This Life (15 page)

For the next few years Father did his best to struggle along on the farm while his health declined rapidly, but during this time, with Maans beginning to grow up, Coenraad came to us. We did not receive many visitors, as I have mentioned, but sometimes a stranger would turn from the road or get lost and arrive at our door, usually on horseback, but sometimes on foot, like Coenraad. It was not customary for white people to travel on foot, and such visitors were not invited into the house, but were mostly given something to eat at the kitchen door and allowed to bed down in the outbuildings. When Coenraad arrived on the farm, however, we were without labourers yet again, so he did a few chores for Father and in the end he stayed on. I do not know much about him, only that he was a foreigner, and where he had been heading with his bundle of belongings I do not know either, I suppose for Beaufort or Colesberg, but he remained with us for as long as Maans was a boy. He worked diligently and conscientiously and never shirked his duties, not even when he had been drinking, and the only trouble Father ever had with him came from the farm-hands, for they complained that he was a hard master and that he beat them. Father did not approve, and in the old days he used to reprimand Jakob when he treated our people too harshly, but by this time Father’s word no longer carried much weight on the farm, and it was Mother and Coenraad who conferred and made decisions, for she trusted him and always took his side when there were differences of opinion. He slept behind a screen he had erected in the shed and joined us only at mealtimes, and I remember how strange I found it that he did not attend our family prayers, but as far as I know nothing was ever said about it.

Coenraad seldom entered the house except at mealtimes, but I remember him in the evenings at the table in the candlelight, conferring with Mother. Father sat with them, half-absently stroking his
beard with one hand, not contributing to the conversation. Something gleams in the candlelight, there is a sound – is it Coenraad receiving his wages? Suddenly I remember the glint of metal, and Mother’s face in the candlelight, her sharp eyes fixed on the money as she counts out the coins. Was it his wage that he received, or could he have been given money to buy sheep at auction because Father himself could no longer go? Sometimes he was indeed sent out alone, and he even had his own mount, and it must have been Mother and he who conferred and decided on the purchases, as he increasingly became the one to bargain with the people who came to buy sheep from us. Father counted out the gold coins from the pouch Mother had fetched in the bedroom and Coenraad rode off to carry out their instructions; but more and more often it was Mother who made the decisions and gave the instructions, more and more openly it was she, and we were prospering. Father was a good person, an honest and just person, but he had never actually been a farmer. It is good when a woman is the boss on a farm.

Who said that? Surely no one in our parts would have said anything like that, except in jest or scorn? Good or not good? It is not good …?

I was spending most of my life indoors, at Mother’s side or in her shadow; my duties, my timidity and our strange, isolated way of living bound me to the house increasingly, as if life were something I watched as it occurred outside in the brightness of day, in the yard beyond the threshhold, outlined by the doorframe. I was standing in the dim light of the house – who was in the doorway, visible against the light, and whose voice could I hear outside? Were we so frequently cursed, did so many people come to protest, threatening us with reprisal, or calling down heaven’s vengeance upon us? Yes, they probably did, and most likely more often than I ever realised, for how else were those gold coins collected, the morgens of land accumulated and the sheep flocks increased? It is not good; it is not right … Who was it?
The daylight outside, and a voice. Father or Mother was standing on the threshhold, or both; both were standing there, and a herdsman had come to complain. It was not right.

Now I remember everything I had forgotten, including many things I have no desire to recall. A herdsman had come to complain to Father that Coenraad had thrashed his child, the man standing outside in the yard, while Father came to the kitchen doorway, leaning on his stick, Mother behind him as usual, just inside the door. Where could Coenraad have been that I do not remember him? But there was no need for Coenraad to worry about the labourers’ complaints and tales, after all, for Mother always supported and defended him. In the end the man had no choice but to leave and look for other work: “It is not right!” he cried. “It is not good!” What had happened, exactly? I do not know, but once he got going, Coenraad beat the labourers mercilessly, and he spared neither woman nor child, that I remember well. “We are also human!” he shouted over his shoulder as he crossed the yard, and the woman’s voice – yes, his wife had come with him, with the child who had been punished for some transgression or omission: “It is not good when a woman is the boss on a farm!” That was how it happened; that is what I remember. But, right or wrong, the man had to leave with his family and I suppose we found other workers yet again. It is not right – good or bad – how well I recall those words now. And the beams that have collapsed at Bastersfontein where the house stood empty, the thatch collapsed over the walls, and the fountain dried up.

It was during this time, when Coenraad was still with us, that I went to Bastersfontein, when the houses there stood empty because we could not find labourers, and when Maans was still at home; Maans was young and did not understand, laughing beside me as the wind plucked at my clothes, and my billowing hair blinded me momentarily; it was during this time, when the child was my sole companion during
the day, and in the evenings when he was asleep, I withdrew to join old Dulsie at the hearth as she smoked and muttered to herself, increasingly unaware of my presence or of events around her. She had grown old and was probably tolerated in the house only through Father’s intervention, for there was little she could still do and she lived mostly inside her own head, always talking about the past. Could this have been why I went to the kitchen in the evenings, sitting silently in a dark corner of the hearth, because it was the only place where I could hope to hear Pieter and Sofie’s names? But if she knew anything, she never let on to me, cautious even in her withered old age, and the things she remembered and the long, rambling conversations she had with herself were seldom about subjects that interested me, except that one evening in late autumn shortly before we went down to the Karoo: a cold evening, with Dulsie muttering and mumbling, drawing at her pipe and shoving another branch into the fire. Perhaps Mother and Father were already asleep, for Father went to bed early, and I was lingering at the fire in the only moments of freedom I knew. One of the first cold evenings of frost or sudden snow in the Roggeveld when preparations for the trek had already begun, the fire dwindling in the hearth, and Dulsie talking to herself about Jakob and Gert once getting into an argument about a bay horse, and about a saddle and bridle that had belonged to someone or had been taken from him. I could not follow and was no longer listening when suddenly, as if woken from a dream, I was alerted by the sound of familiar names. “And Gert and that arrogant Malay meid stealing food here in the house, thinking I cannot see them, or hear them whispering here in the dark, and Gert riding over to Bastersfontein every night when Jakob and Sofie were hiding out there …”

In the dark corner I sat motionless: Jakob and Sofie, Jacomyn and Gert – what was she talking about? Something stirred, something
rustled in the shadows beyond the last glow of the fire burning low in the hearth. Old Dulsie had forgotten what she was talking about, however, and said no more, and I dared not ask in case she spoke again. Something stirred in the dark; but it was nothing, only the wind driving the fine, sifting snow through the gap underneath the door. Then Dulsie laughed triumphantly. “And Gert lying so shamelessly and making the Oubaas ride all the way to the Boland to look for them, Gert with his smooth tongue who took Jakob’s saddle and bridle for himself when he left …” Her thoughts travelled far; she drew on her pipe thoughtfully, suddenly cackling loudly. “Oh, how he fooled them,” she crowed, rocking gleefully at the memory. “All the way to the Boland with Jakob’s saddle and bridle, and the two of them sitting at Bastersfontein all the while, Jakob and Sofie, while Gert rides around with his saddle. Oh, how he fooled them, good, good!” she cried, rocking from side to side. I did not move, I did not breathe, too afraid to miss a word or to misunderstand, but the confused memories faded and the old woman dozed on her seat in front of the fire: I was rising cautiously to go to my room when she spoke again. “Back from the Boland empty-handed,” she mumbled contentedly, and then she fell asleep and I covered the last glowing embers with ashes and went to bed myself.

I suppose I could have asked, there is no harm in asking, but I had learned long ago that you get no answers to your questions, and in her lucid moments Dulsie would never have discussed these things with me. I never discovered what train of thought had suddenly sparked off those comments that evening, and she never referred to anything like that again, no matter how carefully I listened to her musings: thus I had to be satisfied with the scant information I had come upon so inadvertently. Jakob and Sofie at Bastersfontein? – no, that could not be right. But Pieter and Sofie; and Gert riding over to Bastersfontein at
night with food Jacomyn had stolen from the house, Gert who finally left us to seek his fortune elsewhere, with his horse and his rifle and the saddle and bridle belonging to the late Jakob who had been found dead in the kloof, Gert and Jacomyn … What had actually been behind Dulsie’s gloating words, and whose side was she on: did she blame Gert for the way he had deceived Father, or revel in the success of his deceit? But she was on no one’s side, dependent like all of us on the goodwill of any random person who could aid or protect her, equally inclined to disparage and insult her fellow-servants as to delight in the ruin of her masters, her loyalties permanently divided by the need for survival. Alone, I realised as I bent over the hearth to extinguish the fire and felt my way to my room through the dark house; alone, man turned against man in selfishness, discord and spite.

In all the years Bastersfontein had been no more than a name to me, an isolated place where Jan Baster and his people once lived and, in later years, our herdsmen and their families, and I had never been there myself; yet it was on our land, at the farthest limit of our farm, and there was no reason why I should not go there if I wished. I would have to wait, however, until spring when we returned from the Karoo: wait, I told myself while I helped Mother pack the crates and tie up the bundles for the trek downward; wait, I said as our trek began the descent down Vloksberg across the rocky ridges, and I looked back at the faded grey winter landscape of the plateau we were leaving behind, looked back at the clouds covering the distant horizon where I knew Bastersfontein lay; wait, I repeated during the months of our stay in the Karoo, and I yearned for the Roggeveld more strongly than ever.

Why was it so important for me to go to Bastersfontein, and what did I expect to find there? I did not know that myself, and today I still do not know, only that the names that had emerged so suddenly from old Dulsie’s incoherent mutterings in that time of silence and loss were to
me the first firm evidence I could cling to, and the only promise that I might somehow discover what had happened to Pieter and Sofie. Wait, I said, and I did not mind waiting, for to be patient was another thing I had already begun to learn.

When spring arrived, we loaded the wagon once more and followed the sheep up the slopes where the flowers were appearing in the crevices, and once again we took possession of the empty house waiting for us just as we had left it behind months before, the doors closed but not locked. The cots and beds were reassembled, the feather mattresses spread out and the beds made; the fire was rekindled in the kitchen hearth; our lives continued. I had not forgotten my resolve, but I could not simply disappear without explanation for an entire day, and so I had to endure patiently, waiting for the rare occasion when Father and Mother would be away all day. At last, that same spring or early summer, it happened – it must have been a funeral, for that was the only reason why Father still left home in those years, and Mother had begun to accompany him so that he would not have to travel on his own; I do not remember anything else, for it was unimportant to me. I only recall the fact of my sudden freedom, and how I hurried to finish my chores, and then I tied a handful of dried pears in a handkerchief and told Maans to come, for today we were going for a long walk. To the end of the world? he asked, for Coenraad had once taken him on his horse to the edge of the plateau where he could look down on the Karoo. Yes, yes, I answered impatiently without listening, and took his hand and set off.

It was far that we had to walk, but not so far that we could not be back before Father and Mother returned, as long as we walked briskly and did not dawdle, and for most of the way Maans ran ahead of me, turning around, laughing, to ask if this was far enough, if we were almost there. Spring or early summer, radiant in the glow of the silvery
sunshine, the wind blowing at us from the rim of the mountains, and in the shelter of the rocky ridges, in the hollows and on the sunbaked slopes we came upon fields of flowers illuminating the silver-grey veld with their brightness, spekbos, gousblom and botterblom like in earlier springs, but I took no notice and hurried Maans along when he wanted to linger to pick flowers. The farther we walked, the more anxious and impatient I became, as if it had become imperative that we reach our destination: perhaps, if we could only move fast enough, I argued irrationally as I stumbled over the uneven ground, if we could only get there in time, it might still be possible to find something, though I still did not know what I was looking for. The remains of a fire, perhaps, with the ashes still warm, bedding that had retained the impression of a body or bodies, the fresh tracks of horses? No, not really, I had never deceived myself so completely, but at last there was something within my reach, something tangible after all the secrecy and evasion, the rumours and suspicions on which I had survived for so long, perhaps incomprehensible in itself, but nonetheless comforting as a symbol of the things I could not understand, like the ring on my pillow in the early morning, or the cross between the stones in the wall. Eagerly and hopefully I pressed on, and time and again I over-took the child running ahead of me, and I communicated my excitement and anticipation to him, so that he insisted on knowing how far we still had to go and if we were there yet.