Father tried to find someone to work for him in Gert’s place, but none of the Basters he hired was as clever or trustworthy as Gert, and after a while some omission or oversight was always discovered, or there were complaints and objections, and the man bundled up his few possessions and left with his family; or otherwise the wives came to help in the house and quarrelled with old Dulsie, or Mother lost her temper and flew into them with a bundle of harpuisbos twigs as was her wont, and then the woman shouted angrily that she would not stay here a moment longer and urged her husband to claim his wages and leave. It became more and more difficult to find suitable workers, for it was during this time that the Basters in the Roggeveld were being forced from the land they owned or inhabited amongst us, and later no outspan or winter quarters or grazing was available to them, so that one by one they moved away from our region with their rickety wagons and their handful of sheep; it was probably also during those years that Father made the first of his land purchases, though as a child I knew nothing about it, neither did I have any interest in it. Thus, of all the families that worked for us briefly after Gert’s departure, I no longer remember individual names or faces, only a few anonymous voices, scraps of conversation at the back door or in the kitchen, jokes, shouts, curses or rhymes that still sound in my ears, swirling around me in the dark, entwined and entangled after all the years, forming new patterns in which I can no longer recognise the familiar threads. They are dead and gone, every last one of them, leaving me without a name or a face, buried outside the wall encircling the white people’s graveyard, or somewhere along the road in the Karoo, or farther north in the interior where their journey had taken them, near Groot River, and the stones that were stacked over them have been scattered and washed away; their children and grandchildren have died too, somewhere on a plain, in a kloof or beside a campfire, and the last memory of their existence has been wiped out. Only their voices still sound in my ears here where I lie awake in the night.
Someone puts a karee log on the fire in the hearth, someone throws a handful of harpuisbos twigs on the fire, so that it crackles and flares, and I hear Dulsie’s voice as she coughs over her clay pipe, and then the others join the circle one by one; but the faces, fleetingly visible in the dancing firelight at the hearth, have become obscure to me. “The mountain big and blue, O how will I get through …” Who sang or hummed that song? “I seek them in the mountains …” – but that was Gert, that was earlier. Rhymes, verses, songs, like the ones Gert always used to make up.
“Cain and Abel had a fight
Who had the pretty maid in sight?
Rode away into the night,
Never more to see the light …”
But who was it? It is not Gert’s voice sounding in my ears, though I still remember the words clearly.
“Abel was murdered by his brother,
Was seen by another …”
Words I did not understand as I sat listening in the dark; furtive laughter I did not understand and a sudden hush when someone approached, Mother on the threshhold of the kitchen … “Jakob’s voice and Esau’s hands”, and the women’s screams as the group scattered. Jakob’s voice and Esau’s hands, and how angry Mother had been, how relentlessly she had thrashed about with the stick she had grabbed, with pale, stony face and burning eyes, and the women in the kitchen scattering to escape, fleeing from the house. Esau’s hands … What had infuriated her so? The next day the woman who had said it left with her husband and her children and their few goats, and from the yard she shrieked imprecations in the direction of the house while Mother slammed the kitchen door and turned away, pale and trembling with silent fury. It was during that time, I am certain, for Gert had already left and Jakob lay in the graveyard under the stones that had been stacked over his grave, so I knew they could not have been talking about him. Or could it have been he – Jakob, who had slipped and fallen into the dark crevice on the mountainside, hands out-stretched against the rock?
Now I remember again: suddenly the thread running through the design becomes clearly visible in the dark. The women were saying what a beautiful child Maans was. Pieter had also been such a spindly little thing when he was small, Dulsie went on; Jakob was never like that. Yes, one of the women added, it is Jakob’s voice but Esau’s hands, and the people sitting at the hearth in the dark burst out laughing as if they understood the words, just as Mother entered the kitchen and overheard them. I did not understand, or perhaps I simply chose not to understand, just as I always did when a choice was possible for me; but in the end understanding was inevitable as the stories did the rounds, stories repeated with unexpected acrimony or slipping out before the speaker could help it, stories repeated because no one realised I was present or because they thought I could not hear; warp and woof woven together over the years into a tapestry in which I can finally make out the pattern. Could Maans have been Pieter’s child? In later years, when it became possible for me to ponder and to question, many years later, when I was growing older and Pieter himself was approaching the end of his life, I often reflected on this matter, and at times Maans must have wondered why I was gazing at him so quizzically, as if I were searching for something in his features. I never found anything, however, no, I never did believe that Maans could be Pieter’s child; but that must have been what people in those parts believed or wanted to believe and what they told each other, until even I became aware of it, until it became an accepted fact that no one questioned any more and in its own way the rumour became more important than anything that might actually have occurred. But who still remains that knew Jakob and Sofie, or cares about Pieter’s memory; who still speaks of these matters? Who remembers?
At the time we must have been the subject of a great deal of gossip, and what else could be expected, with Jakob’s death and Pieter and Sofie’s disappearance, with Gert and Jacomyn’s sudden and mysterious departure and, finally, my long illness as well; what else could be expected in our small, isolated world where everyone ended up knowing everything about everyone else, that miserable handful of white and coloured people in the boundless desolation at the edge of the mountains? Perhaps they tried to help, as people will in times of affliction or need, and perhaps they made offers of goodwill. I remember the people who helped search for Jakob and the neighbours who attended his funeral, lined up silently along the walls of the voorhuis, but I know that as a child I did not see their presence as a sign of sympathy, but rather as an intrusion. Oh, when I was a child it was just too rare for us to receive visitors, and possibly I was simply unused to it and the curiosity and distrust I remember were no more than imagination on my part. But the unspoken words that I remember just as clearly, the questions and the speculations that I overheard incidentally? Where did a group of men once talk about that day, and someone wondered who had searched for Jakob in the kloof without finding his body where it had been lying all the time? The details I no longer recall, but I remember overhearing the question and waiting for an answer that was never supplied. Those men all knew the answer, and the question and the silence that followed were an accusation, even though it was never uttered. Who searched in that kloof, and how did Jakob lose his footing and, with mangled face, fall down into the narrow cleft between the rocks? I shall never know; neither do I wish to know. It is better so.
Did the neighbours begin to avoid us again after these events, or were they simply discouraged from coming to our home? When visitors arrived, Father was always glad to see them, they were welcomed and coffee was served, or sweet wine or brandy but, just as they remained intruders to me, so they did to Mother as well, and even more so in the time after Jakob’s death and Pieter’s disappearance. People inevitably noticed that there was no welcome in her stiff hospitality and sparse words and gradually they stopped coming again. At last the only visitors who still came, were a neighbour in search of an absconded apprentice or a lost sheep, or a servant sent to borrow an awl or a bag of horseshoe-nails.
Only the small, familiar sounds
of the house still filled the silvery days, and the howling of the wind around the corners of the building, against the shutters or in the thatch when I awoke at night and could not fall asleep again. Father still mounted his horse painfully and attended auctions to buy sheep or land; later he bought a black Cape cart in which he set off to attend funerals in the district, but I do not recall Mother often accompanying him, for it was as if she were more withdrawn than ever during those years, though the passion and the zeal and the sudden, unpredictable flashes of temper had intensified. No, actually I cannot remember Mother ever leaving the house in the years after Jakob’s death, except when the minister came from Worcester and there were church meetings on neighbouring farms.
Those meetings and the long journey to Worcester for Nagmaal I remember because they became an ever greater ordeal for me as I grew older. I felt strange and ill at ease among the children of my own age, and awkwardly I hovered at the fringe of their company until it was possible to escape. Once I was standing behind an outspanned cart when I heard a girl ask where I was, and someone said something I could not make out in a cold, disdainful tone. “Oh, that mad creature,” an older woman remarked; and that must have been how I appeared to them, the thin, shy, lisping girl with the scar on her forehead who fled from the people, the tents, the outspanned carts and wagons, to escape from the friendly interaction, shy as a deer in the ridges, dashing away from the people, the voices, the greetings and laughter and jesting, the nicknames, the whispering in corners and the incomprehensible jokes and innuendo, the girls with their arms around each other and the boys to one side with their impertinent glances and their nervous excitement, the approval and disapproval of the older women lined up against the wall, the entire united community of other people into which Mother and Father were briefly assimilated, but in which I could play no part. I turned and fled to the servants’ fire beyond the outspan, and I warmed myself and shared their coffee when it was offered to me, and soon enough they forgot about my presence and continued as if I were not there.
That winter after my illness we all went down to the Karoo as usual and when we returned that spring, Miss Le Roux came with us. Someone had probably brought her from Worcester and Father must have fetched her halfway with the cart, I do not know, for I was told nothing, and even Dulsie spoke only vaguely of the stranger who was coming. However, she came from Worcester to join us in the Karoo before we returned to the Roggeveld, for I was standing in front of our reed house with Maans on my hip when the cart came to a halt and Miss Le Roux climbed down slowly in her black dress. Mother’s formal welcome and my own mystified silence could not have put her at ease and, in fact, she probably never felt at home with us: as strange as she seemed on her arrival at our outspan in the Karoo that afternoon, so she remained to us, in spite of living in our house for two years. I soon found out all about her, but only because I was her sole companion in her loneliness, for I certainly never questioned her, nor did I show the slightest interest.
She had grown up in Worcester: her parents were both dead and of the six daughters the eldest was married, while the youngest lived with her to help with the children; two lived in town and worked as seamstresses, and the remaining two became governesses, and that was how Miss Le Roux came to us in her dusty black dress, with her travelling-case and her trunk, recommended to Father by old Dominee himself, as she often stated emphatically, as if it gave her special standing. She could not have been much older than twenty, a stout, giggling young woman in a black mourning frock, with her effusiveness and excitability and her hiccuping laugh, with her nerves and swoons and sudden tears, her eau de cologne and her vial of smelling salts.
She returned to the Roggeveld with us and the big bed in my room was given to her, while I shared the narrow cot in the corner with Maans; she unpacked her things and hung her black dresses, her black caps and her black cape on the nails in the wall. We spent all day together, she and I, and at night in the dark I listened to her regular breathing in the big bed. She brought along writing paper and quill pens and a knife to sharpen the points and readers in Dutch and English: I knew how to read and write after a fashion, but she made me practise anew and taught me to spell, she read me poems and made me recite them, I learned arithmetic and she told me Bible stories – it was probably all she knew, but it was more than most people in our parts did in those days. I was a quick learner, she said in generous moments, and assured Father that I was a clever girl. Only with sewing and other needlecraft she had no success, in spite of her patience and perseverance, for I was an awkward child and no matter how often she made me unpick the uneven stitches and start over, it only resulted in the cloth becoming even more crumpled. I learned what she could teach me and listened to the lengthy accounts about her sisters and the house where she grew up, and at night I listened to her regular breathing in the dark, but she remained a stranger whose presence I endured silently as she hovered over me, gushing and breathless.
Of course she must have been lonely. Had anyone warned her of the remoteness of the Roggeveld; could she have guessed how isolated our lives were? But even if she had been warned, what alternative did she have? Her parents were dead and somehow she had to make a living, and she was probably only too grateful for the old Dominee’s recommendation. Father was kind, as he was to everyone, but it was Mother who determined the course of events in the house, and to Mother Miss Le Roux was a hireling who had to remain aware of her inferior station and her dependency. Could this young woman’s education have unsettled her, and was that why she treated her so dismissively? Who will ever know what went on in Mother’s thoughts? Mother reacted to the long stories, the nerves and the fainting spells with a disdainful silence, and it was only Miss Le Roux’s skill with the needle that gave her a certain status. Thus, after our lessons she hemmed the innumerable sheets and pillowcases that would be used by our family for many years to come, on the farm as well as later in the town house: Mother died in a bed made up with sheets Miss Le Roux had sewed and after Maans got married, Stienie still used that linen for a long time. In the kist where our linen was stored, the bedding piled up without explanation, just as the land and the sheep flocks were accumulated silently and steadily during those years, in preparation for an unknown yet alluring future.
How could she have been happy with us? On a board across her knees she wrote long letters to her family in the Boland, but how often could she send off those letters? I do not know. And what passerby ever brought along a reply? But sometimes a letter did arrive somehow, and I remember the tears and the excitement, and the long stories she told me about this one or that one, and about the births and deaths in the distant world beyond the mountains where she came from. When a rare visitor arrived, she was always excited too and, giggling and breathless, she presented herself in the voorhuis uninvited, to join the company. It was usually a young man from one of the neighbouring farms who had ridden over with notice of a funeral or a visit from the Dominee, and the way she hovered and fussed made him uncomfortable, and long after the visitor had left, after the sound of the horse’s hoofs had died away and the familiar silence had taken hold of the farm once more, she remained restless and agitated. The young men in our parts were unfamiliar with the Boland girls and their ways; she frightened them away with her unbecoming eagerness when they called on us, and when we attended church services in the district, it was clear that they were avoiding her. But what other future was there for her?
I see that emptiness now, I recognise that loneliness, though I still do not quite understand it, but at the time I was only aware that she was making herself ridiculous with her fluttering and her airs in the company of the young men who were invited into the house for a bowl of coffee, and with all her questions and insinuations after their departure. Over the untidy, irregular stitches of my sewing, I studied her in silence, as deprecating and scornful of her weakness as Mother herself, and I decided that I would never behave like that; that I would never be like her.
W
hat did I mean by that resolution, the silent disapproval of a mere child who knew nothing about other people or about life? Even today I am not quite sure. I would never be as dependent as she, I thought – on her brother-in-law, on the Dominee, on Mother’s goodwill and Father’s wages, on the favour of any random young man; I would never deliver myself into the power of others the way she did, fluttering around an embarrassed young caller in the voorhuis who was trying his best to escape. I was already learning to be silent and to hide my feelings; in due course I learned not to feel at all, and with practice and experience my skills improved. I was a quick and intelligent girl, and I learned fast.
For a year life continued in this way. Perhaps Miss Le Roux had been hired for a year, or perhaps there was simply no chance for her to leave the Roggeveld until the end of autumn when we moved down to the Karoo again. When the time came, she was very excitable and high-spirited for a while and she spoke of the Boland and her people and her friends more than ever, while preparing and packing for her departure. Down in the Karoo she embraced me tearfully and told me never to forget her, and I stood there with Maans’s hand in mine and watched as she and Father left in the cart for the place where she would be fetched. It was over, I thought impassively; but it was not. One day before the end of winter Father fetched her again and Miss Le Roux returned to us with her trunk and her travelling-case; she came back to the Roggeveld with us, and unpacked her things again in the room she had left a few months earlier, and hung her black dresses on the nails in the wall. She was quieter and more subdued, the moments of excitement rarer, and after each outburst she withdrew into herself again; she did not speak of the Boland as often as before and did not write so many letters. Our lessons were resumed where we had left off and nothing was said, only Mother was cooler and more distant than ever. She was not free to choose what she wanted to do with her life, and it probably turned out to be the only possibility for her, to return for another year to the solitary farm, the lonely house, and the company, all day long, of a silent, critical girl and a toddler.
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