by Andre Brink
There she lay, as present in her absence as in life. Until the night she disappeared.
5
SEQUENCE, DURING THE days that followed, was of no importance. An alternation of light and dark, of comings and goings, of people and silence; all contained in the stillness of that small body lying in state among the mouldy walls of the cellar.
In the daytime one’s attention was dispersed. Even in spite of the human screens surrounding me there was so much to attend to: running the house with Trui, attending to Jeremiah’s needs outside on the farm, keeping an eye on the comings and goings of gravediggers, meeting the few visitors I could not avoid – the dominee, the sexton, the undertaker (no relative of the old Piet Malan so abhorred by Ouma, but a pleasant, clean-shaven young man), Ouma’s banker, two of Casper’s relatives: his mother, a pitiful old woman who was sobbing too much to speak; and a sister, a large and severe woman, who made it clear that it was only a sense of ‘Christian duty’ that had prompted this visit to the sibling of a mass murderer who had slaughtered in cold blood a man in the prime of his life, the pride of his family, and a pillar of his community. She would be praying for me, she said, making the promise sound like a threat; she was even prepared to go down on her knees right there, with me, to present my case to the Lord of Hosts. However, this prospect was nipped in the bud by the old woman going into convulsions – and which of us, the sister or I, was more relieved was difficult to tell.
Other visitors, too, had to be admitted. Abel, from time to time, with trays of food prepared by his wife. The doctor, more and more rarely. A man from some funeral company who proposed to inscribe the date of Ouma’s demise on her tombstone: I told him it wasn’t necessary, the space might be left open. Sam Ndzuta, to report that the boys let out on bail were looked after. The old lawyer with Ouma’s testament. I received him civilly, of course, but I’m afraid I did not pay much attention. I shall have to go back to him; there will be enough time for it. All I remember is that she has left me a fair amount. The farm goes to Trui; and money to keep it going. She reacted with consternation at first, but finally accepted with good grace: one doesn’t argue with the dead. And Jeremiah was pleased.
Even when there were no daytime visitors to contend with, or trips to be made into town, there was a constant awareness of outside events invading our enclave. Trui had taken to keeping the radio on, full blast, throughout the day. Two, in fact: one downstairs in the kitchen, the other upstairs in the room which she and Jeremiah had begun to convert into a more permanent abode, gradually taking possession, insinuating themselves into its space – initially with small indispensable items like an alarm clock, a Bible, a torch, a change of clothing, combs and toothbrushes, the mug in which Jeremiah kept his teeth overnight (and for a large part of the day as well, as he preferred to ‘save’ them by wearing them only when required for eating, lengthy conversation, or the presentation of a passable front in the execution of his duties); later with more emphatic signs of occupation: clothes and shoes stowed in a cupboard, a small bedside mat, crocheted cloths, their own double bed, an old lemonwood slave chair, a framed embroidered pietà proclaiming, in High Dutch, Great as the Sea are my Sorrows.
These radios kept us informed of the steady progress of the election and its aftermath, a noisy accompaniment to the silent persistence of our private drama: increasing chaos as all systems of counting, checking and announcing results broke down, to be met with no more than token protest while the whole country continued to ride the crest of a wave of euphoria. The more amazing the news about the corruption or inefficiency of election officials, counting errors, mislaid or stolen ballot boxes, the more ebullient everybody became in their expectation of a happy conclusion. And there was no violence. After weeks, months, years of steadily increasing ‘unrest’, exploding in killings on a scale that matched the atrocities from the flashpoints of the world – Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Bosnia-Herzegovina, most recently Rwanda – suddenly there was this break in the tension. A brief lull? Silence before the storm? But the stereotypes of behaviour seemed themselves to be breaking down. We had stunned the world; we were stunning ourselves. And it was borne out on the few brief excursions I had to make to town: everybody I passed in the street first stopped to exchange greetings, to shake hands. For so many years, when there had not been open animosity or suspicion, white and black had been invisible to one another, each pretending the other did not exist: now there was a sense of discovery in acknowledging our mutual presence. At the same time it was almost unbearable, as it came at the very moment I had to face this devastation of my private world. The two just did not make sense together. Or did they?
On those few occasions when I had to go into town, Jeremiah insisted on driving me. I’d never seen him flourish quite as unreservedly. The Chrysler was finally coming into its own, although I could have done without the attention it attracted wherever we went. I had the impression that he would have welcomed it if I’d resorted to small regal waves of the hand to the people lining the streets as we went by, but in this respect I failed him.
Since most of the funeral arrangements had been taken charge of by Casper’s family, my chores in town were small and private. I went to the bank. I made the few purchases Trui had listed; I returned Jacob Bonthuys’s book and mine to the library (the middle-aged librarian recognised me too late, and when she called my name I was already on my way out and pretended not to hear).
Only one errand I found very difficult to face, but it had to be done – not because it was forced on me or expected of me, but because I myself insisted on it as a necessary conclusion: visiting the undertaker’s to view the bodies. Two large coffins, five smaller ones. Walls painted grey, a smell of formaldehyde or whatever they use in these places, plastic flowers. It was like visiting Madame Tussaud’s, and that in a way made it easier. They weren’t real, only waxen effigies, poor likenesses; the boys looking even more unnatural for the white robes they were wearing. I was used to seeing them covered in dust and grime, their hair unkempt, cuts and scabs and bruises on their hands and faces. They really didn’t take well to being boxed, like the hampers of glazed fruit South Africans order for their friends abroad at Christmas.
Both Casper and Anna looked younger than they had been. She was too strange; and her mouth had been sewn up badly, two stitches showed. But he looked relaxed, something boyish in his face, as if given the chance he could have been a pleasant man. But the fixed expressions unnerved me, like those daguerrotypes of ancestors staring stiffly into the lens for thirty, sixty, ninety seconds, preparing for eternity. I was wishing, fervently, to feel something; but it was impossible.
It was only when I stopped to look down at Lenie that I faltered, discovering how close beneath the surface emotion really lay. The small face so heavily made up, the cheeks too blushing, the lips too red. She would have liked that, no doubt. Did they remember the bra? I could still feel the trust and eagerness of her warm sweaty hand in mine. I thought of touching it again, but didn’t. Also, the undertaker’s wife was hovering in the background, avidly awaiting the display of grief or horror, the breakdown, the uncontrolled sobbing she must have been confident of witnessing, and for an account of which a Sunday newspaper might well have prepaid her a fortune. So with an effort I contained my emotion and turned hurriedly away and went back to the disinterested glare of the sun outside where Jeremiah was waiting in the Chrysler.
‘Take me to their farm,’ I said, leaning back, closing my eyes, trying to remember, then trying to forget what I’d remembered.
The doors stood open, but the place seemed deserted. I went in through the kitchen, hesitating on the doorstep, calling out an apprehensive ‘Hello?’, then venturing further. Someone – servants, the good ladies of the district, Casper’s relatives of whom several had arrived over the last few days – had cleaned up. If one knew where to look, which I did, there were still traces to be found, a stain on the carpet, a patch on the wall, holes where the plaster had been dislodged
by bullets; but otherwise it was tidy, reduced to anonymity. Even the children’s bathroom was spotless now, the signs of their boisterous evening ablutions removed. The passage with the silent telephone. The bedroom from which I’d dislodged a small resentful occupant – what was his name? Dirk? Ben? Cassie? I wish I knew – was bare; the mattress had been removed from the bed. Of course. The master bedroom. A Bible on the bedside table. How frantically one tries to reinvent the scenes no longer necessary, as if the very effort would invest them with some kind of meaning. I am the Lord thy God.
Back in the kitchen I found an elderly, motherly woman standing aimlessly at the sink, staring through the window at the featureless day outside. She started when she saw me, even though the imposing presence of the Chrysler in the yard should have forewarned her. I remembered her from the few days I’d spent here.
‘Sanna? Where are all the others?’
‘They scared of staying here, Missus. They some of them in town, other ones on farms, all over.’
‘How are you keeping, Sanna?’
‘Oh Jesus, Missus.’ She collapsed against me, her large soft body enfolding me like a feather mattress, bursting into tears, crying out loudly in that timeless wail of grief that rips through history. ‘They all dead, Missus, they all dead, my little boys, my little gels.’
For the first time I broke down. In Ouma’s home I couldn’t, there was too much, were too many, dependent on me. Here it was possible, with this woman, consoling and consoled, knowing what we’d lost; and crying for ourselves as much as for them.
It was that night that Ouma disappeared.
6
GRIMLY AND INEXORABLY the funeral ceremony is unfolding about me; almost literally at my feet. I would have preferred to give the church service a miss, to wait here, protected from the glare, and attend only the interment in our family graveyard (which, with eight new graves, has very little space left for further additions; the past is rapidly catching up with the future). But in the end I succumbed to the pressure – not so much to Abel Joubert’s arguments about ‘facing the world’ and ‘paying the last respects you owe your kin’ as to Trui’s expectations of ‘proper’ behaviour. So Trui, Jonnie and I squeezed in very tightly beside Jeremiah on the front seat of the Chrysler, washed and polished for three days running; and proceeded in state along the twenty kilometres to Outeniqua, with Ouma’s empty coffin in the back.
I was the only one who knew it was empty. There was no need to alarm or even to alert anyone, and the men who carried it didn’t find it strange that Ouma’s handful of dust, as light as any feather, added almost nothing to the weight of the coffin. I am sorry I cannot give any satisfactory account of what happened: even if I hadn’t fallen asleep that night while keeping my voluntary vigil in the cellar, I doubt that I would have witnessed anything special to report. She was there, and then she wasn’t.
Trui had tried her best to pack me off to bed early – ‘Kristien, you can’t go on like this, you need to get some sleep, let me make you some hot milk and brandy’ – but finally gave up. There was something very special about those nights all on my own. Jacob Bonthuys would be in the upstairs room to which he’d been consigned, reading one of the books with which I’d provided him; but the others were asleep. I’d turned off all the lights. There were only the candles burning in the cellar, casting fantastic shadows on the walls from which, like nocturnal animals emerging from their hiding places in the dark, the long-lost paintings came alive: those weird copulations and carnivals and processions and celebrations. In the midst of all this, Ouma at rest in her coffin. The lid had been screwed down, only the small hatch over the face lay folded back on its hinges. Below it, her small dried-apricot face, hard and brittle and half-transparent like papyrus, inscribed with the hieroglyphs of her long life.
For her sake I wished she could be buried now so that it could be over and done with; the grave was where she’d wanted to be. But for my own sake this was preferable. There was something precious about having her around like this. Soon, all too soon, life would resume; this unnatural island in time would dissolve and the current would sweep me along again, the future was impatient to take over. But while this lasted I savoured it, and drew strength from her presence. At last, I thought, the coffin would fulfil the purpose of which it had been deprived for so long.
This is where the recollection becomes unreliable. I find it hard to believe that I could have fallen asleep. I felt so alert: and I was still sitting in the same posture, leaning forward with my chin on my palms, my elbows on my knees, when there was a sudden flickering of all four candles, as if a window had been opened somewhere, I couldn’t feel a draught, yet the dancing of the flames registered a current of air. I stood up to investigate. It was then that I noticed she was no longer there.
The lid was still firmly screwed down on the coffin, leaving only the small square of the hatch open. But Ouma had gone. I went nearer. I stretched out my arm, full length, to grope inside. It was quite empty. I was bemused, but felt no fear at all. When I looked up there was a bird sitting on the back of one of the two chairs on which the coffin rested. It was so dark that I couldn’t make out what kind it was, but it certainly had an unusual appearance: owl-like, but elongated, with legs like a flamingo or a crane and a peacock’s tail, the feathers streaked with strange colours, like one of the figures on the wall. It might have been an effect of the candle light.
My mind was very lucid. The first thing to do was to batten down the hatch on the lid of the coffin. The old-fashioned wing-bolts were in place, large shiny brass ones which Jeremiah had polished with great care. It was only a matter of fastening them as tightly as I could. There was no telling how Trui or the others would react if they found out; it was better not to upset them. Ouma, too, I felt convinced, would have preferred me to keep this between the two of us.
Now I was conscious of being tired; and it was the first night since last Wednesday that I had a proper sleep, nine hours, a consummation more than devoutly wished.
‘I had to close up the coffin last night,’ I told Trui the next morning.
She gave me an understanding look. ‘Perhaps you must phone them to come and take it,’ she suggested.
But I shook my head. ‘She belongs here, Trui.’
‘We don’t want a smell around.’
‘No, it’s all right now.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Then you can come and help me in the kitchen,’ she said. I wondered whether she herself was conscious of how, slowly, easily, she was beginning to assume control.
Through the open kitchen door I could see Jeremiah and Jonnie moving to and fro in the distance, raking leaves, sweeping the yard. But that was not what caught my attention: what made me stop to look again was the flash of blue and green among the trees. A peacock. There were other birds about as well; I could hear them twittering and fluttering in the trees. They were coming back.
They are about us now, in the graveyard. Over the last few days they have all returned. If possible, there are even more of them now than ever before. All the way into town they accompanied the hearse; and they perched on the church when we pulled up outside, the way they’d once flocked around the hospital. It was difficult to make our way through the throng, following the empty coffin on its slow progress into the sandstone building. In front of the pulpit it was put in place at the end of the long line already settled into position. Whisperings moved through the congregation the way the wind moves through a land of wheat.
The obsequious sexton took me by the arm and steered me to the pews reserved for relatives. There were a few of the uncles and aunts I vaguely remembered from childhood. Some of them had paid a visit to the farm over the last week, formal, strange, diffident, perfunctory, offering me the wet kisses that stamped them as kin. With those solemn and mostly doddering siblings of Mother and Father had come a number of their children: some of them would have taken part in our nocturnal rampages up into the a
ttic, down into the cellar; one or two of the cousins might have been in the loquat tree with me, hidden in the dark foliage, awaiting the right moment to pee on an unsuspecting adult passing below – but I recognised none, and was relieved not to admit into my private memories any of these stolid citizens with moustaches, with bristles between the joints on their fingers or in their ears and noses.
But by far the greater part of the reserved block was occupied by Casper’s relatives, a solid phalanx of brothers and sisters with spouses and children, and uncles and aunts and cousins, and the still sobbing old mother: most of them staring at me with fixed expressions that ranged from open hostility and accusation to righteous indignation, to gawping curiosity and, thinning out towards the far end of the scale, the steadfast glare of forgiveness (in the assurance that vengeance belongs to the Lord God).
A single seat had been kept for me within this block of decent and outraged citizens. But I had Trui and Jeremiah and Jonnie with me, and I would not be separated from them.
Flustered, the sexton glanced this way and that, then argued in a strident whisper, ‘Ag, I’m so sorry, Miss, but you see, these pews are for family only.’
‘They are family,’ I said, without bothering to keep my voice down.
If my entry had caused a wind in a wheatfield, this was a hurricane. With some luck some of Casper’s relatives might have stormed out, but they had put too much effort into coming all this way, and were adamant not to miss anything; I, too, did my Luther bit, refusing to budge. I had the impression that Jeremiah, given the choice, would have preferred to withdraw. But Trui’s jaw had a square set to it which announced that she was resolved to see this through with me. So was Jonnie, if for rather different reasons.