In the Heart of the Country

  50. The great beam of my vision swings and for a spell Hendrik’s child-bride is illuminated, stepping down from the donkey-cart. Then, like the lighthouse-keeper strapped into his chair against the treacherous seventh wave, I watch the girl slip back into the dark, hear the grinding of the cogs that turn the lamp, and wait for Hendrik, or my father, or that other woman, to swim into view and glow for a spell with a light that is not their own but comes from me and may even be not light but fire. I have only, I tell myself, to throw off the straps and haul on the lever ready to my hand for the cogs to stop grinding and the light to fall steady on the girl, her slim arms, her slender body; but I am a coward, to speak only of cowardice, the beam swings on, and in a moment I am watching the stone desert or the goats or my face in the mirror, objects on which I can happily release the dry acid breath I have held back so painfully, breath that is, I cannot after all deny it, my spirit, my self, or as much so as the light is. Though I may ache to abdicate the throne of consciousness and enter the mode of being practised by goats or stones, it is with an ache I do not find intolerable. Seated here I hold the goats and stones, the entire farm and even its environs, as far as I know them, suspended in this cool, alienating medium of mine, exchanging them item by item for my word-counters. A hot gust lifts and drops a flap of ochre dust. The landscape recomposes itself and settles. Then Hendrik hands his bride down from the donkey-cart. Vivid and unwitting under the lenses of the field-glasses she takes her first steps toward the cottage, still holding what may be a withered posy, her toes demurely inward, soft flesh brushing soft flesh under the stiff calico of her skirt, and words again begin to falter. Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it. Hendrik’s bride, her sly doe-eyes, her narrow hips, are beyond the grope of words until desire consents to mutate into the curiosity of the watcher. The frenzy of desire in the medium of words yields the mania of the catalogue. I struggle with the proverbs of hell.

  51. In the hour before dawn Hendrik wakes, roused by sounds too subtle for my ear, veerings of the wind, the rustlings of birds at the tail-end of sleep. In the dark he puts on his trousers, his shoes, his jacket. He rekindles the fire and brews coffee. Behind his back the stranger pulls up the kaross snug about her ears and lies watching. Her eyes gleam orange. The window is shut, the air in the cottage rich with human smells. They have lain naked all night, waking and sleeping, giving off their complex odours: the smoky sourness of brown people, I know that by heart, I must have had a brown nurse though I cannot recall her; (I sniff again, the other smells are harder) the iron smell of blood certainly; coming piercingly through the blood the thin acrid track of the girl’s excitement; and finally, drenching the air with milky sweetness, the flood of Hendrik’s response. The question to ask is not, How do I, a lonely spinster, come to know such things? It is not for nothing that I spend evenings humped over the dictionary. Words are words. I have never pretended to embrace that night’s experience. A factor, I deal in signs merely. The true question is, If I know these things, then how much the more must my father not know them, and therefore, swelling with envy in its cell, why does the hot shell of his heart not burst? I pick up and sniff and describe and drop, moving from one item to the next, numbering the universe steadily with my words; but what weapons has he with which to keep at bay the dragons of desire? I am no prophetess, but a chill in the wind tells me that disaster is coming. I hear dark footfalls in the empty passages of our house. I hunch my shoulders and wait. After decades of sleep something is going to befall us.

  52. Hendrik squats before the fire to pour the boiling water over the coffee-grounds. While the idyll lasts he will make his own coffee. Then the girl, from fairy visitor grown to wife, will learn to get up first, and no doubt soon be shouted at and beaten too. Ignorant of this she watches eagerly, rubbing the warm soles of her feet together.

  53. Hendrik steps out into the last of the night-world. In the trees along the riverbed birds begin to grow restless. The stars are clear as ice. The pebbles grate crisply under his shoes. I hear the clank of the pail against the stone floor of the storeroom, then his swift stride crunching away to the cowshed. My father tosses his blankets aside, swings out of bed, and stands on the cold floor in his socks. In my own room I am already dressing, for I must have his coffee ready when, stern and drawn, he stamps into the kitchen. Life on the farm.

  54. No word about the marriage has passed between Hendrik and my father since the day when Hendrik came to ask leave to bring a wife on to the farm and my father replied, “Do as you wish.” The wedding-feast was held at Armoede, the wedding-night on the road or here, I do not know, and the day after that Hendrik was back at work. My father increased his rations but offered no wedding-gift. The first time I saw Hendrik after the announcement I said, “Congratulations, Hendrik,” and he touched his hat and smiled and said, “Thank you, miss.”

  55. Sitting on the stoep side by side, watching the last of the sunset, waiting for shooting-stars, we sometimes hear the twang of Hendrik’s guitar-strings, fumbling, gentle, across the river. One night when the air was particularly still we heard him pick his way through the whole of Daar bo op die berg. But most nights the wind whips the frail sounds away, and we might as well be on separate planets, we on ours, they on theirs.

  56. I see little of Hendrik’s bride. While he is away she keeps to the cottage, foraying only to the dam for water or to the river for firewood, where my eye is unfailingly drawn to her scarlet kerchief bobbing among the trees. She is familiarizing herself with her new life, with the routine of cooking and washing, with her duties to her husband, with her own body, with the four walls around her, with the view from the front door and the great whitewashed farmhouse that lies at the centre of that view, with the heavy man and the brisk, thin woman who come out on the stoep in the evenings and sit staring into space.

  57. Hendrik and his wife visit Jakob and Anna on Sundays. They put on their best clothes, span in the donkeys, and trundle sedately down the half-mile of track to the old schoolhouse. I ask Anna about the girl. She says she is “sweet” but still a child. If she is a child, what am I? I see that Anna would like to take her under her wing.

  58. Hat in hand, Hendrik stands at the kitchen door waiting for me to look up. Across the batter-bowl and the broken eggshells I meet his eyes.

  “Good morning, miss.”

  “Good morning, Hendrik. How are you?”

  “We are well, miss. I came to ask: does miss perhaps have work in the house? For my wife, miss.”

  “Yes, perhaps I have, Hendrik. But where is your wife?”

  “She is here, miss.” He nods back over his shoulder, then finds my eyes again.

  “Tell her to come inside.”

  He turns and says “Hê!” smiling tightly. There is a flash of scarlet and the girl slips behind him. He steps aside, leaving her framed in the doorway, hands clasped, eyes downcast.

  “So you are another Anna. Now we have two Annas.”

  She nods, still averting her face.

  “Talk to the miss!” whispers Hendrik. His voice is harsh, but that means nothing, we all know, such are the games we play for each other.

  “Anna, miss,” whispers Anna. She clears her throat softly.

  “Then you will have to be Klein-Anna – we can’t have two Annas in the same kitchen, can we?”

  She is beautiful. The head and eyes are childishly large, the lines of lip and cheekbone clear as if outlined in pencil. This year, and next year, and perhaps the next, you will still be beautiful, I say to myself, until the second child comes, and the childbearing and the ailments and the squalor and monotony exhaust you, and Hendrik feels betrayed and bitter, and you and he begin to shout at each other, and your skin creases and your eyes dull. You will be like me yet, I tell myself, never fear.

  “Look at me, Anna, don’t be shy. Woul
d you like to come and work in the house?”

  She nods slowly, rubbing her instep with her big toe. I watch her toes and her wiry calves.

  “Come on, child, speak, I won’t eat you up!”

  “Hê!” whispers Hendrik from the door.

  “Yes, miss,” she says.

  I advance on her, drying my hands on my apron. She does not flinch, but her eyes flicker toward Hendrik. I touch her under the chin with my forefinger and lift her face.

  “Come, Anna, there is nothing to be afraid of. Do you know who I am?”

  She looks straight into my eyes. Her mouth is trembling. Her eyes are not black but dark dark brown, darker even than Hendrik’s.

  “Well, who am I?”

  “Miss is the miss.”

  “Well, come on then! . . . Anna!”

  But Anna, my old Anna, has, it seems, been hovering in the passage all the time, listening.

  “Anna, this is our Klein-Anna. You are so nice and big: what if we make you Ou-Anna, then she can be Klein-Anna. How does that sound?”

  “That sounds fine, miss.”

  “Now listen: give her a mug of tea, then she can get down to work. Show her where the things for scrubbing are kept, I want her to scrub the kitchen floor first of all. And you, Klein-Anna, you must see to it that you bring your own mug and plate tomorrow. Will you remember?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Hendrik, you must go now, the baas will be cross if he sees you hanging around here.”

  “Yes, miss. Thank you, miss.”

  All of this in our own language, a language of nuances, of supple word-order and delicate particles, opaque to the outsider, dense to its children with moments of solidarity, moments of distance.

  59. It rained this morning. For days there had been rainclouds rolling in trains across the sky from horizon to horizon, and far-off thunder rattling against the dome of space, and a sultry gloom. Then at mid-morning the birds began to circle and settle and give muted nesting calls. All breath of air ceased. Drops of water, huge, lukewarm, splashed straight down out of the sky, faltered, then began to fall in earnest as the thunderstorm, laced with lightning and endlessly resonating, cut a path across us moving northward. For an hour it rained. Then it was over, birds sang, the earth steamed, the last fresh runnels dwindled and sank away.

  60. Today I darned six pairs of socks for my father. There is a convention older than myself which says that Anna should not do the darning.

  61. Today’s leg of mutton was excellent: tender, juicy, roasted to a turn. There is a place for all things. Life is possible in the desert.

  62. Coming over the rise past the dam, my father gathers about his head and shoulders the streaks and whorls, orange, pink, lavender, mauve, crimson, of the haloed sunset display. Whatever it is that he has been doing today (he never says, I never ask), he comes home nevertheless in pride and glory, a fine figure of a man.

  63. In the face of all the allures of sloth, my father has never ceased to be a gentleman. When he goes out riding he wears his riding-boots, which I must help him off with and which Anna must wax. On his inspection tour every second week he wears a coat and tie. In a stud-box he keeps three collar-studs. Before meals he washes his hands with soap. He drinks his brandy ceremonially, by himself, from a brandy-glass, of which he has four, by lamplight, sitting in an armchair. Every month, stiff as a ramrod on a stool outside the kitchen door, the chickens eyeing him and clucking, he subjects himself to the discipline of my cutting-scissors. I trim the iron-grey hair, smoothing it with the palm of my hand. Then he stands up, shakes out the napkins, thanks me, and stalks away. Who would think that out of rituals like these he could string together day after day, week after week, month after month, and, it would seem, year after year, riding in every evening against a flaming sky as though he had spent the whole day waiting for this moment, his horse tethered in a thorn-tree’s shade just over the rise, he reclining against the saddle, whittling clothespegs, smoking, whistling through his teeth, dozing with his hat over his eyes, his pocket-watch in his hand. Is that the extent of the hidden life he leads when he is out of sight, or is the thought irreverent?

  64. Every sixth day, when our cycles coincide, his cycle of two days, my cycle of three, we are driven to the intimacy of relieving our bowels in the bucket-latrine behind the fig-trees in the malodour of the other’s fresh faeces, either he in my stench or I in his. Sliding aside the wooden lid I straddle his hellish gust, bloody, feral, the kind that flies love best, flecked, I am sure, with undigested flesh barely mulled over before pushed through. Whereas my own (and here I think of him with his trousers about his knees, screwing his nose as high as he can while the blowflies buzz furiously in the black space below him) is dark, olive with bile, hard-packed, kept in too long, old, tired: We heave and strain, wipe ourselves in our different ways with squares of store-bought toilet paper, mark of gentility, recompose our clothing, and return to the great outdoors. Then it becomes Hendrik’s charge to inspect the bucket and, if it prove not to be empty, to empty it in a hole dug far away from the house, and wash it out, and return it to its place. Where exactly the bucket is emptied I do not know; but somewhere on the farm there is a pit where, looped in each other’s coils, the father’s red snake and the daughter’s black embrace and sleep and dissolve.

  65. But the patterns change. My father has begun to come home in the mornings. Never before has he done this. He blunders into the kitchen and makes tea for himself. Me he shrugs away. He stands with his hands in his pockets, his back to the two Annas, if they are there, looking out of the window, while the tealeaves draw. The maids hunch their shoulders, disquieted, obliterating themselves. Or if they are not there he wanders through the house cup in hand until he finds Klein-Anna, sweeping or polishing or whatever, and stands over her, watching, saying nothing. I hold my tongue. When he leaves we women all relax.

  66. In this bare land it is hard to keep secrets. We live naked beneath each other’s hawkeyes, but live so under protest. Our resentment of each other, though buried in our breasts, sometimes rises to choke us, and we take long walks, digging our fingernails into our palms. It is only by whelming our secrets in ourselves that we can keep them. If we are tight-lipped it is because there is much in us that wants to burst out. We search for objects for our anger and, when we find them, rage immoderately. The servants dread my father’s rages, always in excess of their occasion. Goaded by him, they lash the donkeys, throw stones at the sheep. How fortunate that beasts feel no anger, but endure and endure! The psychology of masters.

  67. While Hendrik is out on a godforsaken task in the heat of the afternoon my father visits his wife. He rides up to the door of the cottage and waits, not dismounting, till the girl comes out and stands before him squinting against the sun. He speaks to her. She is bashful. She hides her face. He tries to soothe her. Perhaps he even smiles, but I cannot see. He leans down and gives her a brown paper packet. It is full of candies, hearts and diamonds with mottoes on them. She stands holding the packet while he rides away.

  68. Or: As Klein-Anna makes her way homeward in the heat of the afternoon my father comes upon her. She stops while, bending over the horse’s neck, he speaks to her. She is bashful and hides her face. He tries to soothe her, even smiling at her. From his pocket he takes a brown paper packet, which he gives her. It is full of candies, what they call hearts and diamonds. She folds the packet small and walks on.

  69. He bends over the horse’s neck, talking to the girl, trying to soothe her. She hides her face. He reaches into his pocket and I catch a flash of silver. For an instant the coin lies open in her palm, a shilling or even a florin. They both look at it. Then the hand closes. He rides off and she walks home.

  70. He pecks at his food and pushes it away. He drinks his glass of brandy not sitting in his armchair but pacing about the yard in the moonlight. His voice, when he speaks to me, is gruff with defiance and s
hame. I do not need to lurk behind the shutters to know his guilty thoughts.

  71. Where can she possibly spend the money? Where will she hide it from her husband? Where will she hide the sweets? Or will she eat them all herself in a single day? Is she so much of a child? If she has one secret from her husband she will soon have two. Cunning, cunning gift!

  72. He believes that he will begin to prosper once I am out of the way. Though he dare not say so, he would like me to take to my bedchamber with a migraine and stay there. I am prepared to believe he is sincere when he says to himself that he wishes I and Hendrik and all the other hindrances would go away. But how long does he think their idyll will last, the two of them alone on the farm, an ageing man and a servant-girl, a silly child? He will be maddened by the vacuous freedom of it. What will they do together day after day after day? What can they have to say to each other? The truth is that he needs our opposition, our several oppositions, to hold the girl away from him, to confirm his desire for her, as much as he needs our opposition to be powerless against that desire. It is not privacy that he truly wants, but the helpless complicity of watchers. Nor can I believe that he does not know how he enters my dreams, in what capacities, committing what acts. The long passage that links the two wings of the house, with his bedroom in one wing and mine in the other, teems with nocturnal spectres, he and I among them. They are not my creatures nor are they his: they are ours together. Through them we possess and are possessed by each other. There is a level, we both know, at which Klein-Anna is a pawn and the real game lies between the two of us.

  73. I have given in to his wish and announced my indisposition. The green shutters are locked. All day I lie stretched out on the counterpane with my horny toes in the air and a pillow over my eyes. Everything I need is here: under the bed a pot, by the bedside a carafe of water with a tumbler over the neck. Old Anna brings the meals and cleans the room. I eat like a bird. I take nothing for the migraine, knowing that nothing will help me and being anyhow a cultist of pain. Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it. The air is cool and green even in the afternoons. Sometimes the pain is a solid block behind the wall of my forehead, sometimes a disk within my skull tilting and humming with the movements of the earth, sometimes a wave that unrolls and thuds endlessly against the backs of my eyelids. I lie hour after hour concentrating on the sounds inside my head. In a trance of absorption I hear the pulse in my temples, the explosion and eclipse of cells, the grate of bone, the sifting of skin into dust. I listen to the molecular world inside me with the same attention I bring to the prehistoric world outside. I walk in the riverbed and hear the cascade of thousands of grains of sand, or smell the iron exhalation of rocks in the sun. I bring my understanding to the concerns of insects – the particles of food that must be carried over mountaintops and stored in holes, the eggs that must be arranged in hexagons, the rival tribes that must be annihilated. The habits of birds, too, are stable. It is therefore with reluctance that I confront the gropings of human desire. Clenched beneath a pillow in a dim room, focussed on the kernel of pain, I am lost in the being of my being. This is what I was meant to be: a poetess of interiority, an explorer of the inwardness of stones, the emotions of ants, the consciousness of the thinking parts of the brain. It seems to be the only career, if we except death, for which life in the desert has fitted me.