Imaginings of Sand

by Andre Brink

  6

  WE ARE IN our ark again, just the two of us, like so many times before; and more than ever it feels as if we’re drifting on a slowly moving sea, sailing through endless space, a darkness without end. Ouma is lying with her eyes closed. Her breath is very shallow, I can barely see her rib-cage move. The eyeballs have sunk into the skull so deep that they are lost in shadow. As usual, only the bedside lamp is on: it is more gentle, more forgiving. The house itself is breathing quietly around us. It feels more penetrable than ever; the night is moving in on us from all sides. It seems possible that the moon, if it rises higher – it is still low, caught in the black branches of the trees outside – may proceed right through the house, skimming the empty bed.

  Her fingers clasp and unclasp on her chest. The eyelids flutter without opening. Her mouth is twitching.

  ‘Are you sleeping?’ I whisper.

  ‘I’m awake. I’m tired. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘It’s over now.’

  ‘Almost. Not quite.’

  Involuntarily I glance at my watch; it has stopped. A brief consternation besets me, then passes. What does it matter anyway?

  ‘Anna came to see me today,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She’s very unhappy. She should divorce that man.’

  ‘Has she spoken to you about it?’ I ask cautiously.

  ‘No. But I could see. You must speak to her.’

  ‘I shall. I have already.’

  ‘There haven’t been many happy marriages in our family,’ she says after a moment. ‘I must have been one of the lucky ones, don’t you think?’

  ‘But Ouma …’ My protest peters out.

  ‘Nine children your Oupa and I had. We were so happy.’

  Again I feel the need to talk, then let it pass.

  Her eyes open, with difficulty it seems. ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘It’s not that. But you said –’

  ‘I remember what I said. There’s never been anything wrong with my memory.’ Slowly, as in all the nights that have gone before, the very process of talking seems to generate the strength to continue. But sometime, surely, she will have nothing left? A hundred and three years; then the bomb; and still she goes on, quietly, a small flame flickering, flickering.

  I hesitate for a long time; but it must come into the open. So I ask, ‘What about Jethro?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You loved him.’

  ‘Of course I loved him.’

  ‘You went away together.’

  Her face relaxes, invaded by a strange happiness; as on some rare occasions before I realise how beautiful she must have been when she was young. Almost effortlessly – but very softly, so that I have to keep my ear against her lips – she lets herself be carried along by her words.

  ‘There comes a time when one has to break away, otherwise you suffocate. It’s like Samuel who set out on her coffin, this very one, to look for her shadow –’

  ‘But Ouma –’

  ‘Or like Wilhelmina who kept with her the mirror from her mother’s house, in which she could see, at night, the ghosts of the dead.’

  ‘But Ouma –’

  ‘My own mother, too, you remember, the girl Rachel, who ran away to the sea and never came back; which was such a disgrace to her parents that they had to dig a grave for her, and organise a funeral, coffin and everything, so that people would think she’d died.’

  ‘But Ouma –’

  ‘That’s how it was with me too, when Jethro came and we ran away to Paris.’

  ‘To Paris?’

  ‘Paris,’ she says, savouring the name. ‘Yes. That was where we went. Old Moishe arranged it all, he knew people everywhere, he said this was his wedding gift to us. Even though we weren’t married yet.’

  ‘And it was wonderful?’

  ‘Yes, it was wonderful.’ A pause. ‘In the beginning at least. In the beginning we did all the bohemian things. It was summer. I believed it would last for ever. Again, through old Moishe’s contacts, we found a place to stay, a little garret in the Jewish quarter, in the Rue Vieille du Temple. He wrote. I painted. We made love. We went hungry. We sang in the streets and he played a second-hand flute in the Métro and I sketched portraits of tourists. We did odd jobs in Les Halles. We drank red wine. We’d lie about in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in the Bois de Boulogne, it was like walking hand in hand through the Seurats and the Monets we’d seen, pictures which were becoming very fashionable just then.’ She begins to hum a tune, but very off-key, and very low, so that I do not recognise it at all, but it may be something from the Twenties, it sounds like vaudeville. In the middle of it she stops. ‘Or we’d take a train into the country and spend days and nights under the sun, under the stars. It was impossibly romantic. It was impossible.

  ‘Jethro had all these incredible plans for the future. I would be the first great female painter. He would be an immortal writer. Many years later it occurred to me that in some respects, in spite of all their differences, he was just like your Oupa Cornelis. Men. Brimming with plans and projects, visions, schemes, all day long. But when night falls they sit on the toilet and read the newspaper.

  ‘It took a while for us to come down to earth again. Summer was running out. In the Luxembourg the first leaves were turning yellow and beginning to fall. The first hints of cold sent shivers through the city. I’ve never known a city – but then, what other cities have I known? – that lives so closely tuned to the changes in the seasons. All of a sudden our garret was no longer so hospitable. All of a sudden our love no longer seemed altogether adequate. I suppose we’d made the old mistake of confusing being in love with our capacity for living together. I hadn’t reckoned with the fragility of the male ego. Perhaps I simply was unmarriageable. Still, we tried our best to cheat. We borrowed money and went south, to Italy, to Greece, in search of what warmth there was. We survived the winter. With the coming of spring we returned to Paris and our spirits revived. I was beginning to be obsessed with my painting. Jethro started complaining, feeling a bit left out; he was making demands I no longer felt so enthusiastic to comply with. A new autumn came down on us, like a blight, like darkness. We had no money left. We were turned out of the garret. I discovered that Jethro had begun to see other girls, more beautiful than I was, and not nagging so much. He still had his dreams, but I was no longer altogether part of them, nor did I really want to be.

  ‘One day I took one of the small paintings I’d done of him, the one you know; and I stole the money he’d been secretly hoarding under a floor-board in the smelly squat-down toilet on the landing of the place in Clichy where we were then living. There was just about enough to get back home on. I left him my other paintings in exchange. I’m sure he would have got something for them, he’d already sold a few behind my back, pocketing the money for his more personal needs. I didn’t leave a note. I decided a clean break was preferable.’

  There is a very long silence.

  ‘And you were pregnant when you came back?’ I ask.

  ‘Who says I was pregnant?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Oh.’ The hint of a smile which, eighty years ago, might have been saucy. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Please tell me, Ouma.’

  ‘The memory is yours now,’ she says. ‘Do with it what you wish. You understand that now, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. There is so much I still need to know …’

  But she is paying no attention to me; perhaps she really cannot hear me. ‘I had to tell you everything,’ she says. ‘If you don’t know our history it becomes tempting to see everything that happens as your private fate. But once you know it you also realise you have a choice.’

  As I gaze down at her I feel my anxiety subside. It is not really all that important after all to sort out the details of her history, of mine. She has made her choices, so can I. She has lived for so very long. When she was born there were no cars in this country yet, no telep
hones, barely a railway. She has seen the whole world change from the age of the horse to that of space travel. At her birth Sarah Bernhardt was in her heyday, Einstein was a boy, Victoria ruled the waves. Her stepbrothers, or uncles, depending on one’s point of view, fought in Paul Kruger’s war, her stepsister chose to die in a concentration camp; when she was in Paris, if she was there, she might have known the young Picasso, the young Modigliani, Gertrude Stein. In her lifetime two world wars and countless other conflicts have scarred the face of the earth. She was already old when the Berlin Wall was built: she also saw it fall. Men have come and men have gone, she is still here, she has survived, nothing can surprise her. Through all their sophistry and power games, their explanations of the world and why it has to be the mess it is, she has calmly persisted with her own inventions. Behind and below history she has continued to spin her secret stories of endurance and suffering and survival, of women and mirrors and shadows and coffins and flood and shit and divine messengers and rape and incest and suicide and murder and love. The configurations may be interchangeable; the myths persist, she has lived them into being. Why demand the truth, whatever that may be, if you can have imagination? I’ve tried the real, and I know now it doesn’t work. The universe, somebody said, and I know now it is true, is made of stories, not particles; they are the wave functions of our existence. If they constitute the event horizon of our particular black hole they are also our only means of escape.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I whisper impulsively, without understanding why or what has so suddenly prompted me; knowing only that it has to be asked and that she is the only person in the world I can ask it of, the only one who can grant it to me without expecting me to deserve it. ‘Forgive me.’

  You are the only one who can do so; yet you are the only one in whose eyes I have never been guilty. You are perhaps the only person I’ve ever loved wholly, unconditionally, unquestioningly.

  And yes, you are right, of course you are right: you have given me back a memory, something to make it worthwhile to have gone away, and to have suffered, and to have lost my meaning, and now to have come back. I used to think only other people had histories. History belonged to Father. Or to those in the Struggle: it was a train that came past, and I boarded it, and got off, it was never mine. Now something is happening to me. I’m not sure I understand it yet; but I can feel it. This was what it felt like when I discovered I was pregnant, that time. And then I lost it. This time I must hold on. I love you.

  ‘I disapprove of death,’ she says, very softly, but very distinctly.

  Around us the house is alternately expanding and shrinking, a breathing in and a breathing out. The moon is high now. The walls have become transparent. They are translucent. There is space inside, infinite space.

  ‘Poor old Piet Malan,’ she says again.

  I see her sinking slowly, see the flickering ghost-images of many faces passing through hers as if she tries them on and merges with them; see her falling from body to shadow to ever-changing names, cascading through time in a present that never ends; and the unreality of all she makes me see lends reality only to the seeing itself.

  So many lives. Yet Oscar Wilde was wrong, I think: ‘He who lives more lives than one –’ A single death suffices.

  Her voice ebbs to a mere whisper. ‘Do you believe in God, Kristien?’

  I honestly do not know what to say.

  Her lips move again. I press my ear to her mouth.

  ‘If there is a God,’ she says, ‘why am I allergic to feathers?’

  It is quiet now. But in the silence I become aware of a sound emerging from it, barely a sound, a mere rustle, a sigh, very low, almost inaudible, but enormous, moving through the night. Birds. They can only be birds, but they are invisible, filling the air with the soft grey whirring of their wings.

  SEVEN

  Not the End

  1

  THE FUNERAL IS today. It is Wednesday, exactly a week after the main election day. It must be the biggest funeral the district has ever known, even in the heyday of the ostrich feathers. People have come from everywhere. There are even representatives of the new government. The television is here too. I would have liked to stay away and avoid the crowds that trample everything in their way. But I suppose I am the central figure here, much as I hate it. Abel Joubert and Jacob Bonthuys are trying to deflect some of the glare, shielding me from the overtly staring eyes, the greedy media people; but it isn’t much use.

  For a week the gossips and newspapers have run amok. Abel Joubert has arranged to post guards at the entrance to the farm; Jacob Bonthuys has come back as an official doorman. Jonnie has joined his parents in the house to ward off intruders. No strategy was too devious for those who came in search of a story. A family magazine sent a combi loaded with flowers, among which a female journalist and a male photographer lay concealed to jump out at the crucial moment for an impromptu interview; God knows what they were up to in their floral hide-out, for they looked suspiciously crumpled when they did emerge. Faced with Jacob Bonthuys’s gun they made an undignified departure.

  The vulgarity of it all has taken my breath away. Even as I watch the funeral ceremony unfold around me I cannot quite believe what has happened. Surely it is too crude, too extreme, too melodramatic. But we as a people – and a family – have never shied away from the crude or the melodramatic; so how could I expect to be spared it?

  I must try to catch hold of it all; to grasp it before it totally eludes me and recedes into nightmare. If only it were that.

  When did I have the first intimation, on the night of Ouma’s death, that something was wrong? Initially there was no sense of doom or danger. There was, at most, an urge to reach out and touch someone, tell someone. I was still sitting on the bed, all notion of time lost, gazing at the coffin before me, at her changed face now set in death, the insignificance of her little bundle of bones that seemed to be turning to dust in front of my eyes: and then the feeling of unease, a curious anxiety, began to stir in me. I ascribed it, then, to the dawning consciousness of myself there, alone, in the night, with Ouma’s dead body. The need to be reassured by knowing someone else was close to share it with. Trui was the obvious person, and yet I was reluctant to disturb her. There would be enough commotion around her soon, in the days to come. That was when I thought of Anna. There was no logic for it, and no hindsight to illuminate it later. I simply knew I had to telephone her; and in that same instant I was beset with fear at the very thought that she might not answer.

  In a kind of numbness I dialled her number. My hand was trembling. In my mind I was urging her on: Answer! Answer! It rang and rang and rang. I could imagine the sound at the other end, that hollow desolate sound of a telephone ringing at some ungodly hour of the night. But there was no answer. That was when I knew it had been no mere urge but a premonition.

  Again I considered waking Trui and Jeremiah. I went to their room. They were fast asleep. No, I couldn’t. I knew now, with absolute certainty, that something had happened. But for that very reason I couldn’t face them. As yet there was nothing to tell. I was the only one who could do what had to be done – whatever that might turn out to be. Without making a sound I went downstairs, and outside to the shed, and slid into the hearse and drove off.

  From afar, across the emptiness of the plains, I could see the lights of the neighbouring farmhouse. It seemed as if every single light in the house was on, looking like a great festive passenger ship passing in the night.

  But there was nothing festive about the scene that met me when I went to look through the lounge window after there had been no response to my furious knocking. I went on automatic pilot; I became an actor in a barely credible, badly scripted TV play. I found a stone and hurled it through the large plate-glass window, then chopped open a hole large enough to let me through – even so I cut my arm – and clambered inside. Now, even in my bleeding, I was part of the scene I had witnessed from outside. One wouldn’t think that ordinary human beings could have so mu
ch blood in them. The carnage stretched from the front room, where the television was still on – CNN bringing news of the elections; a new beacon of hope for the strife-torn world, the female announcer said in a voice that twanged like an electric guitar – down the passage, into the bedrooms and the kitchen.

  An intruder. That was my first thought. It was so obvious. All the enemies Casper had made in the district; somebody, in the elation of the day’s events, deciding to revenge all the accumulated bitterness of so many years, But I realised very soon that this could not be what had happened. The fact that nothing in the house was out of place or, as far as I could make out, missing. That all the doors were locked, the keys on the inside. (Outside, I’d noticed on my arrival, both the bakkie and the Land Cruiser were undisturbed in their usual spots.)

  There was only one logical alternative. The bastard, I thought, too numb to impose any order on my mind; looking, from very far away, at my own thoughts as they came and went. I wasn’t there. I couldn’t possibly be there. The fucking goddamned bastard. So he’d done it after all. She had feared this all along. Why hadn’t she listened to me and spent the night at Ouma’s place? Why couldn’t somebody have stopped him in time? All my pretty chickens and their dam. Almost clinically, my mind still remote from what I was witnessing, I worked my way through the house, registered what had happened. Two of the boys in the passage, one shot in the chest, the second in the head. Nannie in the bedroom she’d shared with Lenie, toppled over as if she’d just sat up, awakened by the commotion, when she was struck by the bullet. The smallest boy shot in the left temple in his bed where he’d possibly – hopefully – been sleeping through it all. Crumpled against the kitchen door, brought down presumably as she was trying to get out and run off into the night, Lenie. In her shortie pyjamas, through which, like a spelling mistake on a tidy manuscript, the new bra was visible.