Instantly I was wide-awake. That was a phrase he had never used before. Always in the past, when anything went wrong between us he’d shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It’s nothing, Ouboet.’ But now a new realization followed me like a ghost across the flimsy threshold of my sleep. Dear God, had my truth always got to be my brother’s untruth? My untruth his truth? Was something of this sort implicit in the nature of all betrayal?
I got my prize at the end of the year. My father and mother were there, beside the Governors of the school, to hear the headmaster make a pretty little speech before he announced that I had been chosen as the best all-round man of the year. Amid the shattering applause of masters and boys I climbed on to the school platform for the last time to receive the award. I felt drunk with satisfaction at my achievement yet, as I turned to go back to my place in the hall, I was sobered instantly by the sight of two faces in the applauding crowd. One was my brother’s. He was cheering as if the achievement were his own yet there was something in his eyes which made me uneasy. The other was that of the master who had thrown open a window and intervened on my brother’s behalf on the day of the ‘round-up’. Subsequently he had come to take a close interest in my brother and he was looking at me now with an enigmatic expression on his sensitive face while he politely clapped his hands. It came to me that he looked almost sorry for me.
That night, for the first time, I went with my closest ‘buddies’ to a private bar at the principal hotel in town. There we pledged ourselves in strong drink to be forever one for all and all for one. In the morning, with strangely poignant feelings, many of us, and I was among them, left the school for good.
As I wished my intimates ‘good-bye’ on the platform I felt a lump in my throat and noticed that even the eyes of the school Captain were unusually bright. Then my brother and I climbed, with our parents, into the train and for the last time we all journeyed home together. Yet not even then in the intimacy of a family re-united did we ever discuss what had happened to my brother on his first day at school. Neither he nor I ever mentioned it to my parents nor in our talks with each other. We both behaved as if we had no other desire than to forget the incident as quickly as possible. But we reckoned without the incident itself.
That is another aspect of betrayal. It has a will of its own which feeds on the very will that seeks to deny it. I might have succeeded in forgetting the event if it had not so obstinately persisted in remembering me. As for my brother, I believe that his success was no greater than mine.
There was, for instance, the episode of ‘Stompie’.fn3
On the broad acres of my father’s high-veld estate we had immense herds of springbok. Unlike many of our neighbours, my father and his grandfather before him had preserved the indigenous game on their land with the greatest care and affection. There was hardly a view from the high-raised stoep stretching all round our white house, which did not show a group of springbok peacefully grazing in the safe distance. I was never tired of watching them. They were seldom still yet never appeared restless for their movements were consistently rhythmical. The patterns they made on the blue and gold veld possessed a curious heraldic quality and on some of our crystal days the herd, from a distance, would appear to open and shut like the flower of chivalry itself. In summer when the distances were set on fire by the sun, when grass, bushes and sequined savannahs were reflected in the quicksilver air in an endless succession of crackling coloured flames, the springbok held their position in the centre of the tumult with pastel delicacy and precision. In winter, when the fires of summer were drawn and the fine dust of burnt-out ashes stood blue and high in the air, they would still be there maintaining a glow of living fire on the raked-out hearth of my native land.
In the spring the scene was made poignant with the keen thrust of new being in the flickering herds. First, the young bucks would emerge to challenge the old rams. They would bound out into the open from the herd like ballet dancers from the wings of time. Backs arched and a ruff of white, magnetic hair parted along their quivering spines to fall like snow upon their fiery flanks, they would dance their challenge in front of the established but ageing rams. The older ones would ignore them as long as possible, but finally the whiff of disdain emanating from the wide-eyed does waiting alertly for the outcome, would sting them into obeying the implacable choreography of spring in their blood. The battle that followed, then, was deadly. The horns of the two males would interlock with speed and clash as swords of heroes in some twilit Celtic scene. The herd, entranced, would follow closely in impassioned rushes, taking every advantage of ground which gave them a better view of the combat. I have often sat on my horse, watching, with the whole herd, normally so fearful of man, pressing tightly round me for a closer view of the fight, snorting and sighing with excitement and suspense. The fight over I have watched the young does, their hieroglyphic eyes under long lashes shining with the tension of spring without and fear of the uncompromising fires within, display their charms to the winner. Passing and re-passing repeatedly in front of him, tails tucked with becoming modesty under their buttocks, they would keep their glances fixed firmly on the ground.
But in the autumn the herds would contract, drawing young and old together in a circle the centre of which turned on their fear of death implicit in the coming winter. All differences among them vanished. Steadily they gave the homesteads an even wider berth, and became acutely wary of our movements as if they sensed that our season of killing, too, was about to begin.
But there was one odd phenomenon that I noticed had maintained itself for some years in the seasonal regroupings of our herd. There was one buck who was never allowed to join the herd in any circumstances whatsoever. Whenever he came near the main herd the bucks, young and old, would combine to drive him away with a ferocity most unusual in so gentle and lovable a species. For a year or two he persisted, often trying several times during a day to rejoin the herd, but each time he was driven off with the same determined ferocity. In the end he gave up trying and was always to be seen following the main body of his fellows at a safe distance. At first I thought he must be some old ram who had incurred unusual hatred by maintaining a dominant position in the herd extending beyond the normal span. However I soon found out that I was wrong.
One day I was lying in ambush for a particularly cunning jackal who for long had been creating great havoc among both sheep and buck, when the main herd of buck came grazing so close by me that I could hear them cropping the grass with quick lips and a crunch of eager mouths. I know of no more attractive sound for it has always brought back to me a sense of being briefly restored to the abiding rhythm and trust of nature. As the sound receded, leaving me alone with only the faint sigh of afternoon air in the sparkling broom-bushes wherein I lay, I felt strangely forsaken. I had decided to abandon my ambush when another faint crunching reached me. Coming towards me, closer even than the herd, was the lone buck. I was amazed to see, then, that he was not old at all. He was young with a lovely, shining coat and glistening black velvet muzzle. Whenever he stopped grazing delicately to sniff the air, he would first stare forlornly at the herd before searching the vast shimmering horizon trembling on the rim of high-veld like an expanding ripple in a pool of blue water. There was no doubt as to his nostalgia. He went on cropping the grass and only when he was immediately opposite me did he stop, lift his head and turn it in my direction. Instantly I knew the reason for his rejection by the herd. He was deformed. One horn lay crumpled behind a saffron ear; the other was stunted and stuck out crookedly in the air. As for his eyes – On that day I was not ready to allow myself to know of what they reminded me.