Devil's Valley (2 page)

I
T WAS THIRTY years ago that I first found out about the Devil’s Valley. Those were my days of innocence when there were still so many things waiting to be done for the first time. I had a touch of style then, even if I say so myself. In my life, and in what I put on paper. There were people who actually believed I was going to make it as a writer. I was still teaching, fired by ambition and great illusions, and planning my thesis. History, what else? Always my favourite subject. And I was in no mind to produce something that would gather fucking dust on a fucking shelf, no way. Unlike the themes some of my contemporaries at varsity built their reputations on:
Electrolysis in the Gut of the Earthworm, The Diet of German Sailors on Ships in the VOC in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century, Criteria of Taste and Succulence in the Grading of Beef at the Cape Town Abbattoir
. Not for me, thank you very much. Mine was bloody well going to be different. I was set on Making a Contribution. Among other things, finally to shit on Twinkletoes van Tonder who’d regularly taken first place in History right through our university years. I’d always had to work my arse off to get somewhere, he just took it in his athletic stride. His father a professor, mine a shunter on the railways. Their house filled with the bric-a-brac of annual trips to Europe; our only showpiece a ball-and-claw radiogram on which over weekends Pa would play his seventy-eights of old Boer music, Chris Blignaut and the Briel Family.

Twinkletoes van Tonder was what Pa would have called a dainty-fart; I grew up barefoot in the shitty little village in the Free State, where the snot froze on one’s upper lip in winter. I’m not complaining, mind. And I don’t want to go off on a side-spin either. I can take whatever comes my way like a man, right? All I’m trying to say is that Twinkletoes van Tonder was a haemorrhoid in the arsehole of my life. He got his name from sucking up to lecturers, crawling so far up their backsides that only his toes stuck out. With MA wrapped up, the two of us were neck-and-neck for the vacant assistantship in the department. But Twinkletoes, in that ringing bloody phrase from the Bible, was a smooth man and I was an hairy man. And ever since the time of Jacob and Esau the dice have been loaded against us hairy ones. He got the job; I turned to teaching.

Wild Oats

Then one day I stumbled across a reference to a small party during the Great Trek who’d turned away from the other prospective emigrants and wandered into the Swartberg range. Scouting around and reading whatever I could lay my hands on, even spending one summer vacation in the Archives, I finally came up with some hard evidence on Lukas (Seer) Lermiet who’d trekked from Graaff-Reinet in the company of the well-known leader Gerrit Maritz in 1838. What first tickled me was the unusual name. In the Archives I unearthed one Luc l’Hermite who’d come out to the Cape with the Huguenots on the
Voorschoten
in 1688, who might well have been the founder of the family’s local branch. But between this Monsieur l’Hermite and my Lukas Lermiet there was many a gap still to be plugged, and all the wrinkles in the line would first have to be ironed out before one could be quite sure. A damn tantalising idea, anyway. In the meantime my early research had suggested that the original Monsieur l’Hermite was not exactly a fucking ancestor to be proud of, as he appeared to have fled La Rochelle to escape a charge of murder, and travelled to the Cape masquerading as a religious refugee. Once arrived, he did a pretty good job covering his tracks while sowing all manner of wild oats, thistles and tumbleweeds well out of sight of the European authorities. And it might well be that a century and a half later the family finally took root among the koppies of the deep interior. All of which was still virgin territory for the researcher.

Anyway, our Lukas Lermiet left Graaff-Reinet in the company of Gerrit Maritz, but soon ran into trouble with the old sourpuss preacher of the group, Maritz’s brother-in-law Erasmus Smit, and it seems that, possessed by a vision, and accompanied by a few like-minded spirits, the Seer turned off course to trek south-east, into the forbidding Swartberg range. Just as ancient maritime charts of Africa marked certain parts with the legend
Hie sunt hones
, there were old maps of the interior on which the Swartberg was superscribed with the words
Hier zijn duvelen
, or
Here be devils
. Hence, I guess, the name ‘Duiwelskloof—Devil’s Valley.

Odd Reference

There was not much more on Lukas Lermiet and his descendants to be found in the Archives, apart from the odd (sometimes very odd) reference in minor official documents. In the 1890
s
an agent of the Cape government was dispatched to collect taxes or quitrent or whatever from the people who’d apparently disappeared into the Devil’s Valley without a trace; but he was screwed out of his clothes and sent back across the mountains like my finger. Whereupon a whole armed detachment came all the way from Cape Town to avenge the honour of Her Fucking Majesty. Once again without result, for no trace of the blasted commando could ever be found; and soon afterwards the Anglo-Boer War gave the distant government other priorities to care about.

From the time of the 1914 Rebellion came a reference to a couple of burghers who’d escaped into the valley to hide from government troops, never to be heard of again. Much later, during the Second World War, a small band of right-wing extremists from the Ossewa-Brandwag fled into the valley to get away from Smuts’s officers, and the bodies of two policemen sent after them were later found in a deep kloof where they’d presumably fallen to their death. Once again the matter was not followed up.

After the war individuals from the Devil’s Valley sporadically turned up in the outside world, and a legend took root about a community of physically or mentally handicapped people in the mountains, the sad outcome of generations of inbreeding. Somewhere in the fifties a team of census agents were sent out to record particulars of the inhabitants, but they never came back; on another occasion an exciseman dispatched to investigate rumours of illicit distilling met with a fatal accident in the mountains. Still later the University of Stellenbosch mounted an expedition of anthropologists and sociologists and God knows what other -ists on a research project, but they returned not only empty-handed but stubbornly mum about the expedition. Then money ran out as the government started cutting down on university budgets, and that was that.

All of which I found promising enough. But my designated supervisor found it too insubstantial. How about the Development of a Christian National Character Among the Voortrekkers, 1836-1843 instead? I might still have pressed my luck, but that was when Sylvia appeared on the scene and began to play me off against Twinkletoes van Tonder; and if I were to abscond for a couple of months to do research in the Devil’s Valley I had little doubt that in my absence he’d settle so tightly into her own little devil’s valley that once again only his toes would stick out. That was the end of my project. But at the time I thought it would be only a temporary setback. If you ask me, every person has a rat inside, a rat which keeps gnawing away and which you must feed if you hope to survive, otherwise it consumes your fucking guts. And the Devil’s Valley was my rat. I was going to feed it. But for thirty years nothing came of it, until there wasn’t much left to consume in me.

Comes Out Red

That is, until Little-Lukas Lermiet appeared on my horizon a few months ago. The occasion was a day-long seminar in Stellenbosch on ‘History and Reporting’, to be introduced by Professor Hardus (Twinkletoes) van Tonder, Head of the Department of History, D. Litt. et Phil., S.H.I.T., Dean of the Faculty of Arts, as well as Vice-President of the South African Academy of Education, Arts and Science. My presence, as member of a panel on Investigative Journalism, was either pure coincidence or fate, depending on the paradigm, I think that is the term, you use. Our editor was called away on an important mission requiring all his attention (something to do with his wife’s investments), the news editor was otherwise engaged (he has a friend with a box at Newlands), two others who’d been approached were not available, which was how yours truly, well down the pecking order, came to be delegated at the last minute.

This kind of seminar is not my line at all. Do I still
have
a ‘line’? I have no idea any more what I’m doing in journalism. Cynicism stains one like nicotine. There was a time…but forget it. Compromise is the name of the game, until you swallow your last lump of self-respect like the vomit of a bad hangover. Right up to the eighties there were moments when in a flush of misplaced romanticism or something I still thought I had a ‘role’ to play. You go out on a story to Old Crossroads or the KTC squatter camp, you look on while police set fire to the shacks of people who refuse to move elsewhere; you see a child, sent by his mother to the corner shop for a half-loaf of bread, run down by the cops in the yellow van, who then jump out to shoot him execution-style. Then you go back to the office and file your story with the news editor, a shithead ten years younger than yourself, who draws red lines through most of it and tells you to rewrite the piece. Anything you give to that cunt is like a fucking tampon: it goes in clean and comes out red. And when you object, he blows his top and tears up the sheets. You try to protest. He looks you in the eye and asks, “What are you trying to do, Lochner?” You tell him, “I was there, sir.” He says, “For your information, this never happened.” And after the incident has been repeated three times you give up trying. You cannot resign either, because jobs are scarce and you have a wife who has Joneses to compete with and two kids at varsity, so don’t rock the boat, buddy. When you shave in the morning, you look past your own image in the mirror, pretending you’re not here. You feel like a whore on the point of retiring, but she’s already got AIDS and all she can still hope for is to infect a few more fuckers before she croaks.

Fucking Symposium

And then they have the bloody cheek, on a Saturday you planned to spend working on your Cortina and watching rugby on TV, to pack you off to a fucking symposium on Investigative Journalism. Look, if you have to, ask me about crime statistics, and I’ll be happy to oblige. Last year: an average of three murders an hour, a rape every twelve minutes (or, considering that only one out of every thirty-five is reported, one every twenty seconds), an armed robbery every five minutes, a case of child abuse every ten minutes (but of course even fewer of these are reported than rapes), and this happens twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, right? As Alan Paton said, “Ah but your fucking land is beautiful.” And we still have Mandela. But all I’m trying to say is, ask me a thing like that and I’m your man. But don’t come to me with symposiums and conferences and shit. So what does a man do? You go. That’s what you do.

In a Corner

Crap of a high order, lasting a whole morning and afternoon. Afterwards the big brass decamped to a reception in the rector’s house, while I ended up with a few other rejects and off-cuts and a group of rowdy students in a pub.

I landed in a corner, a position I’m no stranger to; and by the fourth or fifth round, when I was comfortably leading on points, I was approached by a spotty youngster. Little-Lukas Lermiet, the name registered after the second or third attempt. As nervous as a fucking puppy not sure whether he’s going to be stroked or kicked. Quite an intelligent, narrow face, but his eyes looked like a frog’s through those thick glasses, and he had a bit of a st-stammer. The kind of dude that just begs to be screwed out of his senses by a really wild girl to change him into a fucking prince.

He clearly wasn’t much of a talker; and I was, not to put too fine a point on it, introspectively inclined. It was a mere week after Sylvia had left me the note (with two typos) and both children had telephoned to make sure I had no doubts about who was to blame; and striking up a conversation with a pimply youth was not high on my list of priorities.

“Sir, there was s-something you said this morning…” began Little-Lukas.

Few people call me sir; and my contribution to the morning’s discussion, I knew perfectly well, had been a load of shit. So there was much bleary-eyed suspicion mixed with my feigned curiosity.

“…about the D-Devil’s Valley in the Swartberg.”

I could vaguely remember the reference, yes. Some stray off-the-cuff remark about topics still waiting to be investigated.

“I-I live there.”

Deep in my guts I felt something stirring; the old rat was gnawing again.

He was the first inhabitant of the Devil’s Valley I’d ever come across in the flesh. It would seem that an old pedlar, a smous, had plied him with books in the Valley, until much pleading and effort and bargaining at long last landed him permission to study outside. Before his time the odd bright youngster had from time to time been allowed to go to school in one of the towns outside the Devil’s Valley, but Little-Lukas was the first and only one ever to go to university. As far as I could gather, however, more and more young ones in the past few decades had simply left the place for good. Then why did one never run into them? Perhaps no one thought of asking; also, most of the exiles presumably chose not to broadcast the matter. It sounded as if the valley had become practically deserted, in spite of a tradition of large families. “There’s only the old ones and the very young ones left,” he said, “and of course the h-handicapped ones.”

Had I met the little nerd thirty years earlier it might have made a difference, but when I first became interested in the history he’d not even been an itch in his father’s balls yet. Now it was a bit late in the day. Still, we started talking. In fact we got so carried away that after the pub closed we went off to his digs where he produced, of all things, a bottle of Old Brown. Now I pack a mean slug, and I take my Scotch as it comes from its mother, it’s part of the job description, but OB plugs my arsehole.

Godforsaken Place