The Afrikaner

by Arianna Dagnino

  Exhausted, Aunt Claire closes her eyes. Her hands are now resting on the linen sheet as inert roots. When her last words come they are barely audible yet strike Zoe with their intensity: “Never reveal what you’ ll find in those diaries. I beg you!” Her aunt’s eyes, suddenly wide open, are fixed into hers. Shaken, Zoe nods. Two hours later, Aunt Claire takes her last breath. At her behest, Willem Heyns, the estate’s director, is appointed as guardian of the two young Du Plessis children, until Zoe comes of age.

  The fuel gauge light starts blinking, drawing Zoe away from her recollections. She straightens her back against the car seat and sets her gaze upon the last chain of mountains before the Finistère. Fifty kilometres later, she rolls the car down the other side of the Franschhoek Pass towards an undulating sea of vineyards. After the dryness of the Karoo, the valley seems ever greener. It shines proud and confident under a sky like cobalt blue porcelain. In the flawless light, the red spikes of flamboyant trees and the snow-white gables of the Cape Dutch farmhouses seem to come directly at the eye. It’s an optical effect that verges on the sense of touch.

  As she pulls into the driveway of the Finistère lined with tall camphor trees, Zoe slows down, taking in its centuries-old spirit. With time she has come to regard this last stretch of road as part of a cleansing ritual. Going through this leafy tunnel means purging oneself of the evils and worries of the outside world. Emerging from its shadows, she blinks at the glare of the white-washed façade of the Finistère. She is home. But, this time, she is not cleansed.

  Zoe’s still getting her bag out of the car when she hears the sound of hurried footsteps on the gravel. She turns and finds herself in the fat, golden brown arms of Georgina, the old housekeeper. After their aunt’s death, she is the one who raised her and her brother to the rhythm of the harvests. Everything seems to overflow ever so gently from her: her generous disposition, her wide hips, her muscular legs, her breasts — swollen like ripe grapefruits and soft as home-made butter. There is always something warm and reassuring in her physical contact. For a moment, Georgina’s smile emphasizes a row of large white regular teeth, before she closes her mouth abruptly, staring at Zoe in disbelief.

  “My baby! What have you done to your hair?”

  “Just wanted to try something different.”

  Instead of grinning at her quip, Zoe looks sadly into her aia’s eyes and then buries her face in the tangle of her frizzy grey hair. She smells ginger.

  “André told me you’d come today. He’s out with the men right now. I’ll send someone to let him know you are here.”

  “No, wait. I’d rather go. Where?”

  “Over there.” Georgina points towards that part of the vineyard that clambers more steeply up the flank of the hill. Zoe walks into it, gazing at the rows of wavy green hills crashing against a crown of purple mountains. She spots her brother and old Willem busy checking young vines. As she walks towards them she takes in André’s features, so starkly Mediterranean, as if his face had been carved wildly — the irregular nose, the nervous mouth, the prominent cheekbones — or had been drawn in charcoal — black eyes, dark locks of unkempt hair.

  He looks more and more like dad. Only his skin colour, even though belonging to someone used to living out of doors, reveals traces of a diaphanous English pallor. He wears an old chequered shirt and khaki pants; Zoe reckons he must have put on some weight since the last time they saw each other. When André spots her, he runs up, presses her to him with one arm and, with his free hand, rubs her skull in what is a habitual gesture of affection between them.

  “Redhead! You’re back at last! What happened to your mane, though? I hardly recognize you.”

  “Not you too, André. Georgina has already told me off.”

  He releases her so that she can greet Willem. Zoe extends her hand. Despite his age — the director of the Finistère is now well over sixty — his grip is firm as ever. As usual, when they meet there is coldness in their greeting.

  Her brother proudly motions towards the new buds.

  “Come and see our new vines. We’re trying to grow good Chardonnay on this side of the hill. It will take no fewer than five years.”

  “Quite some time,” she says without really paying attention.

  “Not for those who work with vineyards,” Willem says.

  Zoe looks at the director unblinking. Instead of replying she turns to her brother: “Shall we head home, André?”

  As they walk towards the house, he no longer holds it back: “You’re a mess ousus, no kidding. Has your Latin Lover anything to do with it?”

  “Dario died. Three days ago. A hijacking.”

  André tightly wraps his arm under her shoulder and keeps walking, without saying a word. Silence is his way of expressing sorrow, pain, grief.

  A childhood memory flashes back. Zoe doesn’t censor it.

  A policewoman informs them of the death of their parents. André sits speechless, staring at the lady in uniform, then runs up the stairs and takes refuge in the attic. For five days he locks himself up there. Zoe brings him baskets with food prepared by Georgina. He doesn’t even bother looking at her. Eventually, though, they take to eating together, holed up in their lonely nest, away from everything and everyone. Day after day, lying on frayed Oriental rugs, through the small attic window they watch the light fade away in the treetops. At night, André curls up next to her like a blind kitten in search of warmth. Zoe keeps him close to her, humming the old lullabies their aia taught them. No one interferes with their grieving. The Finistère waits, hoping that, in a few weeks, a nine-year-old boy would turn into a man.

  “Were you serious about him?” André finally asks.

  Zoe leans on his shoulder.

  “Ja.”

  With his arm now around her waist, André leads her towards the jacaranda behind the big house; so many times have they played, fought, cried, laughed together under its canopy. They sit in its green shadow, letting their fraternal warmth join forces with the reassuring steadiness of the tree.

  It’s dusk when they walk into Georgina’s kitchen. On the large wooden table, stacked neatly in rows of four, are dozens of gemmerkoekies.

  “You rarely come to see us these days. And look at how skinny you are!” Georgina says, feeling her waist with chubby fingers. “When is the last time you ate a proper bobotie?”

  Zoe grabs a biscuit. She is hungry, despite it all. She bites into the gingery soul of the cookie.

  “They taste as good as ever, Ouma.”

  Meanwhile, André pours two cups of coffee from the hot pot on the stove and sits at the large square table; it’s so big that in their youth more than once she and her brother danced on it. Since the day they were orphaned and against Willem’s will, they’ve taken all their meals in the kitchen rather than in the severe dining room. Their friends too, when they came for a visit, would prefer the cozy warmth of Georgina’s world, with its copper pots and pans hanging on the wall, the huge old wood-burning oven always lit in winter, the jars of jams and preserves neatly arranged on walnut shelves. On the table soon appear pancakes, toasted bread, scrambled eggs and boerewors. Zoe looks at their aia gratefully, trying not to show her sadness.

  After dinner brother and sister move out on the covered stoep. Zoe sinks into a low wicker chair and closes her eyes, breathing in the scent of jasmine in bloom.

  “How long will you stay?”

  “A week. I fly back on Wednesday morning.”

  “So soon? Can’t you take a few more days off work? It won’t be easy for you back there.”

  “I know.”

  André waits for his sister’s thoughts to wander through the silence of the night.

  “I will ask Kuyper to send me into the bush,” she says at last.

  “Where?”

  “In the Kalahari.”

  “Another desert.”

  A full moon is rising across the valley from behind the darkened mountains.

  “Africa kills, Africa resurrects,”
dad used to say. “Perhaps up there you will find some relief.”

  Zoe doesn’t reply. She knows she won’t — she is a firstborn Du Plessis.

  André draws closer and gently passes his hand through her cropped hair.

  “You’re exhausted. Have a good sleep and let the Finistère take care of you.”

  5

  FAMILY SECRETS

  HER ROOM IS unchanged. The adventure novels, the atlases, the scientific texts: Everything is in its usual place, as if this were the museum of her own life. Shells, rocks, minerals, bird feathers, collections of beetles and butterflies in small glass cases fill the shelves. Each object she gazes upon has a story to tell. On the mantelpiece, two human skulls still catch the eye: Zoe was about thirteen when she decided to place them there.

  Her mind goes back to that evening when, walking in to wish her good night, her mother found those four empty sockets staring at her.

  She is not impressed. “How did you get them?” she asks in that annoyingly dry tone of hers. Zoe is reluctant to reveal that dad has procured the skulls at her request. She had spotted them in an antique shop in Cape Town while waiting for her mum, busy with some last-minute errands. She knows the issue might be yet another source of discord between her parents. When she had asked for the skulls on the spot, Gloria had refused to buy them. Now, after tortuous negotiations, she surrenders and allows her to keep those gruesome remains where they are. Since that night, however, Zoe senses her mum no longer feels comfortable entering the room of this unruly and introverted daughter of hers, seemingly more in love with the dead than with the living.

  Twenty years later, Zoe wonders if this was her little revenge for having felt excluded from her mother’s fatuous and glistening world.

  She undresses and puts on an old linen nightgown, breathing in the faint trace of lavender. She looks at the heavy oak cabinet in front of her, hesitates, then opens it and removes a pile of blankets to free the box she recovered at the time of Aunt Claire’s death. She pauses to look at it, lightly touching its simple shape, imagining the hand that crafted it: all that patient file and sandpaper work to smooth edges, trying to infuse a touch of discreet gentleness amidst the harshness of frontier life.

  She walks to the mantelpiece and shoves a finger into the eye socket of one of the skulls to retrieve a small key hidden inside.

  As she opens the box, her mind races back to the night when she ventured into the attic looking for the diaries. She relives the sense of anticipation once she found those wellguarded written memories and started reading them, but also the mixed feeling of gruesome fascination and disappointment as she went through records which dripped with family drama and outmoded lyricism. Because, in the end, what she discovered in those pages seemed to her the workings of altered minds, at times steeped in horror, more than the recounting of factual stories. In any case, all that — she told herself at that time — had nothing to do with her. With Dario’s death, however, the narrative engraved in those pages has suddenly acquired a stark, albeit irrational, authenticity.

  Fighting her exhaustion, Zoe pages through the journal of Great-Aunt Charlotte, the sister of her great-grandfather. She hasn’t opened it since that night, eighteen years ago. Now, after what has just happened, she feels the urge to go back to it and read it under a different light. The notebook is made of thick yellow paper covered with worn leather and secured shut by a lace wrapped several times around it. Unfortunately, two-fifths of it has been reduced to ashes. Its pages break off abruptly, sinking into scorched edges, so that often one has to guess what the surviving stubs of words might mean.

  The diary begins with the family tree and the history of the Du Plessis family. Evidently, the line of descent was copied from the final pages, left blank on purpose, of the voluminous Bible that Jean-Marc Du Plessis brought with him from Holland. Often regarded as the only real asset by most pioneer families, that old tome weighing several pounds passed intact from one generation to another — till hers. Year after year, every death, birth or marriage was scrupulously recorded in there. Zoe runs her finger through the tree branches and stops at Charlotte’s name. She was a first-born, like her.

  The journal’s historical account starts in 1698, the year in which Jean-Marc Du Plessis landed in Cape Town with his wife and two sons, along with another hundred and eighty French Huguenots. They were all fleeing the wave of repression unleashed in France against the Reformed, as the followers of Calvin’s doctrine called themselves. Many escaped from certain death by taking refuge in Amsterdam, at the time the cradle of Protestantism. A handful of them ended up boarding a ship of the Dutch East India Company and trying their luck in the Cape Colony. Each family had been promised a plot of arable land. In this fashion, the French vignerons’ knowledge and skills reached the southern tip of Africa. It was their Calvinist faith, coupled with their religious zeal, that forever united Huguenots and Boers in their African destiny.

  Zoe leafs through the journal, trying to find a specific passage. She recognizes it immediately: The handwriting is uncertain and fragmented, as if the author had been in the grip of strong emotion. Moreover, in that spot the paper is unusually wrinkled. She is sure this page contains Aunt Charlotte’s desiccated tears.

  Franschhoek, November 13, 1899

  For as long as I will live, I will not go through a more painful day. For us settlers, life here in Africa has never been a light ride. But what I have learned today goes beyond the most horrific act of the imagination. I don’t know why I’m writing this, perhaps just to keep at bay this unbearable pain.

  Today Frank Russell, my fiancé, died falling from his horse during a race. He was twenty-seven and I loved him to distraction. He was my sun, my air, my music. My talking about him in the past seems so absurd! So far, I hadn’t written anything about him. I was afraid someone might read my journal before we made our engagement official. Now I could fill whole pages about our secret meetings, our walks in the moonlight, our early-morning rides on the river bank.

  Frank died, and with him died the woman in me. I will slowly wither, preserving my family honour. If he could, Frank would offer me the whole world, balancing it on the tip of an ostrich feather. He did much more than that, he gave me his life. Last night he asked Dad for my hand. And father said yes. We would be married in autumn, right after the harvest. My happiness lasted less than twenty-four hours. My anger and my guilt will last forever. For Frank’s death was not an accident, it was already written in my destiny. This whole story of the Du Plessis’ curse had always sounded so far-fetched to me. But facts rubbed the truth in my face, wiping off any doubt.

  Zoe gently closes the journal and lets her ancestor’s anguish join hers. Their shameful secret is now weighing on her heart too. Everything is quiet in the house; only the barking of a solitary dog comes from far away. Zoe turns out the light. In the semi-darkness, she sees the moon’s rays create patches of milky light on her coverlet. But she now hates the magic of this moment and buries her head under the pillow, wishing only for a dreamless sleep.

  6

  THE BLACK PARTNER

  FOR THE NEXT four days, Zoe doesn’t do much except walk through the vineyards and, in the hottest hours of the day, sit in her bedroom to re-read Aunt Charlotte’s journal. She is locked in her mourning and André makes sure nothing interferes with the cocoon into which she has retreated. Only the sound of farm activities comes to her like an unpleasant reminder that life still goes on. She usually meets her brother just before sunset, to have tea together on the stoep and watch the sun take its leave behind a blue strip of mountains.

  “Willem is getting old, it’s time for him to enjoy his retirement years,” André says one evening sucking avidly at his Gitanes cigarette, as if smoke could protect him from the coldness of this statement.

  The news comes as a relief — at least for her — but her brother looks troubled. The director of the Finistère occupies a major role, Zoe knows that. Not only must he manage the workers and their
families, but he is also the one entrusted with the quality control of grapes and the whole production line. André, as their father and grandfather did before him, is mainly involved in sales and distribution.

  “The amount of work has increased, recently,” André says. “With the end of the boycott, we have started selling our Cape wines in Europe and the States.”

  “Then you need someone with a good and clear idea of the market out there,” Zoe says pouring tea into their cups.

  “Definitely.”

  “Have you already a replacement in mind?” she asks rather absent-mindedly, her eyes half-closed.

  “Actually, yes. Although I wanted to discuss the matter with you first. I’d like your take on this.”

  “Since when do you need to consult with me to make decisions about the farm?”

  “This time it’s different,” André replies, lowering his voice. “I want to replace him with a black man.”

  Involuntarily, Zoe stops stirring honey in her tea. The tinkling of the teaspoon fades away, leaving behind a revealing silence. She turns to face him. He holds her gaze. She knows him too well: This time he is not kidding.

  “You should see your face!” he exclaims, relaxing his mouth in a half smile. “Wasn’t it you who once even told me off for being too harsh with our black workers?”

  “You’re right. You left me speechless.”

  Examining her reaction, Zoe has to admit that forty years of apartheid have taken their toll — even on her. She has always been in favour of black empowerment; redistribution is long overdue. Fifteen per cent of Whites should no longer control ninety percent of the country’s economy. Now that the matter concerns them directly, though, she can’t hide her hesitancy to face such a drastic change.