by Andre Brink
We buried him in the coffin that had been waiting in the attic since the day of our wedding to contain Piet’s recalcitrant body; he will need another now, a smaller one. They all came, not only from the Bokkeveld but from beyond the mountains, the distant fertile valleys of Tulbagh and Worcester, for the news had traveled far. Only Cecilia, of course, could not be moved for her wound; and her father stayed away stubbornly to tend her, implying perhaps we were to blame. They brought the others too for burial within the squat walls, newly whitewashed, of what will now be our family graveyard; it is February and too hot for bodies to travel. The new schoolmaster Verlee; and Hans Jansen who, having come for his stray mare, had shared their death. Jansen had no relatives living close enough to attend. Verlee’s wife Martha was there, a small young pretty thing clutching a baby, herself a mere child not yet recovered it seems from the dull surprise of being deprived, through his death, of innocence.
The biggest funeral, they said, the Bokkeveld had ever seen, and dust enough to return to. It took place at noon, so people could leave after the big dinner on the trestled tables under the trees; mutton, venison, potatoes and sweet-potatoes, yellow-rice with raisins, pumpkin, beans. Close on a hundred people, children included; yet, standing together in a hot throng surrounding the three graves, dry holes broken into the unremitting summer soil, we seemed a mere handful on the hard hillside with the mountain behind us and the yellow valley sweeping out below, trembling in a white noon haze; the house on one side, where in stark uncool shade Piet lay breathing and staring, tended I presume by Rose who was taking the chance in my absence to reassert her old subversive hold on him. We stood staring uncomprehending at these graves, exposed to the violent simplicity of the landscape around us, endless and monotonous, vast, patient, bare. We must have appeared incongruous, a handful of grain forgotten on a barren threshing-floor after the workers and the horses had left and the wind had blown away the brittle dust of husks and chaff. But it was not hostile. It had always been hostile, threatening me not with obscure dangers lurking unknown, unknowable, but with its very assertive emptiness; not with mystery but the absence of mystery. Now, for the first time, I felt I had a reason to be here. “Belong” would put it too strongly, no one “belongs” here. But through the death of my son and the imminent death of my husband—breathing and staring there, close by, tended by the dark free woman—I had acquired a responsibility towards the place, the landscape, ours, mine. My life is vested here, I shall be buried with the Van der Merwes. My extraneity has been strangely and solemnly resolved. In Nicolaas my flesh lies interred in this earth, and I am growing towards it.
The slaves were huddled beside the house, not daring to approach: dull placid faces hewn from dark stone, suggesting the cool of the earth as well as its secret heat. Will these too rise against us one day or night? Who are they? They move through our houses, lurk in our lives, but I know nothing of them. Who are we? In this hour of death our shared existences were unravelled and we were left separate, their group beside the house, ours assembled at the graves. Afterwards their men were summoned to fill up the holes while ours watched smoldering, with many guns at hand. Some of the younger ones, Frans du Toit among them, those who had been close to Nicolaas, were muttering in frustration; and Barend, overcome with grief and probably with shame for the nature of his escape, broke away from our group and raised a trembling gun at the men levelling the mounds, but I stopped him. Not on my farm, I told them. We are civilized people, we have standards to uphold, it is for us to set a Christian example. They complied, submitting I suppose to me not as a woman but as the mother of a murdered son.
After they had gorged themselves the people dispersed. Barend and Hester proposed to stay the night, but I preferred to be alone; I’d even sent away the slaves, out of sight in their huts. It was not easy to convince Hester. Thin and dark, she remains singularly close to me, closer than my sons had ever been allowed to be, contained as always in herself, yet now, I sensed, more vulnerable than before. After eight years of marriage to Barend she still had the hard and lean unyielding body of a girl, denying knowledge of the man who had taken her, a waif of fifteen, to himself. The large dark eyes unchanged, disconcerting in their nakedness, and hungry, yet refusing charity. But now, subdued it seemed by death—she’d always been close to Nicolaas as a child—she appeared matured, prepared for pain, as if a consummation of the flesh had finally taken place and at last she seemed ready to acknowledge ineluctable womanhood no longer as fate but as fulfillment.
In the room, after they had left for Elandsfontein, silence was shaped by Piet’s breathing and by a single wasp droning against a closed window. The woman Rose still sat on the floor beside the bed, staring at him, unmoved by my presence.
I said: “Rose,” meaning to send her away too, eager to repossess him and our solitude (the blonde girl Martha and her baby had gone back to the graves to gape in meek awe); but I stopped. There was no need. All these years she had been in the background, suckling our children, taking to her deep body my husband and others, abundant and accessible as any cow, fertile as earth, threatening my small decent authority with her voluptuous presence. When I died, I used to think, he would continue to sow and reap as if nothing had happened; his robust male need would find the female ready. But standing in the door that day—Piet breathing and the persistent wasp droning on the pane, the woman in humble dignity on the dung-floor, my son safe in his grave—I felt anxiety recede like a tide and leave me peaceful and in command. We were old, all three of us, beyond the urgency and exigencies of desire; the white house enclosed us in unthreatened harmony, and outside was the immensity of earth in which I now had a stake with them. In the silence death approached—age its burden and its mark—an ally inspiring confidence, extenuating suffering.
“You can stay the night,” I said to Rose. Tomorrow will be time enough to go.”
Together, we washed him and changed his sheets and made him as comfortable as we could, lavishing on him the care of our common motherhood, while outside the fierce day drew to its end and sunset sounds began to ease the silence into dusk. I fetched the blonde girl from the grave; Rose and I fed the baby and put it to sleep, then comforted the child-mother in her bed. She smiled and briefly kissed me when I tucked her in, cried for a little while, subdued by the gentleness of her ignorance, and slept.
Was I like that, once, a frail blonde doll, flirting with life? Less passive surely, more blindly defiant, high-spirited, headstrong: but then, I’d never had any responsibility to death at her age. Life in the Cape was frivolous and haphazard, there was no need to be involved; evasion sufficed. And how I loved it—the band playing in the Public Gardens of a Sunday, the parade of smart gentlemen and ladies, Malays in tall conical hats or turbans red or blue, red-sashed and agile as monkeys, laughter in the shade of the oak trees, slaves cavorting in their own exuberant dances; the masked ball at the end of winter, curtseying girls and dazzling men, dignitaries from passing vessels, music until the break of day; the throng on the quays when the ships came in, letters from abroad, Holland or Batavia, rumours of irrelevant wars and winters unbelievable in our temperate Little Paris. Without any warning the stranger from the interior arrived in our house, taller than the door, in his duffel jacket and sheepskin trousers, with his booming voice and boisterous laughter. The scent, the smart of the inordinate—in that whirl of gauze and ribbons and gaiety where tomorrow was of no concern and yesterday of no substance, where one’s only responsibility lay in arriving home by the appointed hour and one’s only sense of tragedy in a favorite blue dress torn or a small porcelain ornament—cat? dog? lady with parasol?—broken by a slave (duly punished). Only at night, but rarely, after the town-crier had passed on his rounds, when the distant almost inaudible low boom of an incoming tide insinuated itself into one’s body in repose, there might be a stirring of uneasiness, a youthful pang of uncertainty, an intimation, perhaps—how can one be sure after so many years?—of something else,
different, remote. All this vagueness of idle nights suddenly embodied in a man, expressed in a name: Piet van der Merwe. Yes, I’ll marry you. Yes, of course I’ll run away with you.
The Cape Flats had been my inland boundary—dune upon dune, bleak and pale, marked by tortoises and snakes and the footprints of scavengers—and crossing them sealed off not only familiar space but time as well, the past, making both irrevocable. Days in vaguely menacing territory, green but strange, defined only by the motion of the wagon and circumscribed by the terror following a reckless and unredeemable transgression. There was a brief if irrelevant respite in the incredibly luxuriant valley of Waveren: but then came the mountains, those forbidding mountains. No man could possibly scale them, I was convinced; yet there were the tracks of wagons, and tossing and swaying we crossed them, the ultimate frontier and abandonment of hope, to break into a new dimension of intractable land, Africa. After the compliance of the Cape there was this new crudeness, simple statements of stone and narrow valleys: destiny assuming the shape of a cruel geography.
The very thought of returning had been crushed. For there had been, simultaneously, the other adventure, that other frontier crossed: impaled, terrified, humiliated, quickened—then left exposed and torn, trying in vain to enfold an aching new emptiness.
There was pride too, for having initially implied consent, even though at the time I did not fully know to what, I could not return to face either the rejection or the forgiveness of the righteous. I had to stay; I would be his wife. But I would not acquiesce. In this high forlorn region of mountains and men I saw all too soon the rare women reduced slowly to meek and pliant negative flesh, obtuse and coarse, bearers of children, mistresses of slaves. My survival was vested in resistance; I would live with him, but I would not lower my standards, I would patiently force a civilized way of life on this household. We would have our meals on time; we would be suitably attired at table; our children would read and write; the house would be spotless, not the fly-ridden sties overrun by poultry and goats I had seen elsewhere; our slaves would be instructed in Holy Scripture. Piet thought it a joke and roared with laughter; I persisted. He flew into rages and threatened to break me in forcibly; I persisted. When he came home at the wrong hour there would be no food; if he refused to wash or to dress properly I would not serve him. In the end he submitted as, in other things, I yielded to his superior force. Water eroding stone.
Attrition. The body shows it. These hard, calloused hands, weary with overwork, once were supple and gloved, kissed by officers. The bent spine was straight. These lave breasts were tight and firm; Piet was addicted to them, laughing away my protestations of shame when he fondled them: the only rude tenderness he knew to show in what was possibly love.
Once, after our savage wedding and Barend’s birth, he took me back to Cape Town. I was sick with joy. We were accepted with a show of formal goodwill by my family, but unsmiling forgiveness could not bridge the chasm. The Cape had become the past world of a girl who no longer existed: I had no place in the interior, but there was no possibility of return or rediscovery. The balls and races, the officers’ parties appeared frivolous and irksome, not because the Cape had become British but because I no longer belonged. And yet, as soon as we had crossed our great mountains again, I was as lost as before: a bird exhausted with flying yet unable to settle on crippled feet. I missed the sea: yes, that indeed. But suppose he took me back to it, what would I do? Sit meekly on the sand, listening to the sound, rush into the breakers to soak myself and drown? There was no reason in it at all. And the next time he offered to take me with him I declined, not like a good Christian renouncing something dear for the salvation of his soul but in a small decisive way, accepting that I had foregone all hope of settlement. This I would not share with anyone, least of all with Piet. I became possessive of my own agony. No one should even suspect its existence. I would save face to spare us all the disgrace of incomprehension.
There were the children, of course; the only future I dared presume. The first was Barend, a large, strong baby torn from me and leaving me helpless; if Rose hadn’t intervened he may not have survived. I could never reconcile myself with the thought that she’d suckled him, precisely because it had saved his life. He was the first thing I had ever owned for myself. From the moment I recovered I kept him with me night and day, except when he had to be fed; the effort wasted my body, yet I thrived on it. He was mine, a personal fulfillment, a bestowal of meaning on an ignominious act. The eighteen months after his birth was the closest I came to happiness since the carefree ignorance of my youth. A second pregnancy deprived me of that shortlived joy. I was constantly ill; without the ministration of herbs and horrible concoctions devised by Rose I might have died: I wasn’t sure that I didn’t want to. The child was stillborn, but the illness persisted; I’d lost much of my determination. Piet took over the care of the boy. “I won’t allow my son to be a sissy. I’ll teach him to be a man like myself.” I intervened when I could but had to give up when I fell pregnant again. This time it was Nicolaas and I hated him for forcing my first-born Barend finally beyond my reach. Because he was a frail and sickly child he demanded constant attention almost as if, even as a baby and helpless, he willed me into overcoming my rancor; I exorcised guilt by devoting even more time and care to him than was perhaps necessary.
Barend was bewildered by it all. He had lost me to a sickly, constantly crying younger brother: after sharing intimately the shadow of happiness in my life he was thrust from it, exposed to the harsh demands of a father who knew only the sjambok and the thong to overcome resistance and instill fear where respect was impossible. When Barend crawled to me for comfort, sometimes sobbing in the night, he was torn from my arms by Piet and bundled away; and miserably I learnt to suppress my own burning love in order to save him from the punishment which his father, loth to take it out on me, inflicted on the child instead. I knew then that I had been mistaken in trying to secure a future for myself through the children: I had served only to bring them into the world so that Piet could take them away in order to shape them to his own image.
In the end, broken in like a horse, Barend submitted. He became secretive in his ways, refusing to confide in anyone; learning to obtain by stealth what would undoubtedly be denied him in open confrontation. He did whatever Piet expected him to do, he even took pride I think in his father’s obvious satisfaction with his strength and prowess; but a brooding sullenness remained, never openly expressed, but in its very muteness unnerving. Especially to me, as it became obvious that he bore me a particular grudge for having, as it must have seemed to him, abandoned him; and though I ached for him I knew very soon that I had effectively lost him.
Did I compensate by showing even more affection for Nicolaas whom I continued secretly to blame? Oh God, how agonizing and impossible it all was. To love, to hate; to loathe, to yearn for: how subtle the gradations of our suffering, the stations of our solitude, victims of our own condition. And how does one break out, how recognize the moment propitious for revolt? For us it never came. Perhaps there is redemption in submission; but sometimes even the distinction between heaven and hell seems blurred.
I clung to Nicolaas too, the more so since in Barend I could see what was in store for him. God, oh God, I often thought, how would he survive in Piet’s world? It would be so much easier to be a dumb beast of burden, bending under the yoke and plodding on, unquestioning, like a slave.
By the time one breaks through to a perception of truth it is no longer true: one is always, inevitably?, too late: the wedding—the first child—the second—the third—Hester—and now this death and Piet’s immobility.
That I would lose Nicolaas too, this delicate blond boy, that he too would be forced to progress from son to adversary, a member of “their” world hostile to mine, was never in doubt. But the transition was less violent than with Barend, possibly because by that time Piet had already accepted Barend as “his”; there was less
urgency to claim a younger frailer son. And for a long time, for years, after Piet had set to work on Nicolaas he would still come back to me secretly to confide or be cherished. Barend submitted grudgingly to my lessons of reading and writing, some arithmetic, and whatever I could recall of history or geography; but Nicolaas was an enthusiastic pupil and he used to spend hours with the Bible. Which was an embarrassment to Piet: by no means could he condone negligent work; yet it was difficult to reproach Nicolaas for occupying himself with the things of God. The solution lay in restricting the time for Bible reading to Sundays or evenings, leaving the daylight hours for work: six days shalt thou labor. Even so I noticed that, whenever Nicolaas was sent out with the sheep, he would take the heavy Bible or a more manageable hymn book in his knapsack to the grazing place. Sometimes, inevitably, the sheep would stray while he lay reading in the meagre shade of thorn bush or tree, and a jackal would get at one. Then Nicolaas would be beaten, one of those terrible floggings in which Piet spared neither slave nor son, going on endlessly, dull voluptuous smack upon smack penetrating to wherever I was trying to hide with the corner of dress or apron stuffed into my mouth to stifle the sobs of rage and helplessness; and salt would be rubbed into the open wounds; and at night I would have to spend hours trying delicately to detach the torn shirt from the coagulated blood disfiguring a back that once had been babyish and smooth and mine.
The strange thing was that Nicolaas seemed to bear it with more resilience than his brother. He may not have been physically strong but he was tough. In a way it may have prompted Piet to be even more harsh with him, but I believe he admired him too. And it was only later, at the time of Barend’s marriage, that Nicolaas became obstinate in a different way, moody, aggressive, with flares of temper that provoked Piet to greater extremes of violence and brought on, in me, more of the blinding headaches that had become the bane of my life on the farm.