Willem Anker - Red Dog - A Frontier Novel

I stand still, look around me. Geertruy is not far away. If I go and knock there in the middle of the night, she’ll carry on about it. Mother is not far. If I go back there, my sisters will wake up and comfort me.

I sit down against a red rock that looms up from the scrub like a gravid hippopotamus. I dig next to the rock. The soil soon becomes friable; I dig further. I curl up in my hole against the rock lying hard behind me and of which I cannot imagine the nether end. I scrabble soil all over me. I press it hard against me like the back of my sister. Everywhere herds and flocks and swarms are calling to one another; they warn and threaten and lure. Once I see steam rising out of a pair of nostrils against the pale moon and then the eyes glittering in the bush and then nothing except wings breaking branches. The moon glides past and reflects against the rock above me and spills out onto the ground in front of me. The little I can see in the meagre reflection of the distant light tells me I am safe, and beyond that, I tell myself, everything I hear is only the wind in the brushwood.

I wait by the side of the yard until the people start stirring. I knock at the door. Geertruy opens and takes me inside and spreads a straw mat in front of the fire in the living room.

A few months later Mother marries Jacob Senekal, the young gallows-bait brother of Geertruy’s David. Mother is forty-eight and Jacob twenty-eight, but Mother is a pretty woman with a good many teeth for her age. By candlelight she looks younger than Geertruy. Two years later our grieving mother buries Li’l Jacob as well. The clods have hardly covered the coffin when a next Jacob arises, one Helbeck, who comes to share her bed and brood at Ezeljacht.

I’ve not been away from home for long. I have trouble sleeping in the strange house. I cuddle up to the kaross, think back to the bodies of my brothers and sisters who kept me snug on such nights. I steal into the other room where the family sleeps and crawl in next to Geertruy and David and their child. Dumb-dick David chases me out of the house. The next morning after we’ve consumed our daily eggs and griddlecake in silence, Geertruy takes me aside and explains the sleeping arrangements here. She presses me to her and holds me like that and I don’t let go and then she takes my arms from her. She goes into the house and gives the baby breast and when that dog-dick David catches me peeping, he gives me a thrashing and the next day the piece of putrid pig’s pizzle wallops me once more.

Geertruy is sitting with me under the tree, so old and gnarled nobody knows any more what kind of a tree it is. It is so tall, I’ve never managed to climb more than halfway up it. On Tuesday mornings she teaches me to write in Dutch. It is hot, but I draw the kaross closer around me. Last night I dreamt. I was against the red rock again, I covered myself with soil again. Then I sank away, the soil covered my face, poured into my nose and mouth. In the dream I suffocated. I woke up cold and wet and hurt. I opened the door, coaxed one of the yard dogs inside. The dog settled on my kaross; I snuggled up against him.

The dog is called Ore, for his large flapping ears. He is sitting next to me under the tree. I am still cold. Geertruy is teaching me about zijn and hebben , being and having.

Ik ben, zij is , het is , jullie zijn , she says, I am, she is, it is, you are. Wij zijn . Zij zijn . We are. They are.

She waits for me to recite the list. I look at the white sunlight beyond the shade of the tree. The soil is quaking with heat.

Ik heb , u heeft , jij hebt , zij heeft , hij heeft , het heeft , jullie hebben , she says, I have, you have, thou hast, she has, he has. Wij hebben , zij hebben . We have, they have.

I repeat after her, make a few mistakes so that the lesson can carry on as long as possible. Only she and I. We have each other and are of each other. Hebben and zijn , to have and to be. The house and the other people are over there. I shuffle closer to her, try wriggling myself in under her armpit.

When do I zijn , when do I hebben ? I ask.

You use zijn if you are talking of something that is on its way, to somewhere else, but a particular somewhere else. From here to there. In a direction. Verbs that speak of something that is moving, changing.

Oh, I say, and understand not a whit of it.

Coming, beginning, dying, shrinking, seeming, preventing, staying, looking, appearing, touching. And becoming, she says.

Becoming?

Yes, everything that becomes.

What does not become? I ask.

She is silent, looks up into the body of the tree, the branches above us as thick as crocodiles.

Zijn for departing, she says. Zijn for jumping in, for walking past, climbing up.

My teeth are chattering. I fiddle with the kaross, put my arm around the dog.

Coen, she says, note well. We say verbs are words of working, because words can work hard if you yoke them properly like willing oxen. Words are tools. You must learn to use them like a saw or a hammer. Come, think of more words that take a zijn .

Falling? I ask. Sinking?

Yes, she says. Always zijn .

She presses me against her, strokes the kaross.

Remember, Coen, what you are must be more than what you have. Most verbs need a hebben , but don’t forget the zijn . Zijn is how you grow from the inside. One day when you are old, you’ll see how your zijn , your being, has grown, big and strong like this tree. As long as you’ve given it enough water. Hebben is what you can count, everything you’ve accumulated.

What do you mean, Geertruy?

She pretends to be hearing something near the house.

I hear the baby crying, she says.

Wij hebben elkaar; wij zijn van elkaar . We have each other; we are of each other.

Damnation David flattens me with a blow one evening when I correct the head of the household’s pronunciation of the Dutch God’s High Dutch Word, and he thrashes me half to death when I drive the cattle into the kraal too late, and he beats the shit out of me when I sit too still in the house and look at him and smile.

I don’t want to bore you. A year after I ran off, I walk over to Mother’s homestead. Ore follows me at a trot. Mother is still pretty and the first Jacob is still alive behind his milky gaze. Mother is yelling at the Hottentots. She kicks a suckling pig that’s forever under her feet. She sees me coming, goes into the house and comes out with her hair under a bonnet. She awaits me at the door.

And to what do we owe this honour?

Good day, Mother.

Yes, good day. You’re thin. Don’t they feed you?

We stand and talk at the door and she doesn’t ask me why I ran away and I don’t ask her if she misses my father. While we talk, she directs the affairs of the farm with hand gestures and biting commands. I start to say good bye; she tells me to wait. She goes indoors and returns with the clothes that I left there and that are now too small. She says if they don’t fit me any more, I can pass them on to Geertruy’s offspring.

It’s a girl-child, Mother.

What is that to me.