by Andre Brink
I point at the inside. ‘We’ll have to rip all this out and make a new lining.’
Ouma Kristina shakes her head. ‘The stains are all right, I don’t mind. Just dust it properly, I don’t want to start sneezing when I get to the Throne: I might miss some of the more interesting remarks.’
The nurse shakes her magazine in disapproval, flipping over a page so energetically that it tears. Briefly, as if it’s all my fault, she glares at me over her shoulder.
‘The main thing is that it is comfortable,’ says Ouma. ‘It’s a long sleep.’
I move my hand over the stuffed bottom of the coffin. ‘It’s soft enough. A bit lumpy.’
‘Try it,’ she says quietly. There is no mistaking what she means.
The nurse raises her head.
‘I don’t think I can,’ I protest weakly.
‘Of course you can. You kids did it all the time when you were small.’
‘That was different. Those were games.’
A click of her tongue; I can’t make out whether it is meant to convey annoyance or commiseration. ‘Come on, get in,’ she says.
I kick off my shoes, take a deep breath, then stretch myself out in the coffin, the way we used to do, taking turns, in those summer holidays when death was still remote, unreal, the underbelly of our games and stories. It was the best of hiding places. We had nocturnal contests to see who could last longest with the lid closed. Once some of the older cousins forgot about me; I was already limp when I was retrieved the following day. That should have cured me, but it didn’t. This, though, is different; a game that is suddenly no longer a game.
‘Well?’ asks Ouma.
‘Not too bad. But it’s a tight fit.’
‘I don’t need much space.’
This is how the doctor finds us. I become aware of him when he is already standing in the door, staring down at me in utter disgust. He is not, I have already discovered, the most humorous of men.
The nurse has risen, ready to deny guilt and apportion blame.
‘Miss Müller!’ A voice from my youth; all those voices: Father, teachers, the rector, men. ‘What in the name of God are you doing there?’
‘She’s just trying it out for me,’ says Ouma Kristina from the bed, her tone that of a cajoling girl, grotesquely unsuited to her wasted appearance. Even so, fleetingly, I realise how irresistible she must have been in her bloom.
Red-faced, and not very elegantly, but defiant, I disengage myself from the coffin.
He looks at me as if I’m a new and particularly virulent disease, then obviously decides to ignore me altogether as he advances towards the bed, stethoscope and briefcase in hand. ‘And how are we this morning?’
‘Preparing to meet our Maker,’ says Ouma Kristina. ‘But some of us still need more time from you.’
‘Mrs Basson, really.’ He looks at the nurse. ‘Has she had a good night?’
She seems offended by his mistake. ‘I’m a day nurse, doctor.’
‘I gave her oxygen twice,’ I say. ‘She’s comfortable. But I think the pain is still bad.’
He ignores me and bends over Ouma.
‘I’d like to see the week out if I may,’ says Ouma
‘You really ought to go back to hospital, Mrs Basson.’
‘You just do your best to see me through a few more days, doctor.’
He makes a sound of exasperation and motions to the nurse to give a hand. The bandaging has to be changed, which involves a painful sponging with Dettol, her blood pressure must be taken, her frightfully scorched body – a little flour-bag half-filled with brittle bones – swathed in new Betadine bandages. I approach to offer two more hands, but he studiously avoids me; in fact, he makes it clear that I am in the way. Annoyed, but not entirely without a sense of relief, I wait at the window, my back to them. I prefer not to see too much; what little dignity she has left deserves to be kept intact. But her small gasps and suppressed moans ache in my ears.
He gives her a morphine injection. Only when he picks up his bag again and prepares to leave does he address me again.
‘Will you please see to it that this thing is removed as soon as possible?’
‘This thing will stay exactly where it is,’ says Ouma. ‘It was brought here on my instructions. Kristien tried it out because I asked her to. And I want it there so I can look at it.’
‘Mrs Basson, there will be a time for this.’
‘No better time than right now, doctor. I’m not having old Piet Malan mucking around with my corpse.’
‘He retired years ago, Mrs Basson,’ he remonstrates in the long-suffering tone one uses only with the very young and the very old. ‘His son has taken over the business. At any rate I fail to understand –’
‘But he’s still there,’ she says calmly, ‘waiting for me to go so he can bury me.’
‘What earthly difference could that make to him?’
‘More than you think, doctor. He does things to women’s bodies.’
‘Mrs Basson!’ he exclaims, scandalised. ‘Mr Malan is a highly respected member of the community.’
‘Of course. That’s why no one suspects him. But I won’t have him near me when I die, so I’m taking precautions.’
‘There are all kinds of arrangements we can make when the time comes.’
‘I’ll make my own arrangements while I still can.’ She looks straight at him. ‘And tomorrow, if I’m stronger, you can help Kristien to put me in the box. I want to get used to the feel of it.’
Poor man, he is now in the invidious position of having to appeal to me as an ally.
‘Miss Müller, do you think you could persuade her to –’ He represses an expression of resentment as he takes me by the arm to continue the conversation outside. As we move towards the staircase he says, ‘I may be mistaken, but I get the impression that you’re aiding and abetting her in this outrageous business.’
‘If it makes her happy, doctor, surely the best thing we can do is to play along.’
‘But it’s preposterous!’
‘What if it is? She’s dying. She needs every bit of indulgence we can offer her.’
‘Well!’ His mouth is set in a pout, like a prune.
‘There is something else,’ I say at the bottom of the stairs.
He looks warily at me.
‘I have another patient for you. If you’ll be so kind.’
2
IN THE EARLY afternoon, after I’ve returned from the Sunday meal with Anna’s family, I find Ouma awake and waiting for me.
The nurse, at the other side of the bed, makes a face. ‘She doesn’t want another injection, Miss. She says she wants to talk to you. I told her –’
‘That’s all right then. If you want to take a nap …’
I wouldn’t have minded one myself. But Ouma is fidgety and anxious to talk. It’s the coffin that has brought it on, I think. There are things she wants to clear up, she tells me.
‘You’ve already cleared up so much,’ I try to calm her down.
‘I haven’t even begun yet.’ A weak but irritable gesture of her hand. ‘So many things still to tell you, Kristien.’
‘I’m ready for anything,’ I say quietly.
‘We never went to Baghdad, you know,’ she says unexpectedly. ‘I mean Jethro and I, when we ran away.’
‘Really?’ I pretend to be surprised. ‘I thought every word was true.’
‘We never got beyond Cape Town,’ she says, as if she hasn’t heard me. ‘Stayed with old Moishe’s relatives to start with, in Sea Point. But it was cramped, and they kept on nagging us about not being married. So we moved on. A small flat in Woodstock. Then a room in someone’s backyard in Gardens. In the beginning it didn’t matter, we were so in love. But soon it just wasn’t fun any more. Our money ran out. Jethro found work in a bar for a while, I did some typing. But we weren’t cut out for it. I could still take it if I had to, but he began to sulk. This was no life for an artist, he said. We started bickering and bitching. He w
as going out more and more, on his own, never telling me where he went, or when he’d be back. I began to suspect something. I could smell it on him when he came back. Then I discovered I was pregnant. He was out again, but I waited up to tell him. It was two or three o’clock before he came in. When I kissed him the smell was there again. I asked him what he’d been eating. He said crayfish. Where’d you find crayfish? I asked. And even while I was asking it I knew. And that was the end. The next day while he was out I took the last bit of money I’d saved from my job and walked all the way to the station and caught a train home.’
‘And the little painting you brought back?’
‘Bought it at the flea market on the Parade. I was never a painter.’
I bend over and press my lips against her burning forehead. I don’t want her to discover that I’m crying. But I’ve never been able to hide anything from her; and from the way she gently pats my cheek I know she knows.
‘For heaven’s sake, sit down,’ she says brusquely. ‘I have no wish to be drowned at my age. And there is business to attend to.’
‘Tell me,’ I say, recovering my composure as best I can.
‘This place,’ she says. ‘It’s been built around so many wrongs. You must help me sort it out.’
‘How, Ouma?’
‘My testament.’
‘But I thought that was all done long ago?’
‘I want to make sure. I don’t want Casper to take over the farm.’
‘What about Anna?’
‘Anna is well looked after.’
‘Who then?’
‘You, of course.’
‘I can’t inherit this place, Ouma.’
‘I want you to.’
‘That’s not enough reason.’
‘For me it is. You’ve come back and you must have it.’
‘I only came back because –’ Now, of course, I cannot say it. I rearrange my thoughts. ‘My life is in England, Ouma. I’m going back soon.’
‘That’s what you think.’
‘Ouma, please. I won’t be persuaded. It’s useless even to try.’
‘One doesn’t contradict the dead and the dying, Kristien.’
‘I won’t be blackmailed either, Ouma.’ Impetuously I rush past all hovering angels. ‘Besides, there are others who deserve this much more than I do.’
‘Like who?’
‘Like Trui.’ It is the first thought that comes into my head; but it makes sense. ‘She’s family, after all.’
She looks at me, her eyes inscrutable.
‘That is, if what you told was the truth.’
In her infuriating but characteristic way she simply drops the subject. ‘And you must see to it that the undertaker, old Piet Malan, the turd, doesn’t come near me.’
‘Why are you so set against him?’
‘That man –!’ For a moment I am worried that she is getting too upset; then she relaxes and gives a dry chuckle. ‘You know, sixty years ago that little man was all over me. Wanted to get into my pants.’
‘But Ouma–!’
‘Mind you, he was quite good-looking then. Half my age, of course. But at forty I was in my prime, even if I say so myself. Now if he’d just come to me to try his luck like an honourable man I might have let him.’ A pause. ‘But you know what? He tried to blackmail me into sleeping with him.’
‘But why –? How –?’
‘He’d found out – about my children. Their fathers. You know? One of them had told him. The bastard. You just can’t trust men, can you? So young Piet Malan thought he could try his luck too. I kicked him out of here, tail between his legs. And you know what he said then? “Kristina, I’m going to possess that body of yours even if I have to wait a hundred years.” I swear he became an undertaker just for that. And he has a dirty habit of visiting all his prospective customers on New Year’s Eve, every year, regular as clockwork. Some people find it reassuring. Looked after, someone caring about them, you know. But I’ve never allowed him to set foot in here. Even so, for the last twenty years he’s been turning up at the front door every year, thirty-first of December, you could count on it. Just looking at me – a kind of measuring look, as if to say, “Five foot four” – and then leaving again. So how can I trust myself to those clammy hands of his?’
‘But Ouma, he must be almost ninety himself.’ I dare not let her discover how appalled I am.
‘So what? He can wait. And he will, I swear. That’s why I want you to promise me he won’t be allowed to set foot on this farm.’
‘You can count on that,’ I say grimly. ‘But what I’d like to know –’
‘That’s all right then,’ she interrupts. ‘But there are other things too.’
‘What kind of things, Ouma?’
‘Things I don’t want people to find here when I’m dead. I want you to destroy them.’
‘Where are they? What are they?’
‘Will you promise?’
‘I have to know first.’
‘Then I won’t tell you.’ Like an ancient wizened naughty child she stares at me.
I sigh. ‘All right.’
‘Put your hand between your legs and swear.’
‘Ouma!’
‘That’s all we have to swear by, child.’
Feeling my face flush, more in anger than embarrassment, I do as she tells me.
‘It’s on the floor above. There’s a room off the small passage that leads to the red bedroom where your parents used to sleep. The green door. There’s a picture of the Broad and Narrow Ways beside it.’
‘The one with God’s eye on it? The door that was always locked?’
‘So you know it.’
‘I can’t tell you how many hours I used to spend as a child, every single holiday, trying to get in. No key would fit it.’ Once I even tried to reach it from the outside, lowering myself from the attic with two sheets tied together; but the shutters wouldn’t budge. On one occasion I took a stepladder upstairs, and a torch, to peep through the fanlight above the door in the passage, but all I could make out was stacks and stacks of indefinable bulky objects, obscured by dust. And when I carried the ladder downstairs again I bumped against a huge Chinese vase in a niche off the landing, and the thrashing I got from Father was enough to dampen even my spirits.
‘The key is behind the picture, the upper right-hand corner. There’s a small sliding lid in the frame.’
‘But what’s in the room?’
‘My life,’ she says, not melodramatically at all, but quite casually, as one might say, ‘A bunch of feathers.’
‘Shall I go now?’ I propose eagerly.
‘No, later. I don’t want to know about it when you go. Besides, there’s a story I want to tell you.’ Her eyes turn towards the coffin where a number of owls have roosted while I was away. They stare at us in silent complicity.
‘Who is it this time?’
‘The woman Samuel,’ she says.
3
THE WOMAN SAMUEL. Strange family she married into. She was the mother of the one known as the Fat Woman of the Transvaal. Samuel was one of eighteen children, all of whom survived. Don’t pull such a face, it was true. And nothing exceptional either. What made it unusual was that all eighteen children, eleven sons and seven daughters, had the same name. Samuel. And so Samuel was also called Samuel.
You may well wonder why. The reason was pretty obvious. It was the father’s idea, of course. The family’s surname in those days was Grobler. The father was called Bart, the first in God knows how many generations of Groblers who wasn’t called Samuel. It was a disgrace to the clan, because the family name had to be Samuel Grobler, and it was to be transmitted from father to son forever, apparently in terms of a covenant made with God after the first Samuel Grobler had singlehandedly cornered a tribe of San people in a cave and wiped them all out after they had killed one of his children. His idea of an eye for an eye. That child of his must have had a hell of a lot of eyes, but that is neither here nor there. Anyway, this Samu
el took an oath on the Bible that until the end of time the victory of Good over Evil – which must have been how he saw it, being only a man – would be commemorated by a Samuel in the family. But when it came to the third or fourth generation the eldest son, christened Samuel, was killed by a puffadder at the age of three.
The damage was not irreparable, for the godfearing parents duly christened their next son Samuel too in order to keep the covenant. But Samuel the Second died of croup before his first birthday. Then followed three daughters; and the father was secretly beginning to suspect God of being deliberately contrary, when at last another son was born, Samuel the Third. Blessed of the Lord, this one grew up a strong and healthy boy.
The family increased with many other sons and daughters, each with a name from the Bible, as was only good and proper, but by the time Samuel the Third was sixteen and started thinking of taking a wife, he was slaughtered in the veld by a Philistine. Heaven knows what really happened, but family tradition has it that the attacker was a Philistine, and tradition has a way of prevailing. By that time father Samuel’s wife was past her fertile years and there was no opportunity of replacing the dear departed. God refused to hearken unto their prayers as he’d done once before, in the Old Testament, with Abraham’s wife Sarah. Father Samuel diligently did whatever he could, taking concubines whom he successively christened Billah and Silpah and Orpa and Hagar and what have you before going in unto them, but no new little Samuel saw the light of day. History has it that as he grew more desperate he started taking whatever came to hand, even goats and sheep and wild melons, truly a man of the faith; but none of their offspring could be christened Samuel. And at the time of his death the oldest surviving son, who was our Bart, had to take over in shame and disgrace.
His wife was Lottie, the Shadow Woman. We’ll come to her later. She was perennially pregnant, because if there was one thought that possessed Bart it was to restore the covenant his ancestors had made with the Lord and to produce another Samuel to resume the line. The sort of thing a man regards as important. So every single one of those children was christened Samuel the moment it entered this stern world of blood and tears. Just to make sure. And not one of them died. Once there were four of them in a single go. There was a very experienced old midwife on duty that night, these things always happen at night, it must be part of God’s design to make life difficult for a woman, to avenge the eating of that original apple that turned out to be a fig; so where was I? The midwife. She caught the first one while Bart was holding the lantern; and she was still in the process of washing it when the second made its appearance. Before she had finished with this one, Bart – still holding the lantern aloft – saw the third baby coming. And true’s God, just as the midwife was slapping the first scream from number three’s lungs, Bart called out, ‘Oh my God, Tant Sysie, hurry up, there’s another one.’ As the old woman made a dash for it, just in time, she snarled at Bart, ‘Take away that bloody lantern, I think they’re drawn by the light.’
