by Andre Brink
‘What about your family?’ I prod him. ‘Don’t you want me to send them a message?’
‘My wife is dead.’ For a moment he closes up. ‘It’ll be two years this coming June. And my children don’t live on the farm no more.’
‘How many of them are there?’
‘Two sons and a daughter. She’s a good girl, but she’s married now. The sons –’ He shakes his head. ‘From the time their mother died they became unruly. They gone now, one to Cape Town. The other one …’ He half turns away, then braces himself to face me. ‘He’s in jail in Joh’burg, Miss. So things have gone bad for me.’
As this is the first time he’s ever talked about himself I am eager to press him. ‘What do you do on Abel Joubert’s farm?’
‘I’m his foreman, Miss. So it’s ostriches, mainly. And then there’s a part of the farm under irrigation, so there’s vineyards. He makes a good wine. But for me, I’m more a man for the birds.’
‘And for how long have you been with him?’
‘How can Miss now ask a thing like this? I been there all my life mos. I was born there. Just like my father, he would have been eighty-nine this year if he lived. And my mother was also born there. It’s since my grandpa’s time we live on that farm together with the Jouberts, all the way. My grandpa was a fisherman first, down at Velddrif. But then things got bad, so he came upcountry. Yes, Miss. And Mr Joubert’s grandfather gave him a job. Christmas-times I used to go to Velddrif, there’s still family there. The Bonthuyses come a long way back there on the coast. But now that I’m on my own I stay maar at home. At night I look at the stars and think of my grandpa.’
‘Did he know them well?’
‘They were like his friends, Miss. They were tame to him. When I was small he always spoke to me about them, how they showed him the way on the sea when he was out there fishing. He told me all their names and where to find them. The Southern Cross. The Big Hunter with his bow. The Seven Sisters. The Plough. The Morning Star. And all the stories he told me about them and about the old days. Those were good times, Miss.’ Again the shy gap-toothed smile. ‘After I read Langenhoven’s Loeloeraai and the other things he wrote about the stars, a whole book full, I began to understand a little better. Everything falling, falling all the time. It’s a hell of a mystery, Miss. Later, when I was grown up, I often spoke to Abel Joubert about it. He told me all kinds of new stories, about White Dwarfs and Black Holes and suchlike things. They weren’t around in my grandpa’s time. Does Miss understand anything about that?’
‘Not much,’ I confess. ‘As far as I can make out the Black Holes are very old stars that get heavier and heavier all the time, and smaller and smaller too, so in the end they kind of collapse into themselves. Now you can’t see them any more.’
‘That’s what I find hard to understand, Miss. If you can’t see them, then how do you know they’re there?’
‘I read in one book that it’s like a man in black clothes who dances in the dark with a girl in a white dress. You see only the girl, but from the way she dances you know the man must be there.’
He chuckles. ‘And Abel Joubert tells me this Black Hole swallows everything that gets close. So there’s a limit somewhere, and if you go past it, it’s tickets. Is that right?’
‘Yes, I believe so. There’s this rim of the Black Hole, I think it’s called the event horizon. Once you’re through that nothing ever gets out again, not even light.’ I stop, somewhat shamefaced. ‘I’m afraid I’m giving you a very garbled version, Mr Bonthuys. I’ll try to find a book and read up about it again.’
‘Then you can explain it to me too,’ he says. There is a gleam in his eyes. ‘In the meantime I’ll watch out not to get too close to those holes. And Miss must also maar be careful about dancing with a black man.’
Below the playful surface lurks an old-fashioned soothsayer. Is there in him, as in Trui, a hint of racism? It makes me uncomfortable. At the same time I’m intrigued by this man with his many contradictions. There’s so much I’d still like to ask him, but he may find me nosey. ‘I must be going now,’ I announce.
‘Miss is very good to me.’ He inclines his head in a stiff little bow.
‘Your grandfather would have been proud of you,’ I say, hoping he doesn’t find it patronising. ‘And it does me good to talk to you.’
How strange, I think as I slowly go up the stone stairs again, back to the light: in the beginning, the first night I discovered him here, I felt that the possibility of his death implicated me. Now it is his life.
3
WE’RE IN THE bakkie, Anna and I, on our way to town. The two little girls are in the back, their hair caught in the wind. We’ve left the boys behind. Casper is already in town, with his men, to meet the ANC. I feel miffed that he’s been given precedence; but in terms of the political situation in the district I know it makes sense. Anna is looking very smart, a dress that makes her look much slimmer, elegant; her makeup is immaculate. But she’s wearing dark glasses. As we left her house I started asking about it, but she made a hurried gesture with her head towards the girls. I caught on instantly. And even before she briefly took off the glasses as we got in, I knew what she was going to show me; and felt nauseous.
Blindly, in obtuse anger, I asked, ‘But how could you let him do it?’
A quick movement of her mouth; more a nervous tic than a smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered. ‘But how – why –?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary,’ she said in a dry, bitter voice. ‘Just another argument – about his extracurricular interests.’ Then the unexpected twist. ‘As it happened, you also got drawn into it.’
‘Me!’ For a moment I’m overcome by the memory of last night; irrational feelings of guilt. But I make an effort to control it.
‘Out of the blue,’ says Anna. ‘To change the subject, I suppose. Launched into a vicious attack. Telling me you can’t keep your hands off him. That you actually – even years ago – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told you, it makes me sick.’
‘You can’t let this go on, Anna.’
‘There’s the children. I can’t leave them behind. And he won’t let go of the boys. In a way they’re even more vulnerable than Lenie and Nannie. I don’t want them to be like him when they grow up.’
‘You must see a lawyer.’
She shakes her head.
I glance over my shoulder to catch a glimpse of the two girls, holding on for dear life, laughing, one blonde, one dark-haired. My stomach contracts.
‘What can I do?’ I ask, desperate.
‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Except – perhaps you shouldn’t come to the farm again, not when he’s there.’
‘I’d like to confront him.’
‘He’ll just take it out on me. And the children.’
I raise my hands from my lap; let them fall back, helpless. ‘Fuck!’ I mutter under my breath.
Suddenly, the day has broken loose from my grasp and is careening dangerously. I’m no longer sure we should be going in to town at all, not like this.
Does she sense my distress? For she asks, suddenly, ‘Should we rather go back home?’
An atavistic sense of responsibility takes over. I hear myself saying, ‘No. Actually, I have a date in town with Lenie.’
‘What’s that about?’ There is a quizzical frown above her dark glasses.
‘She doesn’t know about it yet. You and Nannie can go shopping on your own for a while. Leave Lenie to me, just for half an hour.’
‘If you wish.’ Her tone is flat, listless, incurious.
I was helping Trui sort the laundry when the nurse came to call me to the telephone; I’d been waiting for it all morning, yet when it came it was inopportune. I needed the feeling of freedom offered me by the fragrance of that little room, the clean whiteness of the starched sheets, the warmth from the iron, the small hiss it made when Trui tested it with a middle finger; a reassurance more comforting than I could have expected; a recovery of a space in my
self I’d thought I’d lost. And bolstered by this new contentment I was eager to talk. We were feeling our way back to where we’d been the previous time.
‘Does Jeremiah know?’ I asked her as we stood back to fold a newly ironed sheet between us. ‘About what we discussed on Saturday?’
‘I told him years ago when we got married,’ she said calmly. ‘I couldn’t go into it without telling him. He said nothing. We never spoke about it again.’ Suddenly raising her voice. ‘Jeremiah is a good man.’
‘I know. You deserve each other.’ I made the jump. ‘But you both deserve better than the life you’ve had.’
‘We’re old. It’s too late to change anything now.’
‘Jonnie is young.’
‘Life is never easy, Kristien.’ She had taken a risk in saying my name; I let her know that I’d noticed; she acknowledged it. ‘For nobody. So Jonnie too must learn.’
‘But if we can make things easier for him?’
‘You tell me how.’ She pressed the small folded rectangle of the sheet against her sagging breast. ‘Don’t tell me it’s because there will be a new government in Pretoria, or Cape Town, or wherever. Our life is in this place. Jonnie is here. We are all here.’
‘I want to arrange something with Ouma.’
‘You want to take my life in your hands,’ she said quietly. ‘Do I have no say in it?’
That was when the nurse interrupted us; and a minute later there was Abel Joubert’s voice in my ear, saying, ‘How are you today?’
‘Have they come? Are they with you?’ I was aware of the nurse listening behind her magazine.
‘I’m phoning from Sam’s office. Yes, they’re here. Would you like to join us for an early lunch – about twelve?’
‘Of course. Who –’ I checked myself. ‘How many of them came down?’
‘Five.’
No names. It wasn’t necessary, really; but it would have been good to hear him name them. I wouldn’t push him; or my luck. My hand was moist when I put the receiver down. I needed a cup of tea. In the kitchen I put on the kettle; Trui came through from the laundry, which was in a way regrettable, because the kitchen was less conducive to intimacy. In fact, as I was pouring our tea Jonnie came in from outside, so we couldn’t resume our conversation.
‘Morning,’ he mumbled, stopping in the doorway.
‘Hi, Jonnie. Would you like some tea?’
‘No. I came to see Ma.’ The hostility was no longer overt, as on the first day; but there was no mistaking the distance he was keeping between us.
‘All yours,’ I said, taking my cup to go, then stopping to add, ‘By the way, I’ll be meeting the ANC people today. I’ll see if I can set up something for you.’
There was more than enough to do, not only in the house but outside too; at some stage I should try to find out what was happening in the lucerne lands, in the ostrich camps – not to breathe down Jeremiah’s neck but to show solidarity. I’d hardly spoken to the other labourers. But not today. I felt cornered there. It was only nine o’clock, but there was an itch, a restlessness in me that was aggravated by the space and silence of the farm. On an impulse I telephoned Anna; I was too preoccupied with my own thoughts to catch, before it was too late, the hesitation in her voice before she said, ‘Okay, but give me half an hour, I’m not dressed yet.’ She must have exaggerated, or otherwise she was incredibly efficient, because there was not a hair out of place when she arrived from the neighbouring farm. Only those telltale dark glasses. And now we’re in town, turning into the main street with its scraggly end-of-season trees, old stone buildings, haphazardly modernised façades.
‘Would you like to come with me?’ I ask Lenie when the two girls come jumping down from the back.
She looks at me suspiciously. ‘What for?’ Her hair is tousled. In her shorts and T-shirt she has a tomboy look, but it is belied by the incipient femininity of her movements. Instinctively – has she caught my look? – she hunches her shoulders and half-turns away.
‘We’re going to do some shopping, you and I. We’ll meet Nannie and your mother in an hour, in the café over there. Right, Anna?’
Ignoring Anna’s quizzical dark-eyed stare I reach out for Lenie’s hand. It brushes mine, then pulls away. But she falls in next to me and we go round the corner towards Shapiro’s.
‘Where are we going?’ she asks.
‘How old are you, Lenie?’
‘I’ll be thirteen in November.’
‘When I was your age, almost exactly your age, Ouma Kristina brought me here to buy me my first bra. No one else believed I needed it, but she understood.’
Lenie blushes scarlet. But I can see her eyes shining. Quite a pretty child, I discover.
‘Would you like one?’
She nods eagerly, then mumbles in embarrassment, ‘But Mummy says it’s stupid.’
‘That’s what my mother thought too, at the time. But Ouma Kristina always knew what one needed, and when.’
In the dusky shop we are surrounded by eager, ancient little women. I explain our needs. Very seriously, they nod and hop about like bobtails on a lawn, and within minutes we have a whole pile of garments to choose from, most of them ludicrously oversized for Lenie’s modest requirements. But I sweep the whole pile from the counter and accompany her to one of the floral-curtained cubicles at the back.
‘I’ll wait for you,’ I say prudently as I let her go in and draw the curtain between us. She darts me a grateful look, showing for the first time the hint of a smile. I can hear the rustling of her disrobing below the bare globe overhead. At last her flushed face peeps round the curtain.
‘I need your help, please. If you don’t mind.’
The biggest of the bras is draped round her rib cage in two limp crumpled pockets suspended from her fragile pointed shoulders, sitting on her chest like blinkers on a horse. I keep a straight face, make her turn round, adjust as far as possible the straps over the small bony wings of her shoulder blades. Then I leave her for a moment to fetch a hand mirror and we both study, very gravely, the reflection of her torso.
‘I think,’ she says after a while, ‘this one is not quite so comfortable.’
‘You may be right. Let’s try the next one.’
She takes off the first and I hand her the second; our hands touch in the exchange; she smiles, with an unselfconscious frankness that stabs me as acutely as a knife. It is a remarkable moment: not because it repeats so precisely what happened years before, but because so much experience is caught in it. It is not that I am looking at myself through Ouma’s eyes; it is not that this blithe, busy child – each movement she executes a statement of awkward grace – has taken a place once occupied by me. It is not even a question of discovering behind the two of us the long line of others (a girl delivered, at this age, into the hands of a wild rapist farmer; a child-woman with impossibly long hair playing with a rag doll; an infant on a beach watching from among her sandcastles a ship in full sail go by; an adolescent playing games with a gardener and invoking through her thoughtless involvement an avalanche of horrors, rape, incarceration in a dark cellar, death; a young woman dancing among the shrubs and trees like some moonstruck bird of night – ). It is much more complicated and more fluid than mere linearity. It is recovering, briefly, the child I lost; experiencing myself, my many selves, seeing through the multiple eye of a fly the two of us involved, involuted, implacated in each other, the girl child eternally on the threshold of womanhood, surveyed by the older woman, innocence and experience, faith and knowledge; and in us, so briefly, in the series of small gestures and actions that connect us, in the covering and uncovering of her not-yet-breasts, there is a gathering of past and future.
So much at stake; while on the surface it seems so trivial, amusing, insignificant, as we work our way, resolute and unhurried, through the whole collection of bras until we finally agree on what I’ve known from the beginning is the only possible choice.
‘To start with, you can fill them out with han
kies or tissues,’ I suggest. ‘I’ll show you how.’ There is so much, I realise with an ache of inexplicable lack, I’d love to show this child. And quite irresponsibly I say, ‘When I’m back in London you must come and visit me. Will you?’
‘Do you really mean it, Auntie Kristien?’
‘Don’t call me Auntie, it makes me feel ancient.’
‘But Mummy wouldn’t like it.’
‘Then you can call me Auntie when she’s present.’
I leave the cubicle with her, painfully conscious of time and the sweetness of its illusions – the almost tangible quality of time spilled like water, time irretrievably lost.
We choose a dress as well, and sandals; and, for Nannie, a T-shirt. I casually enquire about menstruation and Lenie swallows and nods eagerly; and although I have an idea that it’s more wishful thinking than truth, we provide her with some small pads too. Hand in hand we take a long roundabout way back so that I can improvise on what Ouma once told me, not about shame and hygiene and the curse of womanhood, but about discovery and fun and the nature of nature.
The excursion has offered me escape from the urgency of anticipation, but now it comes back in a sudden wave. On an impulse I take Lenie with me to Sam Ndzuta’s office. The waiting room is full of people, black and white. But the secretary recognises me and approaches, a flustered look in her eyes. ‘I’m afraid we’re running late,’ she says, ‘They started an hour behind schedule. Do you think you could come back at one?’
This is a blow. Will the morning never end? I feel a touch of panic as Lenie and I return to the café where we have arranged to meet the others. But I fight it back. The girl’s small hand is warm and sticky in mine. For her sake, for Anna’s too, I must see this through.
For the next half-hour I pretend to be deeply interested in the children’s chatter while I struggle through the milkshake I ordered in a moment of false enthusiasm. Opposite me, Anna’s face is inscrutable, and she makes little attempt at conversation. I try to read her eyes through the dark glasses, but she seems disturbingly remote. Afterwards we go through the motions of perfunctory window-shopping. Anna also accompanies me to the library; after my last conversation with Jacob Bonthuys I’m intrigued to read something about the stars. Unfortunately they have almost nothing on astronomy. With some misgivings I take out Stephen Hawking.
