Mouroir by Breyten Breytenbach

Author:Breyten Breytenbach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2011-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Think. Black, they say, is not human – not yet; it’s kaffir, they say. The man, that fellow then who may well be the same one here, now, was cultivated and superior and pragmatic (but all abroad, entirely out of his depth) and he walked with wide shoulders and narrow eyes: therefore he must be White, they said; only, the pigmentation of his skin provided him with the ideal camouflage and out of curiosity and impudence he wanted to exploit this. During a police raid on a shebeen – which he frequented anonymously – it was the time of the revolution – he was arrested together with a bunch of genuine Blacks. In the process of sorting out, grading and classifying and partitioning thousands of people each week, a certain amount of confusion and some slip-ups cannot be avoided (made worse by the attempts of the ringleaders and the shrewd ones to obfuscate their true identities). The black White in the twinkling of an eye found himself in a harsh lock-up place, and from there, before you can say “knife”, in the death cell as part of a lot of sweating, chanting and feet-stamping black Blacks. You may say that he now ventured into a truly foreign cultural milieu. Also that his eyes were bigger than his stomach. Do you still remember what a row he kicked up, what a fuss he made, how strenuously he protested? Do you still see the flames in his blue eyes? High on the hilltops the fires spark against the moon. While the others sang to the heavens opening up above them, he, squeezed tight against the bars of the cell door, attempted to draw the attention of any passing authority. But nothing could be done to resolve the matter, the moths were blind, water was in the cellars of the houses. Ichabod, or something along those lines. Should one be bothered by the desperate and farfetched babbling of the condemned? It is not just a question of consequences and precedent and perhaps also quotas – there are finally also rules and regulations and a timetable that need to be respected. Struggling and screaming with foam-flecks around the lips, just like the others for that matter, a human being among the Blacks, he went up to the gallows room one morning at daybreak to have his neck stretched. Like a bow tie the rope was tied around his neck. As if for a dinner or a soirée dansante. But the pillory-cord is a pair of scissors snipping off life, he thinks along. You had an acquaintance among the doomed. It gives death another colour, another exultant visage, another smell.

What does this watery surface further remind you of? The stream of his thoughts is fretting the submerged and reticent stones of experience (like a beheaded cock). What does water always bring home to you? Easy, easy now my old one. The cock is in the head. Superlative tail feathers, no? Beautiful the red bubbling at the throat.

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