Imaginings of Sand

by Andre Brink

  About a third of the house has been destroyed, it seems. One wooden staircase has subsided altogether, leaving a gaping black hole half-blocked with rubble; another has been reduced to eerie scaffolding draped with charred tapestries which pulverise into ashes as I touch them. But the main staircase, of stone and marble, is intact, and the whole left wing of the house appears largely unscathed. Windows still stare blankly outside, interrogating the view. This is what is most disconcerting: the way the sky obtrudes, the invasion of the house by outside space. It appropriates walls and floors, pours through gutted windows, leaks from above, stares through broken frames. The usual demarcations are no longer adequate.

  Also, it interrupts the very process of return, the tensing forward, as it were, to reassume an identity suspended when I left this place, recovering the self that remained behind.

  On a purely practical level, this is not the kind of habitation to receive a centenarian wishing to prepare for death; but there are more important considerations and a move seems feasible. I can imagine what Anna will have to say; and Casper. But I think I can handle them. If the hospital staff can be persuaded, Ouma Kristina can come home to die in peace. I am resolute.

  9

  AT ANY RATE, I cannot return to stay indefinitely with Anna and Casper. Difficult enough at the best of times, it is impossible after the new glimpse I caught last night of a world I’d thought – hoped – I had left for good. Coming home from the hospital Anna insisted that I take a nap. It was hopeless, of course. The transition from London to the Little Karoo was too sudden and too drastic; too much had happened, too fast; too much was still unresolved. Ouma Kristina’s minimal features on the pillows, the feeble urgent motion of her hand, the breathy whispers; that hallucinatory scene with the birds. The still-unfulfilled need to return to Sinai. The enervating memories of the previous night’s flight and the prolonged battle to fend off the attentions of Tarquin & Co. But even if it were possible to dispel all of this and simply succumb to the accumulated fatigue, there was the disturbing proximity of the children in the house all around me. Anna had done her best to instil the fear of God in them should anyone dare to make a noise (which must have put the seal on their already manifest dislike of the obnoxious aunt who had so unexpectedly materialised in their small loud world, turning several of them out of the room assigned to me and creating a domino effect of congestion in all the adjoining rooms): even so their mere presence wreaked a silent havoc throughout the place. This kind of inaudible throb, more than the blaring of trumpets, must have been what caused the walls of Jericho to fall. So what rest I had was neither long nor untroubled; and the bath which followed, in a tub bearing the growth rings of grit and grime from children’s bodies, did little to restore my spirits.

  I was all for setting out to Ouma Kristina’s palace as soon as possible, before nightfall. It was, after all, a mere fifteen or twenty minutes’ drive away, Casper having judiciously and calculatingly bought this adjacent farm when it came on the market only a few years after he’d married Anna. But such a visit, no matter how important it was for Ouma, was immediately ruled out.

  ‘We have to wait for Casper,’ Anna explained. ‘He’ll be home for supper.’

  ‘But I’m sure I’ve seen at least eight or ten women in the kitchen working on the meal,’ I objected.

  ‘There are only four, really,’ she said. ‘The others are just relatives or hangers-on. You know how it is on the farms these days. But anyway, it’s not that. It’s that I can’t let Casper wait.’

  The retort, tart of taste, was already on my tongue, waiting to be spat out. But I restrained myself.

  The taste was familiar, even though it came from a good sixteen years back. Their wedding day; the reception at the Bird House. A huge marquee on the front lawn – not so much, I suspected, to keep the sun out as to protect the guests from bird droppings. I was seventeen. In spite of my foul-mouthed protestations that put everyone but Ouma Kristina to shame, I was roped in as a bridesmaid. Swathed, of all colours, in what Lizzie called ‘chocking pink’. Fit, I assured Mother, for a Mimi to expire in. Of constipation, I said, meaning consumption; but she showed no sympathy. She didn’t even seem to catch the vicious side-swipe at her choice of ‘Che gelida manina’ to entertain the guests on the lawn on a ferociously hot sixteenth of December – not anticipating that her once splendid coloratura would be more or less drowned out by the cat-calls and hoots and shrieks of the birds. How sad. This was what she’d forsaken all her dreams of the Wiener Staatsoper and La Scala for, the one day that was supposed to be the culmination of a career that never was (Exsultate jubilate in the church; Puccini’s tiny frozen hand and one fine day on the lawn); and she really had had a beautiful voice, once – before my untimely birth had spoiled all hope of it ever receiving the training it had merited and she had aspired to; now to be shat on by birds. Really.

  Having temporarily forsaken the bride I became one of a pandemonium of waitresses shuttling between house and marquee to ply the sweating, glistening, purpling guests with enough food and drink to feed most of famished Africa for three days. We took turns to take small breaks, retiring with iced drinks into some of the deeper, cooler recesses of the gothic palace. On one of my turns I filched a crystal pitcher of iced water from one of the fridges in the kitchen, and slipped down to the basement, into the shadow-room of the main dining-room above, where I knew it would be cooler than anywhere else. Also, content that this was the one place where I could count on being alone, I kicked off the silver shoes and stripped off the disgusting pink dress and layered petticoats in which I’d been constrained since before sunrise to dance attendance on the frantic bride. In the light of the single dusty low-watt bulb I draped the clothes over a rickety chair to keep them from gathering too much dust. Then, recklessly, exasperated, I gulped down a fair amount of water before splashing the the rest of the contents of the pitcher over my face from where it streamed down over my breasts and body. And I was still standing there, head thrown back, eyes closed, the pitcher raised above me, when I was interrupted. It was a scene so offensive in its banality it still makes me cringe.

  In brief, Casper had followed me (accusing me afterwards of having ‘invited’ him), and now began to paw me – the whole heavy-breathing act, while mouthing imbecile phrases like ‘kiss for the bridegroom’ and ‘Come on, we’re family now’ and ‘I love a bitch with some spirit.’ I could have screamed, I suppose; nothing wrong with my lungs, and I have Mother’s operatic voice, an effortless high C. But I was too angry, and screaming was too humiliating a way out. No one had had occasion to teach me about a knee in the groin, it just happened by itself, and hard. And as he bent forward I struck him a solid blow with the pitcher on the head. And grabbed my clothes, and ran, turning off the light at the top of the stairs as I came past, and slamming the door behind me.

  There were people at the far end of the passage, the kitchen end; but I had the advantage of knowing the terrain, and ducked into a side passage and from there into a purposeless cubicle attached to it like an appendix to the intestine, and pulled on the petticoats and the dress again. The shoes had remained behind. Too bad.

  I resumed my waitress duties, ignoring the pointed glances and nods in the direction of my bare feet. (‘Not again!’ said Father.) It was at least half an hour before I saw Casper emerging from the house, really not looking very spruce at all. ‘Must have been something I ate,’ I heard him mumble when he got back to the bridal table where his absence had been only too noticeable; and I made a point of being especially obsequious to him every time I passed the happy couple in the course of that long hot afternoon.

  During the four or five years that followed, before I left the country, I took care to avoid every occasion of being alone with him; and as his rage and rancour subsided, together with – I suppose – the fear that I might spill the beans, his attitude became one of suspicious tolerance. Even so I did not exactly relish the prospect of meeting him again, now, under his own roof, and
of being in any way beholden to him for his hospitality. But it was not to be avoided. At any rate the atmosphere was so thick by the time he did come home, two hours late for supper, the children weepy and crotchety with hunger, Anna uptight with the reproach she dared not utter openly, that the tension between the two of us went almost unnoticed.

  In the circumstances he was unexpectedly amicable, to the point of overdoing it. ‘My, haven’t we grown beautiful?’

  It touched a raw nerve but I kept my cool. For Anna’s sake I swallowed the resentment I’d been nurturing ever since that early encounter. At the same time it was unsettling to discover that he had in fact mellowed with the onset of middle age; far from the repulsive image I’d built up inside me, I had to acknowledge that he was not unhandsome, exuding a kind of sturdy animal charm. Not that I allowed it to fool me; and God knows there was enough in the ensuing conversation – a brief ten minutes before he rushed off again to join his gang of vigilantes, without bothering to touch the supper we had all postponed on his account – to confirm my worst suspicions.

  What had happened, as far as we could make out, was that one of his commando members, on patrol duty, had come across a white Toyota bakkie, Transvaal registration, with four black occupants, all heavily armed, speeding along a dirt road towards an outlying farm, belonging to one Abel Joubert, at the foot of the Swartberge. The rest of the commando had promptly been informed on the elaborate radio network that linked all their members, and Casper and his band had valiantly given chase. It had taken over an hour along all the byways of the district – ‘It’s clear the bastards are from this area, they knew it like their own backyard, which proves their number plates were false’ – before they’d cornered their quarry in a sandy patch. The occupants of the Toyota jumped out and scattered into the dense bushes marking the course of a dried river-bed. Casper and company started firing with all the weaponry they disposed of; but by that time the sun had already set and with the swiftness that characterises the African dusk the night had come down. It was asking for trouble to pursue the terrorists in the dark. At least they had the satisfaction of discovering that one of the four fugitives had been wounded. They’d seen the blood. At first light they would resume the pursuit; but with such bandits around one couldn’t take risks, so the whole commando had to keep watch on all the neighbouring farms overnight.

  This also put paid to our intention of visiting Ouma Kristina in hospital last night. And although it made me feel both resentful and guilty, it came as a relief too.

  Not that it was the end of the day’s excitement. Barely an hour after Casper had driven off again, the engine of his Land Cruiser roaring and its tyres skidding and spinning, the police arrived in a yellow van and a bleary-eyed officer appeared on the doorstep. Anna had opened the door with a gun in one hand; there was relief all round – except among some of the boys who, I suspect, had hoped for more action – and she invited him in. He turned down the offer of coffee. His business was not with us but with Casper. And when he learned what we could tell him he was clearly annoyed. ‘If only you people would stop interfering and leave it to us –!’ Then, making an effort to calm himself, he filled in the blanks in Casper’s story. The four blacks, he assured us, had not been armed at all. They’d gone to Abel Joubert’s farm to deposit a relative, one of Joubert’s labourers, who’d been away for a few weeks to visit his sick mother in Soweto. This was what Abel Joubert personally told the police when they responded to his call about several cars and bakkies descending on his farm, firing in all directions as they went.

  ‘But didn’t they check with Joubert first?’ asked Anna.

  ‘They phoned the farm and Mrs Joubert told them, but I got the impression they didn’t believe her. You must realise the people in the district are up in arms because Abel Joubert has allowed a lot of squatters to settle on his farm and they’re causing problems all over the place. So you can imagine the men were suspicious about what Winnie Joubert told them.’

  ‘Of course they would be,’ I couldn’t help saying, making no effort to mask my viciousness. ‘A woman’s word doesn’t count, does it? This is still a country ruled by men. Nothing has changed.’

  Both the officer and Anna were staring at me, uncomprehending.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said frostily. ‘I’m also just a woman.’

  The officer uttered a small strained chuckle; Anna merely looked irritated.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ I asked the policeman.

  ‘We’re trying to track down the commando members to send them home,’ he said, wiping his soaked brow. ‘And if you happen to see your husband before we do, Mrs Louw, then for God’s sake tell him to stay home. Our job is hard enough as it is.’

  ‘They’re only trying to help,’ she said, flaring up. ‘How can anyone be safe with those murderers who attacked my grandmother still scot free to terrorise the district? You haven’t caught them yet, have you?’

  ‘Mrs Louw –’ I could guess what he was going to say, but then he thought better of it and took his leave. I locked the front door after him.

  ‘Sounds like a bloody mess to me,’ I said when I came back. ‘Suppose Casper’s crowd killed that black man?’

  ‘What difference would that make?’ she asked, more aggressive than she’d been all day. ‘Jesus, Kristien, you don’t seem to realise what’s going on in this place. It’s them or us.’

  ‘Now come on, Anna.’

  ‘Look, you’ve been away for God knows how many years. Please don’t try to tell us what to do. We belong here.’

  ‘And I don’t?’

  ‘No, you don’t. You made your choice years ago.’

  ‘I’m not here for you,’ I reminded her. ‘I came for Ouma. In case you’ve forgotten.’

  She sat looking at her spread fingers on the kitchen table, toying absently with her wedding ring. After a long time she pushed herself to her feet. ‘Tea?’ she asked dully.

  ‘No, thanks. It’s time I got to bed.’

  ‘You must be exhausted.’

  ‘You look tired too.’

  She ignored the remark. ‘You sure you have everything you need?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Perhaps a …’ She hesitated. ‘Can I lend you a black nightie?’

  ‘A black nightie? What on earth for?’

  ‘Well, Casper has asked me to make black nightclothes for myself and the children. In case the house is attacked and we have to flee in the dark, you know.’

  ‘You must be joking?’

  ‘This is serious, Kristien. I wish you would realise it.’

  ‘I’ll be all right. Black sheep aren’t visible in the dark either.’

  She was stung; her first impulse, I could see, was to attack. But taking a deep breath she controlled herself. A moment later, to my surprise, there were tears in her eyes. ‘You really don’t understand the first thing about us, do you? This time, this place –’

  How maddeningly she had manoeuvred me into having to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ She didn’t react, didn’t look at me either. And after a brief battle with myself I offered the olive branch, ‘You coming to bed too?’

  ‘No, I –’ An awkward pause. ‘I think I’ll sit up for a while still.’

  ‘Good night then.’

  ‘Good night.’

  In the passage, on my way to the bedroom assigned to me, I stopped at the telephone, pressed my hand on it, then returned to the kitchen. She looked up. I said, ‘Would you mind if I telephoned Michael?’

  ‘Michael?’

  ‘He’s a …’ I suddenly felt at a loss. As if it would expose something private to explain.

  ‘In London?’ she asked. She might as well have said, ‘On the moon?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘It’s terribly expensive.’ She appeared embarrassed.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said quickly. And turned again to go.

  ‘Please!’ she said behind me. ‘Honestly, if you want to … It’s just, well, Casper mig
ht – But by all means go ahead.’

  ‘It’s not important, really,’ I said, not succeeding very well in keeping my voice neutral.

  She said something more, in a weary, cajoling tone; but I wasn’t listening. I passed the telephone without looking at it. God, how perversely I missed him now! – an aching, burning, physical need more intense than anything I’d felt for a long time.

  I should have slept like a log. But I didn’t. For hours I lay awake in one of the two forlorn little beds that smelled of baby-powder and sunlight and grass and pee, my whole body tense, unable to procure any release on my own. I caught myself straining to listen: but what was it I could possibly expect to hear? The Land Cruiser returning in the night? Ouma’s remembered voice? The cry of a peacock or some nameless night bird? There was nothing but the occasional sound of a child coughing, or moaning in its sleep; once, from the kitchen, a kettle boiling; outside, nothing. Nothing at all.

  10

  AS I LEAVE through the surreal back door of Ouma’s palace, screwing up my eyes against the sudden violence of the sun, I can make out, among the farthest trees, a smudge of colour that stains the drab surroundings. It is the peacock, presumably the same one that scared me so, now strutting with its tail fanned out in lurid defiance. There is something both sad and funny about it. A generic thing. Each male who sprouts an erection acts as if he is the first of his kind to achieve it, the prototype of the species.