by Andre Brink
‘And then you sent him packing?’
‘No. The following week I accepted his offer,’ she says.
‘You accepted?’
‘I did. You see, it occurred to me that there were still five more Basson brothers, not counting the idiots. And the thought of going through the same rigmarole with all of them – because the family was set on having Sinai, and the only way of possessing it was by getting me first – that was too much for me. Even if it felt like signing my death warrant. In fact, I secretly vowed to commit suicide before the wedding day. Fortunately, as it turned out, such a drastic step wasn’t necessary.’
‘What happened then?’
‘An act of God. On one of his visits old Moishe brought not only merchandise and contraband books, but his nephew. And the first moment I set eyes on Jethro the wetness came. He was twenty-five, he had studied in Paris, he had the voice of an angel: not that I’ve ever seen or heard one, but I just knew. He was the first man I’d ever met who was made to my own measure, the only one who could save me from marriage. A man I could love, and fight with, and set the world on fire with. He could make music on his guitar that caused the stars to dance and the moon to tilt. He had the most exquisite hands I’ve ever seen on a man, and the whitest skin, the blackest eyes, the wonderfullest mouth. He’d come back to spend a year with his great-uncle (his parents, it seemed, were dead) and earn some money; then he would be leaving for Europe again. To do what? To sing and dance and write and live.’ Her eyes, closed all along, flicker open and a smile tugs at her lips.
I breathe in slowly, deeply. ‘Jethro was the man in your picture?’ I ask with a sense of illumination.
‘Of course.’
‘You ran away?’
‘Yes, and no. I first tried to do the decent thing. On the last day before old Moishe and Jethro were to leave, I spoke to the Wepeners. They couldn’t believe their ears, as you can well imagine. And in spite of all the resentment I’d built up against them all my life, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Everything they’d tried to achieve over the years, for themselves and for me, was brought down crashing on their heads. Then Hermanus Johannes, my father-grandfather, said something which changed it all. His face was twitching as if he was on the verge of having a stroke. (It was, in fact, a stroke that killed him only a month or so after I’d left.) He turned to Petronella and with a viciousness such as I’ve seldom heard in my long life he spat at her, “Bad blood will out. This is Rachel’s doing. It comes from you. There has never been anything like this on my side of the family.”
‘“What are you talking about?” I asked.
‘He grabbed Petronella by the shoulders. “You tell her,” he shouted.
‘And that was when I first learned about my mother.’
9
THE OLD HOUSE sighs and turns in its sleep, like an ancient derelict ship creaking on a dark sea, destination unknown. Its silence is replete with all its concealed life: birds and rodents, rustling insects, Trui and Jeremiah in their room, the stranger down in the basement.
Sometimes her voice fades away altogether. I cannot even be sure that what she says is what I write. And what I hear her whisper merges with what I remember, or seem to remember, from earlier times when she told similar stories. Yet I have the impression that our communication is not dependent on something as extraneous as a voice. There is a more immediate insinuation of what she says into my consciousness; she articulates my writing hand.
I have the feeling, both unsettling and reassuring, of recovering something: not the story as such, snatched from what may or may not have been my history, but this strange urge of the real towards the unreal, as if it must find its only possible justification there.
Father, I know, and Mother too, would have been shocked by this; their stark Calvinism did not allow for such invention. But have they not denied, in the process, precisely this surge of the imagination which links us to Africa, these images from a space inside ourselves which once surfaced in ghost stories and the tales and jokes and imaginings of travellers and trekkers and itinerant traders beside their wagons at night, when the fantastic was never more than a stone’s throw or an outburst of sparks away? How sad – no, how dangerous – to have suppressed all this for so long.
10
‘YOU SHOULDN’T TALK any more, Ouma,’ I tell her. ‘You’re tired. We can go on later.’
‘No. We don’t know how much time we have. And I want you to understand about my mother.’
‘Later,’ I plead with her.
But she is adamant, and I offer a compromise: first a few sips of glucose water, then oxygen. Thank God, the apparatus works smoothly. From now on, I instruct her, she must punctuate her narration with deep inhalations from the small tight-fitting mask. Her voice remains weak, but she seems less exhausted.
‘To understand something about my mother,’ whispers Ouma, her eyes closed again, as if she’s talking in her sleep, ‘you should first know more about Petronella. What brought her here, how she shaped, or desperately tried to shape, her life, why she married Hermanus Johannes Wepener. Her mother was known as the Fat Woman of the Transvaal. Throughout the violent years of the Great Trek, in a world shaped by men, she had survived by outmanning them all; but in the end she was sidelined by history. I’ll tell you about her later. Now it is Petronella’s turn.’
Petronella was born at the mouth of the Umgeni in Natal, a year or two after the Boers and the Zulus had their final, fatal encounter at Blood River, just at the time when the English started planning to annex the new land the Voortrekkers had finally conquered. For the first few years of her life the girl lived on the family farm at the edge of the sea. She used to spend whole days on the beach, surrounded by the crocodiles that slithered from the river to the high sandbanks: living in dread of Wilhelmina, they became more trusted child-minders than any dog. Sometimes, when Wilhelmina had business elsewhere, little Petronella could be left almost entirely to their care, building castles on the long clean stretch of beach, or tracing intricate patterns in the sand, then sitting back as the tide came in to watch with fascination as a whole day’s dedicated work was obliterated; she knew she could always start again the following day. At other times she would simply sit there on a dune, hugging her knees to her body, staring at the immensity of the Indian Ocean.
On one of those occasions, when her mother had deposited her on the beach with the crocodiles before going on her own business, Petronella saw a ship come past in the direction of Port Natal, in full sail. It was a sight such as she had never beheld before, and it was to obsess her dreams for years to come, even when in old age she began to lose her mind. At the same time it seemed to her the solution to all her mother’s worries. They should build their own ship, she proposed that evening, and simply sail away across the sea until they found a place where the English would never find them again. But Wilhelmina dismissed the thought: wherever there’s sea, she said, sooner or later there’s English. And if Natal were to be annexed, which now seemed more inevitable by the day, the only solution would be to turn their backs on the sea and move inland again, into the deepest interior, where their tribe could at last establish a homeland and be free.
Petronella was inconsolable. But deep in her heart a resolve had taken root that nothing would ever eradicate again. She was, profoundly and almost fatally, in love with the sea – not an infatuation such as one might feel for an idea or a cause or a landscape, but a burning, urgent and almost sensual attachment. She would have run away at the first opportunity, back to the sea, but her mother, who must have expected such a move, kept her tied down in the wagon until they were hopelessly far away.
Their trek finally came to rest beside an insignificant little stream that wound its way through the subtropical vegetation of the Northern Transvaal, a region recently invaded by a group of quite terrifying religious fundamentalists who, confident that they had traversed the length of Africa, took it to be the Nile. The Promised Land was near, Unfortunately
the area, for all its stunning beauty and fertility, also turned out to be a valley of death infested by tsetse fly that decimated the cattle, and by malaria that killed off the people.
Here Wilhelmina buried her third husband (she always despised weak men, yet could not resist marrying them) and most of her remaining children; her whole world caved in under her. And just before Petronella’s twentieth birthday, her mother finally expired – true to form, though, not with a whimper but a bang.
Among the young girl’s siblings two brothers, who had remained with their mother out of loyalty, reinforced perhaps by trepidation at what she might do if they dared voice discontent, decided to return to the Eastern Cape where, who knows, it might be possible to reclaim the family’s old farms. Petronella’s remaining sister got married within a month of her mother’s death and moved to Potchefstroom, at that time the capital of the Transvaal. Petronella was left behind with a single brother, Benjamin, reputed to suffer permanently from brain damage as the result of a blow to the head his mother had once dealt him with a plough after he’d inadvertently broken the blade. Brother and sister were by now living in a shack near the ruin of the house in which their mother lay buried, on the outskirts of the village of Nylstroom.
Petronella, who’d had a streak of religious fervour since a very early age, conferred for several nights with the quiescent Benjamin and decided on a course of action for themselves. It was really very predictable. In the time they had been living there she had already more than once attempted the building of a boat to take them back to the sea, but every time an act of God had intervened. A thunderstorm, once, in which the weird framework was struck by lightning and burnt to a cinder; on another occasion a passing group of blacks uprooted by the trekkers from their ancestral territories set upon a half-built boat and carried off the laboriously sawn beams and planks for firewood; in the end her mother had put an end to it by forbidding all further attempts – and once Wilhelmina had spoken no one, they knew from terrible experience, dared disobey.
Now at last Petronella was free to pursue the dream that obsessed her life. They would build a new ship, she told her halfwitted brother, right there on the banks of the Nile, and then float downstream, due north, until they reached the capital of Egypt; there they would obtain from the ruling pharaoh the wherewithal to cross the Red Sea and rejoin the people of Israel from whom the Boers had descended. And so they would attain the happiness in search of which her formidable mother had so fruitlessly sacrificed her whole life. After her long exposure to the reminiscences of her mother and the demented prophets among their neighbours, there was an understandable confusion in Petronella’s mind between the Promised Land and that stretch of beach along the sea that had shaped her consciousness in her earliest years and which was the only freedom she’d ever been allowed in her life. But it was no whimsy, she assured Benjamin. God had personally revealed to her, in a nightly visitation, that a new Flood was imminent; and unless they were prepared they would be swept away like the sinners of the Old Testament, the touchstone of her devout life. These visitations had been a feature of her life ever since the family had joined the trek from the threatened shore of Natal; and as Petronella ripened into adolescence God appeared to become more and more enthusiastic about these increasingly urgent communions with his maidservant. And she, too, it must be said, appeared to derive from this intercourse some quite extravagant and suspect physical pleasures.
It should be interpolated here that Petronella was surprisingly skilled in the art of reading and writing, thanks mainly to the instruction of the leading prophetess of the tribe, Tante Mieta Gous, who had seen in the girl a possible successor. This crazy old creature had two prize pupils, Petronella and a boy called Petrus Landman. (The only reason he deserves to be mentioned here is that it was he, most likely, who imprinted on Petronella the image of an ark: this Petrus told her about some remote ancestor of his who’d built a ship and sailed away into the desert, and this must have given shape to the urge she’d always had to sail away.) What was interesting, as far as Petronella was concerned, was that throughout her life she drew her inspiration from only two books – the Bible, of course, and an illustrated Dutch encyclopedia of obscure origins – both salvaged from the house in which her mother had died. The encyclopedia she would use for what to her was prophesying, while others called it fortune telling. Petronella’s method was disarmingly straightforward. She would look hard at her visitor, then close her eyes and enter into some kind of trance, whereupon she would put the huge book on its spine and allow it to fall open wherever it chose to. There she would scan the columns and take the first phrase or illustration that struck her as a starting point, allowing her guardian spirit or whatever to prompt the rest. This was a practice she indulged in to her dying day. The only curious thing about the whole business was that her predictions invariably turned out to be right.
The first time she had resorted to it was when at the age of twelve or thirteen she’d provoked her mother into threatening to beat her to a pulp with a cast-iron frying pan: in her haste to get away Petronella had caused the encyclopedia to fall from the tambotie dining table, and seeing the picture of a lion where the pages had fallen open she’d invented the prediction of a predator destroying their flocks should her mother proceed with the beating. The mother wasn’t impressed but as the two of them erupted from the house one of the boys came running from the river shouting that a whole pride of lions was stalking the flock and that someone had to get a gun and come quickly, quickly, for God’s sake.
Since that day Petronella’s reputation had spread steadily through most of the Northern Transvaal, to the extent that she herself started believing her prophesies (and why shouldn’t she, since everything came true?). Small wonder that her vision of a coming Flood caused a considerable stir in that far-flung Godfearing community. And so she and her brother Benjamin started building, aided by what casual help they could afford from blacks in the surrounding countryside and from neighbours either generous enough to offer their services or credulous enough to heed the prophecy of another impending Flood. The boat was, to say the least, huge, its dimensions gleaned from close readings of Genesis: three hundred cubits in length, fifty cubits in breadth, and thirty in height, with the odd door and window in accordance with the instructions the Lord God had once given unto his faithful servant Noah.
One problem was that there was no gopher wood in the vicinity, as stipulated by Noah’s instructions for assembly, nor teak as recommended by the Dutch encyclopedia; but in the end they made do with tambotie and wild olive; and the boat turned out very handsome indeed, if rather large and unwieldy (all the more so since they had no inkling of how to measure a cubit) for the trickle of the Nile in those parts. In fact, the vessel effectively stemmed the flow of the little river, causing mild flooding in the area and a total stoppage of water lower down, resulting in outbreaks of hostilities among the affected farmers. But it didn’t last too long as the very night after the completion of the ark, and only hours after Petronella and Benjamin had moved in below deck and hoisted the great sails copied from her memory of the splendid sight beheld years before from the beach of Port Natal, the flood did come, washing away everything in its wake and carrying the boat with it, all the way to Egypt.
That, at least, was what Petronella solemnly swore through all the years to come. There were, inevitably, those who ridiculed the story, insisting that the ark came to grief in the storm barely a hundred yards from where the flood first shouldered it, and that both the occupants were so grievously injured that by the time they set out, on foot, for the Promised Land their hold on the real world was, to say the least, tenuous. This might explain why, when they surfaced in the civilised world again, completely off course, in Algoa Bay, almost two years after the flood, Petronella mistook the wide tract of sand and dunes along the Eastern Cape coast for the Sahara or the Sinai desert or the shore of the Red Sea; whatever the case may be, she believed to the day of her death that she had reac
hed Egypt, after travelling the last several hundred miles on foot, the ark having disintegrated along the way. There is no point in splitting hairs. In Africa a few thousand miles south or north isn’t worth quibbling about.
What matters is that soon after arriving at what she regarded as her first destination, and while she was still waiting for an audience with the pharaoh to be arranged (she was quite confident that a terse reminder of the circumstances surrounding the original exodus would suffice to persuade him to assist her in all possible ways in crossing the sea into Palestine), a very presentable man made his appearance. He was called Hermanus Johannes Wepener, and he’d come to sell some produce in the Bay. When she told him she was waiting for a lift to Canaan he was most happy to oblige. There may have been some misunderstanding along the way as it is barely credible that he should have deceived her outright; but whatever the specific circumstances, which surely are of little consequence in a story, he told her – or she came to understand – that he could take her to the land of Canaan along a short cut, overland rather than across the sea. She was distressed at having to leave the sea behind – she’d dreamed so much about it and travelled so far to reach it – but found the man’s company agreeable enough to consent, provided her brother accompany them. And in due course they arrived here in the Little Karoo which, Hermanus Johannes Wepener assured her, was every bit as good, if not better, than the land of Canaan. My own guess is that she secretly suspected they were still in Egypt, which would explain why this farm was given the outlandish name of Sinai.