Andre Brink - Devils Valley

Andr Brink

Devils Valley

1998

Flip Lochnerembittered boozer, self-described loser, burnt-out crime reporter, would-be historian, failed husband and fatherfinds himself on the farthest edge of civilization one day, descending on foot into a region that lies so deep within the walls of wild mountains it is all but impossible to reach. The Devils Valley has been home for 160 years to a breakaway sect of inbred Boers shut off from the rest of the world, and Lochner has come to dig into their stories, to establish their history, to know their truth.

With Devils Valley, South African writer Andr Brink, author of A Dry White Season, takes the reader on a wild ride into all the dark places of human nature that people most like to avoid. He makes a landscape and social history of these dark places as he brings his protagonist face to face with an agrarian community sternly committed to keeping outsiders out and inner secrets in. Its a place where dream worlds, death worlds, and this world blur and blend, where God and the Devil daily wrestle for the souls of the inhabitants, where simple human dignity is all but out of reach. What is history in such a place? What is truth? The problem is that I have no bloody way of making sure what I have to show for my efforts, Lochner muses on his experience. Statements, testimonies, accounts, or just a damn handful of ravings?

Devils Valley asks the reader to wonder about his or her own history, especially those parts we all like to leave out yet mutter silently to ourselves, the parts that skitter through our own moonlit night lives accompanied by owls and baboons.

Schuyler Ingle

I BEEN SITTING here, waiting for you, said the old man, not bothering to look at me.

My fucking heart missed a fucking beat. Cautiously, as if I had reason to feel guilty, I shifted the rucksack on my back. Id noticed the old dude from quite a distance, perched on the rocky outcrop, as grey as the grass. Without dislodging a stone or missing a step Id come down all the bloody way from the top where the four-by-four had dropped me, heading straight for the small herd of mottled goats; and what with the sun coming at an angle from the front there was no shadow either to warn him; yet there he was on the ridge, in his stupid oldfashioned skin trousers and waistcoat and floppy wide-brimmed hat, his back to me, staring out across the deep ravine, and saying in that level voice, as if hed bloody well been watching me all the way, I been sitting here, waiting for you.

I put out my hand. Flip Lochner, Oom.

Ja, I know mos. The crusty old customer was still gazing into the distance, so I had to drop my hand. You come a long way in this snow.

Around us the mountains were shimmering in the late-summer heat. Bloody baking-oven. I wiped the sweat from my face with my sleeve. Snow, Oom? I enquired cautiously.

Ja, didnt you see? The mountains are white. I decided on the diplomatic approach. I can imagine it must be pretty cold here in winter.

Man, woman, child and beast, they all died of exposure.

He drew the skin waistcoat tight on his sinewy body, shivering briefly as if he could actually feel the cold. He looked fucking ancient, but very straight, kind of patriarchal, his angry grey beard stained with tobacco juice like a tuft of dry grass pissed on many times, the mouth caved in, chewing on his gums. Something left on a shelf well past its sell-by date.

Devils Valley

I suppose thats the Devils Valley down there? I asked sort of unnecessarily after a while.

Whats it look like to you?

More like Paradise.

A reluctant grunt made his Adams apple jump. Then, a touch more affable, he said, We always believed Adam and Eve must have lived down here. I mean, before God got angry with them. Adding as an afterthought, still without bothering to look at me, Names Lermiet. Lukas Lermiet.

It wasnt the sort of name one comes across every day or forgets once youve heard it. I could barely hide my surprise. But thats the family name, isnt it?

Well, what did you expect? he asked in a huff. His voice was like old bloody dry grass rustling, and with a Dutch accent to it.

Im sorry, but it just struck me I tried to collect my thoughts. I mean, the first man who trekked into this valleywhen was that? In the 1830swas also a Lukas Lermiet, wasnt he? Lukas Seer, they called him. And then almost nothing more was heard of them for well over a century and a half. It was only the other day, in Stellenbosch, that I heard the name again

Is that what you come for? To nose around? We minding our own business here. For the first time the old fucker looked at me. The kind of look that unsettles one even in broad daylight: colourless eyes peering through a tangle of grey eyebrows, dulled by cataracts, with a remoteness about them, an absence. What was uncanny about it was this: on the one hand it seemed to miss nothing, picking up all the shit that had ever happened to me, all the hidden agendas behind it, even those I hadnt resolved for myself yet. On the other hand he seemed to be staring right through me, in one way and out the other, as if I was a bloody sheet of glass through which he could see everything in the landscape that had been there before us and would outlive us: the cliffs and ridges folding away, layer upon layer under the fucking endless sky, the slopes reaching down, all steep and forbidding like, to the long narrow valley at the bottom, as bloody void and whatever as it must have been in the time of God and Genesis.

Its a piece of history thats never been written up properly, I tried to justify myself.

With good reason, if you ask me. Why would anyone want to write it up?

So that people will know.

What for?

I had to calm his suspicions. Oom, I promise you I wont offend anyone.

The old number scraped his throat and spat a green gob mere inches past my face.

So Very Sudden

I met Little-Lukas Lermiet in Stellenbosch, I began again.

No answer. He was sitting there like a dumb piece of rock.

The day he died I was on my way to see him, I went on. This might be the only bait hed swallow.

But he still didnt bother to answer; I couldnt even be sure that hed heard me.

You might say I owe him one, I explained. To come here, I mean. To look up his people. It was all so very sudden.

Little-Lukas had no business to go where he went. He had no right to flap out about us, snarled the old man. He got what he deserved.

Oom? I asked, taken aback.

Silence.

I take it he was a relation? The same name and all.

None of your business, he growled.

Well I knew when there was nothing more to squeeze from a stone. At least I thought Id come and see for myself.

Open Eyes

You can still go back, said Oom Lukas in his raspy voice, so gruffly I wasnt quite sure if hed spoken or just cleared his throat. And if you want my advice youll turn back while you still can. Once you put your two feet down there it may soon be too late.

No, Oom, I cant let such a chance go by. Ive been waiting for this for years. And after I spoke to Little-Lukas

Then you going into it with open eyes.

Words I was to remember only too fucking well, much later, too late.

If you dont mind, I can go down with you when you go home, I proposed.

Youll be waiting a long time.

Dont you live down there in the valley, then?

Says who?

Im afraid I dont understand.

Thats your worry. He sat mumbling to himself for a while before he spoke up again: You want to go down, you do it on your own.