In the Heart of the Country

  74. My father is exchanging forbidden words with Klein-Anna. I do not need to leave my room to know. We, he is saying to her, we two; and the word reverberates in the air between them. Now: come with me now, he is saying to her. There are few enough words true, rock-hard enough to build a life on, and these he is destroying. He believes that he and she can choose their words and make a private language, with an I and you and here and now of their own. But there can be no private language. Their intimate you is my you too. Whatever they may say to each other, even in the closest dead of night, they say in common words, unless they gibber like apes. How can I speak to Hendrik as before when they corrupt my speech? How do I speak to them?

  75. Days and nights wheel past, the light in my shuttered room brightens to grey-green and darkens to black, old Anna appears and disappears and reappears in a round of pot and plate, murmuring, clucking. I lie here involved in cycles of time, outside the true time of the world, while my father and Hendrik’s wife travel their arrow-straight paths from lust to capture, from helplessness to the relief of surrender. Now they are past cajolements and gifts and shy shakings of the head. Hendrik is ordered to the remotest marches of the farm to burn the ticks off sheep. My father tethers his horse outside his servant’s house. He locks the door behind him. The girl tries to push his hands off, but she is awed by what is about to happen. He undresses her and lays her out on his servant’s coir mattress. She is limp in his arms. He lies with her and rocks with her in an act which I know enough about to know that it too breaks codes.

  76. “I look upon any poor man as totally undone,” whispers a voice (in my solitude I hear voices, perhaps I am truly a witch-woman), “. . . totally undone if he has the misfortune to have an honest heart, a fine wife, and a powerful neighbour.” Poor Hendrik: undone, undone. I weep drunken weeping. Then I screw my eyes tight against the pain and wait for the three figures to dissolve into streaks and pulses and whorls: Hendrik playing his mouthorgan beneath a far-off thorn-tree, the couple clenched in the stifling hut. There is finally only I, drifting into sleep, beyond the reach of pain. Acting on myself I change the world. Where does this power end? Perhaps that is what I am trying to find out.

  77. Anna has not come. All morning I have lain waiting for her discreet tap at the door. I think of tea and rusks and my saliva flows. There is no doubt about it, I am not pure spirit.

  78. I stand in my slippers in the empty kitchen, dizzy after my long hibernation. The stove is cold. The sun blinks on the rows of copperware.

  79. I stand behind my chair, gripping the back, and speak to my father.

  “Where is Anna? She has not been in today.”

  He forks up a mouthful of rice and gravy, bending over his plate. He chews with appetite.

  “Anna? How should I know where Anna is? It’s none of my business. The maids are your business. Which Anna are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about our Anna. Our Anna, not the other one. I want to know where she is. The schoolhouse is empty.”

  “They have gone. They left this morning.”

  “Who has gone?”

  “She and old Jakob. They took the donkey-cart.”

  “And why have they suddenly left? Why didn’t you tell me? Where have they gone?”

  “They have gone. They asked me, and I said they could. What else do you want to know?”

  “Nothing. There is nothing more I want to know.”

  80. Or perhaps as I come into the room words are already issuing from that towering black cylinder.

  “Anna and Jakob have gone. I have given them a holiday. You will have to get along without Anna for a while.”

  81. Or perhaps there is only the empty kitchen, and the cold stove, and the rows of gleaming copperware, and absence, two absences, three absences, four absences. My father creates absence. Wherever he goes he leaves absence behind him. The absence of himself above all – a presence so cold, so dark, so remote as to be itself an absence, a moving shadow casting a blight on the heart. And the absence of my mother. My father is the absence of my mother, her negative, her death. She the soft, the fair; he the hard, the dark. He has murdered all the motherly in me and left me this brittle, hairy shell with the peas of dead words rattling in it. I stand in the empty kitchen hating him.

  82. The past. I grope around inside my head for the mouth of the tunnel that will lead me back in time and memory past images of myself younger and younger, fresher and fresher, through youth and childhood back to my mother’s knee and my origins, but the tunnel is not there. Inside my skull the walls are glassy. I see only reflections of myself drab and surly staring back at myself. How can I believe this creature was ever a child, how can I believe she was born of humankind? Easier to imagine her crawling from under a stone in her bottlegreen sheath, licking the egg-slime off herself before taking her bearings and crawling off to this farmhouse to take up residence behind the wainscot.

  83. But perhaps if I spend a day in the loft emptying old trunks I will find evidence of a credible past: ornamental fans, lockets and cameos, dancing slippers, favours and souvenirs, a baptismal frock, and photographs, if there were photographs in those days, daguerreotypes perhaps, showing a scowling baby with its hair in curls sitting in the lap of a woman, hesitant, obscure, and behind them the stiff figure of a man, and, who knows, beside them a scowling lad too, in a suit trimmed with lace, a brother who must have died in one of the great epidemics, the influenza epidemic or the smallpox epidemic, leaving me without a protector. And then, in the bloom of her tentative young motherhood, the woman must have died trying to give birth to a third child, died as she feared she would, afraid to deny the man his detested relentless pleasure in her, her death a hideous storm of terror, with the midwife wringing her hands about the room and recommending ipecacuanha as a last resort.

  84. All over this land there must be patient middle-aged children waiting for their parents’ grip on the keys to slacken. The day I compose my father’s hands on his breast and pull the sheet over his face, the day I take over the keys, I will unlock the rolltop desk and uncover all the secrets he has kept from me, the ledgers and banknotes and deeds and wills, the photographs of the dead woman inscribed “With all my love”, the packet of letters tied in a red ribbon. And in the darkest corner of the bottommost pigeonhole I will uncover the one-time ecstasies of the corpse, the verses folded three and four times and packed into a manila envelope, the sonnets to Hope and Joy, the confessions of love, the passionate vows and dedications, the postmarital rhapsodies, the quatrains “To my Son”; and then no more, silence, the vein petering out. At some point on the line from youth to man to husband to father to master the heart must have turned to stone. Was it there, with the advent of the stunted girl? Was I the one who killed the life in him, as he kills the life in me?

  85. In grotesque pink slippers I stand in the centre of the kitchen floor. My eyes pinch against the stab of the sunlight. Behind me lies the haven of the bed in the darkened room, before me the irritation of a day’s housework. How can I possibly, out of the somnolence and banality of my life, out of ignorance and incapacity, whip up the menace of an outraged daughter confronting an abashed or arrogant father, a brazen or trembling servant-girl? My heart is not in it, nothing has prepared me for this part. Life in the desert teaches nothing if not that all things are permissible. I want no more than to creep back into bed and fall asleep with my thumb in my mouth, or else to search out my oldest sunbonnet and wander away down the riverbed till the house is out of sight and I hear nothing but the cicadas thrilling and the flies whipping past my face. My theme is the endless drift of the currents of sleep and waking, not the storms of human conflict. Where this house stands in the desert there is a turbulence, a vortex, a black hole that I live in but abhor. I would have been far happier under a bush, born in a parcel of eggs, bursting my shell in unison with a thousand sisters and invading the world in an army of chopping mandibles. Be
tween four walls my rage is baffled. Reflected from planes of plaster and tile and board and wallpaper, my outpourings rain back on me, stick to me, seep back through my skin. Though I may look like a machine with opposed thumbs that does housework, I am in truth a sphere quivering with violent energies, ready to burst upon whatever fractures me. And while there is one impulse in me that tells me to roll out and erupt harmlessly in the great outdoors, I fear that there is another impulse – I am full of contradictions – telling me to hide in a corner like a black widow spider and engulf whoever passes in my venom. “Take that for the youth I never had!” I hiss, and spit, if spiders can spit.

  86. But the truth is that I have worn black widow-weeds longer than I can remember, for all I know I was a baby in a black diaper waving my rickety little legs, clutching at my black knitted bootees, wailing. Certainly at the age of six I was wearing, day in, day out, a hideous bottlegreen frock that draped me from throat to wrists and revealed the merest flash of meagre shins before these were engulfed in black clubshoes. I must have been photographed at that age, I have no other explanation for it; there must be a photograph of me in one of those trunks or desks, and I must have missed it when I was listing the items. How could a mere child have had enough self-awareness to see herself with such dispassionate clarity, down to the pinched mouth and the pallor and the ratstail of hair? Or perhaps I had a vision, I must not rely too much on photographs, what could all those photographers have been doing in the desert when I was a child, not hunting me I am sure; perhaps, being a brooding kind of child, I was transported out of myself for an instant and had a vision of myself as I really was, in my bottlegreen dress, which must surely also be in the loft, stuck away somewhere, before I was returned to my unthinking animal integrity by whoever it was that vouchsafed me the vision, my tutelary angel, or some other variety of angel, a variety that warns one against high hopes for oneself perhaps, an angel of reality, a minatory angel. Or perhaps I never had animal integrity, or lost it before I was six, perhaps by the age of six I was already a little corporal machine trotting around the yard, building enclosures of stones or whatever it is that children do, pulling the wings off flies, watched over gravely by a little ghostly double; perhaps, regrettably, there are no angels, perhaps all the snapshots of my childish self that I carry about with me are the work of that little watcher (what else had she to do?), perhaps she split off from me when I was very very young, perhaps even my vision of myself as a baby with heartburn or heartache or whatever, clutching at my black bootees and wailing, is a vision of that double, pondering by the cribside, feeling her own ghostly heartache, I guess of course that it was a she, besides seeing blind alleys bifurcating everywhere, which I ignore, being after bigger things than problems of philosophy.

  87. I am a black widow in mourning for the uses I was never put to. All my life I have been left lying about, forgotten, dusty, like an old shoe, or when I have been used, used as a tool, to bring the house to order, to regiment the servants. But I have quite another sense of myself, glimmering tentatively somewhere in my inner darkness: myself as a sheath, as a matrix, as protectrix of a vacant inner space. I move through the world not as a knifeblade cutting the wind, or as a tower with eyes, like my father, but as a hole, a hole with a body draped around it, the two spindly legs hanging loose at the bottom and the two bony arms flapping at the sides and the big head lolling on top. I am a hole crying to be whole. I know this is in one sense just a way of speaking, a way of thinking about myself, but if one cannot think of oneself in words, in pictures, then what is there to think of oneself in? I think of myself as a straw woman, a scarecrow, not too tightly stuffed, with a scowl painted on my face to scare the crows and in my centre a hollow, a space which the fieldmice could use if they were very clever. But this is more than a picture, I cannot deny it, I am not ignorant of anatomy, I am not incurious about my constitution, I am among other things a farmgirl living in the midst of the hurlyburly of nature, or such paltry hurlyburly as we have in the desert, not unaware that there is a hole between my legs that has never been filled, leading to another hole never filled either. If I am an O, I am sometimes persuaded, it must be because I am a woman. Yet how galling, after meditations that would do credit to a thinker, to find myself worked into the trap of conceding that if only I had a good man to sleep at my side, and give me babies, all would be well, I would perk up and learn to smile, my limbs would fill out, my skin glow, and the voice inside my head stutter and stumble into silence. I do not have it in me to believe that the mating of farmboy with farmgirl will save me, whatever save may mean, at least for the time being, there is no knowing what shifts I may be driven to. Provisionally, I believe myself reserved for a higher fate. Therefore if by a miracle one of the rawboned neighbours should come trotting along one day with a posy of veld-flowers, blushing and sweating, to court me for my inheritance, I will take to my bed or read to him from my terrible sonnets or writhe at his feet in a fit, anything to send him galloping off; always assuming that we have neighbours, I see no evidence of it, we might as well be living on the moon.

  88. On the other hand, I have been able, sometimes for days on end, to lose my sense of election, to see myself as simply a lonely, ugly old maid, capable of redemption, to some extent, from loneliness, from loneness, by marriage, a human institution, to another lone soul, a soul perhaps greedier than most, stupider, uglier, not much of a catch, but then what kind of catch am I; whom I would vow to bend to a little lower, slave for a little harder than another woman would, whom I would have to disrobe for on Saturday nights, in the dark, so as not to alarm him, and arouse, if the arts of arousal can be learned, and guide to the right hole, rendered penetrable with a gob of chickenfat from a pot at the bedside, and endure the huffing and puffing of, and be filled eventually, one expects, with seed by, and lie listening to the snoring of, till the balm of slumber arrive. What I lack in experience I plainly make up for in vision; if the commerce of men with women is not like that it might as well be. I can imagine too falling pregnant after many moons, though it would not astonish me if I were barren, I look like the popular notion of the barren woman, and then, after seven or eight months, giving birth to a child, with no midwife and my husband blind drunk in the next room, gnawing through the umbilical cord, clapping the livid babyface to my flat sour breast; and then, after a decade of closeted breeding, emerging into the light of day at the head of a litter of ratlike, runty girls, all the spit image of myself, scowling into the sun, tripping over their own feet, identically dressed in bottlegreen smocks and snubnosed black shoes; and then, after another decade of listening to their hissing and clawing, packing them off one by one to the outside world to do whatever it is that unprepossessing girls do there, live in boarding-houses and work in post-offices perhaps, and bear illegitimate ratchildren to send back to the farm for sanctuary.

  89. Perhaps that is all that election means to me: not to have to figure in a bucolic comedy like the above, not to be explained away by poverty, degeneracy, torpor, or sloth. I want my story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, not the yawning middle without end which threatens no less if I connive at my father’s philandering and live to guard his dotage than if I am led to the altar by a swain and die full of years, a wizened granny in a rocking-chair. I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going. For the other kind of story, the weave of reminiscence in the dozing space of the mind, can never be mine. My life is not past, my art cannot be the art of memory. What will happen to me has not yet happened. I am a blind spot hurtling with both eyes open into the maw of the future, my password “And then?” And if at this instant I do not look as if I am hurtling, it is only because I dither for a while in the empty house, feeling the comfort of the sunlight glancing off the same rows of copperware it glanced off before I was born into this world. I would not be myself if I did not feel the seductions o
f the cool stone house, the comfortable old ways, the antique feudal language. Perhaps, despite my black clothes and the steel in my heart (unless it is stone, who can tell when it is so far away), I am a conserver rather than a destroyer, perhaps my rage at my father is simply rage at the violations of the old language, the correct language, that take place when he exchanges kisses and the pronouns of intimacy with a girl who yesterday scrubbed the floors and today ought to be cleaning the windows.