This Life Page 2

  Against the furthest wall of the voorhuis as you enter, you would probably expect a hearth in this cold region, but our fire was made in the kitchen, and when a visitor once remarked on it, Father shrugged and answered, “No, but that is the way my late mother had wanted it,” as if that explained everything. Did Ouma want to keep the cooking and the servants out of her voorhuis, and was it her way of establishing her own way of life in the house that had been built under her own eyes and hands? In the furthest wall, where you would expect the hearth, two small wall-cupboards with glazed doors had been built in, the only glass panes to be found in the Roggeveld in my childhood years, and in those cupboards Ouma’s china was kept, cups and saucers and bowls patterned in red and white and blue with a touch of gold here and there in between. Mother never used them or even took them out of the cupboards, and as a child I sometimes stood there on a Sunday afternoon, gazing for hours through the glass panes at the red and blue and gold of the patterns on the china, the only brightness in our sombre home or in the faded, flat region where I grew up. Now Stienie probably has it all, though I cannot remember ever having seen it; once people from the Boland, who were interested in such things, called on us in our town house, and Stienie mentioned a bit disdainfully that she still had some of Great-ouma’s old china, but where she kept it I do not know and she never used it, because they were old-fashioned pieces and not to her taste at all. That is all I know of Ouma, the fact that she came from the Bokkeveld and had a house built with recessed wall-cupboards to display her china. Oupa lies buried here in the graveyard behind the ridge, with a stone on which someone chiselled his name and dates carefully, for he died first and she saw to it that a headstone was made for him, but when she herself died, no one took the trouble, so she rests anonymously under one of the overgrown stone mounds beside him. Father had probably still known which grave was hers, but today no one would be able to point it out.

  The brightly-coloured china in the wall-cupboards drew my attention as a child, but, even so, there was more that Oupa and Ouma had left us. When I was a child we seldom left the farm except when we moved down to the Karoo in winter, but as I grew older and we rode over to neighbouring farms more often for weddings and funerals, I came to appreciate better the modest and unobtrusive wealth that we had inherited from them: not merely the brightly-coloured china that had drawn the attention of a child, but the solid homestead with its strong walls and the few heavy, plain pieces of furniture that had not been made locally but had been brought over the mountain passes of the Boland by wagon: Father and Mother’s four-poster bed, the cots, the large table in the voorhuis with its riempie chairs arranged along the walls, and the kists in which our clothes and linen were stored. This house and this furniture which we had inherited from my grandparents seemed to set us apart from our neighbours in the Roggeveld, and as I came to realise that fact, I experienced – yes, I too – something of the pride and deadly vanity that pervaded our family, intensified and reinforced from generation to generation. The ambition I was spared, however, for it was not my task to strive and to strain ahead desperately, but to see, to hear and to remember, as I understand at last, here at the end of my life.

  When you approach the farm, whether from the Karoo by way of the old road over Vloksberg Pass or from the village, the new house is the first thing you see, its shiny roof reflecting the light from a distance long before you arrive, and I am the only one who, almost instinctively, still leans forward in the cart every time we return, to look at the old house with its outbuildings against the ridge, waiting to welcome me. When I picture the arrival on the farm here before me in the dark, it appears to me as it was during all those years before the new house was built, for no matter which road you chose, from the direction of Groenfontein or Oorlogskloof – the village did not exist in those days – following the ruts of the wheels across the low hills and rocky ledges, or along the pass up the mountainside past Klipfontein, when you reached that wide, open, rolling land of the escarpment, you saw from a great distance, across the waving shrubs and grass and the glitter of the dams, the house with its high, thatched roof against the ridge, the house with the shed and stables and other out-buildings some distance behind, the orchard with its windswept pear trees, and the graveyard with its irregular wall of stacked stones. It was the world of my youth, and the surrounding farms formed its borders, except when we moved down to the Karoo in winter.

  “Not that he started out with much,” I heard Oom Herklaas Vlok remark after Father’s funeral, “only the two farms and a handful of sheep”, but by the time he died the land and the flocks of sheep had increased, and there was a measure of disapproval in Oom Herklaas’s voice. Though envy may have existed in the district, I do not believe there was ever malice, not to mention enmity, for Father was never one to make enemies, a placid, silent man who stroked his beard and thought long before he voiced an opinion or answered a question, and whose words people were prepared to heed. So thorough could his deliberation be and so slow was he to decide one way or another, that it was often Mother who made the decisions, and sometimes, impetuous as she was, she became so impatient with his indecisiveness that she took the lead herself while he was still considering his course of action. She thrashed the boys with the horsewhip or sjambok even when they were all but grown-up, and sometimes it was also she who gave the herdsmen a thrashing, because Father seldom and reluctantly raised his hand against anyone. Most probably it was also she who had encouraged him over the years of their marriage to purchase those sheep flocks and that land.

  As the only daughter I grew up in the house with Mother and she died before my eyes, for almost fifty years she and I lived close together, day in, day out, here on the farm or in the town house where she died, but what can I say about her now, when I must review my memories and try to explain, to understand? A slender, dark, quick woman with a fierce temper and a sharp tongue – though this much all the servants and the neighbours also knew, and all the people of my generation still remember her so today and tell stories of her explosive temper and her stubborn pride when they do not know that I am close enough to hear; and I, her own daughter, after being with her for nearly fifty years, cannot really find anything to add to that, for more than that she did not reveal even to me. But how could such a thing be possible? Something there must be among all the incidental words and gestures, shards and tiny splinters, that one can scrape together and arrange, to be able to understand and explain, to try and understand, to try and forgive.

  From my childhood days I remember only what other people remember as well, though I may have had more occasion to observe it all: the diligence, the drive and the passion, the persistence that could so easily become stubbornness, the sudden attacks of blind and uncontrollable fury that scared us anew every time with their violence; drive and passion, yes, and I would almost say obsession, as if she were being swept towards some distant and scarcely perceptible goal by powers invisible to everyone but her, and unfathomable even to her. Does it sound strange when I try to explain it like this? Perhaps I exaggerate now, but I am only trying to find words to describe something of that indomitable woman in whose shadow I grew up and at whose bedside I kept vigil during her long, painful, wordless death. That is all I can still do, try, for no one has remained who can do more than that.

  Passion and obsession – these probably remain the best words. And later, so many years later, when she was old and dying? In her old age the strain or tension remained, for over the years it had become part of her and it was too late for her to change, even if she had deemed it necessary, but then, right at the end of her life, that obsessiveness disappeared, as if that distant goal had been attained and all that she had striven for had been fulfilled. Was that then what she had desired all those years, without ever knowing it clearly herself: the money and the farms and the town house, Maans’s education and his stylish young wife, her own status in the small community as Father’s widow, the seat in the front row at church, the cape emb
roidered with glittering jet? Had it all been for that then, the unyielding ambition over the years, and the pride to the bitter, silent end?

  Does this say something more about Mother?

  There are two more things I know of her, two things from the time before I knew her myself, from a past about which she herself never mentioned a word. After her funeral, when the mourners came to our town house for coffee, I heard one of the young men in conversation with Oom Koos van Wyk ask whether she had also been from these parts. “No,” Oom Koos replied, “her people trekked around in the Karoo.” He said it in passing, like something of no importance or interest to anyone, unaware that I was listening, and he added nothing further to the remark, unaware that I was waiting, transfixed, to hear more, and now he is long dead, he and all his contemporaries who might have had similar information; and so it is all I have left, that single sentence and the almost contemptuous manner in which it was uttered; that, and a fragment from my own childhood memories, an image which has survived in spite of my being unable to place it in context, so that it must remain standing, uncertain and unclear as I remember it.

  It was one winter when we were down in the Karoo, and I was quite young, though I am unable to say how old I was; I do not even remember whether Maans had been born yet and whether Jakob and Pieter were still with us. Only this solitary image has remained: how a trekboer company arrived at our winter quarters one day with a rickety cart, a few thin dogs and a flock of scabby sheep, and we were told it was Oom Ruben, Mother’s brother. Where he and his family had come from, where they were going, how they had found us and what the reason was for their visit, of that I know nothing, and all I have retained is the image of the forlorn little group of trekkers in the sunshine of the winter’s day, the woman gazing out from under the tented hood as if she were not expecting any welcome, the shy, neglected children, and the man with the wild, black beard and Mother’s dark, flashing eyes, deep in their sockets like hers; but, above all, it is Mother herself I recall, how she and this strange man greeted each other without any display of affection or even recognition, as if these were strangers who had arrived here at our stand, and how they surveyed each other warily and suspiciously from a distance, as if they knew and understood each other too well to put any trust in the other. I do not think it was a long visit or that there was much conversation: the visitor got whatever it was he had come for – money, I suppose – and then the whole strange, bedraggled company turned around and disappeared among the geelbos and thorn trees as they had come, and never was there a single mention of them or their visit, nor did I ever hear of them again.

  Is this, therefore, the world Mother came from? I wonder now, looking back and remembering: the daughter of a family who moved with their stock from fountain to fountain and from farm to farm in search of a temporary stand, tolerated by the white people, despised by the coloured people, a half-wild group of drifters and hunters as still existed in the interior in those days, trekking around in the Karoo, as Oom Koos had said where he sat having coffee in our town house after her funeral. Oom Ruben and Oupa Adam – yes, where do those memories spring from all of a sudden, like echoes from the bottom of a well, things I did not even know I remembered any more? Father laboriously entering Maans’s date of birth in our family Bible with the scratchy, messy quill pen, and Sofie standing behind his chair, watching, and asking whether Pieter had also received his grandfather’s name. “No,” Father replied, “his grandfather’s name was Adam, but we did not feel it was a proper name for a child.” He was referring to Mother’s father, the grandfather after whom Pieter, as the second son, should have been named. Adam and Ruben – Biblical names – who was it that had decided against it? Perhaps Mother herself, who had preferred to forget the names and the world from which they came, or perhaps Ouma, who had still been alive then, Ouma from the Bokkeveld with her wall-cupboards and her china? But if this were all so, how did it happen then that Father married Mother and brought her here, and how did they live here together all those years, with Father and Mother in the first house and Oupa and Ouma in the new homestead? Dulsie would have known, but she is dead too, and the little information she had ever disclosed had been so sketchy and confused that I would not have been able to compose any answer from what I remembered of it. Now I would never know; never would I be able to come closer to the truth than with that single memory of Oom Ruben and his shy, withdrawn family with their wary eyes who had slunk out of our lives like scraggy wolves to some distant and unknown destination; Oupa Adam and Oom Ruben with their rickety wagons and their old rifles, silent men with deepset black eyes.

  At the time my earliest memories of Mother begin, she must have been around forty: her date of birth can be seen in the family Bible in Maans’s house and on the big white stone in the village graveyard that had been erected for her by Maans, and for now one would still be able to look it up if it were important. I do not remember these things any more. At the time, she had already been married for more than twenty years and whatever objections or misgivings there might once have existed concerning her marriage had been removed by the deaths of Oupa and Ouma; she and Father had moved across to the new house with its wall-cupboards and its four-poster bed and had had it extended for their family, and there was no one to contest or threaten her possession of it.

  Though Father may not have inherited much, as Oom Herklaas maintained, it must have been sufficient, and with time his wealth had increased; though he was not a rich man, we might have been described as well-off. We never knew any real hardship, not even in times of drought or in years when the migrant herds of antelope, the locusts or the frost caused severe damage: there was always enough food – mutton or venison, with samp or rice, fruit, fresh or dried, if the frost had not ruined the blossoms, milk and butter in summer, and sometimes even bread, for we had a field where Father could sow some wheat. There were enough clothes, enough candles; there were skin-blankets and down quilts against the cold, and firewood that had been brought from the Karoo by wagon; the solid house with its thatched roof and its shutters provided shelter. Even so, though there may always have been enough, in those years there was hardly ever much more than barely enough: with unwearied attention Mother kept the keys and locked and unlocked, measured and weighed the supplies, and patched, altered and remade our clothes; no candle was ever lit unnecessarily or allowed to burn too long and not an extra log or branch was put on the fire.

  We children accepted it like that, for we were not used to anything else, and where we lived in such isolation in a bare and harsh world, it was necessary to be cautious but, looking back now, I have to wonder whether her reaction had not been extreme, driven by that familiar stubbornness. Why else do I remember so few visitors from my childhood and did I get the feeling later that people from the district avoided our house; why did they have to be lured with such difficulty to attend the dance when Jakob was married and again, years later, the dance when Maans came of age? The Roggeveld was sparsely populated and the roads were bad, so that not many people paid social visits, but travellers between the Karoo and the Roggeveld, the Karoo and the Hantam, over Vloksberg, passed quite close to us; why did so few of them stop there in those years unless they were forced to come and fill their water barrels? Did they notice that the hospitality shown them was duty-bound and guarded, and that every morsel they ate and every stub of candle that had to be lit for them were noted and every barrel of water was conceded with ill-concealed reluctance? – by Mother, I have to add, not by Father; never by Father. When neighbours rode over for advice or help, they were likewise not encouraged to stay, and I cannot remember the wives often accompanying their husbands to call on Mother: they, too, would soon have discovered that their arrival was greeted without warmth and that no effort was made to delay their departure; they, too, would have felt the reserve and lack of cordiality with which Mother usually received outsiders, and in the increasingly uncomfortable silence around the big table in the voorhuis they would have realis
ed that every spoonful of tea was being measured out unwillingly and every lump of sugar they used was resented. For as much as the people of our district called on each other, we had no part in their social interaction, and the gatherings on neighbouring farms were seldom attended by us. Only later did things start to change, when Maans came of age and got married, when the town house was built, and when Mother took her seat among the wives of the elders in the front row at church, to hold it until her death. All that, though, was much later.

  It was because of Mother, always Mother, never Father. He was not a greedy or close-fisted person, but always willing to help. He liked company, even though he never said much himself, and over a glass of brandy he could even become jovial in his unassuming way; but his path was mapped out for him like everybody else’s, and usually he followed it resignedly. Only once or twice did I see him turn pale with suppressed anger and Mother yield to him without his having to raise his voice or even say much. She was the one who struggled to make ends meet and who saved so doggedly – do I exaggerate when I say anxiously, as if she were trying desperately to protect us from some danger only she was aware of, and no effort were too great to ward off the lurking danger? Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but not entirely. Perhaps it was the memory of a bitter and hungry youth that drove her to try and establish for herself safety and security, and fear was indeed interwoven with that memory. I do not know, I can only try, and cannot even say whether my efforts make sense – Oom Koos’s incidental remark after her funeral and Oom Ruben’s unexpected visit and that anxious scrimping and saving, these are the only means at my disposal. As a child on the farm I often played on my own near the old graveyard beyond the ridge where the old people had thrown out everything they had no further need of and among the stones I gathered shards of pottery and china or bits of blue or purplish glass. Sometimes, however, there were larger pieces among the fragments, just large enough to be able to make out something of the form or pattern of the original cup or bowl from the round shape or the ornamentation; and just so I have only the fragments of my memories from which I now have to try and recover the form and pattern of the past.