by Andre Brink
More silences than words surround this part of the story. We have to make do with the scant clues we have; they are significant. It would have been understandable if Marga had left after the scene of discovery, as mysteriously as she had arrived. But she didn’t. Not only did she remain with Samuel, but one day the two women set out, with Wilhelmina, on a borrowed wagon: to Cape Town, they explained to whoever enquired. And six or seven months later they returned with the news that they were now married. But much later, after Samuel’s death, Wilhelmina revealed that they’d never been to Cape Town at all: they hadn’t even gone as far as the Knysna forest. It had all been an elaborate hoax to prevent gossip, because everybody in the region still thought of Samuel as a man, the man who whispered. Not that they had many visitors, and the few who did turn up, from time to time, were not received very hospitably; no one was ever invited to stay over. Still, one couldn’t be too careful, hence the laborious planning.
To make their isolation even more secure they moved away from the farm on the Riet River and settled far away, on the other side of the border, among the Xhosa, in a sharp elbow of the Keiskamma River, near the sea. It must have been in the mid-Twenties.
There is so much one would like to know. Why should one not make allowance, in a friendship between two women, for the body in the same way as one would make allowance for death in a relationship between the aged? Only a single image from the child Wilhelmina’s youthful observations has come down to us. Something she saw one night through a chink in the bedroom door. And in the final analysis the image says nothing. Or does it say everything that can possibly be said? Samuel and Marga in bed, the gentle orange glare of the lamp, and Marga stroking the close-cropped head beside her own: stroking it for hours, deep into the night, the way Harm had stroked her hair so many years ago. Then Samuel would close her eyes and drift off into dreams, moving far away from that little hovel on the bank of the Keiskamma washed by the sound of the sea, following in her mind the strands of hair meandering in all directions, ever more distant, beyond all horizons, covering the whole earth in their gentle golden pleasure, rippling with light, hair without end, world without end. And when she woke up again in the dark predawn, the lamp still burning, now low and smoking, she would find Marga’s head beside hers on the pillow and begin to weep; and she would slide from the bed without waking Marga, and wander aimlessly through the house, along the bare blind walls, until the daylight came raging through the windows and she ended up in front of the coffee mill to start grinding, grinding away like someone possessed.
It must have been hard on Wilhelmina. She was fiercely loyal to her mother. She couldn’t stand Marga. How to handle their relationship, in the closed world in which they lived, defies enquiry. But it’s no use speculating; no use pitying her, or anybody else for that matter. All that concerns us is that she withdrew more and more into her own life. By the time she was twenty she was so independent from her mother that she joined an old German trader on his travels to and fro between Cape Town and the most distant reaches of the land of the Xhosa. Soon afterwards she met a pious turd who changed her life. Isn’t it outrageous, the way we are made to depend on men for these decisive moments? But I’m keeping that for later.
Samuel accepted it with resignation. One gives birth, then the child grows up, and leaves the nest. In many ways we too are a species of bird. A rare one at that.
6
SAMUEL HAD DECIDED long ago that she didn’t want to grow old. It was a carefully considered decision, the kind one takes about getting married, or buying a horse, or building a house. She would have liked to go at thirty, but that was the heyday of her hair, and Harm was so passionate about it that for his sake she postponed her death. Soon afterwards came the unplanned child, and when Samuel was forty Wilhelmina was still too young to leave behind. At fifty there was Marga. But fifty-five seemed a suitable age, and this was how she explained it to Marga and Wilhelmina. Neither was disposed to take it seriously; and Wilhelmina’s pious husband tried his best to preach her out of it. No one, he argued, knew in advance the day or the hour, and one shouldn’t try to interfere with God’s will.
All the hectic arguments around her made little impression on Samuel. Marga’s tears and threats and pleading were more difficult to handle. But just as resolute as Samuel had once been about lopping off her hair, she now was about dying at the appointed time. And in a way the two events were related. Cutting off her hair had been a sin with which to expiate another sin. Now it was time to get her hair back. To do so openly was out of the question, given her relationship with Marga. (Can you imagine how Wilhelmina’s husband would have reacted?) There was only one way out: to die. Because she’d heard that after death one’s hair continues to grow unchecked. When Judgement Day came round she should at last be in a fit state again to meet her Maker unembarrassed.
Marga was to lay out the body, to ensure that her secret went into the grave with her. All she needed was a respectable coffin. This was Wilhelmina’s responsibility. Through her trading she had established the necessary contacts. It had to be a special coffin, not one of those yellowwood-and-stinkwood boxes any handyman in the Border region could nail together. It had to come from Cape Town, a place Samuel had never seen in her life but which in her reckoning ranked with the new Jerusalem.
Leendert Pretorius, Wilhelmina’s husband, became more and more insistent in his attempts to dissuade Samuel from her sinful resolve, but she would not be moved. She reminded Leendert that he’d never been officially ordained, which was quite a sore point; and she was not taking orders from a layman. With infinite patience Wilhelmina persuaded her husband, for God’s sake, to undertake the journey to the Cape, and as he thought he could use a new black linen suit he finally consented.
It had been agreed that the coffin could bide its time in Samuel’s voorhuis until it was required. The date elected for her death, Samuel reminded them, was 6 March 1831. They preferred not to start a new argument, but it was plain for all to see that she had many good years left in her yet.
Marga was the only one who continued to rebel. ‘If you go,’ she threatened, ‘then I go too.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re a mere child,’ Samuel reprimanded her.
‘And you’re only fifty-four. You can live another twenty years.’
‘We’ve already been through all that, Marga.’
‘You perhaps, not I.’
‘A person’s death is a private matter,’ Samuel said calmly. ‘I’d prefer you to go on living. You can look after my grave. You’ll have more than enough to do. But if you decide otherwise, it’s your choice. I have as little say in that as you have over my affairs.’
Four months before the due date the coffin was delivered, quite an achievement given the route it had to follow, all the way from the Cape along the South-east coast, then inland from Algoa Bay. The only problem was that Samuel was still in exceptionally good health. In fact, from the day the coffin was deposited in her voorhuis she seemed more energetic and happy than ever before.
‘You’re not going to commit suicide, are you?’ Marga asked, horrified.
‘Of course not, that would be a sin.’
Marga felt slightly more reassured: anyone could see that Samuel still had a great reserve of life left in her, and if she wasn’t planning to kill herself they could look forward to many more years together. The coffin in the voorhuis, polished daily and bedecked with fresh flowers, became a piece of furniture.
On the evening of 5 March Samuel performed her ablutions in the kitchen with an inordinate amount of hot water, trimmed her hair so that it would grow out evenly, opened the coffin, slid inside and made herself comfortable, and then called Marga to secure the lid with the brass bolts that came with it.
Marga refused, of course. She wouldn’t be a party to suffocation. But when Samuel pointed out that the small hatch above her face could fold open, the young woman reluctantly obeyed: it was the only way to keep the peace. She was convinced that af
ter spending a night in those cramped conditions, surely Samuel would see the folly of it all, and the whole outrageous business would come to a tidy end.
Samuel folded her hands on her chest and said, ‘Good-bye, Marga.’
Marga bent over and kissed her. ‘Good night, Samuel.’ She was in tears, but fought them back.
It was a bright, still night. The stars in the sky were shining like fireflies.
Shortly before midnight, with unbelievable suddenness, a storm came up. The kind of storm one experiences perhaps once in a lifetime. The rains came down as if the heavens had been rent. The rumbling of the thunder caused the walls to shudder. Lightning hit the house. Everything went up in flames. Then the river behind the house broke its banks. In the flood the coffin was swept away. The whole lie of the land was changed so drastically that it was almost impossible to discover the site of the house again.
How Wilhelmina and her husband came to hear the news, no one knew. Perhaps some of Samuel’s black neighbours went to their farm, which was a long way from the Keiskamma. Two days later they arrived. Their first child had been born by then, and a second was under way. They began to scour the surroundings, but it was a full week before the coffin was found where the waves had washed it up, surprisingly unscathed, high and dry on the beach. Of Samuel there was no sign. Not then; not afterwards.
Marga’s body was found in the driftwood along the far bank of the river.
7
‘AND THEN CAME an elephant,’ says Ouma, ‘and blew the story away.’
Her eyes are closed; the effort has sapped her strength. I revive her with oxygen. She recovers surprisingly soon.
‘Is it really this coffin you were talking about?’ I ask her.
‘Yes, of course. You can still see the marks of the flood, can’t you?’
‘And you think Samuel’s daughter Wilhelmina carted it along the length and breadth of the country in the Great Trek?’
‘What does it matter what I think? The coffin is here, isn’t it?’
‘I’d like to know more about this Wilhelmina. She seems to be a crucial person.’
‘They’re all crucial.’ Her eyes flutter shut. ‘We’ll talk about her when the time is right.’
‘But how did the coffin ever get here?’
‘Wilhelmina’s daughter Petronella, of course.’
‘But you said her ark was shipwrecked. Then how was the coffin salvaged?’
She shrugs. Her single useful hand lies on the sheet like some poor discarded object on a beach. ‘O ye of little faith.’
‘It takes a lot of believing,’ I remark cautiously.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That’s what it is all about.’
There is a purring, gently coughing sound from the coffin where the owls are roosting. In the half-dark of the room – the curtains are drawn – their eyes glow like phosphor. But their presence is reassuring rather than ominous.
Ouma Kristina looks at me again.
‘Do you understand why I’m telling you all this?’ she asks. Her eyes, too, seem to have acquired a kind of phosphorescence.
Wily old desert woman!
‘If I say yes, you won’t tell me; if I say no, you’ll tell me to figure it out, right?’
Her head moves; it may have been a nod. She looks content. Without any transition she is asleep.
8
BEHIND THE PICTURE of the Broad and Narrow Ways, exactly as she said, in the top right-hand corner of the heavy frame, there is a narrow lid sliding in two almost invisible grooves and in the cavity behind it, a tight fit indeed, is a small weirdly shaped key. It slides easily into the serrated slit of the lock, and I cannot suppress the light thrill that runs down my spine. It is like entering a story, something by Grimm, Bluebeard’s Castle. The door creaks, as it should, on its hinges. It is dark inside, there is no bulb in the bare light-fitting suspended from the stained ceiling, so I go over to the window to open the shutters. But it is obvious that they haven’t been touched in years and they will not budge. All I can make out beyond any doubt are the piles of bulky objects I once spied as a child; for all I know they haven’t been touched since then. No furniture; nothing. Only those shapes, covered, like the floor, in inches of dust and drab festoons of cobwebs.
I have no choice but to lock up and go downstairs, skulking like a guilty child, to collect a paraffin lamp from the pantry. Armed with this, at last, I am ready for the Lord Carnarvon act. Scraping the mounds of dust from the objects I bring to light a collection of carrier bags, mostly brown paper, stacked in rows upon rows, hefty as washerwomen. They turn out not to be heavy at all, only bulky; and my first thought as I plunge a hand into the nearest is that they’re filled with nothing but crumpled newsprint. But each ball of paper contains something, a wad, a pad, something very old and dry and stained with what at first sight appears to be dark paint but then turns out to be, so help me God, browned and blackened blood. For they are all sanitary rags and towels, used, and gathered, and stowed. What on earth for? Ouma won’t ever tell. A silent witness to – what? Her life, she said. Her femininity? Her rejection or affirmation of it? God knows; and he is unlikely to tell. Bags and bags and bags of them, years and years of bleeding, of ‘the curse’, of moving with the cycles of time, once every twenty-eight or so days, thirteen times a year, how many years? Should I cry, or laugh, or shrug it off? No, it is not to be shrugged off. It is – nothing. It is a life.
This, I think, is worse – both more eloquent and more dauntingly mute – than that embroidered name and date on a piece of cloth left by a great-great-aunt from the Boer War. In its silence it becomes the testimony, not of the century marked by one woman’s life, but of all women, all of us, since Eve first got the blame for seducing Adam. This is myth still; yet different. All those ancient myths of the frontier woman in the frontier country; all of them conceived and perpetuated by men. So what was there left for Ouma Kristina except to spit the pips of her forbidden fruit into the faces of the myth-makers?
How curious she should have chosen today to ask me, what with my own period starting. Or has she guessed? Nothing has ever escaped her.
I wish I could tell Anna about this. But I don’t think she would understand. And Ouma asked me to destroy it, privately.
Why now? Why after all these years? There can be no embarrassment attached to it, not for Ouma, and not now. Something else to figure out. And I will; I promise myself I shall. Right now there is something to be done, a pledge to fulfil.
It is Sunday now – the hour of the idiots? – and there is no one abroad; I can start now. But I shall have to bide my time; I cannot risk Trui or the nurse or whoever else finding out. This is between Ouma Kristina and me.
9
I HAD TO borrow tampons from Anna when I went there for lunch. I’d driven in to town first – having scored a victory over Jeremiah, who finally, mellowed presumably by a Sunday mood, granted me the freedom of the hearse – but of course there was no chemist open. These pious folk, I presume, don’t bleed on Sunday; all natural processes are interrupted in the name of that stern threesome, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. At the Greek café where in my childhood we used to buy ostrich biltong (they still stock it, I discovered with satisfaction) I stopped to buy sweets for Anna’s children, a reckless assortment of Smarties, Chocolate Logs and Peppermint Crisps for each – three, four, five, I counted in my mind, plus one extra in case I’d miscalculated – and a huge Easter egg to share: this was courting disaster, I knew, but it was on special offer (and probably whitened with heat or crumbled with weevils), it being a full three weeks after the event, and what the hell. I was in a mood for atonement and peace offerings. And even if it didn’t sit all that well with the solemnity of the hearse – which I drove, for the sheer incongruity of it, at a hundred and forty kilometres per hour on that open stretch of road to the farm, singing Beethoven’s Fifth at the top of my voice and glancing in glee at the oncoming cars that nearly wrecked themselves in clouds of dust at the awesome sight – I hop
ed they would accept it in the spirit of generosity that had inspired it. Which wasn’t exactly what happened, as the children appeared highly suspicious of a non-Greek woman bearing gifts; and Casper complicated matters by issuing dire instructions that not a bite or a lick could be assayed before lunch.
The fare, carried in by a safari of servants in pink overalls and white kopdoeke, was as extravagant as anything I remembered from family Sunday dinners in the past: chicken, roast leg of lamb dripping with fat, potatoes, yellow rice with raisins, sweet potatoes in honey and cinnamon, pumpkin fritters, peas, a sweet-and-sour tomato salad, beetroot; rounded off with a baked vinegar pudding with custard and ice cream. The meal was preceded and closed with prayer, and I was aware of indeed needing some divine assistance to cope. There was little sign of enjoyment. For one thing, everybody appeared force-fed into their tightest-fitting Sunday best; I found my heart going out to the two girls, twelvish and eightish, in whom I recognised my earlier self, eyes squinting with the tightness of their plaits, narrow chests moulded in suffocatingly taut bodices. It was painfully obvious from the hunched shoulders of the elder one that she was desperately trying to minimise, to no avail, the visibility of what seemed like two small protruding crab’s eyes; and a minor catastrophe erupted when Casper instructed her halfway through the meal to sit up straight, which resulted in an outburst of tears, a chair overturned, and a gawky rush to a bedroom. I promised myself that at the earliest opportunity I would take her to Shapiro’s fashion emporium to do unto her what Ouma had once done to me.
