Noon silence. The floorboards in the passage creak. Is it somebody standing by the telephone table, shifting weight from one leg to the other? Or studying a photograph on the wall, or hesitating, overtaken by a thought, an afterthought? To-ing and fro-ing? Pro-ing and con-ning? The floorboards creak of their own accord.
There is nobody there. These are the sounds of an old house.
My house can make more sounds than I.
Sometimes I imagine that I can hear footsteps, swiftly from the front to the back all the way through the house, a hurried, peremptory tread in the mornings. At night, in the afternoon hours between two and three, a laboured pace, a shuffling gait, a walking stick.
As if somewhere a recording has been made of all the times that I’ve walked in the passages and rooms of my house, as if it were now being played back to me on a worn audiotape, a record without clear information.
What must I make of it? What is the message? I was intended to be an upright animal? Intended to stretch my limbs, delimit four quarters in the air, a golden section, my reach the compass of my intentions? Created to swim, to walk, to climb, sufficiently sanguine to attempt flight?
Here I lie. Drawn and quartered would be preferable.
Sometimes there’s a knocking on the rooftop, once, twice, thrice, four times, loudly as the roof beams contract in the night. Then I wake up and wonder who has arrived.
Who wants to come in? I want to cry out, who is there?
But there’s nobody there. When Agaat leaves me alone, like today, I am nobody. Between me and me no fissure of differentiation.
In the mornings when the roof beams heat up, there’s a tick-ticking above my head for an hour. As if there’s a pacemaker wanting to help me think, an apprehension that on my own I cannot shape into thought.
I am less than a roof.
I am a gutter.
I hear, sometimes, a rustling in the door frames. Woodborer it must be, mice perhaps, or cockroaches. Gnawings sifting down between the wood and the wall, mice probably, insects.
I should be able to impress upon Agaat to bring me a cockroach in a bottle so that I can see it scampering with its grey flat body, scrabbling with its feet against the glass. She’d find mirth in my envy of a cockroach.
My bed in which I’m tilted, makes my weight palpable to myself. My loose weight inside my fixed weight. Each time I can feel my intestines welter inside me. My heart in a basket, my guts a roll of chewing-tobacco tumbling about inside a crate. That’s all she’s done for me today. Came here to tilt me. Without a word.
My meat is unfairly distributed over my bones. The weight of my skeleton is my only honesty. My meat makes me cry.
I see the contours of my feet under the cover. My feet are logs. The tension has deserted my toes. My feet look like knees, my knees look like wodges, like half-loaves, my hip-bones form ridges and in-between is a basin. My chest inclines towards me, on either side of my breastbone there’s been nothing but folds of skin for a long time now. I remember the weight of my breasts, the shadow of my breasts.
Now light plays around me, a clod in a field, a shallow contour. It gradates itself over my heights and depressions, a crafty modeller. The cover is white, the shadows blue. The light sketches the railings of my bed around me like a barred cage. I am a skeleton within a skeleton, a crate in a truck, but I still have time, in me is my time, my wasting flesh preserves my time within me.
One should consist entirely of bone when the dying starts. But an animated skeleton. A skull full of flashes, a hand that hinges like a railway signal. One gesture must be granted you over the creatures that are permitted to die in innocence. And then you have to step back into line.
Darknesses slip along the skirting boards, light rings out over the floorboards, over the chrome, over the piles of white linen, over the jars and tubes and cloths. Stipples and stripes and spots. What is the time? I don’t want to know. In the front room the grandfather clock ticks.
My room limns itself from hour to hour, completes itself every day. My room is a perverse painter. I am the still-life. The fold in the cloth, the turned-open book.
I page myself to the outside. The sounds of the last harvest come to inscribe themselves in me.
It must be just before afternoon, time to unload the morning’s harvest and to make repairs and to draw breath, to rinse the itchy chaff and the straw from the eyes. The combine harvester that went out this morning comes droning back up the yard. The driver calls: Open up! The door slides open scuffing on its rollers, on its track of steel set into the threshold, the engine echoes darker with the rolling-in under the roof. Here comes the first tractor now, I can hear it’s pulling a wagon full of bales. The second tractor is hauling a wagon full of sacks, it’s labouring harder. To judge by listening, it sounds like a year of hefty weights.
They’re shouting in the yard. They call: Carry in, carry in! Grab hold! It’s Dawid and Kadys and the new man, Kitaartjie. I hear a bakkie. That must be Thys coming to cast an eye. Towards the back in the caverns of the shed there’s a ting-tinging of ball-peen hammers. I know the sound. They’re clinking new blades onto the red harvester’s cutting-rod. The hay must be strong because the blades hop, the blades wear out.
Perhaps they can carry me out into the yard one more time, on a stretcher. They can fit my neckbrace and strap me in and stand me up under the wild fig-tree. So that I can see. So that I can smell the dust, so that I can see the black plume of diesel fume spurting from the tractor, so that I can assess the swing of the wagon on the drawbar, and count the bales as they are carried into the shed, and count the stalks on the back of the bearer, praise the one who will break open a bale before my feet so that I can see the density, the power, and the glory, the one who shall know to gather me a handful from the centre and press it against my cheek.
Somebody must bring the small scale before me and hold it up in the air until the hand stops quivering.
A bushel of Daeraad I want to see weighed, a bushel of Kleintrou, a bushel of Sterling.
And somebody must stand in front of me and take a mouthful of Vondeling and chew it for me and look into my eyes and I want to see the pupils contract as the grains crack open, and hear soft singing while the molars grind, hey ho, hey ho, yoke the oxen now. And as the cud starts to bind, I want to see the eye start to shine.
And somebody must bring a coop of chicks and enfold my hands in their hands and put chicks in my hands and feed them with the wild pulp in which spit and bran are stippled. I want to feel once more in my palms the chirp and throb of the body of a chick.
And somebody must wipe my tears and somebody must see to it that I don’t choke.
Because the map I must still see.
They must unroll it in the dust and place stones on its corners so that it doesn’t roll shut. Four red-blue shards of shale.
They must remove the brace so that my neck can bend.
They must take my head in their hands so that it doesn’t become too heavy, and lift it up and lower it as the rod points on the map and the hand points over my world, so that I can see the map of Grootmoedersdrift and its boundlessness. The blue waverings on paper of the Korenland River to the west, from the Duivenhoks and the Buffelsjag on the east, the dense contours, fingerprint-like, of the Langeberg in the north and the Potberg in the south. The square dots of the encircling places: Suurbraak, Heidelberg, Witsand, Infanta, Struisbaai, Port Beaufort, Skipskop, Malgas, Swellendam, Stormsvlei, Riviersonderend, Caledon, Bredasdorp, and Barrydale just over the Tradouw and Montagu and Robertson and Worcester.
And amongst the mountains and towns and rivers, with the straight red line of the bypass traversing its body, the extent of my farm. The dotted lines of the boundaries, the white dots of the beacons, the green of bushes and orchards and the gardens in its domain, the silver dams, the number of watering-places and stored waters on the dryland, the stables and the sheds and the kraals. The grass pasture next to the Klip River and the lands, the camps for the lambing and the summering, the plots of fallow land, the shallow basins where the sheep sleep, and the black shadow of bluegums.
Between the land and the map I must look, up and down, far and near until I’ve had enough, until I’m satiated with what I have occupied here.
And then they must roll it up in a tube and put on my neckbrace again like the mouth of a quiver. And I will close my eyes and prepare myself so that they can unscrew my head and allow the map to slip into my lacunae.
So that I can be filled and braced from the inside and fortified for the voyage.
Because without my world inside me I will contract and congeal, more even than I am now, without speech and without actions and without any purchase upon time.
I pile up three breaths. With my chest I create an incline. The hand-bell that Agaat put under my hand rolls from under my palm with a tinkling. First it falls against the iron railing and then further, onto the floor.
The farmers in the vicinity liked inviting you and Jak to their parties, the glamorous, chic, childless couple of Grootmoedersdrift. And if you invited them back they were all too eager to accept. There were harvest festivals, wool festivals, water festivals on Grootmoedersdrift, a festival of triplets in the lambing time, a festival for the new tower silo with automated mowing-trunk and conveyor belt. And your parties were always the swankiest in the region.
Jak was urbane and talkative at these gatherings, as always appreciative of you in front of guests. The festival fairy he called you. Not that he ever lifted a finger to help you. As a matter of fact, nobody knew how much the success of those dinner parties in the late ’50s on Grootmoedersdrift owed to somebody that you could count on at all times. Everybody assumed that it was Jak who was supporting you. Nobody could have guessed that the farming didn’t interest him much. And nobody knew that it was to the back room that you went for comfort when he left you on your own.
You saw how they fell for him, the flocks of twittering wives and the freshly scrubbed young farmers. He was the pièce de résistance at every occasion. You recognised yourself in them, in the way they couldn’t get enough of him. You could see what they were thinking. How did she contrive it? How can a woman be so lucky?
Their eyelids fluttered at the sight of Jak’s new cars and lorries and implements and innovations, his imported stud bulls and rams. They ogled his fine Italian shoes and the cut of his trousers, and blushed at the casual way in which he turned back his shirtsleeves once over his tanned wrists. All this while you were lightly conversing about books and music, just enough to bind the company around the dinner table while yet leaving everybody free to indulge their flights of fantasy around Pretty Jak de Wet.
That suited you fine. You didn’t want to draw attention to Jak’s weaknesses. You wanted to show to advantage yourself. Your job was to camouflage him. Because apart from his toastmaster’s jokes he didn’t have much in the way of conversation. Boast, that he could do, and wittily comment on what he’d read in the papers, the plans of the Party he could explicate, and the mechanisms of his implements, but he was too light-weight for you. Often in that sitting room resounding with laughter, you bit your lip. You wanted him stronger, more independent, less transparent, you wanted him to possess more of himself, of his own substance.
What did you want him to be? An anchor post? A trailblazer? A source of insight? How could you expect him to understand that?
You didn’t understand it yourself. You could only hint and squirm. You were in the shade. That was what angered him without his knowing what was bothering him, this: That you replaced his guts with your own projects.
But when did you start to see it in this light? Not with so much clarity in those first twelve years.
You wanted a child.
And for that he was good enough.
Because that was something you didn’t have. It was in him. His seed.
1 January 1960. The day that you heard that you were pregnant you’d been invited to a New Year’s party on the neighbouring farm Frambooskop for the welcoming of one of the Scott brothers who’d returned from Rhodesia to take over his father’s farm.
You didn’t want to tell Jak immediately. You were all a-flutter. You put on your prettiest dress, a black one with a low neckline and bare shoulders, with sleeves that fell open when you lifted your arms. You’d last worn it on the evening of your engagement. It still fitted you perfectly. It made you blush.
You felt eyes on you, eyes that interrogated you, a face that was unsure of this new mood of yours. But you kept the secret.
Who laid a hand against your arm as if your temperature would warm her? Who touched the hem of your dress? Who twirled over and over again in her hands the tubes and jars and lipsticks that you’d taken out to beautify yourself? Was there somebody who could guess something and wanted to share in your excitement?
No, you were alone. You wanted to be alone. You became a different person. Everything altered in interest and in scale.
Twelve years you had waited, twelve times three hundred and sixty-five days. So you made the sum for yourself over and over again while you were getting dressed. Why should it have happened now suddenly?
The doctor had phoned an hour earlier with the news.
Good news for the new year, he’d said, I had to go and collect something from the consulting room and then there was the result from Cape Town. Just be careful now, my little woman, he said, you’re a few weeks gone already, remember no emotional upsets, not too much movement in the first few months, no lifting heavy objects, not too much alcohol, not too much rich food, pregnant women are inclined to heartburn.
You took your time over your make-up and you couldn’t stop repeating it to yourself: After all the years, after everything that you’d had to endure, after everything that you’d undertaken, however good or bad, long after you’d given up all hope, the reward.
You smiled at yourself with red lips in the mirror. It had been worth the trouble keeping everything together against all the odds. You caressed your neck. You lifted up your arms and spun around to feel the fall of the sleeves, the swishing of the cloth. You couldn’t remember when last you’d done something so indulgent. It felt as if your limbs, the hair on your head, the nails on your fingers were inspired, as if your body vibrated, your body, always inadequate, always inferior, but now too much, too full. You were filled full with something that for once in your life you had not planned or calculated and of which the execution and the rounding off was not a laboriously artificial and forced affair, but an entirely natural process.
Good heavens, but you’re tarted up tonight, what’s got into you, Jak said when you came out onto the stoep where he was waiting.
You smiled.
My dear husband, you said, you look so good yourself in that tuxedo of yours and just look at the new bow tie!
You felt it coming out of your mouth. Like a noose it fell around his neck. You drew him nearer, pulled up his cummerbund slightly, adjusted one cuff link, dusted the shoulders of his jacket.
You started laughing. You couldn’t believe it. You no longer needed him so badly. You needed nothing and nobody as badly as before.
What are you laughing at? Jak asked.
Because you look like a model, you said, because I can’t believe it.
So, you think I look good? He inspected himself from all angles in the mirror in the entrance hall while you were grooming him.
Fantastic, you said, absolutely fantastic, you belong in a fashion magazine, in Paris.
Clay in your hands. And you could flatter him from pure generosity.
Pregnant.
He could not know it. He had caused it, but he could not know it with his body. It was your knowing alone. In you it was attached, a glomerule of cells that for three weeks already had been sprouting and dividing at its own tempo and with its own plan while you had been eating and sleeping and working.
You noticed that evening how other men looked at you. You looked back, nodded, smiled, felt that you had the right to enjoy yourself.
You look breathtaking, Beatrice came and whispered in your ear, is there something I don’t know?
And you look stunning, you said, how are your suckling pigs?
Jak darted you a look.
Over coffee the people at your table bickered over agricultural matters. The new owner of Frambooskop excused himself, clearly didn’t want to get involved in an argument at his own party. It was about profits and costs and optimal utilisation of soil.
Two-stage! Two-stage! everybody shouted and Beatrice’s Thys beat out the syllables on the table with his hand. Wheat, fallow, wheat, fallow, or, better still, wheat on wheat. With the new fertilisers one couldn’t go wrong, was the consensus, bumper crops every year, it was an Overberg miracle. They looked at Jak, who was living proof of the miracle, even though after five years he’d sold the land that had treated him so well to start farming beef cattle.
Jak hit the right notes. The soil analysis laboratory of FOSFANITRA had impressed him from the start, he said.
Modest enough he could be.
With his gentleman’s hands he demonstrated. They could scientifically determine exactly how much phosphate, how much nitrogen, how much potassium one needed per morgen for a good yield.
Scientific or not, I don’t agree, you said.
Jak looked at you, taken aback. You felt yourself blushing, took another sip of wine, but you could also see the people waiting to hear.
That’s a mistake farmers can always make, you said, that they prepare a rod for themselves and their dependants with which everybody will be beaten one day when the wheel turns.
Ag, Milla, what rod and what wheel are you talking of now, my dear wife?
You laughed. He was so hypocritical. ‘My dear wife’ before the guests, my dear tarted-up wife who looks like nothing unless something gets into her.
You were angry, twelve years’ worth of anger. You intercepted quite a few covert glances. People didn’t want to say it out loud, but everybody knew that Dirk du Toit, to whom Jak had sold the land on which he had made his profits, was as good as bankrupt. You knew why.
I’m speaking of the wheel of Lady Fortune, you said, and I’m speaking of her assistants the moneylenders, my dear husband, they who make themselves indispensable by offering certain essential services and goods on credit, and I’m speaking of monopolies.
They waited for you to continue, the guests, they couldn’t believe their ears.
For farming that’s always a dangerous thing, you said. Here in the Overberg we’ve known it since the days of the Barrys. The lessons of history are there for those who want to take the trouble to study them.
You’re telling me, said one, I’m still farming today on a little triangular slice of the original round family farm. Staked out way back by my great-grandfather on horseback, a beautiful round farm. He was mortgaged up to his ears to the Barrys’ firm and when they went bankrupt, he lost all his land. From one day to the next he lost everything, he kept just a little sliver like that.
It was a freckly chap from Bredasdorp, a Van Zyl. His jacket sleeves were too short. His thick wrists covered in dense red hair protruded as he described a triangle with his hands to indicate the portion.
Oh my goodness, somebody exclaimed, a slice of pie, but that should be quite enough for you, Flippie!
People laughed at the naughty innuendo, but it didn’t help. There was muted grumbling. The director of the fertiliser business was within earshot and quite a few officials of Agricultural Technical Services gathered around when they heard the subject being broached. You thought, good, let them hear for once by all means.
My point exactly, you said. My mother still has an old five-pound note of theirs. A kind of bank they were, you remember. ‘Here for you, Barry and Co.’ is written on it. So much so that when the whole lot went under just about everything ground to a halt from Port Beaufort, the whole Heidelberg plain, the whole Overberg from Caledon to Riversdal and over the mountain all the way to Worcester.
Well yes, in these days I suppose one has to say Fertilise or button your flies. That was the contribution of one of the sallow Dieners of Vreugdevol.
The roar that arose drew more people to the table.
What’s going on here? We also want to hear! What’s the joke?
Jak was uncomfortable. He tried, but he couldn’t get up because people were crowding around the table. He fumbled with his bow tie, took large gulps from his glass.
Ask Milla de Wet! one called out, she started it. Ask Jak, looks like she’s got him under her thumb!
You were angry, but your secret of the day made you impetuous. Jak would just have to look after himself for once, you thought.
Look at the condition of the soil, you said. Thinner and poorer by the year. Just look at the dust when the wind blows before sowing-time, look how it erodes in winter. From sowing wheat all the time. From greed. And from worry. Because the bought-on-credit fertiliser still has to be paid off. And the Land Bank is squeezing.
That’s right! Round and round on the merry-go-round all the way into the ground!
That was Dirk du Toit, who’d bought Jak’s land.
Tell them, Dirk, I called, tell them what happened to you, you see they don’t want to believe me.
Dirk made a cutting motion across his throat.
Yes, I owed them. Then they forced me to sell all my wheat to them, at cost. Their idea is, it’s our fertiliser, so it’s our wheat. Then they sell it again, then they keep the profit.
Everybody started talking at the same time. Out of the corner of your eye you saw Adriaan, one of the Meyers brothers, owners of the fertiliser company, surveying the palaver, a parsimonious little smile round the corners of his mouth.
You tapped on your glass with your knife.
Listen, you said, that’s not all, the real point is this . . .
Aitsa! the little four-share plough of Grootmoedersdrift! Now she’s going for the middle furrow!
It was Gawie Tredoux of Vleitjies. He was United Party by birth and a Freemason and he liked you. He passed along a glass of dessert wine to you. You lifted it in his direction and took a sip, put your finger in front of your lips, indicated that you couldn’t drink too much. Oh come on, he gesticulated back and took a big gulp from his own glass. You put your hand on your stomach. So? he signalled with his eyebrows. Really? You nodded. He raised his glass high: Congratulations! Jak intercepted the exchange. You smiled sweetly at him before speaking again.
The real point is: The Overberg is the bread basket of the whole country. Remember: Good wheat and good bread, and the nation’s well fed.
She’s a poet and she doesn’t know it! somebody shouted and rapped on the table.
Jak looked away.
You knew of one more supporter at the table, the new young extension officer, Kosie Greeff. The little chap glanced around somewhat anxiously when he saw that you wanted to say something. His wife looked at the glass in your hand. Beatrice as well, all the women at the table thought that when a woman opened her mouth like that in male company it had to be because she was tipsy. You’re welcome to look as much as you like, you thought to yourself and smiled at Beatrice.
It was young Greeff who’d convinced you of the new rotational system. He was having an uphill battle in the region. Now he was red in the face because it was his area of expertise that had cropped up in discussion.
Mrs de Wet is right, he said, and what’s more, gentlemen, the soil problem in the hill country is a bigger problem than the so-called colour problem.
I agree, you exclaimed. You were in full flow now, you could hear you were preaching, but you kept at it.
You can’t take more out of the soil than you put into it, you said. And here we are now, a little group of people at the southern tip of Africa in the process of totally destroying this national asset within the space of a few decades. All the fertiliser crops may make you rich, but it’s not a long-term investment in the soil. Fallow is the answer. It’s a tradition born of respect for nature. In a state of pseudo-death you restore your substance. Even a frog knows that.
Hear hear! the people shouted.
Froggy went a-courting and he did ride, red-faced Flippie sang with a suggestive fillip to his voice.
A commotion erupted.
Beatrice looked at you dumbfounded.
Milla, please, stop, you’re making a fool of yourself, Jak said under his breath, his voice hoarse with irritation.
Give her a chance, chaps, Gawie shouted, such an opportunity you won’t get again soon!
You fixed their eyes as you spoke.
It’s the rhythms of nature that you have to respect as the Creator determined them. That’s what agriculture should be based on. This new greed is barbaric, it’s a form of sacrilege.
And then a thought came up in you and you said it before you thought about it. Perhaps the sips of wine together with your exhilaration had gone to your head.
If a farmer clears and levels his land year after year it’s as good as beating his wife every night. In a manner of speaking, you added, but the words were out and they had been spoken.
You saw Beatrice gasping for breath and putting her hand in front of her mouth.
A heavy silence descended.
Gawie came to your rescue.
Food for thought, chaps, definitely food for thought, let’s hear what Thys wants to say, he looks as if he’s going to burst a blood vessel if he’s not given a turn.
Now it’s enough, Jak hissed, now we’re leaving, you and I.
At the door Gawie greeted the two of you. You he kissed on the cheek and pressed your shoulder.
Congratulations, Jak old friend, you married a first-rate wife, look after her well.
He shook Jak’s hand emphatically, but Jak didn’t know what it was all about. He released his hand quickly.
He got into the car and slammed his door without opening the door for you. Of that he normally made a big show in front of other people.
It was rally-driving all the way home.
Good God, you, Jak swore, think you know everything!
At home he staggered out of the car and urinated against the first tree. He swayed on his legs, he was so drunk.
Your mouth is too big! he shouted as he entered the front door.
You went to your room, heard him pour himself a whisky from the carafe in the sitting room. He came to look for you in the bedroom, came to stand in the doorway, and glared at you.
Jak, I have something to tell you, you said.
So, and what could that be? That you have something on the go with Tredoux?
Jak, he’s our friend, he was just congratulating you.
And on what, may I ask? On your speech? What gives you the idea that you can sit and preach to farmers on how to cultivate their lands?
What must they think of me? You and your mother, you’re tarts of one crust, you think you know it all. How am I supposed to show my face ever again at the fertiliser company?
Jak, I said, I can’t help your feeling like that.
Come here, you said to soothe him.
He stood in the middle of the room plucking at his clothes.
And that soil is like a woman whose husband beats her! What kind of crap is that, I ask you? You’re looking for it, you know it, you’re looking for me and you’ll look for me till you find me!
Yes baas, you said to him.
He wasn’t used to that. You stared into the slap without ducking, straight into his eyes.
Jak, you can’t do that to me any more, you said.
He shoved you back onto the bed.
If you want to be my soil, I’ll do on it as I want to. Slapping is nothing! Shoving is child’s play! Now tell me, pray, what kind of soil are you? Clay, perhaps? Dirt? Shale? A bloody rock-ridge? Come on, you’re supposed to be the expert here! Grade yourself for us, perhaps it will be of use to the man who has to plough you!
You got up from the bed. He knocked you flat again.
What does one do with soil, eh? What does one do with it?
You drive a post into it, you grub it, you quarry out a dam! Or you dig a hole for yourself and fall your arse off into it. That’s what happened to me!
He approached threateningly. You held your arms around your stomach. You saw him noticing it. You altered your gesture, you stroked your abdomen.
Jak, you said and put your foot on the arm of a chair, you pulled your dress up into your groin and started undoing your suspender, won’t you please undo my zip?
Do it yourself, he mumbled.
But from his tone you could tell that you had him where you wanted him. You didn’t even have to look in his direction. He stood rocking on his legs, glared at you with bleary eyes.
You undid the zip and stepped out of the dress, unfastened your other stocking and slowly rolled it down your thigh while you looked at him. You slid the straps of your black petticoat over your shoulders and went and lay down on the bed.
What does one call that? So spread open? You wanted to feel it, his powerlessness. It excited you to wait for it. You felt you had the advantage, for the first time.
He was very rough. He just unzipped his trousers and half pulled you off the bed. On your knees against the bed he forced you. He tore your petticoat and gripped your wrists. You turned your head to see it.
Look in front of you! Look in front of you! he yelled and slapped you against the head.
Jak, you should be ashamed of yourself, you said. But you heard your voice. There was a kink in the words. You were in it together, in the shame.
Whore! Jak shouted, whore!
You laughed, that was what you did. You thought you saw a movement in the mirror but there was nothing. There were only the two of you. You and your shadows, it was the red cummerbund, it was the rags of black petticoat over your white shoulders.
What are you looking at? he shouted.
He grabbed a footstool with one hand and threw it at the mirror and shattered it.
He rammed himself into you.
You fastened your hands around the back of his hips and pulled him deeper into you. You dictated a rhythm. For yourself.
Come now, you whispered, you’re still the best, come now. We’re made for each other!
That was what you heard yourself say. You wanted to feel it. Dry. Sore. Good. You had him where you wanted him, you were done with him, he was good only for decoration. To know that, was the reward.
I have something to tell you, you said when he was done.
He leant against you in a daze.
I am pregnant, Jak, you said, and if you ever lift your hand against me again, I will sell the farm and leave you and take your child with me and you will never see him again.
He was too numb to answer back. He half-crawled over you onto the bed and drifted into sleep. His penis dangled out. It looked like a piece of intestine.
A son, he mumbled.
He flung his arm across the pillow and straightened his legs, foot on your face where you were lying at the end of the bed.
You pushed his feet out of your face. You looked at yourself in the shattered mirror until he started snoring. Then you went and ran a bath and lay in it for hours adding hot water. You listened to the sounds of the house.
Before going to sleep, you picked up the shards of mirror and gathered your torn clothes in a bundle and threw them away in the bin in the backyard. The side panels of the mirror were undamaged. You turned the panels towards each other and inspected yourself from one side and the other. You couldn’t get enough. After twelve years of despoilment you, Milla de Wet née Redelinghuys, were going to be a mother.
You folded the wings of the mirror so that in the morning the damage to the central panel would not be visible.
The bigger you grew with child the more time Jak spent on his appearance. He became fastidious about what he ate, combinations of certain foods at certain times, power supplements that stood around in tins in the kitchen. You couldn’t keep up with cooking what he wanted and the servants understood nothing of it.
Then cook your own food, you said, and so he ate nothing but raw grated vegetables and macaroni. Every night before coming to bed he trained with his weights in the stoep room. Every morning and every evening he went for long runs in the mountains and almost every weekend since you fell pregnant he went off to take part in tennis tournaments or races. He became the Overberg long-distance champion and the Tradouw’s prime mountaineer. His only responsibility towards the world, he seemed to think, was that he shouldn’t get fat, that he shouldn’t with time come to seem coarse and heavy like most other farmers. His only bailiff was his stop-watch, his only judge the bathroom scale.
His achievements he displayed all around him. He kept the maps of Grootmoedersdrift in his new stoep room. If he could have lifted his leg like a fox terrier, he might have had his way with them. There they hung surrounded by his shelves full of trophies and mounted medals with ribbons in display cases, amongst his photos of himself.
The photos in themselves constituted a whole history of one man’s vanity.
Jak on graduation day in his gown, Jak at Elsenburg with the agriculture students’ athletics team. Jak with his first sheaf of short-stem wheat, Jak with the agent next to the new combine, with a glass of wine in his hand at the regional caucus of the NP, Jak on his Arab mare, booted and spurred for a horserace, Jak at a farmer’s day in his white clothes, leaning against his first red open sports car, Jak in close-up, in a studio portrait, brilliantined hair, smoothed back, charming Jak de Wet, the gentleman farmer. A dead ringer for Gregory Peck, as your mother used to say.
In the time of the fixing up of the new rooms you got into the habit of going into Jak’s office when he wasn’t there. Who is this beautiful man? you wondered. What has he got in him? Nobody can be so beautiful from the outside and so hollow from inside. Not even in a third-rate novel. When is he going to reveal himself? When is he going to show who he really is? You could tell that he was brooding on something, but what?
Over and over again you looked at the display, picked up all the trophies and read the inscriptions, removed the medals with their satin ribbons from the glass cabinets and weighed them in your hand, examined the photos from up close, touched all his strange hard apparatus and reins and harnesses, fastened and unfastened the buckles and belts, tried to budge the weights, smelt and tested the powders and oils between your fingers.
Perhaps there were other reasons for these sessions. If Jak, indeed if anybody, had had to see you in his room, they would have imagined that you were feasting on his fame.
That may be what Beatrice thought when she found you there one day. You hadn’t heard her approach. Then she saw you there in front of the photos, came and stood next to you, and produced a sigh, cunningly, now you think back on it.
Ai, Milla, what a wonderful man you married, if only Thys were like him.
You played along for a while.
What’s wrong with Thys? you asked, he looks like a real pillar of strength to me.
Thys, he, he is . . . hard.
But with you? you asked, with you he is surely soft?
Beatrice looked away.
What got into you? Did you want to shock her? Perhaps you thought your pregnancy gave you licence, gave you power, liberty to be open-hearted.
Pretty Jak de Wet is a dog, Beatrice, you said. A Doberman if you like, fine of build with a beautiful muzzle, but a dog nevertheless.
Then you told her about Jak, about how he treated you. She listened.
You told her everything about the painting of the cabinets and the dragging across the cement and the scratches and the bruises and how it had gone on over the years, and how he had withdrawn into himself, a time-bomb waiting to explode. She’d always thought there was something wrong, she said. The more you told, the less she wanted to hear, but you kept her there.
Why did I marry him, Beatrice? you asked, who is this man? The more I stare at these photos to try and understand, the more the mystery deepens.
Perhaps, Beatrice began, you could see she was hesitant, perhaps you wanted to share in his . . . in his . . .
Beatrice looked away. You waited for her to continue.
Perhaps you’re dependent on his . . .
She took her handbag, left her sentence hanging in the air. You changed the subject.
No, you said, don’t go yet, it’s your turn now, you talk to me now, I also guess my guesses about you, you know.
And then you saw it, how she clammed shut, how the defensiveness came over her, over her mouth and into her eyes. More than defensiveness, disgust, judgement. Of you, not of Jak.
I shall never talk out of the house, Milla. Marriage is holy and it’s private. Everything depends on that. Thys has his faults but he’s a good human being, a good man, and I stand by him through thick and thin, as I promised before the holy Lord.
On her heel she turned and walked out. You went and sat on a chair there in Jak’s room, in his display case, as if his displayed wares had to forgive you for what you’d let out of the bag. What dark mood was it that drove you out of there? You took his camera that was lying on his desk, and went looking for him.
You found him in the implement shed with the new ripper. You walked across the yard slowly, your body was big, it was a month before Jakkie’s arrival. The plough had been delivered that very morning by the agent of International Harvester. You had a good reason to go and look for him because lunch was on the table. The shed was dark, you stood still for your eyes to adjust. Jak was standing caressing the seed hopper of the new plough. His lips were moving.
Soilmaster, you heard him say. The word sounded clearly in the shed. He squatted into the backside of the plough, his eyes closed while he played his hands up and down over the teeth.
You wanted to turn away and leave, you held the camera behind your back, but he’d already seen you.
Milla, he called after you.
Come and eat, you wanted to say, but then you said something else.
Then you said to him, move the plough out under the wild fig, I want to take photos. And you walked back to the house with your heart filled with dark feelings and you paged through his wardrobe until you found an olive-green shirt.
This will show off the red of the plough more clearly, you said, they’re complementary colours, red and green.
And then you posed him, like this and like that, and you aimed from below and from above, from near and from far, full and half and quarter profiles.
Smile, you said. Pensive. Say cheese, sing, happy days are here again, sing, I talk to the trees.
The farm kids also wanted to be in the photos. They swarmed all over the plough like bats and fiddled and fidgeted everywhere as if they might find something edible there. And then Jak said abruptly, that’s enough, he was tired now. Certainly the first time that you’d heard him say that of a photo session.
When at last you were seated at table, he looked at you, pale-faced, said he felt terribly exhausted, he hoped it wasn’t his heart, and then went to lie down without eating.
You sat there for a long time over the cold food, a taste of iron in your mouth.
…
easter it is easter I want to say let us bake a cake for the twins for the triplets and for the quadruplets of the four we shall gather the tiniest the little one who was last the one lying with her muzzle just above the clover her we shall gather in our arms I want to say a name we shall give her of clouds a name of rain a name of autumn that drifts in quince trees she who is one of a quatrain of heaven earth god and mortal sweet we shall call her sweetling sweet-flour spit of mercy I want to say but I get mired my tongue up against my teeth eggs on the ground quips I say and queep and speet in stead of sweet and eater instead of easter and instead of honey money how did it come about? so it came in my mouth like the next minute like a thief in the night like the slow inclination of the underground clover-flower to place her seed next to her foot in the ground like the nocturnal rising of dough in my body it came like yeast the sleeping seed the dodder plant the white lamb that pushes out of me and disempowers me.
…
12 July 1960 11 o’clock at night
The more I think back on the day the more I feel I should perhaps have done the whole thing differently first talked & explained everything but how does one ever explain everything to a child?
She wasn’t at all at ease after the sheep-slaughtering this morning just stood there in the kitchen door right sleeve stretched smeared with blood & looked straight at me. Arrange your face I said we still have lots to do I thought take no notice take no nonsense but she stayed there chin on chest & and put one foot on top of the other & fist in the mouth. There, go & wash yourself I said see what you look like & stand up straight & take your hand out of your mouth & go and take off that jersey one doesn’t walk around like that. Next thing she throws her arms around her body the one arm over the other & I grab her by the shoulders Saar shakes her head & sucks her teeth as if I’ve now done something wrong don’t you meddle here I say & go & fetch my old red jersey in the bedroom she can’t walk around any longer in that blood-stained thing. And then A. doesn’t want to take it off in front of me so much for gratitude! So I gave her a piece of sunlight soap & said go & take it off yourself outside at the tap & soap it in so that it can soak & I gave her a bucket because I didn’t want her to go into the house then but she mustn’t go into hr outside room either. That would spoil all my plans right there & there she stands & she refuses flatly. I have another jersey like this one she says where’s my jersey I want my own jersey it has the right sleeve.
Simply had to talk over her objections because hr case with hr clothes was already in the outside room. So I had to think quickly to put hr in hr place & I quickly pushed my hand into the pocket of hr dress in front & this sheep’s ear? what’s it doing here? I don’t want to see any superstitions in you & then I threw the ear into the bin & then she looked so sad so then I said when you’re clean come & have tea there are ginger biscuits you were very good about learning to slaughter we all have to do things in this life that we don’t like & then I gave her my red jersey to take with her and to go and put on behind the house in privacy.
After lunch she polished the stoep & I instructed Saar to help hr next thing there they are singing together. Good sign after the business of the morning.
If I have a whip I must have a yoke
Hard at work’s the name of my yoke
Don’t let slip’s the name of my whip
Looksmart’s the name of my cart
Pair-of-socks is the name of my ox
Spick-and-span’s the name of my man
Meek and mild’s the name of my child
Love of my life’s the name of my wife
Next thing I hear A. teaching Saar a new line: Stand in the shade’s the name of the maid & All in a whirl’s the name of the girl piece of liver piece of lung food to keep the old man young. Heaven knows what’s going on in that head of hrs but she made good progress through the list looks as if she picked up some spirit in the course of the day. Praised her wherever I could.
Plaited onions
Took out potatoes
Weeded the vegetable garden
Took pumpkins down from stable-roof
Loaded cabbage & pumpkin in the trailer for market
At 5 o’clock she told me her hand was tired. Had seen it coming but I was ready for her: Nay what I said lots of work will make that hand of yours strong soon you won’t even know about it. Got a cup of coffee into her & pushed through till 6 o’clock & then said go and make a fire now we’re going to have a nice braai you can clean yourself afterwards you’re just going to be standing around in the smoke now anyway.
12 o’clock
Over-tired. Over-exerted myself can’t get myself to bed. Still nauseous shouldn’t have eaten that meat must be more careful. Hope A. has gone to rest she’ll just have to get accustomed in hr own time. Was fed at the kitchen table everything that we had for supper she’ll never have to fret about that fresh sheep’s liver in caul fat & chops & bread & baked beans & tomatoes. Didn’t want to put her mouth to the food do you think I want to poison you? I asked but the chin stayed on the chest.
Waited till she’d finished washing dishes then I said come see here in the back is a surprise for you.
Pity about the hinge not fixed yet so there the lower door scuffed garrrr over the linoleum. Showed hr nicely you just pick it up slightly & I switched on the light in there & the room looked a bit barer than I’d thought the bulb cast a dark spot on the linoleum & the bed looked too high (remember to find another apple box tomorrow to put in front of the bed).
So this is now your room A. I said, yours alone for your convenience it’s for your own good you’re a big girl now, aren’t you. And I opened the little curtain taterata-a-a! and showed the black uniform dresses. That’s all you’ll wear six days a week then you can save your house clothes I said & I showed they all had nice extra long right sleeves as she likes it & I showed I had specially sewn on broad white cuffs for her.
Explained about the aprons one for every day of the week. See that they’re always clean & stiffly starched & ironed. Showed hr where all the cleaning materials & ironing board & the irons are & the borax & the turpentine for the starch & the blue for the whitening. Underlined I don’t ever want to see stains & creases on hr uniform when she’s working in the house & demonstrated how she must take turns heating the little irons on the electric plate but not red-hot so that they scorch the ironing & how she should iron the aprons under a damp ironing-cloth. The caps were the most difficult. I said I know you don’t like things on your head but you’ll just have to like it or lump it. Asked her nicely she must put on a clean one every day & pin it up nicely. Do you understand? I asked because she was just standing there & staring in front of her. I thought I’d show her how to put on the cap & I said I don’t want to see a strand of hair.
It’s nothing to be ashamed of or scared. It’s as it should be. You’ll be my special help here on Grootmoedersdrift I said. My right hand in your case my left hand & I pinned the cap in place & she held her neck stock-still. The little face actually looked quite small under the white band. I wanted hr to look in the mirror but the mirror was too high & and I was afraid it would crack further if I took it down so I said look into my eyes how do you look to yourself?—like a smart Dutch house but she looked right through me and didn’t look for her reflection.
Close your eyes I said because then I really felt quite queasy but she kept on looking at me like that so then I pressed 5 pounds into her hand. It’s more than the other servants together earn in a month I said & that will be your daily wage & if all goes well I’ll increase it every six months a penny saved is a penny earned. Showed hr the savings book. Will teach hr how to work with it hrself I said but nothing made her excited or glad. Stored her first note in it. Put it away again in its proper place I said but she didn’t move. Cat got your tongue? I asked & put the kettle on the stove & I showed the rusks and everything.
Don’t be ungrateful I said & if you have something to say say it now don’t nurse grievances but the mouth is set in a thin line. Have a nice cup of tea before you go to bed I said & you can let me know if there’s anything more you want. Don’t you say thank you, then? What kind of manners is this? Didn’t feel like hassling further so I issued the orders instead. 6 o’clock in the morning she must be at her post in the kitchen & make me a nice cup of coffee in the blue coffee pot with the proudpourspout and for the baas in his room on the stoep & milk & sugar & rusks on the tray and I don’t want to see a long face.
Suddenly out of the blue she asked where are my things what happened to my things? I showed hr the suitcase under the washstand. Do you think I want to steal your stuff? I asked. But by then I was feeling really sick couldn’t get to the house in time vomited copiously in the drain there next to the kitchen my stomach in revolt I took a bucket from the kitchen and said at her door throw water in the drain and wash away the puke because the dogs will come and sniff at it there & when I left I said lock your door at night remember you’re a big girl now there are no-goods about.
Well then, more I can’t do for her salvation & my pen is almost dry. Must remember to buy a new bottle of Quink.
Half-past twelve
Did after all just go & peek through the nursery window into the yard & her light is still on at least the door is closed now but the bucket is still just where I left it & there’s a smell of puke in the air in the yard. It will have to be as it wants to be. Too tired to talk once again. Must get to bed now otherwise tomorrow will be too difficult. The child feels as if it’s pressing down in me.