Devil's Valley (42 page)

I’d have preferred the fucking floor any time, but Dalena wouldn’t hear of it. And in a community where even bride and groom spent their first night in a coffin I suppose there was nothing offbeat about the proposal. Moreover, it turned out to be the biggest coffin I’d ever seen, almost the size of a double bed, and surprisingly soft inside. A bit dusty, if truth be told, but that was only to be expected after a hundred years.

A
ND SO IT came that like two newly-weds in the Devil’s Valley Emma and I spent the night in a coffin. Deep in the night she came to me, like one of my nightwalkers. I heard the door open, and sat up, startled. Although I knew it could only be her, it was unexpected all the same. It had been different in her room in Isak Smous’s house; even in my room at Tant Poppie’s it would not have been a problem. But here in the house of the Judge, it felt like a goddamn crime. A capital offence for all I knew.

She got into the coffin next to me. In a way I suppose it was funny. But more like macabre. And dangerous above all, for her more than for me.

“If Lukas Death finds out about this all hell will be loose, Emma.”

“He needn’t find out.”

“He’s already upset about your staying here.”

“That’s his worry.”

“What has he got against you?”

“He never liked me. He tried everything he could to keep Little-Lukas and me apart.”

“But why?”

“I suppose I just wasn’t good enough for his son. I’m rubbish, remember.”

“But Lukas Death is such a gormless soul, I’m sure he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Have you ever tried to have it out with him? I’m sure he’ll understand reason.”

“Don’t underestimate the man, Flip. He’s possessed by the same devil as all the Lermiets.”

“If that’s so, then how on earth can you come here to sleep with me under his own roof?”

She held her breath. “I just can’t sleep in Little-Lukas’s room.”

“What is there to be scared of?”

“You don’t understand, Flip,” she said. “Little-Lukas is in there. He wanted to get into bed with me all the time. He never pestered me like that when he was still alive, but he isn’t shy any longer.”

I swallowed the sudden spurt of jealousy. In this fucked-up place nothing was too bloody outrageous to believe. And perhaps it was this very weird discovery of having a ghost for a rival that made it happen. In spite of all my good intentions, and after having struggled for so long to control my feelings, that night I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.

My Hand Between

Even when she started caressing me with an urgency that caught me unawares, I still tried to resist: “Emma, we’re tempting fate. This is too bloody dangerous.”

“I know you want to.”

“As soon as we’re out of the Devil’s Valley, I promise you we’ll make love. But not here, not now.”

To my consternation she said, “You did it with the others who came to you.”

“How do you know that?” I stammered.

“I just know.”

“That was quite different,” I protested, “I didn’t even know them.”

“And if we never have another chance?”

“Don’t say that, Emma.”

“Do you rather want me to go back to Little-Lukas?”

Quietly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world to do, and in a way it was, she pulled up her dress to her waist and placed my hand between her legs.

Crime reporter forfeits last opportunity of redemption. Chooses hell with open eyes
.

So yes, Your Worship, yes, we did. The earth didn’t move, but when she came she cried. And as a matter of fact, so did I.

Not Alone

I was still inside her when, finding her invisible face in the dark, I said with an urgency I couldn’t control, “We cannot stay here after this.”

“I know,” she said, her hands entangled in the hair on my back. “You will have to go.”

“You too, Emma.”

“We’re not talking about me now.”

“You can’t risk your life for nothing.”

“You call this nothing?” She briefly stirred, and with a contraction of subterranean muscles I did not expect in one so inexperienced, she clasped me and made me swell again.

“We’re talking about life and death, Emma.”

“Don’t talk,” she whispered.

We made love again, even though I never thought I’d be up to it again so soon. We were both exhausted. Perhaps we even fell asleep. But we were still joined when, sometime in the night, I said once more, “You
must
go back with me, Emma.”

And after a very long pause she said, “All right, I will. As soon as we can get away without anyone knowing.”

“We mustn’t wait too long.”

But she had drifted off already, in the crook of my arm, in Lukas Up-Above’s ample coffin. I couldn’t sleep. Even the sense of fulfilment I felt about what had happened could not contain the many fears that beset me. And to make it worse there was the strange sensation—throughout the night, until just before dawn when she rose, and kissed me, and tiptoed out—that we were not alone. It wasn’t just the sound of footsteps pacing through the house all night: that was probably Lukas Death wandering about, keeping watch. It was something else, and more unnerving in its way. It was too dark to see anything, but the stale smell of whisky in the room betrayed his presence. I’d recognise White Horse anywhere.

F
ROM THE CONFUSION of those days, in which all bloody chronology was suspended, only two encounters remain vivid in my mind. With Henta, and with Gert Brush.

Henta in the bluegum wood, the day little Piet Snot was buried, a small interval between all the preparations for the Valley’s next assault on God. I couldn’t face going to the funeral. Nor could Henta, I suppose. But this meeting was different from the others. There was no provocation. Although she must have sensed how diffident I was, because with a bitchy edge I hadn’t expected of her she said:

“Oom needn’t be afraid of me.”

“What makes you think I’m afraid?”

“You never liked me.”

“Henta, that’s not true.”

“It is. Everything I do you think is dirty.”

“Please stop it.”

“Why didn’t you go to the funeral?”

“Why didn’t
you
go? He was your brother.”

Instead of answering she asked, “Will you be going away now?”

“What makes you think such a thing?”

She just shrugged. The thin material of her torn dress—still the same dress—clung to her. She bore on her body the smell of the night as others do the smell of sex. Out of the blue she said, “Won’t you please take me with you?”

“If you go with me they’ll immediately come after us to fetch us back.”

“Well, I’m not going to stay here any more.”

“You mustn’t do anything rash, Henta.”

“What do you want me to do with this thing then?” she pressed her two palms to the curve of her lower belly. I remembered the prayer-meeting and I felt sick. I thought:
My God, she wasn’t pretending after all
.

Her eyes stared at me, the once-beautiful eyes which had seen too much; nothing of which could now be effaced.
We’re all marked
. Everything brings us closer to our own death. (Little lesson from the crime reporter.)

I wanted to reply, but couldn’t; she wasn’t expecting anything more from me either. Without warning she turned round and ran off, effortless as a bird taking flight, leaving no scar. I stood bewitched. I wanted her to come back, but to which name would she respond? Henta? Talita? This time I didn’t even have a bunch of bluegum leaves as an alibi. Who still remembered Talita Lightfoot? Who would remember Henta? For how long must the circles on the surface of this dark pool still go on? What price must still be paid, what sacrifices brought, before she would be redeemed? And all that remained in me after the girl had disappeared, forever, among the fragrant eucalyptus trees, was guilt. For something I still couldn’t understand, but which felt like betrayal. Worse, much worse, than any other act of fucking betrayal I’d committed before, and God knows there were many.

G
ERT BRUSH. I didn’t go to his place on purpose, but when in passing I saw him at work on a painting in his voorhuis I climbed up the few steps to the stoep. Like the previous time, I had the impression that I’d caught him unawares, and he quickly put out his hand to turn around the canvas he’d been working on, but then left it after all. His face was smudged with paint.

“Am I disturbing you, Gert?”

“Not really. I was just messing around.”

“I still meant to thank you for speaking up for me the other day.”

“This place is like a beehive,” he muttered. “I don’t know how long this can still go on.”

“Why did you do it?” I asked.

“Because I think you mean well.” He wiped his face with a much-used cloth, succeeding only in making a greater mess of it. “But I think you have outstayed your welcome, if I may say so.”

“If it was only me I’d have gone long ago, Gert. But I’m worried about Emma. She deserves better.”

“We all deserve better.”

I came closer. The canvas on his easel was just a confusion of brush-strokes, yet it seemed vaguely familiar.

“Isn’t this the one you were working on the last time I saw you?”

“Could be.”

“Why did you paint out Emma’s face?”

“It wasn’t Emma.”

“But I saw it myself.”

“Must have been a mistake.” He looked ill at ease. “I was trying to do a portrait of Mooi-Janna. But it didn’t work.”

“Strong-Lukas’s daughter? The one who…?”

“Yes. It was the first time I tried to paint one of the women. The problem is no one can remember what she looked like. My father and grandfather also tried, I know, but it was no use. In the end we just paint the face we can call up most clearly.”

“But the black hair, the straight eyebrows…?”

He started to wipe the top layer of paint from the canvas with his cloth. “All anybody knows about Mooi-Janna with any certainty,” he said, “is that she had four tits.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Everybody knows. That was why she could do what she did, you see. No man could resist that. And you must admit, it’s not the sort of thing one sees every day. But of course I’d never dare to paint that, the people wouldn’t allow it.”

T
HROUGH ALL OF this, as in the days before Nagmaal, there was a sense of urgency building up. Its focus was the Final Solution proposed by the Council of Justice to solve the problem of drought. Pure sacrilege, boomed Brother Holy through his bouts of scratching, but no one was paying much attention to him any more. It had been Hans Magic’s brainchild. And I must confess that even if the means were old·fashioned, the thought behind it was pretty up to date.

The idea was to bombard the clouds when they showed themselves again: literally to shoot the rain from them.

“And if you hit God?” asked Brother Holy in righteous fury, tying himself into a most undignified knot to scratch his arse.

“Then He better duck,” sneered Hans Magic.

Not that there was much danger of that, the fucking technology was far too primitive. The plan was to select two sturdy saplings in the bluegum wood, close enough together to be used as props for the catapult they had devised, and then to tie a long loop of plaited thongs between them. Once this was done, all the men in the Devil’s Valley—with the exception of a few conscientious objectors—would give a hand to pull the two saplings back as far as possible, fit a heavy boulder into the loop, and then to anchor the contraption in that position until the clouds came over. According to Lukas Death this was among the techniques first devised by Lukas Up-Above in his attempts at flying; and it had taken him six months to recover after a quite spectacular failure. It was after this event that he’d turned to birds.

All things considered, it was quite a feat. And in a way it restored to their ranks something of the unity that had been so sorely disrupted. To Emma and me it came as a bloody blessing as it gave the settlers something else to focus on.

The contraption was put to the test several times. With the first few attempts one of the trees, or both, snapped in the process, causing the rock to drop limply right in front of them. The fourth or fifth time round it hit Jos Joseph who was too slow in scampering out of the way, and shattered his spine. This caused several corrections to be made, and stronger trees were selected, but to play it safe it was agreed not to have another trial run: faith would do the necessary.

By the third or fourth day everything was ready. Only the clouds had to put in an appearance. And as it turned out, they proved to be surprisingly cooperative, because after the previous gales they’d more or less fallen into the habit of coming over in the afternoon. The wind sprang up. The first clouds came rolling through the mountains, white at first, but rapidly growing darker. The whole settlement was present, including the sceptics, the conscientious objectors, and even Brother Holy. A few of the oldest inhabitants, and some of the sick too weak to move, were transported to the bluegum wood on handmade stretchers or wooden wheelbarrows, as this promised to be a spectacle no one wanted to miss. The only absentee I was aware of, and a notable one at that, was the old Seer. Which confirmed my hunch that after spilling his black beans he’d finally chosen to go to rest.

Uninvited, and still scratching away, Brother Holy intoned a rambling prayer. But no one paid attention. Well before he’d finished a chorus of voices shouted, “Watch out!” Whether it was meant for the crowd or for God, was not quite clear.

Requiescat in Pace

The plaited thongs were pulled loose from the anchor. The two elastic saplings swung up. But something in the calculations had gone wrong, because at the last moment the cocksucking Peet Flatfoot didn’t let go in time with the rest of them, so that he was propelled into space with the rock.
Ejaculatio praecox
, in, a manner of speaking. For lack of velocity the projectile and its human pilot plunged to earth a mere thirty yards or so away.
Requiescat in pace
, Prickhead.