Devils Valley - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

André Brink was born in Vrede, Free State, South Africa, in 1935. He is a three-time recipient of South Africa's CNA Award, and he has been short-listed twice for the Booker Prize. He is a professor of English at the University of Cape Town.

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Excerpt

Come a Long Way

"I been sitting here, waiting for you," said the old man, notbothering to look at me.

    The shock with which it struck me. Cautiously, as if I hadreason to feel guilty, I shifted the rucksack on my back. I'dnoticed the old dude from quite a distance, perched on therocky outcrop, as gray as the grass. Without dislodging a stoneor missing a step I'd come down all the bloody way from thetop where the four-by-four had dropped me, heading straightfor the small herd of mottled goats; and what with the suncoming at an angle from the front there was no shadow eitherto warn him: yet there he was on the ridge, in his stupid old-fashionedskin trousers and waistcoat and floppy wide-brimmedhat, his back to me, staring out across the deepravine, and saying in that level voice, as if he'd bloody wellbeen watching me all the way, "I been sitting here, waiting foryou."

    I put out my hand. "Flip Lochner, Oom."

    "Ja, I know mos." The crusty old customer was still gazinginto the distance, so I had to drop my hand. "You come along way in this snow."

    Around us the mountains were shimmering in the late-summerheat. Bloody baking oven. I wiped the sweat from myface with my sleeve. "Snow, Oom?" I inquired cautiously.

    "Ja, didn't you see?. The mountains are white."

    I decided on the diplomatic approach. "I can imagine itmust be pretty cold here in winter."

    "Man, woman, child and beast, they all died of exposure."

    He drew the skin waistcoat tight on his sinewy body, shiveringbriefly as if he could actually feel the cold. He lookedfucking ancient, but very straight, kind of patriarchal, his angrygray beard stained with tobacco juice like a tuft of dry grasspissed on many times, the mouth caved in, chewing on hisgums. Something left on a shelf well past its sell-by date.

DEVIL'S VALLEY

"I suppose that's the Devil's Valley down there? I asked sortof unnecessarily after a while.

    "What's it look like to you?"

    "More like Paradise."

    A reluctant grunt made his Adam's apple jump. Then, atouch more affable, he said, "We always believed Adam andEve must have lived down here. I mean, before God got angrywith them." Adding as an afterthought, still without botheringto look at me, "Name's Lermiet. Lukas Lermiet."

    It wasn't the sort of name one comes across every day orforgets once you've heard it. I could barely hide my surprise."But that's the family name, isn't it?"

    "Well, what did you expect?" he asked in a huff. His voicewas like old bloody dry grass rustling, and with a Dutch accentto it.

    "I'm sorry, but it just struck me ..." I tried to collect mythoughts. "I mean, the first man who trekked into thisvalley--when was that? In the 1830s--was also a LukasLermiet, wasn't he? Lukas Seer, they called him. And thenalmost nothing more was heard of them for well over a centuryand a half. It was only the other day, in Stellenbosch,that I heard the name again ..."

    "Is that what you come for? To nose around? We mindingour own business here." For the first time the old fuckerlooked at me. The kind of look that unsettles one even inbroad daylight: colorless eyes peering through a tangle of grayeyebrows, dulled by cataracts, with a remoteness about them,an absence. What was uncanny about it was this: on the onehand it seemed to miss nothing, picking up all the shit thathad ever happened to me, all the hidden agendas behind it,even those I hadn't resolved for myself yet. On the other handhe seemed to be staring right through me, in one way andout the other, as if I was a bloody sheet of glass through whichhe could see everything in the landscape that had been therebefore us and would outlive us: the cliffs and ridges foldingaway, layer upon layer under the fucking endless sky, theslopes reaching down, all steep and forbidding like, to the longnarrow valley at the bottom, as bloody void and whatever asit must have been in the time of God and Genesis.

    "It's a piece of history that's never been written up properly,"I tried to justify myself.

    "With good reason, if you ask me. Why would anyonewant to write it up?"

    "So that people will know."

    "What for?"

    I had to calm his suspicions. "Oom, I promise you I won'toffend anyone."

    The old number scraped his throat and spat a green gobmere inches past my face.

SO VERY SUDDEN

"I met Little-Lukas Lermiet in Stellenbosch," I began again.

    No answer. He was sitting there like a dumb piece of rock.

    "The day he died I was on my way to see him," I wenton. This might be the only bait he'd swallow.

    But he still didn't bother to answer; I couldn't even besure that he'd heard me.

    "You might say I owe him one," I explained. "To comehere, I mean. To look up his people. It was all so very sudden."

    "Little-Lukas had no business to go where he went. He hadno right to flap out about us," snarled the old man. "He gotwhat he deserved."

    "Oom?" I asked, taken aback.

    Silence.

    "I take it he was a relation? The same name and all."

    "None of your business," he growled.

    "Well ..." I knew when there was nothing more to squeezefrom a stone. "At least I thought I'd come and see for myself."

OPEN EYES

"You can still go back," said Oom Lukas in his raspy voice, sogruffly I wasn't quite sure if he'd spoken or just cleared histhroat. "And if you want my advice you'll turn back whileyou still can. Once you put your two feet down there it maysoon be too late."

    "No, Oom, I can't let such a chance go by. I've been waitingfor this for years. And after I spoke to Little-Lukas ..."

    "Then you going into it with open eyes."

    Words I was to remember only too fucking well, muchlater, too late.

    "If you don't mind, I can go down with you when you gohome," I proposed.

    "You'll be waiting a long time."

    "Don't you live down there in the valley, then?"

    "Says who?"

    "I'm afraid I don't understand."

    "That's your worry." He sat mumbling to himself for awhile before he spoke up again: "If you want to go down, thenyou'll have to do it on your own."

    "Perhaps you could at least show me the way?"

    He sniffed, and for a while he seemed to have switchedoff. Then he raised his hand-carved kierie. "Go down this littleslope to the break in the cliff, and past the two big bouldersof the Gate. You can wait down there, someone will come toshow you the way. And down in the kloof Lukas Death willtake over. You can stay with Poppie Fullmoon. I already toldthem to expect you."

    "But how could you have known? I haven't discussed thiswith anyone."

    Ignoring the question he said, "That's to say, if your mindis really set on it."

    "It is."

    "All right, then get going. But mind the snow, it's veryslippery. We'll talk again."

    Hooking my thumbs under the straps of the rucksack thatwas giving me hell, I began to go down the slope, my heartin my throat. I'd been warned that it could take days to findone's way down to the valley. If you make it. More than oneclimber had fallen to his death down these cliffs--and theywere experienced mountaineers, not people whose systems hadbeen fucked up by years of smoking and drinking and whatever,especially whatever. And could I really rely on the wordof an old dodderer whose head had clearly taken a knock?

GOD'S GRANDMOTHER

Down below me stretched the Devil's Valley, much as it musthave been when it was first torn into the earth's crust. Ungodlycliffs on either side, with ridges and bands in reds andoranges and browns, grays and blacks, thrown up from theiroriginal horizontal layers by bloody unimaginable forces. Somehad been shoved into diagonal or even perpendicular positions,others were rippling like petrified waves. The kind of landscapethat turns a man into a fucking ant. As if the earth itself hadturned and tossed in a predawn slumber before it sort of satup, all bleary-eyed. And down at the very bottom lay the deepslit of the valley, half-hidden behind dark thickets of naturalforest. The kind of view that turns on a dirty mind.

    It was like being the first man ever to set foot in this place.I could imagine the sensation the first Lukas Lermiet musthave felt looking down here, the kind of sexual urge thatmarks every first man: seeing the earth unfolding ahead, justwaiting to be conquered. With my tape recorder and my camera,here we go.

    In the motherfucking cliff-face ahead of me was a singlebreach. That must be the "Gate" the old man had spokenabout. The two huge boulders he'd pointed out were speckledgray on the outside, but where the crust had eroded the rockwas flame-red. I stopped for a moment to look back. A hundredyards higher up I could see the old dried-up turd stillperched on his rock surrounded by his grazing goats, motionlesslike a stone carving, and worn away by wind and sun,water, lightning. Brittle and fragile, a mere twig of a man,older than God's grandmother.

Infamous Fruit

My time is running out. From where I'm sitting now, just outof sight of the sprinkling of whitewashed houses and the squatstone church, I can look out over the scorched slopes. It ishard to believe how much has happened in the time I've beenhere. From deep inside the Devil's Valley, like Jonah from thebelly of the whale, I've got to cry out or something. But whowill hear? No matter, I've just got to try, there's nothing elseI can do. The day I came down here, when I passed throughold Oom Lukas's high gate, the rocks mottled with lichen, birdshit, dassie piss, the crap of baboons, pollen blown by the wind,all this was still waiting to happen. Yet in a way it was alreadythere. Sure, the old number had given me due warning, buthow could I have known what he meant? These things alwayscome too late. One prepares to face the threats one knows,not the fucking unknown. And at that moment all was stillunknown.

    Would I have turned back, that afternoon, if I'd then seenwhat still lay ahead? Jesus, it would have spared so much. Forme, for Emma, for everybody in the Devil's Valley. All theviolence of suffering, suspicion, intrigue, grudging, memory,blood, betrayal, scorched earth. All these things which todayconverge to spell "knowledge"--or, more pretentiously, "wisdom."Yet I have a hunch I would have pressed on regardless.I mean, would Adam have turned down his woman's infamousfruit--apple or apricot, mango or fig--if he'd been wise beforethe event? No way.

TALL TALES

The problem is that I have no bloody way of making surewhat I have to show for my efforts. Statements, testimonies,accounts, or just a damn handful of ravings? A man who spenthis whole life trying to fly. A woman who drove a stakethrough her husband's head. A savage who fathered seventeenchildren on the grave of his enemy. A witch who turned intoa white goat when the moon was full. A girl who gave herown body as ransom for her father's life. The dead and tineliving celebrating New Year together. And a hell of a lot more,plumes in the wind, lightning on the horizon. But with nosubstance at all, just bloody inventions and tall tales. How canI get this to make sense? This is what bugs me. Especially now,with my time running out.

    When I first came here I was still cocksure that it wouldall work out. And when the old fart up there told me hisname was Lukas Lermiet, it was like a sign that I was on theright way. Okay, I was ready to see almost anything as a goodsign. For what I had behind me didn't bear much thinking of:fifty-nine years old, a wife gone off with someone else, twochildren who'd kicked me under the arse, the job at the newspaperwhere all my juniors had long been promoted past me,a fuck-up of a life. With only one thought in my mind: nowit was all or nothing, now I was going for broke, to feed therat that had begun to gnaw again, the old dream I'd thoughtI'd given up. Another man, I suppose, could shit on a dreamlike this, but for me it was ambitious enough. Perhaps I stillhad it in me. I mean, for Christ's sake, it wasn't as if I meantto move heaven and earth, or change the world. Have a heart.All I planned to do was to write a little tract of history, somethingto hold its own, something different from the daily news.From our crime reporter. Jesus, at fifty-nine. Starting each dayin front of the cracked mirror: the nicotine-stained fingers, thepurple spiderweb across nose and cheeks, eyes bloodshot, liverspots, the man who passes for me. Flip Lochner, pleased tomeet you. A sight for sore eyes, if I say so myself. But I haven'talways been like this, God is my witness. And this may be justabout my last fucking chance to prove it, right?

Continues...

Excerpted from Devil's Valleyby Andre Brink Copyright © 2001 by Andre Brink. Excerpted by permission.
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