Imaginings of Sand

by Andre Brink

  I smile at the memory.

  ‘And in your very first year at school – was it? – the music teacher came to see Mother about you. She complained that you refused to utter a sound in singing class.’

  ‘What else did you expect? We had music shoved down our throats at home all day.’

  ‘And then the teacher decided to punish you. She ordered you to stand, and said you’d remain standing there all day until you agreed to sing.’

  ‘And then I told her, I was still lisping, “Will thow you. Will thtand. Won’t thing.” And stood there until the last bell went.’

  ‘Can you imagine how it stung Mother? Because she knew, we all knew, you had talent. I once overheard a man saying you had a voice that caressed not only the cochlea but the coccyx. But you always refused to sing. The stroppiest person I’ve ever known. While I never had much talent, but I practised till I was blue in the face, to please Mother.’

  ‘They tried so hard to break our spirits. All for our own benefit, they said, in the name of love and of God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Whereas the dirty little secret was quite simply that it made it so much easier for them to control us. You let them, I didn’t.’

  ‘It’s damn unfair,’ she says. ‘I tried so hard, and what can I show for it all? While you –’

  ‘Don’t overestimate what I’ve got, Anna.’

  ‘At least you’re independent. You make your own decisions. You follow your own mind.’

  ‘So can you.’

  ‘No. That’s the difference. I’m married.’

  ‘How nice to have a ready-made excuse you can blame for everything,’ I say, rather more sharply than I meant to.

  On any other occasion this would have triggered a no-holds-barred fight; our whole relationship over the years, until I left, was marked by such quarrels. But it is different today: have we simply become battle-weary? or more circumspect? or is there a more profound, submarine, change taking place?

  ‘I wasn’t looking for excuses,’ says Anna. ‘If it is one, then how do you explain your decision to leave – what was it? – eleven years ago? Was that rebellion, taking a stand, making a statement – or running away?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ I say, and mean it.

  ‘Can you bear to tell me about it?’

  I hesitate. I pour another cup. I look at her. ‘I can try. I’ve never really discussed it with anyone. The only time I wanted to, quite desperately, was after I lost the child. After the abortion, I mean. I wrote to you, remember? For once I needed a big sister.’

  ‘I didn’t write back,’ she says quietly. She cradles the cup in both her hands and looks into it. ‘I failed you, didn’t I?’

  ‘I thought so then. Now I’m not quite so sure any more.’

  ‘Your letter came just after I first found out that Casper was cheating on me. I remember every moment of it. I’d just come home from hospital with my third child. There was a party to welcome me back. I had to go to the bedroom to feed the baby. I was rereading your letter with the child at my breast. It was so upsetting – I was so furious with you – that before joining the others in the sitting-room again I went outside to compose myself. And found them on the side stoep.’

  I stare at her, unable to comment.

  ‘Do you know what my first reaction was? I wanted to go back to the bedroom and smother the child with a pillow. I wanted to kill him. And after that I was feeling so guilty I couldn’t write to you.’

  ‘There is so much we still need to sort out.’

  2

  THERE WAS NO Damascus experience for me, no great leap for mankind (or womankind for that matter), only a series of small shifts, each insignificant in its own right, but each making possible the next. A rebellion that sometimes assumed weird and rather distorted forms. Fighting against the idea of being the dutiful daughter, but going about it so skilfully – although there was always a risk – that I wouldn’t get caught: stealing little objects from class-mates, things they prized, and then throwing them away because I didn’t want them anyway. Once, I remember, I stole a tiny ceramic figurine of a rooster, quite exquisitely painted – and then had no idea of what to do with it. In the end I spent a whole afternoon making a little matchbox dresser, covered in brightly coloured paper, with a silver-paper mirror; and then I placed the rooster on it and offered it for sale at the church bazaar, which somehow cancelled the guilt. That kind of thing.

  When I was already in London I remember once walking past a large sign on someone’s garage door that said:

  DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING HERE.

  And all of a sudden parking there was all I could think of, although I didn’t even own a car. In fact, I spent days, if not weeks, trying to figure out how I could get hold of a car just for the sake of parking it there. See what I mean?

  As a child, in the games we played, I always wanted to be the robber, not the cop; or the knight, not the sweet little lady waiting to be rescued; the one who fought the monsters and sometimes won and sometimes lost, not the one who had to be saved. Even at high school I was beginning to have doubts about my female fate: not only the idea of getting married, but that having a husband and children should be the be-all and end-all of my life. I suppose Mother had a lot to do with this. Because of what she did to us; but also because of what she allowed Father to do to her. Most of my friends revelled in the prospect of being let loose to flirt and experiment with the passions and try their wings, safe in the knowledge that afterwards they would settle down peacefully for ever and ever, amen. As though the fascination of seeing male desires focused on yourself could blind you to what was in it for you. To me the idea was repulsive.

  We once had dinner with a friend of Father’s. It was a Sunday, after church, we were all straitjacketed in our finery. We’d been warned beforehand that this was a very important man, we had to behave ourselves and be as quiet as mice. Which we were. But the man’s own two kids were quite small, three or four years old or thereabouts, and they were pretty rowdy; and halfway through dinner the man looked at his wife and made a motion with his head, and she took them outside to play in the garden so as not to disturb her husband and the guests, and she had her meal by herself, afterwards, while the others were taking coffee in the lounge. I remember that I, too, ran out to play in the garden with them, although I was already about eight or ten and should have known better, but it seemed so much more fun outside. Except it was so awful seeing the woman sitting there on the swing crying but pretending not to. I went over to her and pressed myself against her where she sat, and decided to tell her my ‘secret’ to make her feel better – which was that when I grew up I’d never have children – but that made her cry even more.

  In one sense university improved my life, but in another it made it worse. It was an improvement, because for the first time I was tasting a kind of freedom. But it was worse, because I knew a moment of decision was approaching. Holidays were terrible, except in summer when we came here to Sinai. There were always arguments with Father – about not working hard enough, or taking ‘useless’ subjects, or reading the wrong books, or turning my back on ‘my people’, or wearing the wrong clothes. Jesus, there was one argument that went on for days, simply because I’d put on what Father regarded as a see-through blouse that showed my nipples, which was about all I had up there. A girl who flaunts her nipples, he maintained, is making herself cheap by blatantly announcing her general availability. For once. Mother took my side, although her argument was somewhat back-handed: I had nothing to flaunt anyway, she said, so what was the fuss about? I tried to be aloof, then became sneering, then shouted at him, then made a fool of myself by bursting into tears of rage, and in the end only felt sick (although I refused to change my blouse). What really scorched into my mind was his ultimate warning, ‘Well, don’t come to me for sympathy if you get raped.’ To which I could not help but shout in reply, ‘And don’t expect sympathy from me if you get kicked in the balls.’ That cost me the final humiliation of a thrashing, eve
n though I was supposed by then to be too old for that.

  Towards the end of my university career – I went to Stellenbosch, not Pretoria where Anna had gone; my only reason being to put as great a distance between me and my parents as possible, but it was not without irony, because as Stellenbosch was their own alma mater they enthusiastically supported the move – we made a family trip to distant relatives in Namibia (which was then still ‘South-West Africa’): he’d always been very conscious of family ties. The only worthwhile moments on that whole wretched journey were the visits to the Namib, the shifting dunes outside Walvis Bay, where every time one returned one would discover them in new configurations – and yet they seemed eternal and immutable. I could have stayed there, I think. I fell in love with the desert; it was the first time I formed an image to match the name of Africa, and until today it is the most vivid in my mind. The rest of the holiday was miserable. Mainly because the whole trip was organised around a hunting expedition, which sounded exciting beforehand, but turned out to be less than inspiring.

  We spent most of the time on this vast farm, north of Okahandja, stretching to beyond the horizon. A whole army of relatives and friends had descended on the place, most of us camping outside because the low, grey, depressing farmhouse was much too small to lodge us all. That in itself was no problem, except that the tents pitched in a sandy dried-up river bed under tall camel-thorn trees were soon infested by bird-lice of a particularly venomous kind; and Mother complained endlessly about the lack of amenities. Also, she was scared by every night sound. Once, when a donkey brayed in the vicinity, she was convinced it was a lion and sent Father scuttling outside on all fours, presumably to kill the predator with his bare hands.

  Before sunrise every day the men drove off with their guns in their bakkies while the womenfolk stayed behind to work. And work they did, from long before dawn until the men came home at sunset, because only through slaving away could they justify their existence. In the very biltong they cut, in the marinades they made and the miles of sausage they stuffed, I could see the system itself going about its inexorable business.

  After a few days I couldn’t stand it any more. So I fled – accompanying the men on the back of a bakkie, where the previous day’s blood had coagulated in a dark jelly on the metal floor, covered in red dust. I took an orange with me, and a can of beer, a length of stringy biltong, and a book. I spent most of the day nearly passing out in the sweltering heat, trying to read Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Third-year Psychology. Until in the hazy afternoon the men returned, an almost totemic sight, carrying on their shoulders the bleeding carcasses of the game they’d shot.

  After that I stayed behind again; but leaving the women to their energetic duties, and ignoring Mother’s dire warnings about lions and leopards and the more nameless terrors of Africa, I strode into the veld resolutely carrying a pair of binoculars, a knapsack of provisions and Roberts’s Birds of South Africa to do some bird-watching (though any other pretext would have done as well); and of course I got lost, and soon consumed my sandwiches and dried wors and tepid cooldrink and was beginning to believe I’d die of thirst when I was found, humiliatingly, by a search-party of men, led by Father and our host, well after sunset.

  It is hard to tell whether I was more furious with him for finding me or for having caused me to wander off on my own in the first instance. Perhaps an awareness was already beginning to dawn that a time would come when I wouldn’t take it any more. There was no future for me in this fucked land. Even then it wasn’t easy to take a decision that meant a total uprooting. At university I’d become involved in mildly leftist politics (there were no more radical options available on that campus). At least part of my motivation must have been the knowledge of just how much it would irk Father. He was so smug in his dedication to the great causes of Afrikaner politics (which as far as I could make out in practical terms meant only his own advancement) that it was almost obligatory for me to find ever new ways of mortifying him.

  But it wasn’t all self-interest. Inasmuch as such decisions can ever be pinpointed in time and space I recall a party, towards the end of my second year, at the house of friends in the exemplary suburb of Dalsig – all pseudo-Spanish architecture, landscaped gardens with indigenous shrubs and trees and triumphant middle-class values. Somebody’s birthday, I think. The weather was perfect and we were lounging around the illuminated pool in the afterglow of too much to eat and even more to drink; it must have been near midnight. The conversation, prompted by God knows what, was, as befitted a group of students carried away by a reckless overestimation of their own intellectual faculties, the human condition, nothing less. All of it solidly embedded in European tradition, all Hegel and Heidegger, Sartre and Camus, a dash of Foucault, and of course a thoroughly disinfected and sterilised Marx. In the midst of all this half-baked erudition there was a sudden irruption into our cosily sequestered world as a man, a black man in ragged overalls, came bursting through the privet hedge, scuttling across the lawn, colliding with chairs and upsetting trays and tables, dashing past the edge of the pool, and crashing through the opposite hedge into the neighbours’ garden. Before we had recovered from the shock two more men came tumbling through the privet in his wake, two constables in blue this time, guns in hand. Bang-bang, you’re dead. Quite oblivious of our presence, intent only on their furious pursuit, past the pool, through the shrubs, and off into the next-door garden. It was all over as abruptly as it had begun. The whole thing had been so surreal that it was hard to believe it had ever happened. It was as if a sudden squall had struck the place, leaving havoc in its wake, then disappeared.

  A few of us went over to the neighbours to enquire, but they were blissfully unaware of anything. (We also checked the papers the following day, but there was no mention of anything untoward.) A few intrepid souls tried to resume the conversation, but there was no spark left and soon it petered out and everybody went home. I have no idea of whether any of the others ever gave the incident another thought; none, as far as I can remember, brought it up again. But to me it was another shift, as if the whole submerged other half – four-fifths – of life in South Africa had suddenly, forcibly, broken into the comfortable little enclave in which I’d been brought up. It was as if that other man, the one who’d once come to Father for help, with blood on his head, had been resurrected to come and haunt me. Perhaps my reaction was ineffectual, and sentimental, and certainly embarrassingly ‘white’. But having been brought, for one shocking instant, face to face with that secret dark segment of life in this country on which everything else is predicated, I couldn’t just blithely return to the bliss of my habitual ignorance.

  Had I been religiously inclined I might have been inspired, like most of my fellow students with bad consciences, to join some missionary action of the church. As it was, I had pretty little choice. But I did become active in whatever leftish political activity was permitted on our campus, where even the suggestion of questioning ‘traditional values’ was regarded as a potential act of terrorism, Communist-inspired.

  So it was all very safe, really. But it did provide me with some sense of becoming a part of larger issues, of a movement gathering momentum and running diametrically against what Father had always so passionately described as ‘our people’s struggle for recognition’. And it helped me through the next few years. The most remarkable – and gratifying – discovery was that, however cautious and tentative our position was in real terms, within the context of campus life it was regarded as very dangerous indeed.

  What was particularly frowned upon was my relationship, in my Honours year, with Eric Olivier, who was regarded as something of an oddball at Stellenbosch: artistic, unconventional, with an angry satirical streak that did not go down well among the rugger-bugger crowd which dominated student life. What brought Eric to prominence was his involvement in anti-military campaigns, burning his call-up papers, advancing in the ranks of the End Conscription Campaign. It was amazing to see that shy,
stuttering boy suddenly fired by a conviction I found almost frightening at times. I was fascinated by Eric. But the relationship didn’t last long. One day as he came from an art class he was whisked away in a car; and I never saw him again. We – some of us, at least – staged demos, wrote to the newspapers, plastered the admin buildings with posters demanding that the university step in to have him released from detention, but no go.

  And then it was my turn.

  I was called in by the primaria of my residence, ticked off by the house committee, eventually summoned and officially reprimanded by the rector. My behaviour was termed unacceptable for an Afrikaner, particularly reprehensible in a young woman. I was asked to resign from the SRC and sacked from the editorial board of the student newspaper. People were warned against associating with me. It was great.

  The rest of my student life followed what must be the standard Afrikaans-student-having-seen-the-light pattern: I lost a few friends, I also made new ones, particularly coloured ones, comrades from the United Democratic Front. Among them, Jason. He was a coloured teacher, twelve years older than I, an organiser for the UDF, who’d already been detained twice. Had the circumstances been different I could easily have fallen in love with him, but our relationship was strictly platonic. I knew his work in the UDF was too important to be jeopardised by complications of a different kind.

  There were others who could fulfil my physical needs as and when these obtruded. I rather liked men, and going to bed with them when the mood was right, but I saw no need for involvement except on my own terms. One or two episodes had turned out badly and made me more wary; but I acknowledged the needs and desires of my body and I prided myself on being able to make, by and large, I hope, sensible judgements. If the great consuming passion in which I confess I still secretly believed had not yet come my way, I felt sure it was just a matter of time.