The Covenant

  Despite this censure, De Pré did gain one of his objectives: the refugees were given permission to build a small church for the minister who had sailed in one of the ships from Amsterdam, and behind its whitewashed walls only French was heard. But the children, and especially Henri and Louis de Pré, continued to speak mainly in Dutch, and it became apparent that the Compagnie’s efforts to stamp out French would in the end succeed.

  It was agreed between the Van Doorns and the De Prés that the question of language would be discussed no further; each side had made its position clear and only animosity could ensue if the arguing continued. Of course, no one supposed that any peace treaty would be honored by old Katje, and whenever she gave the De Pré boys a goodie she would tell them, ‘Say thank you like a good Dutch boy,’ and the boys would say, ‘Hartelijck bedanckt, Ouma!’

  One night she asked Paul, ‘Why did you come to a Dutch land if you don’t like it?’

  ‘I do like it,’ Paul said. ‘Look at my fields.’

  ‘But how did you get here?’

  ‘Your husband’s brother sent me to steal the grapevines, as I told you.’

  ‘How is the old thief?’

  ‘Katje!’ Willem protested.

  ‘Well, he is an old thief, isn’t he?’ she demanded of De Pré.

  ‘If he is, he’s a smart one,’ Paul said. ‘He married one of the richest widows in Amsterdam.’

  ‘I’m sure of that,’ Katje snapped, and when De Pré revealed the clever manner in which the Widows Bosbeecq had outmaneuvered Karel in the matter of their seven ships, she chortled.

  ‘Nine cheers for the widows!’ she cried, then grabbing her granddaughter Petronella, she said solemnly, ‘If you ever become a widow, outsmart them, Petra. Keep your wits about you and outsmart them.’

  ‘Grandmother!’ Annatjie said sharply. ‘Don’t talk like that to a child.’

  ‘And you too!’ the old lady said. ‘If you become a widow, which God forbid, watch yourself. Women are smarter than men, much smarter, but in times of emotion—’

  ‘But you see,’ Paul broke in, ‘the Widows Bosbeecq were forewarned about Karel. They knew he was a tricky man.’

  Suddenly Katje leaned forward, and reaching out to grasp the Huguenot by his arm, she asked, ‘How did they know that?’

  ‘They warned me about him when I went to work at his big house. They were ready to marry him, you understand, either of them, but they knew he was a thief … because of what he had done to you.’ At this point he addressed Willem.

  Katje tugged at his arm: ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The way he stole from your husband.’

  Sharp tug: ‘Stole what?’

  ‘When he sold your mother’s house in Batavia. Everyone knew that half the money was for Willem, but he kept it for himself … all of it.’

  ‘I knew it! I knew it!’ the old woman shouted, jumping from her chair, and rampaging back and forth from table to door. ‘I told you he was a thief.’ Halfway back to the table she stopped, remembered old days, and cried, ‘I told him to his face. “You’re stealing from us.” ’ On and on she recalled scenes of that last confrontation when she had divined what the couple was up to. At the end she fell into her chair, dropped her head on the table and wept.

  ‘There, there,’ Willem whispered.

  ‘But we could have had that money. We could have gone back to Holland in style. We didn’t have to work like slaves …’

  ‘I would never have gone,’ Willem said, and his wife looked up at him in astonishment, then with slow understanding as he asked, ‘Would you have missed this valley for a smelly house on a smelly canal?’

  But as the De Prés started to walk home they could still hear the old woman haranguing her family: ‘Always remember, your uncle was a thief. He stole what was rightfully yours.’ On and on, until they could hear no more, she lectured on how she had been right, back in 1664.

  * * *

  It annoyed Paul that his sons used Dutch to refer to Katje. It was ‘Ouma gave us a cookie.’ ‘Ouma said we could sleep over there.’ It meant old mother, hence grandmother, and was a term of endearment, for if Ouma gave her husband a bad time over the various mistakes he made in his life, she compensated by her love for children. She knew they needed discipline and she was the one to dispense it, but she also knew they needed love, and she was as indulgent with the De Pré children as with the Van Doorn.

  One morning, when Henri and Louis had gone to the big house to beg sweets from the old lady, they ran home in tears. ‘Ouma’s dead! Ouma died last night!’ Three days later she was buried at the foot of a hill, and on the way back from the grave Marthinus said, ‘She’s had time to get to heaven, and right now she’s advising St. Peter, sternly.’

  Her death had a curious aftermath. Old Willem, recalling how often she had badgered him to enlarge the farmhouse—seeking by this means to finally compensate for the cramped hut at the Cape—decided that he would at last accede to her wishes. When he announced that he was riding to the Cape to buy a Malay carpenter, his son asked why, and he replied to Annatjie, as if she were old Katje’s surrogate, ‘It’s about time I made this house the way she wanted it.’

  By starting early and riding hard through the heat of the day, the old man reached the Cape before dusk, and what he saw always delighted him. The bay now had a quay at which ships could tie, a handsome new fort of gray stone, streets with solid houses and spacious orchards growing pears and lemons and oranges and plums and apples. More than half the white people in the colony lived in the town, which had every aspect of a thriving community—except one: the entire place contained not a single formal store; the Compagnie felt that the duty of the Cape was to refresh its fleets and collect goods for use in Java. What local buying and selling might be necessary would be done by the Compagnie, from its offices, and no merchant class would be allowed in the Cape.

  But Amsterdam was a world away from the raw settlement in Table Valley, and its restrictions had the opposite effect from those intended: practically everyone at the Cape became a secret huckster, dealing directly with passing ships, hoarding clandestine stores in their homes, selling, bartering, smuggling until they became so skilled that they earned their entire living at the business. Corruption was also rife among Compagnie officials, as poorly paid as they were resentful of service at this insignificant and forsaken outpost; venality reached to the top, as proved by the vast private estates operated by some Compagnie men.

  The Lords XVII had never sought a proper settlement here and constantly proclaimed that free burghers were to keep within the bounds established by the authorities in Amsterdam. Physical and spiritual lives alike were minutely prescribed, for the truth was that the Lords were both perplexed and frightened by the vastness of Africa. Holland was a small, hemmed-in country and provided the scale by which their Cape entrepǒt would always be judged. The Lords believed that if, through their Council of Policy at the Cape, they were able to dictate what could be read, or spoken in church, or discussed publicly, they would retain control; so they instructed the farmers how to conduct their leisure hours, their wives how to dress, and all citizens when to go to bed at night.

  But Willem had the Lords XVII to thank for providing him with an opportunity to purchase a carpenter; the Lords had ordered: ‘No homeward-bound official may bring his slaves with him to Holland.’ So Willem picked up a bargain and hurried to the Castle, as the new five-bastioned fort was now called, to register his property, but he found the officials more interested in Paul de Pré than in the deed of sale.

  ‘Tell us, does De Pré still converse in French?’

  ‘Not with us. We don’t speak it.’

  ‘But with his children?’

  ‘When his boys are with us, they speak Dutch.’

  ‘Is he circulating any more petitions?’

  ‘He’s too busy with the grapes.’ Had De Pré been manufacturing grenades, Willem would not have betrayed him.

  With visible reluctance the Co
mpagnie granted permission to buy the young Malay carpenter, Bezel Muhammad, whose name betrayed his mixed origin—the first deriving from his black Madagascan mother, the second from his brown Malaccan father. He spoke five pidgin languages, none well, and was a master of saw and hammer. He was reluctant to leave a town which contained other Coloureds, with whom he liked to associate, but he saw advantages in moving closer to where trees grew. He preferred the timber of Africa to the mahogany of Mauritius or the heavier imported woods from Java. He also liked the forthright manner of Van Doorn, and promised, ‘I build good.’

  As they were leaving the Castle an official called out after them, ‘Remember, you’re responsible for that slave! See that he doesn’t run away!’ Willem agreed, thinking: How men change. When Jango wanted to run, I helped him. But for this slave I paid my own money, so I must guard him.

  Willem could not have foreseen the effect that Bezel Muhammad would have upon the valley. The children loved helping him with his tasks, accompanying him into the forest in search of stinkwood, that heavy dark wood which smelled so foul if a tree rotted, but looked so grand when planed down and polished. Annatjie, now in sole charge of the house, appreciated his helpfulness, but it was Paul de Pré who was affected most deeply.

  He quickly discovered that Bezel was an artist, not only in wood but in all building, and it was he who argued Willem into allowing the slave to refinish the west façade of the house, the side facing Table Mountain: ‘What we should do, Willem, is make the long house not only a little bigger, but a little more pleasant.’

  ‘That’s what Katje always wanted.’

  ‘We’ll do it for her,’ Paul said, but often as Willem watched the energy with which the Huguenot worked he gained the impression that Paul was building not for Katje, but for himself. On important points the Huguenot was adamant.

  ‘The front must be kept long and low, but over the door we want a beautiful gable, like the ones I knew in Holland.’ He sketched the graceful curves that would define the gable and determine its height, and although he consulted the two Van Doorn men on what materials Bezel Muhammad should use, it was he who directed each stage of the construction.

  It was De Pré’s idea also to build a wing projecting backward from the front door, so that the house took the form of a T, with the kitchen and serving areas in the stem at the rear. When the house was completed, he found a way to finish off its long clean walls with cow manure, which hardened like stone, and then to whitewash them so that they gleamed pure-white. But because the mud-and-manure produced an uneven surface, when the whitewash was applied, it assumed magnificent planes and dips and protuberances which reflected light in a thousand different ways. Like a crystal jewel set among trees, the gabled whiteness symbolized the scintillating Dutch-Huguenot alliance which, with its strong German component, was forming a new society.

  ‘And now the surprise!’ De Pré announced as all looked with pleasure at their new dwelling. ‘What I have in mind is something else Katje would have liked.’ And he sketched in the dust his plan for a stoep, a front porch on which to rest when the sun went down behind Table Mountain. It was agreed by all that Katje would indeed have liked this, would have sat there at the end of day; so the gallant old woman, who had rarely been given a moment to rest while alive, was memorialized by a stoep on which her descendants would sit doing nothing.

  ‘It mustn’t be a high stoep,’ De Pré cautioned, ‘for that would mar the face. Just two courses of stone and only wide enough for two rocking chairs.’ When it was finished, the Van Doorns applauded, and on the first evening when Annatjie tested the rockers, looking out to Table Mountain, she told her son Hendrik, ‘It will be your job to care for these fields when your grandfather and your father are no longer here.’ Later she would remember that when she said this, her son had turned away from the Cape and said, ‘Grandfather always wanted to go that way. Didn’t you?’ And old Willem had agreed with his grandson: ‘Go beyond the mountains. If I were younger, I’d build my farm out there, and to hell with the Compagnie.’

  Bezel Muhammad had his own surprise for his new family. Having found several large stinkwood and yellow-wood trees, he had built a standing clothes cabinet, nine feet high, with finely polished swinging doors in front, a set of four drawers below, and feet carved in the form of an eagle’s talon grasping an orb. In simple design the closet would have been handsome, but when the two woods, near-black and glowing gold, were alternated, the result was quite dazzling. It was a gift for Annatjie, but everyone agreed that Katje would have loved that armoire.

  When De Pré used this word the Dutchmen looked at him askance, and even when he explained its meaning they resented it. ‘That thing’s a wall cupboard,’ Marthinus said, and he was aghast at what De Pré suggested next. Leading the entire family to a spot well west of the remodeled house, he asked them to look at its quiet perfection as it nestled among its hills: ‘See how all things fit together. The gable not too high, the stoep not too big, the walls reflecting the light. It’s our palace in Africa.’

  The Dutchmen did not like the analogy. Palaces were occupied by Spaniards and Frenchmen, and they had meant death to Calvinists. ‘I want no palace on my land,’ Marthinus said.

  De Pré ignored him: ‘There’s a new palace building near Paris. Trianon it’s called. Our African palace should be called that, too.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ Marthinus cried, but De Pré said quietly, ‘Because when we start to sell our wine, we’ll need a good name for it. And if we call it Trianon, we’ll catch everybody. A few will know it to be a good Cape wine. The main will think it’s French.’

  This made sense, and when De Pré saw that the Van Doorns were wavering, he dispatched Henri to fetch a bundle by the door, and when the lad rolled in the wrapped parcel, Paul carefully folded back the covering to display a beautifully made oaken cask, capable of holding a leaguer of wine, which Bezel Muhammad had decorated with a most handsome replica of the gabled house and the single word TRIANON.

  Old Willem accepted the cask, and after he had studied it in various lights, said: ‘We’ll call it Trianon. Because my wine wasn’t worth a stuiver till this fellow came along.’

  In the years that followed, when the wine of Stellenbosch was gaining favorable attention both in Java and Europe, Bezel Muhammad continued to build, but only occasionally, his wall cupboards of the two contrasting woods, and whereas he took great pains to design each one in lovely balance—making his art the only one of high degree that flourished in the colony in these decades—he never exceeded that first handsome design. It stood in the bedroom to the left as one entered Trianon and was admired by all.

  His cupboards were sold as soon as he could finish them, and at various farms in the Stellenbosch area they were prized. The slave who made them was in great demand when it came time to build a gable or enlarge a house, and this caused Annatjie some uneasiness, for although she was quite willing that her family profit from the work of their slave—Marthinus sold the cupboards and kept all but a few rix-dollars on each—she was not content that this skilled man should be without a wife, and it perplexed her as to how she might find him one.

  When she raised the question at supper one night, Marthinus said, ‘Most men who come out here live without women for years. Look at De Pré.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I wonder about him, too.’

  ‘Let him get one of the King’s Nieces. The way I did.’

  When next De Pré ate with them she raised the question: ‘Paul, it’s time you should ask the Compagnie to bring you a wife. You could write to Karel. He’d find you someone.’

  ‘He’ll not deal with that one,’ Willem said sternly.

  ‘But he can’t always live alone,’ Annatjie said, and she was so persuasive that De Pré drafted a careful letter to his old employer, asking for a wife. A year later Trianon received word that Karel van Doorn had died, his estate going to the Widows Bosbeecq.

  So Annatjie turned her attention to Bezel, dispatching l
etters to the Cape to ascertain if there were any Muslim slave girls, or black ones, for that matter, seeing that he was half-black, who might be purchased, but there were none, and Bezel continued to live alone, building the houses and the furniture that became a feature in the elegant town of Stellenbosch.

  It had a fine church now, broad streets lined with young oak trees, and a score of tidy small houses whose floors were smoothed brown with cow manure. It looked nothing like Holland, not too much like Java; it was a unique little gem of a town born of the South African experience, and no house excelled that one called Trianon.

  And then a farm family moved nearby with a marriageable daughter, Andries Boeksma and his pretty child Sibilla. ‘She’s God’s answer to our prayers,’ Annatjie told Paul as soon as she heard the good news. Using the excuse of taking spiced apples to the newcomers, she studied Sibilla and drove back to Trianon, exultant—‘Paul, Marthinus! She’s just what we’ve prayed for’—and she insisted that the two men dress properly, kill a lamb and take it to the Boeksmas. She very much wanted to go along, but felt that to do so might betray her interest in having Sibilla meet the Huguenot widower.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked breathlessly when she and her husband were alone.

  ‘I don’t really understand,’ Marthinus said. ‘They took an instant dislike. They were barely civil.’

  ‘What could have happened?’

  ‘Well, Boeksma walked to the cart with me, and while Paul was saying goodbye to Mevrouw he confided that Sibilla would never marry a Frenchman, and on the way home Paul confided that he had no interest in her. He was most emphatic. Told me, “None whatever.” ’