This Life (8 page)

Was I thrashed by Mother because I had disappeared from the
house without permission? I do not know, because by that time I had learned to distance myself from Mother’s anger and her punishment. I do not remember whether anything more was said – the faces around the table and the angry voices could just as well have belonged to that evening as to any other; the chair falling over, the door being slammed – but it was our last excursion of that kind and Sofie’s last escape from the house, for very soon her condition became more of an impediment, confining her to the house increasingly. I know that she tried to occupy herself with sewing where she sat near the window in the voorhuis, but she had very little patience and she often pricked her fingers with the needle so that the item she was stitching was flecked with blood, and sooner or later she would let it fall, on to her lap or to the floor, and just sit staring through the window. Our lessons did not continue for long either, and later I would just sit down on the floor beside her with one of my books and try to read to myself as well as I could manage in the available light, my back resting against her chair: motionless she would sit there with her swollen body and her swollen feet and often she would cry to herself, tears streaming soundlessly down her cheeks. Why? Sofie at the window with Mother’s foot-stove under her feet, and Jakob leaning across the table, both hands resting on the tabletop, and the bitterness of their accusations and reproaches, so that Mother came from the kitchen to intercede – do I remember this, can I really remember it, did it really happen? Cobwebs, shadows, illusions; I shall never know, only that the separation and estrangement between them were real, however it may have been expressed, and that I knew about it and can still remember it to this day.

The baby was expected early in winter and it was out of the question that Sofie could go down to the Karoo with us: it was thus decided that, for the time being, only the men would go with the sheep, and that Pieter would return with the wagon and a load of firewood and would
take us, together with the household effects, as soon as Sofie felt up to the tiring journey. It was the first winter I ever spent in the Roggeveld and that alone is reason to make it stand out in my memory. The men had left, the herdsmen and their families had gone, and only us women were left behind at home, Sofie with her shawl wrapped around her in the voorhuis where the fire-pan now burned all day, Dulsie and Jacomyn in front of the fire in the kitchen, and Mother and I. Dulsie was disgruntled because she would have to endure part of the winter here, but otherwise we co-existed mostly in silence, and silently we moved past each other, briefly united only for evening prayers, where Sofie read aloud from the Bible and Mother strung familiar phrases together into a prayer. After a while Pieter came back from the Karoo with the wagon and he occupied himself around the house, chopping wood for the kitchen and tending the oxen, but there was very little for him to do, and actually we were all just waiting for the child to come so that we could join Father in the Karoo. As I remember it, Pieter was mostly inside, and he often sat with us in the voorhuis, listening as I read aloud, or talking to Sofie.

How long did that waiting period last? I no longer know. I remember it as a lengthy, vacant, translucent time, cold and clear as glass, the violence of the wind against the locked doors and shutters, the sombre horizon with its leaden ridges and the low sky threatening snow, the intensifying cold, and the silence in which we waited. The night deepens, and only the tabletop and the small glass panes of the wall-cupboards deep in the twilight of the voorhuis still catch the light, until even these reflections grow dim and only the coals in the pan on the floor still glow in the dusk.

On one of those bitter grey days, as I was helping Sofie to her room, I discovered she was holding, hidden in the palm of her hand, the wilted red bell-shaped flowers of a plakkie, though it was long past the
flowering season. “Boetie gave them to me,” she answered distractedly when I asked her, and he must have come upon them somewhere in the veld on one of those occasions when he disappeared from the house without telling anyone where he was going and without anyone even bothering to ask. Had she always called him “Boetie”, for that was my name for my younger brother; or was it only because she was speaking to me?

Sofie did not have an easy delivery: I know I was woken during the night by her screams and could not fall asleep again. Encapsuled in the dark of the room and the comforting warmth of feather mattress and skin-blankets, I lay listening to the regular recurrence of those screams, and towards daybreak I finally dozed off again from sheer exhaustion. All of the next day the screaming in the front room continued, and I could not escape or evade it, for I had to stay inside, though none of the women had time to take any notice of me. Rigid with fear and confusion, I withdrew into a corner of the kitchen beside the hearth, not so much for the warmth as that it was simply the farthest I could escape from Sofie’s room and her screams. What had my life been thus far? Grim, austere, sparse, even, without much tenderness, not to mention love, yet only periodically and partially had I been alarmed by things I did not understand, and only on that single occasion in the fog on the mountain pass had I experienced fear or terror without being able to supply a reason for it. Without the friendly cloak of the mist to hide the abyss from me, I now stared down into the darkness and vaguely realised I would have to choose before it was too late, that I should turn around and turn away and find my own way along the steep, rocky precipice. Was there truly a choice, had there ever been a choice? Considering my life, one would scarcely think so; but still, without being able to explain what I mean, I want to say that if ever I had the privilege to choose, it was at that
moment as I sat alone in the corner of the dark kitchen, determining my own future blindly and unwittingly.

And Pieter? Men do not cope well with reality, and Pieter least of all: it was always Jakob or Gert who slaughtered for us and Jakob who took the lead when the men went hunting for red jackal or wild cat, and that day Pieter fled the house and did not come back inside in spite of the bitter cold but, wrapped in a jackal-skin kaross, he paced up and down in the distance, far enough so that he could no longer hear Sofie screaming. At twilight her screams at last became fainter, intermingled with feeble squawks and the voices of the women attending the birth, and Mother entered the kitchen to fetch a candle, and told me that Sofie had a boy. In the pale grey twilight of the winter evening I ran out to tell Pieter so that he could come inside and I remember the razor-sharp cold on my face and the swirling silver snow in the air, the fine white shimmer of snow on Pieter’s hair and on the jackal-skin around his shoulders as he came inside to the candlelight and the fire.

Thus Jakob had a son, that squawking little creature in the crib beside Sofie’s bed. That winter in the Karoo he was christened Hermanus after his grandfather, and he was called Maans; but he would be the only grandchild, and there was never any heir other than he.

After the confinement Sofie was eager to get to the Karoo, and Mother, too, probably wanted to escape from the Roggeveld as soon as possible before winter really set in and we were snowed in. Thus, as soon as it became possible for Sofie to travel, Pieter took us down in the wagon, with Sofie and her baby cocooned in down quilts and pillows as we jolted from one rocky ledge to the next, along the edge of the cliff.

Nearly every year of my youth and most years afterwards I travelled to the Karoo with my family in that way, at first down the slopes of Vloksberg Pass, and later, when the road had been built, by way of
Verlatekloof, initially with Maans as a newborn baby in Jacomyn’s arms, and later with the little boy running behind the wagon, or as a young man, helping to herd the sheep, or as an adult, taking responsibility for the trek himself. Why then do I remember this particular trek as the last one, while in truth it was one of the earliest in a long sequence through my entire life? Down the pass with Pieter and Sofie and her baby, over rocks wet with rain, fine, blustering hail lashing our faces, to the Karoo where birds twitter in the winter sunshine and streams surge down cliffs and crevices, heralding the rains that have fallen on the heights above, where waterfalls cascade from one ledge to the next and the day is filled with the rushing of water and the grinding and milling of the pebbles in its course.

It was late afternoon when the small trek arrived at our winter quarters in the Karoo, and I jumped from the wagon as it halted and saw Jakob walking slowly towards us through the veld, rhythmically beating his horsewhip against his leg. Pieter lifted Sofie from the wagon in his arms, while Jacomyn followed with the child, but Jakob did not approach to greet his wife or to look at his child, and we remained waiting beside the wagon as if we had arrived among strangers where the reception was uncertain and the welcome dubious. Where could Mother, who had come with us, have been and why was Father not there to welcome us? I remember the Karoo scent of herbs and bushes and grass, the twittering of the birds, and the rumble of milling rocks churned up by the floodwaters. What was the nature of the change that had taken place, so that nothing was the same after this? According to what pattern, or rules, the memory decides what to retain and what to discard, I cannot say: I remember Jacomyn climbing down from the wagon on our arrival in the Karoo with the baby on her arm, the way she ducked her head with the gleaming black hair from which the scarf had slipped from under the tented hood and with one hand
lifted her dress before her feet; after all the years I still remember that insignificant, incidental gesture and I see clearly before my eyes a woman who is long dead, but what I want to know now remains hidden from me, and I can only feel around in the darkness of the past for the splinters that may help me restore the pattern.

The last trek to the Karoo I called it, even though forty or fifty others followed in years to come, and so it was, for that winter something ended, and on our return to the Roggeveld in spring everything was different. Sofie spent only two springtimes with us, the spring after her wedding and the one when Maans was a baby, but in my memory they have remained distinct, though it would be difficult for me to describe the difference between them. That she had new responsibilities and duties was not the reason, for I do not believe she took much notice of the child, and she never seemed to be bothered by the way Mother took charge of him: she never showed the least inclination to resist Mother’s possessiveness, and otherwise he was left in Jacomyn’s care, and Jacomyn had very few duties in the house other than to look after him. Mother and Jacomyn and old Dulsie fought silently and wordlessly over the possession of that squealing little bundle who now formed part of our family, and each was determined to stake her own claim and to stand upon her rights, while Sofie held herself aloof from the battle. It was Jacomyn, however, who raised Maans as a baby, and later I; for a few years it was as if he were my child, until Mother appropriated him completely and he finally married the woman she had selected for him. Thus that victory was Mother’s too.

That spring, I might say, it was already as if Sofie was no longer one of us. What had happened that winter in the Karoo? Nothing that I can remember, nothing I ever knew about, and perhaps no more than the usual visits back and forth of neighbours and acquaintances, the music and the dancing. Sofie’s family and friends were also there, of
course, and for a few months she was back in the world she knew. I remember the luxurious warmth and the rush of the swollen fountains and streams, the boisterous and excited shouting and the music from beyond the thorn trees – it could have been that year or just as well any other, because that was the way the winters in the Karoo usually passed. To us, however, it was never more than a delay and an interruption, and the annual return to the Roggeveld was a homecoming every time, so predictable that, when we delayed, the sheep found their own way to the familiar heights without waiting for us: upward through the narrow shadow of the kloof to the pale undulations of the plateau with its constant threat of unseasonable frost or snow, the glittering of the water in the dams, and the dark house with its sturdy walls. For us the return was a homecoming after every absence but for Sofie, could it ever have been anything but exile?

It was late that year before spring finally arrived, and long after our return there was still frost. Sofie usually stayed inside, as she had done during the last days of her pregnancy, and our lessons were resumed, with the exception that I had suddenly been seized by a burning desire to unravel the secrets of the letters and to master the contents of the books, and to be able, in my childish eyes, to read and write as fluently as Pieter and she. Perhaps in my own way I also had something of Mother’s burning ambition, or perhaps I cherished the idle hope of having my progress rewarded with her approval. Or perhaps I merely hoped to be able to enter Sofie and Pieter’s world in that way, and to participate in what they shared, and from which I was excluded, something I could only associate with the reading and writing in the voorhuis, as I could find no other explanation for it. As usual, Pieter was often there when I had my lessons, teasing or distracting us, or arguing playfully with Sofie about the pronunciation, the meaning or the spelling of a word, until she herself began to laugh. Frowning
and determined, with ink stains on my fingers, I bent over the stained paper, and when I looked up I saw them as they sat teasing each other across the table or conferring over a book. Heads close together, they spelt out the foreign text and followed the words with fingers accidentally touching, in the dimly-lit room where there was no observer but me, a child bent over her task, too busy to take notice and too young to understand.

The chair is overturned violently or falls over as someone jumps up from the table, and I awake from my dream; the door is slammed thunderously. What has happened, and whose voices are arguing so fiercely in the other room? Only once or more often, I do not know, but it must have been more than once in that divided house in which we lived, for strife and anger were nothing strange during my childhood years. Jakob’s scorn at my sudden quest for learning, Jakob’s increasing animosity towards Pieter, brother against brother, and Pieter’s insidious, relentless badgering, Sofie’s restlessness and her impatient outbursts against her husband, and in the kitchen the continuing feud between Dulsie and Jacomyn, and Dulsie’s squabbling with Gert. Spring arrived too late and too hesitantly that year, and in the renewed winter that followed our return from the Karoo, we were forced together inside the walls of the house too often, together in the voorhuis and kitchen with all our discontent and unrest. I still remember the glittering of snow on Pieter’s hair and on the jackal-skin around his shoulders; but no, that was earlier. What glittering do I remember then, blinding in the sunlight, and where did Pieter stand like that in the drifting snow, across which snowfield did he come walking out of the distance?