Keepers of the House

by JH Fletcher

  Mark had suggested this visit as an antidote to the traumas of Guguletu, but was that the only reason?

  Certainly this valley with its spreading vines, its trees and rivers and mountains, the house itself amid its screen of leaves, was as far in spirit from the dusty violence of the township as it was possible to be.

  She turned in through the tall white gate posts bearing the name that had become so much a part of her childhood, and drove along a gravel drive past a succession of oaks until, at last, she arrived at Anneliese’s house.

  Whatever her motives might be for coming here, perhaps she was about to find out.

  She parked, switched off the engine. For a moment she made no attempt to get out of the car, but sat remembering Anneliese telling her of something that had happened in this place over a hundred years before.

  The snow-covered peaks, the ice-bound wind, the breath of the mounted men smoking in the frosty air as Anneliese’s father reads from the Book. From the verandah of the house two children and their mother watch as the commando rides out, a dying clatter of hooves up the trail to the distant pass. When, a day and a night later, the men return, the burghers gather in judgement, the flares streaming in the wind, the men’s faces as stern as the rock from which both land and men are made. The caterwauling of the prisoners as they are led away.

  Here. On this spot. Anna blinked, staring at the old house drowsing in the summer heat. For a moment, she had been in that world that had vanished over seventy years before she was born. Now she had come back, yet the past lingered, adding perspective to the scene before her.

  She got out of the car and a man came and stood on the verandah of the house. She looked up at him. Pieter Wolmarans did not move as she walked across the driveway to the house. At the bottom of the steps she paused.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Wolmarans.’

  He nodded, barely, saying nothing.

  ‘May I come up?’ She was careful not to do so without permission.

  Again the nod. Up the steps she went, with the old man staring down. She stood on the verandah. Anna was not short, yet the level of her eyes barely reached this man’s shoulder. He would be about sixty, upright and massively built, with no sign of fat on him.

  ‘Welcome to my house,’ he said.

  My house … Anna wondered if the words were deliberate.

  He led the way to a small table, with two chairs beside it, that stood at one end of the stoep. A leather-bound book was lying upon it.

  ‘Be seated …’ Pieter said, unsmiling.

  They sat on either side of the table and looked at each other. Now she was here at last, Anna found she did not know what to say.

  ‘You said you were in South Africa on holiday? Why have you come here? To discover your roots?’

  His tone was inquisitorial, unfriendly, but it unlocked something in Anna’s head. Suddenly she knew that, yes, that was precisely why she was here.

  ‘Something wrong with that? My great-grandmother told me so much about this place.’

  ‘About Oudekraal?’

  ‘And the valley. Everything she remembered. The good things and the bad.’

  ‘There was a lot of bad in her life. She was a murderer, of course. Did she tell you that?’

  Anna blinked at the hostility in the old man’s voice. ‘She did not put it like that.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  Anna could not decide whether this man’s anger was directed at Anneliese and the past or at herself, a foreigner, for bringing back to life something best forgotten.

  Too bad, she thought rebelliously. He invited me; he must have known why I phoned him.

  ‘Anneliese told me lots of things. What happened when she was a child, and later. I was remembering one of her stories now, how her father Christiaan rode after the escaped prisoners and brought them back here, to face judgement.’

  His expression did not change. ‘Is that what they are to you? Stories?’

  Confrontation would get her nowhere. She decided to change her approach. ‘They are my past, too. As they are yours.’

  She felt the weight of his eyes assessing her silently.

  ‘Why?’ he said at length.

  ‘The way she talked … My great-grandmother made this place part of my childhood. Of my life.’

  ‘You could have written,’ he said.

  ‘I intended to, when Anneliese died. But …’ She raised her hands, helplessly.

  ‘But did not.’

  ‘I was fifteen. I had never been outside Australia …’

  The apologies sounded lame, terrible. Her voice petered out.

  ‘We never heard a single word in all those years,’ he told her. ‘Not from Anneliese. Not from you. Not from anyone. My grandfather Deneys saved her neck, yet she never even wrote to say she was safe. And now you come here, with your questions —’

  Anna decided she’d had enough. ‘You are telling me I shouldn’t have come.’ She stood abruptly. ‘Very well. I shan’t bother —’

  ‘Wait.’

  She stared down at him, her hand resting on the back of the chair.

  At last he sighed, gesturing at the chair. ‘Please …’

  She sat again, but warily, on the very edge of the chair.

  Once more he was silent, then stood in his turn and walked to the railing of the stoep and rested his hands — heavy, outdoor hands, she noticed — upon it. She watched his back as he stared out across the valley.

  ‘Every day I think of what has happened here over the centuries,’ he said. ‘How my family built this place after Colin Walmer first came from England to settle here. My ancestors are my family. I talk to them just as I talk to you. I shall never leave this place while I live and, when I die, I shall be buried in the graveyard behind the house, become part of the land that made me.’ He turned, walked slowly back to the table and sat down again. ‘You are an Australian. What do you know about such things?’

  There was weariness in his voice but also anger, as though he feared that he had already revealed too much of himself to this stranger. She thought he was prepared to resent her because of it.

  ‘I know very well,’ Anna said. ‘It was Anneliese’s dying wish to be buried here, too.’

  Pieter dismissed the remark. ‘She chose to leave.’

  ‘They would have hanged her, otherwise. But her last thoughts were of Oudekraal.’ She decided to make one final appeal. ‘I know that I am a foreigner but I am a member of your family, nonetheless. I want to find out something about my ancestry. If you will tell me.’

  Pieter Wolmarans sat silently for a long time; then, apparently, he came to a decision.

  ‘This is what we shall do. I shall show you around the farm. I shall think about what you’ve said. Then we shall come back here and I shall tell you what you want to know.’ For the first time there was the hint of a smile, yet with the ice still in it. ‘Or not. Agreed?’

  Anna saw it was the best offer she was going to get. ‘Agreed.’

  They went in an open jeep, Pieter driving with an elan she would not have expected across shallow fords and up the slopes of hills.

  ‘Over three hundred metres here,’ he shouted above the rush of wind. ‘The cooler air is good for the Chardonnay.’

  Down the opposing slope they roared, over a narrow wooden bridge that drummed beneath their wheels and up a track winding between trees to the crest of a hill. Pieter switched off the engine. Silence came swooping.

  They got out. Below them lay the estate with the rest of the valley beyond. In the distance was the azure glint of the sea.

  ‘Two hundred hectares,’ Pieter said.

  Anna had done her homework before coming here. ‘The biggest estate in the valley.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He pointed. ‘A few years ago we built the big dam. We pump water from the river in winter and use it for spray irrigation during the dry months.’

  They got into the jeep and drove back down the hill. They visited the wine cellar where Anna inspected
maturation casks of oak with brass spigots and crests carved deep into the ancient wood.

  ‘A hundred and fifty years old,’ Pieter told her.

  ‘How much do they hold?’

  ‘Seventy thousand bottles.’

  They passed through a door into a different century. Rows of stainless steel tanks looked more like an oil refinery than a wine cellar, with pipes and walkways everywhere. The floor was tiled, and over everything hung the thin sour smell of maturing wine.

  A young man came to meet them. Anna saw shorts, an old tee-shirt, sturdy and sun-bronzed arms, an open and pleasant face.

  ‘Nico Walsh. My winemaker.’

  The two men spoke technicalities for a while before Pieter took Anna back to the house.

  ‘He’s young,’ Anna said.

  ‘Knows what he’s doing, though. Graduate of both Stellenbosch and Geisenheim, in Germany —’

  She cut him off, for the moment uninterested in how Nico Walsh had become a winemaker. ‘You said you would show me around and think about what you were going to do.’

  His eyes met hers. There was none of the hostility she had seen in them at the beginning, but still he said nothing.

  Enough, she thought. Either he will or he won’t. ‘Mr Wolmarans, are you going to tell me about the past or not?’

  After Anna had left, Pieter Wolmarans fetched himself a glass of wine and went and sat again at the cloth-covered table.

  ‘I am going to trust you,’ he had said. He had handed her Deneys Wolmarans’s journal. ‘Take this away and read it. It will tell you something of what you want to know. When you have finished, bring it back and perhaps we shall talk some more.’

  She had handled the leather-bound journal with awed fingers. As though it were something precious, he thought, and was pleased. Precious it was, indeed, and good that she should be aware of it.

  ‘I am honoured that you are willing to lend it to me.’

  ‘Take good care of it.’

  ‘I shall guard it with my life.’ And meant it.

  ‘You’d better.’

  She had gone and he had wondered if he had done the right thing, then dismissed the doubt. She would indeed guard it with her life; in the short time she had been here, he had seen enough to know that.

  He thought about this out-of-the-blue cousin. A good woman, he decided, genuine — which was why he had been willing to lend her the book. Yet it was another matter that troubled him now.

  She could not be expected to know it, but her visit had created a problem for him. He had never married, had always intended to leave Oudekraal to Johannes Verster, his friend and neighbour. Now he knew for certain that there was surviving family, this would present a difficulty. Johannes would be the first to agree that land should remain within the family, yet surely this must be a different case.

  Anna was an Australian, had never set foot in Africa until a week ago. You could not expect her to have any real feeling for the land. For the family, either, for all her talk. It made no sense to leave Oudekraal to her.

  Yet the rule was iron-hard. This place had been in his family for two hundred and forty years and Wolmarans land should be left to Wolmarans blood, as long as a member of the family survived to inherit it. Yet to leave it to one who did not care, who would probably sell it in any case …

  A problem, indeed.

  Sixty-one years old or not, he was as fit as a flea yet his visitor had brought to mind something that he had perhaps been too ready to ignore: that he, like all men, was mortal and, like all men, should do what was necessary to ensure the dignified arrangement of his affairs.

  To die in violence was one thing. No one could blame anyone when that happened. But to leave things in a mess through neglect, to give someone else the trouble of sorting things out, was another matter entirely.

  No one liked to think of the world going on after they were no longer in it but death, after all, was a fact of life. Five years or ten, he thought. Twenty, even, if the good Lord permits. But the day will come when I, too, shall be gone from this place. The last of the Wolmarans, after more than two centuries.

  Except that now he was no longer the last of the Wolmarans.

  The chair shifted beneath him, seeking the comfort they had shared for more than a generation. Beyond the trees, the valley fell away until it reached the line of purple hills that filled the western horizon. On the other side of the house, the vines again, running steeply up to the foot of the mountain that closed that end of the valley.

  I had believed I was the last one, he told himself. Now I know differently, but last or not last does not matter. What matters is that we have been here since 1742, when Colin Stephen Walmer came to Africa and established the first farm in the valley — Colin Stephen Walmer, from Devon in England, who changed his name to Cornelius Stephanus Wolmarans, which must have been quite a mouthful for him, in honour of his new land. His sons and grandsons, in their turn, had cultivated the soil, adding to the buildings, developing the property. Nicholaas, Barend, Willem and all the rest. Their names are there in the family Bible. Within my own memory, my grandfather, my father and now me, Pieter Cornelius Wolmarans, and so finally an end to it all.

  Because even if this young Australian woman inherits, she will never sit here as I am sitting here, never look out at the land with the love and anguish that the land brings to those who own it.

  There would be bitterness in being the last to look across this land and call it his own, a sadness to rot the heart. The last days, the last evenings, the last sunsets.

  He thought: It is strange to think of this place being owned by another person, someone from a different land, even. I have never been outside this country or thought to go. What is here has always been enough for me, as it was for my father and his fathers before him. Until the present generation and all the troubles of these last years, none of the Wolmarans ever wanted to leave their land. They are all buried here in the little graveyard at the back of the house. That has always been our way, to return to the soil those who have worked it, within the sights and scents and sounds that were familiar to them in life: the eagles above the mountain, the sweet smell of the spring grass with the flowers bright in it; the lowing of cattle, the call of voices, the noise the press makes in the vintage; the sharp tang of juice running from the crushed grapes. The breath of a living farm.

  It was strange how land differed from other things. He had heard of men who had spent their lives building up a business, a shop or factory or engineering works, who could sell and walk away without a second thought, their money in their pocket. The land was different.

  In truth, you never own the land, he thought. It is not your possession or anyone’s. It is the other way round. In time, as you work it, it comes to own you. I know of no one who has lived on land that his family has worked who has not left it, when the time to leave has come, without something of death in his heart.

  That is how I feel now. This Anna Riordan’s visit has caused it. Yet in truth it is not fair to blame her. It all started seventy-nine years ago when Anneliese Wolmarans was forced to flee from the wrath of the English. Nowhere in this country was safe for her; she had to go as far as Australia to find sanctuary, yet now Anna says her heart remained here always.

  From what my grandfather told me, there were some folk hereabouts who said she had not been right in the head, that her brain had been turned by hatred and suffering. And indeed she suffered greatly. Everyone knew of the terrible event that drove her out. I remember my own mother talking about it, hush-voiced, and indeed Anneliese was much to blame for what happened. Yet in my heart I can sense her dreadful, empty grieving and wonder what I myself might have done had I the misfortune to be in the same situation.

  They were terrible times. I have thanked God often that I was not alive to see them — although, of course, I have felt their impact down the years; the legacy of hatred and vengeance come down to us from those days. Everyone, at the time and since, has been changed by that w
ar.

  As for this Anna Riordan … After my initial uncertainty, I took her around the farm, did my best to make her feel at home, listened to her, watched her. She had said she was here on holiday, but I wonder. Once she relaxed she began to talk, as people do: about justice and the important man for whom she worked in Australia who wanted to know the truth about this country. Which made her a sort of spy, I suppose.

  She asked me what I thought about sanctions. I told her the truth: that I know nothing about them or wish to. Nothing to do with politics is worth a tickey in comparison with the things of real value, the land, the work that nurtures it and brings it to fruitfulness, the love that makes all things — earth and water, man, woman and child — whole and pleasing to God.

  I told her so, she with this nonsense about sanctions and some story about a riot in Guguletu. What was she doing in such a place, and she a stranger to the land and the people, black and white, who inhabit it? She went away very down in the mouth, I can tell you.

  Yet I lent her my grandfather’s book because, despite all her nonsense, I found that I trusted her. She will read it and come back. Then, we shall see.

  Since I watched her little car drive away, I have been telling myself that her visit changes nothing, but her blood remains my blood and that is something I cannot ignore. God indeed moves in mysterious ways and if they sometimes seem perverse that must be a weakness in my understanding, I suppose.

  In the meantime, I sit here with my memories. It is strange to look at the vines and the mountains at the back of them and think of the generations that have worked to make this place what it is today.

  There are two types of history: the type you read about and the type you know because you were there or knew someone who was there. I have read and loved books all my life, but nothing can beat the knowledge that comes from personal experience, your own or someone else’s.

  Colin Walmer took out the first title. That I know. His son and all the later generations developed the land, planted the oaks, put their roots deep into this soil. I know that, too, yet for me the real history of the farm started ninety-nine years ago, in 1883, when the escaped convicts murdered the Wessels family and my great grandfather Christiaan Wolmarans set off after them at the head of the local commando.