But to return to the differences between my brother and myself. In appearance he was not at all like me. He was very dark in accordance with an unpredictable law which seems to dominate reproduction in both my father’s and mother’s families. His hair was as thick and dark as mine was fair and fine. His skin was a Mediterranean olive and his eyes, which were his best feature, were wide and of an intense radiant blackness. I could never look in them without feeling curiously disturbed and uncomfortable. I wish I could say why, but the discomforts of the spirit are beyond reason. Suffering is only a stroke of Time’s implacable Excalibur dividing meaning from meaninglessness. I am forced none the less, to attempt an explanation. There were moments when those deep eyes of his seemed to me to be unbearably defenceless. They seemed too trusting, too innocent of the calculation and suspicion of our civilized day. And because of this they seemed (though I am never sure regarding the personal emotions or intentions of my brother) to hold a kind of reproach against me and the world wherein I was so conspicuously at my ease.
I wish I could deal more firmly with this subtle discomfort but I cannot. I only know it was there from the beginning and as far back as I can remember it expressed itself from time to time in an involuntary feeling of irritation which, no matter how unreasonable and unfair, no matter what precautions I took to the contrary, would break out impatiently from me. What made it worse was that my brother never seemed to mind. He would take it all quite naturally, almost as part of his own dark, impervious birthright. When I begged his pardon awkwardly, as I invariably did, he would look at me warmly and say quickly, ‘But it was nothing, Ouboet,fn1 nothing at all. Don’t worry so.’ In fact he would behave as if I had just rendered him some great service, as if my very impatience and irritation had given us both an opportunity which otherwise might never have existed. It was all very mysterious and I have had to make my peace with it by accepting it as something inevitable. But the flaw (if it is a flaw) inflicted by life on me is also, I suspect, incorporated in the master-seed of the being and greater becoming of us all, just as is the infinitesimal flaw that first gave birth to a pearl in the shell. One has said that there is ‘no greater love than that a man should lay down his life for his friends’. Yet is it not, perhaps, as great a love that a man should live his life for his enemies, feeding their enmity of him without ever himself becoming an enemy until at last enmity has had surfeit and his enemies are free to discover the real meaning of their terrible hunger – just as my brother provoked and endured my strange hostility without ever becoming hostile to me? However, I am expert not in love but in betrayal and as little entitled to make points on the specialist’s behalf as he would on mine, so I shall not press the issue unduly. Yet, for the sake of the proportions of my narrative, I must add that I was not alone in my reaction to my brother. He had much the same effect on most people with whom he came in regular contact.
I grew up, as I indicated, tall and gracefully made. He from the beginning was a square, short, awkwardly-shaped person, immensely strong but ponderous and inclined to be clumsy in his movements. He was not, I fear, prepossessing to look at. What magic he had was in his eyes and they, unfortunately, made one uncomfortable. His head was too big even for his broad shoulders, yet his face after such roughness of stature was disconcertingly tender, while his brow, with a double crown of hair at the centre, was from birth deeply furrowed. The effect was of a face profoundly still though darkly withheld. Yet it could become startlingly light, even beautiful, when he laughed and showed his even, white teeth. But unfortunately in public he rarely laughed. Laughter appeared to be something he kept for the two of us when the tension between us lessened. So, as a rule, his face seemed folded, brooding over his nature rather like one of our black African hens over her nest, head cocked slightly towards the earth, senses deaf to the music of the sun stroking the great harp of light in one of our feverish summer days, listening only to the electric expectancy of life within her.
At school I was good in most things, games as well as studies. My brother had great difficulty in scraping through his examinations and could take no interest and acquire no skill in sport. I was fast and a first-rate sprinter; he was slow and an indefatigably plodding walker. I loved animals, the flame-flickering game and sun-fire birds of Africa. He took no great interest in them but from childhood was absorbed in all that grew in the earth. I had no patience for planting and sowing: he loved to plough and to sow. It was remarkable too how successful his clumsy fingers were: whatever he put in the earth seemed to grow and blossom. He used to walk behind his favourite span of roan-purple oxen from dawn to sunset, his deep single-furrow plough turning over waves of Africa’s scarlet earth like the prow of a Homeric blackship the swell of a wine-red morning sea. He would come home in the twilight after a day’s ploughing deep in content. Often I’ve found him resting, silent on the handlebars of his plough. ‘A penny for your thoughts, Boetie,’ fn2 I would greet him.
He would never answer at once. Then he’d say slowly, ‘Just smelling the earth. You know, there’s not a flower in the world that smells so good to me as freshly turned-over earth.’
Then I would notice it too, that smell of Titanic perspiration in the glandular earth of the ancient land charging the fiery air all around us like the black quintessential of a magician’s spell. Finally, when the rough old greatcoat of the earth was turned inside out and its antique lining lying velvet in the sun, he would stride across the naked land sowing his first corn like someone in an illustrated New Testament parable. I would watch him bestride the passionate soil noticing his awkward, lumbering gait as if his being always had presupposed this heaving earth beneath his feet even as a sailor’s feet always presupposes the swinging sea. His intuition in regard to the land too was uncannily accurate. As a child I have watched him standing absorbed over a patch of earth for so long that in the end I have exclaimed impatiently: ‘Are you going to stand there all day dreaming? Wake up, for God’s sake!’
‘Sorry, Ouboet,’ he would say equably, ‘I was wondering what we should suggest planting here. It might grow something pretty good. But what?’
‘Well, we’ll have to try before we can know,’ I would reply unmollified.
‘All the same looking does help, Ouboet,’ he would answer mildly, or words to that effect, and despite my sniff of unbelief I had an uncomfortable suspicion that perhaps he was right. In a way that I could not understand he and the earth had their own magnetic exchange of each other’s meanings. When we got home he would suggest a crop to our father and that crop, as often as not, is growing there fruitfully to this day in the course of its lawful rotation.
Besides all this he possessed a remarkable gift of water-divining. I remember so well the day when we first discovered that he possessed this power. I was already almost a man but he was still a boy. Our father, anxious to add to our existing supplies already weakened by a succession of droughts, was looking for new water. Accordingly he had called in the help of one of those water diviners who were always drifting through our land in the service of their strange intuition like Old Testament prophets.
We watched the gaunt old man arrive with a donkey led by a tiny black boy, watched him cut a forked stick from the nearest wild olive tree and strip down the stick from its precise classical leaf. Then he strode down to the selected site like Moses to the rock in the vermilion desert at Horeb. Once there he gripped the fork, a prong placed tightly in the palm of each hand, but the stick itself pointed up at the blue sky like the hands of a pilgrim joined in prayer. Then, with a slow ritualistic step, he walked across the scene from east to west, the fitful whirlpool eddies of the hot afternoon air irreverently flicking his long beard out of the focus of his trance-like movement. When the critical moment came the knuckles of his hands went white from the effort he was making to prevent the prongs of the fork turning in his grasp. But slowly the point of the stick began to vibrate and waver until suddenly, despite all his exertions to prevent it, the point plunged straight down quivering like an arrow in a drawn bow over the earth at his feet. As it happened an involuntary murmur went up from the white people present and a marvellous ‘Ye-bo!’ came from our uninhibited black servants followed by a laugh which was not only a laugh but also a release of tension as if the charge which had mounted so mysteriously in the blood of the old man had welled up unbearably in them, too.