10

 

Each one of the 700 kilometres we travel is like the other. We journey with the hearse following us in grim convoy. We enter a different kind of time—one of long seconds.

We travel to uncle Hendrik’s farm, where Frankie will be buried with the other Van der Swarts.

Everything appears to have a sickly, cheap shine—from the glossy little casket to the large hearse. They tell me he is inside this box and it feels so wrong, so unworthy of what it’s holding, so far removed from the real Frankie.

Hour after hour I look back at the face of the car behind us, the chrome grill smirking between two cold eye lights. Is he rolling around in there? Is he comfortable? Can he feel? Does he know? Where is he? The tar is like an elastic band stretching between us, never letting go.

This is all there is: Frank and I and the vessels transporting us . . . How can one not want something so much, yet it still happens?

At Laingsburg and at Three Sisters we stop for fuel, and so does the black car. My parents are arguing constantly about the funeral. My father does not want to offend his elder brother, who has arranged for a minister from the Dutch Reformed Church, while my mother, being Catholic, won’t hear of it—there has already been a service in the Catholic Church in Bellville. Uncle Hendrik will not allow the funeral to take place without a service and he doesn’t want a priest to do it.

Every time they refer to my brother they use the past tense.

When we get to the first farm gate, I get out to open it and close it after the hearse. Dust clings to the black mirror-duco of the car. I hear a hiss of heat through the teeth of the chrome face, then a blowing sound, and then the engine dies. After running without water for many miles, the head gasket has blown.

At the first gate of the many that compartmentalise the road to uncle Hendrik’s farm, we move some of the bags to the back seat and put my brother in the boot of our car. The lid won’t close, so my father ties it to the bumper. We take the driver, in his weary grey suit that smells of stale cigarette smoke, to the only hotel in Richmond. Then we turn around and drive back to the farm. When we pass the hearse, I notice that it has been sucked closer to the ground, looking melted down and pathetic, close now to its own death.

My father is quiet, my mother is crying, and I go down into the hollow of the seat and turn my face to the backrest to talk to my brother.

 

There are no hugs between my father and my uncle, just a set way of acting—solemn, no display of emotion. Everybody, even Hanno and the staff, have taken on this ‘way’ as if from a manual. The warmth of enfold-me, it-will-be-all-right, talk-to-me, that I yearn for and got from Gran, Grandpa and my mother’s side of the family at the memorial service in Bellville, is missing here.

All grieving has a structure and it is different for each person. The one I hate is the flimsily constructed sorrow, the temporary, overcrowded sadness with too many words. Here everything is different. I watch them walk and talk, and I don’t trust them. They constantly use the Afrikaans words for tragedy, great sadness and sorrow.

I follow them when they remove my brother in his dusty box from the boot and carry him to a cool place. I go unnoticed in the gloom under the mantilla of night sinking over the homestead and outbuildings.

My father and uncle Hendrik put the coffin down in front of a corrugated-iron sliding door. There is a grating sound as the wood connects with the gravel and they fumble with the lock. Inside the cold room a single light bulb casts meat-hook shadows on the wall and lights up the red and white sinew and fat on the carcasses under which they place the casket. The air smells of meat, blood and cold.

I don’t cry, nor do I say anything as the sliding door is closed, slicing the view of the casket with the disembowelled animals above it until there is only a shaft of light, a knock and then nothing.

I lie in the bed where Frankie held me when I cried for Sophie. I don’t cry; I speak to the hollow emptiness in me, and I learn to understand purgatory—limbo.

 

The next day the minister comes from town, with an extravagant, patronising sympathy. Everyone is wearing black, and outside the wind is blowing. I meet relatives whom I don’t remember and forget again immediately. Nobody talks to me. They just greet me, touch my head, and then they appear to switch on their tears elsewhere.

Five cars drive up to the place where all the dead people lie under the ground. The car doors slam. Women hold on to their skirts and hats, and their white petticoats contrast with the black.

Past the rusty gate is a freshly dug hole. The coloured layers in the walls of the grave reflect the eternity Frankie will be entering. The minister is very serious about this business of putting Frankie into the hole. He reads from the Afrikaans Bible with foreboding, the wind fraying the end of each sentence. He makes me feel that where Frankie is going, he’ll be suffering.

The coffin is lowered on ropes. It swings forward and hits the top end of the grave. Some soil is dislodged and falls on the lid, and I imagine Frankie’s head hitting against the gravel. My mother and father are beyond caring about the wind or anything else.

From behind the wall I hear voices. The farm workers are singing a hymn for my brother. They are not allowed inside the white people’s walls, but their weather-beaten faces are distorted with compassion. They stand in their ragged clothing, under which one can see their emaciated frames. It is they who touch me, for pity is part of their design; suffering and understanding ingrained. It is their anguish I will never forget.

High above us the sky is filled with flaky clouds, like wallpaper on the clear blue of the big, big heaven.

 

Lunch, tea, and then the drinking. I wander amongst the people. The sounds, the movements, the black clothing all seem to blur into a marsh of indifference. Everything is so completely different now that every molecule of my world has been distorted. How dare anything exist, and not Frankie? How can my life go on when its axis has gone?

As dusk descends, the wind dies down. From where I sit on the back steps of the kitchen, the labourer’s cottages beckon me. Their exaggerated shadows from the firelight dance against the walls and their voices are animated.

 

On my way to the cottages I come across a metal drum lying on its side, and inside I see a corgi with her four puppies. I am still staring at the perfection when Hanno arrives and beats the side of the drum with a stick. Then he strikes again, and this time he hits the mother.

I jump up and grab the stick. Only afterwards do I realise what I’ve done. He is shocked by my reaction and leaves the stick in my hand, kicks the dog, grabs one of the puppies and walks back to the house. My bravery astonishes me. Halfway to the kitchen Hanno turns back and shouts,

‘Get the fuck away from those dogs, they’re mine! I will kill them if I want to. And tomorrow I’m shooting that bitch, you sissy, you moffie!’

 

The labourers only notice me once I am standing amongst them. Their voices die down and they stare at me. They have an understanding of my grief and they don’t need to tell me. Their eyes are soft and moist from smoke and alcohol. I sit down on an old tyre, and their conversation resumes. From where I sit, I see the glow of a cold, ancient sun sliding over the vastness of the Karoo. Black paint crawls from the shadows, around the small houses, and stops behind the people at the fire.

I feel the warmth of the circle, different from Sophie’s people who seemed to grow from the earth. Sophie’s world was mud and grass; this world is tin and poverty. Their sounds are also sharper, whereas the ones at the feet of the dragon are deep, rounder. But the empathy is equally inviting.

They can feel my grief, and to me this is sympathy. Their collective warmth gives me a comfort I have not felt since Sophie. Piet, the one who blew into the mouth of the baby springbok, smiles a toothless grin at me, and the music starts up again.

A big woman with sagging breasts starts to sing. It is more like attrition; weeping, hypnotic cycles. Its strength is not in the lyrics, although they have a raw sincerity, but in the passionate way she expresses them. Her head tilts to one side, eyes closed, her face remarkably dramatic, with round cheekbones like golf balls.

A man gets up, as if in a trance, and dances around the fire with his eyes closed. Puffs of dust fly up as his worn-out shoes drag and beat the ground. His body is skeletal and his arms look remarkably long. His frame is bent over and his arms gyrate as if controlled by a different brain. I have a sense of comfort and honesty, a reality so completely different from the restrained discipline, the formulated emotion that has chilled this day.

 

By the time they find me it is quarter past twelve. My mother is bordering on hysterics. Uncle Hendrik is angry. He tells me to get home immediately. On the short walk home he is able to talk to me without parents’ presence: I am different and badly behaved, an embarrassment to my father; the sooner I change, the better. Now that Frank is gone I’m the only boy. I’m the eldest, I must do what my father tells me, and I must respect my father at all times. I must stay away from the non-whites. He has heard me speak Zulu, which is not good. We do not mix with them. We are different. If we mix with the staff they will become white. We must always show them who is boss.

All I want to do is stay with those poor people. Their sorrow is visible; it is raw and honest, whereas in my world it is deep and secretive. I want passion that weeps and holds, not hides and pretends.

When we get to the house I am the centre of different attentions: relief from my mother, disappointment from my father, embarrassment that manifests itself as anger from the rest. I have ended their ‘party.’

Uncle Hendrik speaks to my father as if I don’t exist. My mother is crying and wants to hug me, but they take her to her room.

‘Look what you’ve done to your mother.’ He shakes his head. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ My father walks me down the long, dark passage, composed but angry-drunk. He holds me by the scruff of my neck, and by the time we reach the room my toes are barely touching the ground.

In the room he removes his belt and orders me to lie over the side of the bed. It’s the bed my brother slept in. I am panic-stricken because my mother is not here to protect me. As he strikes the first blow I start to cry. The leather claws around the side of my legs, where it hurts most, like cuts.

Afterwards I curl up on the bed. I can’t hear anything around me—the space is full. I have lost my brother and my life.

 

***

 

To me there will always be the time before and the time after. A clear line, even though three days pass between Frank’s death and the funeral on the farm. The event is so large it takes days to mark. Everything ‘before’ is drained away like dishwater swirling towards a slurping hole—behind the absolute divide that crystallises over these days.

In the days that follow I rescue one of the puppies and insist on taking it home—this in a house where children don’t insist. Dot, my father names her, for the one white dot on the neck of her otherwise brown body. She looks more like a corgi than the others, which are now dead.