Three Stories Read online

  He asked his mother about the circle. Is it a fairy circle, he demanded? It can only be a fairy circle, she replied. He was not convinced.

  They were visitors on the farm, though not particularly welcome visitors. They visited because they were family, and family were always entitled to visit. This particular visit had stretched on month after month: his father was away in the war, fighting the Italians, and they had nowhere else to go. He could have asked his grandmother what the circle was, but his grandmother never went into the veld, saw no sense in walking for the sake of walking. She would never have laid eyes on the circle, it was not the kind of thing that interested her.

  The war ended; his father returned with a stiff little military moustache and a dapper, upright stride. They were back on the farm; he was walking with him in the veld. When they came to the circle, which he no longer called a fairy circle since he no longer believed in fairies, his father casually remarked, “Do you see that? That’s the old threshing floor. That’s where they used to thresh, in the old days.”

  Thresh: not a word he knew, but whatever it meant, he did not like it. Too much like thrash. Get a thrashing: that was what happened to boys when they were naughty. Naughty was another word he drew back from. He did not want to be around when words like that were spoken.

  Threshing turned out to be something one did with flails. There was a picture of it in the encyclopedia: men in funny old-fashioned clothes beating the ground with sticks with what look like bladders tied to them.

  “But what are they doing?” he asked his mother.

  “They are flailing the wheat,” she replied.”

  “What is flailing?”

  “Flailing is threshing. Flailing is beating.”

  “But why?”

  “To separate the kernels of wheat from the chaff,” she explained.

  Flailing the wheat: it was all beyond him. Was he being asked to believe that once upon a time men used to beat wheat with bladders out in the veld? What wheat? Where did they get wheat to beat?

  He asked his father. His father was vague. The threshing happened when he was small, he said; he was not paying attention. He was small, then he went away to boarding school; when he came back they were no longer threshing, perhaps because the drought killed the wheat, the drought of 1929 and 1930 and 1931, on and on, year after year.

  That was the best his father could offer: not a fairy circle but a threshing floor, until the great drought came; then just a patch of earth where nothing grew. There the story rested for thirty years. After thirty years, back on the farm on what turned out to be his final visit, the story came up again, or if not the story in full then enough of it for him to be able to fill in the gaps. He was paging through photographs from the old days when he came upon a photograph of two young men with rifles, off on a hunt. In the background, not supposed to be part of the photograph, were two donkeys yoked together, and a man in tattered clothes, also not supposed to be in the picture, one hand on the yoke, squinting toward the camera from under his hat.

  He peered more closely. Surely he recognised the site! Surely that was the threshing floor! The donkeys and their leader, captured in mid-stride sometime in the 1920s, were on the threshing floor, treading the wheat with their hooves, separating the grains from the chaff. If the photograph could come to life, if the two grinning young men were to pick up their rifles and disappear over the rim of the picture, he would at last have it before him, the whole mysterious business of threshing. The man with the hat, and the two donkeys, would resume their tread round and round the threshing floor, a tread that would, over the years, compact the earth so tightly that nothing would ever grow there. They would trample the wheat, and the wind—the wind that always blows in the Karoo, from horizon to horizon—would lift the chaff and whirl it away; the grain that was left behind would be gathered up and picked clean of straw and pebbles and ground small, ground to the finest flour, so that bread could be baked in the huge old wood-burning oven that used to dominate the farm kitchen.

  But where did the wheat come from that the donkeys so patiently trod, donkeys dead now these many years, their bones cast out and picked clean by ants?

  The wheat, it turned out (this was the outcome of a long investigation, and even then he could not be sure if what he heard was true), was grown right here, on the farm, on what in the old days must have been cultivated land but has now reverted to bare veld. An acre of land had been given over to the growing of wheat, just as there had been an acre given over to pumpkin and squash and watermelon and sweetcorn and beans. Every day, from a dam that was just a pile of stones now, farmhands used to irrigate the acres; when the kernels turned brown, they reaped the wheat by hand, with sickles, bound it in sheaves, carted it to the threshing-floor, threshed it, then ground it to flour (he searched everywhere for the grinding stones, without success). From the bounty of those two acres the table was stocked not only of his grandfather but of all the families who worked for him. There were even cows kept, for milk, and pigs to eat the scraps.

  So all those years ago this had been a self-sufficient farm, growing all its needs; and all the other farms in the neighbourhood, this vast, sparsely peopled neighbourhood, were self-sufficient too, more or less—farms where nothing grows any more, where no ploughing or sowing or tilling or reaping or threshing takes place, farms which have turned into vast grazing grounds for sheep, where farmers sit huddled over computers in darkened rooms calculating their profit and loss on sheepswool and lambsflesh.

  Hunting and gathering, then pastoralism, then agriculture: those, he had been taught as a child, were the three stages in the ascent of man from savagery, an ascent whose end was not yet in sight. Who would have believed that there were places in the world where in the space of a century or two man would graduate from stage one to stage two to stage three and then regress to stage two. This Karoo, looked upon today as a desert on which flocks of ungulates barely clung to life, was not too long ago a region where hopeful farmers planted in the thin, rocky soil seeds brought from Europe and the New World, pumped water out of the artesian basin to keep them alive, subsisted on their fruits: a region of small, scattered peasant farmers and their labourers, independent, almost outside the money economy.

  What put an end to it? No doubt the Great Drought disheartened many and drove them off the land. And no doubt, as the artesian basin was depleted over the years, they had to drill deeper and deeper for water. And of course who would want to break his back growing wheat and milling flour and baking bread when you had only to get in a car and drive for an hour to find a shop with racks and racks of ready-baked bread, to say nothing of pasteurised milk and frozen meat and vegetables?

  Still, there was a larger picture. What did it mean for the land as a whole, and the conception the land had of itself, that huge tracts of it should be sliding back into prehistory? In the larger picture, was it really better that families who in the old days lived on the land by the sweat of their brow should now be mouldering in the windswept townships of Cape Town? Could one not imagine a different history and a different social order in which the Karoo was reclaimed, its scattered sons and daughters reassembled, the earth tilled again?

  Bill and Jane, old friends from the United States, have arrived on a visit. Starting in the north of the country, they have driven in a hired car down
the east coast; now the plan is that all four of them will drive from Cape Town to Johannesburg. The route, which runs for hundreds of miles through the Karoo, is not one that he likes. For reasons of his own he finds it depressing. But these are special friends, this is what they want to do, he does not demur.

  “Didn’t you say your grandfather had a farm in the Karoo?” says Bill. “Do we pass anywhere near there?”

  “It’s not in the family anymore,” he replies. It is a lie. The farm is in the hands of his cousin Constant. Furthermore it does not take much of a detour off the Cape Town–Johannesburg road to get there. But he does not want to see the farm again, and what it has become, not in this life.

  They leave Cape Town late in the day, spend the first night in Matjiesfontein at the Lord Milner Hotel, where they are served dinner by waitresses in floral dresses and frilled Victorian caps. He and his wife sleep in the Olive Schreiner Room, their friends in the Baden Powell Room. On the walls of the Olive Schreiner room are watercolours of Karoo scenes (“Crossing the Drift”, “Karoo Sunset”), photographs of cricketers: the Royal Fusiliers team of 1899, burly, moustachioed young Englishmen, come to die for their queen in a faroff land, some of them buried not far away.

  The next morning they leave early. For hours they drive through empty scrubland ringed by flat-topped hills. Outside Richmond they stop for gas. Jane picks up a pamphlet. “NIETVERLOREN,” it says. “Visit an old-style Karoo farm, experience old-style grace and simplicity. Only 15 km from Richmond on the Graaff–Reinet road. Luncheons 12–2.”

  They follow the signs to Nietverloren. At the turnoff a young man in a beret and khaki shirt scrambles to open the gate for them, stands to attention and salutes as they drive through.

  The farmhouse, gabled in Cape Dutch style, brilliantly whitewashed, stands on an outcrop of rock overlooking fields and orchards. They are greeted at the door by a smiling young woman. “I’m Velma, I’m your hostess,” she says, with a light, pleasing Afrikaans accent. They are the only guests thus far.

  For lunch they are served leg of lamb and roast potatoes, braised baby carrots with raisins, roast pumpkin with cinnamon, followed by custard pie, melktert. “It’s what we call boerekos,” explains Velma, their hostess: “farm cuisine. Everything grown on the farm.”

  “And the bread?” he asks. “Do you grow your own wheat, and thresh it and all the rest?

  Velma laughs lightly. “Good heavens no, we don’t go as far back as that. But our bread is baked here in our kitchen, in our wood-fired oven, just like in the old days, as you will see on the tour.”

  They exchange glances. “I’m not sure we have time for a tour,” he says. “How long does it take?”

  “The tour is in two parts. First my husband takes you around the farm in the four-wheel drive. You see sheep-shearing, you see wool-sorting; if there are children they get to play with the lambs—the lambs are very cute. Then we’ve got a little museum, you can see all the grades of wool and the sheep-shearing instruments from the old days and the clothes people wore. Then I take you on a tour of the house, you see everything—the kitchen, which we have restored just as it used to be, and the bathroom, the old bathroom with the hip bath and the furnace, all just like in the old days, and everything else. Then you can relax, and at four o’clock we offer you tea.”

  “And how much is that?”

  “For the tour and the tea together it is seventy-five rands per person.”

  He glances at Bill, at Jane. They are the guests, they must decide. Bill shakes his head. “It sounds fascinating, but I just don’t think we have the time. Thank you, Velma.”

  They drive back through the orchard—grapevines, oranges, apricots heavy on the bough—past a pair of languid-eyed Jersey cows with calves by their side.

  “Remarkable what they grow, considering how dry it is,” says Jane.

  “The soil is surprisingly fertile,” he says. “With enough water you could grow anything here. It could be a paradise.”

  “But—?”

  “But it makes no economic sense. The only crop it makes sense to farm nowadays is people. The tourist crop. Places like Nietverloren are the only farms, if you can call them that, left in the Karoo: time-bubble, theme-park farms. The rest are just sheep ranches. There is no reason for the owners to live on them. They might as well be managed out of the cockpit of a helicopter. As in some cases they are. More enterprising landowners have gone back even further in time. They have got rid of the sheep and restocked their farms with game—antelope, zebra—and brought in hunters from overseas, from Germany and the US. A thousand rand for an eland, two thousand for a kudu. You shoot the animal, they mount the horns for you, you take them home with you on the plane. Trophies. The whole thing is called the safari experience, or sometimes just the African experience.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “The bitterness of defeated love. I used to love this land. Then it fell into the hands of the entrepreneurs, and they gave it a makeover and a face-lift and put it on the market. This is the only future you have in South Africa, they told us: to be waiters and whores to the rest of the world. I want nothing to do with it.”

  A look passes between Bill and Jane. “I’m sorry,” murmurs Jane.

  Jane is sorry. He is sorry. All of them are a bit sorry, and not only for his outburst. Even Velma back on Nietverloren must be sorry for the charade she has to go through day after day, and the girls in their Victorian getup back in the hotel in Matjiesfontein: sorry and ashamed. A light grade of sorriness sits over the whole country, like cloud, like mist. But there is nothing to be done about it, nothing he can think of.

  III

  HE AND HIS MAN

  BOSTON, ON THE COAST of Lincolnshire, is a handsome town, writes his man. The tallest church steeple in all of England is to be found there; sea-pilots use it to navigate by. Around Boston is fen country. Bitterns abound, ominous birds who give a heavy, groaning call loud enough to be heard two miles away, like the report of a gun.

  The fens are home to many other kinds of birds too, writes his man, duck and mallard, teal and widgeon, to capture which the men of the fens, the fen-men, raise tame ducks, which they call decoy ducks or duckoys.

  Fens are tracts of wetland. There are tracts of wetland all over Europe, all over the world, but they are not named fens, fen is an English word, it will not migrate.

  These Lincolnshire duckoys, writes his man, are bred up in decoy ponds, and kept tame by being fed by hand. Then when the season comes they are sent abroad to Holland and Germany. In Holland and Germany they meet with others of their kind, and, seeing how miserably these Dutch and German ducks live, how their rivers freeze in winter and their lands are covered in snow, fail not to let them know, in a form of language which they make them understand, that in England from where they come the case is quite otherwise: English ducks have seashores full of nourishing food, tides that flow freely up the creeks; they have lakes, springs, open ponds and sheltered ponds; also lands full of corn left behind by the gleaners; and no frost or snow, or very light.

  By these representations, he writes, which are made all in duck language, they, the decoy ducks or duckoys, draw together vast numbers of fowl and, so to say, kidnap them. They guide them back across the seas from Holland and Germany and settl
e them down in their decoy ponds on the fens of Lincolnshire, chattering and gabbling to them all the time in their own language, telling them these are the ponds they told them of, where they shall live safely and securely.

  And while they are so occupied the decoy men, the masters of the decoy ducks, creep into covers or coverts they have built of reeds upon the fens, and all unseen toss handfuls of corn upon the water; and the decoy ducks or duckoys follow them, bringing their foreign guests behind. And so over two or three days they lead their guests up narrower and narrower waterways, calling to them all the time to see how well we live in England, to a place where nets have been spanned.

  Then the decoy men send out their decoy dog, which has been perfectly trained to swim after fowl, barking as he swims. Being alarmed to the last degree by this terrible creature, the ducks take to the wing, but are forced down again into the water by the arched nets above, and so must swim or perish, under the net. But the net grows narrower and narrower, like a purse, and at the end stand the decoy men, who take their captives out one by one. The decoy ducks are stroked and made much of, but as for their guests, these are clubbed on the spot and plucked and sold by the hundred and by the thousand.

  All of this news of Lincolnshire his man writes in a neat, quick hand, with quills that he sharpens with his little penknife each day before a new bout with the page.

  In Halifax, writes his man, there stood, until it was removed in the reign of King James I, an engine of execution, which worked thus. The condemned man was laid with his head on the cross-base or cup of the scaffold; then the executioner knocked out a pin which held up the heavy blade. The blade descended down a frame as tall as a church door and beheaded the man as clean as a butcher’s knife.