Red Dog. Willem Anker

      During that year and the following you can come and look for me among the huts of the farm folk. On such a summer’s evening I’m sixteen and loitering among the fires. Children hang about me and I lift them up on my shoulders. They crow with pleasure and their parents call them in. I walk past the hut where I know she lives, a few times, and ask nobody about her and she doesn’t appear. I go and sit with a group of young Hottentots and we talk about the cow and her udder that started festering that afternoon. One of the Hottentots has a birthmark on his face and vomits on the fire and the others laugh and I see her nowhere.

      On a later, cooler evening you can find me next to a fire drinking beer with two old cattle-herds who talk of drought. Now and again they peek at me. I sit and drink what they have and promise to give them back the next morning what I’ve drunk and they laugh because they must and say I’m welcome and I don’t ask them about her and much later I get up and walk to another fire.

      In winter the wood is wet and the fires smoke and the old men are older and when they see me they slip into the nearest hut with their calabashes. I fight when I’m drunk and sometimes I pretend to be drunk so that I can lash out more savagely and on none of these evenings does she appear and on every one of these evenings I look up too quickly when her name is mentioned. Piccanins who should be in bed by now taunt me with her name when they see me approach. The young Hottentots laugh but not out loud. Early one morning the karrie makes me vomit and I take a young half-caste girl to my hut. I lie with a woman for the first time. I remember what she smelt like and how bony she was and that she didn’t want it and how quickly it was done. In the following weeks I jump two more and sit around with Saterdag who never talks about her.

      Towards the end of winter the fires are small and the people keep indoors. I still now and again sneak up to where I can see the shadows of her and her family moving around in their hut, but I don’t come out of the bushes. One night the sky is open and the stars shower down all around me when I get up from the fire where a few souls have elected to brave the cold. It’s freezing out here, but my jackal hole is too stuffy. The men around the fire all have their reasons not to be with their wives in their huts. They sit still, the only dance being the shadows in the smoky flames. I walk into the veldt with a calabash. There’s someone walking behind me. I stop a few times, listen. The footsteps are light, but not accustomed to prowling in the dark. The figure stands still as soon as I sit down. The dark outline stands watching me for a while and then walks back in the direction of the fire. I drain the calabash. Snivel-snot Senekal’s brandy scorches my throat. I go home. As I walk I look behind me to see whether I don’t recognise one of the shadows. In front of my hut she’s waiting for me.

      My father is scared of you.

      Whatever for?

      He sees you walking up and down in front of our hut. He says you’re wearing a trench with your feet between your place and ours.

      I walk in many places.

      So I hear, yes. But nowadays you only walk in one path. Father says he’s going to beat me to death if he catches me with you. He says you can’t look after a woman. He says you can’t look after yourself.

      I look after myself. I built this house.

      My father says this thing is no house, he says ostriches build better nests.

      So let your father come and build me a house.

      If you tell him to, he’ll have to do it.

      What are you doing here?

      Why don’t you talk to me at the Master’s house?

      I talk.

      You never talk.

      What do you want to talk about?

      We sit out the night in my ostrich nest and she tells me about her life and her parents and her little sister who died the previous year and her father who paces muttering up and down in the hut and hits them if the pacing doesn’t help and the children of Geertruy whom she looks after and knows better than I do and I tell her nothing but I listen to everything she says and I don’t forget any of it. It is morning by the time she starts talking more slowly. The most important things that had to be said have been said. She allows me to touch her. The dress she starts taking off was my mother’s and was Geertruy’s. We kiss until she has to go and skim the milk for goddam David’s goddam butter. My prick isn’t having any. When she’s gone, I work up a hard-on by hand and harrow a plot of ground where I’m lying and wipe myself on the kaross. I walk past the dairy and see her there, fishing out the spoon that has fallen into the vat. Her arms are dripping cream. I turn away, walk in the direction of the veldt, stand still and turn around again and check behind me again. See, she’s coming towards me.

      She’s barely four feet tall. I lie on top of her, it’s as if she disappears into the ground under me. When she bends over me, I’m a child between her breasts. She is soft as no other body is soft and she smells of animal fat and buchu and the stuff she uses to starch Geertruy’s bonnets. The following few months we search each other out in the veldt and behind the homestead and there are toothmarks on our bodies and our crotches are raw and sore.

      Regard us well, spy on us if you can, because after two centuries I can still not capture our lovemaking in words. Words like passion and all-consuming create no pictures of her nipples. Geertruy taught me to read and write properly; I know what it’s worth. Rather unbutton the front of your pants or slip a hand in under your dress and see her back straining.

      See, I look much older than twenty that day when I walk far into the veldt. The thunderclouds are massing low and full. The black clouds make the plain seem brighter, the greens and yellows sharper. I pick tracks at random. I home in on an oribi spoor, then foot by foot I follow the tracks of a mountain tortoise. I follow a footfall as long as the pace pleases me, until an alluring track crosses the previous one. I follow a klipspringer in the direction of the river; I trot and run along the bank with the speed of a rhebok. The stream winds its shallow course through the poort. Then the spoor that piques my notice is above me in the air: the whistlings of swifts flashing over and past one another, as if knotting and unknotting invisible loops. On their way northwards. I wonder how far Ezeljacht is from France and my ancestors. Dancing and chirking they stretch their sable wings, the wings wapping like hands clapping all around me. They break their circles and fly high into the sky. One of the swallows skims down low over my head and disappears into the ridge across the river. For a moment it seems as if the bird flies into the rocks without breaking

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