by Andre Brink
Both Oom Hennie and old Freddie had died long ago; and there I was, on that Saturday afternoon on the farm, in Dad’s study, looking at his own crooked shelves, made with much love if without any skill. Rickety as they were, he’d been proud of them. They’d supported his little world.
Without knowing what I was really looking for, I went nearer to scan the titles. All the books showed unmistakable signs of extensive handling. Theal, Cory, Walker, Preller, the Cambridge, Archives Year Books, the Van Riebeeck Series. European history too: Fisher, Hayes, Robinson, Shotwell. Toynbee. Older leather-bound tomes. Carlyle’s French Revolution in three black volumes. A dark brown series of Gibbon. Without much interest I began to pull out books, leafing through them. There were notes in all the margins, in Dad’s small, neat handwriting. Holding a book close to my eyes I tried to read what he’d written: a running conversation with the author, agreement, approval, questions, refutation. Once again, as in the course of the prayer at table, I became conscious of his living presence. I could hear his voice again. If you go back in history. But it didn’t bring me any closer to an understanding of him.
Returning one of the Gibbons to the shelf I felt an obstruction and when I pushed harder something fell from behind to a lower shelf. Going down on my haunches, I removed several books to retrieve a brown file, one of the old-fashioned type fastened with faded green ribbons. And an old dusty cane, the end frayed and worn. It must have been the one Dad had used to intimidate the children at school. Including the girls, I remembered. They’d received their stripes on their hands or bare legs while the boys had’ had to bend over a desk: one cut for every question unanswered. I’d always found it beyond my comprehension that he should have resorted to such violence while he’d never beaten either of his own children at home (that had been left to Ma, a task she’d never neglected). But why had he brought the cane with him to the farm? A souvenir? Of what?
I placed the cane on the desk before blowing dust from the file cover and opening it. Old circulars of the Ossewa-Brandwag. 1940. Captivated, I turned the yellowed pages, but there was nothing remarkable really. Boring motions. Agendas. Circulars. Rhetoric. An oath, underlined:
If I advance, follow me.
If I retreat, shoot me.
If I die, avenge me.
SO HELP ME GOD.
With a strange feeling of wry sympathy I put down the file and picked up the frayed old cane again. I was much more intrigued by it than by the dull contents of the file. How had it landed behind the books on the shelf? – had it fallen in by accident, or had Dad hidden it deliberately? The thought was ludicrous. Unless he’d felt guilt about it for some reason. But what then? The meagre sense of authority he’d been able to enforce with it? A touch of perverse pleasure? A depressing feeling of “sin” because he’d derived some joy from it? Our Calvinist heritage?
There was a knock on the door. I froze, as if caught in an indecent act.
“Baas!” a voice called outside.
Hurriedly I pushed the cane in behind the Gibbons on the shelf again. It was Dad’s secret, I had to keep it for him. The shelves swayed at my touch: some of the pegs anchoring it to the wall had come away and fine plaster-dust was sifting to the floor.
“Baas!”
I felt what he would have felt if someone had disturbed him in this room.
When I opened the door irritably, Kristina was waiting outside with my coffee on a tray.
“The madam sent me, Baas.”
“I don’t want any coffee.”
She looked uncertainly at me.
“All right, give it to me.” Taking the cup from her, I closed the door again and returned to the desk, sitting down on the beautiful old hand-carved chair our ancestor had repaired for his Melanie. It had come a long way, that chair; and there were many people sitting on it with me. But Dad above all.
Absently, I stared at the books on the opposite wall, too far away now to distinguish any titles. And I wondered: How shortsighted had Dad been? Not in the literal sense, but in his interpretation of everything he’d read. The history of man, of this country, of our tribe? How much of it had he really conveyed to me – and how accurately would I hand it on to Louis one day? How much of it had he really grasped and understood?
How much of him was there for me to understand?
Pa’s conscience had always troubled him. Not because of the cane (that too, perhaps): but a more profound anxiety surfacing at regular intervals. Very predictable intervals. Something like a spiritual menstruation.
In my childhood I’d been unable to understand it, but when I’d discussed it with Ma one day, many years later, her explanation was very simple:
“It’s the Broederbond, sonny. The Band of Brothers, you know, that secret organisation everyone knows about.”
“What’s the Broederbond got to do with it?”
“It’s been going on all these years now. You know, except for one short period in the war, your father has never been one for mixing with others. Prefers to keep his own company. That’s the way he’s made. But now there’s this Broederbond business, with their monthly meetings. And every month, from the day the notice arrives until the meeting is over, he’s impossible to live with. Dissatisfied with everything: we’re not good enough Afrikaners, we’re neglecting the Cause, all that nonsense. As soon as the meeting is over, it’s all right again – until next month.”
I’d seen the humour of it and, like her, learned to accept it. (Lovable old plodder.) And one always knew, before broaching an important subject with him, to first confer with Ma. If she said: “No, sonny, your Dad’s in his bad time again”, one simply postponed the matter for a week. One of his charming eccentricities.
But had it really been so simple? Here I was sitting in his chair having my coffee, isolated in the room with its hidden cane, closer to him than I’d ever really been. And for the first time I began to understand – no, it was less than understanding; a mere intimation – something of his anxiety about being left out of the mainstream of his people; a shift in the relationship between the individual and his context. Under normal circumstances it suited him fine. But at regular intervals there came the reminder that all was not well. He couldn’t put a finger on it – hadn’t he spent all his life trying to determine just that? – but he knew it was there, it existed: something was lacking, something which might prove of immeasurable importance.
Mechanically I started paging through the OB file again. That, I assumed, represented the “one short period in the war” Mother had referred to. I couldn’t imagine him ever getting involved in anything of real importance; after all, he’d never been prosecuted, and during the war, I knew, they’d kept a close watch on teachers. The most he’d done was probably drawing up a few insignificant reports like those; translating a couple of documents from German; no more. He must have resigned from the OB quite soon, because I knew he’d become a Malan supporter at an early stage and, of course, Malan had never approved of any underground organisation.
But perhaps he’d been left with a sense of loss. The way I saw it, he’d been involved, however fleetingly, with something great: he, Wim Mynhardt, had been able to transcend his own insignificance by immersing himself in a noble, national cause. And then, drifting away from it, he’d returned to the paltriness of his solitary existence, with only that thin brown file to remind him of what might have been. And his passion for history had become the unsatisfactory surrogate for all that.
I must pursue the thought. Did Dad have some presentiment, perhaps, in his brief monthly anxiety, of an apocalypse, of a great general fall in which he would once again be part of his people? An all-embracing death-wish? In which case that apocalypse would have been a fate prepared through all our preceding generations, like a trembling of the earth. Destruction and apotheosis at the same time. Apotheosis because of destruction, since that would be a vast, collective experience, fusing all the minute meaningless particles into one great mass, a heap of clay in the hand of an angry G
od.
That would explain the obsessive nature of his work, of his efforts to understand what had happened in the past and what was inevitable in the future. In order to be prepared more fully for that Judgement.
There had been nations in history before, he told me, who’d disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving any trace at all. The Avares, for example. And it might happen again.
It is a strange and awesome thought: if such an apocalypse were really imminent and unavoidable, then every day or every trifling action we perform, brings us closer to it. And, looking back, whatever I was doing on that farm, wandering up a hill, or having coffee with Ma, or chatting in a store, or remembering long-lost little girls, or recalling in the dusk the words of years ago: And have not love – or sitting in that chair of Dad’s – all the time, around me, below me, deep inside me, there would be a current moving inexorably in that direction. It was as inevitable as the flood that would end the drought. And suddenly the mere sound of a teaspoon against an empty cup acquired a terrifying significance.
There is a morbid streak in us. Not only in our family: in all our people. Even our anthem sounds like a funeral hymn. Oom Peet, the undertaker/barber in the village of my youth, once expounded his philosophy of life to me:
“The way I see it, Martin, everything in the world keeps changing all the time. Farms, horse-drawn carriages, churches, markets, the lot. There’s nothing you can really depend on. Except for death. Death is a man’s best investment, and it keeps one close to God. That’s why I chose it as my career.”
It is applicable to more people than just Oom Peet. I think that was why Ma, and even an otherwise sensible woman like Elise, found it so shocking that I should have been absent at Dad’s death. What difference could it really have made? I’d taken my leave of him long before that, before his cancer had dragged him beyond our reach. And today, I think, I know better than they ever did the comfort death must have become to him. Not as an escape from suffering, but as a way of being reunited with his own: in the death of the individual he was able to experience the death of his kind.
The whole family returned to the farm for the funeral. Elise and I, Theo and his wife; and also Dad’s sisters with their husbands, and Ma’s brother from the Sandveld. The previous occasions on which we’d all been assembled like that had been the funeral of Dad’s elder brother and that of Oupa Mynhardt. It took death to bring us together.
The old family home was filled with people again, as in the holidays of my childhood when there had been uncles and aunts and cousins sleeping in all the rooms, even in the dining-room and the lounge. Only this time it was very sombre, without the exuberance of children on holiday.
The dominee came to the farm for the service; and many other townsfolk too. It had been raining since the previous afternoon and the earth was soaked, the grass as green as in the best of summers and the soil as red as blood. Under the black umbrellas we assembled in our black clothes in the muddy graveyard, for the final prayer and the lowering of the coffin. I spoke on behalf of the family, and old Mr Lawrence on behalf of the friends and neighbours. Then, unexpectedly and unannounced, old Danzile came forward too – he’d been foreman on the farm for years, before Mandisi took over – launching into a long mumbled discourse on how good the baas had been to them, and how they were mourning the death of a father: rendered in a mixture of Xhosa and Afrikaans, rather rambling and annoying in the discomfort of the rain. He spoke about the rain too, I remember, calling it the blessing of the Lord: “Where He buries, He also gives new life” – or something to that effect. In the end I had to ask him to cut short his speech, and motion to the vicar to get on with the hymn, otherwise we would have been there until dark.
Afterwards all the guests went up to the house to sit down at the enormous funeral dinner Ma had been preparing since dawn. She still believed in the old-world thoroughness of leg of lamb and yellow rice and sweet potatoes, all the way through to milk tart and coffee for everybody – including the labourers assembled at the back door.
Elise was inconsolable. At the graveside I had to support her when she dropped her handful of mud on the coffin. Quite indecent, I thought, such a public display of grief. Ma herself never shed a tear during the two full days we spent with her. And after the guests had left, late that same evening, she went out in the rain to tidy the study and get everything in order; none of the servants, not even old Kristina, was allowed to give her a hand. When I went down to look for her shortly before midnight, she was still on her knees, polishing and shining floors and furniture, clearing the desk, stacking away the books. I offered to help, but without a word she motioned me out of her way; and I sat waiting on the divan until she finished just after one. Then she drew the curtains, made sure nothing was out of place, turned off the light and locked the door behind us. It was still drizzling faintly outside. For the first time I felt that now, for her, Dad had really died.
“Well,” Ma said. She sounded weary, but there was a deep satisfaction in her voice, as if she felt relieved beyond words; as if she had finally got rid of an unbearable burden.
Later that Saturday afternoon, I’m not sure about the time, Ma came to me in the study. She’d opened the door so softly and I’d been so wrapped in thought that I only looked up when the door clicked shut behind her.
“What are you doing here all by yourself?” she asked. Without making it obvious, she was surveying the room to ensure that everything was still in its place. I felt relieved that I’d hidden the cane again, although I didn’t know what earthly difference it could have made.
“I was just looking round.”
“Of course.”
I pushed the brown file towards her. “I found this.”
“What’s that?” She opened it and began to page through it, frowning.
“Dad’s old OB papers.”
“I thought he’d thrown them all away years ago.”
“Doesn’t look very interesting.”
“Oh well, you know what he was like.” She closed the file and tied the faded ribbons.
“Don’t you come here any more?” I asked her.
She looked up at me, but didn’t reply at once. “Not really,” she said at last. “I have more than enough to keep me busy.”
“Were you happy together, Ma?” I asked in spite of myself.
“Happy?” In her characteristic way she pushed back a few loose strands of hair. “What a question. We were married for more than forty years, you know.” She sat down on a straight-backed chair.
“We knew so little about him.”
“Ag, well.” She seemed to be looking for an explanation, or an excuse. “What does anybody know about anybody else?” She looked directly at me: “Even one’s own children.”
Ignoring the hint, I asked: “Had he always been so secretive? Or did it only come later?”
She reflected for a minute. “When we were young, somehow it seemed easier to get on with him. We were talking and planning all the time, he had so much ambition for the future.”
“Ambition?”
She gave a short laugh, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d heard me. “You know,” she said, “in the war he once went out to a farm – those days he loved to go hunting whenever farmers invited him – and when he came back, he told me about it. He was all red in the face, but he couldn’t help laughing at himself.”
“What happened?”
“He was out in the veld, you see, when he had this sudden, well, call of nature. And while he was sitting there in a nice sandy patch, he wrote with his finger, in large letters on the ground before him: GENERAL WIM MYNHARDT. Then he forgot all about it. But by the time they went home, one of his friends came to him, one who’d been in the OB with him, and he said: ‘Wim, it’s time you buried that general of yours, he’s beginning to smell.’”
“You think that was his ambition?” I asked after a while. “In the OB?”
“I don’t know anything about becoming general and that sor
t of thing. It’s just that – ag, I suppose he just wanted to be recognised, you know. By somebody. But he left the OB very early, it was in ’41 I think, and since then there never was much life in him.” She got up, quite unnecessarily, to pull a loose thread from the hem of the spread on the divan. “But people easily misjudged him,” she said with sudden vehemence. “There was more to him than met the eye, let me tell you.”
“In what way?”
She continued to wander through the study for a while, pushing the books into an even row with the palm of her hand, wiping away a line of dust from the edge of a shelf; and almost casually she began to tell me the story of Dad’s encounter with the police. He’d been on the point of leaving for a secret OB meeting, one day, she said, when there’d been a knock on the door. Two sergeants from the Security Police.
Dad invited them in, glancing at his watch. When it became clear that they were in no mood to leave soon, he came straight to the point.
“Do you mind coming back tomorrow?” he asked with disarming candour. “I’m rather busy this afternoon.”
“Oh?” they asked. “What sort of business?”
“Well, I’m going to a meeting.”
“Really? What sort of meeting?”
“We have a regular prayer meeting every Tuesday,” Dad explained without batting an eyelid. “Discussing texts from the Bible and so on, you know.”
Finding it most interesting they offered to go with him. He tried to get out of it by hinting that they might get bored, but when they remained adamant he quietly fetched his Bible and left with them in their official car.
At the house where all the OB men sat waiting, Dad went in ahead of his escort and introduced the visitors. “Friends,” he said, “we have two newcomers to our prayer meeting today. Sergeant Grobler and Sergeant Henderson of the Security Police. On behalf of all of us I’d like to welcome them in our midst.”
