Authors: Damon Galgut
The Quarry (11 page)
He came to a large rock bulging out of the ground. He climbed up on to it to see. The rock was very hot and he couldn’t touch it with his hands. He walked on it. He clambered up to the
highest point and stood there, looking around. The earth seemed uniform and flat. He looked for the road but he didn’t know in what direction it was. He turned a full circle, looking every
way, before he stopped rigid and stared.
It was a long time before he was sure. In the desolation it might have been a termite hill, a branch. But it was a human figure moving slowly. He stood quite still, looking back, and then he sat
down on the rock.
He breathed out. He stood up on the rock again and brought his hands up to his face. A big man, very tall. He went down the side of the rock that was farthest away from the policeman and started
to run on through the grass. In a short time he slowed to a walk. He gasped for breath and kept looking behind him and his shoulders were trembling again. When he looked behind him now he saw the
other man clearly, both of them bisected by the line of the grass, their halved bodies floating and bobbing.
The sun went down in a sewage of colour and the landscape looked violent and strange. At first the darkness was complete. The only light came from the stars. He thought he could change course
in the night but the sky to his left grew paler and he could see the horizon and then the moon came up. It was full and round with a blue barren face and it cast its radiance down. The grass was
like metal in the thin blue light and everything could be seen.
The heat of the day disappeared quickly. He could feel dew prickling on him. Then the moon set and then it was dark. He was very tired by now and his mind had no edges and twice he fell asleep
on his feet. He staggered and caught himself and the third time he did fall, sprawling on his face on the ground. He fell asleep immediately and he didn’t care what might happen to him.
He woke abruptly and tried to get up. He couldn’t. He fell and clambered and fell over again. A baby. A drunk. He lay there and suddenly he laughed. The sound was harsh and not quite
human to his ear, as if it came from somewhere outside him. He stopped laughing and looked around. The sun was up and there was a mist. The grass was weighted down with it and he bent his mouth
to the drops and drank. He tried to stand again and this time he did.
He set off again, striking out randomly in the fog. After a short while the sun became hotter and the mist burned away and he could see the policeman behind him. He was further away than he had
been yesterday but otherwise his pursuit was unchanged. A solitary figure plodding through the grass. Listing to one side like a sketch in a cartoon, a creature from which the stuffing was leaking.
One man pursuing another man through the brown land. They were not people any more, they were a principle in operation: law and outlaw, hunter and quarry.
He came to a windmill which stood alone and skeletal in that ruined brown landscape like a monument to a deed done long ago and in the cracked concrete dam that stood at its base a thin gruel
of slime had collected. He lay prostrate in it with his mouth pressed to the moisture. He drank. It tasted of sediments from deep in the ground but he drank it as if it were wine. He would have
drunk bile, or blood. He felt the liquid move through him like a sort of emotion and his body took on a charge. He sat splay-legged in that primitive mud as if recently created from it and he
gazed for a long time at his reflection in its surface with what was possibly amazement. My face. My eyes. My mouth. When he got up again it was as if no time had passed but the sun was sinking
in the west already and the earth was exhaling its heat. Far behind him he could see the policeman, advancing still, but slowly now, crippled, demented. His shape was elongated and wavering on
the air like an abstract idea of a person.
The man climbed out of the dam and went on. When he had gone for a way he stopped and he saw the policeman come to the dam too and climb in. He experienced again the taste of the water because
he knew that the other man was drinking. He sat down on the ground and waited. When the policeman climbed back out of the dam he got up again and went on. He was no longer sure that there was a
difference between them or that they were separate from each other and they moved on together across the surface of the world and the sun went down and it got dark and still they continued in duet.
They moved through the night in faintest silhouette like dreams that the soil was having.
He didn’t sleep at all and when the sun came up again he was considerably weaker and the policeman had gained distance in the night. He was close enough now for his face to be visible and
his buttons glinted like rivets.
He came to something that ran across his path and he stared in dull confusion at the parallel lines with their transverse slats of wood before his memory unpicked meaning in them. Train
tracks. He looked at the line and then he followed it, one direction as good as another. The tracks ran on like sutures on the ground and he walked next to them. The earth was flat and barren
still. But between the sleepers here and there he saw blades of grass growing. He passed a crushed beer-can and once there was a turd on the tracks. Towards noon of that day he heard a thin
metallic humming. He thought it came out of his head. But the humming grew louder and it seemed to come from the ground and then it seemed to come from the tracks. He stopped and looked back. In
the white heat and distance he saw the policeman, also stopped next to the tracks. Both of them standing there, waiting.
It came slowly, accreting rather than approaching, a speck becoming a shape and then a form growing quickly in speed. He stepped back and let it pass. It did pass. The engine was hissing and
blotched with rust and he thought he saw two men moving in the cab but he wasn’t sure and then the engine was gone and there was wind and the carriages were also going past. He stood
stupefied and watched. Car after car after car with metal doors bolted and locked dragging past him in the dust and open platforms piled with pyramids of coal and wheat and one with a yellow car
lashed down on it that was jouncing and sliding with the speed and then the carriages became more solid and discrete and their outlines more steady on the eye. There was a gushing sound and the
friction of metal and the train was going much slower now. The wind eased and the groaning got softer and then the train stopped altogether. He looked to the left. Next to the track there was a
tower of sorts and the engine was next to this tower. There was movement. He looked back in front of him. There was a box-car made of some brown rotting wood and the door in the side of it was
open.
He climbed in. It was dark in the car. There were crates stacked up against the sides. In the gloom at the far end there was another human figure crouching. A ragged man in overalls, face hunted
and haunted, eyes dark. Much like he was himself. They looked at each other and then the man leaned forward and looked along the line of carriages at the policeman. He watched him come closer and
he continued to watch him even when the train jolted underneath him again and again started to move. The policeman made a clutching motion at the nearest car but there was no purchase and he
stopped dead and stood with the dust swirling thickly around him. He receded quickly in the haze and the train was moving on, moving on.
Then the man sat back in the gloom. He looked at his companion. Now they recognized each other and after all that had taken place it didn’t seem surprising that they should be reunited
here. They still didn’t speak but as the train went into a curve light fanned through the inside of the car and the two of them nodded to each other. Gravely, as passengers do. Then the train
gathered speed and Valentine’s head dropped in sleep and the man sat in the open rectangle of the door and he watched how the molten earth poured.
There was a box of matches left there for the candles with only one match in it. The flame was a tiny centre of light. He cupped a hand to keep it from dying. There is
something in fire no matter how small that is the same as something in us and he looked for an instant into the flame as at some truth from his own life that he had suddenly understood and then he
bent with it to the altar that was covered with a worn brocade. He broke a chair and fed it to the flames. In minutes the front of the church from where the minister had delivered his sermons was
writhing with light and heat and thickening tendrils of smoke. He turned and ran to the door and out. He stopped only for a moment outside but the plaza was deserted and he ran across it to the
northern end and stopped. He looked back and then he ran on.
He went through the streets of the township. Only when the houses ended and the veld began did he lift up his head. The ground was riven and dry. He came to a ditch with brown reeds growing in
it and a worn plank laid across and he stopped again and looked behind him. The sky was clear but smoke zigged across it like a thin fatal flaw in something otherwise perfect and he ran over the
plank across the ditch and on.
He went a long way that night without sleeping. He had burned one hand in the fire and when he woke at dawn he was in pain. There was a large blister in his palm like a weird white stigma and he
tore a piece from his shirt to bind it. With his bandaged hand and his broken gait he limped on over the land.
By mid-morning he saw a line of blue mountains off to his right, very small, very distant, a stain seeping up from the horizon. They were geometric and featureless, a graph of some kind. He
altered course and went towards them. They drew him.
By nightfall they were closer. The sun went down but the tiny peaks ahead glowed red and faint like a filament cooling long after the sky had gone dark. Then they also went out.
He came to a farmhouse and orbited warily around it. Then he went closer. There was a washline strung between two poles with a pair of overalls hanging on it. He took the overalls for himself
and left his own clothes in their place, flapping ragged and hollow from the wire. There was a well nearby and he winched the metal bucket to the surface and drank the dark water in it. Cool water,
earthsmelling. He looked around till he found an old bottle and filled it with the water and went on. Later he found an anthill that was partly hollowed out and he crawled into the chamber and lay
down. He slept encased in mud that was crenellated with tunnels like a brain.
At dawn he woke and stretched and set off at a slow run. The mountains rose out of the level plain ahead as sudden as an accident and by noon he was in their foothills. He was diminished and
pared by the high peaks, the gorges. He came to a stream. He drank and took off his clothes and washed in it. The water was cold and brilliant on his skin and it continued to ache in him long after
he had left it behind. He went on up the steepening ground while the shadow over him became deeper and at dusk he came to a copse of trees and crawled among their dark boles and slept. He woke at
first light among a matrix of roots and it was a full minute before he knew where he was.
He wandered on among the outcrops, going higher and higher. He came to a footpath. He followed the path. He passed a scarlet lizard with a ruff of skin around its neck. He saw a snake sliding
through a crevice. He passed a white bone lying next to the path that might have come from any creature’s body, his body. In the afternoon he came to the ridge. The path went over it and down
and he saw a valley opening out with a cluster of houses in it. A train track running down from the houses. He crouched behind the rocks to wait.
At twilight he descended, skulking from shadow to shadow like a villain. It was full dark when he came to the houses. In an iron bin overflowing with refuse he found the remains of a meal and he
ate ravenously, like a dog, crusts bones skin potatoes beans.
Afterwards he passed along the outskirts of the little settlement till he came to the railway track glimmering faintly. Standing on it in a prolonged procession of inert formations was an engine
and a line of carriages. He walked along them and back again. There was nobody else nearby. On the door of one of the cars the padlock was rusted and he used a branch and the remains of his
strength to force it to open for him. Crawled in. He lay in the dark and comfort of odours and he thought that he would leave before daylight.
But the sun had cleared the rim of the mountains already when he woke and the train was rocking like a boat. He stood in the doorway and saw the village, the drab houses, backsliding. Then the
train gathered speed and he heard it under him and he heard the echo returning. He sat against the wall of the carriage and slept again and woke, slept and woke. He saw the mountains recede like a
bite-mark on the sky and then a charred plain replaced them. Outside the train there was nothing. He slept more and when he woke the train was stopping and then a man climbed up into the car.
He said a word to his companion.
Valentine looked strangely at him. He mimed the action of drinking. Valentine gestured to a crate. He saw that the crate had been opened. He crawled to it and inside it and maybe inside all of
them were bottles filled with bright yellow cooldrink and he took one and opened it and drank.
He drank another and another and another. He and his ragged companion sat hunkered in the open door together, drinking bottles dry and discarding them. They threw them out of the door and they
burst on the ground in tiny and beautiful explosions. There was nothing to eat in the car. He had an urge to take the other man’s hand and because he wanted to he did so. Then they crouched
there together like lovers, not looking at each other, not speaking.
The sun went down. The train moved through the dark and he saw flames spurting up from the wheels. He saw the burned-out carapace of a car standing in the wilderness where no road was. He fell
asleep as if a switch had been thrown in his head and when he opened his eyes again he was lying on his back and Valentine had retreated to his corner and was crying out in his dreams.
Nee
broeder
, he called,
moenie moenie
. He sat up and looked out through the doorway and they were passing through a bare stony country with low hills, thin scrubby bushes. He saw a fence
made of barbed wire and sheep following each other like people and the train passed howling through a settlement of tin shacks between which were men women children standing staring or running
after the train and the wind of its passage made their fire lean backward and sparks flew up on the air. Then the dark clapped down like a hand as if they had never been. He staggered to his feet
and pissed out the door into the world. The first time in three days. He lay again and was again instantly asleep as if a blind had dropped in his brain and he dreamed about a woman that might have
been his mother or perhaps she was some other woman.
