by Andre Brink
“I have my clinic this morning, Mr Scholtz,” she said. “Martin can go with you.”
I would have preferred not to accompany him, but could think of no excuse to get out of it. He turned to me, obviously resigned to the inevitable.
“What about some coffee before you go?” Ma offered.
“No, no,” he declined. “It only works on an empty stomach.”
Ma went round the house to the front stoep. The small built-on room, where Theo and I had slept when we were small, had been converted into a simple dispensary years ago and on Saturdays she ran her clinic for all the Blacks in the neighbourhood who required medical attention. There were already ten or twenty of them waiting in the meagre sun against the front wall, ranging from suckling infants to shuffling and half-blind old men. The more seriously ill would be driven into town, any day of the week, on the back of her little van. There had been occasions when Ma had got up at two or three in the morning to take someone to the doctor. I’d often tried to dissuade her from continuing with these time-consuming, irksome duties, but in vain. It probably satisfied some deep need inside her, the urge which originally had made her become a nurse.
“Shall we go?” said the old man, like a clergyman announcing the hymn to be sung. “Bring the trunk, Philemon.”
I followed him up the hill behind the house, past the cluster of labourers’ huts, Philemon bringing up the rear with the small metal trunk. It had no handles, so he had to carry it like a child’s coffin.
“Isn’t this too high?” I ventured after some time.
“One can never be too high,” he said cryptically, his breath coming from his chest in short asthmatic gasps.
From behind, probably because of the black outfit on his large boneless body, he looked familiar – like Elise’s dominee father. The broad-minded, benevolent old man with whom I’d had so many interminable arguments, on predestination and Pilate, churches and prophecies and the Word made flesh. I remembered him saying: “One thing you should always bear in mind is that God must have an enormous sense of humour too, else He would never have made man.” He and Bernard had been great friends in the past. His wife had been more cautious, but between the two men I’d sensed a profound bond of sympathy. All I ask of life is that I won’t ever grow too old to kick a sacred cow in the balls – before she shits on your head. The old man had often chuckled about those words; perhaps he’s even approved secretly. But to his wife’s liking Bernard had been too “worldly”, too much of a threat to her daughter’s peace of mind and purity of body. She’d probably preferred me as a son-in-law not so much because she’s liked me as a person but because I’d saved Elise from a worse fate. The dominee, it seemed to me, had been rather disappointed, although he was much too loyal ever to make it obvious.
What would his poor wife have done had she known about the nights Elise had spent with me in my room in Aunt Rienie’s house during that final study year? The first Sunday afternoon when, after long and passionate petting, she’d pushed her hands up behind her back to undo the hooks of her bra, gasping through wet and open lips:
“For God’s sake, Martin, what are you waiting for? Take me!”
In those days, after my lusty initiation with the voluptuous Greta, I’d regarded myself as a man of “experience”; and that first time Elise had still been a virgin. But it was a virginity troubling and oppressing her, so that, in the end, it was really she who seduced me. And I became infatuated with her body, those large firm breasts, the tension of her taut belly between her hip-bones, the golden hairdust at the bottom of her spine, the smoothness of her tanned skin. Amazing how such a skin, exposed to sun and air, can age and become wrinkled and dry; how heavy and pendulous the breasts can grow with the years. The hideous disfigurement of stretch marks after a birth, the discoloured weal of a Caesarean. Strange how one can be enraptured by a body in youth simply because it is a body: and how one can be revolted by it later for exactly the same reason. A body with flaws and scars, fallible, withering and wasting all the time.
Her parents, too, had changed with age. Even her father had become more narrow-minded that last time they’d spent their holiday with us: the time Bernard stayed in my apartment. That was when we’d had the discussion about Pilate and he’d disappointed me with the conventionality of his opinions. I remember it particularly well, for that had been their last night with us. The next day, on their way back to the Free State, they were both killed instantly in a head-on collision. He’d become much too old to drive, his reactions had slowed down, but he’d refused to listen to my warnings.
High up on the slope the old diviner stopped, his pale unhealthy skin shining with perspiration.
“Put it down, Philemon.”
“What do you keep in that trunk?” I asked.
He shook his head, looking mournfully across the scorched valley.
“I can feel it running that way,” he said, pointing. “Can you see it?”
I couldn’t see anything but pretended to be pleased.
“It’s these underground courses which keep a farm alive,” he said. “You don’t see them, but they’re there all right.” It sounded like the text of his funeral sermon. “If it hadn’t been for them, nothing would have grown. One has got to know about them and heed them.”
“I understand,” I said demurely.
He didn’t look at all happy with my response.
“Down there, Philemon.”
“Are you from these parts?” I asked him, trying to make the depressing silence more bearable.
“Yes, I’ve always had this gift,” he said, panting, as if that was a comprehensive and satisfying reply.
He stopped again. Philemon put down the black trunk, but made no attempt to open it. On an even strip along the slope the old man began to pace up and down, the white forked stick in his outstretched hands. In the long, measured strides of a secretary bird, his face taut with concentration, he walked ten yards to the right, stared at his feet for an instant, then went ten yards back. Repeating the move, without any pause, for about fifteen minutes on end, while Philemon remained standing, more or less at attention, beside the trunk.
The old man began to heave. His eyes widened. I could see perspiration on his neck and the backs of his hands. The stick began to twitch and turn in his hands. It was a very strange thing to watch, as if that dead piece of wood had suddenly acquired a life of its own, touched by some hidden source of power reaching up from the recesses of the earth itself. I was scared that the stick might hit him in the face. He was holding his breath now, his head turning a deep purple for as far as one could see under his black hat. His neck seemed to swell like a bull-frog’s. And then, suddenly, he let go, breathing out like a punctured tube, dropping the willow fork, panting for breath.
“Found something?” I asked, intrigued in spite of myself.
“No,” he said, looking happy for the first time that morning.
For a moment I had a ridiculous, unreasonable wish for Bernard to be there with me to share the moment.
But there is no sense in bringing Bernard back into it. I’ve dealt with him. It is imperative for one to organise one’s material, keeping the different elements apart, otherwise there can be no system in one’s thought. I have a lifetime to interpret in terms of the events of four crucial days. Without a system the only result can be anarchy.
“I’m going home,” I announced as the old man stooped, with obvious effort, to retrieve his fallen implement.
He stared at me in surprise and sorrow.
Without waiting for an answer I turned back and began to walk downhill as fast as I could risk it without my glasses. From the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the farmyard, I looked round, but everything was reduced to a dull smudge. The old man himself might have been an illusion.
7
LOUIS WAS WASHING the car when I arrived home. He’d pulled it behind the kitchen door where he stood hosing it while ducks and geese were quacking in the mud around him.
I was angry on the spot. “Don’t you know how scarce water is?” I scolded him. “This isn’t the city where you can just open a tap.”
“Morning, Dad.”
“Morning. Did you hear what I said?”
“All right.” He went to the tank to shut the tap. “I only wanted to —”
“Trouble with you,” I said angrily, “is that you never think of other people. As long as you can just go on messing about you’re dead happy.”
“How should I have known?”
“If you’d opened your eyes for a minute you’d have seen how dry it was.”
“Well, I’ve closed the tap, haven’t I?” Taking the chamois from his shoulder he started cleaning the Mercedes. I was irritated by the possessiveness of the gesture.
“How did the car get here?” I asked.
“I drove it here, how else?”
“Suppose you’d hit a gatepost or something?”
“I didn’t.”
“But just suppose —”
“Oh Jesus, Dad, it’s just a car, not a woman or something!”
“Mind your tongue, Louis!”
“It’s time you realised I’m not a child any more.”
“You’re behaving like one. You haven’t shown the slightest sense of responsibility these last months.”
He didn’t answer, but I saw his jaw tighten.
“Lying about at home like a tramp, refusing to lift a finger to do anything, expecting us to wait on you. And why? What for?”
From the other side of the shining pale grey car he glared at me, a small contemptuous smile on his lips, as far as I could make out.
“You’re not the first person to go to war, you know,” I went on.
“What do you know about war?” he asked with a sneer.
“That’s got nothing to do with it.”
“If you knew —”
“Hundreds, thousands of young blokes went up to Angola with you. Don’t tell me they all came back as punch-drunk as you.”
I had to restrain myself before I went too far. If I hadn’t gone too far already. I was wrecking the whole weekend. I’d brought him along with the intention of trying to “find” him; now I was compromising the chances just because I felt frustrated by Ma’s obstinacy and by the breaking of my spectacles and the futile superstitions of the old diviner trying to find water we wouldn’t need. All the months since Louis’s return we’d been trying to handle him with understanding and patience: something traumatic had happened and we had to help him re-adapt to life, however much our nerves became frayed in the process. More than once I’d felt like exploding, but for the sake of Elise and Ilse I’d controlled myself. Now my restraint was wearing thin. Damn it, I’d been close to death myself, I also needed some consideration.
“The other soldiers came back to become useful citizens again,” I said. “But you don’t care a damn.”
“Why should I try to become a useful citizen in this goddamned country?” he asked viciously.
“There is no need to swear,” I said coldly.
“I’ll swear if I want to! You realise it’s you who are responsible for the mess the country is in?”
“Oh no, I’m not,” I said. “For Heaven’s sake don’t try that naïve little argument on me.”
“I’m talking about your whole generation!”
“That’s what I mean. But it’s too easy to get out of your tight corner by starting to accuse me.”
“I didn’t ask to go to Angola!” he said.
His aggressiveness caused mine to subside into a feeling of wry and reasonable superiority. “Listen, Louis. I regarded this whole Angola mess as a foolish blunder from the beginning. We should have stayed out of the war altogether. It was their business, not ours. In all of this I’m with you. But whether we liked it or not, we did get involved. And once one lands in a stew like that all you can do is to see it through. No sense in trying to get out.”
“I didn’t chicken out. I went all the way,” he said, flushed with anger. “But it’s easy for you to talk. When one’s right in the middle of it, one wants to know why it’s happening. You want to know what you’re fighting for, what you’re getting killed for. You don’t want to get your head blasted off just to keep this shithouse standing.”
“What you call this shithouse is the country you were born in. It’s the only one you have. What would you do without it?”
“Don’t lecture me, Dad. It’s not a political meeting.”
“Louis!” For a moment I felt like clobbering him. What he needed was a bloody good hiding. But even in my rage I realised he was quite capable of resisting and I wasn’t sure how that would turn out. (My heart.) In hopeless anger I stared at him. For the first time in my life I had to acknowledge that I had no physical control over him any more. It took a great effort to calm myself. “If you don’t like the country,” I said as acidly as I could, “you can either leave it or try to change it for the better. But you’re not helping much by just sitting on your arse.”
“And what happens when one does try to change things?” he asked. “What happened to Bernard?”
“You leave him out of this!”
“Why? I think he’s very relevant.”
“There’s no need to provoke a confrontation like he did. There are other ways.”
“Like elections? Working from the inside? D’you think there’s still time for that sort of thing?”
“There is always time for doing the right thing.” I was regaining control now, of myself and of the situation. “I know what the world looks like when one is young, Louis. There was a time when I felt just like you —”
“What did you do about it?”
“I told you there are more ways than one. You saw the uselessness of violence in Angola, didn’t you? You left a greater mess behind you than you’d found.”
“That wasn’t what I asked you, Dad.”
“I’m not sure you’re really interested in an answer.”
“Don’t you understand what I’m trying to say?”
I looked at him, calm and composed by now, confident that I knew how to handle his impetuousness. “Finish the car,” I ordered, and walked away.
“What happened to your glasses?” he suddenly asked behind me. I swung round, but he was too far away for me to read his expression: was he trying to placate me, or merely taunting me again?
“I broke them,” I said laconically.
“What are you going to do about driving back home?”
“I’ll manage.”
“But you can’t see properly without them.”
“Of course I can. In any case, what else can we do?”
“I can take over.”
I looked at him, a misty figure behind the shimmering shape of the Mercedes. Without answering, I walked off.
A small group of Blacks still sat clustered on the front stoep waiting for Ma. With some hesitation I went nearer, and they made way for me to pass. The smell was overpowering, but Ma didn’t seem to notice. She went on attending to her patients, questioning and examining and carrying on long conversations in Xhosa, which I could follow only with difficulty. I tried to help by handing her whatever she required from the large cupboard in the corner: ointment and powder and tablets, medicine for diarrhoea or cramps, cough-mixture, plaster, occasionally a syringe or vaccine.
“It’s going to take you all morning,” I remarked after some time.
“There’s more and more of them every week,” she said.
“Breeding like germs.”
“I’m waging a running battle with them about it. Next week I’m rounding up all the women again for injections. No use giving them the pill, they just throw it away or carry it in a bag round their necks for doepa.”
“You need a more drastic solution than that.”
“It’s the men,” she said. “Think it’s a disgrace if their women don’t have babies, so they don’t want them to use anything. We’ve nearly had murders on the farm because of th
at.”
Of course contraception wasn’t the answer. She was approaching it from the wrong end. What was involved, was the standard of living as such. A sense of responsibility to be instilled in them. And they wouldn’t acquire that by living off Ma’s charity on the farm. One had to start in their own homelands, raising economic standards: how often must I repeat this?
I felt irritated by all the bodies and dumb faces surrounding us.
“Let’s go and have some tea first,” I suggested. “You need a break.”
“I’m all right.” But when I left, she followed me, instructing the patient human bundles to wait for her return.
I went to wash my hands; even my clothes felt dirty. But Ma went straight through to the kitchen. Kristina brought in the pot of bush-tea which had been left to simmer on the kitchen stove.
“What about Louis?” Ma asked.
“Kristina can take his outside. I don’t think he’ll come in right now.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged.
“Something wrong?” she insisted.
“Not really. We had a bit of a tiff.”
“About what?”
“He was wasting water.” I took my cup. “I suppose I’m a bit overstrained. This tension isn’t good for me.” (An unfair blow, I had to admit, but I had to use the opening.)
“What tension?” she asked innocently.
“This farm business. I’ve been worrying about it for so long, and it’s bad for my heart. Until you’ve made up your mind —”
“Why should you worry about it?” she said. “We spoke about it this morning, didn’t we? I don’t think there’s anything more to be said.”
“You know very well we can’t leave it like that.”
She sipped her hot tea. Only after she’d put down the cup again did she look up: “What does Theo say about the whole idea?”
Did she suspect something about the conversation I’d had with Theo just after Dad had fallen ill? Had he gone to her behind my back? But her face didn’t give away anything.
“I didn’t discuss it with him,” I said as calmly as possible.
