This Life (12 page)

Only two events from the time after Pieter and Sofie’s disappearance and Father’s return from his journey stand out in my memory.
One of them – when was it, when could it have been? Jacomyn went out with the child as she did every day, and when she had left the house, Mother went to the bedroom, the front room where Jakob and Sofie had slept, and suddenly I heard something crack and splinter, shattering in pieces as it broke. Frightened by the noise where I was standing in the kitchen, I did not immediately understand what was happening, and then I realised that Mother had smashed Sofie’s framed looking-glass against the wall. It must have been very soon after Sofie’s disappearance, when the grudge and bitterness over her flight was still intense – could it even have been on the day of Father’s return, while he was asleep after the long journey? Every trace of Sofie had to be obliterated: Dulsie came and swept up the shards, quickly and submissively, asking no questions, as experience had taught her, and in the oven outside Mother wordlessly burnt the rest of Sofie’s belongings. What they were, I do not know, for I did not dare try and find out, even from a distance; neither do I know what Sofie had taken with her or how much it had been possible for her to take along. Her books must have been left behind, and those Mother would have torn apart with great satisfaction before stuffing them into the back of the oven. And her black satin dress, her wedding gown, did she leave it behind, and did Mother with brute force tear the heavy, gleaming fabric along the seams to burn it, looking on as it smouldered slowly? I do not know, only that nothing remained, that Mother stayed outside at the oven until everything had been destroyed, reduced to ashes in the cold oven, powdery ashes that were blown across the yard. Only the child remained to remind us of Sofie’s short stay, and Jacomyn who looked after him; but the child, after all, belonged to Jakob, the heir.

And after this, one afternoon very soon afterwards it seems to me now, Mother told me to fetch the writing materials. Father was away once again, though I no longer remember where he was, and Jacomyn
had gone out with the child, while Dulsie was collecting harpuisbos twigs for the fire; that I remember very well, that the two of us were in the house alone that afternoon. I fetched the ink-well and the pen and brought them to the big table in the voorhuis, and Mother placed the family Bible in front of me. “Write,” she ordered, and I saw that she had turned to the page where the dates of our births and deaths were recorded and she was pointing at the last inscription, that of Jakob’s death in Father’s scarcely legible hand, with above it the birthdate of his child, and above that his wedding date, his and Sofie’s. “Write there,” she ordered, and prompted, “Died …” It was Sofie’s name she was pointing at and, bewildered, I turned and looked up into her face, for no one had told me that Sofie was dead, but it was clear that she would not stand for any questions or objections, and so I bent over the book and wrote what she told me to, while she stood beside me grimly. Did she leave us to die then, I wondered, or did she die suddenly during that mysterious journey, and why were we not informed when Father returned, why did I have to write it into the Bible while Mother and I were in the house alone, and why did he not do it himself as he usually did? But it was untrue and the date was false, it was the date of Sofie’s disappearance or perhaps that of Father’s return after his long search, that Mother made me write into the Bible on her own authority, as if the mere inscription would instantly render it true; and I had to do it because she herself did not know how to write and probably could not even read well enough to make out where Sofie’s name was written.

Years later, when Maans was a young man and he opened the Bible to record Father’s death, he read through all the entries. “But this is your handwriting,” he said to me. “Why did you write in the Bible when Mammie died?”

It was a rainy day and it was even darker than usual in the voorhuis: Mother sat close to the window with her back to us, and I did not
know whether she had heard the question. “Oupa was often ill during that time,” I said at last, and in the silence I heard the rain dripping through the thatched roof on to the floor-boards of the loft; and it was true that he was frequently ill in the time after Sofie and Pieter left us, even confined to his bed at times, but that was not why he had not entered the date into the Bible himself. He had probably never even seen the inscription, for the next entry in the family tree was his own death, so he had had no reason ever to look it up.

How long did that silence last? Father immersed in his pain and Mother in her bitterness, Jacomyn distant and waiting in the house where she was merely tolerated, and Dulsie gradually becoming old and grumpy, and the only sound the wind outside, the whirling dust against the shutters, and the wailing of the baby as Jacomyn paced up and down with him, shuffling across the floor on bare feet. How long could it have lasted? Oh, long, very long; months passed and eventually became years, seasons of blustering snow and uncertain springs drifted across the veld, and the only sound was the wind against the shutters. My only company was the servants as I sat unnoticed in the corner of the kitchen in the evenings, the silent listener in the corner, and sometimes entire days passed during which no one thought to address me except to give me an order or to scold me for some oversight. It was autumn and the wind whipped the dust across the veld, so that the shutters were closed and we lived in the dark with only the fire in the kitchen glowing in the hearth; the darkness and the silence, the rattling of the doors and shutters in the wind and the grating noise as the wind swept along dust and fine pebbles and branches, and the child crying, and Jacomyn’s bare feet across the dung floor. I was often alone, and in my childhood years loneliness gradually became second nature to me. Sometimes I wandered far from home without knowing
what I was looking for, driven farther and farther, gazing at the faded, flat landscape from every ridge, as if I were searching for something. But what did I expect to see? Dassies slipping away among the rocks when they saw me, or a jackal buzzard rising from its prey to hover in the air on outstretched wings, the sheep flocks grazing among the bushes or the wispy smoke of a herdsman’s lonely fire at his shelter miles away, or at most a lone rider, unrecognisable across the distance, or the white tent of a wagon on the distant mountain pass, strangers passing by our isolated homestead without even considering turning off and paying us a visit in our isolation. I did not expect company, however, neither did I desire the arrival of strangers in our midst; I turned from the distant road and chose places where not even the sheep went, and I walked farther and farther as if I were heading for some distant destination. I saw the low hills darken and the renosterbos glow with a bluish tinge as the thin silver sunlight faded at the end of the day, and in my fervour to reach that mysterious distant goal, I began to run, stumbling along the plateau on the crest of the mountain at the end of the world. The silver light streamed away before my eyes and I lost my footing on the uneven ground.

One of the herdsmen apparently found me there in the veld. Whether they had been searching for me and whether they had been anxious or worried about my disappearance, or for how long I had lain there before he found me, I have no idea. I fell, I suppose – what does it matter now, except for the scar on my forehead, and I learned to live with that a long time ago. Near the edge of the escarpment he found me, far from home, but that is all I know. When I regained consciousness, it was night, and by the light of the oil lamp I could make out among the flickering shadows in the room old Dulsie where she sat sleeping on a chair beside my bed; and then it was dark again.
Of course it could not have been so very long, those months of emptiness and silence in the empty, silent house; it was autumn when Pieter and Sofie left and not yet winter when they found me in the veld, near the end of autumn it must have been, for my illness had once again prevented Mother from going down to the Karoo with Father, and we had to stay behind in the Roggeveld. I suppose Gert went with Father, and perhaps Jacomyn and the child as well, and Dulsie must have stayed behind to help Mother. Or did Mother go with Father after all, leaving me behind with Dulsie? I was sick all winter and unconscious or delirious most of the time, so that my memories of those months are vague and confused, but I do not remember Mother being there, only that Dulsie was always beside me with a kaross around her shoulders against the cold and her feet on a stove, or curled up on the floor in front of the bed at night; Dulsie holding me, trying to make me drink from a bowl, Dulsie throwing open the shutters that had been closed against the cold and letting the first pale daylight of spring into the room.

Why do I not remember Mother? The more anxiously, the more deeply I delve into my confused memories, the more they slip and slide away, but not for a moment can I find her face anywhere. There is no one I might ask about it any more, and yet I realise that sixty years later it is still important to me, I still want to know whether Mother left me or stayed with me and whether she showed any sign of anxiety or concern during my long illness. How dearly I would like to discover her among the fragments of my memories, bending over my bed for a moment, her hand on my brow, her arm around my shoulders; but it is only Dulsie I see before me. Who helped her then? Sofie I remember, bending over the flickering light, her face recognisable for just a moment, and then her dark hair like a veil, hiding it from view, obscuring her features; Sofie – but no, that was a different time, it is an older
memory, and if I had seen her during this time, bending over my bed in the candlelight, an inscrutable look in her dark eyes, if I had seen her, then it must have been an illusion, a shadow, a distortion created by the darkness on the walls of the room where I lay.

Dulsie’s head sinks forward in her vigil beside the bed, she nods for a moment as she dozes off, then sits up abruptly, bewildered, looking around her, uncertain of her whereabouts. Then slowly, mumbling to herself, she gets up and arranges her bed on the floor, and against the wall her distorted shadow joins the other shadows, lengthening and shrinking, extending and flowing together in fluid patterns. The dancing light of the flame, flickering for a moment in the wind, and the smell of the kraal and the veld, the smell of fire made with bushes and dung, of dung fire and smoke and herbs. Why do I remember that smell, and how did it find its way into my room where the shutters were closed against the cold and where we lived in eternal half-light and candlelight and darkness? The smell of smoke and bushes, the smell of boegoe and soil and dust, and a hand on my forehead that was not Dulsie’s. Could it perhaps have been Mother, Mother after all? But no, a strange hand, and strange voices murmuring in the dark. Who was that stranger – the wife of a herdsman who had slept in the house with Dulsie during that long winter? I do not remember anyone who resembled her, however, neither was she like the Basters or Hottentots of our parts. On some of the farms in the Roggeveld there were still Bushmen from the days of the raids and battles before my birth, when the men were killed and the surviving women and children herded together and put to work by the white farmers, and it seems as if it could be an old Bushman woman that I remember; but we never had any of these people in our employ except as herdsmen, and they would never have been allowed inside the house. It is possible that it was an illusion, one more illusion among the many that merge with
the shadows, and yet I know it was not my imagination, and that I saw her here in my bedroom, beside my bed, with her hand on my brow, and I remember the muttering of strange voices and the smell of bushes and herbs and kraal fires.

That, however, is all I remember of those weeks and months, for the winter passed without my being aware of it, and it was spring, and the sheep returned from the Karoo: I opened my eyes in my bed and saw the bright silver light streaming inside where Dulsie had thrown open the shutters, and the pale blue of the sky outside, and I was aware of the delicate, hesitant warmth and the smell of the veld after the rains. Outside the sheep were bleating at the kraal and I heard Father shouting at the herdsmen and Gert’s voice calling; inside the house I could hear Mother in the kitchen. I lay there like someone who had returned after a long absence, trying to make sense of the sounds. Like someone searching for words in a long-forgotten language, I recalled their names one by one. I averted my face from the bright window, exhausted by the effort, and fell asleep again.

I survived, though apparently no one had expected it. While I was ill, they had ordered boards from the Boland and a coffin had been made for me that I saw unexpectedly years later when it was taken from the rafters in the shed for the funeral of one of the neighbours’ children. Maans said it was a child’s coffin, and it took a while before I realised it was mine and I could picture my own shape in the dimensions of that child’s coffin, the thin girl who had turned around at death’s door after months, to arise from her sickbed. Yes, as if I had returned from another country and spoke a different language, and for a while they did not know how to behave towards me and where I fitted into their circle. Were they grateful, were they glad? No one showed any gratitude or joy, except perhaps Father. Because there was no mirror in the house, it was only much later that I saw myself with
the scar on my forehead where my head had struck a rock as I fell, but I could feel it with my fingers, and I must have been a peculiar sight, for during my illness my hair had been shaved, and it took long before it began to grow out again.

That spring with the wild flowers and Sofie laughing in the veld, the flowers whipped from her hands as she held them out to me; that spring of the shifting light and shadows when Sofie and Pieter sank down into the shadowy pools and were lost to me; and finally that long spring of my return – how much had changed within two years and how different that season was when, carefully and hesitantly, I learned to move through the house again. A time of delicate, drifting, silver daylight and the gleam of the water in the dams below the house, and across the pale green fields of spring the two horses galloped away noiselessly to vanish over the horizon. The day was quiet and the house empty and for some reason I was alone, alone with the sudden knowledge, relentless and unavoidable, that I would always be as alone as I was at that moment. I was a mere child and did not understand, but I turned my face from the silver light and did not want to know, not yet. Always. I could clearly feel the scar with my fingers and when, much later, I stood in front of a mirror again, it did not show me anything I did not already know.