Noontide repayeth never morning-bliss—
Sith noon to morn is incomparable;
And, so it be our dawning goth amiss,
None other after-hour serveth well.
Ah! Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe paine—
Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe!
RUDYARD KIPLING, “Gertrude’s Prayer”
Eugène Nielen Marais had sat silently for more than an hour watching the ground, sheltering under the long veranda, tucked into the blind spot of the house, not yet wanting to be seen. If the farmer had poked his nose outside and seen the fatigued man, he would have concluded that he was locked in deepest thought again, because that was what he was famous for, often while wandering in the bush around Pretoria. He had just made his way up from the Prellers’ farm. His daily supply of morphine had not been replenished and he was miles from anybody who could help, if indeed those people existed at all. This was not a surprise, he had seen it coming like the constant squalls of rain that saturated the land. He wondered if it was but part of his subconscious plan. There was nothing here to help him; he enjoyed the remoteness of the farmhouse, knowing that too much contact with humans might deflect his purpose now. He needed the clarity of ants and the passion of baboons to battle the cramps and shout down the sweltering cold pain.
The black ants that made the ground writhe were not the kind that he had studied. They had not yet entered his brain, which would literally happen before the present hour was spent. But now, while watching, he let his sight go deeper—the tethers to actual meaning stretched beyond need. He saw a movement beneath the ants, a movement in the earth itself, as if the very particles were alive or infested with something of great power and invisibility. A kind of focus that lived independently. Like water that had seeped into the matrix of solidity. This wild scrubland seemed to seethe with a force that would cleanse or bleach every living thing, giving a whiteness to all, forcing all nuance and ingenious time into submission. The idea chilled his blood and sent an involuntary shudder chasing after the ghost of the morphine. For a fraction of a second he remembered a child’s dream of a terrifying whiteness. He stood up and walked to the other side of the house. His bones ached and he could barely climb the wooden steps. He knocked on the sun-faded door that was now sodden with rain. The farmer took his time answering. Eventually he appeared at the threshold and glared at the gaunt figure of Eugène Marais: lawyer, poet, drug addict, who would one day, years after this meeting, be hailed as a visionary and a genius.
“There’s a snake in the thorn tree,” said Marais, trembling.
The farmer just looked at him.
“At the rondavels, it’s eating the birds.”
The sound of the long rain hissed between then, amplified by the corrugated tin roof of the simple building. The farmer stared a little deeper.
“Do you have a rifle I could use to kill it?”
“Take a shotgun. You can’t shoot a snake with a rifle, you should know that,” said the farmer.
The men looked at each other for a long while with no more words to say, before the farmer turned back into the house to retrieve the gun from its rack, which bristled with others. It was one of his best, a handsome well-used double-barrel 12-gauge. He loaded it as he slowly returned to Marais. They nodded and the gun was exchanged.
They walked together for a short while into the wet, sour grass. Marais had missed the path and the farmer understood. He stopped and turned back so that Marais could walk on alone. Alone with a vision that confirmed his regret about humanity, a vision a millionfold stronger than his own human frailty.
Marais walked less than another hundred yards before he closed the shotgun and cocked its hammers. He turned it in his shaking hands, holding it like a paddle, gripping the oiled barrel, keeping the butt end of the stock away from him as if ready to row and steer his way along a stream that only he could see. He straightened the gun, resting the twin holes on his chest, and put his thumb in the trigger guard. Some part of him smiled at it as the sun poked out of the clouds and he turned sideways into its light. He hoped that the farmer would ignore the shot and that by the time they came looking for him, most if not all of his earthly remains would have been removed by wild dogs or hyenas. Under his feet the wet ground dipped. A previous subsidence in the tunnels of other creatures had caused the surface to smoothly hollow. He stumbled a quarter pace, slithered the barrel, and fumbled the trigger, sending the resounding thunder glancing through the side of his rib cage. The heavy fist bludgeoned and ripped at an inch or two of his lung and sent splinters of bone to dart and embroider the skin and silk that had contained them. The gun fell away as he spun backwards into the soaking knee-high grass. The morphine ghost shrank, hiding away from the pain as Marais groaned and wrestled the bloodstained gravity and terse plants, crawling through them to try to find the gun. And suddenly he remembered Cyrena Lohr and the letter that he had written to her. Saw it on the table curling in the sunlight next to the empty box that he was going to gift the mechanical crown in. He had been delighted in finding her dream object, her halo of insects. He had found it inside one of the most treasured magical artifacts that survived the Possession Wars. A great sickness of pain and guilt rose up in him. He knew that his servants would find the crown, the box, and the letter and send them to her. And he knew the terrors that could happen if she wound its motors and placed it on her head. He now had another reason to die quickly.
The sound of the shot echoed out and over everything with ears, and a few without, for miles—their keen activities and their shallow sleep halted for a second or two. Heads lifted to gauge the distance and direction. The scavengers moved first. The farmer looked out towards the shot and the place where the visionary had disappeared into a blurred focus.
Marais’s sticky fingers touched the barrel again, dragging it closer. One shot left, he knew he did not have the strength to miss again. Half sitting, he edged the gun closer until he could bite onto its end, tasting the fresh cordite, gun oil, and gritty earth. The shaking white hand seeking the shaking black trigger, which waited alert and as sensitive as the antenna of an ant.
The remote farm Pelindaba where he took his life is now unrecognisable. In Zulu, Pelindaba means “the end of the business”—although the more common interpretation is “place of great gatherings.”
Pelindaba is derived from the words “pelile,” meaning “finished,” and “indaba” meaning “discussion.” The whole area is now dominated by the 2,300 hectares of the Nuclear Research Centre. The home of South Africa’s atomic bombs.