This Life (21 page)

The discord, the angry conferences in the voorhuis and the rows with the church council continued, however, and after four years Mr Van der Merwe received his demission. Mr Reyneke, who succeeded him, was a more cautious and more flexible young man, and he and his wife called on Mother regularly and showed suitable respect for her position, so that she developed a liking for them. Gradually the serious rift in the congregation was mended; but until the very end of her life, when it was no longer possible for her to leave her room or even her bed, Mother retained her honorary seat in church, the black-clad figure increasingly gaunt, but the back as straight as ever. In those years she ordered from Worcester a cape, embroidered with glittering jet, which caused a mild sensation and to which the women of the congregation reacted with spite: such a display of elegance did not suit her, and she was not really comfortable with it herself, but for years she wore that embroidered cape to church every Sunday, glittering among the paler women.

Could it really have been ten years? I looked after the house-keeping and supervised in the house, baked bread and counted the washing when it came back from the fountain at Ouplaas, and tried to protect the paltry flower-beds from frost and drought; I filled the paraffin
lamps that were used in the voorhuis and dining-room, and in the evenings drew the curtains against the dark; I followed Mother to church on Sundays and took my seat at the back, close to the door, while she moved among the pews in her glittering jet to claim her honorary seat in front of the pulpit – a good daughter, a model daughter; a blessing in the house. To others it must have seemed a tedious and lonely life, but I never saw it that way myself, for I had learned to distance myself from appearances and to be unaffected by the restrictions of my existence. After church the women addressed me kindly and when I passed them on my way to the store as they stood talking in front of their houses, they graciously tried to include me in their conversations, but I was unfamiliar with most of the matters they were discussing and there were also many things they did their best to withhold from me. Their goodwill was not unlimited, however: sooner or later they lost patience and gave up on their efforts and their verdict was probably the same as Stienie’s. Well, you must understand, Tantetjie has always been a little strange; and the bright sunlight falling through the net curtain is diffused, so that the room where I stand alone seems gloomy and mysterious.

I am standing at the window and under my fingers I feel the smooth, straight edge of the splashboard – no, not like that, not that. I am standing at the window … What memory comes back so vividly now? It was a different evening; for a moment I feel the window-pane smooth and cool under my fingers before I draw the curtain, and for a moment I linger, because outside in the twilight I see something stirring, a figure at the gate, fumbling for the catch. Must I remember, must I go on to remember what has been forgotten for so long without making the slightest difference? I have been trying to sleep, and because I cannot sleep, my thoughts have been set in motion here where I lie alone, speechless and paralysed in the dark of the sleeping house; I did not want to remember anything, it was never my intention
to call up the past and to call up figures in the half-light, to have phantoms step out into the light where their features would be recognisable again. Where does Abraham van Wyk come from now, striding out of the past, out of the dark night to stand at our front door once again, his eyes blinking in the light of the candle I hold in my hand? There was no reason for him to visit us that evening, but neither was there any reason for such a visit to seem strange, for he was an old acquaintance, always somewhere in the background over the years with his bashful smile, his sparse beard and dry cough. His wife had died and there were no children, and now he was suddenly standing at our door without us even being aware that he was in town.

I lit the lamp in the voorhuis, for when we were alone we usually sat by candlelight until we went to bed, and made coffee and took it in, and then I carried on with my chores while Abraham discussed his affairs with Mother. What did I actually know, I who was nearly forty years old? I was never told anything, nothing was ever explained to me and no reasons were ever supplied; I continued with my work without asking questions or expecting explanations and I considered it natural that questions, explanations, feelings remained unspoken, and knowledge was accumulated along other ways, in the form of deductions, suspicions or incidental observations, a few words in the passage, a flash through the chink of a door, a hazy figure in the gloom behind the net curtain. He took his leave of Mother and departed and I accompanied him to the door with a candle; he muttered a few words of farewell and walked to the gate in the dark, and I shut the door behind him.

What did I know after all? Thus I was completely unprepared for the outburst that engulfed me when I returned to Mother in the voorhuis, and it took a while before I understood the gist of those knife-sharp words and realised that her scorn and outrage were directed at Abraham; accustomed as I was to the vehemence of her hostilities and
feuds, it took me even longer to realise that this time I was involved too. A loser with a stand barely big enough to keep a handful of sheep alive, a no-hoper who in a million years would not be able to pay off his debts at the store, a weakling who would never even be elected as deacon – Father would have laughed in his face, she declared, trembling with barely contained outrage and fury; Father would have driven him from the house before he had even finished speaking. I listened silently to the biting words without interrupting, for since childhood I had learned to let her attacks of almost demented fury wash over me, and it was only when she began to prepare for evening prayers and bed, still seething with fury and stuttering over the prayer, that I realised, dazed, that it had been for my sake that Abraham had come that evening.

I remember lying awake for a long time that night, quite astonished, trying to take in the events. Father would not have laughed at him, that I knew, nor would he have driven him away: Father’s heart had been too kind and loving for that and as far as Abraham was concerned, he may not have been wealthy, but he was a decent and well-respected man who had nothing to be ashamed of. That this unassuming widower wanted to court me, surprised me, but I considered the fact without the rush of panic I had felt when old Tant Mietjie had sent Jasper across the dance floor: instead, the knowledge moved me in a strange way, and I felt a kind of gratitude towards Abraham because he had come that evening, but nothing more. I remember how cold the nights were towards the end of that autumn, and how I lay wide-eyed, watching the bright moonlight move across the floor and listening to the incessant, distant barking and howling of the dogs at the straw huts of the coloured people below the ridge. The offer had been made, I thought, and as far as I was concerned, it had never been withdrawn, so that it would still be possible to take it up; it would still
be possible to get up and move soundlessly across the moonlit floor to the window, to swing myself over the window-sill and walk barefoot down the white street to the little church house where he stayed when he was in town, to knock on the shutter until he opened. Would anyone see me; would anyone hear me? Would it matter?

I know I lay like that for a long time, contemplating the possibility, and I realised it was my last chance to flee from this sleeping house; but though I saw that clearly enough, it did not even enter my mind to get up and make my escape along this final route. The possibility existed, but it remained no more than a possibility, something to contemplate and consider without trying to make it real. This was my life, this room where the moon-light moved across the bare floorboards, this large, silent house, and as I lay awake motionlessly, I realised it and accepted it. In some way the choice had been made long ago, without my ever being aware of it, and all I could do was to continue. The next morning I got up, light-headed with sleeplessness, and rekindled the fire and brewed the coffee as usual. My road lay straight ahead of me, not along a side route.

Abraham van Wyk soon married a widow of more or less my own age, and a year later she died during childbirth, both she and the baby. Abraham moved to the Bokkeveld and what became of him then, I never heard. He never came to our house again; I never saw him face to face or spoke to him again after that evening when I accompanied him to the front door with the candle.

Every year on Mother’s birthday the town ladies came for coffee and a few of the church councillors came to congratulate her, but she remained so proud and quick-witted and straight-shouldered that it was hardly noticeable that she was growing older. Only sometimes I was startled for a moment as I entered the voorhuis where she was
sitting alone, but when she heard me she pulled herself together at once, as if it were only my imagination that had suddenly made her appear fragile and wasted, and naturally I asked no questions. How long did the pain gnaw at her before she finally yielded? I know I sometimes thought I heard her cry out in the night, but when I got up to listen at her door, all was quiet; when I knocked hesitantly, she answered after a while, as if she had been asleep, and then she said it was nothing and told me to go back to bed. It was a long time before she sent for old Tant Gesie who doctored with herbs, and even longer before I was allowed to boil or steep the herbal infusions because she could no longer do it herself. By that time she did not enter the kitchen or eat at the table any more; she mostly sat at the window in the voorhuis, and later she no longer left her bedroom. During all that time of her drawn-out deathbed she never said a word about her illness to me, however, or conceded that she was ill, and never amid the worst pain did she admit that she was suffering, refusing in her wordless pride and stubbornness to yield to the inescapable humiliation and defeat of death.

It seems easy to sum it up in a few words now, those last months or weeks of her life, though while I was a witness to her silent death it seemed an endless drawn-out passing, longer than the ten years that we lived in town together. No relief was possible by this time, though I continued to brew the herbal infusions: sometimes she allowed me to sit with her at night, or at least she did not object, until one night she shrieked with pain, so that I woke up where I had fallen asleep beside the bed, and she told me to fetch Tant Gesie. I still remember how I ran through the dark and knocked on her shutter, and how the bewildered old woman groped for the flint to strike a light, how she gathered her clothes and, panting and groaning, followed me with her medicine chest under her arm, but it was too late, and not even
with her herbs and infusions could she provide a semblance of hope any more. It was so late that Mother even allowed the doctor to come, for she knew that he, too, would be unable to do anything, and so she was indifferent to his arrival.

Maans and Stienie came to bid Mother farewell before they went down to the Karoo for the winter. Afterwards Maans sat at the kitchen table, tears pouring down his cheeks, for he had always loved Mother, and Stienie looked away and chattered in a loud voice, impatient to get away and unwilling to show it. They had brought Pieter along, and I still remember how he sat next to Mother’s bed, stroking her bony hand slowly, carefully and distractedly, as if it were a strange object he had come upon somewhere in the veld, the feather of a spur-winged goose or the quill of a porcupine, for that seemingly intimate gesture nonetheless held no recognition.

She did not surrender, she did not surrender one step of the way, and to the end she battled with death, but on the inside she was being eroded by the pain, hollowed out like an anthill, and finally she succumbed wordlessly. I sat beside her bed in the motionless chill of the winter night and forced myself to stay awake. Was I expecting anything more, was I still hoping? But there was no word or sign, no gesture of supplication or reconciliation, no sign of love when the last breath in the small, wasted face on the pillow gave out and the end came.

By rights she should have been buried beside Father on the farm, but Maans was still in the Karoo and there was no one to arrange it, and so the funeral took place in town: her grave had to be hewn from the frozen soil with crowbars. There were few people left in town to attend the service and it was a struggle to find enough men to act as bearers. In the bitter eastwind the handful of mourners did not remain at the graveside long, and it was all over very quickly.

The neighbours pitied me for having been left behind so alone: they enveloped me with their sympathy, with small tokens of love, with words of consolation and efforts to help; they offered to sleep in the house at night and invited me to stay with them, they offered to send word to Maans to come and fetch me or to arrange transport so that I could travel to the Karoo. They dearly wanted to do something for me, and I could not tell them there was nothing I desired from them; disconcerted, they looked at me as I stood before them, wordless and tearless, uncomfortable in the presence of their unsolicited sympathy, waiting for them to go and to leave me alone, and at last they withdrew and did not bother me with their offers of help again. The young minister came regularly to support and console me with verses from Scripture and to pray that I might deal with my loss and accept my new solitary state, and I listened to his words of comfort and encouragement and expressed suitable gratitude for his visit. He was doing his duty as well as he could – for he was still young and did not know much about life – but I needed no consolation or encouragement, for there had been no bond between Mother and myself other than the one established by years of familiarity and habit, and as far as solitude went, alone in the big house after Mother’s funeral that winter I realised with amazement that I was not lonely and that I had never been conscious of loneliness. I could remember a moment of solitude and fear, with the fog billowing in the kloof, there was the long, dark emptiness after Pieter and Sofie had left us and another moment when I had knelt on the muddy banks of a fountain, but that was something else, something more than loneliness and at the same time also something less, and that memory came from long ago and was almost irretrievable in the distant past.