River without end

At least once a month I dream in rivers, dreams in which I am listening to the fish eagles calling  in the gorges above the Pungwe River of my childhood home in Zimbabwe or dreams of crossing the  broad brown sea of the Congo in an old steamer, engines grinding as we pass islands and mudbanks and swamps, watched by  sleepy crocodiles, crows, white egrets. In these dreams I am always alert for danger and waiting to see land, staring into the murky or turbulent floodwaters with both fear and exhilaration.

This morning a wind like ice is cutting through the mountains, gritty and dark with mist. More storms, more rain. My back garden is full of roosting speckled guineafowl, taunting my small dogs who dash back and forth barking up into the trees. The concrete-lined ditches and dug-out canals that line our village roads and lead into back yards and garden plots are gushing with pure mountain water from reservoirs high up  above the Elandskloof Pass.

I have been deadheading  orange and mauve and yellow daylilies in the front garden and ambling around looking at Cape Fold mountains at the far end of the valley, with clouds coming and going. I have on winter socks and a thick grey sweater in mid-summer. Away to the west there is the Hottentots-Holland range and to the north the Riviersondereind Range; the Breede River to the east and the Atlantic and Indian Oceas to the south. The mountain ranges are of Table Mountain sandstone and reach 1 590 metres or 5 217 feet in height, snow-covered in the winter, and spectacular because they rise with no foothills from the valley floor, craggy and imposing. Before the Dutch settlers Corporal Hieronymous Cruse and Ensign Oloff Bergh came in search of the River Without End in 1669, an indigenous people known as the Hessequas lived in thickly wooded forests teeming with game — on their journey, the two Dutch explorers estimated they saw more than 1 000 bonte hartbokken (antelope).

Now the forests of yellowwood, stinkwood, assegai, wild pear, alder are gone  — there are no longer giant fig trees in the Vyeboom (figtree) valley – the herds of buck, buffalo, zebra and the hippopotami are long gone and the Hessequas along with other Khoi and San peoples are extinct: they were enslaved or hunted down like wild animals. A terrible history. The old names  retain some memory of that once fertile paradise: Tygerhoek (leopard corner), Olifants Bosch (elephant bush), Bokke Rivier (buck river), Soete Melk Vallei (sweet milk valley). And right through the valleys where I live there flows the River Without End, the Riviersondereind, called after the Hessequa name Kanna-Kam-Kanna.

Meaning water everywhere, water without end, never-ending flow of living, moving water.

Rivers are very much part of my personal mythology because I grew up in a small landlocked country sandwiched between two great rivers, the Limpopo to the south and the Zambesi to the north. As a young girl I was taken on a camping trip to the Congo, crossing the delta of the second largest rainforest in the world, and later sailed along the Nile on a school trip. Years later, I realised that I had already encountered the Congo while  living near Lake Tanganika and crossing the Lualaba River which rushes down from the East African Rift Valley to become the Congo below Boyoma Falls. The cradle of humankind, the oldest known human habitation.

There have been other rivers of course, other memories: walking over a footbridge across the Thames  on a spring morning, the Avon flowing between water meadows, crossing the Severn into Wales,  having coffee beside the Seine. But those are another kind of river. The only river I have known that brings up in me the same tremulous sense of a strange brown god is the Mekong in Vietnam. The river described by the French- Indo-Chinese writer Marguerite Duras in The Lover:

‘My mother sometimes tells me that that never in my whole life shall I ever again see rivers as big and beautiful and wild as these, the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great regions of water soon to disappear into the caves of ocean. In the surrounding flatness that stretches as far as the eye can see, the rivers flow as fast as if the earth sloped downwards.’

Marguerite Duras: who came from a French outpost in Sa Dec  near the Mekong, who arrived in Paris so poor she would sell herself for a sack of rice. Who had earned the money to travel by whoring with a young Chinese merchant. She survives the Second World War,  she has a still-born child, she sees her husband come back from the concentration camp more dead than alive. She nurses him back to health and then has an affair with his best friend. She does not draw a sober breath in years but she creates a personal mythology that makes her a published author. She drinks. She begins to believe the myths written in her books. She  is able to live only in the past, back before the war, before the creation of  Marguerite Duras the tragic writer. She only lives as a child on the banks of the Mekong, staring into those brown waters of the great Asian delta,a hungry child scavenging on the Plain of Birds.  She becomes again her mother’s daughter, alone and poor and enraptured in the heart of Asia.

“I can’t really remember the days. The light of the sun blurred and annihilated all color. But the nights, I remember them. The blue was more distant than the sky, beyond all depths, covering the bounds of the world. The sky, for me, was the stretch of pure brilliance crossing the blue, that cold coalescence beyond all color. Sometimes, it was in Vinh Long, when my mother was sad she’d order the gig and we’d drive out into the country to see the night as it was in the dry season. I had that good fortune- those nights, that mother. The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility. The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue. The sky was the continual throbbing of the brilliance of the light. The night lit up everything, all the country on either bank of the river as far as the eye could reach. Every night was different, each one had a name as long as it lasted. Their sound was that of the dogs, the country dogs baying at mystery. They answered on another from village to village, until the time and space of the night were utterly consumed.”

Alcoholism is the driving force behind the most powerful and deluded mythologies a drinker can create. It shapes us in ways we cannot even begin to realise, holds us captive to a past that never was, a past of victimization or untouched potential or lost love. Irresistible until the day we stare into the destroyed present and know we have to begin again.

‘Now I see that when I was very young, eighteen, fifteen, I already had a face that foretold the one I acquired through drink in middle age. Drink accomplished what God did not not. It also served to kill me; to kill. I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me.’

So I stand in my garden looking out at the folded sandstone mountains all hazy with mist and I think about the dangers inherent in personal mythologies. And I remember that in the dreams in which I am crossing rivers, staring at brown expanses of river, I am drunk, unsure of my footing, uncertain of reaching dry land. And that always there is a storm in the water, turbulence, darkness, and strong tides dragging at me, pulling me underwater, that in these dreams I cannot seem to swim. It is a relief to wake sober in my own bed, to leave the rivers for another day.