The turbulence is less now, the plane has been humming evenly for a few hours. Can still not sleep. The last few days on the farm remain with me, the dust on the Suurbraak road, the dried-up drift, stones, cattle grids, flower arrangements, legs of pork, professions of grief. And just look at him now. His bag of samples knocking at his knees.
Not puzzled things out for myself by a long shot, but I’m making fair progress, especially after this lot. God help us. Gaat making people by the graveside sing the third verse of Die Stem: . . . When the wedding bells are chiming, Or when those we love depart.
And then all eyes on me for: . . . Thou dost know us for thy children . . .We are thine, and we shall stand, Be it life or death to answer Thy call, beloved land!
Wake up and smell the red-bait, as Pa would have said. Poor Pa with his ill-judged exclamations. Did at least make a note for my article on nationalism and music. Thys’s body language! The shoulders thrust back militaristically, the eyes cast up grimly, old Beatrice peering at the horizon. The labourers, men and women, sang it like a hymn, eyes rolled back in the head. Word-perfect beginning to end.
Trust Agaat. She would have no truck with the new anthem. Only Dawid didn’t open his mouth. Totem pole. He watched me closely, whether I was singing along. And then also: As pants the hart for cooling streams, all the verses according to Ma’s directions, a whole programme there before the coffin could be lowered.
It’s a Boeing 747, this time. A light vibration, now and again a few faint shocks, but not as bad as on take-off. The bag by my feet is starting to get in my way.
Inconvenient stuff to cart along. These fragments. Apart from the blue Delft birth-plate and the parcel of fennel seed, the horn and the bellows. Extra hand luggage that couldn’t go in the hold. Wild aromas of Africa, dry protein. Will have to be declared on arrival. Will in all probability be sniffed out by the customs dogs. Be confiscated.
Agaat insisted.
Blow me a note on it every now and again, she said, looked away. I’ll hear it, she said. Thought that’s what she said, only her lips moved. Then her voice was clear again.
And make yourself a nice fire in your fireplace. Do you have a fireplace? It’s covered in snow almost all year round there where you are, isn’t it?
Still ten hours of flying to the snow. The cabin in semi-darkness. Here and there the yellow shaft of a cabin light over the book of a late reader, a hostess in the aisle with glasses of orange juice, with extra blankets, with milk bottles for a baby. A few rugby players still up and down. Without exception younger than twenty, raucous all through the meal. Now and again sang a snatch, Make her say no make her say oh, to the tune of Macarena. Will have to write something about it. Wine, women and balls. Now also at last to rest.
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care.
A nightmare it was. Had still considered a tour of the Overberg, a few tape recordings in the townships, all the old places once more, the farms and little towns with the odd names of which I try to tell people in Toronto. Entertainment for Vermaaklikheid, Le Fleuve Eternel for Riviersonderend. Rather just let be.
I do admire our Good Lord for his aesthetic flair in creating a world that is at one and the same time both heaven and hell. Who wrote that? Konrad? The Garden Party. Ma’s funeral obsequies, posies wherever you look, the garden in full flower, around it the summer drought.
Discrepancy, a gritty feeling ever since I set foot on land. The trip from the airport, the light glaring white, the blaze that blinds one. Arid red lands next to the road, black shadows of bluegums, pit dams with yellow condensation-rings, a last slimy dreg at the bottom. It’s always been like that. When and where did my romantic yearnings originate? Deserted farmyards, neglected buildings, rusty bits of machinery.
My standards have shifted, of civilisation, of human dignity. Drove for a long time behind an open lorry, full of labourers being carted to town for their Saturday shopping. Crush in the main street. Stayed in my car, stared out of my eyes. Boundary-maintaining body language if ever. Drunkenness in the streets of Swellendam. Your mother’s cunt! the coloureds yell at one another, unmistakable the inflection. Hurrying through them the whites with quick little steps and stolid faces.
As if from behind three-inch glass, suddenly it was there, the old realisation. I don’t belong here.
Have been away for too long.
More than a decade.
Perhaps too short.
Gaat didn’t twitch a muscle. Her cap was higher, more densely embroidered than I remembered it, spectacles on her nose. For the rest she was as always, perhaps a bit stouter, her chin pushed far out, her steps energetic, her soles squelching on the wooden floor. Apartheid Cyborg. Assembled from loose components plus audiotape.
The funeral food made me sick, the quantities, and then after that a whole week’s recycling till Gaat had it put out in enamel dishes for the workers. The children falling upon it before the adults could even get to it. Agaat letting fly with a cane among them.
Can’t stop thinking about it. An abundance that never suffices, as always on Grootmoedersdrift. And everything sweet. Sweet sweet-potatoes, sweet pumpkin, sweet stewed fruit, sweet yellow rice, sweet peas, banana salad in yellow condensed-milk mayonnaise.
The undertaker, pudgy little fingers, chatty, his theme the embroidered shroud: Genesis and Grootmoedersdrift in one, a true work of art, must have taken a lifetime, every stitch in its place.
Relieved after all that I was too late. Couldn’t have stomached it. Agaat herself sewing Ma up in the fully embroidered gown, Agaat lifting Ma into the coffin, placing the hand-splint that she wrote with in the last years in the coffin as well and screwing down the lid. Nobody else was allowed to touch her, according to the undertaker.
And then also the diaries, perhaps that’s what’s bloating my stomach. Like sheep dip. Takes a while to be excreted into the bloodstream. Was asking for it. Perhaps I should be grateful. Perhaps its effect is more like inoculation against smallpox.
Two days after the funeral. The yard still after the midday meal. Me naked on my bed in the spare room, the heat pressing on my chest.
Gaat’s white apron hanging from the hook behind the kitchen door. The big apron pocket, Agaat’s marsupium in which she stows her keys. Stuck my hand in there, goose pimples all over, a scoundrel, naked in his deceased mother’s house.
The key to the only room in the house that was locked, the only room in all the house that had a door. New hinges but no explanations.
The silence with that key in my hand, heavy as before the offering up of prayer, before the laying on of hands, before the sprinkling of the forehead, like those silences of my childhood, the town church, the re-echoing coughs in the pews. The roof ticked with the heat, the floorboards in the passage creaked under my feet. My heart beating. The same feeling I had as a child when I slipped away in the afternoons to the outside room. To be with Agaat, with her soft body in the nightdress where she was taking forty winks, her smell of starch and Mum.
Dark it was in the room. Locked the door and stood still to accustom my eyes.
Ma’s room. For a moment it was just like always. Drawn curtains, an atmosphere of aches and pains, an aroma of grievance, of anxiety. Meine Ruh ist hin, mein Herz ist schwer. Soft radio music. Midday concert. But this time it was quiet.
And there before me: A high bed piled with pillows, a dark stain on the top one, objects dangling from the ceiling. Chrome railings, benches, chairs, steel frames. Cramped it felt, the walls covered in stuff. Installation for percussion. Shadows shifting behind the curtains.
That’s the way it was. As always. More questions than answers.
Her voice! Muted, from somewhere. Some things don’t have reasons, Jakkie, some things just are the way they are. And you don’t have to believe everything you’re told. There’s a lot of ill will. There are old wives’ tales.
Walked through the room with long strides, plucked open curtains, unlocked and threw open stoep doors. There were too many smells, of cloth and upholstery, and dry grass and vanilla, medicine, disinfectant, soap, breath, a sweetish miasma of mortality.
Turned round, surveyed the room. The afternoon light on the floor, points of light on chrome and glass. Trumped. Ali Baba’s cave. Not quite an accurate simile. The murky realm of mothers, rather. Monstrous specimens everywhere. Samples of some weird mnemonic.
Dresses and hats, mirrors, watches, maps, photos, yellowed diagrams, pieces of paper scribbled over with lists of phrases: I wish, I fear, I hope, I dream. Question marks, exclamation marks, a chart with the letters of the alphabet: V is Canaan’s vine bearing bunches so black, the explorer returns with a bunch on his back.
Ran my hands over everything, over the feathers, the seeds, ears of wheat in an old ginger-beer jar, scraps of paper pinned to the curtains.
One by one I picked up the objects and put them down again, the skull of a buck, of a baboon, a lizard’s skeleton, a ram’s horn, a trocar and cannula.
Cranked once the meat-mincer screwed down to the end of a table. The empty metallic sound on wood. The mills of God.
There were my varnished birds’ eggs in a bowl, the old binoculars in their leather case with the red lining, Oupa’s old telescope with which Ma taught me and Gaat about the stars.
The moon and the stars, that’s about all that was missing from that room.
There were butterflies pinned to green felt, a copper pestle, the blue Delft birth-plate, now in my suitcase, a spade, a tarred rope, a combine blade, a dried-up sheep’s ear, a horseshoe, three droppers, a wire spanner, a bag of compost, jars of soil samples, a wire clipper, a Coopers dosing-can for sheep medicine, a rusty sickle.
Not quite pictures in a gallery.
Also a worn brown suitcase, lichen around the locks, set up on the arm rests of a straight-backed chair right next to the bed, full of mouldering bits of cloth and paper and bone, a few marbles. Musty. Corpus delicti. Lifted it off and sat down in the chair, dizzy.
It was Gaat’s handiwork, unmistakable. Miss Havisham in the death chamber.
What would I myself have selected to commemorate my mother? So vaguely present in my life, compared with Gaat.
Definitely more than commemoration had happened there. To judge by the placing of the chairs, a kangaroo court rather. And me there naked amongst the deceased props a nude figure in a Kienholz environment. He would be jealous of it. Homunculus in the skull nursery.
At last I could get up. Simply had to go and see what the dark object on the pillow was. A little pelt, soft-brayed, of a mole, of a bat. Suspended by threads from the ceiling, the rim of a little wheel. And a stick. Analyse that.
Only after a while noticed the Croxley booklets lying everywhere in little piles. Pages from these torn out and pinned to the curtain, filled with Ma’s handwriting. Diaries. From before my birth. Everything that Milla de Wet saw fit to bequeath her readers. In the hope that somebody would discover it. And I wasn’t the first reader. She must have reread the diary herself, several times, there were corrections in her handwriting with dates, days and even months, years later than the original entry. As if she’d had trouble rendering the whole truth in just one version.
I was nervous of being caught, but got enough read to form an idea, especially the parts underlined in red with dates in the margin in Gaat’s hand and ticked off as ‘read’, the first, the second and the third time. Some parts were read every day of the last months. Read from the wheelchair, inside the walking frame, in the hip-bath, as Gaat had noted on each page. Sung, recited, copied in block letters with a different line division on the counter-page, biblical texts, curses, indictments. All the words written out in full, the sentences provided with punctuation. As if she couldn’t tolerate the abbreviations and untidiness.
Two of the copied-out sheets were still clamped to the reading-frame.
14 September 1960, a month after my birth:
As directed by the Almighty God, Ruler of our joint Destinies and Keeper of the Book of Life, I Kamilla de Wet (neé Redelinghuys) dedicate this journal to the history of Agaat Lourier, daughter of Maria Lourier of Barrydale and Damon (Joppies) Steefert of Worcester so that there may be a record one day of her being chosen and of the precious opportunities granted to her on the farm Grootmoedersdrift of a Christian education and of all the privileges of a good Afrikaner home. So that in reading this one day she may ponder the unfathomable ways of Providence, who worked through me, His obedient servant and woman of His people, to deliver her from the bitter deprivation in which she certainly would have perished as an outcast amongst her own people. I pray for mercy to fulfil this great task of education that I have undertaken to the glory of God to the best of my ability.
Let His will be done.
His kingdom come.
For His is the power and the glory,
For ever and ever.
Amen.
Could she really have written that? My sentimental, hypochondriac mother with her head full of romantic German melodies? So force-fed with the insanity of this country? Sounded more like Pa’s language. Toastmaster bravado. But without a trace of irony.
I loved her, in my way. But that I shouldn’t have read.
Also not the epitaph. In the barn in the back Agaat went to show it to me, the headstone, neatly engraved.
Kamilla Redelinghuys. 11/3/1926–16/12/1996
Passed away peacefully.
And then God saw that it was Good.
How people can get it into their heads.
Cold I am all of a sudden. Could I be the only person awake in this plane? Moonlight on the cloud canopy. The curtain of the service galley has been drawn.
How can Grootmoedersdrift determine my idea of myself? Unavoidable. And yet, the meaning of my existence is elsewhere, always and in principle elsewhere, even if I were to stay here, in a realm of thought where the thoughts assess themselves, the region where you always listen at a distance.
Is listening enough? For how long? Before I’m forced to do something?
At least my will has been lodged with the attorneys in Swellendam, the farm made over to Agaat. She can bequeath it one day to whomever she wants. Is man enough, will battle through the rest. With hand-plough and mules, with churn and sickle and harness-cask and threshing-floor if need be, like the first farmers on the land. She’s part of the place, from the beginning. Calloused, salted, brayed, the lessons of the masters engraved in her like the law on the tablets of stone, deeper and clearer than I could ever preserve it. She knows the soil. She knows the language. She knows her place. She’ll look after herself. And maintain her shrine inviolate. Going every day to beat her forehead in its white cap against the bedstead like a Jew by the Wailing Wall. With this difference: The promised land is hers already, her creator is keeping remote control. Six feet under.
It’s not a country for me to live in. To study, yes. The Fat-Anna Schotisse. The Stormberg Vastrap. Nobody has yet written up how exactly this music functioned in the identity-formation of the Afrikaner. Only ever Heimwee by S. le Roux Marais. Couldn’t with the best will in the world call that a fado.
Yesterday’s newspaper I left at the airport. Remarkable journalism. Rugby players on the front page and the back page and the centre pages, lawlessness and corruption, child rape, political denial of AIDS, middle-class sex scandals, letters from indignant creationists.
How in God’s name is it to carry on from here?
In the first place: For the execution of useful research the impulse to go and work for the Red Cross must be suppressed. That’s what I tell myself.
I just want to cauterise it all neatly now. A dry white scar, une cicatrice. Perhaps still slightly sensitive during changes of season in the northern hemisphere. Mourning is a life-long occupation, says my therapist. That is what I must do then. Must learn to do. Mourn my mother, my mothers, the white one and the brown one. Mourn my country. Pa who understood better than Ma how things worked between them, but who couldn’t help himself.
They had to lug the branch out of him, I’ve since heard, with the letter that Gaat wrote on my behalf, covered in blood in his pants pocket. Fancy the detail. Just after it happened, she wrote to me that he’d had an accident with his car in the drift, full stop.
So it was ‘my’ letter, then, that caused it. My poor father.
My poor mother.
What remains? Grieving. Grieving till I’ve mastered the hat-trick. The difficult triple sanity: Wafer, stone, and flower in turn. de Wet individuated.
Do I hear something under the engine noise, through the air conditioning? A melody? A rhythm?
Why that? Of all things? Gaat’s story, the last story that she always had to tell me before I’d go to sleep, the one she never wanted Ma to hear. Her voice close to me, her forehead bent over me, the embroidery on her cap very close, white sheep, white flowers, white, mountains and trees . . .
Images behind my eyelids. High up in my nose a prickling, sooty, smoky, the ember-fire in Gaat’s room. Every word. If she left out one, I knew. If she told anything differently, I protested. Or I said, start all over, you’re not telling it right. Emphases, rhythms, repetitions, questions. Agaat’s strong arm around my shoulders, her small hand on my chest. Her voice, incantatory.
Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a woman who was terribly unhappy. She lived with her husband on a farm at the foot of a big blue mountain next to a river. Her house stood close to a drift amongst high trees in a garden filled with flowers. It had two white gables and a stoep and many rooms inside. At night when the noises of day died down, and she heard the river flowing, the wind in the trees, the sound of the sleeping mountain, g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g, like the soughing of a shell against your ear, then she was very sad and then she cried in her bed, softly so that her husband shouldn’t wake up. He was a good-looking man with shiny black hair, but his heart was cold. In a loud voice he bragged about nothing at all, his hand was cruel and his head was filled with flippancies. He couldn’t comfort her.
The man was one reason for her unhappiness. But there was another greater reason. Can you guess what it was?
Was she as ugly as sin?
No, she was pretty enough.
Was she poor?
No, she was rich.
Was she without friends?
No, she knew lots of people.
Had her mother cast her off?
No, her mother was fond enough of her, even though she was strict and a bit stingy.
Then I don’t know. Why then was she so unhappy?
She was childless, the woman, and she couldn’t fall pregnant and she’d been married for seven years. That was the reason for her sadness.
But then one day she went to visit her mother’s farm beyond the big blue mountain. And when twelve o’clock struck, her mother said to her:
Go and see there in the labourers’ cottages, there’s a little girl who’s been cast off, perhaps you can help her.
And the woman reached the houses of the workers, small brown houses on dry brown soil, and she thought, what am I doing here? Here there are only feather-legged chickens and dogs lying long-tongue in the sun.
But the door to one of the little houses was ajar. And the woman went to stand at the opening and called and knocked, but nobody came out.
So then she pushed open the door.
G-g-g-g-creaked the hinge.
It was pitch-dark inside. At first she could make out nothing, but when her eyes got accustomed, she saw a pitch-black hole. It was the fireplace, full of ash and soot and burnt-out logs. And in the corner of the hearth sat a pitch-black something.
And she went closer and she saw the thing had legs.
And the thing had arms.
And the thing’s head was hidden deep in her clothes.
And the clothes had holes.
And through the holes she counted ribs.
And the elbows were chapped.
And the knees were grazed.
And the hair full of lice.
And the ears were stopped with wax.
And around the neck was a necklace of dirt.
And the feet were full of mud.
And the woman looked even closer and saw that the thing had one arm thinner than the other and one crooked shoulder and one hand with fingers clawed together, it looked like the head of a snake.
And the woman knelt before the thing in the fireplace and she asked:
What is your name?
And she pricked up her ears to hear but there was no reply.
What is your name? she asked again, are you perhaps the child that’s been cast off?
And she listened even more closely and still she heard nothing.
Look at me, she said, tell me, what do they call you?
And she put her hand on the crooked shoulder and the creature shrank into itself and then she heard something.
G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g.
And the thing looked even blacker than before, and she felt as cold under the woman’s hand as a burnt-out coal.
And then the woman got very angry.
Little rapscallion, she said, and she grabbed the thing by the neck and plucked it out of the hearth-hole and she dragged it out, out by the door, into the bright sunshine.
Stand up straight, she said, so that I can see what kind of an animal you are!
And then she saw that it was a little girl. And the child took one look at her, and she jerked loose, and took off from there, the chickens scattered and the dogs made way and the woman ran after.
Little tin-arse, she screamed, you I’m catching today!
Over the ditches the little girl jumped, barefoot over the stones, through the thorns, this way round a bush, other way round a tree, over an ant-hill, faster than the white-foot hare with the woman right behind her. And they ran and they ran, far over the veld, far over the fallow land, and down the dust-road all the way to the top of the dam wall, and the woman grabbed her round the body, and she fell on top of the child flat on the ground.
And the child kicked, and the child bit, and she wriggled, and she coughed and she blew and she g-g-g-g-g-g-ed and she squeaked, but the woman held on with all her might and she said:
You I’m washing white as snow today!
And she dragged her to the dam and she dunked her in and she started washing her with a white handkerchief, but the handkerchief turned black and the water turned black and the child stayed black.
You I’m taking home today, said the woman, you I’m taming, you I’m turning white!
And she packed her in a little box, as small as a watch, as black as a cricket and she took her along over the mountain to the house with the two white gables by the river.
What is that, asked the husband?
It’s a child, said the woman.
It’s a stone, said the husband, it’s a piece of coal.
And the woman said, just you wait, you’ll see, her I’ll cut down to size, her I’ll wash till she’s clean.
And the woman she scours and the woman she spits and the woman she blows and the woman she buffs and the woman she rubs and the woman she scrubs, and the child doesn’t turn white, but she does come out clean and she’s turned out brown.
What’s your name? Is your tongue gone, then, little ash-potato, asks the woman, open your mouth.
But the child wouldn’t talk and the child wouldn’t eat and child she stayed as shut as a stone.
And the woman she pinches and the woman she slaps and the woman she threatens and the woman she pleads and the woman she swears and the woman she screams and jumps up and down and later she’s worn out with struggling and she locks up the child in the back room of the house and she sits down in a little heap with her head on her knees and she weeps.
Dumbstupid woman! the farmer scolded. Look, now you’re even unhappier than you were before. It’s a bad child you’ve brought into our house, it’s a dung beetle.
And the woman said: Just you wait, you’ll see, I know she’s good, she’ll bring us lots of happiness yet.
And the woman made a slot in the door and she whistled through it at the child, and all day she sang and she played the piano and she rang the bells and she struck on sticks and she made her dresses and shadow-animals and verses and the sweetest foods. But the child stayed small and hard and stiff and she said not a word and she slid away under her bed and she rolled herself into a ball in the corner of her room.
And then one day the woman had a bright idea and she said:
I found you in the cold pitch-black fireplace. Perhaps what you need is a real live fire!
And when the woman said ‘fire’ then the child’s eyes shone like two morning stars, and she leapt up there, can you believe it, and she became as lively as an ant and she searched for dry grasses and a ball of paper and she gathered the twigs and the sticks and she carried three pine cones and five old mealie cobs and piled everything in a heap and the woman dragged up three big logs and she took an ember from the stove and she placed it under the heap and she said to the child:
Now blow, my child, for all you’re worth, and do get some life!
And the child she bulged her cheeks and she blew and she blew with all her might, and before long a little spiral of smoke arose and a little flame leapt up and the heap caught fire. And it crackled and sputtered and the sparks they flew and the fire it flared up and the flames they beckoned with hot red hands and they said:
Come, little child, come! And dance and sing because we are the place you come from! You come from the hearth, you come from the wind, from the glow of the wood, from the soot-black chimney that sucks up sparks and that speckles the lily with ash, you come from the smoke that turns the sun red as copper and the moon as yellow as gold.
And from that day the little girl was good and sweet and a child like every other child and she was baptised with the name Good.
And the woman taught her to bake and cook and wash and iron and sweep and polish and knit and sew with needle and thread. And she taught her to read and to write. And she tied a ribbon in her hair and showed her a mirror and she said:
See, now you are a human being.
And she took her to the forest and the sea and the fields. And she taught Good the names of the plants and the fishes and the animals and the bugs and the flowers, the months and the days and the time for sowing and the time for reaping and the lambing-time and the shearing-time and the psalms and the hymns of thankfulness. And Good wore a red dress and learnt hard and was in everything she did as good as her name. And Good wore a green dress and she grew up and got strong and had good manners and said her prayers and ate at table with the farmer and his wife and slept in her room at the end of the passage. And every evening the woman told her the story of how she had rescued her from the pitch-black hearth and made of her a child in the house and a human being in the mirror. And the woman’s breath was sweet and her hands were soft on Good’s head. And sometimes when the woman’s husband beat her, she crawled into Good’s bed at night for comfort and slept by her till morning.
And then one day after seven years something happened that changed everything.
The woman was expecting her own baby.
Out she said to Good. Out of my house, from now on you live in a little room outside in the backyard.
Take your things!
Here’s a suitcase!
And off with the red dress and off with the green! Here is your apron and here is your cap keep it white and here is your dress it is black and here is your bed next to the dogs’ kennel and here is your plate and your mug of tin and from now on you’ll eat alone.
And here’s your book to learn how to farm and the Bible, see to it that you look after your soul and here’s a big white cloth learn to embroider nicely to decorate your room.
From now on you’re my slave. You’ll work for a wage.
And Good’s heart was very very sore. But not for long and then it grew as hard as a stone and black as soot and cold as a burnt-out coal. And she took the suitcase filled with the dresses and shoes and things of the child she’d been and went and buried it deep in a hole on the high blue mountain across the river. And piled black stones on top of it. And trampled it with her new black shoes and cocked her crooked shoulder and pointed with her snake’s-head hand and said:
Now, Good, you are dead.
Nobody noticed anything of Good’s mourning because she cried without tears. Every day she kept doing her work faithfully. Fed the dogs, scrubbed the kitchen floor, cleaned the fireplace, polished the silver and buffed the table to a shine and rubbed the sheets in the soapy water till they were staring-white and ironed them in knife-sharp folds and stacked them in neat piles in the linen cupboard. She plaited onions and packed pumpkins and slaughtered sheep and plucked geese and cut lucerne with the sickle and brought flowers from the garden and arranged them in vases, the roses, the lilies, the grass.
And the woman said: My good slave, your work is good.
But Good looked at the woman’s hands folded around her stomach that grew bigger and bigger with the child she was expecting. And her mouth was bitter as aloe and her insides were filled with bile.
And after eight months and two weeks in the middle of the morning the woman got birth pains and she said to Good:
Come with me, I’m going to my mother over the mountain. But pack everything that I need, a knife and scissors and forceps and cloths and towels and water and fire, because this child may well want out before noon.
And when they were halfway there, then the woman screamed: The child wants to come!
And there beneath the high sun next to the road where the waterfall foams, Good made a bed of snow-white cloths, and she poured water into a snow-white bowl and she whispered between the woman’s snow-white legs:
Come, little buttermilk, come come little bluegum-flower, come out, snow-white lamb of my même, come!
And the woman she blows and the woman she strains and the woman she farts. And Good she runs and Good she pulls and Good she spits and Good she pushes, and she calls and she curses and she prays and she pleads but the child is stuck like a key in a lock.
Help me! the woman cries, grey are the cliffs and black is the river, Good, I’m going to die, help me!
And Good takes a knife and she takes forceps and scissors and she takes a deep breath and she cuts open the woman’s stomach from top to bottom. And when noon struck in the church towers on both sides of the mountain, then she took the child out of the blood and the slime and she cut the string and she cleaned him and she covered him in cloth and she gave him a name that only she knew about.
You-are-mine she called him.
And he grew up on her breast and she washed him when he was dirty and gave him milk when he was thirsty and rubbed his tummy when he had winds and cooled his forehead when he had fever, and cradled him and comforted him when he cried and sang to him and dressed him and undressed him and put him to sleep every evening in her room in the backyard before she took him into the house. Taught him to walk, taught him to talk and swim and dance and fly and blow on the curved horn of the ram.
I am a slave but You-are-mine, she always whispered in his ear before she handed him over to his mother.
And his mother looked on at Good teaching the child to walk and talk, teaching him to swim and dance and fly.
And she listened to them calling each other by blowing on the horn, the child and his minder far over vlei and hill.
And every evening Good told him how she had rescued him from the grey cliffs and from the black river and chanted rhymes and asked him riddles and hummed songs on blades of grass between her lips by the fire in the outside room and with her little laundry-mangle hand made him shadow-pictures on the wall.
And the woman eavesdropped at the door. She could see through the chink and she could hear through the keyhole and she was jealous, but what could she say and what could she do?
And Good caught the little boy silver fish in the sea, and copper frogs in the dam and showed him the blue butterfly in the forest, and made him trousers of red velvet and a shirt of green cotton and embroidered the Good Shepherd and the Wise Virgin in white on his pillow slips.
See, you are a human being, she showed him in the mirror, and You-are-mine.
And he laughed in her eyes and played at her feet and skipped at her hand under the high trees around the house with the two white gables on the river next to the blue mountain and her heart was lightened and her insides were warmed. And her bile subsided because he was the light of her life.
Tell me more Dolores. Grimm meets Goth in the Overberg.
There’s another story here.
The world is large.
‘Suddener than we fancy it, more spiteful and gay than one supposes, incorrigibly plural.’
Where do I get that from?
‘Soundlessly collateral and incompatible.’
That I would change. Not ‘soundlessly’. Full-sounding, rather, full-soundingly collateral and incompatible.
I’ll keep the ram’s-horn on the window sill.
Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
And the bellows by the firedog next to the JetEagle.
Blaes blaest—blaes blidt—i blinde,
blaes friskhed til min hyttes baenk
med myge, vege vinde
og regn I sagte staenk.
Blaes blaest—blaes op—fanfarer,
til natten åbenbarer . . .
North and south, a frozen interval, a butterfly on felt.
On the flight-information screen the blue dart of the Boeing approaches the great green body of Canada. Plectrum and harp.
I close my eyes to sleep.