by Zoe Wicomb
Yes, he confesses, even if a full story were to be figured out by someone, it would be a story that cannot be told, that cannot be translated into words, into language we use for everyday matters.
There is no such thing, I say, as a story that cannot be told.
Then it remains for you to show how it is done, he sneers.
His eyes move along the length of the table, back, and forth, lingering over the knots in the wood. Once, thank God, once only—he looks up at me, into me, with irises a ghostly green line of light around pupils black and dilated, like those of a trapped animal, mute, distorted, and it is I who must look away and pray that he will say nothing.
This is an intrusion, a weight that I cannot carry. That no amanuensis should have to carry, I later decide as I ponder the boundaries of my task.
Many were given to lying from the mere habit of freely indulging the vagaries of a romantic imagination. They invented stories and enjoyed gossip, they loved the marvellous and exaggerated greatly.
S.J. Halford, The Griquas of Griqualand
BEESWATER 1922
When Gert cleared his throat to ask about the function of the quarries, Le Fleur cut him short with a speech about virtue and toil, about fighting idleness and improving their lot. They, men of little faith, were to lift their hearts as they raised their pickaxes, lest the instruments blunder into barren rock and turn blunt.
You will gain nothing by shouting red flag. The only flag that will save you is your pick and shovel. Plant your seed, and whilst others are carrying red flags and shouting destruction and the rights of the worker, your children will be eating the fruits of your labour.
Gert stared in puzzlement. He knew nothing of red flags, had never shouted about any flag; why would anyone shout about such a thing? And as for fruit, the fig and peach they had planted refused to live on brackish water. So that the Chief had to change his tack: only glad souls rejoicing in toil would be rewarded, for even in the most barren patch of earth God had left traces of his bounty. God had not abandoned them, no, he was testing them with the heat and the drought. Without physical toil they would not enjoy good health, and without good health the soul would not grow.
In midspeech he heard the words that old Eduard had borrowed from Sterne—the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and the radical moisture—saw them crack open like stones, revealing themselves loudly, so that he, too, boomed: Here we have the radical heat, right here held in the stones that must be cracked open with pickaxes, even as God demanded in the quarries of Robben Island, but we must balance the heat with a vision of radical moisture. And before his parched eyes rose the image of water, a burn tumbling down a mountain gorge, dashing against the rock its cool white spray, atomised into radical moisture that would be transported to the desert to sprinkle over the entire volk and coax the stubborn trees into fruitfulness.
Take to the water, he thundered. You men of dusty faith must be drenched and baptised into fresh life.
Casting his eyes over the cracked earth and the goats grazing listlessly on ghanna bush, Gert protested, But there is no water, no rain; it will take some powerful medicine men to bring us rain this year.
Well, what kind of talk was that? That was the problem with the fellow, a raw pagan at heart. He felt a pang of shame at his increasing impatience with Gert.
Think, he said patiently, just think of how only a bucketful of winter rain in June or July can turn the veld into a painted sea of Namaqua daisies and the ploughed furrows into bright green lines. It is that idea of rain—except in the memoir he calls it precipitation—that memory of moisture that can cool you down in the heat of the summer sun. Since the rain will not fall of its own accord, well, then, we will send out our intermediaries, our Rain Sisters, who will travel to the Cape peninsula and then to Robberg, and from there bring back the idea of radical moisture that will drench us through the months of drought, so that the wilting pumpkin leaf will lift its head in pride and the orange flower trumpet its praise and this dusty land bellow before God its hidden core of greenness.
Rain Sisters, Gert asked in blunt Namaqua idiom, and what for a thing is that?
There was no need to think through the details. He saw in a flash that the women blessed with the most bountiful behinds, the queens of steatopygia, were the chosen Brides of Christ—that they would be the ones to carry water to the promised land. Not the volksmoeder, Rachael Susanna, who was no longer in good health, but Antjie and four other women who had been shaped by God into perfect vessels for collecting and carrying back radical moisture from the rain-soaked Cape peninsula with which to temper the radical heat of Namaqualand.
Gert muttered that Antjie, unlike the others, was not a virgin, was already middle-aged, but the Chief growled that this was not what Rain Sisters were about and that such vulgar comments were never again to be uttered.
We must revive the old customs Dorie, he said to his wife, those that have fallen into disuse; for he believed the idea, which had been born so smoothly, to be his memory of a lapsed tradition.
I do not recall such a thing, Rachael frowned, measuring an altered brown frock on her youngest, her Deborah, who, having reached an ungainly height, needed an extension to the hem. No, she mumbled, a pin clamped between her lips, I have never heard anyone in the Kok family speak of radical moisture.
You must have forgotten, he said. In the old days I have a clear notion of my own father, Captain Kok’s chief secretary—as if she did not know—speaking of the ritual of Rain Sisters carrying water from the peninsula to bring rain to Griqualand West.
As for Rachael, she wondered whether she would have liked to be one of those, to get away from the harshness of the place, the stifling summer, the unrelieved grey of the land, but she had grown too listless to contemplate a journey. Her mouth now stuffed with pins, she could only nod at her husband’s insistence that the ritual was a practice of the past. She had certainly never heard of it. In her beloved Kokstad, from where, on still nights, you could hear the distant roar of the Mzintlava, there had not, of course, been any need for water-bearing women of bounteous bottoms.
There are many stories about the Rain Sisters, about how, when they returned from Town after the water gathering trip, their long green Voortrekkerish frocks seemed freshly ironed, their fairy wings of dew-dappled gossamer crisp as the leaves of a new storybook. About how their feet did not quite touch the ground and their veldskoens were transformed into crystal slippers from which water sprayed as they walked. And about how, in the middle of summer, Noah’s rainbow curved its colours across a clear blue sky, announcing their arrival. But these are not true, except for the gossamer wings of water, which indeed always trembled in the light above their heads. Otherwise, their Voortrekker frocks of green drill were splattered with filth, their veldskoens grey with dust, their throats and kappies alike caked with the mud of time and travel. For these women who had walked from Clanwilliam, singing their hymns, surviving on water alone, and holding aloft their bulging water bags of canvas, fell at the feet of the elders waiting by the church with a resounding Juig aarden juig. The Chief gave thanks to God, the water was ritually sprinkled over the shoulders of the Rain Sisters, and only thereafter the warm roosterbrood and mugs of steaming coffee brought out for the weary pilgrims.
It was then that Antjie, who fainted on her first return, was caught by the Chief, held in those strong arms, and, in the last second of consciousness, found her eyes drowned in the melting green of his own. But that moment, snared in the hurly-burly of celebrations, did not return as she surfaced from the swoon. Momentous as it was, she remembered little, for all was erased by the sudden darkness at midday when the world went dead still just before warm rain began to fall loudly throughout the Union of South Africa, drenching the earth, swelling the dead tubers so that within weeks the land was ablaze with carpets of Namaqua daisy, with lurid green ghanna bush and with the succulent milkbush that swelled the udders of the cows. In the shade they kept rows of three-l
egged cast-iron pots in which the excess milk fermented into heavenly curds.
To be a Rain Sister is going to be no ordinary business, no joke, Gert warned in his gentle, irritating manner.
As if Antjie did not know that; as if this burden disguised as an honour did not weigh heavily on her heart. And then there was the business about being thought a virgin, for although she was childless it did not of course mean that they were celibate—not that she would have minded, but Gert being a man of God, was a man all the same. It was altogether an awkward business being in the limelight, being looked at by all. She tried not to think of the intense gaze of the Chief, for that made her blood bubble afresh and then she found herself wanting. Would that she be instructed on her every step, her every thought, but Gert said that that was all foolishness. Miss Rachael said that she had been a fine example of hard work, frugality, and moral uprightness, that honour could not be kept away where honour was due. But she feared that she was just not up to it, quite apart from the physical stamina required to walk all that way without, as the Chief instructed, any frivolous women’s talk or gossiping. Since they supposed that all their talk was frivolous women’s talk and gossip, they walked in silence in order not to jeopardise the mission. They walked to Clanwilliam, where they caught the post office bus to Malmesbury, from whence they walked again to Cape Town, to the tightly packed lanes and smelly latrines of Welcome Estate, where a Griqua choir revived them with hymns and bathed their feet in mustard. But what if it did not rain for weeks, would they have to stay in those crowded places waiting in the cold wind, so far from home? Miss Rachael said no, it always rained in Cape Town.
If the truth be told, Antjie would have given anything to get out of the vague and heavy responsibilities of a Rain Sister, which she could not quite fathom. Whatever the expectations were of her, she now knew that she could not live up to them. The silence of the journey was oppressive; it brought her face to face with things she could not bear to think about. How often she felt her jumbled prayers spill into the red dust, unfit to soar to heaven, where God could not possibly make sense of the shifts in her distracted pleas or praise. The only constant was a pair of fierce green eyes that rose from the dust to come between her and God, eyes that held her own transfixed and stirred in her breast such turmoil that she had to stop with a hasty amen.
On her return she avoided the others, wandered on her own into the veld for wood or to see to the goats, the better to savour that vision of the eyes, vulnerable as raw yolks on the sand, or to relive the rare moments when that familiar voice midst the sermonising or the barking of instructions grew suddenly gentle, lost its thread in galloping copulas, soft as song, whilst the eyes turned to her, lapping at her own until she heard in their albumen embrace every word translated into a liquid language of love. Or had she imagined it? How delicious to remember and to doubt, for it was a whisper of syllables that she raked together in such reverie, and in truth, she could not have borne to hear it spelt out loud; she would, as she returned with a pile of wood balanced on her head, allow those syllables to scatter once more. Thus she was able to make the fire and cook a wholesome pot of mealies and beans flavoured with kaiings and listen to Gert’s rough tales with kindness, lowering her own voice into sweet remembrance.
And so it came about that after the years of barrenness Antjie the Rain Sister conceived a child. Improbable as that was, she had known at once, and marvelled at the miracle of the eyes that had penetrated her body, lapped at every cell, probed every cavity, that had turned into flames licking about her every organ—lungs, liver, kidneys, heart—and made her blood simmer with love. And her womb having been filled in that fire, she felt at last at peace with God, who had taken charge and translated the locked gaze, the whispered syllables, this time into the substance of flesh. Only once did she wonder what it would be like to be with her lover, but, like Mother Mary, knew that it would not do to think of such a thing, was grateful instead, as the child stirred in her belly, for that consummation of the gaze, for the silence of their language. Thus blessed by the radical moisture that in her heart she had carried also for her unborn child, she treasured for as long as was possible her secret of a little boy of strong limbs and stern voice, whose green eyes would blaze as he spoke.
When she finally told Gert, he broke, overjoyed, into the prohibited kabarra dance and declared that they would slaughter a sheep to celebrate. Antjie warned against extravagance, against tempting fate, but no, he said, the old sheepskins would not do for a spanking new child, so he slaughtered the animal and cured the skin himself with utmost care. There were to be no shortcuts as he salted the damp fleece, still warm with the flesh it had carried, and kept a vigilant eye on the drying process, for the softness of the skin depended on manipulating it at just the right moment. A stiff, rough skin would just not do for their baby; it would have to be as malleable after the process as before, and he imagined a new bundle of damp little girl with Antjie’s slanted black eyes, wrapped in the fleece that would give her a form, so that she would falter like a newborn lamb in the veld, not quite finding her feet.
There was no need to tell Andrew Abraham Stockenstrom le Fleur of the miracle. He nodded knowingly; he had seen a vision of the child some months before, and said yes, of course, they must give thanks that Antjie had fulfilled her duty as Rain Sister to God and to the volk and had been blessed accordingly. For the first time he took her hand, tenderly, in both his own, but that prudent woman, fearing the language of the eyes and thus for the health of the child in her womb, refused to look up lest her heart burst into flame. The hours went by, and she could not remember when he let go of that hand, which continued to tremble like a captured bird.
She need not have feared; he would never have spoken, never have acknowledged the feat of telegony, and besides, he was already occupied with the radical transformation of the cult of the Rain Sisters. Since the city had become a den of iniquity, the tradition, like all good traditions, had to be changed. The matron was replaced by a healthy young girl, and the water was now to be collected only a few miles away at Ratelgat. In an elaborate ceremony the radical heat was captured and sealed in a bottle half-filled with hot sand, into which the procured water was poured. God, presiding over the chemical reaction of heat and radical moisture, ensured that the mixture, shaken over the parched earth, raged and frothed so that the rain clouds never failed to appear, bringing a coolness, even if it did not always rain. Never again, however, were they to witness the lusty downpour of Antjie’s days as Rain Sister.
The baby was a girl, with bright eyes set like jewels in her brown face and a booming voice that would brook no delay of the breast, so that, in her sling of softest sheepskin, she spent whole days tied to Antjie’s chest. It was Gert who declared that she looked like a Le Fleur, and indeed, those telegonous eyes were a brilliant green. Little Ragel, he called her, but not without seeking first the permission of the volksmoeder, Rachael Susannah le Fleur, who was only too happy to have her own Deborah mind the baby, who in the process grew to look so like her minder. The Chief indulged her like a grandchild, called her his own wee Ralie and dandled her on his knee, but was careful to avoid the mother’s eyes. Even after the Sunday service, when they all shook hands in a circle outside the church, he barely held hers for fear of another miracle.
And how, I ask, have you arrived at this mumbo jumbo? Was it one of Ouma Ragel’s stories?
Not in so many words. Lately I’ve been trying to put together her many stories and hints, work things out for myself. I’m not convinced that Ouma herself was absolutely sure, but there are so many indications that the Chief cared too much for Antjie—not to mention, of course, the fact that some people think I look remarkably like him, and I must say that in certain photographs I can see a resemblance.
The some people are of course a single old woman literally in her death throes, but I let it pass. I am inclined to believe that there is another, a literary origin for Antjie as Rain Sister, an Afrikaner poem called �
��Die Dans van die Reën’—The Dance of the Rain—which I cannot quite remember. These days David, like an old man, is easily transported to his childhood, to the crumbling raw brick of the schoolroom and the daily recitation of poems and prayers. In the afternoon heat that crackled like crossed wires in the reed and clay roof, with dust sifting on to the pages of the book, they chanted in Afrikaans:
Oh the dance of our Sister!
First she peeps slily over the mountain top,
and her eyes are shy;
and she laughs softly.
And from far off she beckons with one hand;
her armbands flash and her beads glitter;
softly she calls.
She tells the winds of the dance,
she invites them, for the clearing is wide and it will be
a great wedding.…
she spreads out the grey kaross with both her arms;
the breath of the wind is lost.
Oh, the dance of our Sister!
He remembers only these fragments from the beginning and the end, but I also recall the stampede of antelopes as they race to see her footmarks in the sand.
The Griqua Rain Sisters were, of course, without the dance, without the decoration of native beads and copper anklets that Le Fleur would have considered backward and pagan. But we decide that the legendary flower-fairy-cum-princess image is a cultural translation, a severely Calvinised version culled from Eugene Marais’s poem, that it is one of the many signs of the Chief’s confused adoption of a native voice that was in fact produced by a European.