by Andre Brink
Hermanus Johannes Wepener was eager to get married and start a family, but Petronella wanted to make quite sure he could be depended upon. One must understand the situation in which she found herself, even apart from that disturbing religious streak in her. All her life, like the rest of the vast brood in whose midst she’d grown up, she had been dominated by the looming figure of her mother. Whatever differences there might have been between them, that great mother was always there, not just in the background but surrounding her family, as the ultimate arbiter of the permissible and the forbidden, of right and wrong, good and evil. But this was a role her mother could play only because she was exceptional, in every sense larger than life. Petronella on her own, a young woman literally stranded on the beach of an unknown ocean, amounted to nothing, nothing at all. And Benjamin, as loyal as any large floppy-eared dog but soft in the head, was useless.
No wonder she retreated, when it suited her, into the asylum her excessive religiousness had provided; but it would be misguided, I’m sure, to think her mad. Shrewd she was, canny, at times uncanny; but no, not mad. I knew her too intimately, saw too much of her real vulnerability. At the same time there was nothing planned or contrived about the way she grasped at what Hermanus Johannes Wepener appeared to offer. What she did was probably to consult the Dutch encyclopedia which had so amazingly survived the flood with her. And then to read into it whatever best suited her, which was to attach herself to this big-boned, well-to-do, seemingly respectable man who could guarantee her some standing in the world. ‘Standing’, after all, was what her mother had always had, because of her physical prowess and her ferocious temper in her younger years, her sheer size in older age. On her own Petronella could not attain this; nor would she have wanted to, I suspect, if she could. But with Hermanus Johannes Wepener at her side she might enter whatever Promised Land she had elected.
Even so she wanted to be quite sure, before the knot was tied, that he could be trusted in every respect to do her bidding, while offering her the security and standing she sensed she needed, She proceeded very methodically to put her intended to the test with a series of Herculean labours, the last of which was the uprooting of all the vines, which had been the pride of his farm. Hermanus Johannes Wepener complied. And at last they were married and embarked with commendable dedication to the raising of a family. Eulalie, Willem, Barend and Martiens, and then the fateful girl, Rachel.
Somewhere along the way Benjamin disappeared. God alone knows what happened to him. A poor weakling for most of his life, ever since that plough dashed his hopes of a normal future, he may well have died what in the circumstances would have been a natural death. Or, as some people have suggested over the years, he may have become the first inhabitant of the basement after the construction of this house. Or, as another theory has it, he may have been inadvertently bricked up in one of the thick walls. A more malicious rumour has it that he was the father of the child Rachel came to be pregnant with soon after her fourteenth birthday. Or worse, that he was Rachel’s father, standing in for Hermanus Johannes Wepener on one of the latter’s journeys to Algoa Bay or the more distant Cape. But there are flaws in each of these suggestions; so why opt for any one? He may simply have flown away with the birds one day, or crawled into an aardvark hole never to emerge again: is this really more fanciful than any other explanation? The story doesn’t need him any more, so we’ll drop him here, yet another skeleton in yet another cupboard.
In one respect – unfortunately the only respect that ultimately mattered – Hermanus Johannes Wepener did fail her. He never took her back to the sea. That meant that, even after the ordeals she’d put him through, she regarded him as a traitor to the last, unworthy of her trust. Consequently their marriage was a running battle of epic proportions. On the surface, especially in the company of others, they were the perfect couple; but below that veneer all hell was seething. I suspect that for Hermanus Johannes religion was the surest means of advancement in the community; Petronella resigned herself to the rages and disappointments of matrimony because suffering was God’s way of proving his unfathomable love. And also because – of this both her Bible and her encyclopedia assured her – it was certain not to last.
Even after forty years of marriage she still regarded this farm as a place of temporary sojourn, a watering place in the desert from which they would eventually set forth to their true destination. And this, I guess, explains the house. She never thought of it as a house. It was her ultimate boat, her ship, her ark, to redeem her from the corrupted world; the vessel in which, one day, when it behoved the Lord God, she would sail forth to the sea that nightly washed the shores of her dreams.
11
AND THEN RACHEL was born. From the first stirrings in her womb Petronella felt different about this child. The older ones, Eulalie and Willem and Martiens and Barend, were no more than the inevitable consequence and proof of her unremitting war with her husband. They were cared for and, I suppose, loved according to the Bible’s requirements for parenthood. Rachel was different.
For one thing, the child was born during one of Hermanus Johannes Wepener’s prolonged absences from home which grew both longer and more frequent as the matrimonial war at home became more intense. This particular journey had kept him from home for just over a year. When on his return he was confronted with an unexpected new child he flew into a rage and accused Petronella of consorting with all and sundry, from neighbours to goats and devils. The child had been born six months ago, she answered calmly. Then it must be retarded, he shouted: anyone could see the baby was a puny little thing no more than a few weeks old. There were no neighbours to call as witnesses, as Petronella had kept to herself during the term of his absence; and not a single labourer on the farm could be induced, whether by plying them with wine, subjecting them to extensive sermons, or by the infliction of corporal punishment, to shed any more light on the matter. Instead of raging back at her husband, as Petronella was wont to do, she met his wildest accusations with a serene smile and the simple response that if the child wasn’t his (and whose else could it conceivably be, since he knew all too well how loathsome she found sexual congress) it could only have been the outcome of an immaculate conception. In fact, she told him, gaining quite visibly in confidence and enthusiasm as she spoke, that the miraculous nature of the event had been announced beforehand by none other than God Almighty himself during one of his nightly visitations. Furthermore, it had been corroborated subsequently by the encyclopedia. He was free to look it up for himself, she’d made a note of it, page 463.
And nothing could ever prise anything else from her.
On one of the occasions when he brought the matter up again – it became the best opening gambit to any argument for the next forty years – she quietly countered, ‘What did you do during that year, Hermanus? Were you faithful to me?’ It was the first time, amazing as it might sound in retrospect, she had retaliated in kind: previously, whatever else she might have hurled at him, verbally or physically, his sexual fidelity or lack of it had never entered their quarrels. Being part, presumably, of woman’s fate, she had tended in the past, with the grace of God and a silent grim wish for eventual divine retribution, to grin and bear it. But no longer.
Hermanus Johannes gaped at her. ‘What do you mean? How dare you!’
‘I was just asking. There was a woman with three children here on the farm while you were gone. She said she’d brought them to meet you. I sent her away, of course. Told her to come back later when you were home again.’
‘Who was it?’ he stormed. ‘Did she say her name?’
‘She did, but I’m not going to tell you.’
‘Was it Susanna?’
She shrugged.
‘Petronella, you’re going to tell me! Was it Lavinia?’
She shrugged.
‘Was it Maryke? Breggie? Ulrika?’
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Why don’t you say anything? Petronella, I’ll –’
‘I’m thinking,’ she said. ‘If one day all those women start coming here with their families we may have to add more rooms to the house.’ Was that one of the reasons the house had taken the shape it had? Certainly it was no idle thought. In due course, at least until the time of Rachel’s incarceration, strange women did occasionally arrive on the farm accompanied by what they claimed were Hermanus Johannes Wepener’s offspring. Clearly, like the good sower in the Bible, he had visited indiscriminately the wayside, and stony places, and thorns, and good ground, bringing forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. These visitors were lodged, their silence presumably bought at an acceptable price in order to safeguard the family’s standing in the community; until after shorter or longer sojourns they could be prevailed upon to depart for destinations as far away as possible.
At least Rachel could not claim to have grown up lonely. Her own sister and brothers were around, all of them of an age where communication and interaction were possible; and then there were all these other visitors from afar. In spite of this, Rachel preferred to withdraw into her own games. It was not that she had trouble communicating with the others, but that she preferred her own company. Above all, she liked to paint, and in this, as in everything else, Petronella indulged her.
She grew into an exceptionally beautiful child, all the more reason for Hermanus Johannes Wepener to regard her with suspicion and jealousy. His own children, far and wide, tended to be plain, some of them quite severely and extravagantly so. But Rachel was a beauty. Petronella saw it as a sign of heavenly grace, confirming the girl’s divine origins; for Hermanus Johannes she spelt bad news. Was it smouldering resentment, a guilty conscience, or an even guiltier awareness of sinful desire in his own heart that caused him to be so excessively possessive of the girl? And was that also the reason why, from the moment she reached puberty, his philandering came to an abrupt end? He wouldn’t even go to town any more. Petronella had to take over much of the running of the farm while he stayed in the house to keep an eye on Rachel.
Which makes it all the more amazing that the girl could have fallen pregnant without his knowledge. Unless in this, too, it was the hand, if hand it was, of God that showed? In this wide district where gossip has always run wild like ostriches there were many stories, even though they surfaced only years later. If it wasn’t God, or Hermanus Johannes himself, some averred, then it could only have been the dominee, who had been trusted ex officio. Or the doctor who had been called in once or twice when she’d been ill. Or the teacher hired to teach the children on the farm; but when was he ever allowed to be alone with her? The most likely culprit arraigned, tried and found guilty by the district, was one of the labourers on the farm. But really, there was no plausible explanation. And of course neither Hermanus Johannes nor Petronella was any help, ever; the shame was too great, and the front they kept up too impenetrable. Only on the day Jethro entered the family scene so many years later, did they briefly lift the curtain; but even that wasn’t much, only the barest details.
It is known, now, that as soon as Hermanus Johannes Wepener discovered his daughter’s condition he wanted to have her committed to an institution in Cape Town. After all, he reasoned, for a white girl to have relations with a coloured labourer (if that was indeed what had happened), she must have taken leave of her senses; and an asylum was the only safe place for such a one. But Petronella prevailed and had the girl locked up in the cellar, an act of mercy perhaps, however hard it may be today to interpret it as such. Certainly, that was how she tried to present it in her final illness. But there is so much we shall never discover.
All that is known for certain is the fact of her pregnancy and of her incarceration, the silent evidence of her paintings that no one could ever expunge from the basement walls – reappearing after every attempt like stigmata – and her unrecorded death. To this day, as far as I know, it has never been officially registered. There is that single unmarked grave outside the family cemetery, but we have only her mother’s word that it is Rachel who lies there. All that the family has ever offered in explanation, was that she’d ‘gone away’. Did she simply waste away, refusing perhaps to eat, until she drifted off into death? Was someone hired to kill her, either in retribution or out of mercy? Did she hang or stab herself, or take poison on one of the rare nightly excursions when she was let out to collect plants and soils to mix her paint?
On her death bed, long afterwards, Petronella divulged, not without a perverse sense of pride, that when she’d questioned Rachel about the pregnancy, the girl had smiled – much the same smile I imagine Petronella herself had once given in response to Hermanus Johannes Wepener’s inquisition – and said, ‘I slept with the King of Africa.’
And that is all we know. Once upon a time there was a girl called Rachel; and then one day she wasn’t any more.
12
‘I AM HER only flesh,’ says Ouma Kristina, looking up at me again from another deep inhalation of oxygen. ‘And it was only when I confronted Petronella and Hermanus Johannes with my decision to go away with Jethro that I came to know about her. I still do not know much more, although over the years I’ve worked through this whole house, every nook and cranny, in search of clues and signs. But there’s nothing. Except the paintings. And I, her child. As I discovered on that momentous day.’
‘And then you ran away with Jethro?’
‘What else could I do? Hermanus Johannes would have shot me, both of us, if we’d stayed. Petronella was not so bad. She even told me, afterwards, that she secretly approved. At last, she said, one of her offspring would join the Jews, and return to the sea.’
‘And did you? Return to the sea, I mean.’
‘Not really. We did go to Cape Town, but only to catch a boat. Old Moishe had arranged it through family and friends, and from there we went abroad.’
‘Where?’
‘We went to Persia,’ she says without batting an eyelid. ‘To Baghdad.’
‘On a magic carpet, I suppose?’ I ask tartly.
She stares quietly at me, quite unperturbed. ‘I’m not asking you to believe me, Kristien. I’m only asking you to listen to me.’
I decide, not without a touch of irritation, to humour her. ‘What was it like?’
‘From the air it looked incredible. All those minarets and domes and spires covered in gold. Like the New Jerusalem, I suppose, all jasper and rubies and whatever. And in a way it was like a homecoming, I felt I knew the city so well from my readings in Revelations when I was a child, and the books old Moishe had brought me. My favourite used to be the Arabian Nights. And now we were there. It was almost too much to believe.’
‘Didn’t Jethro have problems?’ I ask with a straight face. ‘Being a Jew, I mean.’
Her eyes flicker, but whether it is in amusement or disdain I cannot quite make out. ‘You’re very perceptive,’ she says. ‘But that only came later. In the beginning – I mean, how were they to know? I was the only one who’d seen him naked. Very beautiful he was too, I may add.’
‘Ouma, other men in the Middle East are also circumcised.’
‘Are you telling this story or am I?’ A petulant little shake of her head on its thin stalk. ‘Anyway, I’m not talking about the Middle East. I’m talking about Persia.’
‘And how did you find a place to stay?’
‘I told you old Moishe had connections everywhere, being in commerce. And Baghdad was full of merchants, travelling across the seven seas and back. As a matter of fact, the man who first put us up was called Sindbad. Not the Sindbad of course, but a descendant. He lavished all kinds of splendid gifts on us and showed us all the sights. The days were very hot, but the evenings were divine. We used to stroll to the outskirts of the city to watch the sunset, when all the camels would climb into the palm trees and sing hymns in Latin. Every night there was a party, either at Sindbad’s palace or at one of his friends’. With – what do they call those girls? – obelisks, and eunuchs, and veiled dancers,
and storytellers, and the most exquisite food and drink, and opium pipes, and perfumes wafting about. During the daytime we were on our own. Jethro wrote poetry, or sang, he had an enchanting voice, and I painted. I’d always been fond of drawing and painting, and once the Wepeners had been persuaded that my interests ran to sweet little still-lifes and landscapes, nothing like Rachel’s lurid imaginings, they’d let me have my way. But there in Baghdad I became more daring. My talent exploded. I must have made hundreds of paintings of Jethro.’
‘All of them showing his Jewish streak?’
‘Some more, some less.’
‘Then why didn’t you just live there happily ever after?’
‘Because there’s a snake in every paradise, even if it is Valhalla, or Nirvana, or whatever it was they called it in Persia. And this particular snake was a man called Achim Sidi Achim. One of the most powerful men in Baghdad, a personal friend of the Grand Vizier. He was quite young still, not yet forty, and he was very handsome, in a Persian sort of way I mean. Well, to cut a very complicated story short, he fell in love with me. And he wanted to marry me. He could see no obstacle, as Jethro and I were not legally married in terms of Persian law, or any other law for that matter; and Achim Sidi Achim had only three hundred wives of his own, so he had space and appetite for lots more. Those Persian men, I can tell you –
‘Achim Sidi Achim took to visiting me late every afternoon, when Jethro was out with his friends. I tried my best to discourage the man, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. He could easily have had Jethro removed, they have very refined ways of doing that, but because of his feelings for me he announced he would do the honourable thing and challenge Jethro to a duel. Which would have been all right, because among the skills Jethro had picked up in Baghdad was swordfighting and very few could match him. But the problem was that according to their custom such duels must be fought naked. It is part of the code of honour of those swordsmen – what do they call them again?’