Unperturbed by the reaction of the onlookers, the old man stopped instantly at that point, drew a long line with his finger east and west in the earth, retreated thirty paces to the south and repeated his tense, hypnotic walk to the north. His gift did not fail him. The stick plunged a second time, and there again he drew another line south and north in the earth. Where the two lines crossed, he dug his heel into the ground and said to our father: ‘There is good water here. Two strong arteries meeting about a hundred feet down.’
I had just completed my first year of Law at the University and my newly-awakened reason was irritated by the old man’s air of simple assurance. I thought at once that he was just putting on an act to disguise a guess that could be no better than our own. I whispered so to my brother but he, without emotion, quietly disagreed,’ You’re wrong, Ouboet.’
‘Don’t be so silly, how could anyone know?’ I replied irritated.
‘But I know,’ he answered mildly. Then seeing the irritation mounting in me he added quickly with an odd note of surprise as if the explanation were news to him, too: ‘I know because – because I believe it would work with me, as well.’
‘What?’ I looked down at him but there was no mistaking that he was in deadly earnest. ‘Let’s prove it then,’ I said quickly thinking it would do him no harm to make a fool of himself.
Instantly he went up to the diviner without a trace of embarrassment. ‘Oom,’ he said, ‘would you mind if I tried it, too?’
The old man looked at him with quick surprise. Then he gave me a glance which somehow disturbed me before turning back to my brother. ‘Certainly,’ he answered. ‘Here’s the stick. Be careful to hold it like this.’ He put the prongs of the stick in my brother’s hand. ‘Grip it tight; keep your eyes on the point and walk steadily. A step with each breath and you will not fail to confound the unbelievers in our midst.’
Then we all turned to watch the awkward, lumbering figure of my brother imitate the diviner’s performance.
Intangible as these things are there was no doubt that my own disapproval was beginning to communicate itself to the others and there was an increasing feeling that the boy was being allowed to presume too much. However, my brother seemed unaware of this mood in the watchers. Young as he was I could not help remarking the odd authority in his bearing. In fact he repeated the diviner’s performance faultlessly and at the end of it all the fork twisted earthwards and where the old man had bent to make his cross, he too drew another like it in the earth with his forefinger. Then he stood up to look at us no doubt expecting some acknowledgement for what he had done. But, as if in mutual agreement that to give him too much credit for what had happened might add to his boyish presumption, after a few words we passed immediately into a busy discussion of the arrangements necessary for boring on the chosen spot.
I do not know what my brother felt but the scene has stayed with me, and often in a guilt-quick memory I have remembered him stooping awkwardly and with his clumsy finger making again his first sign of the cross in the thirsty sand. Oh! the mysterious inevitability of those crosses in our blood! This deep game of noughts and crosses played unremittingly, night and day, from one dimension of being to another of becoming. First the flaming sword of an archangel making a cross over the gate to the forbidden garden of our lost selves. Again a cross over the doorway of the first ghetto to keep away the angel of death on the night of terror before exodus from nothingness in the bondage of Egypt’s plenty to another country of strange, unlikely promise across the desert. Then another Cross where darkness gathers steeply over the very promise itself. Always, the significance of a long journey from bondage to a country not yet known: the negation which can only become positive when a cross has been nailed against it. Always it seems, in the blank space at the end of the inadequate letter lies a large cross for a kiss from that terrible lover, life, who will never take ‘No’ for an answer. So here, too, at the beginning of the boy about to become a man was a cross made to mark the possibility of water in problematical sand.
Yet if on that day automatically we tried to make nothing of my brother’s gift, he was unaffected by this.
He came up to me and said: ‘Look, Ouboet. It was much stronger than me!’
I looked unwillingly and saw that the bark had been stripped off the olive as it twisted and turned in his fist and there, in the broad palm turned upwards before my sceptical eyes was stigmata of the deed, the skin torn and the flesh red and watery from its struggle with the fierce earthbound wood.
‘Looks as if you’d scratched yourself,’ I said coolly.
Yet that night as we lay in the shared bed on the wide open stoep, looking up at a clear sky with the stars crackling and the Milky Way coming down like a river in flood, I begged his pardon. I admitted grudgingly that he may have been right – though it couldn’t signify what he and the diviner thought it did.
He replied, ‘Oh, that was nothing,’ and turning on his side he fell instantly asleep, leaving me wakeful and dissatisfied.
For there are degrees in nothingness. Nothingness has its own backward inevitability of erosion. On this occasion there was something specific for which I could beg his pardon. But the master-nothing to which all these apprentice occasions are bound is so insubstantial that no question or thought of pardon arises.
There remain still two essential differences between my brother and myself to enumerate but before I do so I must add that when my brother became a man his gift for water-divining was much in demand in our remote world. He put it at the service of whoever needed it. But he would never accept any reward. Uncomfortable as it made many rich people to be under an obligation to him he would never charge, saying always: ‘I can’t take payment for it. The gift isn’t mine. If I took money for it, I know it would leave me.’
I have mentioned already that physically I was well-made and my brother not so favoured. Now I have to confess that he had a slight deformity. It was not in the least obvious, and my brother was able to conceal it almost entirely by arranging that his clothes were always slightly padded along the shoulders. It was not discernible as a specific deformity and yet in some way it formed a sure centre round which not only all that was odd in his appearance but also all that in his nature was at variance with the world seemed to meet. It was amazing how, whether other people knew of its existence or not, sooner or later their eyes were compelled by the laws of my brother’s own being to fasten on this spot between his shoulders. I don’t know who was the more sensitive about it: he or I. All I do know is that between us we never referred to it by name. We always designated it by an atmospheric blank in our sentences. For instance, I would say, ‘But if you do go swimming there wouldn’t they see . . . blank.’ Or he to me: ‘D’you think if I wore that linen jacket it would . . . blank . . . you know?’