A LETTER FROM HOME
199
angels, then Esther mustn't read it. But why don't you let me take
this
back with me and print it in
Onwards?"
He went white and looked as if I might knife him there and
then like a
totsti.
He grabbed the manuscript from me and held it
against his fat chest, and he said: "They mustn't see it."
"You're right," I said, understanding him completely.
"It's dangerous keeping it here," he said, darting fearful looks
all around.
"Yes, you're right," I said, and I sat down with a bump in my
rimpie
chair, and I said: "Ja,
if
they found that, Hans..."
"They'd kill me," he said.
I saw
it,
completely.
I was drunk. He was drunk. We put the manuscript
boekie
on
the table and we put our arms around each other and we wept for
the citizens of Blagspruit. Then we lit the hurricane lamp in the
kitchen, and he took his
boekie
under his arm, and we tiptoed out
into the moonlight that stank of marigolds, and out we went down
the main street, all dark as the pit now because
it
was after twelve
and the citizens were asleep, and we went staggering down the
tarmacked street that shone in the moonlight between low dark
houses and out into the veld. There we looked sorrowfully at each
other and wept some sad brandy tears, and right in front of us, the
devil aiding us, was a thorn tree. All virgin it was, its big black
spikes lifted up and shining in the devil's moon. And we wept a long
time more, and we tore out the pages from his manuscript and we
made them into little screws of paper and we stuck them all over
the thorns and when there were none left, we sat under the thorn
tree in the moonlight, the black spikey thorns making thin purplish
shadows allover us and over the white sand. Then we wept for the
state of our country and the state of poetry. We drank a lot more
brandy, and the ants came after it and us, so we staggered back
down the gleaming sleeping main street of Blagspruit, and that's all
I remember until Esther was standing over me with a tin tray that
had a teapot, teacup, sugar and some condensed milk, and she was
saying: "Master du Preez, where is Master Hans?"
I saw the seven o'clock sun outside the window, and I re–
membered everything and I sat up and I said: "My God!"
