by Eben Venter
A Free Stater is how he describes the man; he’d left for overseas one day and never came back to South Africa, not to his people and nor to their Free State farm, never once. Can you imagine? So then Paul said he should come and join him, there’s a life awaiting them over there. He painted a very, very rosy picture of it all, but then, sadly, there was no money. He couldn’t very well beg from his father; that was out of the question. And by the time money did become available, when Luiperdskop was left to him and Bennie after his father’s death, and later when Marko came along and bought the farm from them, ‘Ag, good heavens, Mattie, by that time I’d long since lost touch with Paul.’
He fetches a blue envelope stored in a plastic bag; this then was Paul’s last letter, 1964, after that he never again replied to his, Hannes’s, letters. He suspects he’d said something he shouldn’t have. Uncle Hannes ends the story there, sits down, letter in hand, avoiding Mattheüs’s eyes.
They remain sitting like that, surrounded by Uncle Hannes’s possessions: the horns mounted on the curved wall, knick-knacks consisting mainly of found objects from the veld or from the mountain, long blue-grey crane feathers pushed between two books and pointing upwards to the cone-shaped thatched roof, a handful of old marbles in a bottle, a dried tortoise shell, reddish stones with fern fossils – that kind of thing. On the green waxed stoep by the door – there is only a single entrance to the rondavel – sparrows peck away and scurry about. A wedge of morning sun slants in upon the two of them, warming the dusk inside.
Well, Paul probably gave up on him, you can’t hold it against him that he didn’t want to keep the hope alive. Paul realised that he’d never make it to the other side. He was a curly-head, as Mattheüs can see, it was fashionable in those days to keep your hair quite short. But as he remembers Paul when he was still in South Africa, he also had a curl at the back of his neck, ‘A scandalous little kiss-curl,’ Uncle Hannes laughs wryly, that’s what he remembers about him.
Mattheüs gets up and holds Uncle Hannes’s head close to his body. Uncle Hannes responds to the gesture by hugging him too, though clumsily, the dogs’ eyes once again on the two of them, then he pushes him away, gets up from the chair rather heavily, and taking a cloth he walks over to the kudu horns above the dresser to whisk away a cobweb that he’s spotted. He says he appreciates Mattheüs’s sympathy, however that’s not what he was seeking in telling the story. He’s long past self-pity, long past it.
‘Life on the farm teaches you to put up with a lot, Mattie. Otherwise you go under.’
Another slug of brandy for each of them in their coffee – mostly brandy by now, the coffee having been drunk. ‘Ag, Mattie, what more is there to say?’ Throughout the years on Luiperdskop, first in the main house and later here in the rondavel where, as he can see, he’s made himself reasonably comfortable. Throughout the years he’s seen droughts come and go, changes in the breed of sheep, merinos replaced by the hardier dorpers, his mother buried first, then his father. Bennie’s success with the beautiful German cars he observed from a distance, and he, what about him, was he left behind? No, he wasn’t, he persuaded himself. He visited his friends, both men and women, in town, the librarian in Beaufort West, a few of the farming families, ag, all in all no more than a handful. He regained hope, yes, hope, and then lost it again as the interminable years passed, ag, Mattie. And what is he actually trying to say with all of this? What can he say? ‘Mattie, to be absolutely honest, I don’t know.’
There was something else. There is. He supposes he can, ag, he doesn’t know how to. There was a sentence in his last letter, Mattie must understand, there was a sentence that he’d written and which he later realised – of course when it was too late – must have been the death knell.
‘I find it dreadfully difficult to say it, nobody has ever heard it, I suppose it’s the kind of stuff that you’d sit and spout to a psychologist. The sentence, then, ag, Mattie, you see I can hardly get it out, anyway, I went and wrote: I want to hold you close to me day and night, my Paul.
He believes that this was the end between them. After that, Paul’s letters from Paris dried up. That letter was overburdened with neediness, ‘Do you understand, Mattie?’ That sentence had put the wind up Paul. The man will come over to Paris and smother him. He’s used to nothing out there in the dust and sticks, he yearns for you-know-what, and that’s still okay, but a man who’s too starved is of no use to anybody. Everything, it was all in that sentence, Paul couldn’t read past it.
Now, whenever he goes for a walk with the dogs, he likes going to the wetlands, ‘you know, don’t you, where this is on the farm, at the back, to the north-east, there’s strong spring water there,’ that discordant sentence keeps echoing in his head. At night, when he’s lying in bed reading, drifting in and out of the story as sleep overwhelms him and he eventually lets go and his mind clears again and he picks up the book that’s lying on his stomach and he carries on reading, as a rule he’s then at ease and contented, until the time comes to close the book and turn over and try to sleep and then, then that sentence returns with a vengeance, you might say, to haunt him. Year in, and year out. He’s tried all possible techniques, some of them picked up from self-help books, for instance, you pretend that the sentence is a material thing and you go through the motions of wrapping it in a parcel, sealing it, and sending it away. He’s prayed, too, everything, but that sentence keeps echoing in his ears. With a single stroke he destroyed the most precious thing in his life, once and for all. There’s nothing to be done about it. It’s irreversible.
At this point, Uncle Hannes is so upset that in getting to his feet he bumps the coffee table, and the cups and ashtray and things all tremble a bit and a few books fall to the floor. He clutches his forehead and moves to the far side of the rondavel, to a room divider with three silk panels painted with pale Chinese boatmen, and there he sinks to his knees, his head hanging in shame, the dogs all around him, wagging their tails. ‘I was unwise. No, too eager. Too greedy. My Paul got cold feet, and who can blame him? Everything wiped out in one sentence. Lord, have mercy on me.’
A little girl peeps around the door of the rondavel: ‘Mamma wants to know if the uncles want bacon and eggs for breakfast?’ Mattheüs nods and gestures to her to leave. She seems to understand and ambles off home.
He is touched by the confession. He tells Uncle Hannes that he is too hard on himself, ‘please, Uncle Hannes, after all these years, still so much self-flagellation,’ and knows, as he’s saying it, that these are idle words that will make no difference. This is the life story of a hermit on a farm in the Great Karoo, caught in his own cycle of reflection and regret, a torment that becomes more and more of a burden as time goes by.
Uncle Hannes at last gets up from among the licking dogs, fetches the photo of Paul in the wooden frame and puts it back in its place. Then he walks to the hand basin right at the back, next to the shower cubicle that’s closed off with a plastic curtain, and washes his face.
He offers Mattheüs more coffee and pours a third dash of brandy without waiting for a reply. He says he’s heard of Mattheüs’s business in the city and he wants to wish him every success. This time he fetches something from the wardrobe, rummages among the shoeboxes at the bottom and produces a box, a purple shoebox with Florsheim printed in faded gilt. He sits down, opens the shoebox, and produces an object inside a leather pouch. ‘Dassie hide.’ He holds it out for Mattheüs to take. ‘It’s yours now.’
‘But what is it, Uncle Hannes?’ He’s suddenly suspicious.
‘Open it. I’m giving it to you today. You’ll need it.’ Mattheüs opens the soft hide and finds what he expected, a pistol that he leaves inside the pouch on his lap, a blue-black colour, just a shade off black, in fact.
‘I can’t accept it, Uncle Hannes. Thank you very much, but it’s not me. If someone started shooting at me or whatever, I don’t know. I suppose it’d be a case of my time has c
ome.’
Uncle Hannes suddenly becomes quite animated. He says Mattheüs is being a bit too, how shall he say? The men who have their roots on this farm have never been shy. So, where’s he going to work? Where is his business? Main Road, Observatory. Well, now, that’s one of those gangster streets, isn’t it? He’s there all alone on the premises and it soon gets late, with his whole day’s takings on him, ‘It’s a cash business, not so?’ No, Mattie must keep his wits about him, give it a bit of thought.
Mattheüs holds out the dassie-hide bag with the gun; Uncle Hannes starts fiddling with the thing, showing how it works. Here, he points at the barrel: Beretta. It’s the Cougar 8000 series, the Italians used to manufacture it, now it’s made by Turks. You can’t get any better. Easy to conceal, he’s taken it to Cape Town how many times, walked up and down Adderley Street with the thing in his trouser pocket, through the Gardens, everywhere, ready to take on anyone looking for trouble. And nice and light, too, it’s like walking about with two rather than one in your pants, he jokes.
Mattheüs is surprised and pleased at Uncle Hannes’s sudden high spirits after his sad story. But on the matter of weapons, a gun, he and Uncle Hannes part ways.
It’s got a double-stack magazine, Uncle Hannes continues, like a real weapons instructor, it’s a nine-millimetre, he says. It takes fifteen rounds, here’s the safety catch, on the slide, easy to handle. Here, take it, feel how it sits in your hand. It’s got a lovely grip. A pity I lost the holster. But the dassie hide’s also fine, actually even better.’ When Mattheüs still doesn’t hold out his hand, Uncle Hannes takes his right hand in his own and places the gun in it.
‘So there, you see,’ says Uncle Hannes when he notices that Mattheüs is beginning to show an interest, and positions the butt of the gun so that it fits into his palm, or at any rate feels as if it fits, he’s not used to weapons at all.
Uncle Hannes sits down with one of the smaller dogs on his lap, now permitted in celebration of the transfer of the Beretta, and no doubt also as consolation for his eternally lost Paul.
Should he, Mattheüs wonders, must he accept it? Or is he completely crazy now? He immediately conjures up a couple of scenarios like the one sketched by Uncle Hannes, even though he’s never in his life walked down Main Road, Observatory. Late afternoon on that street, behind his counter with the left-over food and especially the day’s takings, a weapon might be useful even though he’d never want to use it. On the other hand, if you do have one on you, you can always threaten; he can reconcile himself with that, he can imagine himself in a situation like that. Beretta, he reads on the barrel. Quite neatly made. Actually, damn good-looking.
The rest of that day, he and Uncle Hannes practise target shooting with the Beretta, faded Coke and Fanta cans in a row on a ridge far away from people and animals; he couldn’t say why or from where, maybe it’s something in his genes, but after a while he’s an ace shot and nails the cans one by one. When Marko comes to have a look, he hits five out of the seven cans, while Marko hits four. Cut or with a foreskin, hard or flaccid between the legs, an older guy all beard and bush on sand-coloured sheets in a sleazy motel, images from his photo archive flash across his mind when he stiffens his arm, takes aim and pulls the trigger.
And yet. The steaming piles of dung from this morning’s milk cows, for instance, are also there, and Sissy with the dish of crisply fried bacon, and Marko, ag, he’s got no evil intent, and the soil where they’re standing, the dryness of the air that he breathes, and the tiny grey veld birds – after a while these things come to constitute the chief content of his consciousness.
All the time, too, he needs to know how Pa is getting along. Wants to go to the kraal, and makes Sissy and the children take him there. He wants to go to the dip tank where his father drove the cattle at the start of winter to prevent tick paralysis. All over the farm there are particular places he wants to go to, and mostly he has to be driven there. Mattheüs never goes along, just needs to know where his father is each time. And has he had his Sustagen yet, and so on.
‘You’re not his keeper, after all,’ she says. But he is, and she knows it. She listens to him even though she doesn’t like doing so.
‘It’s high time Pa took a nap,’ says Mattheüs when they return from a trip in Marko’s 4x4 bakkie to the cement dam in the kraal closest to the farmyard. That’s where Pa used to collect weaver-bird eggs as a child, he wanted to go and have one last (he says this himself) look.
At dusk, he suppresses the impulse to climb up to the flat stone to check his messages. And then remembers Uncle Hannes’s hand gesture, how at the end of the shooting session he handed him the Beretta, pushed it at him, as it were. There, take this thing away from me. The looking away and then, looking up again, the sudden alarm, there, in his urgent glance: don’t you get it? Take this thing away from me.
He fetches a beer from Marko’s bar and walks into the veld on his own, due west; his arm held out in front of him is orange-brown in the light of the setting sun. He sits down under a thorn tree, emptied of almost all thoughts of Jack and of his business that must open on Wednesday, or not. It takes honesty to admit that it’s happened to him on this barren farm, among people with ways that are not like his (Sissy uses Aromat), far away from the city that he regards as his heimat, his true homeland.
When he returns to the farmyard and walks into the sitting room, Pa is in the recliner with a rug over his knees and earphones plugged into his ears. He’s listening to Liewe Heksie, Sissy explains. He’s had a wonderful time today. Look, his cheeks have even got colour.
He bends over his father and takes his hand. Pa knows immediately from his touch who it is: ‘Oh, it’s you, Mattie,’ and the earphones are pulled out. Pa draws him closer to say into his ear: ‘I’ve done everything I wanted to do. I’m ready. We can get going quite early tomorrow. They really don’t know how to handle me here, Mattie. I’m ready to go home.’
Sissy (she’s making rusks to be taken to Cape Town) immediately demands to know: What is he saying, what is it this time that Pa doesn’t want to share with her? She tends to be distrustful.
He’s just saying that he’s ready to go home. ‘Oh,’ she says.
For the first time ever, in his role as his father’s primary caregiver, he feels superior to his sister. Maybe that’s not the right word: equipped, better than she is with her husband and three children and chickens and orphaned lambs and whatnot that she has to see to; the fragile body of their father, that she cannot deal with.
When she kisses him goodnight in the passage with the triptych of wedding photos on the wall, she again asks him to please see to it that the will is not meddled with (her phrase). Mattheüs does not answer her. It’s clear that the intimacy between him and Pa unnerves her.
My dear son,
Pa doesn’t know whether this could perhaps be one of his last recordings. It’s getting too much for me, the talk-talk-talk. If the Lord wants me to go, I resign myself to His will. But I want to believe that it’s not my time yet. I can feel here on the desk the flowers that you put into a vase for me. What kind are they? Oops, Pa can’t find the pause on the old Philips. I suppose they must be daisies. Ag, my child, what would I do without you?
I’m going to get right to the point here. Not that I really know why now, of all times. That’s how thoughts and all kinds of things enter my mind. Pa has always wanted to tell you about the doors of the Mercedes. Pa thinks you may not realise exactly what has gone into those doors. The technology and the refinement. All I really want is for you to appreciate those doors as I appreciate them. Look, all those years before I got the Mercedes agency, it was always General Motors cars, as a matter of course. Chevs and Pontiacs, and so on. Also quite good cars, mind you. And then, later, all the Japanese cars came along. But it was only with the Mercedes that I discovered how a door should really shut.
Ag, I remember it very well, the
model, a pitch-black 220S, you know the one with the fins on either side of the boot, it was one of the most beautiful Mercedes cars they ever made. A cousin of mine, Karl-Hendrik, you know, the eldest son of my Uncle Jan, came driving up one afternoon to our house in Observatory in his swanky car. Get in, he said to me, and he drove us to Sea Point. Once we were there, he told me to get out and to get back in again and then to shut the door. Ag, by that time I was in love with the car already, the red leather seats and the creamy-marble steering wheel and the beautiful walnut of the dashboard, there was no comparison with the Americans. So I got out as Karl told me to, we always called him Kallie. An attractive man, looked after himself too. Women? Listen, there wasn’t a woman on this earth that he couldn’t sweet-talk.
So anyway, I got back into the car and closed the door behind me. No, he said, get out again. You closed the door too hard. It’s not necessary with a Mercedes. You bring the door to within a few inches of yourself and then you just pull it ever so lightly towards you, that’s all that’s required. So I did as Kallie instructed me, and then I knew exactly what he meant.
It’s a kind of lubricated click into its lock. Man, the Germans knew just how. It’s not those tinny doors of the General Motors cars. Here you’re dealing with a totally different class of craftsmanship. Do you know, as I’m sitting here, I can hear exactly the gentle click as the Mercedes door neatly shuts.
Ag, I know you and Sissy and your mother sometimes looked at me askance when I asked you please not to slam the doors like that. And sometimes there was more to those looks of yours, especially your mother’s, than just a look. It’s not as if I didn’t notice it. I’m also just human, you know, Mattie.