Agaat stirs on her bed in the passage. I see the first glimmering through a chink in the curtain. It’s five o’clock on the phosphorescent hands of the alarm clock on the night-table.
Agaat doesn’t need an alarm. Every morning just before the grandfather clock chimes the hour, she awakens. By then I have been lying awake for a long time. Sometimes I pretend to be sleeping so that she can sing. Gaat sings me awake.
There’s only one creak as she sits up on the camp stretcher. While the chimes echo in the front room, she doesn’t budge. What could she be thinking of in between the five strokes? Would she be steeling herself there on her bed, looking down the dark passage with the first light falling from the rooms, from door frame to door frame? Would she be swiftly running through her schedule for the day? Praying perhaps? No, Agaat doesn’t pray, she only prays on my behalf, she says, that will have to suffice.
At the beginning of winter she carried in the stretcher for the first time from the storeroom. Too flimsy for her to my mind, she’s filled out these last few years. Since she’s been looking after me she no longer works so much around the house and in the garden. Dig here, scrub there, I hear her handing out orders.
At night I don’t hear her stir. She sleeps like a ramrod on that bier. I can see it before me. On her back with the hands on the chest. The sleep of the vigilant. Twice a night, once before midnight and once after, she comes and stands by my bed in the dark on bare feet. She is not officially awake. Nor am I, I pretend to be asleep. Sometimes of late she then goes out at the back and stays away for an hour or longer.
I don’t hear her go into the back room. Where on earth would she roam?
There’s the first stirring now. The stretcher creaks as she stretches to reach the switch of the passage light. She takes one gulp of water from her mug. The enamel krrts on the floor as she sets it down. Another creak as she swings her legs off the little bed. A swish as she puts on her housecoat over her nightdress. A squeak and a bang as she folds the stretcher, a shuffling as she slides it into the second broom-cupboard next to the bathroom.
She walks down the passage. Thud, thud, thud, go her bare feet on the boards. She unlocks the kitchen door, talks to the dogs, closes the lower door behind her again. The screen door squeaks, the screen door slams, seven paces, the outside room’s door is opened, the lock, the bolt, the lower door that scuffs on the linoleum. Washing and dressing is what she’s going to do. Use the bathroom in the house, I try to get through to her, but she pretends not to understand me.
Koffie and Boela make whimpering sounds. I hear them paw the lower door of the kitchen. She no longer allows them in my room. On Leroux’s advice, she says.
I don’t believe her. From the day that she started to read from the booklets, she forbade them here. As if she wanted to be the dog herself.
She cannot abide to see other life in my room.
Just as little as she can abide the idea of moving into the guest bedroom and to stay in the house decently with me. Why not? There’s more than enough space here, I gesture, but there’s no getting her to understand.
I miss the dogs. Always when they came galloping in here, I felt as if I was still somebody’s owner. First with the front paws on the bed’s edge, wet muzzles pressed in under my hands, smell of dog bodies in my nose, laughing mouths and panting breaths, a whole warm brown fur-covered life here over my white covers. With their wag-tails they whisked the air into life here in the room in the mornings. After a while they would calm down and settle on the little mat by the glass door next to Agaat’s chair, and I would look at how their eyebrows twitched as they watched me for a while and how they at length would sigh and go to sleep. I could watch them like that until they started dreaming, till the hind legs started kick-kicking, and the little muscle started twitching in the forepaw and the lip started quivering with a muted growl. Chasing rabbits.
Now it’s only Agaat’s chair there in front of the glass door. There she sits and embroiders during the day if she has time, if she feels well-disposed towards me, and in the evenings until I fall asleep.
It’s a big cloth. She’s been working at it ever since I’ve not been able to move, all of eleven months. Started it a long time ago, it seems, because one side had already been thoroughly worked when she brought it in here the first time. I often signal with my eyes, let’s have a look, but she pretends not to see. Now the first light darts through the chink in the curtain onto the embroidered cloth where she put it down on her chair. The decoration is dense and thick in white satin thread, an intricate combination of drawn stitch and shadow stitch. If I focus in a certain way, the strip on which the light falls looks like a band of white marble with convoluted detail sculpted in low relief.
She’s made great strides with the embroidery, Agaat, she’d by now be able to add a few chapters to the embroidery book.
Quarter past five, it chimes. She’s back in the kitchen where she put the kettle on on her way out, so that now she only has to add boiling water to the bag and the thickening agent. Here she is coming down the passage. First tray, set out last night, second quarter-hour of the day. Tea. Morning medicine.
With her smell of Lifebuoy and Mum and calamine she enters the room.
Praise the Lord, rise up rejoicing, she sings. She stops when she sees I’m already awake.
Her uniform crackles. Her cap shines like a beacon. She is wearing a clean white housecoat with short sleeves, over that a white crocheted jersey. I can smell the cold-water Omo. The apron is stiff with starch. Her rubber soles sough as she tacks about my bed.
She cranks me up, she pummels my pillows, she hoists my neck out of my body, she props up my head, she arrays me.
Wake and shake, make and take, she says.
She comes with a wet lukewarm sponge and wipes out my mouth.
Mole from the mouth, she says.
She unfastens the nappy between my legs, puts it aside in a bundle and slides the number one pan in under me.
She puts on my bib.
She clamps the jug with the long spout and the little tube to the railing of the bed. She bends the drip-stem with the mouthpiece so that it’s suspended above my lips. She adjusts the drip-hole. She puts the mouthpiece into my mouth.
Ten counts between each swallow, she says. Ready steady go!
She eases open the valve. The first drop of warm thickened liquid spreads over my tongue. Rooibos. One mouthful tea and one mouthful breath and count to ten, says Agaat, think of the undrprvlgd.
A mouthful of consonants. Lest I forget what I wrote.
I do my best. Half runs down my chin.
She watches me closely while she prepares everything. She tucks the bib in further under my chin. She wipes my chin. I get hold of the rhythm. I am thirsty. I count to ten. I swallow. I count ten tens and ingest ten mouthfuls, a quarter-mouth at a time. This cup.
Agaat fills the plastic basin with hot water from the kettle that she’s brought with her from the kitchen. She arranges the towels, the washcloths, the soap and the sponges, everything neatly on the large hospital trolley that Leroux carted in here.
I drink three more tens.
Drinking merrily she is this morning, says Agaat. Have you peed yet, Ounooi?
I signal, no, you can see for yourself the nappy is dry. She doesn’t look.
I’m asking, have you peed yet?
Now she looks. I signal again no, I have not and don’t be so crude so early in the morning.
Well go on pee, Ounooi, I haven’t got all day.
Don’t look at me, I gesture, look in the other direction.
Agaat makes little whistling sounds between her teeth to encourage me.
It won’t come.
I hear nothing, she says. She puts her hand behind her ear.
Is the little tap stuck this morning, hmmm? Well, perhaps you can’t drink and pee at the same time. Let’s close the tap up here, then maybe the one down there will open.
She keeps her face straight. She closes the tea drip and takes the spout out of my mouth. Her rubber soles suck noisily at the floor, it sounds as if there’s extra torque, extra weight in her tread. I recognise it. That’s what she does when she discovers she can’t make me. She turns her back on me. I know what she’s going to do. She swirls the water around in the washbasin. She wrings out the cloth to make it drip in the water. Still nothing. I know she’s listening. Her ears point backwards. She takes a glass, she pours the water, over and over, from a height.
I try to think of something else. My bladder is full. I want to. I didn’t want to in the nappy, else there would have been all manner of commentary. And I don’t want to make extra problems, I don’t want to distract her.
Pee and tea is not the problem. Agaat is the problem. She acts stupid. It’s been five days now that I’ve been gesturing there is something, there in the front of the house, in the sideboard, in the front room, with the photo albums.
She doesn’t like the idea that I want to take leave. Perhaps I can kill two birds with one stone. Perhaps telepathy works better through piss in the pan than transmitted in waves through the air into the rock-hard skull of Agaat.
Streams of grace abounding, Agaat sings, flow from God above, sacred source of freshness, that was pledged by His love.
I think of the water map. I think of the underground water-chambers in the mountain, of the veins branching from them, of the springs in the kloofs, of the fountains of Grootmoedersdrift, the waterfalls in the crevices. I think of the drift when it’s in flood, the foaming mass of water, the drift in the rain, when the drops drip silver ringlets on the dark water. And just after it’s cleared, when the black-wattle branches sag heavy and sodden over the ditch and the frogs clamour in the drenched grass-thickets on the bank. Memories in me and I awash between heaven and earth. What is fixed and where? What real? If only I could once again see the places marked on the map, the red brackets denoting gates, cattle-grids, sluices, the red is-equal-to sign of the bridge over the drift, first and last gateway over which the livestock of Grootmoedersdrift move and will continue moving when I am gone. Sheep, cattle, cars, lorries, wire cars, mud and time. Slippery, supple, subtle, silvery time.
Maps attend lifetimes. What is an age without maps? I see it, chambers full of idle melancholy cartographers in the timeless hereafter. Hills there surely will have to be in heaven, but eternal, Eternal Humpbacked Hills, and Eternal Fairweather. Idle melancholy meteorologists. What is a real human being? A run-off. A chute of minutes for God the sluicer. He who paves his guttering with people.
Perhaps I’ve been infected by Agaat. She’s blasphemed for a long time.
It’s coming. Here it comes, through my blessed piss-sphincter, first passing of the day.
Good girl, says Agaat. You don’t perhaps want the number two pan as well, seeing that you’re in the swing of things now? Lesson six, remember? You don’t want dung and piss all over everything if you can help it.
Quite right, I flicker, but I’m not a slaughter animal.
She flickers back.
Otherwise we’ll have no choice but to dose you with a Pink Lady again, she says, a Pink Lady for the lady of Gdrift, it’s five days now that her guts have been stuck. Perhaps that’s what’s making her so restless. What goes in must come out, after all, good heavens!
Take away the pan, I gesture.
No, you first drip-dry nicely now. Then we fix up your uppers first.
It’s a quarter-body wash this morning. Half-wash is every second day and full wash every fourth day. A lick and a promise, Agaat calls the quarter-wash.
She wipes my neck and face with a lukewarm cloth. Then my chest. She works in the cloth under my hospital gown, over my shoulders. She brushes my hair with a dry shampoo. She supports my head with the little hand, so that it doesn’t loll or roll. She rubs cream on my face and ointment in the corners of my mouth. Now the neckbrace. Krrts, karrrts, she rips loose and refastens the Velcro until it’s seated properly. It expands all the time. My neck feels loose.
She brings the hand mirror closer. I close my eyes. Take away your mirror. We haven’t looked in the mirror for a long time. I recognise the mood. She wants to torment me. She’s quite capable of digging up the lipstick and mascara from somewhere again.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, says Agaat, who’s the fairest of them all?
I keep my eyes shut. My face flushes hot with defying her. I refuse to look, I wait until she moves away. I hear her adding water to the washbasin. She pulls out the pan from under me. I hear her walk away with it. I peep from the corner of my eye to see what she’s doing. She puts on her glasses, examines the contents in front of the window. She puts it down on the trestle table, covers it with a cloth. She writes on the calendar with the pencil suspended there on a string, Leroux’s urine record that he wants to see every time he visits me. My logbook. The motions of my entrances and my exits. Today Agaat looks into the pan again and again as if it contained a message. She takes her magnifying glass out of the dressing table drawer. She peers through it and she writes and she looks again. Augur of my elements, who will prevent her from prognosticating my piss? Perhaps it contains tadpoles.
Quite satisfactory under the circumstances, says Agaat, a slight little cloudiness, but nothing to fret about.
She pages the calendar back, taps on it once before she replaces it in the hole for November. She replaces the magnifying glass in the drawer. Ting, go the dressing table’s swing-handles as she slams shut the drawer with her thigh. She knows I’m peeping at her.
She throws off my covers. She wrings out the washcloth, gives me one quick wipe between the legs. It’s too hot. She knows very well it’s too hot.
I keep my eyes shut.
Pees like a mare, says Agaat, nothing wrong with the pee.
I wait for her to cover me again, I’m cold.
She waits for me to take the bait.
A pretty light yellow. Clear except for the little trail. And not at all over-sharp on the nose, she says, just about perfect pee.
What can I reply to that? What acrobatics of eyelids to convey: Your sarcasm is wasted on me. If I could die to deliver you, I would do so, today. Go and find somebody else to pee perfection for you on command. You’re the one who wants to be perfect. You want me to be perfect. We must not be lacking in any respect. If you can do without, I must be able to do without, that’s what you think.
A perfect nurse. A perfect patient.
As I taught you.
According to the book.
What more can anybody expect? you think. And what sticks in your gullet is my surplus neediness, and that you no longer know who I am, and that I’ve changed, that I’m still, every day that I lie here, changing. And that I require something specific from you.
I open my eyes. She’s standing next to my bed with one hand folded into the other.
Everything’s fine, Agaat, I signal, don’t get so het up about nothing, I’m as contented as a little snail in a salad.
But that’s too easy. She’s not looking for an easy victory. She wants to see me angry. She wants to see insurrection. She wants to see what insurrection looks like in the spine of a paraplegic. In my chest I feel a sigh. I have too little breath to sigh. A groan escapes me. I feel tears. I hold them back, but it’s too late, she’s already caught me at it.
Time for your exercises, she says, the chin jutting out. Nothing like movement to lift the spirits, she says, and to get those old guts of yours going.
Your arse, I signal.
Seize the day, says Agaat. She opens the curtains, light streams into the room.
The bedclothes are all pulled off the bed, yanked out at the foot-end, the mattress quakes under me, the bedsocks are stripped off my feet.
No, I gesture, please not now, I’m tired. I close my eyes again, slowly. Last defence, play dead, play at aestivation. Wild pea.
Tired, what’s with tired! Doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders! says Agaat.
Cunt.
Hey! says Agaat, such language! Come now, pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake.
She bends over me and picks my arms up by the wrists and moves my hands in a slow applauding motion.
One, two, three, one, two, three, we greet, we greet, the mighty sun!
Nice deep breaths, she says.
She brings my wrists next to my sides, suddenly drops them.
Oops, she says.
She’s at the foot of the bed. Fast. This is still just warming-up. She presses her fists against the undersides of my feet in a kneading motion, a mimic of pedals under my soles. One pedal is weaker than the other.
Busy little feet, she says.
Stop it, stop it, stop it!
Any complaints so far, Mrs de Wet? She doesn’t look up from my feet.
She moves around quickly to the side of the bed, faces me head-on. Her voice a parody of gentle persuasion.
You get sore, you get stiff, your blood doesn’t flow properly, you get cold, your feet get blue, look how blue they are already, you get constipated, your general condition deteriorates if you won’t allow me to exercise you.
Allow, I say with my eyes, allow!
She grabs one arm by the wrist, straightens the elbow with the little hand. Wide circular movements she makes, first one way round and then the other way round.
Windmill in the south-east, she says, windmill in the north-west. Ickshee, ickshee, ickshee. Water in the dam, mud in the ditch, step on her head, dirty rotten bitch.
My arm terminating in its stiff claw swings through the air. Agaat is breathing faster, her eyes are shining.
Now bend, she says. She works the elbow joint.
Knick knack knick, she says, bend the tree, snap the stick.
My other arm is a lighthouse tower. It sweeps over wild waves. Agaat blows the horn. Two bass notes.
What do you say, Missis? We’re having fun, aren’t we? Now we’re giving this old body of yours a run for its money.
My bonnie lies over the ocean, she sings, my bonnie lies over the sea.
Agaat’s colour is high. Her breath comes panting. I catch her eye.
Agaat, you’re hurting me!
Just don’t be touchy, she says.
Slowly, I flicker, slowly with what’s left of me.
Shuddup, now the legs, says Agaat, but no sound comes from her, only her lips move.
Giddy-up, Shanks’ pony, she says aloud, and with my legs she forms an angle of ninety degrees above my torso. She bends my dangling feet up and down.
Her feet are going east, she sings, but she is going west.
Agaat plants corner posts. She puts them into holes. She hammers them in with a ten-pound mallet. She anchors them with braces, she paints them silver, she hangs the droppers. I smell tar. She sets up the drawbar. She tightens the wire till it sings. My ankles, my toes.
We have take-off, she says as she propellers them in her hands.
And now, she says, now to rise above this earthly vale of tears. Nourish also our souls with the bread of life, oh Lord.
She gathers me, the little arm under the backs of my legs, the strong arm under my arms.
Dough, dough, she says, rise for us. Hup! she says and lifts me, almost lifts me up, off the bed.
Kneaded well, waited long, she says, hup once more.
Shake out the raisins, she says, shake them out, God-hup helpyou!
I bounce slightly on the bed as she lets go of me.
She stands back. Arms akimbo. Her chest rises and falls.
Lighter by the day, she says.
She extends the little hand to me. With her strong hand she extracts the stunted little finger from the bundle of fingers of her crippled hand. She keeps the little finger apart between thumb and index finger, in the air before my nose.
Soon, she says, soon I’ll lift you with my little finger.
…
The first seven years on Grootmoedersdrift. Every day of the month you adjusted yourself again. Took iron pills and ate radishes. Prayed and spread your legs for Jak.
During the day you worked yourself silly on the farm. Tennis elbow from cutting silage, wrist infections from helping with the milking, cramps in your calves from walking the contours on the steep slopes with the surveyor day after day. In the evenings you had to lie in the bath for hours on end with the mustard extracts that Ma had given you.
Why do you drudge yourself like that? Jak asked, you’re not a bloody slave!
He was furious when you were ill. You could feel it in the body that he rammed into you.
Modern appliances are the answer, Milla, he said, these aren’t the Middle Ages any more. Why churn on with lucerne and lupins and compost when there’s fertiliser?
It’s all about synergies, Jak, you tried to staunch the flow, a game one has to play. With nature. It’s subtle. Nature is subtle and complex.
Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift.
The deepest stone in the drift. That made you cry.
You’re a fine one to talk! Jak scolded. Subtle! Bah! Nature! And you can’t get pregnant!
I’ll go for tests, you sniffed, for treatment, there are modern aids. For men too.
Was that when Jak conceived his strange theories about you?
Over my dead body, he said, there’s nothing wrong with me. Nor with you. It’s in your head something is wrong. It’s because you wear yourself out like that, he said, just stop bawling, then things will come right, it’s because you complain about everything, because you flap about here on the farm with a long face. Where is the loving gentle Milla that I married? Look at you, pale as pale, as if you’re anaemic.
He thought you were putting it on when you said you were tired. Invited Beatrice and Thys in the evenings on purpose so that you should have to go and get dressed and made up.
Just see how much life there still is in her after a day’s toil, a real never-say-die, my little Kamilla.
And then he winked at you, and rubbed it in even further.
Just a short while ago she was hanging from a branch, furled like a bat, dead-tired, now she’s chattering like a finch. Goes to show what good friends mean to you here in the Overberg.
You saw Beatrice looking from him to you and back again. I’m here if you need me, she’d already whispered to you a few times, but you resisted her. She was more inquisitive than anything else. And greedy. For power, for status. Constantly comparing her husband’s position in the community with Jak’s. And the gossip over who was, was going to be or wanted to be chairman of this or treasurer of that. Mud-slinging. Jealousy. The secession of the Swellendam members of the National Party from the Bredasdorp branch was the latest, and how she’d had tea with the wife of Van Eeden, the new chairman. You in your own terms were not an item. Barren. Dry ewe. You felt that everybody was against you. Jak was starting to sound like your mother when he provoked you. And the gossips were agog for news from Grootmoedersdrift, for reasons, for scandal.
Ma was concerned on the one hand, but also critical of your childless condition. You could hear it in her voice on the telephone, sometimes sneering, you thought. Even so you phoned her every evening. With who else could you talk about it? She recommended traditional remedies. Like standing on your head afterwards, like drinking an infusion of stinging nettle.
Some evenings you couldn’t stop crying after putting down the phone. This infuriated Jak.
That mother of yours, he said, a violent tea cosy if ever there was one, cosy on top and down below she latches her claws into you.
Then you really cried. Jak was right. It wasn’t about what you could or couldn’t do. It was yourself, something in you that offended her. Your character.
I am who I am, how can I help it? you sobbed.
Jak slammed doors and stormed out of the house and drove off when you were like that.
Just don’t leave me alone, you pleaded.
You tried everything to prevent him from going. Played on his feelings, flattered him, nestled up against him.
Get out, out of my guts! he pushed you away, for heaven’s sake go and blow your nose!
But you knew that if he got rough enough with you, you could keep him with you. Then at least he was involved. You learnt to use his anger, the energy of it. It was less than nothing.
A smack in the face, a blow on the back.
Billing and cooing on Grootmoedersdrift.
You couldn’t stop crying about it all. Am I then never allowed to feel weak? you asked, but that only infuriated him further.
It went quickly. Two, three years. You no longer guided his hand over your body to teach him how to touch you. You were after something else. You bent your head and sucked him off and caught his semen in your hand and tried to inseminate yourself.
His preference in any case. I don’t want to see your face when you’re so miserable, he said. Often he didn’t even notice that you were crying.
You prayed every time that you would take, made pictures in your head of cells simultaneously shooting, a comet shower, a cataclysm, a fusion.
Why can the animals manage it so easily? Am I of the wrong nature, then? Comfort me then, just hold me, you pleaded at times.
But if he didn’t put a cushion over his head and turn his back on you, he took his blanket and went to sleep in the stoep room.
Weekends and holidays were worst, and the quiet times on the farm between seasons. Because then he wanted to go mountain-climbing or running or rowing, or to read his books by Ian Fleming and Louis L’Amour, always as far away as possible from you. You had to think up things to keep him on the farm. Painting, a new silage tower, large-scale yard clearance, the big compost project with the adjacent farms.
You saw to it that other people came to inspect the work at the most dramatic moment. When a project had just been completed, you arranged parties, lunches for the neighbours, agriculture days with information sessions for the members of the farmers’ associations.
Then Jak beamed in the glow of all the attention, his best foot well forward.
Let’s redesign the garden, you said, there’s nothing that makes a homestead look as attractive as a garden. You haven’t forgotten, have you, that you promised it to me, my paradise?
Don’t think I can’t see through you, he said, you’re more wily than the snake. That’s the only bit of paradise that there’ll ever be on this farm.
You thought, if we can’t be lovers, let us then at least be friends. Friends can learn to differ, even over paradise. But he was forever wanting away, to other people.
You tried to console yourself with work. When there was plenty of pressure on the farm, things that had to be done urgently and accurately, you were at your happiest. You liked working with people in a team, according to a fixed plan, with a predictable outcome, with a view to the long term. That’s the only way a farm can work, you’d learnt from your mother.
We can buy you an American saddle horse if the wool price is good, you said to Jak, or a new car if we sell the new Jersey heifers.
If you rewarded him, he helped you well at times. But simply to ask him for something, that wouldn’t do.
Why must I always hold your little hand in everything that you want done? After all, you’re the real farmer here, or so you’d have me believe.
It took you a long time to accept that if you wanted things done on the farm, you would have to think it all up yourself. And that you should turn to OuKarel and his son to help you take things in hand and make a start. They looked at each other and OuKarel wordlessly signalled to Dawid: Do as you’re asked to do. That Jak did not like. If he saw that they were helping you, he would make a show of lending a hand for a while. They soon discovered what was going on, pressed him for more pay.
They’d lost their sharecrop, was OuKarel’s argument, how was he supposed to support his dependants? Not that you knew who exactly he meant, he’d been a widower for most of his life, and Dawid was to all appearances a loner, but as Jak with time succumbed to the pressure and restored half of the Okkenels’ status by making them foremen on Grootmoedersdrift, the dependants came and presented themselves: OuKarel’s second cousins and their wives and children who couldn’t all live off the carpentry business that his brothers ran in Suurbraak. A never-ending influx it was. The houses were over-full, but Jak refused to build on and forbade them to construct shacks.
Do you want the whole mongrel rabble with their so-called Scottish surnames and mission-station affectations here on your front stoep, Milla? Over my dead body, he said, enough is enough.
You tried to keep the peace by seeing to it that enough bags of flour and pails of milk found their way over the drift to the labourers’ cottages. And you tried to establish goodwill by regularly going to buy a chair or a little table from the family business in Suurbraak. The five Okkenel brothers, all of them like OuKarel with the high brow and the green eyes and the sharp nose, looked at you with shrewd understanding and knew just how to fix a price that accorded with your feelings of guilt. With the passing of time you realised that it had been a mistake to abolish the sharecropping. It was their only source of capital for buying good timber for furniture and there was enough wheat left after they’d sold the surplus to supply the whole clan with bread flour.
Jak would not hear of reinstating a sharing. He dreamed of a completely mechanised farm that would require only one or two pairs of hands.
There was never a contract, he said, your mother kept the people here for her own convenience, we are under no obligation. The fewer of them the better.
You were ashamed of the attitude. Where were the people to go? It was their land as well, after all, their place, and they also had to work and eat.
Why did you keep your mouth shut, Milla? What were you scared of? Why could you never think that there were other possibilities? And Jak, why did you tolerate his bluntness and his selfishness and his vanity? You were bemused at the time by the short stories you read in the magazines. The heroine who exclaims with flushed cheeks: Now I’ve had enough, now I’m leaving you! Otherwise not a single magazine would sell hereabouts, you thought. But you thought no further.
You tried to assess other wives’ husbands dispassionately and you couldn’t really see that you were in a worse position. Jak was still the most attractive and the most intelligent of the lot. Not one of the women you knew was ‘fulfilled’, as they said. You could see that in their faces. But they were unshakeably loyal. It was Basie this and Fanie that and Thys came first clap your hands. Especially those in your circle of friends. And yet everyone was always starved for company. Always somebody who wanted to listen. Not one of the women you knew of who didn’t get lonely on a hill-farm. Not that the exchange of commonplaces could keep you going.
For a few months at a time you could keep a reading group going, or a music-appreciation group, but the women sat taciturn in your sitting room. As if the music of Schubert and Brahms and Mahler embarrassed them. Bach was acceptable. Sounded sufficiently like church. The books that you lent them they returned unread to the half-moon table in the hall and for the rest spoke of patchwork and complained about their servants who stole soap.
What failed most miserably was the walking club for amateur botanists that you tried to get going. You didn’t know all that much yourself, but you’d inherited your father’s books on trees and fynbos and as child had learnt the first principles of plant identification at his knee. But after you’d invaded the foothills a few times with the little ladies, stumbling along in their Sunday-best shoes, and their dresses that snagged on everything, and the anxious out-of-breath countenances solely concerned about what they had to serve their husbands for supper, you gave it up. You were not like them, you thought, you’d been born to more adventurous ways.
But you lost the way the first seven years on Grootmoedersdrift, and the loneliness started getting you down.
Your mother was a last resort when you were too lonely.
Then take me to Barrydale, you said when Jak wanted to go away on his expeditions on public holidays or for long weekends after lambing time or sowing-time.
Not that you really wanted to be with her all that badly, because her you could never satisfy. She was even worse after Pa’s death. She set snares for you, to test you, you felt. The quarrels were even more intense than at home with Jak. Against your mother you had no defence.
That was the summer of ’53. Ma had problems with her workers on the farm. She made you feel you had to find a solution. You accepted the challenge, wanted for a change to show her one needn’t be a victim of circumstance, needn’t allow other people to become victims.
You’re making a bed for yourself, is what she said, when she heard what you wanted to do. You’re meddling with things you’ll never hear the end of.
You were standing in the pantry, 16 December 1953, you wanted to take food to the workers’ huts. You were standing with a cooked leg of lamb in your hand which you wanted to pack to take to the people.
What on God’s earth are you doing now? she inveighed. Are you trying to bribe them? and then I’ll be left with the mess when you’ve left.
That was the last straw. You started shouting at her.
So what will ever be right and good for you, Ma? I thought you wanted me to help you, I thought I had to help your people here, on your behalf? What do you want me to do then? I want to give you the best I have, my faith, my ingenuity, my love, my courage, the best years of my life, and you’re still not satisfied? Why can I never be good enough for you?
You were so beside yourself, you could have sunk your teeth into the meat and torn it apart, but you only lifted it up in your hands. This is my body, you thought. You dropped it at her feet. She folded her arms and looked at the meat on the ground.
Or do you want to take me apart and reshape me over and over again until I am to your satisfaction, to a T? Will I be right then?
You’re wasting food, she said.
She turned her back on you. You were incensed. You took a step backwards.
Then it rose up in you. You started saying it. You could not stop. She turned round when she heard the new tone. You spoke quietly, to her face.
Or is your problem that you don’t know exactly how you want me, Ma? Is that your real problem? Because there is no image on which you can base me? Because there is only a hole there where you are, a silent hole in the ground? Well, I am something, Ma, you hissed, I am not nothing, I am somebody and I know what I want from life and I know what to do to get it. I will provide for myself.
That was the only time in your life you’d ever seen her scared. Her pupils dilated and her mouth gaped, but she said nothing. You pushed past her. It was she who was left on her own in the pantry.
That was the first and the only time. After that she was different with you until her death.
I wash my hands of you, she came to tell you later that evening at your bedroom door. Just that, and closed her bedroom door.
You were alone with the plan which would change your life.
The whole story of how it all started, nobody knew except you and Ma. Not even you yourself understood it very well. All your life you’ve wanted to record it, just for yourself, to try to gain some clarity. But you never got round to it. It was a skipped chapter. You couldn’t bring yourself to do it.
…
threshold kerbstone step do they brood over these barricades dally dawdle halt camouflage the tread the stumble-step nightly from window to bed the foot that falters on the fringes of carpets the bump in the garden path how did it begin? was it all the comings and goings of my years right over the pebble in the shoe right over the heel-wart regardless of the toenail growing in was it the hot sand? that running with one sandal? that lunging-after and catching by the neck of the white-foot hare? was that where the germ entered my heel the iron around my ankle the black pound-weight swinging from the bridge of my foot? foot that drags foot that hangs foot that sleeps and everywhere that milla went the lamb was sure to go.
…
12 July 1960 8 o’clock (after supper)
What a day! Half restless. I have a sense that I’m forgetting something, but what? Have just gone and peeked if the light in the outside room is off yet, but it’s still burning. Jak says it’s the first time he’s heard of a skivvy’s room with electricity is this my interpretation of the Light we’re supposed bring to the Southern Tip of Africa. Simply put my foot down. She has to be able to see to read & to embroider how else is she supposed to occupy hrself in the back there in the evenings? J. looks at me as if I’m off my trolley.
The door is still open a crack as I left it behind me I suppose she’s drinking hr tea I suppose it’s all very new for her perhaps she’s washing hr clothes. Don’t know how she’ll get the blood out of the white jersey.
Honestly thought it would be good if she could work herself to a standstill before moving into hr room. Went this morning & put the brown suitcase with hr possessions on the half-shelf under her little table. Was at first tempted to surprise her & to unpack everything for hr like fairy godmother but had second thoughts. She has to be independent. In any case you have to find your own bearings in a new place perhaps she’ll see for herself now that hr old things don’t go with hr new things & perhaps she won’t even unpack them & forget all about them that will be best.
And I must also forget. Otherwise I’ll go mad. Or get sick. Can’t afford it now with the child in me.
Took the precaution yesterday of devising a whole list of things to be done today so that she can stay busy one shouldn’t have too much time to think on a day like this. First little routine chores with which to warm hr up sweeping the stoep washing dishes doing laundry & ironing & folding & packing away then the sheep-slaughtering.
I imagine that with the child I won’t have time to supervise personally. A. must become the slaughter-hand on Gdrift. Sent message to the cottages last night Dawid must teach her the basics & I’ll stand by so that he can behave himself. Ten o’clock this morning he’s standing in the kitchen door, no the slaughter animal has already been picked do I want to see it first he asks no I say tether the sheep in the shade & give water because I didn’t want to go too far away from A. she was still ironing shirts & sheets in the spare room & I had to show her how you get the collar smooth without wrinkles & how you fold the sheets.
Everything went reasonably smoothly with the slaughtering except for myself who felt unwell later on at the slaughter-drain. D. & two helpers brought the sheep closer a well-set little wether still half lamb from the little camp of hanslammers that we had to cull. Take it by the ear I said to A. don’t be timid she goes & takes the ear with the little hand & the wether stands & looks at her use your strong hand I say he’ll jerk loose & right then the wether steps back violently I give A. the knife in hr good hand & I say hold her hand show the way next thing D. is all giggly from being so close to the girl’s body & takes the wrong hand so the wether jerks its head & bleats & steps back & squitters a green splodge over D.’s shoes & against A.’s dress & her leg & the farmworkers roll around laughing & next thing the whole yard’s littl’uns are there hey-no shouts Dawid he doesn’t know about this if it’s going to work Mies.
A. is still too small for sheep-slaughtering. He must keep his mouth shut & she must learn everything I say she’s clever.
First lesson of sheep-slaughtering I teach her the animal must eat nothing for 3 days so that the gut can be nice & clean & the last day you give bran that absorbs everything that could still be in the stomach & it washes out easily now with all the talking the little sheep was all wild but make it lie down hold it down I say. So D. ups & says usually I get hold of a little sheep like this from behind in the camp before he knows what’s happening to him his throat is cut while he’s still standing & thinking it’s Christmas in the lucerne flowers then when you eat him his meat is sweet because he was never scared.
That’s the second lesson I teach hr: sheep that get panicked before they’re killed have bitter meat they secrete something from the adrenal with the fear so never dawdle with the killing so then they cast the sheep & held its neck over the edge of the cement furrow & the little wether struggled something terrible it can’t carry on like this I thought now I count to three I said to A. her eyes bulging in the sockets come nearer says D. Oh come nearer oh all ye children of the Lord the kitchen-girls sing bend says D. to A. he grasps her hand in his & quickly they draw the blade over the wether’s throat the blood spurts everywhere. A. stands back & the knife falls from her hand & rolls down the incline of the slaughtering-floor no-no-no I say you don’t throw away your knife like that climb in there & take it out the workers kill themselves laughing there you are Arsgaat check that farmgirl they shout. Be quiet I say the dogs lick the blood from A.’s shoes she stands stock-still D. goes to pick up her knife & presses it into her hand. Saar comes with the white enamel basin the workers yell catch the blood eat the meat the wool is white the meat is sweet give over I scold it’s hr first slaughtering-turn & then the little wether’s eyes roll back in its head & its upper lip retracts & the ridges on the nose smooth out & the ears lie flat I show A. all the signs & right there the wether’s body contracts into a lump & he gives an almighty kick against her shins all the hands let go & he lets fly another splodge all over her feet.
Take note of lesson 3: You don’t let go of the feet too soon it’s a convulsion kick it’s a death-throe & the animal is half-dead but that hurts the most.
And there I see Jak standing hand in the side & watching the whole business. Now that looks prosperous to me Milla, he says: Butcher baker butler then you can make her head-girl over a hundred. If only he’d rather attend to his own business it’s after all entirely at his insistence.
Have just gone to peek again if the outside room’s light is switched off yet do hope everything works out right with hr there in the back I feel all the time as if I’ve forgotten something.
10 o’clock
Everything quiet windows shut tight back there must be sleeping I can’t get the slaughtering out of my head after all it’s just ordinary sheep-slaughtering. Why do I want to write up everything? Did I leave something undone? Didn’t I teach her everything, step by step? Not easy but everybody must go through it the first time.
Lesson 4: Bleed well till empty otherwise the meat is spongy.
Lesson 5: hygiene. Provide a cloth & water you can’t slaughter if you’re covered in sheep manure look how the flies swarm. Bent down there heavy of body as I am & washed the sheep manure from her legs & shoes & next thing her knees start jerking fits fits yell the littl’uns be quiet I say no more from you or you don’t get any lung.
I took her hand with the knife & I bent behind her & I started cutting open from the gash in the throat. Had some trouble with the sternum now you & D. carry on alone I say to A., & press the knife in her hand sing I say to D. so that she can take some strength sikketir sikketir sikketeat sings D. the lamb comes to the block with its wool & its meat sing along A. I say so that you can get some life but her mouth is a straight line & then suddenly she gets some life & she looks me a very straight look & she takes the knife.
Not to cut too deep I say here is lesson 6: We don’t want dung & piss on everything & she cuts shallow & clean all along the belly-line really quite to my surprise.
Then D. took her two hands in his & he pulled the entrails loose & the whole heap of guts fell out & I felt sick & went into the house but I vomited & had done because we were right in the middle & I couldn’t leave A. there alone, then they sorted the intestines so that she could see the dirty & the clean the pizzle & the bladder & the gall-bladder & the small intestine & the large intestine on one side & heartlungs-kidneysliver on the other. A.’s right sleeve by that time full of blood as if she’d been injured & I nauseous all the time & irritated with the circumstances & the spectators.
Lesson 7: The one place where you can soon find out whether a sheep is healthy is in the intestines. Look for worms in the gut & parasites in the lungs they must be nice & spongy & red & the liver soft & dark the right size like the fist of your right hand. Small & hard or waterlogged means there’s something wrong with the heart quite probably with the whole sheep the heart is the blood’s windmill I teach her if it doesn’t cast the whole animal dries out.
Made A. touch everything & identify everything. Just after a while couldn’t take the bloody sleeve dragging through everything any longer either you take off that jersey I say or we push that sleeve up but A. latches onto the bloody sleeve with her thumb. Dawid hangs the sheep under the bluegums from wire hooks in the heels so then A. can’t reach. He brings an apple box no I say it’s not strong enough cut longer hooks so then the kitchen-girls start singing oi oi oi five pigs in a heap, raise the girl or lower the sheep.
Shut your traps I say but they dance buttocks in the air all around A. her lip trembles & I say it’s just kitchen-skivvies don’t take any notice of them they’re getting only head & guts & tonight you’re having chops.
There the sheep is hanging cut off the head I say it’s dripping on her feet. So then I see D. first cuts off the ear & pushes it into A.’s pocket without notches not marked yet for slaughter as we do with the hanslammers. Saw him say something to A. which I couldn’t hear & I didn’t want to ask in front of everybody (must beware of intimate contact between A. & the men-workers).
Then D. shows A. how she should loosen the skin & push away the meat from the membrane & I hold it & at first it’s a struggle she cuts now too deep now too shallow. I say take your fist knead the skin loose from the membrane while you feed the blade & only then it improved a little the right fist in the white crocheted jersey a bloody stump looked as if it had been amputated but she persevered well even though it took three times longer than usual but then she knew all the cuts also from the neck to the loin & the groin & what one can best use it for, for braai, for roasting, for baking in the oven or for stewing.
Well done my little girl now you know meat. Next time we slaughter an ox you’ll get to be the prime butcher here on Grootmoedersdrift I said we’ll just have to think of something for that little arm of yours a butcher’s sleeve.