by Andre Brink
Back in the lounge, Casper spreadeagled on the carpet, on his back. Three shots, as far as I could make out. In the stomach, in the left shoulder, in the forehead. And slumped over him, Anna. The hole in her right temple ringed in a blackish scorch-mark.
And then the final realisation. The thought I couldn’t possibly admit. It was too outrageous. It made no sense. It made every sense. It was Anna who had done it. Shooting him first; then the children; then returning to him to kill herself. The way her body was positioned over his, her fingers still touching the pistol.
My wrist was still bleeding.
2
I DIDN’T FLAP or run about. I didn’t get hysterical. I didn’t scream. I could not cry. I sat down in a chair opposite the TV, an eye glaring insistently at me, not looking but demanding to be looked at. What was happening on the screen passed me by; it came from another world altogether. For how long I remained there I cannot tell. Just sat quietly, too numb to be horrified. It is almost impossible, now, a week later, to recall my thoughts; whatever I try to say about it may be confusing the blankness of that night with the jumble that came afterwards. But if there was anything in my mind I could grasp it was that this was the worst I was likely to see in my life. Nothing else could ever again be compared to this. Others may have lived through experiences more extreme; this was my limit. And there was a curious serenity about the discovery. I could now relax, I might even go to sleep, there was nothing more to fear. Nothing I could imagine could outdo this. Reality had cancelled itself. That surge within the real towards the unreal, which had fascinated me for so long, had fulfilled itself. There was no temptation to betray what I couldn’t change.
A woman came from the desert of death to ask, ‘Do you know what I’ve come to tell you?’ The answer, I now knew, was neither yes nor no. The only possible answer was before me, inside me. It was silence.
I think I thought: This is the inevitable consequence of Ouma’s stories. To transform oneself into a tree, to drown in shit, to await a flood in a coffin, to paint on the walls of a prison, to scribble on a surface: nothing, nothing is innocent. Below it lurks the shadow, that little investment in darkness we can call our own; one day it must break out.
Centuries and centuries of struggling and suffering blindly, our voices smothered in our throats, trying to find other shapes in which to utter our silent screams. Dragged across plains and mountains – just like those others, the nameless dark servants – barefoot, helping to preserve the tribe, loading the guns, healing the sick and wounded, fighting and dying alongside the men, then returned to the shadows while the men assumed what glory there was. In every crisis we were granted, by special dispensation, our brief moment in the light: then back to the familiar domestic obscurity of our predestined ‘place’. To suffer, to cry, to die. Theirs the monuments for the ages; ours, at most, the imaginings of sand. And again I thought: Why have we borne it? Why have we never, collectively, rebelled? For the sake of the brief ecstasy of sex? The survival of the species? A pathetic sense of security? But surely we could have done it on our terms, not always, exclusively, on theirs?
For all the fertile years of her long life Ouma stored her bloodstained towels as a silent testimony – proud, defiant, shocking, but silent – of her womanhood. But then it dried up. No longer fecund, she broke out in stories. These are mine now. I can, if it is not yet too late, assume my history. But for Anna it was too late.
Her only power was the power to destroy herself; and from that she didn’t flinch. If it had to be done – I’m trying to persuade myself – then she wouldn’t flinch from it. It was her only, ultimate, accomplishment; the least I can hope for is that she did it lucidly, courageously. If your tongue is cut out you have to tell your story in another language altogether. This carnage is the only sign she can leave behind, her diary, her work of art. She couldn’t have done it alone. Countless others have converged in her to do this, to articulate this. There were many women in my sister, as in me: and I knew only one or two or three of them. She was a multitude. I am. We are. It is a very basic arithmetic I am learning.
At some stage I got up – the television was still on, that uninterrupted flow of images, even more absurd with the sound turned down (when had I done that?) – and went to the telephone in the passage. It was from here she must have called me, God knows how long ago, to say, ‘It’s Ouma. You must come.’ Michael sniggering. ‘Somebody called Ah-na, frightful South African accent.’ How our accents do inform against us. It wasn’t Ouma after all, it was Anna herself, only neither of us knew it at the time. I dialled the police, the doctor. I went back to my chair. There was blood on the arm-rest. Mine, hers, his? Ours. I sat down. I was still there when they came.
3
THE DOCTOR WAS finished first. There wasn’t much he could do. On his instructions the police allowed me to go as soon as the most obvious questions had been asked (I no longer remember what I replied); it was the same officer I’d met here the first time, fortunately not the one who had brought the detained children round to Sinai. The doctor wanted to drive me home, but I insisted on returning in the hearse; for once it was appropriate to the occasion. Even so he followed me to the neighbouring farm in his car. Just as well, because it was only when we stopped in the yard under the black trees that I remembered there was another body inside for him to deal with.
Trui came running from the back door as we approached.
‘Kristien, where have you been? Something terrible has happened.’
‘I know, Trui,’ I said perfunctorily. I’ve brought the doctor.’
‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ she scolded me. ‘When I got up you were just gone and there was Jeremiah and I alone in the house with a corpse.’
The doctor patted her on the shoulder. He went on ahead with her. I presume he told her about what had happened on the other farm, because she suddenly gasped and started wailing very loudly. Breaking from his grasp she ran back to me, threw her arms around me, nearly throttling me, and broke into incoherent snatches of speech. It was almost a relief to have her to deal with.
Jeremiah was waiting upstairs, wide-eyed but resigned. He escorted the doctor with the stiff formality of an usher at an important function, while I attended to Trui. A few minutes later the doctor came back to us.
‘I’ll arrange for somebody to collect the body,’ he said briskly.
‘There’s no need. I think Trui and I can cope.’
‘But –’
‘It will be something to do.’
‘I’d like you to know that I really don’t approve,’ he said. ‘But if you insist –’
‘I do.’
But he was adamant about giving me an injection and ordering me to bed. I objected blindly. He paid no attention, accompanying me to my room and pressing me down on the bed.
‘I’d prefer to take you back with me to town to keep an eye on you,’ he said.
I shook my head.
‘Jeremiah and I are here, we’ll look after her,’ Trui intervened, calmer now, her sense of practicality restored.
It hadn’t occurred to the doctor to offer them sedation; they hadn’t thought of it either.
I was still trying to resist when the drug, whatever it was, took effect. And it was almost midday before I opened my eyes again, to be flooded, the moment I sat up, with all I could remember of the night before. Even then there was no violence in the recollection; the feeling of being wholly distanced from the world persisted. In a calm that must have struck Trui as unnatural I went through the motions of my morning ablutions, put on the first clothes I could lay hold of, which were the very ones I’d slept in and worn the day before.
On my way down to breakfast the phone rang. It was Michael. I took almost a minute to place the voice; by that time he’d already started repeating my name, believing we’d been cut off.
‘Kristien? I just had to talk to you, to hear it all first hand. It sounds too good to be true. Tell me all.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked
.
‘The elections, of course,’ he said, as if explaining to a child. ‘The press is going overboard. Sounds like a miracle. After the violent run-up, the dire predictions, everybody expecting the absolute worst, and now this. Were you there? Did you vote?’
‘Michael, listen –’
‘Tell me, blow by blow.’
‘Michael,’ I said, ‘I’m trying to cope with eight deaths in the family.’
‘Oh, don’t be absurd,’ he said.
‘Look, I’m trying to tell you –’
‘How’s your gran?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Really?’
‘That’s about the daftest question you could have asked, Michael. What do you expect me to say? That I’m lying? That I’m playing the fool? That it’s all been a gas?’
‘I’m sorry. But you’re in such a strange mood.’
‘Women are like that,’ I said frostily. ‘We have our moods. And now you must excuse me. I have bodies to attend to.’
It was getting out of hand. Our telephone conversations had been skirting disaster for a while: but this was the closest we had yet come to breaking point. Then why could I not feel anything? I loved the man, didn’t I? More than geographical distance lay between us. But all I felt like saying – to whom, I didn’t know – was, Please, please: not now. Whatever you expect of me, not now.
I had just put the receiver down when the phone rang again. It was a journalist from Cape Town. I couldn’t believe it. The news had been on the radio, he said. Would I mind telling him – I pulled the jack out of its socket before he’d finished his sentence. This was a consequence I hadn’t even thought about. And it made me feel sick. I literally started retching and had to run to the bathroom to throw up on my empty stomach. It was a while before the blackness receded. I knew I had to catch hold of myself. Seriously. Urgently. Something had to be done to prevent the farm from being overrun by the curious. For the first time I now began to feel threatened. The world was closing in alarmingly. Yet I was so cut off from my own thought processes that the most elementary arithmetic was beyond me – two and two make seven? make a camel? make an ark on the river Nile? – and the very last thing I could manage was precisely what mattered most: practical decisions.
Two visits, telescoped together, imposed some semblance of order on the day that had begun to slip from under my feet. The police in a yellow van; then Abel Joubert in a bakkie so similar to Anna’s that I felt my breath catch in my throat.
My first impulse when the police arrived was to run away and hide; in the cellar, behind the graveyard, anywhere. For a moment I couldn’t even think what they could have come for: all I knew was that I had to get away. But, curiously, when they began to question me – with commendable patience; with fatherly concern – I found that the effort to remember collected my mind, helped me to regain something of the grip I’d lost. We spoke outside, right there, under the trees: for some inexplicable reason I felt I had to keep them out of the house; they shouldn’t invade Ouma’s space; I had to protect her. After a while I heard the other vehicle approach, and backed away defensively; then recognised Abel Joubert, and ran to him.
He held me against him for a moment. Still keeping a protective arm round my shoulders he turned to the police. He was very brusque with them. But I assured him I was all right. His support made it easier to tell them the little bit I knew – which was even less than I would have thought beforehand. A life, seven lives, reduced to a few facts of circumstance, position, place, time, no more. Was there anything else I could tell them? Had Anna given any indications of impending disaster? Was there a history of depression, perhaps? Anything in the family? Anything whatsoever?
‘That’s enough,’ said Abel firmly. ‘What Kristien needs now is to be left alone.’ He took over. He arranged with them for guards to be posted, to keep out the seekers of sensation. And he’d brought Jacob Bonthuys – now for the first time I saw him in the bakkie, his face stricken; bringing with him the reassuring smell of tobacco when he approached – in case I needed assistance of some kind. It was the most reassuring thing he could have done.
And within hours there was a smooth system running on the farm: two police guards at the gate to intercept all visitors (that first day’s trickle became a veritable flood as the weekend drew closer and magazines and Sunday papers had to cope with deadlines), communicating by two-way radio with Jeremiah and Jonnie, taking turns; whatever seemed plausible to them was relayed to Trui, who did a deft filtering job before allowing me – in those rare cases where she was persuaded I should have a say – the final choice. Jacob Bonthuys manned the telephone and here, too, Trui made the real decisions. This left me free to sort out my own priorities.
4
FIRST, OUMA. THERE was no need to plan anything beforehand: the moment I broached the subject with Trui she indicated with a brief efficient gesture the kitchen table which she had already scrubbed and covered with black plastic sheets produced by tearing open refuse bags. In matters of death, as I presume of birth, Trui assumed a natural authority. And once we had established our common purpose she issued a few curt orders that sent Jeremiah and Jacob Bonthuys hurrying upstairs to bring down the body wrapped in a sheet.
All available space on the two stoves – the regular electric stove, as well as the old black Dover which had been specially and ceremonially stacked and lit – was taken up by huge pots and cauldrons of boiling water. The kind of scene one has come to expect in popular stories about scenes of birth in some backwater community in the rather distant past.
On the kitchen table the body was laid out. The men withdrew: it didn’t take much to send them scurrying. They had strict orders to make sure we were not interrupted, not even by an act of God should such occur. Sun slanted through the window, its progress still marked by Ouma’s patterns on the floor, but now unheeded. It was very quiet. Neither of us spoke. Swiftly and professionally Trui denuded the body, like a narrow pale fruit peeled from its skin. I was struck by how diminutive she was, how hard, how dry, like a small plucked chicken. The large patches of burnt skin looked fearsome, yet curiously dessicated. I watched Trui washing her with great care, as if it were a baby’s body, very fragile; but she did it with a thoroughness that was impressive. I could imagine Wilhelmina setting about this kind of task in the same manner, practical in the extreme, yet drawing on a formidable store of accumulated knowledge, female and arcane. And I followed her example. There was no feeling of revulsion in me, nor hesitation; but it was no merely perfunctory chore either. It was, if I now think of it, a kind of atonement, a different way of asking forgiveness; in this ritual ablution I was seeking to fulfil a need in myself, if not of absolution, at least of understanding. It was a necessary function to perform before I could think of going on. And she was, as before, the only one who could possibly accord it to me. No, there were no tears; this was beyond their reach. But a sense of mourning, yes; a leavetaking; an assumption, too, of all she had left me. She was no longer Ouma Kristina. She had detached herself from this frail flesh and bone. She was the summary of all those others who had been given life through her; in cleansing her I was cleansing them, I was cleansing the abused, poor, indestructible body of woman.
Another of my small steps, I thought. Illumination need not come by itself, in a great flood of light: it can be the accumulation of small moments, gradually adding up to finality. I’d thought, years ago, before I’d left the country, that this was what had happened to me; but it had been at most a negative illumination, if such a thing exists: it had been the discovery of what was wrong in the country, what I had to escape from. Now, standing over Ouma’s body, helping Trui to dress it in the long white flannel gown Ouma had designated for the purpose, I knew I had to go further. A discovery of my need of others, perhaps. How imperceptibly it had been happening: Anna, Trui, Jeremiah, Jonnie, Jacob Bonthuys, Sam Ndzuta, Thando Kumalo, Abel Joubert. I had to do something to help make it worthwhile for Sandile, for myself, all of us.
Had I ever really loved? Even what I’d felt for Sandile: had that been love? Perhaps the painful experience of finally renouncing him, three days before, had opened a breach in myself. What I’d first thought of as an emptiness, a lack, might have been the accommodation of a new space inside, a capacity perhaps for love. And love goes beyond a person, an individual: it involves what I was now beginning to discover. This fatal, miraculous involvement with others; all of them, the good and the bad and the indifferent, the living and the dead. The dead, now that she has joined them, entrusted to my hands, to mould them to my needs, to be moulded by them to their inevitability. I can no longer be detached, apart. I am not simply the result of those who have gone before: if I need them, as I need Ouma, they also need me. History is not an impersonal force that sweeps us along like a flood; it is as real and physical as this body, which so serenely enfolds all its past selves. Hers, mine; ours.
Our work was done. Soon afterwards, as if summoned, the doctor arrived at the gate; his presence was relayed through all the intermediaries; he was permitted entry. He seemed taken aback when he discovered the body on the kitchen table, decently dressed by now; but after a token protest, resigned it seemed in advance to defeat, he shrugged and left her to our care. But he would be neglecting his duty, he said, if he did not warn us about certain natural stages of deterioration a body might be expected to undergo when not refrigerated and/or embalmed; if at any stage we felt – he paused to find a word suitable to the occasion – incommoded by its presence we should not hesitate to approach him. We were not incommoded. Ouma’s coffin was placed in the basement, temporarily transformed into chapelle ardente; both Trui and I paid her regular visits, Trui I suspect for eminently practical reasons, I for more emotional, less readily definable ones, but there was no sign of deterioration. Perhaps she’d been so thoroughly dried out by the time she died, like an old apricot in the sun in summertime, that there was nothing left to pass through those natural stages. A lesson to the old Egyptians. She looked no different from the sleeping old woman I’d tended the last few weeks of her life. Except, naturally, she was no longer breathing.