by Andre Brink
Within a week we had another business lunch, and three days later we signed the contract. Smiling stiffly, he agreed it would be better for himself in the long run to keep his own profit as low as possible: it would avoid tricky questions in the press or in parliament.
But when we shook hands after signing the deal, I knew very well that I’d acquired a new enemy, one who was in no mind ever to forget what had happened.
What he didn’t know was that I had to settle the sale with Ma before the news was made public. Dad had left the farm to me in his will all right, but Ma was entitled to the usufruct for life and there had been an explicit codicil to the effect that it could not be sold without her written consent. That was why I had to go to the farm without delay. If Ma decided not to co-operate, Minister Jan Calitz would finish me off very efficiently, and with glee.
3
MA WAS BUSY with the Black baby again when I came into the kitchen. The child was screaming as she went her imperturbable way, administering medicine, washing, changing a nappy, uttering small comforting sounds until the baby became quiet in her arms. She’d been a nurse before her marriage.
“Morning, Baas,” said Kristina from the stove.
The young woman who’d been in the kitchen with her the previous night was there again, at the corner of the table, looking at me without saying a word. There was neither insolence nor limp passivity in her attitude. Serenity, really, if the word wouldn’t sound out of place here. Now that I was able to see her properly, I was quite impressed by her face, which reminded me of some of the Black women painted by Tretchikoff in his youth. But what really caught my attention – because I must admit that most Black women look alike to me – was the swollen wound on one cheek, partly exposing the flesh.
“What’s happened to her?” I asked Ma after she’d handed the baby back to its mother.
“It’s her husband. That foreman, Mandisi. Beat her because she came here last night to get medicine for the child.”
“Why has she come back then?”
“She waited for him to go down to the cows. The baby was very sick during the night.”
“But what’s the matter with the man?”
“You know how they are. He doesn’t trust White medicine. He wanted to take the child to the witchdoctor.” She sighed. “You should have seen how he beat her up last year, just after Dad died. Just because I gave her an old bra of mine and she put it on. She came crawling down here in the middle of the night, a collarbone and one of her arms broken. I didn’t think she would make it.”
“Why doesn’t she leave him?”
“I suppose she loves him.” Taking the poker from Kristina she started stirring up the fire in the stove. “I’ve spoken to her many times. All she can do is smile. One day, I remember, she said: ‘I know he’ll kill me sooner or later but he’s my husband.’ Can you beat that?”
“Why don’t you give him the sack? He’s a menace.”
“Without him the farm would have been down the drain long ago. He’s a difficult customer – he’s the one who pulled the knife on me when I hit him with the sjambok that time – but he’s a good worker. He drives me up the wall with his insolence. But he’s my right hand and one must take it as it comes.”
“I can’t understand why you continue to put up with it all.”
“We’ve already talked about that, haven’t we?” she said calmly before turning to Kristina to go on with her work.
Opening the back door I was struck viciously in the face by the cold. A clean, incisive cold cutting one to the bone. My breath forming small white clouds in the air, I walked through the backyard, past the water tank and the electricity plant. The chickens had come down from their slats and were eagerly pecking up the mealies someone had thrown out for them. A group of chilly geese and muscovy ducks were messing about in the shallow ditch running from the water tank, shattering the thin layer of ice.
Beside the house stood the enormous wild-fig tree under whose widespread branches the members of our family had gathered for generations, on holidays or festive occasions. There were still a few rotten boards and dangling ropes left of the treehouse Dad had built years ago for Louis and Ilse (and then he’d fallen from the tree and hurt his back, so he had to spend the long December holidays in bed). A broken plough, some old worn tyres, the axle of a wagon. The place had always been a jumble, but now it really seemed to be falling to pieces.
I went round to the front of the house, looking out over the valley. And for the first time I discovered the full truth of what Ma had said. I’d seen the farm in other droughts, but never as ghastly as this. The lawn was reduced to dry tufts, now covered with frost, leaving large bare patches of red earth in between. Beyond the stalks of shrubs and cannas the hill sloped gently down to the dairy and Dad’s outbuilding. The lower reaches of the slope and the valley itself, normally a lush green even in the harshest of winters, appeared arid and scarred, the remaining euphorbias looking like black charcoal smudges on a dirty sheet of paper. Where the two rows of hills met at the far end of the narrow valley, the thickets surrounding the stream still showed a touch of green, but even that was dull and lifeless compared to the luxuriant virgin forest I’d known before.
Going down to the cowshed and the dairy I could feel the brittle grass and twigs snapping under my smooth-soled shoes. The bell of the separator was tinkling regularly. A few labourers were washing the pails as another poured skimmed milk into a trough for the calves. I inhaled deeply, relishing the smell of dung and milk, the warm odour of life. As I came nearer the men looked up, murmuring a greeting: “Molo, nkosi,” their white teeth sparkling against the dull blackness of their faces.
As the cows were chased out I had to sidestep smartly not to be trampled by the front ones. In passing I recognised the man following them.
“Molo, Mandisi.”
“Molo, nkosi.” He didn’t smile like the others, but looked me straight in the face; nothing submissive about him.
Struggling to scrape together individual words from the bit of Xhosa I’d picked up through the years, I said: “Is everything still all right on the farm?”
“Ewe.”
I wondered whether I should say something about his wife, but decided against it for the time being: there were too many others listening.
“The Missus told me the electricity plant is broken.” I gestured in the direction of the small shed behind the house. “Do you think you can fix it?”
“Ewe.” Without waiting, he went off after the cows, driving them downhill much faster than he should. At a turn in the road he looked back, shouting something at the other labourers, who promptly burst out laughing, one or two with a furtive glance in my direction. I couldn’t make out what he’d said: something about me? Whatever it was, it made me furious.
“Don’t stand around like that!” I said. “Get on with your work.”
They fell silent immediately. The separator was still tinkling inside. Far in the distance I could hear Mandisi’s voice again, shouting at the cows.
In spite of myself I had to admit that there was something appealing about the man. He wasn’t really provocative. It was, rather, a positive if disturbing affirmation of independence; there was something regal and assertive about the very movement of his legs as he strode on, in the attitude of his shoulders and his barrel-chest: as if all the world belonged to him, as if nothing could contain him; a man carrying the fire within him.
On an impulse I went to Dad’s small outbuilding. But the door was locked and the faded green curtains were drawn behind the windows.
What I did next, had been unavoidable from the beginning. Following the narrow path, hardly more than an erosion ditch, I went downhill to the stone wall of the small graveyard below. My smooth leather soles were slippery on the rough surface: I hadn’t thought of bringing along my veld shoes and these Italian ones were most uncomfortable, the sharp-edged stones pressing right into my footsoles.
A small formation of hadedahs, f
our or five of them, flew past overhead, shrieking their wild death-cries across the valley. The sun was rising above the hills.
The wooden gate in the wall got stuck as I pushed against it. The rusty top hinge had broken, so the gate had to be lifted before one could open it. Then a silly thing happened. Leaning forward to force the gate, I stepped on a loose stone and lost my balance, stumbling against the wall. My glasses fell on the ground. And turning round to retrieve them, I heard a crunching sound under my foot. One of the lenses was shattered and the frame itself broken in two places.
Well. Another of those entirely unpredictable mishaps, this time much more serious than the previous day’s. Squatting on my haunches with the broken spectacles in my hand I stupidly tried to fit the shattered bits together. In the process one of the splinters cut into my palm, sending a thin needle of pain up through my arm. In a momentary blind rage I threw the useless thing away and got up.
In the distance the vague shapes of hills were huddled in large simplified patterns of ochre and brown and olive green. All precision had disappeared from the landscape, leaving me lost and angry in the midst of it. Damn it! Suddenly my own farm had become strange to me. I could still see well enough to find my way, but all detail was lost, all definition blurred, all familiarity gone. I felt isolated, abandoned among the dull hulks of things.
The remarkable thing is that everything should appear so startlingly clear to me now that I’m writing about it, whereas it seemed so distant and vague to me then. I can almost see myself in that landscape, on that farm, enclosed in the small graveyard.
My first impulse was to go back home. But I’d wanted to come down there, so it would be better to stay until I had regained my grasp on the world. Moving haltingly past the other, older, graves I picked my way to the shining new stone which I hadn’t seen before. It wasn’t difficult to read the large capitals of the inscription:
WILLEM JACOBUS MYNHARDT
born 5.9.1908 – died 11.5.1975
followed by a text. Gravel, a glass container with imperishable plastic flowers, an empty jam jar.
Willem Jacobus Mynhardt. I found it impossible to relate the formal names to him. The whole pretentious grave had nothing to do with him. I looked up, across the stone wall, at the hazy world in the distance, then back to the headstone. Was it only the loss of my glasses which gave me that feeling of total isolation, of being remote from where I was, wholly out of touch with that grave? I felt no emotion, nothing whatsoever. And even though I’d learned to eliminate emotion long ago, nevertheless I had expected to feel something, to come one step closer to the enigma of my father.
Perhaps I can explain that sense of absence in terms of an experience Elise often spoke about in connection with our children: her feelings for Louis have always been profoundly different from what she feels for Ilse. Not only because, after the first miscarriage, she was exceptionally possessive about Louis when he was born, but also, and perhaps especially, because it was a particularly difficult birth, two full days of almost unbearable agony: and afterwards it took over a year to recover from the complications. Which was quite a shock to both of us, since we’d always regarded that beautiful body of hers as infallible. When, four years later, the doctor predicted a second baby as big as the first, a Caesarean was recommended. Elise was pushed into the operating theatre in the morning and only saw the baby several hours later. Afterwards it was as if she could never quite accept the fact that Ilse was her own child – because she felt she hadn’t been “present” at her birth.
Would it have been different for me too if I hadn’t missed Dad’s death? Surely it would be a purely sentimental argument. Or had the bond been broken in advance, during those long months when the ravages of cancer had torn him out of our reach? He’d been so untouchable in his agony; death had replaced all other landscapes in his eyes long before he actually breathed his last. But this argument presupposes that there had been a strong bond to start with, and I’m not sure that I ever really understood him. Who was this man I called Dad? And what are the real implications of the relationship father/son? Is there sense in assuming that something is handed on from generation to generation?
I must return to his death. I’d been up in the Northern Transvaal, inspecting a small chromium mine I’d just taken over near Tzaneen, and I’d arranged with Elise and my office that I would be back on the Thursday morning. But in fact I’d already returned on Wednesday evening and spent the night in my apartment with Bea. It was something I did quite regularly: the easiest for all concerned, as I had no wish deliberately to hurt Elise. I presume she was intelligent enough, and woman enough, to suspect that, like any other man, I had women on the sly from time to time: but as long as it remained unrevealed and unsaid it could be ignored since no one was injured by it. I can state with a clear conscience that I am a good husband to Elise; I give her a bigger household allowance than anyone else I know of, I allow her the freedom to indulge in all the hobbies she’s had over the years: painting, weaving, pottery, gardening, batik, the whole gamut. (All I fail to understand is that every time she becomes proficient in something she loses interest and gives it up: anyway, that’s her worry, not mine, although she knows very well I don’t approve of vacillation.)
However, to return to Dad’s death. (After so many years of being concise and to the point in reports and memorandums, I can now enjoy the liberty of indulging myself by digressing whenever it suits me.) When I arrived back home at about ten o’clock that Thursday morning – “from Tzaneen” – Elise awaited me with the news that Ma had been phoning constantly since the previous afternoon. Pa was dying. We took the first plane that afternoon and hired a car in East London to drive out to the farm, but when we got there he was already dead. If we’d come the previous evening, or even early that same morning, we would still have been in time: but the South African Airways service to the Eastern Cape leaves much to be desired. And there is no point in blaming myself for the night with Bea. If I hadn’t spent it with her I wouldn’t have returned home before the Thursday anyway. Any argument on “liability” in this connection is senseless.
During the last hours, Ma said, he’d been very clear and calm, with no pain. They’d just sat there, she told us, holding hands and talking about the times they’d had together. She’d been a nurse in Paarl where he’d studied for his Higher Primary Diploma; after their marriage they’d started together in Calvinia before he got the History post in Griqualand West.
Those last hours, according to Ma, they had been like two young lovers again, and age and suffering seemed miraculously to disappear from his face as if an old skin had been shed. And while they were laughing about something they’d remembered – how, soon after their wedding, he’d dropped a stud on the floor and went down on all fours to look for it when she stepped on his hand – he suddenly gave a curious little sob, and when she looked at him he was dead. I still think that maybe it was a good thing after all that we hadn’t been there to intrude into their intimacy.
The body had already been removed by the undertaker when we arrived on the farm that evening. The next day I went in to town with Ma, “to say goodbye”. There, again, I felt that strangeness between him and me. I hardly recognised him, his face looked quite different, relaxed and unfamiliar, wearing the hideous make-up like a mask; and then that ridiculous frilly shroud.
It wasn’t death as such which put me off. Even as a child there had been something natural about it. Our village barber had also been the undertaker: and often it happened, when one arrived for a haircut, that his shop would be empty – then the accepted thing to do would be to go through to the backyard surrounded by a tall, red, corrugated iron fence, a real scrap-yard filled with the wrecks of old cars, a decaying lathe, jacks, piles of firewood, tarred beams, sheets of iron and rolls of wire. Chickens. And wild birds. Oom Koot had the most remarkable collection of birds I’d ever seen, and when one arrived in the backyard all those hundreds of birds would be singing their little heads off and
hens would be cackling behind the pepper trees in which cicadas were shrilling uninterruptedly. From the row of tumbledown iron garages one would hear the sound of hammering. That was where one invariably found Oom Koot in his black trousers and waistcoat and greasy dotted tie with a gold pin, the top buttons of his shirt undone. One had to pick one’s way through the rows of coffins – the expensive black ones with silver handles, simpler brown or stained ones, and the cheap pine ones for Blacks. The corpse would be laid out on a trestle table, and there Oom Koot would be working, whistling or humming like a truly happy man.
“Come for a hair-cut? I’ll be with you in a moment. Just hand me that hammer. No, over there, beside Uncle Dirk’s left hand.” He always referred to the dead as if they were still alive; sometimes, working on a corpse, he would address them directly and carry on long one-sided conversations with them.
Usually I stood on the threshold waiting for him to finish and to put on the white dustcoat he wore for cutting hair. What held me spellbound was not Oom Koot’s fascinating activities but the collection of pin-ups on his iron walls, among the coffins and the tools of his macabre trade. There was no titillating literature available in our village in those days (the hours it took to find a picture even remotely sexy in one of the agricultural magazines or in Ma’s Femina, to stimulate one’s pubescent fantasies! – a glimpse of anything above the knee was enough to raise a hard-on, a bare midriff was paradise; the mere sight of bra or panties almost unthinkable): my only contact with that world of forbidden delight was Oom Koot’s garage – those cuttings from old calendars or imported magazines brightening up the unsightliness of his walls among the stacked coffins.