In the Heart of the Country

  I have never been privileged to hear a firearm discharged indoors before. I am used to wave after wave of echoes coming back at me from the hills. But now there is simply the jerk of the butt against my shoulder, the concussion, flat, unremarkable, and then a moment of silence before the first of the screams.

  While I listen I sniff in the cordite fumes. Ironstone chipped against ironstone invokes a spark and a wisp of the same heady smoke.

  119. In fact I have never heard a scream like this before. It fills the dark chamber with its brilliance and glares through the walls as if they were glass. Exhausting itself in tiny yip-yips, it bursts open immediately again. I am amazed. I would not have believed one could scream so loudly.

  The bolt comes back, the spent case tinkles at my feet, the second cartridge, cool, alien, slips into the breech.

  The screams grow shorter, they are acquiring a rhythm. There are also numerous angry lower sounds without rhythm, which I shall separate later, when I have time, if I can recall them.

  I elevate the barrel, close my eyes, and pull the trigger. At the same instant the rifle jerks out of my hands. The detonation is even flatter than before. The whole rifle leaves me, surprisingly. It snakes through the curtains and is gone. I rest on my knees empty-handed.

  120. I should leave now. I have caused enough trouble, my stomach is unpleasantly excited, the night is spoiled for them, I will undoubtedly have to pay. For the present it would be best if I were by myself.

  121. Hendrik stands in the moonlight in the middle of the yard watching me. There is no knowing what he thinks.

  In cool, well-formed words I speak to him: “Go to bed, Hendrik. It is late. Tomorrow is another day.”

  He sways, his face shadowed by his hat.

  The screaming has devolved into shouting. It would be best for all of us if I left.

  I circle Hendrik and take the road that leads away from the farmhouse, or, if one prefers to look at it in another way, that leads into the greater world. At first my back feels vulnerable, but later on less so.

  122. Is it possible that there is an explanation for all the things I do, and that that explanation lies inside me, like a key rattling in a can, waiting to be taken out and used to unlock the mystery? Is the following the key: through the agency of conflict with my father I hope to lift myself out of the endless middle of meditation on unattached existence into a true agon with crisis and resolution? If so, do I wish to employ the key, or do I wish to drop it quietly by the roadside and never see it again? And is it not remarkable how at one moment I can be walking away from a scene of crisis, from gunfire and screaming and interrupted pleasures, my shoes scuffling the pebbles, the moon’s rays bearing down on me like bars of silver, the nightbreeze growing chilly, and at the next moment I can be lost to things and back in the gabble of words? Am I, I wonder, a thing among things, a body propelled along a track by sinews and bony levers, or am I a monologue moving through time, approximately five feet above the ground, if the ground does not turn out to be just another word, in which case I am indeed lost? Whatever the case, I am plainly not myself in as clear a way as I might wish. When will I live down tonight’s behaviour? I should have kept my peace or been less half-hearted. My distaste for Hendrik’s grief showed my half-heart. A woman with red blood in her veins (what colour is mine? a watery pink? an inky violet?) would have pushed a hatchet into his hands and bundled him into the house to search out vengeance. A woman determined to be the author of her own life would not have shrunk from hurling open the curtains and flooding the guilty deed with light, the light of the moon, the light of firebrands. But I, as I feared, hover ever between the exertions of drama and the languors of meditation. Though I pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, I closed my eyes. It was not only a woman’s faintness that made me act so, it was a private logic, a psychology which meant to keep me from seeing my father’s nakedness. (Perhaps it was this same psychology which made me incapable of reaching out to comfort Hendrik.) (I have said nothing of the girl’s nakedness. Why?) There is consolation in having a psychology – for has there ever been a creature blessed with a psychology yet without an existence? – but there is cause for unease too. Whose creature, in a tale of unconscious motives, would I be? My freedom is at risk, I am being worked into a corner by forces beyond my control, there will soon be nothing for me but to sit in a corner weeping and jerking my muscles. It makes no difference that the corner presents itself to me at this moment as a long walk on the open road: at the end of it I shall discover that the earth is round: corners have many shapes. I do not have the equipment for life on the road. That is to say, while I have the feet and legs, and while I would be deceiving myself if I claimed a need for sustenance – with locusts and rain-showers and the odd change of shoes I can go on to infinity – the truth is that I have no stomach for the people I shall meet, the innkeepers and postillions and highwaymen, if that is the century I am in, and the adventures, the rapes and robberies, not that I have anything worth the robbing, not that I have anything worth the raping, that would be a scene to remember, though it happens to the most unexpected people. If, on the other hand, the road is forever as the road is now, dark, winding, stony, if I can stumble along forever in the moonlight or the sunlight, whichever it is to be, without coming out at such places as Armoede or the station or the city where daughters are ruined, if, wonder of wonders, the road goes nowhere day after day, week after week, season after season, except perhaps, if I am lucky, to the lip of the world, then I might give myself to it, to the story of life on the road, without psychology, without adventure, without shape or form, slog slog slog in my old button-shoes, which fall to tatters but are at once replaced by the new button-shoes which hang on a string around my neck like two black breasts, with infrequent stops for locusts and rainwater and even less frequent stops for the calls of nature and yet other stops for slumber and dream-passages, without them we die, and the ribbon of my meditations, black on white, floating like a mist five feet above the ground, stretching back to the horizon – yes, to such a life I might give myself. If I knew that that was all that was required of me my step would quicken at once, my stride lengthen, my hips swing, I would fare forward with a glad heart and a smile. But I have reason to suspect, or perhaps not reason, this sphere is not a sphere of reason. I have a suspicion, a suspicion pure and simple, a groundless suspicion, that this road leads, if I take the right fork, to Armoede location, and if I take the left, to the station. And if I pick my way southward along the cross-ties I will one day find myself at the seaside and be able to walk on the beach listening to the wave-surge, or alternatively to march straight out to sea where, failing a miracle, propelled relentlessly by its ancillary mechanisms, my head will be submerged and the ribbon of words finally trail off forever in a welter of bubbles. And what am I going to say to the folk on the train who look at me so strangely because of the spare shoes around my neck, because of the locusts that spring out of my handbag – the kindly old silver-haired gentleman, the fat lady in black cotton who dabs her perspiring upper lip with the daintiest of handkerchiefs, the stiff youth who looks so intently at me and might at any moment, depending on the century, be revealed as my long-lost brother or my seducer or even both? What words have I for them? I part my lips, they see my mottled teeth, they smell my carious gums, they blanch as there roars at them the old cold black wind that blows from nowhere to nowhere out of me endlessly.

  123. My father is sitting on the floor with his back against the footboard of the great double bed in which so much of the engendering in our family has been carried out. To the waist he is naked. His flesh is lilywhite. His face, which ought to be of the same brick-brown as his forearms, is yellow. He is looking straight at me where I stand, hand to mouth, in the first morning light.

  The rest of his body is draped in green. He has pulled the green curtains down the curtain-rod too, that is why the room is so bright. It is the curtain which he is holding around
his middle.

  We look at each other. Try as I will, I cannot work out what feelings his face expresses. I lack the faculty of reading faces.

  124. I go through the house closing doors: two living-room doors, two dining-room doors, bedroom door, bedroom door, sewing-room door, study door, bathroom door, bedroom door, kitchen door, pantry door, door of my room. Some of the doors are already closed.

  125. The cups have not yet been washed.

  126. There are flies in my father’s room. The air is heavy with their buzzing. They crawl on his face and he does not brush them away, he who has always been a fastidious man. They cluster on his hands, which are red with blood. There are splashes of dried blood on the floor and the curtain is caked with blood. I am not squeamish about blood, I have made blood-sausage on occasion, but in this case I am not sure it would not be better to leave the room for a while, to take a stroll, to clear my head. However, I stay, I am held here.

  He speaks, clearing his throat lengthily. “Fetch Hendrik,” he says. “Tell Hendrik to come, please.”

  He does not resist when I uncurl his fingers from the bloody wad of curtain he holds against himself. In his belly there is a hole big enough to slide my thumb into. The flesh around it is scorched.

  His hand catches a corner of the curtain and covers his sex.

  It is my fault again. I cannot do right. I put the wad back.

  127. I am running now as I have not run since childhood, fists clenched, arms pumping, legs toiling through the grey sand of the riverbed. I am wholly involved in my mission, action without reflection, a hundred-pound animal hurling itself through space under the impulse of disaster.

  128. Hendrik is asleep on the bare ticking. Bending over him I am overwhelmed with the stench of liquor and urine. Into his dull ear I pant my message: “Hendrik, wake up, get up! The baas has had an accident! Come and help!”

  He flails with his arms, striking me, shouting angry syllables, then falls back into his stupor.

  The girl is not here. Where is she?

  I begin to hurl things at Hendrik, a kettle, handfuls of spoons and knives, plates. I pick up the broom and ram the bristles into his face. He stumbles from the bed shielding himself with his arms. I thrust and thrust. “Listen to me when I speak to you!” I pant. I am beside myself with anger. Water ebbs from the kettle on to the mattress. He backs through the doorway and sprawls over the threshold. Dazzled by the sun he curls again on his side in the dust.

  “Where is the bottle? Tell me! Where is the brandy? Where did you get the brandy?” I stand over him with the broom, glad on the whole that no one is watching us, a grown man, a grown woman.

  “Let me alone, miss! I didn’t steal anything!”

  “Where did you get the brandy?”

  “The baas gave it to me, miss! I don’t steal.”

  “Get up and listen to me. The baas has had an accident. Do you understand? You must come and help.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  He struggles to his feet, wavers, staggers, and falls. I lift the broom high. He raises a leg resentfully in defence.

  “Come on, for God’s sake get a move on,” I scream, “the baas will die if you don’t help, and then it won’t be my fault!”

  “Just wait a moment, miss, it isn’t easy.”

  He makes no effort to rise. Lying on the ground he breaks into a smile.

  “You sot, you filthy sot, you’re finished here, I swear it! Pack your things and get out! I don’t want to see you here again.” The broomhandle thuds against the sole of his shoe and spins out of my hands.

  129. I am panting and toiling through the riverbed again. Would that the river came roaring down in flood and washed us away, sheep and all, leaving the earth clean! Perhaps that is how the tale will end, if the house does not burn down first. But the last of the dawn mauve has been scorched away, we are in for yet another fine day, I would say that the sky is pitiless if I did not know that the sky is merely clear, the earth merely dry, the rocks merely hard. What purgatory to live in this insentient universe where everything but me is merely itself! I alone, the one speck not spinning blindly along but trying to create a life for itself amid this storm of matter, these bodies driven by appetite, this rural idiocy! My gorge rises, I am not used to running, I fart heavily in mid-stride. I should have lived in the city; greed, there is a vice I can understand. In the city I would have room to expand; perhaps it is not too late, perhaps I can still run away to the city disguised as a man, a wizened beardless little man, to practise greed and make my fortune and find happiness, though the last is not likely.

  130. I stand heaving at the bedroom window. “Hendrik is not coming. He is drunk. Daddy should not have given him brandy, he is not used to the stuff.”

  The rifle from last night lies on the floor near the window.

  His face is a liverish yellow. He sits as before clutching the curtain to him. He does not turn his head. There is no telling whether he has heard me.

  131. I kneel over him. He is looking at the blank wall, but his gaze is focussed somewhere beyond it, on infinity perhaps, or even on his redeemer. Is he dead? Despite all the smallpox and influenza in my life I have never seen anything larger than a pig die.

  His breath strikes my nostrils, feverish, foul.

  “Water,” he whispers.

  There are midges floating in the water-bucket. I scoop them off and drink a beakerful. Then I bring the full beaker back and hold it to his lips. He swallows it with reassuring energy.

  “Can I help Daddy to get into bed?”

  He is moaning to himself, gritting his teeth, one moan to each shallow breath. His toes, sticking out from under the curtain, curl and uncurl.

  “Help me,” he whispers, “get the doctor quickly.” Tears roll down his cheeks.

  I straddle him and, gripping him under the armpits, try to raise him. He gives me no help at all.

  He is crying like a baby.

  “Help me, help me, the pain is terrible! Quickly, get something to stop the pain!”

  “There is no more brandy. Daddy gave it all to Hendrik; now that we need it there isn’t any.”

  “Help me, child, I can’t bear it, I have never had such pain!”

  132. My soles stick unpleasantly to the floor. I tramp about the house without plan or purpose, leaving marks which I shall have to clean.

  He is sitting in a pool of blood like a baby that has wet itself.

  133. A third time I cross the riverbed, trudging now, tired, fed up. I have the rifle slung over my shoulder. The butt bumps against my calves. I feel like an old campaigner, but wonder what I look like.

  Hendrik is lying flat on his back snoring. Another stinking man.

  “Hendrik, get up at once or I shoot. I am sick of your games. The baas needs you.”

  When one truly means what one says, when one speaks not in shouts of panic, but quietly, deliberately, decisively, then one is understood and obeyed. How pleasing to have identified a universal truth. Hendrik gets groggily to his feet and follows me. I give him the rifle to carry. The cartridge in the breech is spent and has been since before midnight. I am harmless, despite appearances.

  134. “Hendrik, get him under the shoulders, then we can lift him on to the bed.”

  With Hendrik at the shoulders and myself at the knees we lift my father on to the tousled bed. He is groaning and talking to himself in delirium. I fetch a basin of water, a sponge, carbolic acid.

  What I have not seen is the gaping wound in his back from which blood seeps steadily. Petals of flesh stand out from it. I wash delicately around them. When the sponge touches raw flesh he jerks. But at least the bullet is out.

  There is not enough bandage for a wound of this size. With dressmaking shears I begin to cut a sheet into strips. It takes a long time. Hendrik fidgets until I tell him to wave the flies off his master. He does so self
-consciously.

  While Hendrik raises the torso I cover the two holes with wads of lint and wind the bandage round and round the thick waist. The sex is smaller than I thought it would be, almost lost in a bush of black hair straggling up to the navel: a pale boy, a midget, a dwarf, an idiot son who, having survived for years shut away in the cellar, tasting only bread and water, talking to the spiders, singing to himself, is one night dressed in new clothes, set free, made much of, pampered, feasted, and then executed. Poor little thing. It is not possible to believe I came from there, or from whatever that puffy mass is below it. If I were told that I am an idea my father had many years ago and then, bored with it, forget, I would be less incredulous, though still sceptical. I am better explained as an idea I myself had, also many years ago, and have been unable to shake off.

  Hendrik is embarrassed by my diligent hands and eyes, my dutiful hands and eyes, but all the same my woman’s hands and eyes wandering so near this pale unprotected manhood. I am aware of his embarrassment, and turn and smile the first frank smile I have given him today, or perhaps in all the years I have known him. He lowers his eyes. Can brown-skinned people blush?

  Over my father’s head I draw a clean nightshirt. With Hendrik’s help I roll it down over his knees. Now he is clean and decent.

  “Now we can only wait and see, Hendrik. Go to the kitchen, I will come and make coffee in a moment.”

  135. So all of a sudden here I am at the centre of a field of moral tensions, they are no less, for which my upbringing has barely prepared me. What am I going to do? When he finds his balance Hendrik will want to know whether the accident is an eccentricity of the ruling caste or whether I am culpable and can be exploited. He will want to know who is most shamed, he or I, we or they, and who will pay more for silence. Klein-Anna, if she can ever be found, will want to know whether I am angered or frightened by her liaison with my father. She will want to know whether I am prepared to protect her from Hendrik and whether in future I will try to keep her away from my father. Jointly she and Hendrik will want to know whether they must leave the farm or whether the scandal is to be hushed up. My father will want to know what penitence I can be made to do; whether I will work upon the girl while he is out of the way; whether a fiction is to be brought into being among the four of us to explain his injury, a hunting accident, for example. I will be watched by hooded eyes, my every word will be weighed, words will be spoken to me whose bland taste, whose neutral colour, whose opaque surface will fail to cover nuances of derision. Smiles will pass behind my back. A crime has been committed. There must be a criminal. Who is the guilty one? I am at a terrible disadvantage. Forces within me belonging to the psychology I so abhor will take possession of me and drive me to believe that I willed the crime, that I desired my father’s death. With the dark subtle figures of Hendrik and Klein-Anna wagging their fingers behind me I shall find my days turned into a round of penitence. I shall find myself licking my father’s wounds, bathing Klein-Anna and bringing her to his bed, serving Hendrik hand and foot. In the dark before dawn, drudgemaiden of a drudgemaiden, I shall stoke the fire, I shall serve them breakfast in bed and bless them when they revile me. Already the snake has come and the old Eden is dead!