by Andre Brink
The house was a veritable ark for a vast variety of bird-life. Under the eaves or in the immediate surroundings nested all manner of birds, swallows and finches, yellowtails and red-eyed wood-pigeons, even – at the back – a couple of small falcons; some left in autumn to return again in spring, others stayed; on one of the many chimneys a pair of blue cranes nested, on another a couple of storks; in the attic lived an extended family of barn owls that never failed to scare us stiff whenever we dared to venture into their smelly dark domain. And outside, the tangled shrubs and massive trees – pepper and conifer, monkey-puzzle and hardy palm, ash, cedar, bluegum, syringa, wild fig, oak, and one incredible loquat tree as ancient as the earth – was home to flocks of starlings, sparrows, mousebirds and yellow or scarlet weavers (one summer lightning struck the great loquat and afterwards we collected one thousand two hundred and seventy three birds among the broken branches on the soggy ground); there were even, from time to time, a few bedraggled vultures whose mere presence would frighten the hell out of us; around the muddy green farm dam geese cackled and approached with spread wings and outstretched necks to scare off intruders as if it were the Capitol they were defending; while on the patchy drought-parched lawns strutted fantastic peacocks that stained the surroundings with their brilliant blues and greens and purples; and at night their cries sent ecstatic tinglings of fear down our spines where we all lay wriggling and giggling together in the great communal bed the grownups had made for us on the floor of a cavernous hall well out of their way.
The farm, for some obscure and no doubt fanciful reason, was called Sinai; but to us it was always known as ‘The Bird Place’, and it seemed only natural that in the midst of such ornithological excess Ouma Kristina herself should gradually come to resemble her surroundings, as dogs are said to resemble their masters; smaller and frailer she shrank into a delicately boned birdlike body, her nose beaked, her wispy grey hair for all the world like scraggly feathers in the moulting season. Beside her, old Lizzie, one-time family servant turned lifelong companion, resembled more and more an angry brooding hen.
Seen from a distance, surrounded by a dark dense mass of trees and shrubs, the palace with its turrets, spires, domes, and chimneys, looked like the wreck of a great ghost ship perched on a submerged rock or sandbank in a sea of petrified undulating plains, windswept and sun-scorched. A place where anything or everything was possible, might happen, did happen. At night it was visited by ghosts and ancestral spirits – I know, I’ve heard them, felt them, seen them, believe me – but even in the daytime, in the stark God-eye of the sun, it appeared mysterious, improbable, dream or nightmare, wishful thought or guilt-ridden vision, desperate and exuberant proof of the extremes the human mind, let loose, is capable of.
‘Aren’t you afraid of ghosts?’ I once asked Ouma Kristina.
‘Of course not.’ She seemed amused at the mere idea. ‘I know them all.’
‘But what do you do when they come at night?’
‘I just brush them aside.’ Like cobwebs, I imagined, both horrified and reassured.
Over the years I’ve seen the place change, not just bleached and eroded like the surrounding landscape, but a sadder and more subtle kind of change, as the swarms of summer visitors slowly dwindled; fewer and fewer of the relatives turned up for Christmas as the young grew up and discovered other attractions, devising ever more ingenious excuses and explanations for not coming; as the old grew older and more disinclined to exert themselves, or became incapacitated in one way or another, or died, gradually using up the coffins stacked in the attic. Grandpa expired (not a day too soon, Ouma Kristina commented, dry-eyed) and with that his – considerable – side of the family subsided into obscurity. Father and Mother still honoured, with grim determination, the old tradition: once a year, then every other year, every third; then they too stopped visiting. (The delight of those journeys, especially by train, all the way from the remote Transvaal where we lived, the tic-a-tac, tic-a-tac of the wheels on the rails embedded in my memory. The car journeys were less pleasurable. Anna and I used to quarrel so much on the back seat that a set routine developed: every two hundred kilometres, on the dot, Father would stop the car, and get out, and remove his belt, and give us each a hiding, and then drive on.)
As the stream of visitors diminished to a trickle and then dried up, Ouma Kristina remained alone with old Lizzie in the sprawling surreal palace, until Lizzie too was gathered unto her mothers, leaving only Ouma behind, smaller every time I saw her, beginning slowly to stoop and shrink under the weight of time, seventy, eighty, ninety … moving soundlessly through that home of many mansions, a thin grey shadow with wispy hair and knuckled hands, fingers bedecked with rings, a glittering array of jewels on her ears and round her scrawny neck, enormous brooches on her concave chest, as ancient and in her own way as redoubtable as God. A shadow among the shades inhabiting the house, enveloped in emptiness, a silence disturbed only by the sounds of owls and bats and peacock-screams at night, the crying of a lost child, the whisperings of the dead. The outside world fell away from her. She was surrounded only by trusted labourers from earlier days, mainly the members of old Lizzie’s substantial family, and they lived some distance away from the palace. No relatives arrived on her doorstep any more, no visitors at all. Only I persisted, once a year, at least until I was almost twenty-two and left the country. Never to return, I swore.
‘You’ll be back,’ said Ouma Kristina, unperturbed. She should know. She, too, had left once, for good; and returned. (She, at least, had the small painting of a naked man to show for it.)
And here I am on my way back to her. But will she still be there? And what has remained of the house itself?
3
ANNA’S CALL CAME at the most mundane of times, just past noon on Saturday. Bad news is supposed to come at night, when one is vulnerable and unprepared; not in the middle of an early spring day when life seems bountiful and to die absurd. I was sitting on the toilet reading the paper; Michael took the call as he was within reaching distance, being in what passes for a kitchen, rustling up lunch – he is much more adept at it than I am, which may be one of the reasons I have put up with him for longer than with any of his predecessors. (That, and the fact that he’s Michael, not Mike; I’m allergic to Mikes and Nicks and Dicks. Not, I should add, that marriage, for me at least, is on the cards, not even after three years of sharing a fair amount of our waking and most of our sleeping hours. Michael has no axes to grind, no cause to espouse – his predecessors used at least to be into Anti-apartheid; his only passion, except for me I hope, is Shakespeare.)
‘Somebody called Anna on the phone,’ he announced from the door. ‘She said “Ah-na”, frightful Afrikaans accent. I told her you were involved in a matter which requires your undivided attention but she says it’s important.’
‘My sister!’
‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’ He sounded hurt.
‘She’s part of a past I’ve written off.’
‘And now it’s catching up with you.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t let it.’ But I felt more apprehensive than I dared let on. I picked up the telephone. ‘Anna? It’s Ouma, isn’t it?’ Because this was the one thing I’d always feared; this was the phantom limb which one day would begin to ache again.
A gasp at the other end. ‘How did you know?’
‘She was here last night. She came on the back of a big bird.’ The memory was startlingly vivid. I’d looked at my watch, it was just past one; Michael was snoring. She’d come with the memories of sunsets and thunderstorms and dust-devils swirling on the plains, and of birds, and of silences deeper than earth or water.
Anna’s voice cut across the recollection. ‘Kristien, what are you saying? You mean you dreamt about Ouma?’
‘No. I couldn’t sleep. And I saw her, but she wouldn’t talk to me.’ Hearing an unintelligible sound in my ear I sighed. ‘All right, then. Let’s say it was a dream. Now tell me.’ ‘Something terrible has happ
ened.’
‘Is she dead?’ I whispered.
‘No.’ A catch in her voice. ‘At least, not yet. She … They burned down the house. Last night. And now she’s … she keeps on quarrelling with the doctors and the nurses. She thinks you’re with her and she keeps on talking to you.’ A choked laugh. ‘She says she has stories to tell you.’
‘For God’s sake get to the point,’ I snapped, aware of Michael lending an ironical ear to the conversation. ‘Tell me what happened,’ I insisted.
‘I’m trying to. It was after midnight. Someone threw a bomb or something through her window. No one knows for sure yet. But they say the place is burnt down, you can imagine, all that woodwork. Somehow she managed to get to the phone before she collapsed, but even so – it was hours before they could put out the fire – and now she’s in hospital in Intensive Care. She’s in a bad shape, Kristien, you know she’s over a hundred.’ It was some time before she could go on. ‘Casper says I must hurry up, it costs money. But it’s so awful. There’s police all over the place, and the farmers are calling up a commando, and Heaven knows what’s going to happen.’ Followed by a muffled remark, presumably addressed to Casper. I could imagine him remonstrating authoritatively; the whine in her responding voice unnerved me. How old was she? Thirty-three plus nine, forty-two. About the age Mother was when I was born, the laatlammetjie, the afterthought, that put paid (as she never oh never failed to remind me) to her ‘singing career’. Now Anna. Was I supposed to pity her? But this, after all, was the destiny she’d chosen, knowingly, my once bright-eyed brilliant exemplary sister, straight As, first tennis team, top of the Bible class, Jacaranda Queen, all the right things at the right times, including married bliss, for better or for worse, happily ever after. Unlike this obstreperous youngest sibling who’d spurned commitment and, backed only by Ouma Kristina, had left behind family, friends, lovers and job security to emigrate when, as they say, the going got tough. Which earned me, from Father, the moment I had my first address in London, the solemn reminder from, I think, Jeremiah, The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. It tickled me so much, I copied it out in the italic script I was then so proud of, and stuck it on my pinboard on the kitchen among the unanswered letters, the cards, the cuttings, the cartoons, the photographs, including the nude one Jean-Claude had taken of me and which I found a useful conversation piece, or conversation stopper as the case might be, with would-be new suitors.
‘What do the doctors say?’
‘They don’t seem to think there’s much chance. She –’
‘But she’s still talking, you said?’
‘On and off. I told you she keeps on speaking to you as if you were here. But she’s very weak. A few days perhaps, no one can tell. Kristien, please –’
‘But it’s ridiculous! Why would anyone want to throw a bomb at her?’
Scandal had been the key to Ouma’s life; even her death, it now seemed, would be scandalous.
‘The whole country is a madhouse,’ sobbed Anna. ‘Everybody is killing everybody else –’ More muffled conversation. ‘Casper says –’
‘Fuck Casper!’
‘Kristien! At a time like this –’
Of course she didn’t know, had never known, about Casper and me. And if she had I would have been the one to blame; I’m the wicked female. Ouma’s bad blood, presumably.
‘Anna, I’ll see what I can do. It’s the middle of term and everything. I’ll phone you back.’
‘You can stay with us if –’
Casper’s voice growling in the background.
‘Just give me time to think.’
Yet the moment I replaced the telephone, even before I turned to face Michael, I knew I would go back. What swayed me, ridiculous as it might seem, was what Anna had said about the stories. Michael would hold the fort. Surely it would not have to be for long. I could rely on his charm to placate Mr Saunders at my Hampstead school As for the kids – I felt a momentary twinge of conscience, one never quite escapes the Calvinist background, but they’d survive; and I could do with a respite from my habitual casting of false pearls to real swine.
‘What’s up, love?’
‘My gran’s dying.’ I gave him a brief summary of Anna’s garbled message. ‘I have to go back.’
‘What’s the point?’
Only last night we’d spoken about it in bed (not much of a bed, just a heap of tangled sheets and blankets on the floor in the corner of my room, the mattress salvaged years before, in my more obviously indigent days, from a pavement off Russell Square): what a relief it was at this time, more than ever before, not to be in that benighted country. At the very moment, ‘democratic’ elections in sight, when one would be expecting to see the unresolved rage of centuries temporarily settling, however uneasily, into the tense calm of anticipation, wave upon wave of violence was racking the place. We didn’t even feel like turning on the television any more; it was all so nauseatingly predictable. And so last night, too, it had surfaced in our conversation, just enough to turn us resentfully – not against each other but against the world – from the bliss and oblivion of love.
Now here I was, a mere twelve hours on, contemplating return.
‘I have no choice, Michael. I have to go.’
‘It’s madness, Kristien! You took your leave of her long ago. She probably won’t even recognise you. If it’s really as bad as this Anna person says – And with the whole country going to the dogs.’
‘I know. But it’s Ouma. And if she really needs me – Michael, while I pack, will you please phone Heathrow and find out about planes?’
‘When?’
‘Tonight.’
‘But it’s –’
Less than three hours later we went out into the unwavering sunshine; an April more translucent and balmy than any I had seen in the years of my chosen exile. It was with a strange feeling of resignation that I drew the front door shut behind me: the bright red door which, seven years before, had first drawn me to the gentle graceful curve of Sussex Gardens, its deceptive green-thought tranquillity. Now I was leaving – only for a week, a fortnight at most, I reminded myself; yet with a feeling of facing something much more unpredictable than death.
(If I were to have known in that instant what I was heading for – not that single death but so many; and my role and responsibility in all of it – would I have pressed on regardless? It seems inconceivable. And yet – )
There was a moment when Michael, carrying my single hastily-packed scuffed suitcase, stopped, asking in a strained voice, ‘Kristien, do you realise what this thing – at this time – could do to us?’
I said, ‘I don’t know what it can do to us. I know what it may do for me.’ Looking at him – we were mere feet apart – it felt as if I was, already, very far away.
He winced. He looked strained and pale; this was the last thing we could or would have foreseen, wished.
‘You are being incredibly selfish,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know. If I were not I’d probably fall apart.’
What I thought, but did not say, was, Can’t you see that I’m not going just to have my way? This is something I have to face myself, something I do not understand and need to understand. I’m sick of being, if not all things to all people, at least many things to many people; it is time to return to older kinds of knowing, to withdraw again to that desert where Ouma and her spirits have roamed and where they are now in danger of extinction. This is my call of the wild.
‘South Africa brings out the worst in you,’ he said tartly, but still quietly. Michael is not one to raise a voice. ‘Even melodrama.’
‘If that’s all it means to you –’ I said. And took the suitcase from him and hailed the cab that was providentially passing, leaving Michael with his car keys already in his half-outstretched hand. (A totally unwarranted expense, and I regretted it a minute later; impulsive action has been the bane of my life.) I looked back once, as we curved towards Bayswater. He was
still standing there, tall and slightly stooped, with his unkempt hair and grave spectacles, angry and not-so-young, something vulnerably boyish in his attitude; and for a moment I felt like turning back. Was I not making a dreadful mistake – not in going home to Ouma, but in leaving him behind? Three years. When I’d first met him, when we’d first made love behind that scarlet door, on our return from Dr Johnson’s house, so curiously excited by notions of death, he’d seemed such an elegant solution, even if it were to a problem not yet identified. Three years of propinquity, too much or not enough? Where, how, had the shift occurred that turned solution into problem? Or had I been the problem all along?
