by Andre Brink
At that moment, through some miscalculation or from a sincere wish to defuse a potentially disruptive situation, the organist, suitably bedecked in black but with an aggressively purple hat, moved through a not altogether successfully improvised transition from some rather bland imitation of Bach to a powerful if heavily sentimental rendering of Handel’s Funeral March. The sexton, caught between the glare of animosity from the reserved block and the imminent emergence of the dominee from the vestry, chose the lesser of two evils and, still clutching me by the elbow, scurried towards the front pew where he whispered urgently into the ear of the nearest man. The message was relayed from one to the other, and in a brief commotion four or five venerable men rose and hurried to the vestry, colliding with the dominee just as he made what he must have hoped would be a memorable entrance, and returning with rather too many straight-backed chairs upholstered in blue, which were lined up in front for us, so close to the coffins that we could have rested our chins on them.
The organist continued playing for a while longer, which clearly frustrated the dominee; but at least it reimposed some semblance of order after the disturbance. In a gesture that moved me through its very unexpectedness three of Casper’s relatives came forward to take up the empty chairs beside us. One of them, a man who bore an eerie resemblance to Casper himself, briefly pressed my hand.
The service began. I tried to switch off, offended by the histrionics of the dominee who brought all the sound and fury he could muster to this crowning moment of his career. What made it easier for the mind to wander was that throughout the service there were birds flitting in through the doors and windows as if to monitor our progress, then darting out again to spread the message. I even noticed a mouse scuttling along the front of the pulpit, past the row of coffins, towards the vestry. Would there be any leftovers, I wondered. Ouma hadn’t left any; she posed no eucharistic problems.
At last that, too, was over. Then came the endless procession to the farm. It looked more like a church fête or a rugby match, judging from the size of the crowd. But it won’t be much longer now.
7
SAM NDZUTA IS standing on my left beside Ouma’s grave. As many of the crowd as have been able to squeeze into the graveyard are massed around the graves; overhead a vast cloud of birds hangs suspended, casting its shadow over most of the farm. Eight graves. The mind fails to come to grips with it. It’s like a skyscraper: once it exceeds a certain height it can no longer tease the imagination and loses its power to fascinate.
It is also a matter of experience. If I am left dazed by the sheer extent of it, to Sam it is nothing new. ‘How many times in the townships have we been to these funerals?’ he says. ‘Three at a time, five, thirteen, twenty-six. After a while one stops counting.’
Yet to the whites in today’s crowd those funerals took place beyond the reach of history. They involved blacks. Massacred by police, by ‘security forces’; or victims of ‘black on black violence’. To them this is different. This turning in of the self upon the self. I wonder whether Sam understands it: whether to him this would be ‘white on white’. Would he realise that he, too, is involved in this, or would he repeat our own past mistake of believing we could remain beyond it, of misreading our own terrible complicity?
Wilhelmina once said, if Ouma was to be believed, ‘If it is God’s will we shall stay here; and if it isn’t then we’ll pack our things and trek away.’ But what happens when there is no further horizon beyond which one can run away? What happens when geography closes in on you, when the gravity of a black hole permits no ray of light to escape and carry the message of what has happened, is happening?
Michael telephoned again, some time this last week. His voice had gone flat with shock. ‘Jesus, my love, the last time I spoke to you I thought you were making some sick joke about the deaths in your family. Can you ever forgive me?’
‘I don’t know, Michael,’ I said. I didn’t mean to be cruel; I didn’t mean to be anything in particular. I was merely saying what I thought: that I didn’t know, couldn’t predict anything about myself.
‘I’ve just read the papers,’ he said. ‘I still can’t believe it.’
‘I can’t either. I keep thinking I’ll hear a car outside and see Anna get out. I keep wishing she’ll bring the children. Even the boys I couldn’t stand. I keep thinking, hoping … But what’s the use?’
‘“What’s done cannot be undone”?’
‘Please!’ I said sharply. ‘This really isn’t a time for being clever.’
‘I wasn’t meaning to sound clever. I just don’t have any words of my own. A poor player. Sorry.’ An awkward pause; perhaps we were both equally desperate about getting through, about feeling in touch, if only to persuade ourselves that there were hands out there to be clasped, and held. I remembered the early days of our love, the visit to Gough Square, Dr Johnson’s famous phrase, a time when death was still a literary event; even so it excited us enough to go home and make love behind the red door. Now death has become all too real. And our earlier reflexes seem not only inadequate but obscene. I heard him saying in my ear, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had any time to think about coming back.’
‘I’m not coming back.’
It came as a shock to hear myself saying that. It was nothing I’d thought out, resolved, cleared in my mind. All of a sudden the words just came; and as I said them I knew it was true. It was the one thing that I knew for sure, now that it had been spoken.
‘What do you mean?’ I could hear him gasp as if he’d been hit in the stomach.
‘I’ll probably have to come over to sort out my things. But my life has been displaced. I have to be here now.’
‘But what about us?’
For a while it was difficult to utter the words; but they had to be said, for his sake as much as for mine. ‘It hasn’t worked out, Michael. There’s no one to blame for it. Or if there is it’s me, not you. I have no idea yet what I’m going to do, but whatever it is it will be over here, not there.’
Nothing as trite, as simplistically political, as responding to a ‘challenge’; nothing as private or pathological as ‘proving a point’ or ‘proving myself’. It was both larger and more intimate than that.
And standing here among the graves, as all the coffins are lowered simultaneously to the barely restrained satisfaction of the undertaker who must see in this feat a sign of divine approval, and no doubt of excellent business in the future, I know it is the right decision. It is also the only one. But there is a difference between taking a decision because it is the only one, and doing it because you would have chosen it from any number of others had they been available. I have chosen this place, not because I was born here and feel destined to remain; but because I went away and then came back and now am here by choice. Perhaps for the first time in my life it is a decision that has not been forced on me from outside, by circumstances, but which has been shaped inside myself, like a child in the womb. This one I shall not deny. It is mine.
The birds above are breaking away from the cloud they have formed. In a great wash of sound they take off in all directions, return, swoop down low overhead, execute dizzying dives to the edge of the graves, then rush away again, a spectacular display in many colours. Most of the crowd are so intent on staring down into the graves as they fling their handfuls of petals, their handfuls of earth, on the coffins, that they do not seem to notice.
All that is still needed, it occurs to me, is old Moishe: old Moishe as a young boy, to act as mourner and to weep so extravagantly that he falls into the grave, which will earn him a pound; it would go some way towards sending his grandson and a footloose girl to Baghdad where the camels will sing hymns, in Latin, in the trees at dusk.
The crowd begins to shuffle out and disperse, trampling the flower beds; children go off in pursuit of the peacocks, oblivious of the goose or chicken shit in which they trample. I linger behind for a while. The undertaker gives a signal to his labourers to start filling up. I watch the
red dust as it billows up, caught in the near-horizontal sunlight from behind.
Yes. After all, and in spite of all, this is my place.
I no longer have the wild faith of youth in my ability to change the world; but I also know that it can be changed, and that I want to be involved in it. It is more than a private act of commitment, a personal rebellion. For too long the women of my tribe, of all tribes, have been forced to suffer and to rebel in the small private space allotted them by the powerful males who rule the world; I do not intend to run off in search of a shadow, or to change myself into a tree, or to be buried in shit, to embroider my name on a sweet little cloth, and especially not to vent my rage by wiping out my family with myself. I understand that rage; my God, how I understand it! But it cannot be repeated, cannot go on. What I want to undertake is much less spectacular. To work with others, to bring about a world – slowly, gradually, but surely, I swear – in which it will no longer be inevitable to be only a victim. I know that the present – this small square riddled with graves – is less real than the possible.
There are points of no return that mark the beginning, not the end, of hope.
Casper’s brother, the one who joined me in church, comes back to me to offer me an arm. He must think I am too overcome by grief to follow the others. But there is no need to offend him, and to explain will take too long. I accept his arm.
8
THE MOON IS in its last quarter and there is very little light. But Ouma gives off a fine luminosity, not enough to see by, but sufficient to mark her position. She is sitting on her tombstome, on which the date of her death is still blank, as it will now remain. A single death clearly does not suffice; Wilde had it right. I have appropriated the peacock’s roost on the wall. Some ostriches have lined up, absurd black shapes along the nearest fence. At the gate a couple of mahems, frail shadows in the dark, are humming. The palace among the black trees is dark. There are a few owls about, and from time to time there is a sleepy twittering of birds. They have resumed their old habits, their habitual perches. The crowd has gone, leaving devastation in its wake. We shall have to start tidying up tomorrow. Think about the future.
The dead are silent. They now depend on me.
This must be what Thando Kumalo had in mind when he said, ‘Salani kahle.’
‘It has gone well,’ says Ouma. ‘Under the circumstances.’
‘You should have been part of it.’
‘No, I didn’t want to spoil Anna’s day. Funerals are not my scene anyway. People no longer enjoy themselves the way they used to.’
‘I missed you.’
‘But you have me now. I’ll always be here. Of course, you may decide to run off again.’
‘I won’t. I’ve decided that if you could come back from Baghdad, I can come home too.’
‘Why? Because it is easier now?’
‘No!’ I say in a rush of passion. ‘Because it is more difficult. Because there is work to be done. As much for myself as for others.’ I look hard at her; right through her. ‘Will you help me?’
‘We’ll all be here.’ She looks out across the graves, and beyond; far beyond. ‘The things we’ll do together –!’
‘Until one day an elephant comes and blows the story away?’ I ask, not without a touch of malice.
I cannot see her face, but I have an idea she is smiling. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not this time. I’m not going to make it easy for you.’
‘Why not, Ouma?’
‘Because, Kristien, you’re a big girl now.’
Author’s Note
I am indebted to Abraham de Vries who first recorded the legend of the idiots of the Little Karoo in Die Uur van die Idiote (‘The Hour of the Idiots’), and to V C Malherbe’s Krotoa, Called ‘Eva’: A Woman Between, for the raw material of my Kamma/Maria in Part Three, while for Wilhelmina’s story in Part Five I have drawn on the Great Trek diaries of Susanna Smit.
The epigraph by Octavio Paz has been translated from the poem Blanco.
On the map of South Africa the site of my Outeniqua would roughly coincide with that of the ostrich town of Oudtshoorn; but Outeniqua is not Oudtshoorn, nor should the inhabitants of the one be mistaken for those of the other.
More than anything I have written before, this story needed a woman’s hand; and the help of my wife Marésa has been inestimable. Where I have failed to follow her advice the blame is squarely mine.
Glossary
[Words not explained in the text]
ag – oh
assegai – short spear
biltong – dried, salted strips of meat
bliksem – scoundrel (literally: lightning)
Boer – Afrikaner
boer – farmer
bokmakierie – onomatopoeic bird-name: species of shrike
boytjie – diminutive form of boy
broekie lace – wrought-iron trellis on verandah (literally: knicker-lace)
bywoner – poor tenant farmer
doek – see kopdoek
dominee – Dutch Reformed pastor
duiker – small antelope which runs with a characteristic bobbing motion
gevrek – hopeless (literally: dead)
impi – detachment of Zulu soldiers
kaffir – (here) member of a black tribe (later pejorative)
kambro – plant with large edible bulb
kaross – blanket of animal skins
katlagter – ground robin
kelkiewyn – onomatopoeic bird-name: sand-grouse
kierie – (walking) stick
kiewiet – Cape plover
kist – chest (usually for storing clothes)
(kop)doek – headscarf
maar – but, rather
meerkat – ground squirrel
MK – (member of) Umkhonto weSizwe, ‘The Spear of the Nation’, armed wing of the ANC
moffie – homosexual
mos – just, just so
platteland – rural regions
pollies – police
pot bread – bread baked in a cast-iron pot
riem – thong
smous – itinerant salesman, pedlar
tambotie – fragrant dark wood, much used for furniture
tsamma – wild melon
veldskoen – rough hand-made shoe
voorhuis – lounge (literally: front room)
wors – sausage
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Copyright © André Brink 1996
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First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Martin Secker & Warburg
Minerva Edition 1997
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