On Monday Jacobus was relieved to see that he must have remembered to turn off the irrigation. The compound stank of fermented maize in various avatars — spilt beer, vomit, urine. And the few bones feasting dogs and flies were testimony to the inadequacy of a goat. Someone — who else but that woman? — had hung the horns above the sack that covered the doorway of Solomon’s room. He threw them on the ash-heap.
You should just see it. A pity you can’t see it. It was getting on for autumn that first time I came to look over the place — wasn’ t that the year the drought had already begun, anyway? You couldn’t imagine, looking at it then, it could be like this.
It is true any woman would go crazy over the multiple-headed lilies that are suddenly blooming out of these untidy streamers of leaf. Some were burned, in the fire; he remembers kicking at the exposed apexes of the bulbs, thinking they were done for. But no, with the early rain, they are out all over the veld: they don’t look like wild flowers, at all, they are something you’d pay through the nose for, from a florist’s, stems rising two-foot tall with a great bunch of five or six blooms at the top, white striped with red. He has counted seventeen over on the island that the fire made visible; the new reeds aren’t thick enough to hide it completely, yet. And where the river is narrower and the banks are clear of the reeds, red-hot pokers are flowering right out of the water. Down here at the third pasture the place looks like a water-garden on some millionaire’s estate.
You wouldn’t believe it was natural. If you could show it to Kurt and his old cronies! Genus: Amaryllidaceae; species: Crinum bulbispermum. One of the secretaries at the office has been sent out to buy the best book available on veld flowers and from it he’s identified the lilies as the Orange River Lily, Crinum bulbispermum, spring-blooming, favouring swampy ground. It belongs to the amaryllis family, most of whose members are distinguished by the arrangement of the flowers in an umbel subtended by two or more bracts.
— Look — a perfect mandala- Showing off, or flirting by pretending to assume he would know what she was talking about, she gestured with her foot at some bedraggled plant. But in that courtship dance that led over pasture and donga, he had seen the foot rather than the plant: chipped red shield of a big toenail that protruded from the sandal like an imperious finger.
— A what? —
— The shape of these leaves — you know — it’s that whorl you see inside a marble. A symbol of the universe. —
— What sort of word is that? —
— Now you have me. Sanskrit, I think. — Crawling through a fence while he held the barbed wires apart for her, a strand of her hair caught and remained there. A pause; part of the fine old chase. She laughed while he jerked the hairs loose and wound them round his finger to present to her. He often saw tufts of coarse blond hair from the cows’ tails left like that, on the fences.
Crinum bulbispermum. The bulbs of many species contain alkaloids and some have medicinal value. (He keeps the book now on the sideboard in the house.) Perhaps that’s why the boys seem to have gone round clumps of the plants instead of ploughing them in, over here, and in other places where they occur on the edges of the mealic fields. Fortunately the piccanins don’t pick flowers (they’re not interested in such things) but he does remember last year seeing some woman from the compound digging up roots. Jacobus ought to be told that medicine or no medicine, these bulbs mustn’t be taken.
— What is pig-iron? No, I’m serious —
Pig-iron really doesn’t interest me that much any more, you know — but since pig-iron’s what you conveniently associated me with, since that’s my label — I’ve sold enough of it and all the other things, sold and bought, known when to buy and sell enough for several lifetimes. Oh I’ve had my fun among the big boys. Now there are possible new markets in Brazil; enormous potential. I’ve been over to have a look (a weekend in Jamaica on the way back — ever seen a black beach?), but I don’t get excited about such things. Was there ever a transformation like the one brought about by the early rain on this place? Could there be anything finer? And it all happens in its own time, nothing can force it up, corner or rig it, and when it’s ready, nothing can hold it back. Did you know that when there is drought, hippos abort? And now with the early rain the lilies and red-hot pokers were in full bloom in October, and by November the lucerne — he suddenly noticed as he came to that high ground near the eucalyptus trees, this morning — is turning blue in flower. You’d never know the vlei had burned. More birds than ever. You’d never know anything had happened there. The ploughing was early because of that good rain and half an hour ago I stood within thirty yards of a dozen Hadedas feeding among the young mealies. Several Sacred Ibis, too. The plants are up to my knees already.
— Now that you’ve bought that place, I can just see you in a few years time, falling into its bosom. When all this is finished for you —
Was it so great a bounty, naked clairvoyant, that you read in your body? The Hadedas looked around from time to time but went on sticking their beaks into the earth as if I weren’t there.
— Mother it and husband it and lover it —
There’s some sort of wild clover, with a yellow flower, that’s come up among that special mixture of pasture grasses I got from the agricultural research people, and I can tell you, it has a scent like fermented honey, it blows across all the time, makes you breathe deeply, makes you want to lie down and sleep…
— You’ll wallow in it. —
That wasn’t one of our more successful get-togethers, I suppose. Something a bit pathetic about the way the two bodies separate with a little sucking noise like two halves of a juicy fruit being pulled apart from the pip. Women expect something then — a caress, an endearment — they often don’t seem to know what. You were like the others, although you were going on about my ‘historical destiny’. I don’t have anyone hanging around here, thank God, if you walk about this place on your own, I can tell you, you see things you’d never see otherwise. Birds and animals — everything accepts you. But if you have people tramping all over the place —
— All to yourself. You’ve bought what’s not for sale: the final big deal. The rains that will come in their own time, etcetera. The passing seasons. It’s so corny, Mehring. I thought you had more to you than that I’ll bet you’ll end up wanting to be buried there, won’t you? Down there under your willow trees, very simply, sleeping forever with your birds singing to you and Swart Gevaar tending your grave. O Mehring! — hiking herself up from the bed on one elbow, the way she did, so that her brown breasts swung like weights in a sling — O Mehring — her laugh — you are a hundred years too late for that end! That four hundred acres isn’t going to be handed down to your kids, and your children’s children —
— Come on — I’ve only got one —
— Well, his children’s children. That bit of paper you bought yourself from the deeds office isn’t going to be valid for as long as another generation. It’ll be worth about as much as those our grandfathers gave the blacks when they took the land from them. The blacks will tear up your bit of paper. No one’ll remember where you’re buried. —