The Covenant (45 page)

In all he did, he consulted the wishes of Mevrouw. He might have been tempted to be unpleasant with Annatjie, for she was both older
and plainer than he; fifty-one years of ceaseless work had roughened her face, while he remained a handsome youngish man of only forty-two. Girls from surrounding farms, and sometimes their mothers, too, had looked at him with affection, but he had so desperately yearned for control of Trianon that he was willing to pay the price, and that was faithful attention to Annatjie, through whose hands he had acquired it. He would never belittle her, or mention her advanced age, or in any way fail to pay the debt he owed her.

He gave evidence of this attitude on the day the two outreaching buildings were completed, each door with its splendid identifying oval, for after Annatjie had inspected everything and approved this handsome addition, Paul said, “And now we attend to your needs.”

“I have none,” she said.

“Oh, yes. Your house is too small for you.” She noticed with approval that whereas he often said “my farm, my vineyard,” and even “my fields at Trianon,” he invariably referred to the house as hers. There she was mistress, and he proposed making it worthy of her.

Leading her inside, he showed how the T could be improved by the simple device of adding two large rooms to the stem. “What we’ll do,” he explained, “is change it from a T to an H.” And he pointed out that if this were done, she would also gain two small gardens in the empty parts of the H. “In hot summers, the cool wind will come at us from all sides.”

When the H was completed, it worked exactly as he had foreseen, and the De Prés now had the finest house in Stellenbosch, a low gracious set of buildings beautifully associated with meadow and mountain. But still his insatiable urge to build drove him on: “Bezel, I want you to carve me a monstrous oval, six times bigger than the little ones.”

“Showing what?”

“Wine casks decorated with vines.” And while the Malay carpenter carved the symbols, Paul directed his slaves in building a huge wine cellar at the rear of the house but closely attached to it, so that a Spanish-style patio resulted. Trianon now had four lovely gardens: the big one in front, the two little ones tucked into the angles of the house, and this quiet, restricted one at the rear, closed in by white walls and dotted with small trees. When Bezel Muhammad bolted his carving into position, Paul said, “Here’s a building in which wine of distinction might be housed.”

His building mania was almost ended. When the great wine casks
from France were placed in position, and the pigeons and chickens and pigs were in their cubicles, he informed Annatjie that he would build one final thing for her, and when she tried to guess what it might be, he told her to visit with the Boeksmas in Stellenbosch for five days. When he came to the Boeksma farm to fetch her, she asked what he had done, and he told her, “You must see for yourself,” and as they drove up the lane, and into the areaway between the two embracing arms, she could detect nothing new, but as they approached the house she gasped, for at each end of the low stoep on which they sat in the evening Paul had directed his workmen to build two ceramic benches perpendicular to the front wall and faced with the softest white-and-blue tiles from Delft. They showed men skating on frozen canals, women working at the river, views of old buildings and sometimes simply the implements of Dutch farm life. They converted ordinary benches into little jewels, glistening in sunlight, and the great house of Trianon was complete.

It was great in neither size nor height, nor was it Dutch. Its chief characteristics had been borrowed from Java, its secondary ones from rural France, but the spirit that animated it and the manner in which it hugged the earth came only from South Africa. Dutch workmen had helped build it, and a French megalomaniac, and a Malay carpenter, and slaves from Angola, Madagascar and Ceylon, with Hottentots doing much of the light work. It was an amalgam, glorious yet simple, and its chief wonder was that when one sat on the Delft benches at close of day, one could see the sun setting behind Table Mountain.

Paul’s attitude toward his five children would always be ambivalent. Concerning Annatjie’s boy Hendrik, who had vanished into the wilderness, he was glad to see him go, for he recognized him as a threat. He did not worry about his own son Henri, now in Amsterdam, for he judged this one would never have wanted to farm; indeed, he felt some relief at the boy’s disappearance, for he sensed that sooner or later he would have had trouble with him. Annatjie’s boy Sarel he considered a dolt and was pleased to see that girls thought so, too, for the boy was not married, would produce no heirs to claim the vineyards, and could be dismissed. His son Louis was a different matter; Paul was still convinced that after a few years at the Cape, the boy would want to come back to the farm, and it would be to him that
Trianon would ultimately revert; often he consoled himself by thinking: The experience with the Compagnie will make him a better manager. He’ll know about ships and agents and markets. That the boy would ultimately return he never doubted, and that Louis could wrest the vineyard from silly Sarel was evident. “Trianon of the De Prés” he saw as the ultimate title, and if the French name should be submerged in the Dutch Du Preez, that would be all right with him.

It was his attitude toward Petronella that surprised Annatjie, for he had bitterly opposed her liaison with Bezel Muhammad, but now his opinion changed radically. One day he said, “Annatjie, I’m not using my house, and the boys seem to have fled. Why not give it to Petronella and Bezel?”

“I think they’d like that,” Annatjie said, and she was astonished when he not only gave the young couple the house, but also helped Bezel erect a workshop in which his tools would have an orderly place. He even assigned three slaves to the task of cutting stinkwood trees for Bezel and shaping them into timbers.

Later, of course, Annatjie discovered that Paul had talked Bezel into building only wall cupboards, which were carted to Louis de Pré, who sold them at top prices at the Cape. Bezel was given less than a third of the profits, but he and Petronella did occupy their new home rent-free, and he appreciated the fact that Paul’s patronage was of great value to a carpenter who had been a slave.

Then came the years of conflict. Paul was determined that Louis come back to inherit the vineyard; Annatjie was equally insistent that her son Sarel pull himself together, take a wife, and produce the Van Doorn children who would supervise Trianon far into the future. In this struggle De Pré used vicious weapons, denigrating Sarel at each opportunity, spreading in the community rumors that he was an imbecile. He spoke casually of the day when Louis would return to take command: “He’s studying the wine business, you know. The Compagnie has sent him to Europe to ascertain who the trustworthy merchants are.”

The struggle took an ugly turn whenever Annatjie maneuvered her self-conscious son into contact with any marriageable girl, for then Paul would arrange to meet, by happenstance, her parents, to whom he would drop bits of intelligence: “I don’t really suppose he’s an idiot. He can buckle his shoes.” And since Sarel, who blushed beet-red at the sight of a girl, did nothing to advance any courtship, the meetings arranged by his mother came to naught.

She wondered what to do. She was fifty-seven now and did not expect to live far into her sixties; Sarel was not deficient, of that she was certain, but he was shy and awkward and he needed a wife most urgently. But where could she find one for him?

She arranged an excuse for taking him to the Cape, but accomplished nothing, so in desperation she looked toward Holland and the orphanage from which she had come. She very much wanted to commission Henri de Pré to make contact with the women who supervised the girls, but her peasant instincts warned her that Henri could be trusted no more than his father, so in desperation she sat in her corner of the big house and penned a secret letter to a woman she had never seen, the mistress of the orphanage where the King’s Nieces resided:

She forwarded the letter without letting her husband know, and nearly a year of anxiety passed before a courier arrived with news that a Compagnie ship from Amsterdam would soon be putting in with a wife for Sarel van Doorn.

“What’s this?” De Pré demanded.

“Someone’s sending out an orphan, I suppose. The way I came.”

“But who asked for an orphan?”

“Many people know that Sarel needs a wife.”

“What would he do with a wife?” This was a difficult moment for De Pré. Never had he transgressed his resolve to treat Annatjie with respect and even love, and he did not propose to treat her poorly now; but he was determined that Trianon stay in his family, and if Sarel married and had children, such inheritance might be in question. If he forbade himself to abuse Annatjie, he felt no such restraint where Sarel was concerned, and now he made gross fun of the hesitant young man.

“What would that one do with a wife?” he repeated, and Annatjie, wanting most earnestly to slap his insinuating face, left the house.

She ordered slaves to inspan her horses, then asked Bezel Muhammad to accompany her to the Cape, where she would greet the arriving bride. “Why not take Sarel?” he asked, and without thinking, she replied, “He might not know what to do.”

She would. When they reached the Cape, the promised ship had not yet arrived, but others of its convoy assured the officials that it was on the way, so she waited. And then one morning guns fired, and a pitifully small ship limped into harbor with almost half its passengers dead. For a dreadful moment she feared that she might have lost her orphan, but when the survivors came ashore Geertruyd Steen was among them, twenty-two years old, blond, squared-off in every aspect, and smiling. She had a large square face, a stout torso, big hips, sturdy legs. Even her hair was braided and tied so that it accentuated the squareness of her head, and Annatjie thought: Dearest God, if there was ever a woman destined to breed, she is it.

The girl, not knowing what to expect, looked tentatively about her for some young man who might be awaiting a wife, but saw only sailors and Hottentots, so she took hesitant steps forward, saw Annatjie, and knew instinctively that this woman must be her protector. There was a slight pause, after which the two women ran at each other and embraced almost passionately.

“You’ve come to a paradise,” Annatjie told the girl. “But it’s a paradise you must build for yourself.”

“Are you to be my mother-in-law?”

“I am.”

“Is your son here?”

“It’s an important story,” Annatjie said, and on the spur of the moment she directed Bezel Muhammad to take one of the horses and ride on ahead. It was important that she talk with this girl, and a long ride across the flats would give her just enough time.

She whisked Geertruyd out of the Cape that morning, afraid lest she be infected the way Louis de Pré had been, and as they entered the flats, she began talking: “I shall have to tell you so much, Geertruyd, but every sentence is important, and the order in which it’s told is important, too. My husband, your father-in-law, is a remarkable man.”

She explained how he had fled persecution in France, the courage with which he had made his way to Holland, and his great bravery
in risking a return trip to fetch the vines which now accounted for the prosperity of Trianon. She told how tough old Willem van Doorn and his nagging wife had ventured out into the wilderness to build their farm, and how Paul de Pré had transformed it into a rural palace.

The first hours were spent in these details, but when they stopped to have their midday meal, Annatjie changed the tone of conversation completely: “You’ll see a dozen kinds of antelope, and hear leopards at night, and maybe one day you’ll find a hippo in the river. We have a flower called protea, eight times as grand as any tulip, and birds of all description. You’ll live in a land of constant surprises, and when you’re an old woman like me you still won’t have seen everything.”

She asked Geertruyd to look about her at the endless flatness. “What do you see?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Always remember this moment,” Annatjie said, “for soon you’ll see such a place of beauty that your eyes will not believe it.” Geertruyd leaned forward as her mother-in-law-to-be added, “If you do your work well, you’ll build a little empire here, but only you can do it.”

All elderly people claim that the future lies in the hands of the young people, but few believe it; Annatjie de Pré knew that alternatives of the most staggering dimension depended upon how this particular young girl behaved herself and with what courage she attacked her problems.

“What problems do you mean?” Geertruyd asked.

“Inheritance,” Annatjie said. “Yesterday you were an orphan girl owning a few dresses. Tomorrow you’ll be a significant factor in the ownership of the finest vineyard in the land.”

Geertruyd listened and did not like what she heard. “I am not penniless,” she said. “I have guilders in my package.”

Annatjie liked her response, but goaded her still further: “You come bringing nothing. Except your character. You’re being offered everything, if you demonstrate that character.”

“I am not a pauper!” Geertruyd repeated, her square face flushing red.

“I was when I came across these flats,” Annatjie said, and without emotion she told the girl of how she, too, had left that orphanage, and of how her first man had rejected her, and of how she had slaved
to improve the farm. “You say you have a few hidden guilders. I had nothing.”

Abruptly she turned to the problem of her son, the proposed husband: “Sarel is a fine, honest young man. He’s always been overshadowed by the four children he grew up with. My husband, who despises him because he’s afraid of what he might become, will tell you within the first ten minutes that Sarel’s an imbecile. Sarel will be especially afraid of you, and if you believe my husband, you may shy away.” She paused and took Geertruyd’s hands. “But we never know, do we, what a man can become until we treat him with love?” They talked no more.