by Andre Brink
‘Then she was the one who made the paintings in the basement?’
She doesn’t bother to confirm or deny it. ‘That’s not all,’ she says. ‘I only hope we’ll have enough time. There is so much to tell. All the stories. The whole history.’
‘Stories or history?’
‘Not much difference, is there? When you were a child you thought they were stories. But one way or another they all fit in.’ Another long silence. Then, without any discernible link, she adds, ‘We’ve always had this yearning for the impossible. Me, you, your mother, all the others before us.’
‘Tell me.’
And she does.
‘I was very lonely as a child,’ her papery voice rustles in the dark, matched by the scratching of my pen as I write. ‘All the other Wepeners were already grown up, Eulalie and Willem and Barend and Martiens. Of course they were really my aunt and uncles, although I had no inkling of it then; I’d been brought up to think of them as my elder sister and brothers. Eulalie must have been twenty-six when I was born, Willem about twenty-four, and the twins, Barend and Martiens, twenty. Those two were still around to give a hand with the farming but they’d moved into our townhouse. Willem was running his in-laws’ farm in the district, and Eulalie had moved to the Free State, married to a farmer, three children. So you can understand that I was left largely to my own devices. My grandmother, Petronella, who of course I then still thought of as my mother, must have been sixty by the time I was ten, her husband Hermanus Johannes even older, so they couldn’t be bothered much with a small girl around. Which suited me in a way, because as you know this house can keep a child occupied almost indefinitely. The only place forbidden to me was the basement. The doors at the top and bottom of the stone staircase were always kept locked, and with dire warnings they tried to instil the fear of God in me to keep out. But that only fired my imagination.
‘I can no longer remember precisely how it finally came about, but one Sunday I found the key. The grownups had gone to church and I was left behind in bed with some obscure illness; I often had such Sunday fevers. It is possible that Lizzie aided and abetted me, the little coloured girl who was my only close friend, the foreman’s daughter, and as unmanageable as I.
‘I won’t ever forget the anticipation with which I crept down those cold stairs, holding a lantern that sent the most frightful shadows scurrying across the walls. And then those paintings, totally shocking to one brought up as strictly as I was. You know, I was even expected to keep my shift on when I had a bath. I can still remember the feel of that heavy wet thing clinging to my limbs. Some nights I had dreams about drowning in deep dark water, unable to move arms or legs in that long dress that kept dragging me down, down, down to the bottom. Of course, that had made me all the more curious about my body. You were the same when you were small. Don’t think I didn’t notice. And when it rained, perhaps because it happened so seldom, I’d take off all my clothes and creep up into the attic and from there on to the roof where I’d sit for hours in a huddle, feeling tragic.
‘Now you can imagine the kind of explosion those paintings set off in my mind. Seeing them in the dark, by lantern light, in those deep colours, the reds and greens and blues glowing at me like strange exotic fishes swimming up from some deep underwater world. Men with staggering erections, women spreadeagled, exposing their things like gaping wounds, and all kinds of copulations involving people and animals and birds and monsters, even trees and stones. I was both horrified and fascinated, and from that day on I could not stay away, lured back like a moth to the fatal glare of a flame.
‘In the end they found out, of course, and I was given the thrashing of my life. And when I crept downstairs again a week or so later, because obviously that was the first thing I did as soon as I’d recovered, I was stunned to find the walls blank, whitewashed from top to bottom to obliterate all signs of the paintings. I was so shocked that I ran to my father and attacked him, with fists and feet, kicking his shins and butting my head into his huge belly, screaming and shouting abuse in language I didn’t even consciously realise I knew. It was a long time before he learned the reason for this sudden attack from me, and then of course it meant another hiding. But in the end they gave up. They had no choice, really, as they knew by then that once I’d put my mind to something I’d cling to it like an octopus. Even when they hid the key in the most unlikely places I was bound to find it; and by the time they finally mislaid it as a result of hiding it so well that they themselves could no longer retrieve it, I’d already discovered another key in the attic that fitted the basement lock.
‘Now can you believe it? Not quite a month later the paintings were back in all their blatant glory. Only much later did I learn that they’d tried to whitewash the walls many times before, but that the same thing had happened. To me it was a miracle. But to them, too, if you ask me, judging from their expressions every time they went down there to retrieve me and found the paintings resurrected from the dead.’
‘But what happened to the paintings then? Today there are only blotches left.’
‘That happened after the Wepeners died. I suppose they served no further purpose then. Another miracle, or just the ravages of time? We’ll never know.’
‘But how did you eventually find out about the artist?’
‘As you can imagine, I never gave the Wepeners any peace of mind about the origins of those sinful images. But not once did they give away the smallest hint. The closest they ever came, at least until I was almost twenty-eight, was to say that the Devil had painted them. Presumably they thought that might scare me off. But it had the opposite effect. I didn’t have much truck with God, I’m afraid. I’d had an overdose of religion in the Wepener household; moreover, he sounded suspiciously like a sterner version of Hermanus Johannes to me. I much preferred the Devil, he seemed a lot more interesting; and I would have changed places with Doctor Faust any time, had I known about him then.’
‘Why didn’t they just send you away? It would have made everything so much easier, for all of you.’
‘I think they needed to be reminded of their guilt every day. And take it out on me. They probably saw it as their personal responsibility before God to keep an eye on me, even when they were persuaded I was a rotten egg. And from time to time, especially when I was ill and could not run away, they would invite the dominee, or elders of the church, to pray over me and try to exorcise the evil they believed had taken up permanent residence in me. What some of those fervent old men, all of them resembling in one way or another my image of God Almighty, did to tease the Devil out of me, once they had arranged to be alone with me, I need not dwell on. But they certainly gave me a singularly warped idea of our religion.
‘The one good thing to come out of all this was that I was once again left to myself. Except that from the time I had my first period I was virtually imprisoned on the farm. No further schooling, except that they hired a governess. My only companion was Lizzie. She’d lost her mother at birth and was living with her grandparents, Salie and Nenna. You remember her, I’m sure. She was almost exactly my age, only a few days’ difference, and we remained inseparable for life. Not that the old people approved. Both my father and hers did their level best to discourage our closeness, without ever giving a cogent reason for it. It was only many years later that I discovered what was behind it, and by then it couldn’t make a difference any more. We remained like this’ – she holds up two knobbly fingers – ‘and it lasted for almost ninety years, until she died thirteen years ago. If it hadn’t been for Lizzie, my childhood would have been desperately unhappy. Of course, there were also the birds. Wherever the two of us went there used to be birds; usually they were the ones who warned us if Lizzie’s parents or mine were approaching.
‘I don’t know how it came about, but from the time I was very small there was a special understanding between us and the birds. Petronella told me once how they’d flutter about my pram when I was pushed outside in the shade to sleep in the mor
nings. At first she’d tried to scare them off, afraid that they’d mess on my blankets, but they never did that; and in the end I was left alone with them. They actually looked after me. Once, I was told, they started screeching and twittering when a snake approached the pram; and when it persisted they actually began to attack the intruder. Even the small finches and weavers and bobtails joined in, and that attracted larger birds, and just as Petronella came outside to see what was causing the racket, a hawk swooped down and carried the geelslang off.
‘But I did crave human company apart from Lizzie’s, and that was largely denied me, as Hermanus Johannes and Petronella became unbearably jealous and possessive of me whenever people arrived on the farm, even if they were close friends or neighbours. It was a life of awful deprivation.
‘What made it even harder for me was the family’s experience in the Boer War. Here in the Cape Colony, of course, we were largely out of it, and my father-grandfather was much too old to think of getting involved; but my three uncle-brothers were all swallowed up by the war: Willem was killed on the battlefield, Barend was executed as a Cape rebel, and Martiens died of dysentery in Bermuda.’
‘What about Eulalie?’ I ask.
‘Died in the concentration camp at Bethulie, with her children. The family firmly believed the English had force-fed her on ground glass. We were sent a small finely embroidered cloth she’d made, with her name on it, and the dates of her birth and death. You tell me how she knew that.’
‘The Wepeners must have been shattered,’ I say.
‘They grew old overnight, I can tell you. All of a sudden the future had swung shut in their faces. No sons to take over, and of course only sons counted. All they had left was me. No wonder they became so unbearably possessive.
‘Thank God I had by then made friends with an old Jewish pedlar who regularly came to the farm twice a year; he’d discovered my love of reading and, knowing from experience how my parents would react (in our house only the Bible and Petronella’s encyclopedia were allowed – I’ll tell you more about that later), he soon began surreptitiously to ply me with books. Lizzie hid them in their house for me, knowing my people would never stoop so low as to visit there, and as I read voraciously whatever old Moishe could lay his hands on, life became a little more bearable.
‘He was a wonderful old man. He looked, I always thought, like a prophet from the Old Testament. His family had drifted down to Africa all the way from Lithuania, surviving the most incredible hardships. Two things had helped him, he used to say. Laughter and stories. If you have those, he maintained, nothing can kill your spirit. It said in the Talmud, he told me, that God had created people to tell Him stories; but later, sadly, they forgot about Him, they even forgot that they themselves were stories first told by God. And ever since, if old Moishe was to be believed, men and women have been telling each other stories. To fill the gap after the Great Storyteller had fallen asleep. He could tell the most marvellous stories about his own life, and each time it was different. Life, to him, was one long celebration. He used to tell me how, when he was a child, and dirt poor, he used to earn money by crying at funerals. For a perfunctory performance he was paid a shilling, for a good loud weeping he earned five bob. And if he cried so inconsolably that he fell into the grave, it might be a pound. Needless to say, he invariably ended up in the grave and had to be hauled out. That set him on the road to prosperity. No wonder old Moishe and his stories and his books, even if he came only twice a year, saved me from loneliness.
‘From the time I was sixteen or seventeen young men began to visit over weekends, but they were invariably discouraged by the Wepeners. It was only after the collapse of the feather market when the Great War broke out that they came round to the idea that I should get married. We’d been spared the worst thanks to Petronella’s encyclopedia which prompted her to start diversifying well before the crash came. But the better prospects in the Little Karoo were beginning to dwindle as one ostrich farm after the other folded. I wasn’t getting any younger either. I couldn’t care less, I wasn’t interested in settling into matrimony merely to satisfy others. I’d always been dreaming about something else, something more, something different, even though I couldn’t find the words to explain it. Hermanus Johannes Wepener thought I was a witch. Perhaps he had good reason to.
‘Anyway, something had to be done, and after considering all the prospective candidates Petronella settled on Francois Basson, who stood to inherit one of the biggest farms in the Little Karoo. What was more, it was adjacent to Sinai. It was all arranged between the families: first the men got together, then the women were let into it. They believed they were saving me from spinsterhood, a fate clearly worse than death. No one consulted me. Marriage, after all, for them, had little to do with personal feelings. It was simply a form of barter to strengthen alliances or consolidate wealth or ensure the heritage. And a young woman like me was the unit of currency.’
‘So you refused?’
‘Naturally I felt like sending them all to hell. But the stupid fact was that I’d actually fallen for Francois Basson’s charm. There was a wild streak in the man I couldn’t resist. Once the marriage had been agreed to the Wepeners turned a blind eye. This freedom was delirious. For the first time I had an inkling of what life could be like away from Sinai. Francois and I would go riding for hours, galloping across the plains, right through the remaining flocks of ostriches, sending the plumes flying. Some evenings he would carry me off to the dam on their farm, and we would cavort naked in the water. For the first time I discovered for myself the passions the Girl had so glaringly exhibited on the walls of the cellar. It wasn’t love. It was lust.
‘But a mere month before the wedding it was called off. The mayor’s daughter, Letitia Meyer, announced that she was expecting Francois’s child. If it had been anybody else I’m sure the Bassons would have bought them off. But the mayor was a different matter. And on the date set for our wedding the two of them were married.
‘I was devastated. Only much later did I appreciate what a lucky escape it had been for me. Because Francois turned out to be a rotter. He had no real interest in farming and after his parents’ death he started spending all their accumulated money. Letitia died in child-birth, and the child didn’t make it either. Francois started going downhill. It was a long and painful thing to watch, it took years. They say in the end he would sit on his front stoep in the afternoon, drinking straight from the bottle, watching the baboons from the Swartberg invading his vineyards – the family was one of the few who’d reverted to vines soon after the phylloxera had come and gone; which means that by the time the feather market crashed they were among the most notable survivors. But it made no difference. In the early thirties, the time of the Great Depression, he reached his limit. Watching the baboons plundering his vineyards and destroying his pumpkin and sweet potato crops, Francois would burst into maniacal laughter, waving his bottle, and shouting at them, “You bastards, enjoy it while you can! I’m going to drink this whole farm from under your blistered backsides!” And in the end he doused the house with paraffin and set it alight, then blew out what brains he had left with his shotgun, right there on the stoep, while the baboons looked on.
‘The farm was sold, it changed hands once or twice again, a new house was built, and in the end, of course, Casper bought it. He wanted to get as close to Sinai as he could. But that’s another story.
‘Long, long before Francois came to grief my own fate had been decided. At least the Wepeners and the Bassons had tried their damnedest. If I couldn’t marry the elder Basson brother, then what about the second, Cornelis Frederik? Once again the patriarchs met, the wives were called in, and a decision was made. This time I was stubborn. Francois had turned my head with his wildness. But young Cornelis Frederik was different. Not that there was anything wrong with him: there were two idiots in the family by then, but he was not one of them. The problem was quite simply that I found him boring. Cornelis was too good, too solid, too dece
nt to be true.
‘Yet what could I do? What other hope was there for me but marriage? I was already twenty-seven. Still I resisted and resisted. I was pleaded with, and reprimanded, and thrashed. The effort nearly caused poor old Hermanus Johannes Wepener to have a stroke; he had to stay in bed for days. I refused to give in. Once again the parade of old men trooped through this house. Dominee Hechter. All the elders, first singly, then in one grim, impressive, black-clad conclave. Then the sourpuss sisters of the congregation. Why? Why? Why? they wanted to know. Because he brings no wetness to my cunt, I told them. I wish you could have seen them.
‘I left them, not in triumph but in despair. Even if it might not have seemed like that, I was close to giving up. I promised myself that if I could strike the slightest smallest spark from Cornelis I would accept. But it was impossible. Our parents would arrange ostentatiously to leave us together – left? we were thrust together – to encourage some kind, any kind, of bond. I teased him, and flirted with him. I showed him my ankle, my knee, a flash of thigh. I had rather beautiful legs in those days, I’ll have you know. He spoke about the will of God and the temptations of the flesh. One night out here in the garden I took what I thought was the final step. Look, I told him, if you want me, then for God’s sake take me. Take me now, or leave it forever. He renounced. It was then a kind of madness invaded me. Without warning, I stripped off my clothes and began to dance for him, a fantastic, extravagant, bacchanalian dance. It must have been a frightening experience for him, I realise now, as I rushed about like a creature possessed, flinging myself into the shrubs and bushes, crashing into tree trunks and the fence of the fowl run, whirling up dust and treading in chicken shit. Finally, gasping for breath, limp, exhausted, I flopped into his arms. He made a manful effort to thrust me back into my discarded clothes, uttering gentle and cajoling words, things like, “My dear little child, my poor little girl,” although he wasn’t much older than myself, and when at last through our joint fumbling efforts I was more or less decent again, he offered to pray for me. Poor man. I grabbed him where it evidently caused excruciating pain, and twisted with all the energy I could still muster; had there been more of it I would have tied a knot, but there was a sad insufficiency.’
