In the Heart of the Country
I lean over her, I caress her arms, I hold her limp hands in mine. That is what she gets from me, colonial philosophy, words with no history behind them, homespun, when she wants stories. I can imagine a woman who would make this child happy, filling her with tales from a past that really happened, how grandfather ran away from the bees and lost his hat and never found it again, why the moon waxes and wanes, how the hare tricked the jackal. But these words of mine come from nowhere and go nowhere, they have no past or future, they whistle across the flats in a desolate eternal present, feeding no one.
227. We have had visitors.
Anna was cutting my hair. I sat on a stool outside the kitchen in the cool of the morning. From across the lands the breeze brought the muffled subterranean clang of the pump, another sound in a world full of familiar evocative sounds. I can conceive of myself blind and happy in a world like this, raising my face to the sun and basking, tuning my ears to the distance. Anna’s scissors slide cool across the nape of my neck, obedient to my murmurs.
Then all at once there is tumult in the empty doorway, brown on grey on black, the space discomposing and recomposing itself before my eyes, and Hendrik has come and gone, his trouserlegs whipping against each other, his soles crunching the gravel; and Anna at once behind him running too, bent, urgent, the comb and scissors scattering, from stillness into motion without transition as if all her life with me has only been an instant frozen, abstracted, stolen from a life of running. Before I can stand up they are gone behind the wall of the shearing-pens, behind the wagonhouse, down the slope into the riverbed.
With the tablecloth over my shoulders and my half-cut hair in my fist I emerge from the house to face two strangers, two horsemen. Unkempt, surprised, it is I who ought to be at a disadvantage; but I know better, they are on my land, they have disturbed me, it is they who have to make their apologies and state their business.
“No,” I tell them curtly, “he left early this morning . . . No, I don’t know where . . . The boy went with him . . . Probably late. He always comes home late.”
They are father and son, neighbours. When did I last see a neighbour? Have I ever seen one? They do not say why they have come. They come on men’s business. Fences are down, a dog-pack is at large, there is an epidemic among the sheep, the locusts are swarming, the shearers have not arrived, they will not tell me what. These are real calamities, how will I ever deal with them by myself? If I make Hendrik my foreman will he be able to run the farm while I stand severely behind him pretending he is my puppet? Would it not be better to span barbed wire around the farm, lock the gates, kill off the sheep, and give up the fiction of farming? How can I convince hardened men like these that I am of their stuff when patently I am not? They have ridden far on a futile errand, they are waiting for an invitation to dismount and take refreshment; but I continue to stand silent and forbidding before them till, exchanging glances, they tip their hats and turn their horses.
These are trying times. There are going to be more visits, harder questions to answer, before the visits and the questions stop. There will be much temptation to grovel and weep. How idyllic the old days seem; and how alluring, in a different way, a future in a garden behind barbed wire! Two stories to comfort myself with: for the truth is, I fear, that there is no past or future, that the medium I live in is an eternal present in which, whether heaving under the weight of that hard man or feeling the ice of the scissors-blade at my ear or washing the dead or dressing meat, I am the reluctant polestar about which all this phenomenal universe spins. I am pressed but not possessed, I am pierced but my core is not touched. At heart I am still the fierce mantis virgin of yore. Hendrik may take me, but it is I holding him holding I.
228. “They will come again! You can’t fool around with those people! They will be expecting the old baas to come, and if he does not they will know there is something wrong!”
He strides in and out of the pool of lamplight. He has returned by night bringing the tempest with him. Now I can truly see how far we have progressed in familiarity. He has learned to leave his hat on in my presence. He has learned to storm up and down while he talks, striking his fist into his palm. His gestures express anger, but also the confidence of a man free to show his anger. It is interesting. What passion he has shown for me has been a passion of rage. That is why my body has locked itself against him. Unloved, it has been unloving. But has it been hated? What is it that he has been trying to do all this time? There is something he has been trying to force from my body, I know, but I have been too obstinate, too awkward, too lumpish, too stale, too tired, too frightened by the flow of his angry corrosive seed; I have merely gritted my teeth and clung on when he wanted something else, to touch my heart perhaps, to touch my heart and convulse me. How deep, I wonder, can one person go into another? What a pity that he cannot show me. He has the means but not the words, I the words but not the means; for there is nowhere, I fear, where my words will not reach.
“I am telling you, one of these days they will be back, sooner than you think, along with other people, all the other farmers! Then they will see that you are living with the servants in the big house. Then we will be the ones to suffer – not you – she and I!
“And they will find out about the old baas too, you can be sure of that! That old Anna has been spreading stories for a long time, everyone knows that the old baas was messing around with my wife. So when they say I shot him, who will believe me, who will believe a brown man? They will hang me! Me! No – I’m leaving, I’m leaving tomorrow, I’m getting out of this part of the world, by tomorrow night I want to be far away, I want to be at the Cape!”
“Hendrik, can we speak reasonably for a moment? Will you please sit down, I get confused when you storm around like that. Tell me first, where were you all day and where is Anna?”
“Anna is at home. We are not sleeping here any more.”
“Are you also not sleeping here? Do I have to sleep alone in this house?”
“We are not sleeping here.”
“Do you know, Hendrik, you hurt me. Do you know, you have the power to hurt me, and you do it every time. Do you really think I would turn you over to the police? Do you think I am too spineless to acknowledge my guilt? If so, you don’t know me, Hendrik. You are so bitter that you are completely blinded. I am not simply one of the whites, I am I! I am I, not a people. Why have I to pay for other people’s sins? You know how I live here on the farm, totally outside human society, almost outside humanity! Look at me! You know who I am, I don’t have to tell you! You know what they call me, the witch of Agterplaas! Why should I side with them against you? I am telling you the truth! What more do I have to do before you will believe I am telling the truth? Can’t you see that you and Anna are the only people in the world I am attached to? What more do you want? Must I weep? Must I kneel? Are you waiting for the white woman to kneel to you? Are you waiting for me to become your white slave? Tell me! Speak! Why do you never say anything? Why is it that you take me every night if you hate me? Why won’t you even tell me if I do it right? How am I to know? How am I to learn? Who must I ask? Must I ask Anna? Must I really go and ask your own wife how to be a woman? How can I humiliate myself any further? Must the white woman lick your backside before you will give her a single smile? Do you know that you have never kissed me, never, never, never? Don’t you people ever kiss? Don’t you ever kiss your wife? What is it that makes her so different from me? Does a woman have to hurt you before you can love her? Is that your secret, Hendrik?”
Where was it in this torrent of pleas and accusations that he walked out? Did he stay to the end? Is he lost to me forever? Would it be possible, if I smiled more, if I could make my body thaw, to rediscover the patient young man I once knew who made his own shoes, who turned the handle of the coffeegrinder while I poured the beans, who tipped his hat and flashed his teeth and loped off to his next task with that relaxed, tireless stride? In knowing him better I
seem to have lost all that I liked best in him. What is the lesson I should learn, if it is not too late for all lessons, if I am ever to know a man again? Is it the lesson my father learned when he could not raise a hand to wave the flies from his face: Beware of intimacy with the servants? Is it that Hendrik and I are, in our different ways, ruined for love? Or is it simply that the story took a wrong turn somewhere, that if I had found a more gradual path to a gentler form of intimacy we might all have learned to be happy together? Or is this desert of fire and ice a purgatory we must pass through on the way to a land of milk and honey? And what of Anna? Will she come too? Will she and I one day be sisters and sleep in the same bed? Or will she, when she finds herself, scratch my eyes out?
229. There must be other ways of filling empty days than by dusting and sweeping and polishing. I move through the cycle of rooms like a mouse in a treadmill. Is there no way of cleaning a room definitively? Perhaps if I begin again in the loft, plugging the gaps between roof and walls, pinning paper over the floor, perhaps if then I seal and caulk the doors and windows, I can halt the sift of dust and leave the house till the coming of spring, if spring ever comes again, if anyone is here in springtime to unlock. Perhaps I can leave one room open, my own preferably, for old times’ sake, and pile in it the last of the candles, the last of the food, hatchet, hammer, nails, the last of the paper and ink. Or perhaps it would be better to close the shutters, lock the last door, and move my effects into the dim little storehouse where the builders of the great house lived when long ago they plotted the feudal dynasty to come. There, among the mice and cockroaches, I might surely find a way of winding down my history.
230. One by one the doors of the great house click shut behind me. Shuffling furniture, capturing dirt, turning wood to ash I have found occupation for a lifetime. Slaves lose everything in their chains, I recognize, even joy in escaping from them. The host is dying, the parasite scuttles anxiously about the cooling entrails wondering whose tissues it will live off next.
I was not, after all, made to live alone. If I had been set down by fate in the middle of the veld in the middle of nowhere, buried to my waist and commanded to live a life, I could not have done it. I am not a philosopher. Women are not philosophers, and I am a woman. A woman cannot make something out of nothing. However sterile my occupation with dust and cobwebs and food and soiled linen may have seemed, it was necessary to fill me out, to give me life. Alone in the veld I would pine away. Out of the movements of the heavenly bodies and the tiny signals of insects debating whether or not I might yet be eaten I could not possibly fill day after day and night after night. I would need at the very least, besides eyes and ears, two hands and the use of them, and a store of pebbles to build patterns with; and how long can one go on building patterns before one longs for extinction? I am not a principle, a rule of discourse, a machine planted by a being from another planet on this desolate earth beneath the Southern Cross to generate sentiments day after day, night after night, keeping count of them as I go, until I run dry. I need more than merely pebbles to permute, rooms to clean, furniture to push around: I need people to talk to, brothers and sisters or fathers and mothers, I need a history and a culture, I need hopes and aspirations, I need a moral sense and a teleology before I will be happy, not to mention food and drink. What will become of me now that I am alone? For I am alone again, alone in the historical present: Hendrik is gone, Anna is gone with him, they fled in the night without a word, taking nothing that could not be strapped on a bicycle. What is going to happen now? I am full of foreboding. I huddle in the storeroom, the chill of the stone floor seeps into my bones, the cockroaches stand around me waving their curious antennae, and I fear the very worst.
231. Winter is coming. A cold wind whistles across the flats beneath an iron sky. The potatoes have gone to seed, the fruit has rotted on the ground. The dog has departed, following Hendrik. The pumps spin monotonously day and night, the dams flow over. The farm is going to ruin. I do not know what will happen to the sheep. I have opened every gate on the farm, they have spread into every camp. One morning before dawn a hundred grey shapes passed between house and storeroom, a muted thudding and jostling, in search of new pasture. I find that they mean nothing to me. I cannot catch them, I have not the stomach to slaughter them. If I had bullets I would shoot them for their own good (I weigh the gun in my hand, my arm is steady) and leave them to moulder. Their fleece is long and filthy; infested with ticks and blowfly, they cannot survive another summer.
232. I live on pumpkin and mealie-porridge. I have put away nothing for the hard days ahead. God will provide for his own; and if I am not one of his own, it were as well I should perish. I trudge about my trivial businesses whipped by the wind. Particle by particle the skin is flayed from my face; I have no will to regenerate it. Atoms of skin, atoms of mortar, atoms of rust fly off into oblivion. If one is very patient, if one lives long enough, one can hope to see the day when the last wall falls to dust, the lizard suns itself on the hearth, the thornbush sprouts in the graveyard.
233. I have had visitors, more visitors than I can name. I did not know, in my aboriginal innocence, that there were so many people in the world. Every inch of the farm has been searched for my father, who rode out one ill-fated day and never came back.
The name cannot be crossed off the list, they explain to me, until the remains are discovered. That is the principle. I nod. How fortunate one must be to have simple, credible principles to live by. Perhaps it is not too late to leave the wilds and find a home in civilization.
234. The horse. The horse stood in the stable for weeks after the disappearance of my father. Then I tired of feeding the horse and turned it loose. Now there is no horse. Or perhaps the horse roams the hills looking for its lost master.
235. Ou-Anna and Jakob have visited the farm too. They came in the donkey-cart to fetch their last belongings. Ou-Anna sighed and spoke of my father’s virtues. “He was always a man of his word,” she said. “What news do you have of Hendrik?” I said. “Nothing,” she said, “he has disappeared, he and that wife of his. But they will catch him yet!”
Jakob presses his hat to his chest and bows. His wife guides him to the cart. She whips up the donkeys and they trundle out of my life, wizened, hunched. I watch until they cross the drift, then I close the door.
236. What will become of Hendrik? When they came to search for my father, those bearded men, those boys with the rosy cheeks and the strict little mouths and the marksmen’s blue eyes, were they truly searching for the absent master or were they after the truant slave and his mate? And if the latter, must they not have found them by now, and laconically shot them, and gone home to their suppers? For in this part of the world there is no hiding-place. This part of the world is naked in every direction to the eye of the hunter; he who cannot burrow is lost.
But perhaps they did not shoot them out of hand. Perhaps, having tracked them down, they took them in, tied like beasts, to some far-off place of justice and condemned them to break stone for the rest of their lives to pay for their crimes and the crazed vindictive stories they told. Perhaps, as a woman, as a maiden lady weak in the head, I was told nothing. Perhaps they marched Hendrik and Anna out of the courtroom and looked at each other and nodded, tempering justice with mercy, and sent the bailiff with a roll of wire to wire the gates of this farm shut, and cast me out of their minds. For one may be locked away as well in a large space as in a small. Perhaps, therefore, my story has already had its end, the documents tied up with a ribbon and stored away, and only I do not know, for my own good.
Or perhaps they did indeed bring Hendrik back to the farm, to confront me, and I have forgotten. Perhaps they all came, the magistrate, the clerks, the bailiffs, the curious from miles around, and marched Hendrik up to me chained at wrist and ankle, and said, “Is this the man?” and waited for my answer. Then we looked upon each other for the last time and I said, “Yes, it’s he,” and he swore villainously
and spat on me, and they beat him and dragged him off, and I wept. Perhaps that is the true story, however unflattering to me.
Or perhaps I have been mistaken all the time, perhaps my father is not dead after all, but tonight at dusk will come riding out of the hills on the lost horse, and stamp into the house, growling because his bath is not ready, bursting open the locked doors, sniffing at the strange smells. “Who was here?” shouts my father. “Have you had a hotnot in the house?” I whimper and begin to run, but he catches me and twists my arm. I gibber with fear, “Hendrik!” I sob, “Come and help, the ghosts are back!”
But Hendrik, alas, is gone and I must face my demons alone, a grown woman, a woman of the world, though one would not think so, crouched behind the last bag of mealies. Hendrik, I cannot speak to you, but I wish you well, you and Anna both, I wish you the cunning of the jackal, I wish you better luck than your hunters. And if one night you come tapping at the window I will not be surprised. You can sleep here all day, at night you can walk about in the moonlight saying to yourself whatever it is that men say to themselves on a piece of earth that is their own. I will cook your meals, I will even, if you like, try again to be your second woman, it is surely not beyond me if I put my mind to it, all things must be possible on this island out of space, out of time. You can bring your cubs with you; I will guard them by day and take them out to play by night. Their large eyes will glow, they will see things invisible to other folk; and in the daytime when the eye of heaven glowers and pierces every shadow we can lie together in the cool dark of the earth, you and I and Anna and they.