This Life (11 page)

Why would I imagine this, or with what could I possibly be confusing it? She blows out the candle, and I turn over in the dark, I sink back into sleep, and am called back by the light on my eyelids; bewildered and only partly aware of my surroundings, I perceive the brightness of the moonlight falling into the room and spilling over the floor where the shutter has been opened. Why would I imagine something like that? She blows out the candle and darkness shrouds the room, darkness shrouds the sleeping house; the shutter swings open on its hinges almost soundlessly, and the moonlight slips over the window-sill and spills over the dung floor of my room. The moon is full, and it is a brightness like daylight that makes me stir uneasily in my sleep without awakening fully. I see the bright square of the window and a dark figure appearing outside, etched against the light, and I see him hoisting himself up over the window-sill and swinging himself over swiftly, before the shutter is closed and everything is dark once more; I hear the intruder dropping down lightly and the rustle of Sofie’s dress, but I know there is no reason for anxiety or concern, even if I do not understand what is happening, for in that moment when the shutter was open, dazed and sleepily, through eyes half-shut, I recognised Pieter.

I am dreaming; I dreamed, it is a delirious dream from those long weeks of my illness when feverish images recurred endlessly, soundlessly, unexplained and inexplicable, Pieter hoisting himself over the window-sill and landing inside, as nimble and silent as a wild cat, as soundless as a dream, while old Dulsie has fallen asleep where she watches beside my bed. She has forgotten to snuff out the wick of the night-light, and the candle flickers fitfully, so that restless images
dance over the uneven surfaces of floor and walls, here in the room where I am lying now. What did Sofie want here with me, she who had her own room in the house where the baby’s crib stood and Jacomyn slept on the rug in front of her bed; why would Pieter enter the house here, through my window? I must have been dreaming.

I lie awake in the night and try to remember; motionless I lie against the stacked pillows in the room where, as a child, I slept so blithely, and can find no refuge in sleep any more, powerless even to turn away from what I would rather avoid. The rustling of clothes or the whispering of people speaking with heads close together, lips held to ears, scarcely audible, part of a sleeping child’s dream.

Strange to think back and remember a time when, as a child, I felt completely carefree, with no knowledge of any lurking danger that could affect me: the house, the yard, the veld stretched out before me and I took that freedom for granted, I ran through the streaming light and shadows of the veld and reached out to grab the flowers in springtime. From what distant place does that memory suddenly return? I must have been very young when one day old Dulsie took me along to the farthest orchard to look for apples on the trees that had been left to grow wild. I was running ahead when a yellow cobra suddenly raised itself from the bushes in front of me, and I remember the glistening body drenched with sunlight and the smoothness of that rapid movement when I chased him up from his lair, just for a moment, before old Dulsie saw what was happening and stooped to search for a stone. She was too slow, however, for the very moment she bent down, he drew back and slithered into the renosterbos, glistening golden and unharmed; and afterwards I never ran quite as freely through the veld again without taking care where I put my feet.

Strange to think that there was once a time when I could wake up at night without asking, wondering or remembering, and fall asleep
again, unhindered, reassured by the vast darkness, the shelter of the house and the presence of the people around me, asleep in the other rooms. How long ago it seems now, that time when I learned to mistrust the silence, startled from my sleep by a rustle in a wall or in the thatch of the roof, startled from my dreams by that distant scream in the ridges, to lie awake, like now, in a darkness filled with unease and memories: the rustle of a dress, the whispering voices of two people, their lips close together; Pieter, my brother, hoisting himself over the window-sill, fleetingly visible in the brightness of the moonlit night, and Sofie’s face veiled by her hair as she bends over the candle-stub to blow it out. For a while she slept in my room when I was in bed with some children’s disease, and held a cold compress to my brow, dosing me with medicine and the infusions brewed by Dulsie to make me sleep. These are things I remember and not my imagination.

In the morning I used to dress and go to Sofie’s room to say good morning and I stayed with her until Mother called me away to come and help in the house. Because I had been ill, for a time I was allowed to remain in bed a while longer, and that morning I overslept, for when I got up, her bed had already been made and the room had been tidied, and only Jacomyn was there with the baby. “Where is Sofie?” I asked, but that morning she was sullen and tight-lipped, as was often the case, and she did not answer; the door to Father and Mother’s bedroom was closed, and in the kitchen Dulsie was banging the pots at the hearth and took no notice of me. Sofie was nowhere to be seen. “Where is Sofie?” I asked Dulsie, but she would not answer me either. “Go play outside,” she said impatiently. “Why are you always inside?” Everything was different, and I could not say what had changed so suddenly, and at last I went outside and wandered about alone in the cold bright autumn morning until Mother called me for family prayers.
“It is you who wanted it like that,” I heard Father say when I entered the voorhuis, but nothing more was said. He sat at the table with the Bible in both hands, ready to read to us; he spoke softly as was his wont, but deliberately, and Mother grew pale and turned away, and his hands were trembling.

We said our prayers and I ate in silence with Father and Mother, just the three of us, and I did not ask where Pieter and Sofie were; and after we had eaten, Gert saddled Father’s horse and brought it to the door, and I realised he was going away when I saw Mother packing provisions and a few items of clothing into his saddle-bags. He had stopped riding long ago but with Gert’s help he mounted slowly and painfully. As he was standing there with his hand on Gert’s shoulder, about to put his foot into the stirrup, he suddenly remembered me, and he turned to look for me, and called me to him. There, in front of the house, he embraced me and took leave of me, took leave of me for good, and then, with Gert’s help, he mounted and turned the horse around and rode away in the direction of Vloksberg Pass and the Karoo. Mother stood looking after his departing figure for another moment before she went back into the house and called for me to continue with my work. The child had to be weaned and for a while he needed all the women’s attention, so that they took little notice of me.

Why do I say “for good”? Father returned from the trip; but he was away for a long time, a matter of weeks rather than mere days. Is it possible that Mother and I lived together during all that time without saying a word? I am probably exaggerating when I ask this, but I know she never used to say much, and the mysterious events were never explained to me, not by her or anyone else. It is as a time of utter silence that I now remember the weeks of this waiting period, except for the evenings when I had to read from the Bible for the two of us, as well as I could manage by candlelight, struggling with the syllables, and stringing into a prayer Father’s familiar phrases about
mercy and compassion. Where is Sofie? I wanted to ask her. Where is Pieter? Where has Father gone? But the questions died away on my lips and I continued to endure my bafflement in silence. Only once did I push open the door of Pieter’s outside bedroom tentatively and look inside as if I were hoping to find an answer to my questions there, at the same time fearing the shape it might take. There was nothing to fear, however, only the low cot on which he had slept, the burnt-out stub of a candle on the shelf beside the bed and the horns on the walls from which he had hung his belongings. His clothes and his saddle and bridle had disappeared with him, and when I saw the dark, empty room, I realised he was gone, beyond my reach.

While I was standing there, Gert came around the corner of the shed and laughed when he saw me on the threshhold. “Are you looking for your brother, little girl?” he teased as he walked past me, but he spoke softly, so that he might not be heard from the house. “You are searching in the wrong place. You need a horse to get where your brother is.”

He walked on to the stable and forgot about me, but I followed him and stood watching for a long time where he was dressing a leather thong, whistling, paying no attention to me. “Where is Sofie?” I asked after a while, and I know I spoke very softly and found it even more difficult than usual to say the words; but he heard me, for he was startled and stopped whistling. “As far as a horse can go in an hour,” he said at last, smiling, not looking at me, and then he began to croon softly to himself.

He is teasing me, I thought, though he did not chase me away impatiently like Jacomyn or Dulsie, and his voice was not unkind. He said no more, however, though I waited for a long time, and only when I turned to go back to the house, did I hear him again, singing softly.

I stood listening as if I expected him to say more, but it was just one of the songs and rhymes that Gert was always making up as he worked, and as I crossed the yard back to the house, I could still hear him singing softly. During this time, with Jakob dead, Pieter gone and Father absent, it fell to Gert to manage most of the work on the farm and so he was often in the yard and in the kitchen without fear of being chased away by Mother. Perhaps his new standing had gone to his head, for I remember him being more high-spirited than usual, and whenever he was in the vicinity, he could be heard singing or humming to himself. Once I came upon him and Jacomyn behind the kraal wall, standing close together in intimate conversation, Jacomyn with her glistening black hair combed up high and her bright floral shawl with the long fringes wrapped around her shoulders as if it were a festive occasion. When they saw me, they seemed alarmed, but only until they recognised me, for I was only a child and held no threat to them; neither did I ever tell anyone about finding them there.

During this time of silence and solitude I sought the company of the servants more and more often. Where else could I turn? Sofie was gone, Pieter was gone, and even Father with whom I sometimes spent time, had said farewell wordlessly and left. Thus, whenever possible, I
crawled into a corner of the kitchen, where Dulsie put up with my presence. As I have said, Gert was often indoors during this time and when the child was asleep, Jacomyn joined the others in front of the fire and, forced together like that by loneliness, their individual grudges and grievances were often forgotten for a while and they would talk and tease and scold, without noticing me. “When the master comes back,” Dulsie sometimes mumbled to herself, unhappy about something that had gone wrong on the farm, or the winter trek to the Karoo that had been delayed too long; and once, “When Pieter comes back”, so that I looked up at the mention of that name I had not heard since he disappeared so inexplicably from our midst. Then Gert laughed where he was drinking his coffee in front of the fire. “That will not happen soon, old woman,” he said. “The riem has not yet been cut that is long enough to catch those two.” “I don’t know about that,” Dulsie answered peevishly, drawing at her pipe. “Sometimes I feel I could reach them in an afternoon if my knees were not so stiff.” I sat in the shadows in the corner of the hearth, and Jacomyn, who was kneeling in front of me to warm the child’s milk, suddenly looked up as if she had been startled by something. For a moment it was quiet in the kitchen. “Then you’ll have to go quickly if you still want to catch them, old woman,” Gert said quietly, “and be careful that you don’t step into a porcupine-burrow and break your neck”. “I won’t be the first one to break my neck,” she snapped, and he swore and took his hat and went out to his sleeping place: the ceasefire here was never more than conditional, and at any moment it might break down into attack and defense. Which two, I wondered, when they had been talking about Pieter? But after that when I thought of Pieter and Sofie, I always saw them together, two horses galloping away through the vlei where the light flashed on the glittering water among the reeds, galloping away from us across the veld, together.

And then one day – it must have been weeks later – Father came back, alone, and Gert came running to hold his horse and to help him dismount and Mother came out of the house to support him. He greeted us, but said nothing, and he and Mother went into the bedroom and closed the door and it was a long time before Mother called Dulsie to bring him some coffee and wash his feet. Usually when he had been away, he had something for me on his return, acid drops or a handful of raisins or nuts, but this time he did not bring anything, as if he had forgotten about me. We continued to live together like that, Father and Mother and I, and he never spoke about that long absence or mentioned it at all. What I do know about it, rather than suspect, infer or guess – what I do know, whether true or untrue, reliable or not, I overheard incidentally much later, when old Dulsie was shouting abuse at the family of a herdsman who had briefly been in our service earlier, before being dismissed by Father. “Basterfontein’s band of drunk Basters who lied to the master and made him ride all the way to the Boland in search of Pieter!” That is all.

So we continued to live like that, Father, Mother and I, together around the table for breakfast and supper, together around the table for family prayers before going to bed at night. Father was forced again to take on much of the farm work that he had left to Jakob and Pieter before, and from time to time, with Gert’s help, he mounted his horse painfully and rode out to inspect the sheep. I never heard him complain, however; and after his long absence he seemed quieter and even more withdrawn. Did nobody speak any more, was the silence that descended on our home absolute? Anyhow, that is how I remember it now.