Maans continued to be as well-respected as always, but yet there was a new sharp edge to people’s feelings towards him that had not been evident before, for the war had brought discord to our district, and certain people felt he had collaborated too well with the government, while others thought he had been too friendly with the commandos on the farm. Where people had teased him for years about having so little to say in Parliament, he was now blamed by some for not contributing enough, and by others for what he said when he did speak. I heard him being disparaged, in the kitchen I overheard the words, in the passage where the door stood ajar, at the fringe of the company, behind the backs of those who had forgotten about me, as usual, and with increasing certainty I knew that he could no longer count on the same affection and trust as earlier. What had happened? I did not know myself, for it was something from outside, that bright serpentine path of gold, flashing in the sun, making its way across the faded landscape.
In the end Maans himself became aware of these feelings. He might never have become involved with politics had it not been for Stienie, and had it not been for her, he would probably also have retired a long time ago, for the duties and responsibilities and the long absences from the farm had become an increasingly heavy burden for him, and it became clearer from one year to the next how reluctantly he shouldered it. However, each time he mentioned retiring, Stienie interrupted with that quick motion of her head and shoulders, and laughingly made some deprecating remark to show he did not really mean what he was saying; but at last, when there was talk about a Union, he said he would stay on only until the new Parliament had been elected, and this time Stienie did not interrupt, but listened to his words in silence, staring at her rings as if she had no interest in his decision. He had grown old, this child I had raised, and there was more silver than black in his hair; when I looked up at his words and saw him like that in the lamplight, I was suddenly afraid, as if I had just been reminded how quickly the years had passed. And if Father had allowed him to become a soldier when it had been his one desire, would it really have made a difference?
I could look across the table in the lamplight and see; I could stand in the dim light of the passage or in the voorhuis behind the lined curtain, and hear – that was all. There was nothing I could do to prevent anything, or to change the course of events, and over the years I had withdrawn so far from these affairs that no sense of involvement remained. I still went in to town for Nagmaal and attended church services with Maans and Stienie but afterwards, when the house was filled with visitors, I began taking the liberty of withdrawing from the company, and if people initially noticed my absence, they soon became used to it. On the farm I gave orders in the kitchen when guests arrived and saw that coffee was served in the voorhuis, but I never joined the company any more, and though at first Stienie had frowned at my lack of manners with that impatient little shrug of her round shoulders, she did not say anything, and in all honesty there was no one among the visitors who requested my company or who missed me.
Once I attended a wedding with Maans and Stienie unwillingly, the silent and disregarded guest at the fringe of the merriment, and I heard the women clustered together in the light of the chandelier discussing Stienie over their glasses of sweet wine. “Yes,” one of them remarked disapprovingly, “Maans is seldom at home these days. His mad old aunt looks after the farm for him.” I no longer remember who spoke those words, I do not even recall whose wedding it was or where it took place; I just remember being seated in the shadowy corner and hearing that observation that no one contradicted, and then the sudden silence that fell when they realised I had been sitting there all the time and had overheard their conversation. For a moment the yawning abyss returned and I found myself on the opposite side once again, almost indistinguishable in the distance; but then they quickly changed the subject, and where I sat, excluded from their circle, I was overwhelmed by the realisation of my own freedom. After this I deemed it unnecessary to attend any more weddings or funerals in the district. I still went in to Nagmaal with Maans and Stienie and attended church with them, but my last discernible connection with the people around us had been severed.
When I was a child, we had no mirror in the house and thus I never had the chance to see my own face. In these years I learned to live without mirrors again, as I had no further need of them, for I knew very well what I looked like: a dishevelled old woman, no longer capable of sensible conversation or any form of intercourse with her neighbours, unsociable and slow of speech, with a peculiar scar across her forehead, scorched by the sun, tousled by the wind, half-wild as a result of her strange and isolated existence. That was all; and this is all that has finally remained: an old woman alone in a bed in a dark room, voiceless and paralysed, so far retreated into herself that no return to life is possible any more. All.
What does it matter? Let the girl sleep on the cot at the foot of the bed: she is young and her life lies ahead of her. Why should she wake and get up? There is nothing more she can do for me.
What did I expect when I kept listening for the cock’s crow, peering through the dark to try and make out the first grey light of dawn; what could the morning bring that the night had not already given me? I have remembered what I had forgotten, I have articulated what I did not want to know, and my mission has been accomplished; I am tired now, and I want to rest, undisturbed by anyone, or by the day with its bustle and noise. The pattern has been laid down and the slivers and fragments joined together, my task fulfilled, and it is not for me to judge whether it has been done well or poorly. Only one more thing, seeing that I have gone so far and said so much; only one more thing, even though I do not understand why, and then it will be enough.
During these last years after the war, when I had detached myself from all the affairs of the district, people began to look me up in my isolation on the farm, just as they had done in the old days when there had been few educated people in our parts and they had come to ask me to read or write their letters. Again it was the simple people who came to me, poor people and bywoners, and when I was not at home when they arrived, they simply sat in their carts in the shade of the wall, waiting for me to return; sometimes there were coloured people in a cart drawn by mules who had come a long way from the Riet River district or the Nuweveld because they seemed to have heard of me. Timidly these visitors described their ailments to me, and I discovered that they credited me with a special knowledge of plants and herbs, for this was how people in the district explained my solitariness and my long rambles in the veld, and in their simplicity they interpreted my loneliness and isolation as signs of wisdom and power: humbly they revealed their sores, their ulcers, their swellings to me, and then looked at me expectantly, confident that I could cure them. There was nothing I could do for them, however, for, faced by their suffering, I was as helpless as they and I felt ashamed by the trust they put in me so undeservedly: I could only mutter an apology, suggest a few remedies that I happened to know of and give them some balm or solution from the medicine chest, and shamefacedly watch the rickety cart struggle down the road again, its passengers returning home with their pain and their sorrow. Perhaps there was no one else to listen or help and they appreciated my care and attention, but over the years they kept coming, for they truly believed I knew how to alleviate their pain; and how annoyed Stienie was when these ramshackle vehicles came struggling across the yard when she was at home, and how scathingly she denounced these visitors, though never in my presence. What could I do, however, caught between her disapproval and their groundless faith and only too painfully aware of my own inadequacy? These sufferers were the only people who still needed me, no matter how unfounded their faith in my abilities, and their infrequent visits the only connection that still tied me to the world.
One day while Maans and Stienie were away in Cape Town, a rickety old wagon came to a halt some distance from the house. I was sitting at the dining-room window, for I had been feeling tired all day, so I did not go out to see wh
at they wanted, though I heard a man speak to the servants at the kitchen door. They have come for advice, as always, I thought, but actually it was not the case, and the maid came to tell me that there was a white man asking whether he might stand on our ground for a while and let his sheep graze. I sat with him in the kitchen while he drank the coffee he had been served, for lately Stienie did not want these people in her voorhuis any more, and even in the kitchen they were not really welcome. He was a youngish man, though he looked old and tired in his dusty clothes and worn shoes, and while we were sitting there, he spoke politely yet indifferently of the long road he had travelled, from beyond Sak River and Riet River and down through the Nuweveld. I showed him where he might stand, and as he was taking his leave on the threshhold of the kitchen, he remarked almost in passing that his wife lay ill in the wagon, not as if he wanted or expected any help from me, but as if merely recounting another of the many woes of his itinerant existence that he had been listing for me while drinking his coffee.
It was not often that a white man trekked around to find pasture for his sheep any more, dependent on the hospitality and the mercy of others, neither were these ramshackle old wagons as common as during my childhood. As I sat at the window, I could not help thinking of the past and of many long-forgotten memories, Oom Ruben with his barefoot children and Jan Baster’s meagre trek on its way to Groot River. I wanted to lie down and rest for a while, but after the arrival of the stranger I was uneasy, and the old memories stirred up so many feelings inside me that I could not find any rest. At last I took the medicine chest and went across to the wagon.
The man was alone except for his herdsman, and there was no one to help. His wagon was old and rickety, the canvas worn and torn, and it shook unsteadily when I climbed in; the woman lay on a bed of skin-blankets that had been made for her on the cot, and was not even aware of my arrival. I searched among the remedies I knew, but she took no notice of me; the man thanked me almost submissively for my help, as if he had not been expecting it and was unused to such solicitude, but he seemed to know that no medicine would be of any help. There was nothing more for me to do, so I left them alone. I sent them a little food from the house; but later that evening I took the lantern and walked across again.
The herdsman had already fallen asleep at the remains of his fire, and inside the wagon the man sat at his wife’s bedside by the light of a candle-stub that had been fixed on a chest. He sat motionless, his shoulders sagging, and he did not look up at my arrival or move aside as I bent over her. I looked at her in the uncertain light and knew there was nothing more I could do for her, and so I sat down on the camp-stool at the foot of the cot to keep vigil with the stranger. Why did I do it? I might just as well have gone back home, for he had as little need of my presence as his wife. In the flickering light of the tallow candle I surveyed the scant belongings in the wagon – the chipped basin, the cracked cup, the knife – and this tired, defeated man and the dying woman in the bed. How old could she have been? It was impossible to say, for years of poverty and suffering on the road had left deep lines on her face, but her hair was still dark where it fell across her damp forehead and it was even possible to believe she had once been pretty – who could know? I got up and bent to wipe the sweat from her brow, for the man made no move and did not attempt to do anything; when she moved her hand feverishly and uncertainly over the blanket, the fingers searching, he did not even notice, and it was I who leaned forward to grasp it, and that was how she died, with her hand in mine.
We sat like that for a while, without moving, until the flickering candle threatened to go out, for I did not want to disturb this rare moment of insight with any ill-timed word or movement. Sofie had died like this, I knew as I sat with the dead woman’s hand in mine, or in a similar way, somewhere in a wagon or a tent, in a shelter or an outside room, in the desolation of the Great Karoo, Bushmanland or Namaqualand or in the region across the Groot River, in similar isolation, in similar poverty, in similar despair, and it was from a wordless deathbed like this one that Pieter had at last been brought back to us. For fifty or sixty years I had wondered and had carried my uncertainty and unasked questions around inside me, and now the questions had been answered and the circle completed: in a final gesture of tenderness and reconciliation I could reach out across all the years and touch her brow, could reach out and hold her hand while she was dying, and bid her farewell. Now the inscription in the family Bible could at last be made and the date chiselled in the stone.
The next day the man and his helper dug a grave in the graveyard in a place that I allotted them, next to where Jakob lay buried; only the two of them were present and Annie and her daughter and I. After they had filled in the grave, they heaped stones on it, with upright stones at the head and foot, and the man thanked me with a few gruff words before moving on to the next stand with his rickety wagon and mules and his handful of sheep tended by the herdsman. His wife remained behind in our graveyard: on one side of Jakob’s grave was Sofie’s headstone with the date taken from the family Bible, and on the other side was her grave. After the man had left, Annie suddenly remembered that no one had asked the woman’s name; but who would ever erect a stone for her, and, in truth, who could believe an epitaph, even if it were chiselled in stone?
The next day I walked out to Bastersfontein, the first time since that day when Maans had been a little boy and I had taken him there. It had been a long way for a girl with a small child, but it was an even longer way for an old woman who was returning reluctantly and hesitantly to the place she had avoided for so long: I was almost afraid to see it again, but there was no reason for my fear, for nothing had remained, only the low line of the rocky ridge and the grey shrubs against the faded blue sky. The last remains of the dilapidated huts I had once still found there had vanished, and among the harpuisbos and on the rocky ledges I searched in vain for the place where they had once stood; neither could I find any trace of the fountain among the rock layers, no sign of muddy soil or moisture, of bulrushes or reeds, or of softer earth that might have retained a footprint. I found only the heaped stones of two graves, almost invisible among the greyish shrubs: they belong to the herdsmen who used to live here and who buried their people here, I thought, but then I saw bunches of wild flowers, not quite wilted, that had been placed among the stones, and I realised that this was the place where the two men thought to be spies had been shot by the Boers during the war, and I remembered again the women at the kitchen door, wailing, and how Maans and I had been unable to do anything to help them. Now the war had been over for a long time and no one spoke of it any more or remembered what had become of the men’s families; yet, years later there were still people who remembered, nameless people who came here through the veld to place the wild flowers they had gathered among the rocks on the two graves.
I sat there for a long time, for I was tired, and I listened to the wind growing stronger. “The sorrow and the pain,” I remembered from long ago, “O the sorrow and the pain”, but I was unable to recall where I had first heard the song or who had sung it, for the voice of the singer had been forgotten, as insubstantial as the wind. There is no plant in the world that can offer a cure, I realised, no shrub that can guarantee oblivion. We are doomed to remember and to bear our burden, right up to the end.
After a while I realised I had to get up and go back, no matter how impossibly distant the house might seem, for the clouds had been gathering over the escarpment, and so I began to walk, shuffling and stumbling over roots, stones and gullies. The daylight grew dim in the wind; sunshine and shadows moved across the veld, and the landscape rippled before my feet; under the deep blue of the darkening sky and the threatening storm, in the shrouded light of the sun, the grey renosterbos glittered with a silvery gleam, radiant before my eyes, and I stood there blinded, so that the day surged over me and the earth was washed from under my feet. I stumbled over a root or a rock, my foot sank into a porcupine-burrow, and I fell.
When I was a
child, they noticed my absence and searched for me and a herdsman found me in the veld and carried me home, reclaimed from death’s door; slowly and painfully, unaware of my surroundings, I had wrested myself from the dark depths and risen, back to the light, but that was a long time ago, and there was no reason why I should still desire to live. I would rather lie where I had fallen, close my eyes and listen to the rustling of the wind through the renosterbos, until the radiant landscape was cloaked in darkness and I could descend into the depths, noiselessly and without resistance, carried by the weight of my body. I was getting too old for these solitary journeys, I realised drowsily, and this would have to be the last one.
After a long time I got up painfully, my body stiff with weariness and bruised by the fall, and slowly I walked back through the rolling and surging light and shadows, the silver glow of the late afternoon and the threat of the approaching storm, amid a splendour I had not witnessed for many years, until I saw in the distance ahead the dams glittering in the sun, and I knew I was home. There was no one to witness my shambling return, my clothes dusty and torn, my hands and face bruised. In my room I made an attempt to brush off my dress, I put up my hair and poured some water to wash, but then my hands fell away from me, and I toppled backward into the darkness I had craved for so long, that merciful dark in which I could go to sleep right there on the floor of my room. But not yet: the maid discovered me and called Annie, and the women carried me over to Annie’s house, to the old house, to the house where I was born and the room where I had slept as a child. I was aware of their frightened voices, I saw their anxious movements in the candlelight, but I no longer heard their words. Cloistered with my thoughts and memories, I was waiting for the words to end and the candle to be snuffed out, waiting for the nightlight beside my bed to burn out, for even the regular breathing of the sleeping girl on the cot to quiet down. For a moment I was afraid of the darkness and the silence that was vaster than anything I had ever expected, for a moment I was afraid of what I had to remember, but now the anxiety has been conquered, the knowledge attained and the wisdom acquired, and with eyes wide open I behold the dark.
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