This Life (17 page)

The shuffling and coughing of the people, the smell of the fresh thatch and the moist earthen floor, and Mother seated in the front row among the elders’ wives, Mother’s straight back, stiff neck and angular shoulders. Mother’s eyes never wandered in church as she sat rigidly in the place of honour that was her due, while Father faltered and stumbled over the words, and after the service she moved among the churchgoers like a shadow, erect and unyielding in her black dress with the new gold chain around her neck, and she paused to greet people without ever really joining in their conversations, lingered to ask and answer questions without revealing anything or making any concessions. Yes, it was during this time that Father gave her the gold chain as a gift, or perhaps she ordered it from Cape Town herself, Mother who never wore any jewellery except her wedding ring: a long chain of narrow gold links reaching to her waist, as was the fashion at the time.

What did people think of her when they spoke to her outside the church or when they called on her in the new house to satisfy their curiosity? I do not believe she had any true lady friends, not to mention confidantes, and neither did anyone who knew her love or respect her, and she knew this without actually caring in the least, for she desired neither affection nor respect. What did they say among each other as they watched her walk away, followed by Maans and me? She did not care about that either. Father’s status in the congregation and his increasing wealth were important to her, the front seat in church, the new house, the coffee cups, the visiting ministers who stayed the night and the unspoken envy and spite of the other women – I had probably always realised this as I lived beside her, but only now can I find the words to express it, an old woman alone in the dark with no one to listen.

It was during this time that Maans was sent away to school, and I believe that this was Mother’s wish as well, for the desire for every child to be educated was as much a part of the plan she followed blindly yet relentlessly as the new house or the coffee cups. Most young people in our parts were taught at home by school-masters hired by their parents, like my brothers with Meester, or they somehow picked up just enough reading and writing to be confirmed, but in those days no one had a private governess like Miss Le Roux, neither was anyone sent away to school in the Boland, and Maans was the first. Where did Mother get this idea and why was it so important to her? Was it that her instinctive wisdom and insight told her that money and education granted power and commanded respect? Moreover, Maans was her favourite, just as his father once had been, and with an indulgence never evident before, she even showed him some affection at times. Thus Maans was sent to school in Worcester with a small roll of gold coins wrapped in paper, and he was instructed to have a suit made
there and to have himself photographed in town and send us the portrait, which Mother kept in her Bible. Maans strongly resembled his father, a big, dark, slow boy, but without his father’s fierce temper, a good, willing child who never gave any trouble or caused any problems: he was excited about leaving home, but at school he did not fare very well. I had to read his infrequent notes with their mistakes and ink blots to Father and Mother, and then Mother took them from me and put them away in her bedroom. Thus the three of us were alone, Father and Mother and I, with old Dulsie in the kitchen, but by this time she had become so old and confused that she could hardly be reckoned any more. Father walked with great difficulty, and the responsibility of the farm fell mostly to Coenraad.

When Maans left it made no real difference to me, for I had lost him when he began to grow up, and I had learned long ago that nothing endured and no belonging could be considered permanent. All my worldly possessions I had obtained through Father and Mother’s mercy and I used them without ever regarding them as my own: clothes to wear, a brush and comb, a sewing kit, a Bible and a hymn book. The only possessions that were truly mine remained a secret that no one else knew of: the little cross Meester had left me and the ring to remind me of Sofie, wrapped in a remnant of cloth and a piece of sheepskin, secreted among the stones of the wall. I never went there to look at them – why would I, for what would I do with them? – yet I was always aware that they were there, an undisclosed and undisclosable secret while Mother and I were curing meat in the kitchen or paring quinces for bottling, while I sat beside Father’s chair with the pillowcase I had to hem, while I served coffee to the visitors, absent-mindedly enduring their questions and their curiosity.

The tiny parcel among the stones in the wall of which no one knew, the memories that I shared with no one, the brightness of the water at
Bastersfontein and the thatch and the beams collapsed over the ruins, Sofie in her glistening black frock among the dancers, Pieter with his pale body on the haystack, laughing in the sunshine, the moonlight across the floor and the mist rolling along the kloof, and the stone dislodged by my foot, rolling away, reverberating from one rocky ledge to the next and from one cliff to the next, lost in the vast, invisible depths of the abyss before me. Sometimes I woke at night gripped by an unexpected fear, and in the dark of the sleeping house I lay awake as I do now, surprised by that fear which I could neither explain nor understand. In this bed, in this room I lay in the same darkness, thirty, forty years ago and more; but now there is nothing left to fear, all that remains for me is to remember, and slowly begin to understand.

It was during this time that Pieter came back to us.

One morning, while I was busy in the kitchen, we heard the sound of a rider approaching, and an unknown coloured man announced that he had brought a letter and stubbornly insisted on handing it to Father personally, refusing to entrust it to anyone else. At last I took him into the voorhuis where Father was sitting and he delivered his letter and was so insistent that it was for Father’s eyes only, that it appeared to be part of the instructions with which he had been dispatched. I usually read Father’s letters to him, but this time he did not ask me; and so I continued with my work, and after a while Mother told us to make the man something to eat and closed the door to the voorhuis behind her.

I do not wish to remember any more.

When will the first greyness of dawn become visible behind the wooden shutters; when will the first cock crow in the dark so that I will know that this night is over, that this night, too, has ended? How often I lay awake in the dark like this as a child, in this very room, in
this bed, fearing things I did not understand, and again now as an old woman, with the memories taking hold of my mind while I am powerless to defend myself against them, against everything I am forced to remember and would rather forget. I do not wish to remember.

The table where I stand with the knife in my hand, the maid kneeling in the kitchen, blowing on the smouldering fire, and old Dulsie in her usual corner at the hearth – it is enough, it is too much already. We listen to the man leading away his horse to be unsaddled and fed, to the clink of the harness and the clip-clop of the horse’s hoofs, while I prepare his food and pour his coffee. It is too much already, like a shadow passing across the yard, a fleece cloud in front of the sun, like darkness moving over my hands as I am working, over the worn tabletop. It is too far already; too late already.

He sat down at the table to eat, and in a lucid moment old Dulsie realised that he was a stranger and tried to question him, but he was a surly man who did not want to talk. From beyond Hopetown he had come, he said, and his master had sent him with a letter, but he could not be induced to say more, and he refused to divulge even his master’s name. I scarcely listened to their conversation, for Father’s affairs did not concern me and what my parents were discussing behind closed doors in the voorhuis was no business of mine, unless they needed me to read the letter or to compose an answer. This time I was not called in, however, and some time later Mother told us to pack some provisions for Father and gave orders for the cart to be inspanned; that same morning he left with the strange coloured man, without us learning anything more about the visitor or the purpose of his visit; Father who never left the farm any more except to attend Nagmaal in town and who hardly even left the house to walk slowly across the yard to the kraal, leaning on his cane.

For days Dulsie muttered crossly about these events about which
she remained in the dark but, as I have said, it was no concern of mine. To push the kettle over the fire for the water to boil, to turn the bread out of the pans and to feel whether the iron was hot enough, those were my duties in life, and they measured out my entire existence. Only sometimes would I look up, cloth, iron, or pan in hand, and through a window or an open door I would notice the wide world outside the walls of the house, or I would see from the yard the horizon beyond the last farm buildings and the glittering of the dams, and then I might forget for a moment what I had been doing; but only for a moment. I was a good daughter, a model daughter, the old ladies sometimes remarked when they called on Mother, a blessing in the house, especially now, with Father needing more and more help, and they glanced at me appraisingly and looked away and spoke of other things, for to them it was only too clear that there was little chance that I would ever marry. What did Mother reply? I do not know; if I ever heard her answer, I must have chosen to forget it. I turned away from the horizon, I walked back to the house with the eggs I had gathered or the washing that had been put out to bleach and, if for a moment my eyes were blinded by the brightness of the sun, it did not matter at all, for I knew my way blindly from one room to the next, where my duties took me. Earlier, when Maans was a small boy, I often took him for walks in the veld, but there was no longer any reason for me to wander outside. The flowers along the ridges in spring, the wind gusting along the rim of the mountains and the tracks of the buck in the mud beside the fountain – I turned away and went inside, I crossed the worn threshhold of the house where duty held me captive, while in the sudden twilight my eyes still retained for a moment those distant images. I was a good daughter, a blessing to Father and Mother in the house.

Mother, of course, provided no explanation, but one day she told
us to make the bed in the outside room, the room where Pieter used to sleep, for since his departure no one had been allowed to use it, and Coenraad, as I have said, bedded down in the shed; and Pieter moved in there. Mother silently unpicked the seams of Father’s old suit and cut the pieces smaller, and wordlessly she remade it for Pieter to wear, for Father had always been a sturdy man, and Pieter was thinner than ever. Thus he was given clothes to wear, and a few skin-blankets, a razor and an enamel basin, for he had brought nothing with him, and he joined us for meals as if he had never been away.

If I peer into the darkness long enough, if with my meager remaining strength I struggle up against the pillows, craning my neck, I can almost make out in the darkness the window outlined against the first grey light that filters through the chink between sash and shutter. The memory of first light and daybreak penetrates the dark and is burned into the retina, and amid the absolute silence of the surrounding night, amid the rush of blood in my ears and the slow rattling of my own breath, I imagine that I hear the distant crowing of a cock. The girl on the cot at the foot of my bed stirs sleepily, the first movement in the long stagnant night, and gropes on the floor for her shoes, searches for the matches to light the candle, and for a moment I am bewildered by the sudden brightness of the flame; I, who have learned to see in the dark, am blinded by the light. The long night which has held me captive is over, and I am delivered from the relentless thoughts I cannot control and the memories I cannot evade, relieved of the obligation to repeat what I do not want to remember and to relive what I have forced myself to forget. Pieter came back. Pieter is dead, that is all; that is enough. I hear the women chattering in the kitchen as they light the fire and boil water, they come and bend over my bed and, as I lie helpless in their hands, I continue to cling to their words, their gestures and their dutiful care that promise me deliverance. Pieter is
dead and rests in the graveyard beyond the ridge and in a few months, a few weeks, who knows how soon, perhaps even tomorrow, I, too, will be borne there along the narrow, rocky footpath, and it will be over. I do not want to remember. If only I can hold out long enough, I shall be safe.

But not yet. The night preserves its darkness and in the silence beyond this room there is no sound: helpless I lie here, surrendered to the night, and I cannot evade the reckoning demanded of me. The bright light burns into the retina and I see the house with Mother waiting outside, her shadow under her feet, and the black cart, and Father being helped out carefully, painfully. That is how Pieter returned.

No, not like that, not quite like that; there is more that I remember and can tell, more that I must tell. The morning comes to life before my eyes and the brightness burns in the dark, and I hear Mother calling for help. Who held the horses, who supported Father as he dismounted? Our attention was focused on him, on helping and welcoming him and bringing him into the voorhuis; we had already begun to move towards the house, our shadows under our feet, when he made a half-turn as if to give a further instruction about the horses, and we paused and turned around too. That was how Pieter returned to us. With our hands shielding our eyes against the brilliance of the sun we looked around and noticed a passenger under the hood of the cart. “Come, Pieter,” Father coaxed gently as if addressing a child, and the figure in the cart stirred, ducked his head and climbed out.

Why must I remember, why must I be forced to remember here at the end of my life? In the end it was good, the way my life continued all those years, the unmarried daughter, the spinster aunt, on the farm and in our town house, between Roggeveld and Karoo, always present in the background and always prepared to help and serve where necessary. It was good the way it was and good the way it ended after
all those years; if a service should be held at the graveside, the minister would readily find appropriate words and texts to sum up my life, and if a headstone should be erected for me, the dates of birth and death would suffice to review the course of more than seventy years. I have forgotten the treachery and the loss, I have forgotten how Pieter left and came back. Why must I remember now?