by Andre Brink
Anna must have become aware of my scrutiny. She sits up and hugs her knees in an awkward attempt to cover up. ‘Not exactly Miss World, am I?’ she asks with a strained laugh. After a moment she adds in a smothered voice, ‘Can you blame Casper for losing interest?’
‘This old grey mare ain’t what she used to be either,’ I say, knowing just how unconvincing it must sound.
‘You’re no good at patronising, Kristien.’ But there is no spark of resistance in her voice. And she leans back again, resigned.
‘Is it really important for you to keep him?’
‘What about the children?’
‘Do they need him?’
‘He’s a good father!’ This time I detect a flare of fire.
I look hard at her, but her eyes are averted. The bathwater moves in rapid wavelets across her body.
‘Are you sure it’s worth it, Anna?’
‘I have a family to think of.’
‘You have yourself to think of too.’
She shakes her head. ‘I suppose it looks different from outside. You’re free to come and go. You have the whole of London, of Europe, of the world, within your reach. You needn’t ever lie awake at night wondering when someone is going to break in and kill you all and burn the place down –’
‘It’s just this thing with Ouma that’s shot your nerves.’
‘No, it isn’t. It’s been going on for years, and getting worse all the time. When this happened it just confirmed what we’d always feared. I’m so frightened. There isn’t an hour of the day or night that I’m not frightened. I can’t take it any more. If only I could run away, and run and run to where no one will ever find me again. But how can I leave the children? I’m not so old. Forty-two isn’t old, is it? But what have I got to show for it? This isn’t life. It’s worse than a prison. You know’ – there is a brief hesitation, then she plunges in – ‘more than once I’ve almost’ – she avoids my eyes – ‘put an end to it all.’
‘Don’t say that, Anna.’
‘It’s true. What is there to live for? Except duties, obligations, responsibilities? And Casper doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand anything. When I try to talk to him about it he puts on a bored face and says it’ll be all right. That is if he doesn’t just get up and walk away. Or else he loses his temper and –’ Her tears are running down her face into the bath. Angrily she sits up and turns on the tap again.
‘I had no idea –’
‘Of course you didn’t. That’s what is so unbearable about living here. Millions and millions of people, we’re all in it together, yet no one bothers about the rest. We’re all alone. So bloody alone.’
I am shocked by the desperation in her voice.
‘Do you have a cigarette for me?’ she asks unexpectedly.
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘I don’t. Casper would kill me if he …’ She sits up. ‘Well, let him.’
‘I’ll fetch you one.’ Wrapping a damp towel around me I open the door and go down the passage to my room. A small child emerges from one of the doors along the way, and stops to stare at me, thumb in mouth, and begins to whimper. I feel, briefly, a perverse urge to flash at him – ‘Ever seen a thing with feathers before?’ – then cover up with a forced smile and sidle past. In this house, as in my parents’, nakedness is not the order of the day. (How unlike The Bird Place, in the rage of summer, when a swarm of us, out on a dare, would rampage naked up and down secret stairways, through basement and attic, and even into the moonlit yard.) Meekly the child returns to the darkness it has emerged from. I retrieve the cigarettes from my room. Through the window I see the veld outside awash in moonlight. Fascinated, I remain standing there, aware of the sensual touch of the night breeze; my nipples become taut. Endless, endless, the plains unfold into the dark, pure space unencumbered by tree or rock. Above, the unnatural brightness of the stars – God, I’ve forgotten how close and graspable they can be here – the glinting dust of the Milky Way, the confident markers of the Southern Cross. I feel duly cut down to size, and duly alien. Chastened, I turn away and go back to Anna who is still lolling in her amniotic sanctuary.
‘I can’t tell you how happy I was when you told me on the phone you’d be coming,’ she says after the first deep breath, looking at me through the light whorl she has exhaled. ‘It was like – I don’t know, like the answer to everything.’
‘And now it’s all evaporated again.’
‘Don’t say that.’ Another slow exhalation. ‘Please. You are here. It does make a difference. I don’t know how, but it does. I wish you could stay.’ With a candour she has seldom shown, she says, ‘I need you.’
We have stopped talking. For an all too fleeting instant, as if we’re outside time, outside history, the two of us are together, sisters, in an intimacy more lucid than I can recall us as ever having known together, contained in the frankness of our naked bodies, our shared femininity. And from this knowledge spreads a subliminal awareness – surfacing only now in the telling of it – of the many circles of the night spreading from this centre where we are: of plains and darkness and beyondness, of moonlight and stars, a free and female universe.
Then there is a distant rumbling sound, soon definable as a vehicle approaching. Anna tenses briefly before she rises in an agitated smacking and swirling of water and reaches for a towel. ‘Casper,’ she says.
17
WHEN HIS KEYS start turning in the several locks of the front door we are already in the kitchen, running water for tea. Anna is wearing her black emergency nightdress. I have put on her gown over the T-shirt. There is, I notice with pleasurable surprise, a freshness and a new lightness about her.
He seems to sense it too. Going to her, he lifts her hair and kisses her nape. ‘Smells good,’ he says. ‘Missed me?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Kristien is good company.’
He turns to me, takes in – I see at a glance – my bare feet, my damp hair, the flimsy gown.
‘Any news?’ I ask to forestall further exploration.
‘No. It’s quiet tonight.’
‘Good. I haven’t told you yet, but I’m going to take Ouma home.’
‘What?’
‘It’s by far the best for her,’ says Anna quietly.
‘But how can you –’
‘I’ll be taking care of everything,’ I say. ‘With the police, and with the doctors. Now let’s have our tea and go to bed.’
‘And by the way,’ says Anna as she pours, ‘the radio was stolen from the bakkie this afternoon.’
Much later, when the house is dark, invaded by the night outside as if the very walls have become penetrable, I hear the sounds of their coupling from the master bedroom next door. He is taking, I tell myself, in his own way, his revenge. I have a brief image of her in the black flannelette nightdress, pushed up or torn away, her white limbs. Impossible to tell from the sounds she utters whether what she derives from it is pleasure or pain, ecstasy or revulsion. And this is what most disturbs me: not the fact of the event, but the impossibility of discovering what it means.
18
THIS, AT LAST, is the confirmation of return. To be in this fantastic house again. It has taken several days longer than I anticipated. Ouma’s condition first had to improve sufficiently; only when it was clear that a collapse of her lungs had been averted and that most of the drips could be dispensed with, the doctors became more willing to consider the move. Even so, several additional opinions from their brotherhood had to be solicited, and in the end a whole rainbow of forms had to be signed to absolve them from all responsibility. At the same time a small army of labourers was set to work on the house: before we could move in, electricity had to be restored and the telephone reconnected, outside doors replaced, burglar bars fixed to accessible windows; the police insisted on completing their search for clues in the rubble; Trui and I, several members of her family, even Anna and a couple of inquisitive neighbours – clicking and clucking, prophesying doom and impend
ing apocalypse – have worked round the clock to clear away the worst of the mess, restock the pantry and the linen-cupboards, replace the most indispensable utensils and implements, clean up and sweep and wash and dust the few rooms provisionally chosen for our habitation in the wing least damaged by the explosion and the over-zealous efforts of the fire brigade. Now we have moved in. It is night, and very quiet.
Ouma Kristina has drifted off into a sleep induced, against her will, by the energetic young nurse seconded to us for the day shift (I am brave, or reckless, enough to assume, for the time being, and against the indignant remonstrations of the doctors, the night watch with Trui.) Before Ouma succumbed to the morphine we spoke for a while; she still had trouble to mouth the words, to make herself audible. But she seemed at last relaxed, at peace with the world.
‘Yes. We’ve showed them, haven’t we? The two of us.’ Clutching my wrist limply in her single useful hand.
‘Now you’ll get well again.’
‘No. Of course not. I’ve come home to die. But we have a lot to talk about.’
‘You can tell me all about what happened.’
‘That’s not important, Kristien. There are other things. I think you’ve forgotten most of what you knew, you were away too long. But I’ll give you back your memory.’
‘You know I won’t forget you. Not ever.’
‘It isn’t me, Kristien. It’s all the others, the ones before us. You dare not forget them now. This land – these – you know ,..’ Her voice trailed off. The injection was beginning to take effect.
‘Don’t wear yourself out. We have time –’
‘We’ll talk, won’t we? We’ll talk. There are many stories to tell you again.’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said soothingly. ‘But first you must sleep. You need the rest. Otherwise they’ll send you back to hospital.’
‘You won’t let them, will you?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘I don’t want that Piet Malan to cart me off to his undertaker’s and abuse my body among all those skeletons of old cars in his backyard.’
‘Nobody will lay a hand on you, Ouma. I promise.’
Then she slid off, returning once or twice, fighting against the drug, mumbling words I couldn’t make out, and fell silent, her mouth still open.
Seated beside her bed, in a deep easy chair salvaged from the ruin below and laboriously lugged upstairs by Trui and myself, I have at last the leisure to savour the sensation of being home again.
An impressive and improbable procession has brought us here. A yellow police van in front, followed by Casper in his Land Cruiser, the ambulance with Ouma and two nurses in the back, then Anna and I and a number of her children (stunned into silence, for once, by the solemnity of the occasion) in the huge black hearse, while a doctor in a new metallic-grey Mercedes brought up the rear. It felt like a State visit, and along the way everybody stopped to stare; all that was missing was a contingent of outriders. The day was hot and bright, yet we travelled in deep shadow as we progressed under a moving cloud of birds overhead, accompanying us all the way from the hospital to the farm. There they descended on the incongruous mass of trees that mark Ouma’s place on the expanse of the veld; many swept in through open windows to perch on what remained of the balustrade of the marble staircase we ascended to Ouma’s new room, leaving only, in a whirr and flutter of wings, after she had been comfortably installed with drips and tubes and monitors and other gadgets supplied by the hospital staff (even an oxygen cylinder in case of emergency). And now we are left, I trust, in peace.
Scared? I cannot deny that I am uneasy, much more so than I would have expected back in the turbulent security of Anna’s house; even though I know that there are two policemen at the distant ostentatious gate, that Casper or some of his eager commando will undoubtedly visit the place on regular patrols, and that in spite of my protestations he has left me a gun and a revolver, neither of which I have any intention – or capability – of using. A room or two away, beyond my own, which is next to Ouma’s, Trui and Jeremiah are sleeping (on the floor, on their own insistence), to be ‘available’ if required. There is even a CB radio in a corner of the room, connected to a mast rigged up outside; from time to time, always unexpectedly, it bursts into a muted distant cackle of conversation before subsiding again into what seems to be its natural state, a steady crackling superimposed on a low contented hum. So it is not a feeling of being unsafe that makes me feel ill at ease; if anything, I am overprotected. The pioneer women of our family made do with incomparably less, and they certainly survived, one way or another. The uneasiness comes rather, I think, from the simple fact of being here, at last, alone, with her, with all the memories contained and defined by that meagre little bundle of skin and bones and tendrils of hair. I know now the extent of my responsibility, and what it means to be exposed here to past and future alike, conscious of origins and possible endings.
For an hour or two I remain by her side, my whole body tensed up in the attempt to follow her breathing or the occasional flickering of her eyelids as she dreams; once she utters a dry chuckle which trails off into a moan. I have kicked off my shoes to be more comfortable. I feel claustrophobic in shoes. As I invariably do when I have time to kill, I inspect my feet, toe by toe, each nail, each knuckle, checking the cuticles, loose skin, chafe marks, signs of calluses. I have a fascination with feet. There is a sense of easy communication about them. The touch, in bed, of toe and instep, heel and pad, a prelude or accompaniment to love, sign of forgiveness or sharing, confirmation of being together. And I tend to judge men in terms of their reaction to feet. (Some find them sexy, some embarrassing; Michael mildly amusing.)
After a while, to keep the circulation flowing, I get up and pace up and down for a while, stopping in front of the window every time I pass it, to peer into the incredibly peaceful night. At last, armed with one of the several large torches Casper and Anna have insisted on leaving behind, I venture out on to the landing and down the old-worldly staircase to the regions below, acting the child again. I am still barefoot, not just to move as quietly as possible in order not to disturb Ouma, but because it lends a different kind of meaning to motion, to the feel of surfaces beneath my soles, a sensual form of knowledge, a reassurance of somehow being in touch with what matters.
Aimlessly, relishing the almost-forgotten tinglings of dread down my spine, I wander from room to room. It is a journey that confirms memory, yet allows space for new discovery. Once or twice I am stopped by what from the corner of the eye seems like a moving figure. But it must be myself, caught in the glass of a picture or the mottled, dusty, cobwebbed surface of one of the many mirrors on the wall. Even from childhood I have been aware of Ouma’s fascination with mirrors – unlike that ancestor of hers (which one? I’ll have to ask her again) who lived in fear or hatred of them and never allowed a single reflecting surface in her house. After each false sighting I move on again, only to be stopped in my tracks, at every turn, by what may or may not be sounds: rustling, sliding, gliding sounds, barely liminal, like sheets or curtains trailing. Mice perhaps, bats up in the attic? But would they have come back so soon after the fire? There are cold and sudden draughts, barely perceptible currents of air wafting along the corridors. They may be ghosts, I tell myself. The ones who followed me from the cemetery. Ouma Kristina has always lived among the dead. They mean no harm. They belong here.
In the preserved wing I find the large dining-room with its long table and high-backed chairs below the moulded ceiling with its two exorbitant candelabras imported from the island of Murano. We have not yet had time to clean up here, and the table is covered with a film of dust and fine black ash which invites me to write my name on it. Many rooms in this house must bear the inscription of my name and those of cousins, traced in dust, scribbled in pencil or coloured crayons, even incised in beams and floorboards. As if it makes a difference.
On an impulse I kneel in front of the huge ornate sideboard – Flemish or Spanish, centu
ries old – and open my favourite remembered door, the one on the right, carved with the faces of putti and jesters and monsters. Inside, the bright dusty beam of the torch picks out what I have hoped to find: the hundreds upon hundreds of white damask serviettes, each fastidiously rolled and tied up with a piece of string, a small square of cardboard with a handwritten name attached. Hendrik. Olga. Marthinus. Philip. Cecilia. Mr Jansen. Mrs Colyn. Dr Leriche. If I take my time, as I used to do so often in the past, there will be exotic ones too: Princess This, The Hon. That, Countess So-and-So. Foreigners, dignitaries, relatives, humble peasants. Every person who has ever sat down to a meal in this room has had a serviette assigned to her or him; and no matter how long one stayed away, weeks or months, years, decades, if ever you returned you would be sure to have your personal serviette awaiting you. Even the tags of the dead have been left untouched, and whenever as a child I asked Ouma about those she would say in her inscrutable way, ‘Who knows, they may still come back.’
The real pleasure used to lie in sorting them, in holding up one after the other and asking, ‘Who was Henrietta, Ouma?’ ‘What’s happened to Princess Véronique?’ ‘Has this General Marmaduke ever come back?’ I start unpacking them; I have all night. Rows upon rows, some yellowed with age. Until at long last, several rows down, yes, I come upon mine. Kristien.
My stomach contracts.
