This Life (28 page)

One day while Maans and Stienie were away in Cape Town, a rickety old wagon came to a halt some distance from the house. I was sitting at the dining-room window, for I had been feeling tired all day,
so I did not go out to see what they wanted, though I heard a man speak to the servants at the kitchen door. They have come for advice, as always, I thought, but actually it was not the case, and the maid came to tell me that there was a white man asking whether he might stand on our ground for a while and let his sheep graze. I sat with him in the kitchen while he drank the coffee he had been served, for lately Stienie did not want these people in her voorhuis any more, and even in the kitchen they were not really welcome. He was a youngish man, though he looked old and tired in his dusty clothes and worn shoes, and while we were sitting there, he spoke politely yet indifferently of the long road he had travelled, from beyond Sak River and Riet River and down through the Nuweveld. I showed him where he might stand, and as he was taking his leave on the threshhold of the kitchen, he remarked almost in passing that his wife lay ill in the wagon, not as if he wanted or expected any help from me, but as if merely recounting another of the many woes of his itinerant existence that he had been listing for me while drinking his coffee.

It was not often that a white man trekked around to find pasture for his sheep any more, dependent on the hospitality and the mercy of others, neither were these ramshackle old wagons as common as during my childhood. As I sat at the window, I could not help thinking of the past and of many long-forgotten memories, Oom Ruben with his barefoot children and Jan Baster’s meagre trek on its way to Groot River. I wanted to lie down and rest for a while, but after the arrival of the stranger I was uneasy, and the old memories stirred up so many feelings inside me that I could not find any rest. At last I took the medicine chest and went across to the wagon.

The man was alone except for his herdsman, and there was no one to help. His wagon was old and rickety, the canvas worn and torn, and it shook unsteadily when I climbed in; the woman lay on a bed
of skin-blankets that had been made for her on the cot, and was not even aware of my arrival. I searched among the remedies I knew, but she took no notice of me; the man thanked me almost submissively for my help, as if he had not been expecting it and was unused to such solicitude, but he seemed to know that no medicine would be of any help. There was nothing more for me to do, so I left them alone. I sent them a little food from the house; but later that evening I took the lantern and walked across again.

The herdsman had already fallen asleep at the remains of his fire, and inside the wagon the man sat at his wife’s bedside by the light of a candle-stub that had been fixed on a chest. He sat motionless, his shoulders sagging, and he did not look up at my arrival or move aside as I bent over her. I looked at her in the uncertain light and knew there was nothing more I could do for her, and so I sat down on the camp-stool at the foot of the cot to keep vigil with the stranger. Why did I do it? I might just as well have gone back home, for he had as little need of my presence as his wife. In the flickering light of the tallow candle I surveyed the scant belongings in the wagon – the chipped basin, the cracked cup, the knife – and this tired, defeated man and the dying woman in the bed. How old could she have been? It was impossible to say, for years of poverty and suffering on the road had left deep lines on her face, but her hair was still dark where it fell across her damp forehead and it was even possible to believe she had once been pretty – who could know? I got up and bent to wipe the sweat from her brow, for the man made no move and did not attempt to do anything; when she moved her hand feverishly and uncertainly over the blanket, the fingers searching, he did not even notice, and it was I who leaned forward to grasp it, and that was how she died, with her hand in mine.

We sat like that for a while, without moving, until the flickering
candle threatened to go out, for I did not want to disturb this rare moment of insight with any ill-timed word or movement. Sofie had died like this, I knew as I sat with the dead woman’s hand in mine, or in a similar way, somewhere in a wagon or a tent, in a shelter or an outside room, in the desolation of the Great Karoo, Bushmanland or Namaqualand or in the region across the Groot River, in similar isolation, in similar poverty, in similar despair, and it was from a wordless deathbed like this one that Pieter had at last been brought back to us. For fifty or sixty years I had wondered and had carried my uncertainty and unasked questions around inside me, and now the questions had been answered and the circle completed: in a final gesture of tenderness and reconciliation I could reach out across all the years and touch her brow, could reach out and hold her hand while she was dying, and bid her farewell. Now the inscription in the family Bible could at last be made and the date chiselled in the stone.

The next day the man and his helper dug a grave in the graveyard in a place that I allotted them, next to where Jakob lay buried; only the two of them were present and Annie and her daughter and I. After they had filled in the grave, they heaped stones on it, with upright stones at the head and foot, and the man thanked me with a few gruff words before moving on to the next stand with his rickety wagon and mules and his handful of sheep tended by the herdsman. His wife remained behind in our graveyard: on one side of Jakob’s grave was Sofie’s headstone with the date taken from the family Bible, and on the other side was her grave. After the man had left, Annie suddenly remembered that no one had asked the woman’s name; but who would ever erect a stone for her, and, in truth, who could believe an epitaph, even if it were chiselled in stone?

The next day I walked out to Bastersfontein, the first time since that day when Maans had been a little boy and I had taken him there. It had
been a long way for a girl with a small child, but it was an even longer way for an old woman who was returning reluctantly and hesitantly to the place she had avoided for so long: I was almost afraid to see it again, but there was no reason for my fear, for nothing had remained, only the low line of the rocky ridge and the grey shrubs against the faded blue sky. The last remains of the dilapidated huts I had once still found there had vanished, and among the harpuisbos and on the rocky ledges I searched in vain for the place where they had once stood; neither could I find any trace of the fountain among the rock layers, no sign of muddy soil or moisture, of bulrushes or reeds, or of softer earth that might have retained a footprint. I found only the heaped stones of two graves, almost invisible among the greyish shrubs: they belong to the herdsmen who used to live here and who buried their people here, I thought, but then I saw bunches of wild flowers, not quite wilted, that had been placed among the stones, and I realised that this was the place where the two men thought to be spies had been shot by the Boers during the war, and I remembered again the women at the kitchen door, wailing, and how Maans and I had been unable to do anything to help them. Now the war had been over for a long time and no one spoke of it any more or remembered what had become of the men’s families; yet, years later there were still people who remembered, nameless people who came here through the veld to place the wild flowers they had gathered among the rocks on the two graves.

I sat there for a long time, for I was tired, and I listened to the wind growing stronger. “The sorrow and the pain,” I remembered from long ago, “O the sorrow and the pain”, but I was unable to recall where I had first heard the song or who had sung it, for the voice of the singer had been forgotten, as insubstantial as the wind. There is no plant in the world that can offer a cure, I realised, no shrub that
can guarantee oblivion. We are doomed to remember and to bear our burden, right up to the end.

After a while I realised I had to get up and go back, no matter how impossibly distant the house might seem, for the clouds had been gathering over the escarpment, and so I began to walk, shuffling and stumbling over roots, stones and gullies. The daylight grew dim in the wind; sunshine and shadows moved across the veld, and the landscape rippled before my feet; under the deep blue of the darkening sky and the threatening storm, in the shrouded light of the sun, the grey renosterbos glittered with a silvery gleam, radiant before my eyes, and I stood there blinded, so that the day surged over me and the earth was washed from under my feet. I stumbled over a root or a rock, my foot sank into a porcupine-burrow, and I fell.

When I was a child, they noticed my absence and searched for me and a herdsman found me in the veld and carried me home, reclaimed from death’s door; slowly and painfully, unaware of my surroundings, I had wrested myself from the dark depths and risen, back to the light, but that was a long time ago, and there was no reason why I should still desire to live. I would rather lie where I had fallen, close my eyes and listen to the rustling of the wind through the renosterbos, until the radiant landscape was cloaked in darkness and I could descend into the depths, noiselessly and without resistance, carried by the weight of my body. I was getting too old for these solitary journeys, I realised drowsily, and this would have to be the last one.

After a long time I got up painfully, my body stiff with weariness and bruised by the fall, and slowly I walked back through the rolling and surging light and shadows, the silver glow of the late afternoon and the threat of the approaching storm, amid a splendour I had not witnessed for many years, until I saw in the distance ahead the dams glittering in the sun, and I knew I was home. There was no one to witness
my shambling return, my clothes dusty and torn, my hands and face bruised. In my room I made an attempt to brush off my dress, I put up my hair and poured some water to wash, but then my hands fell away from me, and I toppled backward into the darkness I had craved for so long, that merciful dark in which I could go to sleep right there on the floor of my room. But not yet: the maid discovered me and called Annie, and the women carried me over to Annie’s house, to the old house, to the house where I was born and the room where I had slept as a child. I was aware of their frightened voices, I saw their anxious movements in the candlelight, but I no longer heard their words. Cloistered with my thoughts and memories, I was waiting for the words to end and the candle to be snuffed out, waiting for the nightlight beside my bed to burn out, for even the regular breathing of the sleeping girl on the cot to quiet down. For a moment I was afraid of the darkness and the silence that was vaster than anything I had ever expected, for a moment I was afraid of what I had to remember, but now the anxiety has been conquered, the knowledge attained and the wisdom acquired, and with eyes wide open I behold the dark.

There is no daybreak any more, only the dark; first darkness, then sleep. The dark has obliterated the moonlight, the dark has snuffed out the candle-flame; Pieter falls wordlessly from the window-sill, back into the darkness whence he had come, and only Sofie’s black dress still glistens for a moment as she dances alone to the rhythm of the soundless music until she too disappears, a shadow in the shadows. They have found peace, and now this life can end too, the report delivered, the account given and the balance determined. The water has dried up and the soil did not retain the footprint. The darkness obscures it all.

I wished to get up and move through the sleeping house, I wished to go out in search of something, but that desire has also passed, as did the anxiety and the memories, and everything has been engulfed
by the vast darkness, and surrendered. What could I still search for now? Let others come, other people one day long after us. Amongst the burgeoning undergrowth where the porcupines have dug their burrows they may find stones for which there is no apparent explanation and the weathered remains of inscriptions that can no longer be deciphered or understood: they may make out a single name or year, but who could determine its authenticity or say what it had once meant? Where the stacked stones of an old wall have fallen apart, among shrubs and stones and grass, no one will ever search for the remains of wood or metal that was once hidden there, and even if splinters or fragments should be found, who would still recognise them for what they had once been, a cross or a ring? The stones once stacked there, have broken up and fallen apart, and there is no sign of them among the rocky ledges, outcrops and ridges in the flat, faded landscape of stone.

BASTER
: person of mixed race; half-breed (sometimes derogatory)

BASTERSFONTEIN
: a place name, fountain where the Basters live

“
BLINK JAKOB
”: Shiny (Sleek) Jakob

BOERS
: inhabitants of the Transvaal and the Free State in the time of the Anglo-Boer War

BOTTERBLOM
: African daisy,
Gazania krebsiana

BRANDSOLDER
: fireproof loft

BROEDERBOND
: fraternal society for Afrikaner men

BOEGOE
: buchu,
Agathosma
species

BYWONER
: share-cropper, person with no land of his own, farming on the land of others

DASSIE
: rock-rabbit, Cape hyrax

DOMINEE
: reverend, clergyman, also used as title

DUIWELSDREK
: asafetida, a resinous plant gum with an ammoniac smell used for medicinal purposes

GEELBOS
: yellow bush (lit.);
Leucadendron salignum

GOUSBLOM
: marigold; Namaqualand daisy;
Arctotis
species

HARPUISBOS
: resin bush,
Euryops
species

HARTBEESHUISIE
: mud-and-daub house, also known as wattle-and-daub hut

KAREE
: Karoo tree, or bastard willow;
Rhus lancea

KAROSS
: blanket or mantle made of skins with the hair left on

KATSTERT
: cat’s tail,
Bulbinella
species

KIST
: box, chest

KLIPSPRINGERTJIE
: small antelope, African chamois

KNEG
(pl.
KNEGTE
): farm labourer with slightly higher status; overseer, foreman

KOLONIE
: the Cape Colony

KRAAITULP
:
Homeria
species

MEESTER
: Master (title given to schoolmaster)

NAGMAAL
: Holy Communion

PADKOS
: provisions for a journey

PERDEUINTJIE
:
Babiana curviscapa

PLAKKIE
:
Cotyledon orbiculata

REEBOK
: a small South African antelope with sharp horns

RENOSTERBOS
: rhinoceros-bush,
Elytropappus rhinocerotis

RIEMPIE
: leather thong (used for making riempie-seat chairs)

SETIES
: dance, also known as schottische, or Scottish polka

SJAMBOK
: short, heavy whip, originally of rhinoceros-hide

SLAMAAIERMEID
: Malay woman (derogatory)

SPEKBOS
: shrub of the genus
Zygophyllum

STUIPDRUPPELS
: anticonvulsive drops

TESSIE
: container with handles for hot colas, placed inside a foot-stove

TREK
: long, arduous journey, especially on foot; can also refer to travelling by ox-wagon

TREKBOER, TREKKER
: migrant farmer

VELDKOS
: veld foods, edible wild plants and fruit

VOORHUIS
: front room, living-room, parlour

WILDE ANYS
: wild aniseed,
Pharnaceum lanatum