from now, when Great Pretoria lay crumbled in dust, you could be sure that some Englishman had knocked down the stones. They were the permanent enemy, and he was about to cry out that he still hated them when his mind cleared and he said boldly to everyone in the room, “I have never hated anyone. I have acted only from a sense of justice.”

He did not hate the English—he pitied them, with their lost empire and their doomed superiorities. Nor did he hate the Indians, either; they were a sad lot huddling in their stores. It was regrettable that they had not been expelled, as the Chinese were; then he smiled, for the vision of Mahatma Gandhi flashed across his mind. “We got rid of that one,” he said. Nor did he hate the Jews, even though they had stolen the diamond mines and the gold. “They contaminate our land. We should have expelled them, too.”

“Who?” his wife asked, but before he could respond, there was a commotion in the hall. An official of some kind, you could tell that from his voice, was warning someone: “You can’t go in there. Blacks are not allowed on these floors.”

Marius hurried into the hallway, offered explanations, and soon brought into the sickroom Moses Nxumalo, who carried in his arms the great brassbound Bible. It was impossible to determine which of these gifts from the country pleased the dying man most. He loved old Moses, who had shared so many of the important moments of his life, and he cherished the sacred Bible which contained the record of that life, reaching back through the generations to the young sailor who had planted this Holy Book, actually and figuratively, on South African soil.

He held out his hands to both the black and the Bible.

“I’m so glad you came,” he said weakly.

“I’ve been weeping for you,” Moses said. “But now my eyes are cured, seeing you again.” They spoke of old days, of meaningful adventures, and it was impossible for the black to acknowledge that it was this white who had done so much to hedge in his sons, who had promulgated so many laws to restrict and emasculate them. Detleef was merely the good master, and to see him so near death was bitterness.

It was the Bible that brought Detleef back to reality, and he began thumbing its heavy pages, printed so long ago in Amsterdam, its heavy Gothic letters setting for all time the course of right and wrong. It was inconceivable that God had delivered these words in anything but Dutch …

He stopped. Not even at the doorway to death could he forgive one insidious enemy who fought both South Africa and God: the infamous World Council of Churches, which refused to see that what Van Doorn and his helpers had done was right and openly made cash contributions to murderous revolutionaries. “How can they ignore the good things we’ve done?”

“Who ignores us?” Marius asked.

“Why do they all persecute us?” he whimpered.

And he began to recite the sufferings of the Boers: “The Black Circuit. Slagter’s Nek. Blaauwkrantz. Dingane’s Kraal. The Jameson Raid. Chrissiesmeer Camp.” Bitterly he repeated that infamous name: “Chrissiesmeer!” Then: “Where’s Sannie?”

Impatiently he gestured Moses and Marius aside and reached toward his granddaughter. When he saw her bright face outlined against the stark-white walls he whispered, “Sannie, never forget what they did to us at Chrissiesmeer.”

Mention of that dreadful place so enraged him that blood drained from his brain and he passed into a strange kind of coma: He saw his bed ringed not with members of his family but with the timeless enemies of the Volk: Hilary Saltwood siding with the Xhosa. The man from America giving orders to the hangman at Slagter’s Nek. Dingane giving his bloodstained signal. Cecil Rhodes, implacable foe. Teacher Amberson making him wear the sign:
I SPOKE DUTCH TODAY
. The Jew Hoggenheimer, who had monopolized the mines. The Catholics who had sought to destroy his Martin Luther church. Officials from the United Nations talking sanctions. Was ever a nation so beset by enemies? And among the shadowy figures he saw his own
son, who had chosen a scholarship at contaminating Oxford rather than a captaincy of the Springboks. Enemies all.

Then blood returned to his fevered brain and a light seemed to enter the room, illuminating past and future. He rose on his arm and began shouting, “Laager toe, broers—Draw the wagons into a circle!”

“Sannie, tell the drivers to draw …” He fell back, breathing heavily, and reached for old Moses: “Warn your sons—everyone must hold to his assigned place …”

When it became apparent that he was dead, Marius leaned down to kiss the embattled face, then covered it with a blanket. Closing the old Bible, he said, “Lucky man. He won’t have to watch the consequences of his handiwork.”

O
N THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY
-
FIVE DAYS A YEAR YOU COULD
smell Pik Prinsloo at a distance of twenty feet. One old prospector who had worked the diamond diggings with him said, “Pik takes a wash once a year. Twenty-fourth of December. Says it covers him three ways. Christmas, New Year’s and the heat of summer. So for about ten days he’s tolerable, but come the middle of January, then it’s the same old Pik.”

Had he been married, his wife would probably have made him bathe, but he lived with a slatternly sister in a gypsy-type tin-walled house-wagon drawn by eight donkeys. He was seventy-one years old, toothless, bearded, stooped, with rheumy eyes and matted hair; he wore a flimsy undershirt, sagging pants, untied shoes with no socks and an oil-stained khaki hat. He had been haunting diamond fields since the age of ten.

He lived on canned foods, bits of meat and such mealie-pap as his slovenly sister bothered to make; his house-wagon was such a disgrace that other diamond hunters said, “Even the bush lice won’t go in.” Yet he lived in a kind of odoriferous glory, because on six mornings a week, year after fading year, he wakened with the conviction that on this day his luck was bound to change: “Today I find
that diamond as big as a fist.” After a swig of lukewarm coffee two or three days old, he would shuffle out the door of his house-wagon, stand in the dust, scratch himself under both arms and shout, “Kom nou! Waar is die diamante?” And he would almost run to the spot where his five sieves waited and his pick and shovel rested against a tree. He was perpetually convinced that a day would come when he would find his diamond.

He had little cause for optimism. As a boy of fourteen he had been the main support of one of those marginal Afrikaner farms, and on this waterless land he had been expected to sustain himself and his sister. Four dreadful drought-ridden years passed as they fought to grub existence from the inhospitable acres, always urged on by their predikant, who cited various parables relevant to their condition. One Sunday, after returning from prayers for rain to a noontime meal of pumpkin and mealies, Pik and his sister concluded that God did not intend them to struggle with land to which He sent no water, so they abandoned the farm and acquired the house-wagon and eight mules.

In 1926, as a youth of eighteen, he searched for alluvial diamonds on the Lichtenburg diggings, following a tributary of the Vaal, and there he found his first profitable gem: a flawed stone of just under four carats for which he received the intoxicating sum of £47. That night he announced himself as a diamond digger: “Pik Prinsloo, diamonds.”

His luck had not held. For five desolate years he trudged the Lichtenburg diggings without turning up another diamond of any size. He found chips. He found trivial stones of less than half a carat. But the diamond as big as a fist eluded him, as did those as big as the tip of his little finger, and in 1932, he experienced the indignity of having to quit the diamond fields to test his fortune in the eastern Transvaal gold fields, but even when he did pan a few payable nuggets he derived little satisfaction from them. He was a diamond man; the lure of those beautiful gems tantalized him, so back he went with his spinster sister, his mules and his sieves to probe the smaller streams of the north.

He had no luck whatever, and 1937 found him on the emerald fields near Gravelotte, at the western border of the Kruger National Park. Sometimes at night, sitting in his house-wagon in some lonely spot, he would hear the lions and hyenas, but unlike the other diggers,
he never ventured into the park to see the great beasts. “I’m a diamond man,” he growled. “I oughtn’t to be here at all. A bucketful of emeralds isn’t worth one good diamond, and some day …”

No matter where he went, or how his fortunes decayed, he had one treasure which differentiated him from most other men, and on the rare occasions when he left his sister to join the other diggers in some rural bar and strangers would intrude, he would be apt to place upon the counter a small flat object wrapped in dirty canvas and say ominously, “Look in there and you’ll see who I am.” And the stranger would rather gingerly unfold the canvas and find therein a Digger’s Certificate, printed by the government in 1926, which stated that Pik Prinsloo, of Kroonstad in the Orange Free State, was a licensed digger. And on the back, in variously colored inks, stood the record of his having renewed this precious license each following year, at a fee of five shillings.

“I’m a diamond man,” Pik explained, and if anyone pointed out that he was working emeralds, he would apologize: “Right now I’m gathering capital, because I got me eye on a stream up north …” He would hesitate, turn his rheumy eyes upon the stranger, and ask, “Would you maybe want to back me? I know where there’s diamonds for certain.”

In this way, in the summer of 1977, Pik found his fifth partner, a commercial traveler from Johannesburg who had always wanted to participate in the diamond madness. They had met in a bar, and when Pik displayed his Digger’s Certificate with its endless renewals, the man said, “I been looking for a fellow just like you. How much do you need?”