A Wave Across the Water
After spending years estranged from my father, I met him again on his deathbed a few days before he died from a fever. We spent a week together before he passed away, and despite us not having seen eye to eye in the past, for a single week in a lifetime, we managed to put old differences behind us. It was a good week. I told him all the things I needed to tell him, and he told me all the things he needed to tell me. I am glad to say that we parted as friends. With my brother’s help, we buried my father next to a stream in a lush valley formed by one of the many hills around Stellenbosch. The sun danced in the water as we buried him.In a few years like to imagine the stream chipping away at its banks, and transporting my father’s bones one by one to the ocean. I think he would have liked that.On one of those days, in the week before he died, he asked me to tell him the story of how I ended up coming back to him after all those years of being apart.
This is the story I told him…
I became a policeman for the Kompanjie because my father was a policeman for the Kompanjie, and every little boy starts life wanting to be just like his father. Of course, being a policeman in his day was nothing like it was in mine. Back in his day the colony only stretched about as far as Stellenbosch, but since then everything had changed. In 1786, the little town of Stellenbosch which still had no more than a few hundred inhabitants, in theory, stretched all the way from the outskirts of Cape Town, to a distance of around four hundred miles towards the Fish River Valley in the east and a similar distance to the Buffels Rivier to the north. But, of course, those were just lines on a map; they didn’t really mean much. The truth is that there was barely anything between Cape Town and those faraway places except a handful of farms and hamlets out on the frontiers; to say that they were under Stellenbosch’s authority would be stretching the truth as far as the Kompanjie stretched boarders. Still, every decade or so the Cape governor would find out that settlers were pushing deeper and deeper into Africa, and he would look at the map and draw some lines here, and draw some lines there, until he felt satisfied that all of the colonists had been accounted for. I was one of only a handful of policemen — turned mounted riflemen — who were meant to police these vast swathes of newly acquired land, which was easier said than done.
The real story starts with the murder of a famous frontiersman called Daniel Ferdinand Immelman by one of his slaves, Maria. Immelman had been found with his troat slashed open and his privates cut off on one of his farms outside of Plettenberg Bay. Ordinarily this would have been a job for Swellendam’s district, but the woman who’d been accused was last seen heading north-east towards a blank spots on the map which was technically a part of the Stellenbosch jurisdiction. That made her my problem. At the time I was stationed hundreds of miles away from Stellenbosch at the newly founded Graaff-Reinet outpost, and in my spare time I was helping them set up a landdros there. It was not unusual for me to be stationed so far away from home at the time since it was impossible to ride the leagues back and forth between Stellenbosch proper and the furthest reaches of its jurisdiction. I didn’t mind, as far as I was concerned, the more distance between my father and myself, the better.
Trying to catch-up to Daniel’s murderer wasn’t all that easy. Maria had a good head start on me, and it took a long time for me to find her tracks. It’s not an easy thing trying to track someone down through the wilderness when they could be absolutely anywhere. But, I’d been doing this job for almost twenty years by then, and having Boesak helps. He’s an old dog now and doesn’t run through the veld chasing after antelope like he used to, but he can still follow a scent better than any dog in the Cape. Still, the trekking was hard and Maria knew the land as well as I did, if not better. I spent weeks trying to catch up to her as she headed through mountain ranges and over rivers to as far away from anything as I’d ever gone before. I’d crossed the Gamtoos river once, years ago, but Maria didn’t stop there. She kept pushing deeper and deeper into the hinterland, past the Sondags river and further and further away from any settlements.
I can’t put my finger on it, but somewhere along the way something in me started to change. When I’d set off from Graaff-Reinet more than a month before, everything had made perfect sense to me. She was a murder. I was a policeman. It was my duty as policeman to catch the murder. Simple. And yet, the longer I followed her, and the further away from everything I went, the less any of it seemed to matter to me anymore. All these laws that she’d broken were like another land’s laws that didn’t seem applicable out here. Might as well have chased after a lioness for killing a gazelle. There was something about the way she moved through the landscape too, that I just couldn’t help but notice. Out there, everything works against you. The sun is relentless, the shrubbery seems malicious in the way that it digs into your legs as you try and wade through it, and on top of that, I hadn’t seen a stretch of flat land since I left Graaff-Reinet either. It was a hard road, hard as can be. And yet, as I followed her tracks, I noticed the cunning way in which she chose her paths, always finding the route of least resistance through the mountains and the shrubbery, no matter how well nature tried to hide it. At first I thought it was because she must have come here before with her master, but this wasn’t that sort of country. There were no paths here, no tracks for her to follow. One might remember a valley here and a mountain there, but you could never remember the crisscrossing labyrinth like paths she led me on the way she did. The paths she took across the country were artful and nothing short of it. I started to admire her, in a way. It couldn’t be helped. It was as though she was leaving pieces of herself behind for me with every choice of left or right and up or down. Sometimes, I thought I could see an outline of her on the mountainsides, but like the end of a rainbow, she was always just out of reach. And, in the cold nights when I couldn’t get warm enough to sleep, I wondered what I’d do when I eventually found her. It was only then, in the darkest parts of the night, that I’d make myself remember who she was, and who I was, and I’d clean out the barrel of my pistol to help me remember these distinctions.
After more than two months of following her, I was getting ready to give up. My food was running out, and there’s only so long that you can go on venison. Then, one day, as I was traversing a hillside high up in the Bruintjies Heights, my horse slipped and broke its leg, falling almost all the way down to the valley floor and nearly taking me with it. For any sane man, that ought to have been the final straw; it would be impossible to keep going without my horse, and I knew that. I knew that if I kept going any further, I would never make it back alive again, but I wasn’t sure I cared anymore. The bush brings out the nihilist in me, always has. It was the reason I took this job in the first place. I’m not a lawman, never have been. The first time I left to go into the wilderness, I knew that it’s what I’d be doing for the rest of my life. There was something inside me, something I was born with that never wanted me to stop once I got going. As far as I was concerned, it seemed inevitable that I would die out here, and this reason seemed as good as any not to turn back. Crestfallen, I made camp — or tried to at least — on the mountainside not far from where the horse had broken its leg, while all around me night time threw its thick blanket over the valley. It was only then, when night had truly settled in around me that I saw the fire down in the valley about a mile downstream. We were far too far away from anything for it to be anyone else but her.
I made it down the valley and to where the fire was just before sunrise with my loaded pistol drawn, but still uncocked. By this point the fire had gone out, and if it weren’t for the smoke that hung above where the fire had once burnt, I might not have found her at all. Next to the gleaming coals, Maria was sleeping soundly as expected, but what I had not expected was the little girl she was holding in her arms. There had been times when I’d thought I’d seen more than one set of tracks, but only very rarely. Then again, a girl like that could be carried on your back. I didn’t wake them. At first, it was because I didn’t know how I would go about it, but after a while, it was simply because I didn’t want to, and so I didn’t. I found a rock again near where they were lying, and sat down on it, watching over them as the they slept, and smoking my pipe with the last bit of tobacco I had left. There was hardly enough left to fill the bowl with, so I puffed on it patiently, and just often enough for it not to go out.
Even when they finally awoke, they did not see me at once, but took a moment to look at each other sleepily, unaware of my presence. They smiled at one another, glad to see that they had both made it through the night, breathing in the misty morning air until it filled their lungs for the new day.
It was only when Maria got up to stretch herself out that she saw me, and I wished that she didn’t. I was quite enjoying watching them sleep, and I was not yet ready to do my duty. But, she did see me, and immediately moved herself so that she stood between me and her daughter. I told them who I was, and Maria nodded. She had not expected me this far inland, but she knew that she would be found one day, and you could see that in her heart she had resigned herself to that fact. I told Maria that I was taking them back with me to Swellendam where she would be tried for murder. Again she simply nodded and spoke no words in her defence. I told her that she would be hanged for her crimes, but still she did not react other than nodding to signal that she understood. I told her to gather their things so that we could start our journey back, and so she started gathering her things so that we could start the journey back.
I watched every move Maria made nervously, wondering why a woman that could so intelligently navigate the lands offered up so little resistance. But then, I looked at her daughter that her mother was so desperately trying to hide behind her skirts, and it started to make sense. The girl was pretty, very pretty, and far older than I had thought she was when she was curled up in her mother’s arms, though she could still have been no older than twelve. She wore a very plain little dress, but it was immaculately clean for a dress she’d worn all this time, infinitely cleaner than her mother’s and even my own clothes. Where some bushes had clearly torn it, it had been neatly and carefully stitched up, and where her mother’s hair was unruly and unkept, her hair was meticulously braided and taken care of. What struck me most of all about the girl though, was not the state of her clothes or her hair, but the strange way that she walked, as though she was injured. I asked the little girl what happened to her legs, but the little girl did not reply. I asked Maria what happened to her daughter’s legs, but she did not reply. I asked Maria a second time what happened to her daughter’s legs, she told me nothing had happened to her daughter’s legs.
I did not understand.
I asked the little girl to come to me, and she started towards me with her awkward gait. Then her mother grabbed her then and wouldn’t let her come to me, insisting that nothing was wrong with her daughter’s legs; begging me not to take her. The more I tried to tell her mother that I just wanted to see if she was hurt, the more she begged me not to. I asked her why she would not let me see her daughter’s legs, but she would not tell me. Then I asked her why she killed master Immelman, and still she would not tell me. I surged up from my rock, angry and powerful, and strode towards the pair of them, firmly pulling the mother away from her daughter. Maria tried to resist me and held on to her daughter with all her might, but she was not strong enough to stop me, and I had my pistol was pointed at her daughter. I told Maria to back up, and Maria slowly backed up, tears already in her eyes. I told the little girl to pull up her skirt, and she looked at her mother as though her mother could make it better. But her mother was powerless now. I told her to pull up her skirt again while Maria was crying and begging and crying and begging for me to let her daughter go. She told me to take her instead, but I insisted that the girl must lift up her skirt. Finally, with tears streaming down her face, she lifted up her little skirt, hiding her face behind the fabric so she would not have to look me in the eye as I stepped towards her.
* * * * *
Maria found me by the riverbank after it was long over. I thought that she was brave for coming. I’d been trying to wash my hands clean in the waters, but with little success. She told me to use the fine river sands instead. She was right, and soon the dirt was drifting away with the sand in a white cloud down the river.
She asked me what I was going to do now, so I said that I would go back home to Stellenbosch and sleep in my father’s house. He was an old man now, perhaps he might have more time for his son. She nodded even though she did not understand. She asked me what I was going to do about Immelman. I told her that Immelman was dead and that, as far as I was concerned, that was for the best. She nodded. I did not need to remind her about what I’d seen under her daughter’s skirt, it was the one thing she would never forget, and neither would her daughter.
She asked me what I was going to do with them now. I told her that I was going to find a stick and try to make a rod to catch some fish with. Boesak is hungry and I’ve always wanted to taste what fish from the Fish River tastes like. When I was done fishing, I said I would arrest her. She looked at me confusedly, she did not understand why I would wait. I told her that it would be a good idea if she swam over to the other side of the river with her daughter to see if she could find some crabs in the water for us to eat tonight, but that she must not swim back when she’s done. Again Maria did not understand, but she did as I asked and took her daughter across the river to look for crabs. I made an excellent rod from a branch and some string I kept in my pack, and caught a fat Kurper for Boesak while I watched the two of them wading through the water.
I waved at them before I left the riverbank and headed back up the steep hills of the valley and back home. It took them a long time to realise that I was not coming back for them. Maria knew the lands better than anyone, but she did not learn it from maps. She never saw the lines that the governors drew on them. She did not know that they ended at the Fish River, but I did. I knew where Stellenbosch ended, and I knew where it began.
It was time for me to go back there. Time for me to go home.
