Devil's Valley (18 page)

What struck me, like on the other paintings by Gert Brush I’d glimpsed before, was the weird use of colour: everything was done in whites and pinks, like fucking marshmallows, so that all the portraits looked seriously sick to the point of unworldliness. I didn’t want to offend the artist, but I was curious to know more.

Gert came up with a very practical explanation: “Well, you see, I never had any lessons, it was just my father who taught me. And he also had trouble with the colours. I tried everything, man, once I even went to the Little Karoo with Isak Smous to see if I could find better colours there, but they don’t seem to make skin-colour.” He placed his hand on the canvas next to Lukas Death’s face. “See? It’s just not the same.”

I bent over the messy table on which his brushes and paints and oil and turps were spread. “This is not really my line, Gert,” I said, “but I’m sure with only white and red you’re never going to get it right. Shouldn’t you mix in something darker? Brown, perhaps?”

“Brown?” he asked, shocked. “But I’m painting
white
people, Neef Flip.”

“Why don’t you give it a try?”

“They’ll skin me alive, man.”

He was so upset that I decided not to meddle with his aesthetics any further. I returned to the painting on the easel to study the pink images.

“Why are there two portraits of Lukas Death?”

Gert turned his head to the side. “The earlier one I did at least twenty years ago. It was time to bring him up to date.”

“The younger face looks like Little-Lukas.”

“Could be.”

“Are you going to paint over the first one now?”

“Ag man, the more I try to paint out the old ones the more they come back. Yesterday, for example, you couldn’t see young Lukas Death at all. Nor his father, old Lukas Devil, looking over his shoulder there. But you can see for yourself, today they’re back.” He stroked a finger lightly across the ghostly face; a smear of paint came off.

Golden Billy Goat

“How did Lukas Devil get his name?”

“He must have been the most unruly of all the Lermiets. He was born with two goat’s feet, you know,” said Gert Brush, touching again with a possessive gesture the vague image lurking behind the layers of paint on his canvas. “No one dared to cross him. About forty years ago, they say, he took on a couple of census officials sent to get the particulars of all the people in the Devil’s Valley. We didn’t want them here, but they stood their ground and of course they had the government behind them. But Lukas Devil said the hell with that thing they call the government. He found a way to get the two of them into the church, told them he wanted to introduce them to some of the oldest inhabitants, and when they got to the tower he closed the door behind them, and there they stayed until they were skeletons.”

“The man sounds like a real terror.”

“You can say that again,” said Gert Brush, picking up steam. “And there was something else he did which caused quite a stir. The way I heard it, Isak Smous’s father, old Jeremiah Smous, cheated Lukas Devil out of a billy goat. The Smouses have always been a crooked lot. Well, Lukas Devil wasn’t a man to trifle with. So one day when Jeremiah Smous was over the mountains on a trip, Lukas Devil took a tin trunk full of coins from under the old swindler’s bed and then he and Smith-the-Smith’s father smelted the whole lot and made a golden billy goat out of it. Anyway, just before church the following Sunday they put the goat on the pulpit to shame the Smous family in front of God and the whole congregation.”

“What happened?”

“One thing I can tell you, and that is that Jeremiah Smous never tried to swindle anyone again. He’d learned his lesson. But he bore a grudge to the day of his death, and he got old Hans Magic’s father to cast a spell on Lukas Devil and Smith-the-Smith’s father to plague the two of them with nightmares for the rest of their lives. It didn’t work with Lukas Devil, they say his goat’s feet made him immune to spells. But Smith-the-Smith’s father never had a proper night’s sleep again. He died with his eyes open. And Smith himself is so scared of nightmares that every evening he makes four new golden horseshoes to shoe that mare if it shows up. They say it’s the only cure for a nightmare, to corner it and put a new golden shoe on each of its hooves.”

“And the gold comes from that billy goat they made out of Jeremiah Smous’s coins?”

“That’s right. And every morning Smith-the-Smith smelts the shoes again, because they have to be fresh every night, or else they won’t work.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I’m not saying it’s true. I’m just telling you what the people say. Not all of them either, because you’ll hear so many stories in this place you can never be sure what really happened.”

“I was beginning to wonder whether they’re trying to pull a fast one on me.”

“They’re dead serious about it,” he ticked me off. “And you’ll be making the mistake of your life if you don’t believe them.”

I shook my head. “If you’re here for only a few days like me, it’s enough to make your head turn.”

“It just depends on how long you can go on.”

“You think I’ll get to the truth in the end?”

He grinned. “I suppose it just depends on what you call the truth, Neef Flip.”

Perhaps Both

Leaning over to inspect the painting more closely I accidentally pushed against it. I managed to catch it, but in the process I couldn’t help noticing the painting behind it, the one he’d been working on when I came in. And once again I found myself looking at the face of the girl at the rock pool. No doubt about the likeness, even though it had only been blocked in large, preliminary strokes. The face showed some detail, but the rest of the figure was little more than a smear, as if he hadn’t decided yet whether it should be a nude or a woman in a full-length dress. Perhaps both. Once again there was a hint of earlier figures lurking in the layers of paint.

“So you know her?” I asked, more accusingly than I’d meant to.

“Everybody knows everybody in the Devil’s Valley.”

“Did she sit for you?”

“You must be mad,” he said, and burst out laughing.

I couldn’t understand his reaction; to flatter him, I commented, “You have a good eye.”

“I always paint from memory,” he said. While he was chewing pensively on the back of a brush, I kept on gazing at the painting. The figures in the deeper layers appeared to become restless. Gert Brush put out a hand and turned the canvas back to front. “I’m sorry, Neef Flip, but this wasn’t meant to be seen. It’s not finished yet, and I always feel it’s a bad sign if people look at something unfinished. Please don’t talk about it. One never knows what people will do. You see, I’ve never painted a woman from the Devil’s Valley before.”

A
T LAST, IN the late afternoon, having caught up with my notes, I took the path to Isak Smous’s house on the far side of the church. He came out on the stoep when I knocked; behind him Alie-Malie-Ralie went about their energetic bustling in voorhuis and kitchen.

“I’m looking for Emma.” No need to beat about the bush.

“Why?”

“Why didn’t you tell me she lived here in your house?”

“You never asked.”

I restrained the urge to throttle him. “I’m asking now.”

“Emma isn’t here right now.”

“Where is she?”

“No idea. She comes and goes as she pleases.”

I was in no mood to argue. Why did the bloody little man annoy me so? Without saying goodbye I stomped off.

Almost by themselves my feet took me out of the settlement, in the direction from which I’d come that first day, hard on Prickhead’s fleshy heels. Everything seemed exactly like before. Only drier, if it was possible to imagine such a thing. The reeds parched as bones, the withered undergrowth, the long rock pool with a flaking black rim of old algae at the bottom where the last moisture had dried away: it was all still there.

As was the girl with the black hair. The girl who had by now acquired a name. Emma.

There was only one difference. This time she was really there. At least I think so. And properly dressed, buttoned up to her chin in a little railway track.

At the last moment I nearly turned tail, but she’d already seen me. So I had to put on a casual air.

“Am I disturbing you?”

She shrugged. “Oom can stay if Oom wants to.”

The form of address hit me between the eyes. “For heaven’s sake don’t call me ‘Oom’.”

“What else can I call you?”

“My name is Flip Lochner.”

“I know.” And then, “Oom Flip.”

“Emma, please.”

She repeated the shrug, whatever that might mean.

“I saw you in church on Sunday morning,” I persisted. “At least I think it was you.”

“And last Wednesday here at the waterhole,” she added.

I gasped like a fish on dry ground.

And then she was the one to look embarrassed. “Oh I’m sorry,” she said, “but you won’t know about it of course. I dreamed I came here for a swim and then Oom found me here.”

“You dreamed?”

“I don’t usually sleep in the day, but I wasn’t feeling too well, it was that time, so Alie-of-Isak sent me to bed. And then I dreamed.”

“But I
was
here. And I saw you.”

She opened her mouth. I could see she wanted to say something. But then she started to blush, a deep, old·fashioned blush which I thought no longer happened in the young. Red as a birthmark it spread from her face down her neck. I’d have given anything to be that blush. She seemed totally bewildered. Be my guest, I thought. It wasn’t as if
I
could make head or tail out of it.

“Oom really saw me?”

I know what goes for what in the world. And the expression in her eyes gave me no choice.

“Yes, I’m sorry.” In spite of myself I gave a crooked grin. “Or not all that sorry, to tell you the truth. I mean, I’m sorry if it embarrassed you, but not that I saw you.”

Desperate Romantic

Her eyes narrowed slightly. Contempt? Annoyance? I preferred not to know. Almost-black eyes, under thick eyebrows which met in the middle. Seeing her in close-up like this for the first time, I can honestly say that she wasn’t beautiful. But then, I mean, what is ‘beautiful’? In the eye of this beholder there was something else about her, something that spoke directly to the lower spine, which they say is the seat of the sense you use to recognise what really matters. And she looked even younger than before. More vulnerable too, if the bloody desperate romantic lurking inside the crime reporter may say so. But her eyes were dark with a kind of knowledge that came from far beyond her years, if this doesn’t sound too fucking precious.

“What is Oom doing here?” she asked.

“I thought everybody knew. I felt I owed it to Little-Lukas.”

A brief nod, as if she wanted to think about it before she answered.

“You were close to him,” I said.

“What did he tell Oom?”

“Emma, don’t call me ‘Oom’.”

“What did Little-Lukas tell you?”

“Not much.” I changed my mind. “No, that’s not quite true. We spoke for a whole night. He’d heard that I was interested in the Devil’s Valley, it’s something that goes very far back, but which I’d never followed up. And I got the impression he was just dying to talk to somebody. But I’m afraid we drank too much, and afterwards I was in something of a mess. So I set up another meeting, but on that very day he was killed.”

“I want to know everything,” she said with sudden urgency.

“That’s about all I can tell you.”

“I’m not just talking about Little-Lukas. I want to hear everything Oom can tell me about the world outside. I spent three years there at school with Little-Lukas, but then I had to come back. No one ever comes here. If only Oom knew how terrible it is to be trapped in here and
know
there’s a world outside, a world you once saw and where you want to go back to but which you’ll never ever be allowed to see again. Can Oom understand that?”

“A bit, I think.”

“
Please
try to understand!” She grabbed me by the arm. Her eyes were burning. “From the first day Oom came here I tried to find an excuse to come to you. I even went to Tant Poppie’s that first night, and looked through the window, but there were too many people.”

“I’ve also been looking for you since I saw you here the first time.”

“Why?” Her voice was tense. All of a sudden, I sensed, there was a hell of a lot at stake. “To talk about Little-Lukas?”

“No. To find out more about you.”

Once again she was the one to be embarrassed. Nervously, she started playing with a piece of dry bark between her fingers. She didn’t look at me again. Yet when she spoke it was about the boy after all: “They never wanted him to go away.” An angry little muscle flickered beside her mouth.

No, I thought again: no, she isn’t pretty at all. Yet the more I tried to deny it the more of a hold she got on me.

“Were you against it too?” I asked.

“I was the one who made him go.”

“Why?”

“Because I was the one who really wanted to go. But I couldn’t.”

I reached back to what Isak Smous had said: “Because you’re a girl?”

“Of course,” she said, her voice heavy with resentment. “The old men have all the say in this place.”

“I believe they all have the hots for you.”

“I suppose they all think I’m available. And I don’t dare offend them, otherwise…”

Her voice trailed off. A heavy silence lay between us. At last I tried to jump-start the conversation again. “Tell me about Little-Lukas.”

“He wasn’t all that keen to go away, but I went on and on. I told him it was for both of us. I mean, he was bright enough. It wasn’t easy for him either but at least he was a boy. All the old men…”

“Why are they so dead against it?”

“They think it’ll be the end of the Valley if people start coming and going as they want to. It’s a bit easier for the men. From time to time one of them even goes out to get married, and brings his wife back here. The women never, it’s out of the question. No outsider may lay a hand on their womenfolk. They’re jealous of their possessions.” She gestured with her head in the direction of the settlement. “Can you imagine anyone being jealous in a place like this?”