We Were Never Here
Smoke poured out of my lungs, and the cigarette dropped from my fingers. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. Inside my body, there was just a damp vacuum, like the space in an old oak eaten away by a slow fungus.
“What if we do deserve to die, Martin?”
“What the fuck man. What the fuck.”
Martin was concerned, but he didn’t know how to handle shit like this. He said I was too intense. I know what he means, I’ve heard it from others. But I felt different this time. I wasn’t lashing out from emotion. I had been through my paranoia and come out the other side. I had seen the light. All was peace within me. The air itself was so still that the smoke on my breath stayed where I put it.
I stood up from my haunches and strode out the door of the empty guestroom and out into the oppression of the summer sunshine, the screeching of the cicadas, a din I hadn’t been treated to since I was a child. I made a left where the lawn had been worn away by the family’s feet, and went towards the main house. This was freaking Martin out. He could see something in me, the way I moved, like a trickle of water rolling downhill, moved by gravity rather than internal mechanism, and it terrified him.
See, I had tried suicide before. It didn’t taste very good. It tasted like vomit, and it tasted like pain and it tasted like metal and a cold fire yawning to swallow the blackness. But I didn’t feel like killing myself. I felt like killing us. The whole fruitless façade. The grandeur, the legacy, the pride, the whole lot of it. Afrikaans, the war of independence, apartheid, all the fingerprints of our race, our hopes for the future, the bloodstains of the past, every trace of it. Our English cousins and their colonies, the enlightenment, the hopes of Liberty, democracy, the rainbow and the nation, the eagle and the serpent. The fragility of my skin, this pustulating ricepaper wrapping that so easily blistered in the sunshine of a climate it wasn’t evolved for. Now I would wipe it all away. I was going back. But first, I would do the only thing that mattered. I would kill my family.
I strode easily through the living room in a cold breeze of effortless motion, and as my eyes welled up, I could hear through the rush of blood in my brain the buzzing words of distress from Martin behind me. If he wasn’t such a coward, he would tackle me to the ground. But he just tore his hair out in frustration, swearing and screaming at me to stop. I could hear other footsteps in the house. They were receding out the back door, and they belonged to Pretty. She never could handle the family spats. But she soon forgot them, or at least pretended to.
I felt a holy and sacred glory compelling me. I wiped my eyes and passed my grandfather, who scowled and squawked through his leathery old cancer-ridden lungs at us for the racket. I smiled at him, and made for the cabinet. He always kept the guns loaded, part of that persistent illusion amongst all impotent men that someday they would get to face the manifestation of their fears and destroy them in an act of rage. His nemesis were the “kaffers”, of course. And since the van Rensburgs had been murdered last year, it was all he would ever use his phlegmatic wheezing for. I pitied him. He had led a stupid and destructive life whittling the family estate down to half its size with boozing and mismanagement. Abused by his father, treated to no affection by his mother, unloved by his wife, whom he beat until his strength failed, never capable of comprehending life’s injustices, wheeling around in his paranoid mind to start at shadows in a repressed rage he longed to express but no longer had the strength for. He longed to be loved, and perform some final act of heroism, ignoring the grinning truth in the back of his mind telling him he was done for.
As I took aim, and watched his glassy little eyes go wild with fear, I thought absently of the orchard, and how it was improperly irrigated, because he employed a truly useless man to manage the farm. Any fool could see that, even me, through the haze of narcotics and metropolitan education. I had wished him dead before, but this time, the moment I killed him, I was not killing him. The gun fired without me, my shoulders swung to train the rifle on Martin. I had not anticipated how loud a gun could be indoors, having only ever hunted in the veld before. Now I could truly not hear Martin. I wheeled the gun on my cousin, who had never hurt anybody in his life outside of clumsy misadventures in romance, where he was as hopeless as his sad eyes and curly mop of hair made him appear. Nonetheless a pretty man, I noticed, as he turned to flee. And as he fell, he grabbed the doorhandle and fell through into the hallway.
I felt cold. Actually cold. I shivered, as if it were winter.
I knew that if I kept on with this and made a point of hunting my family down, I would be caught. I glanced out the window, and saw Pretty’s fat, round buttocks pumping her thick black legs under the pale blue maids’ outfit in a trail of light dust along the road from the farmhouse. If I were in a different mood, I might have found the sight of her attempting to sprint funny. But instead, my mind played a different movie.
I dreamed as I sleepwalked through my automated tragedy. I dreamed of centuries of bloodshed. I dreamed of my ancestors, made refugees in countless wars between Europeans, shunted between kingdoms by papal and ducal and imperial decree, conscripted, butchered, enslaved in generations of serfdom, dying in the mud, dying of cancer, of dysentery, of cholera, of syphilis. I dreamed of the merchants, of the explorers, the Huguenots fleeing persecution to land on African shores, the Dutch peasants who fled the British, who clashed with the Zulu, who slaughtered the Xhosa, who hunted the Khoe, who drove out the San. The misguided folk who acted out of what they perceived to be self-defence, the great hustle in the red sand, to make space for one’s kind. I remembered the stories of the shambling corpses fleeing the Mfecane, the alliance of Boer and Griqua that defeated the Hlubi who had turned to cannibalism in the famine. I remembered all the emaciated skeletons of Boer children in concentration camps, the Rhodes company workers gunned down on the skyline at Kimberly, the Bondelswarts, the Xhosa prophets and their dead followers. I dreamed of the world wars, and my forebears , charting a course through untouched jungle in the Congo to reach el Alamein to be cheated of their youth in the desert, and how the monuments to their pointless suffering were now being defaced. It was all a farce. I dreamed a dream of segregation and the liberals who sacrificed their life and livelihood, the strong African men and women who sacrificed everything, even their souls, for the cause, the torture, the stupidity, the burning and censorship of art. Displacement, suppression, silencing, the dehumanization of millions of people, a people brought to their knees before they could taste a civilization of their own.
And then I dreamed of bombs and necklaces. I dreamed of township justice and its blind and blunt scythe. The ease of the calls to bloodshed and erasure of my people that sprang from the re-awakening of Black Consciousness. It was so easy. They would gain control, erase our history, erase our culture, and erase us. They started at the universities, and on the fringes of our sick and broken society crowded in wild eyed poverty in a million sheet-iron ovens baking in the sun, where clouds of nyaope and stalking demons strangled and raped children and threw them into latrines, gangs of young men were planning to wash their spears once more.
I had rehearsed a thousand arguments with every sort of radical, from the complacent mitlaufer to the stony faced warriors, grim faced sadists, and hysterical vengeance-seekers, but they always had an answer, be it in the form of reason, obfuscation, evasion, or direct threats. I had tried to winkle my knife beneath the limpet ideology fastening onto their tender underbellies, only to learn that resistance was racism, and nobody cared. I no longer cared. It couldn’t happen soon enough. We had to die. All of us.
I went to the storehouse and grabbed a can of petrol and a canvas sack. I took off the cap, and threw the can over. It spilled out over a carpet, handwoven in Afghanistan, that my grandmother had purchased in Paris on her honeymoon. The Oregon pine floorboards, irreplaceable due to Canadian lumber restrictions protecting their native forests, leaked the pungent fluid in drops into the gap beneath. The handcrafted grandfather clock ticked, a beat beneath the siren song of the cicadas, as the portraits of my ancestors stared down from above shelves piled with books acquired over two and a half centuries. I quietly lit a match.
By now, my tears had run so much, my eyes were beginning to ache. I left by the way I came in, and looked back at the hideousness of all that beauty, history and love and hate glow and smoulder as the wisps of my grandfather’s bloodied hair glowed in the amber blaze. My mother and grandmother would be at the farm office with my uncle. My little sister would be at school. I took for the bakkie, and threw the canvas sack with the rifles in onto the back, stopping to pocket the large 38 revolver my father had used to end his own life. There was a packet of cigarettes on the dashboard, and matches in my pocket. I started the engine, and saw that the tank was full.