— She is certainly becoming an old woman. -
Solomon could think of nothing to say in answer to Phineas. Ever since he had known the woman nearly all her front teeth had been missing and now that she was so thin the cheeks sucked the empty space and her skin was grainy and dark round the eyes. He had heard she was not really Zulu at all, but came from Pondoland.
He remarked to Jacobus — I don’t know those people. -
He was crowded into the room against the wall along with others when she had the desire to dance and confess her dreams to them. There was no getting out of it. With her cloth hanging in her eyes she stood in what little space there was and gave the time that was to be clapped and the phrase they were to chant. Somebody had to beat a folded ox-hide. It was awkward to move elbows and clap in such a pressure of people. Izak’s radio was playing outside. When the chant and the beat of clapping was steady in counter-rhythm to it, she began to lift those ankles with the white beads, lift her feet, first one then the other, coming down lightly on the toes. She began to stamp her heels and quiver the muscles of her body like a young girl, right up to her cheeks, flapping the loose skin. The claps fell faster, the chant was drawn from deeper and deeper places in the men’s chests and higher and higher behind the women’s noses. The ox-hide gave off dust and hairs. The radio was pressed out under a far greater volume. Then she stopped; hands were in mid-air, some spattered claps completed themselves. Panting like a skinny dog chasing a rat in the vlei, she was after those dreams of hers, rambling, pursuing, speaking of leopards and chameleons — creatures the children in the doorway had never seen — speaking of snakes she had dreamt she was going to turn into, Umthlwazi, Ubu-lube, Inwakwa, Umzingandhlu; of imamba and inyandezulu, the snakes that are men and if killed will come to life again; speaking of the spirits, amatongo; describing how she had seen the ugly and rough-skinned lizard that is the itongo of an old woman, and how in her sleep there were also elephants and hyenas and lions and full rivers, all coming near to kill her, how they followed her, how there was not a single place in the whole country that she did not know because she went over it all, farther than Johannesburg and Durban, all by night, in her sleep. She started to pray then as people do in church and broke off, saying that when she tried to pray this desire carried all kinds of death to come and kill her at once. Now and then her words became songs she said she heard in her head without ever having learnt; and the songs became words again, telling dreams. She was so exhausted that sometimes her voice was lost; Izak’s radio took up with an advertising jingle about washing powder that the children knew by heart. But the sweat that had filled the room with the smell of her (as if she were leaving her body like smoke) while she danced, continued to pour and trickle while she talked, started and oozed continually, as if her whole body were weeping, as if every pore were a puncture from which life were running out. There was no point at which this gathering of hers broke up. Released from the binding rhythm of clapping, people got restless and began to shift and talk. They simply found their way out to go about other things. Afterwards Solomon suddenly saw her, washing her hands in a tin basin in the yard like a woman who has just finished plucking a fowl or some other ordinary work.
He did not speak to this woman about her dreams. That was her husband’s trouble, not his. But he was told she said if she had dreamed of cattle instead of a wild animal, she would have known what she must do. She would kill a beast and then she would be well again.
It was too warm for the woollen scarf but he wore a knitted cap. He pushed it up from the pursed lips that were like the raised imprint of some strange kiss on his forehead. He had not let the sun get at it yet. It did not hurt but felt tender to hands that touched it. He smiled at the thought of the poor creature, Phineas’s wife. — I’m not ill. —
The woman who lived with him said — But you were nearly dead. You were dead there in the veld. -
Jacobus was always talking. He waited and waited for the right time to ask him. But the only thing to do if you wanted to ask something was just to say it, even if it had nothing to do with what Jacobus was busy telling you. — Was I dead when you found me? —
They were washing the old bull after he had been out to stud.
— Well how could you be dead, you are here now. - Jacobus grinning; or grimacing with his enthusiastic scrubbing among the curly suds of the bull’s flank: the old rake had shat himself, he stood wearily on his stumpy legs, a drooping mustachio at the end of his retracted penis, while Solomon played the hose on to him under Jacobus’s direction.
— But did you think I was dead. —
Jacobus looked up dramatically. He was ready to tell the story again. Spray from the hose sprinkled his woolly beard with tinsel.
— Would you have said, he is dead. —
— Of course you were like a dead man! Didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t snore the way people do when they’re dead-drunk —
A sensation of terrible cold and darkness — that must have been when he was left lying there naked — and the cold, cold edges, the freezing-edged pain over which another, warm darkness flowed — his wound and the blood flooding it. And then he died, alone in the third pasture with the one who was already dead there. As if he died — because he knew nothing, remembered nothing, he did not know he was being carried, he did not know Jacobus and the others were weeping over him, trying to get him to open his eyes, leave the other one and come back to them.
The dark, the freezing ragged edges — they did exist, as the other one did, outside himself and the moment before he died: he knew where. In the sky when a great storm was coming and a thick darkness was suspended from the hills over their heads on the farm, at the edge of a precipice of dark, terribly high up where the frozen rain, the hail, came from, out of the heat of summer, the black ledge of the storm was torn and ragged. That was where it seemed to him he was, that was what he had had knowledge of when he wasn’t there in the veld to answer Jacobus, or to know himself travelling in the pick-up and lying in bed in the hospital.
Phineas’s wife was a nuisance to everyone. The business of wanting to dance and confess was not something done once, over and done with. She wanted people to come and clap for her again. But they all had better things to do when work was finished. It was not as if she ever had any beer to put people in the mood for singing and clapping. Izak laughed and laughed, softly, and would not come near, even the first time. — Why? — But he wouldn’t answer anyone. — It’s not his religion. — When did he say that? — I’m telling you, I know why. — Izak let them go on talking about him; he smiled in their attention. Dorcas came once but was forbidden by her husband, now known behind his back as ‘Christmas Club’, to do so again.
— He’s right. There was enough trouble already. -
— What trouble? —
All very well for Alina to take that tone; but between Jacobus and Alina there was the special circumstance of their accountability to the farmer, which the others did not share.
— She’s bringing people from over the hill there. And also from the location. —
— Tsa! man! He doesn’t know who is living here and who isn’t. —
— He’ll tell me, why do I let everybody walk around on his farm, they will steal cattle, there will be fights, look how Solomon was attacked… that other business down there… this, that — I don’t like her sickness, myself. —
Alina was authoritative with the speculations and evidence of her long talks with the other women who lived up at the compound with Phineas’s wife. It was even said that the woman would not sleep with her husband any more. — You know what’s supposed to be wrong with her, don’t you? —