Agaat’s footsteps, they’re different from when she wants to open the curtains, wants to open the stoep door. They’re always different when she’s setting her mind on opening my eyes. The tread of somebody who has a book in hand and is too burdened by the contents to read it to its conclusion, and yet feels obliged, compelled. Even though the ending is predictable and has been foreseen for too long.
That’s what it felt like the last few times when she opened my eyes. She couldn’t look at me.
But today it feels different. Have I at last been brought back to normal proportions? I’ve always felt too big and always too much in this bed, her expectations of me far too high. I’ve allowed myself to be influenced by that. Made my life, her life, more difficult than was necessary.
But today it is different.
Whom did I become for her overnight?
Suddenly she’s no longer measuring herself by me.
I wait for her to open my eyes for me. What can I give her to study? My blue irises, my motionless eyeballs, the white of my sclera, the black of my pupils? Not much more than that. That is what has remained.
When she left here in the night, last night? she closed both my eyes, the sleeping eye that she distended before the meal and the stare-eye that I can no longer blink or shut, caulked my limbs as if I were a ship, smeared pitch between my planks before she set sail in the embroidered garment.
Did I dream it? The white cap, the white gown at the black wrought-iron gate, the white ring-wall? The taking-off of the shoes?
Did I see it? The gliding passage between the headstones, the feet in the heap of black soil, the sinking away up to the ankles?
A ritardando on loamy clods, lento, lento sostenuto, then the looking down and the hesitation, the lowering into the hole, for a moment only the cap, a mainsail above the waves.
Did I invent it?
And when at length she was lying flat on her back in my grave there in the old family cemetery, was the night then a star-filled rectangle, the Bear and the Scorpion, the Goat and the Ram, the whole ream and the seasons stippled on the great hourglass of the firmaments?
And the Southern Cross, was it visible to her as it always lies above Grootmoedersdrift in the last half of December? Tilted on the rib, a cast anchor?
Was there a trilling? Did I feel the chill under my back? Was there an unevenness under my shoulders? Were my wings properly folded under me? Were the four corners of the Milky Way squared? And the sides, were they dug down plumb?
And the song? Did I hear it then? The song of which the ending is like the beginning? Arising muffled from a dark place?
A tree grows in the earth
And blooms in beauty—
O tree!
For hours it went on, sometimes at long intervals. I sang along, in my dream I could sing, a second voice.
And on the tree grows a branch,
a comely branch,
a lovely branch!
Later the words submerged in the depths soared up and from the heights floated over the yard, a great coloratura voice out of the mountain, words that tied the long rope of cause and effect together in a noose.
Then the child laughed,
a comely laugh, a lovely laugh!
Then the child laughed with the woman,
the woman sits on the bed,
the bed comes forth from the feather,
the feather comes forth from the dove,
the dove hatches from the egg,
the egg lies in the nest,
the nest is on the branch,
the branch grows on the tree,
the tree grows in the earth,
and blooms in beauty—
o tree!
In my end is my beginning. Now it’s morning.
A new sound!
The new footfall of Agaat, as if she’s lost weight overnight.
What do I hear? The locks of a suitcase being opened, old-fashioned sprung clips that click as if they’ve been oiled? When is she going to approach and open my eyes so that I can see what’s happening?
Her shadow falls on my bed, on my skin. Out of the coolness materialises a hand. How light her hand is on my forehead! And now on my cheeks, how different are her palms!
They are poised now for the final chord. For the last kneading. As good as it gets, they say. No more we can do for you. A bread is a bread mixed like that and risen like that and at some point it has to be baked. And music isn’t music if it carries on for ever. There’s an introit and an amen. That’s the minimum for a mass. Even the fantasy for solo harp has to conform to the requirement of closure. Once touched, once sounded, even the last note must eventually die away.
Here we have now the taking-off of my eyepatches, the pulling-off of my plasters, the casting-off of the cotton wool. Shaft by shaft the light opens up. Pale red is the dawn behind my lids. The pitch is soaked off with cool wet swabs. And here are her finger-tips now on my eyelashes. To pull them apart. To risk it. As I taught her.
She arose out of that grave of mine last night.
She went up into the mountain. Now it’s my turn, now she’s coming to fetch me from the water. I strain to keep up, to get where she is, to do my bit.
Ag, that I could speak now! I would want to ask her if she remembers. The butterflies we picked out of pools. After the showers that fell so unseasonably that first year after I got her. Too heavy to fly, trapped by the rain. We took them out of the mud, blew on the stuck-together wingtips until we found fingerholds, carefully, carefully like wet scraps of tissue paper we pulled the wings apart so that one shouldn’t come off on the other.
Slowly we did it with much tsk-ing and ai-ing from me, because she herself wasn’t yet speaking then. For hours on end we kept at it there with the dripping of the last drops and the calling of the frogs in our ears. We placed the butterflies in the sun, dozens of them, as we opened them up, on the earth wall of the irrigation furrow. Then we sat down on the other side with our chins on our drawn-up knees and waited.
Who’s the first to see something move, I played with her. We stared fixedly. As if dead the little creatures lay.
I wasn’t sure. I was taking a chance. I remembered vaguely from my childhood that it could work. I saw her looking at the half-dead little things in the puddles, with a sullen face, her chin far out, her lips pursed, as if she’d prefer to step on them.
It took half an hour.
First the colour returned. Some were orange and white and black, others yellow and black and blue. Then one stirred, then another, then two, three, till the whole wall seemed to be breathing with wings opening and shutting.
See, I signalled to her with my eyes, you didn’t want to believe me!
Then she smiled.
I remember the day. She must also be able to remember it, she read it out, quite recently, from my diary. February, 28 February 1954. Would she still be able to remember it? Her fingertips on the lashes of my upper lid?
That was the first time I saw her smile. With the chin drawn in and an inward pinching of the little lips, a reluctant smile, but it was a smile. I looked away not to embarrass her further. But I remember thinking it was a miracle. I saw more colours than there in fact were because everything was swimming before my eyes. First one butterfly flew up, then two, three, then all together in a cloud shimmering over our heads before they eddied up next to the quince avenue, and then in amongst the trees of the old orchard.
Now it’s my turn. My upper lash is pulled up, fingertips pull down the lower lid. My eye is lost, I can’t find the seeing-slit.
Up, Agaat whispers, look up!
She presses on my eyeball, light rolling movements upwards.
Come, eye, come!
There it is!
I see you!
And I see you!
In the staring eye she puts some drops. The lids of the other one she sticks open, above and below, with strips of plaster. At first her eyes are only on her hands where she’s working. She takes her time. I wait for her to look at me again. Both my eyes feel stretched open slightly too wide.
I must look to her like an extremely surprised person.
That brown case full of my things, remember? It was as if I’d buried it there yesterday. As if it’d been sulphured.
I can’t close my eyes to listen better. I must look at her, her face is right above mine. She looks at me as one would look at a dam full of water. She doesn’t prick through my cornea. She doesn’t penetrate me with a blunt object. She doesn’t fish in vain for the end of the rainbow.
She’s accepted that it’s beyond her, me and my dying.
She smiles at me.
I see my reflection in her eyes.
Everything is still there, she says, exactly as you packed it. Clothes, boots, ribbons. And shells and eggs and stones and bones, my lists, my story books, everything. Only the insects have disintegrated, and the pressed flowers are a bit ragged. And look here, even my sack with which I arrived here on Grootmoedersdrift. Do you remember? In the beginning you hid sweets inside for me.
To get me going.
I was terribly timid, wasn’t I?
And just see what else is inside!
Agaat places something against my cheek before I can see what it is.
Feel, she says, there’s nothing as soft as a moleskin.
She nestles it in my neck.
Even my wheel and my stick, she says.
She pushes the point of the stick into the rim of the wheel, rolls it over the covers over the incline of my body. I can feel it tracking over the skin of my belly.
Down the road to open the gate for me so long, with her white ribbons fluttering and her white bobby socks and her green dress. And her wheel and her stick.
My eyes can’t stay open like this for too long. You must be able to blink. And the mountains freeze in that moment. It’s life that passes in the blinking of an eye. While dying itself can last for an eternity.
Poor Jak. Never had time to pose. Flew through the air. Shrike-spiked on a branch. Never looked back. Stayed stuck in the drift.
Would I have preferred it like that? Instantaneous? Without deferment?
And Agaat, how would she prefer it if she could choose? On impact rather than this clearing-up and fitting-in, this emptying-out and filling-in, this never-ending improvisation? Hip-up hop-down in slow motion? With the bellows-book opened wide to blow out one long sustained blast of air, to keep the ember alive for as long as may be necessary?
What have we left of all that? Of all the twirling of the stick in the hole?
A fireplace, this bed, a stealthy little smoke arising.
A frock in which to bury me.
Sulphured conservation cloth.
Tried on and tried out.
A rat is what I smell!
I see it’s now been hung here next to my bed on top of the maps. Washed and ironed and starched. The white embroidery is luminous. If one were to turn it over, all the threads on the other side would be sewn back and tied down and worked away. Otherwise it wouldn’t be Agaat’s work.
I would like to ask, ag, if I could speak I would now like to ask: Do you remember how Jakkie used to sit by you when he was small? He just couldn’t believe that a picture could emerge from under the needle.
How do you do it, Gaat?
Do you remember how he persisted?
You couldn’t really answer his question.
You fetch it and stretch it and tie it together, you said, you prod it and prick it, you slip it and snip it, you slide it in cotton-thread frames, you hold it and fold it, you pleat it and ply it, you bleach it and dye it and unravel again, you stitch on the stipple, you struggle with pattern, you deck it and speck it in rows and in ranks, in steps and in stripes and arches and bridges, and crosses and jambs of doors and of dams, you trace it and track it and fill it and span it and just see what’s come of the cloth, a story, a rhyme, a picture for the pillow, for the spread on the bed, for the band round the cuff, for the cloth on the table, for the fourth dress of woman.
Will Jakkie still see me in it, Agaat? Will he remember me in it one day? Laid out and dressed in the Glenshee?
I think I recognise the weft. So it’s true what she said? My great present to her for her first embroidery lesson? For one day when she will have mastered the art?
My eyes are drying out. Will she add drops once more so that I can try and make out everything she’s embroidered there? So many tiny details, in places it looks like musical notation. A piece of sheet music? What could it be? If Agaat could compose? A symphonic tone poem?
Or programme music, like Carnival of the Animals? An aria for two female voices and farm noises?
But no, it’s not as pretty as that. Here around the central portion it looks like a page from a manual, a guide to dying, a do-it-yourself book with illustrations, all the information in captions around the body embroidered there in the coffin position, the hands already folded on the chest. A woman in a frock in a woman in a frock I’d be.
Ounooi, says Agaat, your people have come to say goodbye to you. In one hand she has something, I can’t see what it is. The Bible? With the other hand she beckons down the corridor. I hear the clicking of dogs’ toenails on the floorboards.
What must I see? To whom is she beckoning there at the other end of the passage? Come! Come! The dogs? Boela and little Koffie? Who? There at the door? Who’s there? Dawid, Julies with the drag-foot, Saar, Lietja, Kadys, a few well-grown young ones, a few little ones. All in Sunday best, a smell of cheap soap in the room, satin ribbons in the little girls’ hair, their mothers in floral scarves, the men with their hats in their hands.
So these are all the ones I’ll be farming on with here on Grootmoedersdrift, Ounooi, says Agaat.
Her voice is factual. As if she’s leading evidence. She’s showing them, I’ve been alive all this time, three years long in this bed. She shows I’m now moving on. She shows the reins, at the moment of changing hands.
Good morning, um, says Dawid. His cool light-green gaze rests in mine for a moment. He doesn’t know which one of my eyes to peer into. He rotates his hat in his hand.
Oumies, says Saar, we’ll look well.
Oumies was good to us, says Lietja. We will, we will . . . stay here under Agaat.
The message is clear. I see how they look at each other, how they assess it, the new order. We’ll have to see. We’ll just have to make the best.
I see the hands of the adults resting on the shoulders of the children.
Look children, look, that’s what it looks like.
The children are standing dead still, the little girls in their still new unbleached dresses, the unironed shirt collars of the boys, white against the brown skins. Their eyes are big. One of them is holding Boela by the scruff of the neck. The little dog is making whimpering noises under the bed.
Agaat takes up position at the foot of the bed. She looks at me.
It’s good, Agaat, it will go well, I wish you good cheer, and as much peace as is possible.
The ounooi says, Agaat interprets, she says thank you that you’ve come to greet her. You are all good people, she says. She wishes you all peace and prosperity, also for the coming Christmas and a blessed new year. She says that from now one you must be given two sheep every Christmas and a whole tolly as well and a vat of vaaljapie as always. She says she knows you’ll work well with me. Just as well as I’ve worked with her all my life here on Grootmoedersdrift.
Amen, says Kadys in a professional mourner’s voice. Amen, the others mumble under their breaths. Dawid squashes his hat on his head. A suppressed giggle? I see one child nudging another in the ribs. The group is starting to disintegrate.
Agaat opens the book where she’s been holding her finger. The cover is worn, dark blue. She announces:
From the section Soil and factors that can influence plant growth, from the chapter An unchecked danger, from the paragraph, The erosion process. Page three hundred and fifty-five.
It is written there:
Many of us will still remember that not so many years ago there were in certain districts very beautiful large and famous vleis covered in wild clover, vlei grass, and other useful plant species; in which there were also to be found pools and pans filled all year round with clean clear water. Surrounding these pans were bulrushes (Prionium serratum), sedge (Cyperus textilis) and other beautiful plants. Where are the vleis today? They have altogether disappeared and in their stead you find only a nest of hideous ditches, and where of old wild clover displayed its pretty flowers, there is now just here and there a hideous little bitter-berry (Chrysocoma tenuifolia). There is no drop of water to be found because the network of ditches forms such a perfect conduit that, as soon as the rainwater touches the earth, it is flushed away to other and bigger ditches that can take it away further until it ends up in the sea. This whole vlei area that once upon a time could carry and fatten more cattle than any other part of the veld, of the same size on the farm, can nowadays hardly feed a mountain tortiss.
She closes the book. She smiles at me.
Tortiss.
She takes her little scissors out of the top pocket of her apron, cuts a strip of plaster, sticks down the stare-eye. She pulls off the tuft of Vaseline-soaked cotton wool holding the other eye open. I feel the upper lid descending slowly. Firmly she starts singing. I feel her breath on my face. I feel the dogs bumping against the bed. A wet snout burrows in under my hand.
Abide with Me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.
Behind Agaat they fall in, drawn-out, they drag the notes, through bone and marrow, the women just about weeping.
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me!
Now everyone is transported by the power of the hymn. High rises Agaat’s descant for the last verse.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me!
…
The beginning you never recorded. You couldn’t bring yourself to it. It would take too long, you told yourself. A piece of explanation while everything was already in motion. Your marriage, farming with all its ramifications. There was in any case something cryptic about the beginning. You always told yourself, one day. When you’re not so busy. When you’ll be able to focus. When you’ll be able to sit down at your leisure and try to piece together everything as it happened. The whirligigs, circling on the dam, you still wanted to look up the scientific name. As if that would help. Gyrinus natans. Excuses, all of it.
Now you understand the actual reason. Or one of them.
It wasn’t meant for the diary.
Nothing about it was meant for a diary.
It would have to be taken up into the family saga direct: Grootmoedersdrift, farm, house, man, wife, child.
First child.
From the beginning. It was never a story on its own.
Especially not the early beginnings.
You thought you could make of the whole Agaat a separate chapter. You thought you could quarantine it in this way. As if it were a thing you could tend in an isolation-pen so that nobody need experience your failures and your mistakes at first hand.
With her you never discussed any of your considerations and sentiments around her adoption. You forbade her ever to ask anything about it. You told yourself that it was best that way for her own sake, that when the time was ripe you’d rather give her the whole record so that she could read through it herself.
But you forgot about it.
There were incidents that reminded you again of your resolution. But by then it was too difficult. Once you wrote the commission in the front of the first booklet, when things were going well, just after Jakkie’s birth. Another time, a few other times, you tried to conclude it, made a last entry, till it dried up of its own accord. One day you had all the volumes in your hand, arranged them in parcels, bound them with string and stowed them away and suppressed the thought that you’d ever had such a plan, such an intention, to hand it to the one whom it most concerned. You missed your chance. Again and again you missed it. In the end you simply wanted to get the whole lot out of the way. And because you could no longer move on your own, you told her to go and burn it.
And then your deathbed became the fireplace. Crackling with ripeness the time that accrued to her. Wind-dry the material. Your eyes and your ears the hearths into which she could cram the Quink-inscribed pages of Croxley Exercise Books. In a sequence determined by her. With so many omissions and additions that nobody, not even you, would ever be able to ascertain the true facts.
You couldn’t easily improve on her timing. Nor its presentation. Parcel after parcel she fetched the diaries from the sideboard, keeping the best for last.
Timing. That should have been the second name of the Lord. Instead of Providence. Instead of Mercy.
Timing. Chance. Coincidence. From the beginning it had flowed strongly though the whole history.
That week in 1953, mid-December, Day of the Covenant. The harvest was in, there was breathing space on Grootmoedersdrift. You wanted to get away from Jak. He’d caused one delay after the other again through his negligence with the combine. You wanted to get away from the squabbles and the slaps. You wanted to go to your mother. A week you spent with her and then you were ready to leave. You’d brought out your suitcases already.
Then she started talking, out of the blue, with the good God of Timing whispering in her ear, about the labourers, families you’d known since childhood, and who’d lived on Goedbegin for generations, the Septembers, the Louriers.
Maria Lourier is still there, she said, your nanny, do you remember? Piet’s dead, from TB they say. He just suddenly went into a decline and then he died off. She’s taken another husband now, one Joppies as they call him, but his real name is Damon, Damon Steefert, a man from Worcester with a long jaw but for the rest from the dregs, swears and drinks and batters and the Lord only knows what else, and there’s been a child come from it all, the wretched Maria, I warned her, she’s well into her forties. Things aren’t at all well down there in the cottages, perhaps you should go and say something, they do bad things with the child, all of them, a little girl, something wrong with her apparently, deformed or something, won’t talk, sits inside the fireplace all day they say.
Your mother’s feigned chatter. Did she know what she was doing? Did it dawn on her while she was bringing it up? You fancied that she was talking more slowly, as if she could feel something stirring, an idea, a plan.
You could have started saying something. You could at least have opened your mouth. But you were enthralled by the tale. A bad mother, a discarded child.
That was the story she dangled in front of your nose.
Was that how she sought to avenge herself on you? To ensure that you wouldn’t escape your portion of pain in life?
You remember the day well, when you set off under your mother’s watchful eye by the back door to the labourers’ cottages.
Be careful, it’s a holiday! she called after you.
There were cicadas chirring louder and louder the further you walked, devil’s thorns sticking to your sandals at every step, prickle-grass on your hem, the white-hot sun of the noonday hour, no shadows.
It was quiet around the cottages, the hangover silence of the Day of the Covenant, a stink of excrement hanging over everything. Skinny dogs lying around with flies in their eyes.
Maria was sitting at the back against the house under the fig-tree in a tattered dress, a warp around the mouth that you didn’t know. The two sons were there, Dakkie and Hekkie, your erstwhile playmates, with scars across their cheeks that hadn’t been there when you played with them as a child. They replied to your questions sullenly. Only once did Maria come half erect, only when you were about to leave, only when you asked so where is your new husband, and I hear you’ve had another child. Almost as if she wanted to prevent you from asking it, wanted to prevent its being discussed, she got to her feet and gestured vaguely and then sank back on the bench against the wall, chin on the chest.
The back door was ajar but you walked round the front to go in, you knocked and waited and then turned the knob and pushed open the door, took in your breath and held it when the smother hit you, of rotten piss, of vomit, of old sweet liquor, of unwashed human bodies, of cold cinders and half-burnt bluegum wood. At first you could see nothing, so dark was it in the front room, then through a half-open door in another room, a mattress on the floor and a coil of dirty bedding in which you could make out a man’s lower body.
Only when you pushed open a shutter did you notice the child, crouched in the corner of the blackened hearth with the knuckles of one hand crammed into her mouth.
You went on your knees in front of the hearth. The child was bitterly thin, the little legs full of scratches and bruises, her bony body visible in patches through the rags in which she was dressed. One foot was turned in and one little arm she kept pushed in behind her back. You found the child’s eyes, but only for a moment before she jerked away her head and screwed her eyes shut as if expecting a blow.
Never mind, I won’t do anything to you, you said.
The child started trembling.
I really won’t do anything to you, you tried again and extended a hand but the child pressed her head between her knees, and pulled the hidden arm from behind her back and clamped it around her head.
It was a deformed arm, thin and undeveloped, the hand bent down from the wrist, the fingers half squashed together, the thumb folded in so that it looked like a shell, like the hand that your father taught you to make by candlelight when you wanted to imitate the flat head of a snake.
You got to your feet and leant forward in the hearth-opening towards the child.
What’s your name? you whispered softly, tell the kleinnooi what your name is, won’t you? For a long time there was silence, only the child’s breath coming faster.
What do they call you? Tell me, then you come to me, then I’ll stop them hurting you, the oumies says they do bad things to you.
In the silence you heard the man groan and turn over in his sleep. Must I ask your father, hmmm?
Then you heard it, from the cavern of the child’s body where she’d stowed her head, a guttural sound.
Say again, I couldn’t hear so well, say?
You went still closer. Of iron she smelt, of blood, of soot and grass and through the holes of her clothes you could see the skin moving over her ribs. You saw the small spasm of the diaphragm as the child said her name.
Again all you could make out was a scraping sound.
Ggggg-what? you asked, that’s not a name, say it again for the kleinnooi so that I can hear nicely, come. Gogga? Grieta? Gesiena? Genys?
You turned your head with you ear against the child’s face and imitated the ggggg-sound. You could feel her breath on your face. This time you heard the ggggg clearly, like a sigh it sounded, like a rill in the fynbos, very soft, and distant, like the sound you hear before you’ve even realised what you’re hearing.
That was the beginning. That sound. You felt empty and full at the same time from it, felt sorrow and pity surging in your throat. Ggggg at the back of the throat, as if it were a sound that belonged to yourself.
You stood back and clasped your arms around your body. Something convulsed in your lower belly. You put your hands to your face as if you wanted to trace with your fingers the expression that you felt there to make sure.
You didn’t want to go home right away, wanted to hold it fast a while longer. In such a mood you could only arouse suspicion in your mother’s house. And you wanted to gather it, fold it away inside yourself in a place from which you could safely retrieve it, at night in your bed, in the half-hour of privacy while you were having your bath, on your evening walk.
You walked to the old dam, to the willow trees, the ruin of the little pump house on the water’s edge behind which you would be invisible. There you found a place to sit down, on a tree-root with your feet in the water, and tried to fathom the feeling, the vague sweetness and sorrow. The heat of the summer’s afternoon overwhelmed it, the dizzying sound of the cicadas, the call of the kingfisher on the dry branch in the middle of the dam.
From their grazing on the shallow side of the dam the ducks came swimming towards you. You closed your eyes, tried to melt yourself into the cloudy dark-red that one sees inside one’s eyelids when the sun shines on them.
Ggggg, you said over and over, as softly as you could, under the tone of the cicadas. Under the low chattering of the ducks, under the trail of the willow’s foliage on the bank.
When you opened your eyes the world was bright and strange. You held your breath. You were waiting for something, you looked down at the water in front of you. There was nothing except fine circles on the surface, the water insect and its little twin shadow, the hooked scribble-claws, broader around the ankles as if wearing boots, with also their reflections, and between the two sets of claws, between above and below, a single ripple inscribing the surface of the water with rapidly successive perfect circles, overlapping, circling against one another, fading away, starting anew, a weltering writing on water. A fugue it reminded you of. You could hardly imagine that it was the work of a single creature.
When you got home hours later, your mother was predictably upset.
Where have you been wandering on this blazing Sunday? Something could have happened to you!
Something did, you wanted to say. I myself happened, my almost forgotten self. But you said nothing and went to the pantry and hand on hip inspected the contents of the shelves while trying to steel yourself against the tone of her voice.
Milla, are you going to tell me what’s happening? Just look at your face! You mustn’t come and try your nonsense here with me. No wonder Jak can’t get along with you. What are you blubbering about now?
Your voice sounded heavy and shaky.
I’m blubbering about whirligigs, Mother, about the beauty of their existence, however insignificant, wrinkles on water, circles that vanish without ever having been anything, except that I’ve seen them.
What are you talking about in God’s name, Milla?
I’m talking about the fact that down there in the cottages there’s a child suffering in the most appalling manner, and because you know it and don’t do anything about it!
Oh, good Lord, I should have known! she said, all I meant was that you must tell Maria to get a grip on herself and tell her to get her house in order. Don’t interfere in the affairs of the workers, Milla! All you do is incur trouble and misery. Listen to what I’m telling you today. What are you looking for here in the pantry, anyway?
You’d opened the bread-tin already and had started cutting thick slices of bread.
What do you think you’re doing, Milla? That’s this morning’s freshly-baked bread, there’s day-before-yesterday’s bread in the chickens’ feed-bag.
You ignored her, took butter out of the fridge and started spreading it on the slices with apricot jam. You took the leftover leg of lamb from lunch-time out of the fridge and started carving slices from it.
You’re just creating trouble here, Milla. Tomorrow we’ll have a string of children in front of my door saying they want bread and they want meat. Where is it to end? The people know their place on this farm and I’m not going to allow your rashness to foul up my affairs here!
You brought the whole leg of lamb to your mouth, thought you wanted to bite into it and spit it out in her face. But you just lifted the joint in both hands and let go of it so that it fell on the floor by her feet.
Keep your meat then, Ma, keep it and guzzle it on your own while the children around you are perishing of hunger!
You were out of there with a basket in which you’d thrown the slices of bread, roughly stuck together, and a few pieces of fruit that you’d grabbed from the fruit platter in the front room.
Around the workers’ cottages everything was quiet. You went in by the front room and found the child there in same position. You placed the basket by her feet.
Here, just look what I brought you! It’s just for you, you hear? Eat it quickly before they take if from you. I’ll tell your mother not to bother you.
Maria? a man’s voice called harshly from the bedroom. You went out quickly and walked round the back where a bickering conversation fell silent as you came round the corner.
You kept your voice even and commanding.
Maria, I’ve brought food for the little one, see to it that she eats it. I want to see you at the house, tomorrow morning, nine o’clock, and you bring her along, d’you hear. We must have a little talk, you and I.
The woman gazed at you.
Have you understood me well, Maria, nine o’clock, not a minute later. And remember to bring back the basket.
I sound like my mother, you thought. You wanted to cry. You turned round quickly and walked home, straight in by the front door to the telephone, and booked a trunk call home through the farm exchange. You wanted to act in terms of the insight of the afternoon, in the spirit of the whirligig, you wouldn’t allow yourself to be put off your resolve, and you didn’t want time to pass over it, because you knew that the power of the everyday, the perspective of those with the whip-hand, could in the blink of an eye make the mere idea seem like the sheerest folly.
Come and fetch me, Jak, I want to come back. And I’m bringing someone with me, somebody who needs care, you announced later that evening when the call came through.
Just not your mother, Jak started.
My mother can care for herself, Jak, it’s the youngest child of Maria of Piet who was, she’s being terribly neglected here in the hovels, she’ll perish if somebody doesn’t intervene.
What nonsense, Milla! If the people want to perish, then they perish, why must I take responsibility for it?
You needn’t do anything, Jak, it’s my child and I’ll raise her.
Between you there was the usual barrage of clicks and beeps of the fellow-listeners on the party line.
When Jak spoke again, his voice was dry.
We’ll talk later, Milla, you obviously have no idea . . .
Never you mind, Jak, all shall be well . . .
I’ll be there at twelve tomorrow, and then I’ll want to leave at once, tell your mother I won’t be eating.
He put down the phone in your ear. You stood there clutching the receiver to your chest. Images rose before you, of you hand-in-hand with the child turning your back on Jak and walking away, of you glaring at him until he lowered his head and stood aside to allow you to pass.
Your mother came out into the passage. Without a word you walked past her and went to your room and started packing your things.
One by one you held your clothes up in front of you in the unsteady light of the generator: Floral smock, sleeveless summer blouse, full-length petticoat hemmed with lace, before you folded them and packed them in the case. The generator switched off. Through the window you caught a glimpse of a torch moving away from the house in the direction of the cottages. You thought of the child there, in the dark, amongst the people you’d seen that afternoon.
Open-eyed you lay in the dark amongst the cases on the bed and thought about what you’d say, to the frowning elders, to the little deacon of the farm collection in his black frock-coat, to the hatted-and-handbagged older women at the ward prayer-meeting, to George the Greek of the Good Hope Café, to sanctimonious Beatrice, to MooiJak de Wet arranging his cravat in front of the mirror before going out on a Saturday evening.
Your neat speech wouldn’t stand up, no matter how often you rehearsed it in your head: Here I stand, I can do no other.
The argument faded before your excitement. Your heart started beating so hard that you had to get up to drink water from the ewer, to light the candle and snuff it again, to stand by the open window looking out over the yard. Your heart. You placed your hand against your neck to feel the pulse.
Here we go round the mulberry bush, went through your head, one two buckle my shoe, blind man’s buff, you’re it, you must hide, you must seek, you’re out, ring-a-ring-a’roses, pocket full of posies, a-tishoo! a-tishoo! we all fall down, pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man, bake me a cake as fast as you can, four stand in the road four hang in the road, two gore you in the groin and one flicks away flies, what is it? Look at the clouds, do you see the cayman with its pointy tail and do you see the centipede, do you see the Magicman? And the swift-spit snake? Let’s count the horses stamping their hoofs behind the moon and the stars of the Southern Cross and of the Scorpion and the thirty-three fleeces of the thistle till we get sleepy, till we sleep. Outside walks a sheep. Iron on the hoof, pumpkin on the roof, down in the stable all the calves are fast asleep. Do you hear the rainman shuffle-shambling along the Langeberg? Do you see his grey sleeve trailing along the slopes? And the wind in the black pines, and the wind in the ears of wheat hissing over the hills, as far as the ear can hear, the hills of Rietpoel and the hills of Protem, the round-backed hills of Klipdale and Riviersonderend, the dale of rocks and the river without end, swishing and sweeping, one rustling billowing blanket of sweet quivering stalks to where the lands end against the slopes of the mountain of which this side is Over. Overberg. And on the other side the Table Mountain that I’ll go and show you one day when you’re grown up.
The next day you were waiting for them at the back door. You saw the bickering party approaching from afar, hurrying to the yard. Maria with the basket in one hand and the refractory child in the other. And Lys, the eldest daughter by Maria’s first husband. Hessian bag in one hand, gesticulating with the other. According to your mother the only member of the family who was worth anything. She worked in the house. She was the one who tattled the tales of the cast-off child.
Behind you in the kitchen your mother cleared her throat.
Think before you act, Milla, you’re not the only one who’s going to be affected by this, she said. Hard-heeled she stalked into the house.
Sheepishly the little group came to a halt before you. Maria mumbled a greeting, her head hanging. Lys stepped forward, performed an arm gesture, a sweep of the elbow, signifying that she could be trusted as the representative of her family’s interests.
Morning Kleinnooi, I’ve heard Kleinnooi wants to see my mother and the child, so I came along to hear what the kleinnooi has in her heart, if the kleinnooi doesn’t mind.
The little girl didn’t make a sound, just wriggled with all her might to escape.
Maria yanked the child closer.
This picture didn’t accord at all with your fantasies. In Lys’s gaze there was something you couldn’t fathom. As if she had a suspicion of what was coming. She met your eye insolently. You had to look away.
What would you have thought if you’d been she? So, you in your floral dress, with your armpits smelling of lavender, bite it off, and chew it as we’ve been chewing it for a long time, and then you swallow it gobbet by gobbet with your whitey spit. Take! Guzzle it! It’s our crippledness here that’s been born to us!
Is that what Lys thought? Improbable. Absolutely practical considerations rather, you realised. Her voice was full of calculation when she started speaking, her eyes much more impertinent than her voice.
Kleinnooi, excuse, but is Kleinnooi perhaps feeling out of sorts?
Not out of sorts, out of place, you felt out of your depth, caught out. There were, except in your head, no histrionic thoughts, only a scene that must have played hundreds of times in the past, on farms everywhere in the region.
No what, Lys, I’m fine, let’s just get out of the sun, come in, I have cooldrink for us.
You walked ahead of them into the kitchen to where you’d set out the glasses and the Oros and opened the fridge to take out the cold water. Behind you you felt how Lys, as an initiate in the whiteman’s home, accepted the unusual invitation on behalf of the others and hustled them in at the back door.
So tell me a bit about the child, you started while you poured the cooldrinks into the glasses.
How did she get so deformed?
Lys had her story ready, she delivered it in between smacking gulps of Oros.
No, Kleinnooi, she was just born like that, she started, her arms folded, regarding the child.
Very small and red, with the little hanging arm, at first we thought it was a bit of gut hanging out. Dakkie said sis, Hekkie said take away.
And you, Lys? you wanted to ask, but you swallowed your words.
Ma here was quite odd from looking at it. Didn’t want to give the child tit.
Lys waited behind her glass for a reaction.
We said to Ma, Ma take her, give her tit, she’s going to kick the bucket.
That’s enough, Lys, you wanted to say, but the woman was playing for the benefit of Ma in the gallery.
Pa Joppies said give here, let me go and get rid of that, it’s not my child, my arms are straight as poles, both, my hands are as good as shovels, look, nothing’s the matter with me. Yes, Pa Joppies, I thought to myself, your two feet with which you kicked Ma good and proper in the belly when she was carrying, they’re straight too.
You gathered the empty glasses.
So this child got her kicks in the other place already, Kleinnooi.
Lys scraped her chair across the floor as she turned it round to the sink to get your attention.
And then later when they started kicking her so, they just waited for her to start walking, to get the foot in under nicely, Hekkie and Dakkie both, then I said, if you wanted her dead, you should’ve kicked and have done when she came out, then she didn’t know of anything. Now she’s a person. Now you must have respects. The Lord made her like that. She also has a right.
You waited for the Lord’s appurtenances, the devil, the angels, three crows of the cock.
But they won’t listen and I get the kicks if I try to get in between and our ma she turns her back on it and says nothing, she’s scared of them. Those two, they’ve become like savages under their new pa. Looks to me they want to be like him, kick harder and hit harder and curse harder . . .
Lys worked herself up for the climax.
As if they want to go Satan one better with fire, with blows coming down so that you smell sulphur and hear a screaming like pigs down in the poplars, and more I’d rather not say, the Lord is my witness . . . So it will be a deliverance, it will be a mercy, that’s what I’m saying, if the kleinnooi . . . if . . .
If the kleinnooi what, Lys?
Actually you wanted to scream at the woman and throw her out of the kitchen by the scruff of her neck.
Lys had a firm grip on the child’s thin arm, but she was a bit calmer now and stood there, one foot over the other, the glass of cooldrink untouched in front of her on the kitchen table. She started trembling and once, twice, looked anxiously from face to face.
You caught her eye and tried a smile, sent her a wordless message: Come, we must be brave now you and I, now we have to help each other here!
The child’s look just grazed me, she started squirming ferociously. Her glass of cooldrink fell from the table, shattered on the floor, a chair capsized.
Never mind, you said, it doesn’t matter.
Your mother appeared in the doorway, small and old there in the door.
Sorry, Ounooi, excuse, Ounooi, Lys said, on her knees with the scoop and the broom and the floor-cloth, very subservient, but with a venomous set of the mouth. I’ll clean everything nicely, Ounooi.
You put an arm around your mother’s shoulder and accompanied her some way down the passage.
Sorry about the ruckus, you said.
Ai Milla, my dear child . . .
My dear child, you thought, must I figure in a Greek tragedy before you can call me your ‘dear child’?
She turned away and opened the linen cupboard in the passage.
You’d better clean up that little one before you load her into the car.
She fished out a little worn towel from the cupboard and with a sharp yank tore it in two and pressed the two halves into your hands.
One for washing, she said, and one for drying.
When you got back to the backyard you found them standing outside next to the water tank.
You talked past Lys who was waiting arms akimbo.
Maria, I’m taking the child to Grootmoedersdrift and I, my husband and I, we’ll look after her. What’s her name?
You felt Lys’s eyes sliding over your face. You didn’t want to look at her, but she was the one who replied.
She doesn’t really have a name, we call her Gat, Asgat, because she sits with her arse in the ash in the fireplace all the time. She won’t wear a panty.
She won’t want for anything, you said. Either you give her over into my care or your days are numbered here on Goedbegin. There’s quite enough reason to fire the whole lot of you. You squat on the ounooi’s back and mess with one another and don’t pull your weight. You go home now and leave her here, the ounooi and I will manage from here on and the kleinbaas will be here just now. I’ll phone the police and report that Joppie beats his wife so that they can be prepared if there’s trouble again. The ounooi knows what’s going on and she now knows what to do if he or Dakkie or Hekkie misbehaves any more. Is that clear?
It’s right like that, Kleinnooi, we’re only too grateful.
With your hand you signalled to Lys to be quiet.
Maria, have you understood me well here?
Maria stood there with her chin on her chest.
I want to hear a clear yes out of you, Maria, look at me.
Lys smirked.
A dull sound came from the older woman. Her lips stuck out, but she said nothing more. She didn’t look up.
We brought her things, said Lys, picked up the little hessian bag from the ground and held it out to you.
That’s good, Lys, just put it down, I’ll have a look.
She can talk too if she wants. She eats porridge with sugar.
That’s good, Lys, I’ll see to that.
You put your hand on the child.
Kleinnooi must watch out, she’s wild, she’ll pull free and run away, here, take the bad arm, it’s the rein.
That’s enough, Lys, you can go home now, all of you.
You took the child’s good hand.
Maria’s hand came up feebly next to her body, her head was hanging.
Bye bye, Asgat, Lys said, behave yourself, you hear. Tonight you’ll have meat and bread and sweets, you’ll see, and a snow-white bed to sleep in, all to yourself. I put your wheel in the bag and your stick and your moleskin.
You left the dirty bag full of bumps and lumps on the ground.
Cool down, you thought, cool down first. Both of us.
Let’s walk to the dam, then we look at the ducklings, there where I’m taking you there’s also a dam like that with ducks, just prettier, with green heads, and you can swim in our dam, can you swim? I’ll teach you to swim, first with a little tube around you, till you feel you can do it yourself and then I’ll hold my hands under you so that you can feel you’re floating, and then I’ll show you how one does like a little dog, round and round in a circle while I’m holding you, and then little bits on your own till you’re nice and strong and then one day we’ll swim to the middle or we’ll go rowing on the drift with a picnic in the boat just for you and me and a coloured blanket to sit on and then we’ll spread it in the shade and then we’ll eat, nice fresh bread spread with thick butter and apricot jam, just like the sandwiches that I brought you yesterday, you remember, they were nice weren’t they? And red cooldrink. And a sausage and cheese and hard-boiled eggs, and blood-red slices of watermelon. Do you know watermelon? And when we’re finished, then I’ll sing you a song.
You looked at your shadows in the footpath, a woman in a hurry with a jibbing child. You sang.
The bottom of the bottle, the bottom of the bottle
the bottom of the bottle fell out.
Open your mouth open your mouth
open your mouth nice and wide,
so the syrup can flow inside.
You were walking much too fast, dragging the child behind you. She strained back, pulled to one side, looking for an escape route.
I’m walking a bit too fast for you? And I’m talking so much! Let’s walk a bit slower, it’s not far now.
The dam wouldn’t get any closer and the house seemed too far away to turn back. It was very hot. You felt shaky. It hadn’t been a good idea just to set off like that without a plan. Time was short. You looked on your watch. Quarter past ten. In an hour’s time Jak would be there. He was always punctual when he had to come and fetch you from your mother’s.
Your knees started knocking. Nausea welled up in you. You gulped to swallow it down. Once you looked back. The front door was closed and the shutters fastened against the heat of the day.
Come let me carry you the last little bit.
You bent down and lifted the child onto your hip. You felt the pelvic bones against your waist, the wiry body straining away from you. And then. A twist, a slip, a duck, under your arm, a sinewy thing slithering down your side. She left you standing, swiftly, swerving, between the bushes and the tussocks aiming for the cottages to the left of the dam.
You were off balance when you started running. You crashed down. Coming to your feet you were missing a sandal. Over bush and tussock you leapt, within a few paces you were right behind her. But you felt clumsy, you couldn’t anticipate the child’s sidesteps. Your one bare foot crippled you.
I must pass her, in a straight line, you thought, I must get ahead and cut her off, before she’s seen, before Joppies sees her. Because they wouldn’t have told him, or perhaps they would. Both possibilities could spell the end.
The end of what? it flashed through you. You did think that then. A grey streak of lateral considerations that streamed past you along with the tussocks and the ant-heaps and the bushes.
Nothing has really begun, you thought, I can let her go, I can go home, I can go back to the farm and just carry on where I left off. I needn’t put myself out. Not if the child herself doesn’t want to. Not if nobody else, not even my own mother, cares, if not even my husband is going to support me. Not if it seems that I’ll have to fight for something that’s the self-evident duty of civilised people.
You thought it all, as you ran and jumped and grabbed after the child.
Stand still! you screamed, watch out! as you cut in in front of her and grabbed her by the waist and fell down hard with her. The child tried to scrabble away on all fours. You dived after her full-length, grabbed her by one foot. Hand over hand you hauled her in. Ankle, calf, thigh, rump, arms, shoulders, till you were sprawling half on top of her. The dust billowed around you.
You coughed and scolded. You had to wrestle against the wriggling that persisted under you. With arms and legs you had to stop her, on both sides, from worming her way out from under you.
You’re not getting away! you managed to say. I have to look after you. You’re mine now. And now you open your ears and you listen to me well, I’ll thrash your backside blood-red for you if you don’t behave yourself now. If you’re good, I won’t do anything to you. If you carry on being naughty and running away I’ll tell the kleinbaas and he’ll take off his belt and flog you till your backside comes out in red welts and then we’ll tie a rope around your neck and tie you to a pole like a baboon, the whole day long until you’re tame.
The child’s breath juddered. A squeaking sound emerged.
You realised what you’d said. You pressed your head against the child’s collar-bone.
No, that’s not true, I don’t mean it, I’m stupid, stupid, stupid, forgive me, I promise you never ever again, never will anybody hurt you again. And you’re not naughty, you’re just scared. Because you have to go away and because you don’t know what’s going to happen. Don’t be scared, just don’t be scared. Nobody will beat you, not I and also not the kleinbaas. Everything will be fine, I promise, your stick is there and the wheel, Lys packed them. And your moleskin. Tonight when we’ve got to the farm over the mountain you can have them and play with them before you go to bed and all day tomorrow.
You wished the child would cry. Then you’d be able to comfort her. Then you could soothe her and coax her and make promises and give assurances and hold her and offer her something to drink, something to eat. But you were the one who cried. The child went limp. You picked her up and walked on towards the dam with her. She was light. Your tears dripped on her.
Never mind, you said over and over again, never mind, there’s nothing to cry about.
Your dress was torn out of its seam at the waist in two places and your knee was bleeding. The child was grey with dust and full of scratches.
I must use this limp terror to get her cleaned up, you thought.
At the dam you drew the child’s rags over her head. You tucked your own dress into the elastic of your panty. You stopped talking. There was another feeling. Pretty words, you thought, are not what’s going to put matters straight between us, not now and perhaps for a whole long time yet. You I’ll have to rule with a firm hand.
You put her down and went and stood in front of her and pulled her off the dam wall. On the first contact with the water there was another squeaking sound, but softer and feebler this time. The child pulled up her knees, but soon lowered them again. You clamped her with one arm around the chest and started washing her with the other hand. The water left dark lines on the dusty skin. On the wet skin there were still other darker stains, here and there reddish ones that looked like burn marks, spots of scabies, ringworm, and older inflamed scars. You kept on splashing water till everything was dark and then got out the handkerchief that you had in the front of your bra and started washing her, first wiped the face, behind the ears and then the neck, that was badly encrusted. You shuddered at the thickly-caked frizzy hair that had certainly never been combed or plaited or even washed. But that would have to wait. You started to wash the child’s front with the handkerchief. Under your hand you felt the bump of a carelessly tied-back umbilical cord, a tension in the body when you wiped across the lower body. You didn’t go any further, just splashed a bit of water up between the little legs and at the back in the cleft of the buttocks.
There, you said, more to yourself than to the child, now at least one of us is more or less respectable.
Jak was there already with the bakkie. It was parked at an angle with one wheel across the wall of the irrigation furrow, you recognised the sign. You took a detour around the back and dressed the child in a clean bleached dress that you got from the hessian bag. Then you locked her in the outhouse. You peered through the slit to see what she was doing. She scrambled onto the plank and pressed herself up against one corner, fist in the mouth, staring fixedly into the sitting-hole. There wasn’t a lid. A smell of Jeyes Fluid hovered in the air. The outside toilet was no longer in house use. Only the maids went there.
Don’t fall into the hole, there are bats down there, I’ll be back just now, you whispered before you turned the catch and hooked in the latch. An image flitted past your eyes, of the child trying to crawl to the light ahead through an encrusted pipe poppling with human turds. You rubbed your eyes to get rid of the image. The pit didn’t have an open sewer to the outside.
You had to keep your head and act, as fast as you could.
You knew Jak would be in the living room with your mother.
Be there in a minute! you called as lightly as you could and ran down the passage to the bathroom where you had a lightning-quick bath and disinfected the cut on your knee. You went through the bathroom cabinets and found ointment and plasters. You rifled through your mother’s medicine bottles. You slipped three sleeping pills and a bottle of valerian drops into the pocket of your dressing-gown. Rubbing your wet hair with a towel you stepped into the silence of the living room and through the towel planted a kiss on Jak’s cheek. He just stared straight ahead. You babbled through it all.
Heavens, Jak, you must have driven like the wind and then almost into the irrigation furrow, did you see where your front wheel is?
Milla, he said.
Where is . . .? your mother asked.
She’s waiting in the back, you called over your shoulder, we’re just about ready.
You crammed your suitcases and put them out in the passage. You threw on a dress and drew a comb through your hair, a touch of lipstick, a splash of perfume and ran down the passage to the backyard.
And now, now I’m dosing you for the road before there’s more trouble than there is already.
That’s what you said even before you’d got the toilet door open.
You held the dropper of valerian at the ready and on entering grabbed the child, clamped fast her head, forced open her mouth. You felt something snapping in you over the way you were treating her. The only remedy, you told yourself. You pinched shut her nose so that she had to swallow the sleeping pill as well. You rubbed her gullet hard. You could feel the little rings of cartilage under your fingers.
Swallow, you hissed, swallow so that you can calm down, swallow, I’m not taking any more nonsense from you.
…
forehead of flame eyes of soot mouth from which glowing coals crumble roaring of flames lamenting and wailing cast me in a hearth of ice press my front in the snow roll me into a snowball one side of me the other side of me my cold and my hot my wet and my dry who can reconcile my moieties? neither glue nor thongs nor balm nor coalescence nor grafting nor oculation nor welding through my head runs a crack no sentence is completed no wisdom gained nothing more to swallow my teeth are loose my tongue abscised with exhaustion an apple of glass falls from my mouth oh last lip and jaw of woe oh last dream in mistletoe before the pitch may enfold me
is there then a last scream coming from me?
whose are the hands here around my belly squeezing my breath in and out? whose warm weight supporting me from behind and from below? gathering me from the front? rescuing me from the moieties dreamt? who collects my parts? who splints my neck in a straight line and lifts my chin so that my gullet should not become entangled in itself? who gently parts my shoulders like wings? who places a knee between my knees so that I should not cleave to my own flesh? who is a buoy beneath me so that I should not sink from my own weight not perish? in what body am I sustained as in a crib? tilted as in a cradle? who breathes beneath me as if I’m lying on a living bedstead my pulse ignited with another pulse my breath to the rhythm of another my insight capsulated in sturdy scaffolds my sentences erected on other sentences like walls built on a rock? Who?
where are you agaat?
here I am
a voice speaking for me a riddle where there is rest
a candle being lit for me in a mirror
my rod and my staff my whirling wheel
a mouth that with mine mists the glass in the valley of the shadow of death
where you go there I shall go
your house is my house
your land is my land
the land that the Lord thy God giveth you
is this the beginning now this lightness? can I venture it on my own? am I at last membrane between a willow and its reflection? A meniscus that transmits an image? Am I the crown of leaves in the air like the crown of leaves in the water? Yes without lamentation without sighing a permeable world world without end this rustling region culm inclining to culm the stone on the bank like the stone in the dam carried from cloud to cloud on the south-easter where the clover does not know of the humus and the stalk of the wheat does not deny the ear its fullness and the blue crane rises clamouring above the ripples of her beating wings framed by the reflected cloud and the reflected tree on the wash of the still river whose call returns to her for a last time from the valley in carillons in canon-thunder where to the smallest circling water-creature zealously writing everything reflects so with open eyes into the white light so whispering to my soul to go
in my overberg
over the bent world brooding
in my hand the hand of the small agaat