Someone told me you’ve gone off skiing in Austria? — René and I want to have a civilized New Year away from the mob, and I said to him, d’you know, there’s only one person I’d be happy to have with us… truly. You’ve never been to our game lodge on the Olifants River, have you? Well, we’ll take lots of good drink and food and watch the hippos. We’ve built a sort of little tower… René’s got a cousin out from Belgium, a charming girl, I know you’ll get on famously, we’d be cosy.
Some people are intimidated by the machine and couch their messages in telegraphese, as if paying so much a word. Others are cut off just when they are getting into conversational stride — they forget or do not know the span of the recording does not take into consideration how much you may still have left to say. The machine simply stops listening.
Just as he gives no answer. He takes no part in the conversation. He sits with his head tipped back in a long chair, but not negligently. If it were not for the drink in his hand, anyone looking in on the closed-up flat where the owner is away on holiday would take the attitude to be one of a doctor or other disinterested confidant, reliably impersonal.
On Christmas Day they beat a dog and on the last night of the year their radio is turning out boere musiek, the sawing, thumping concertina-stuff that Afrikaners love. The monotonous rhythms must have come originally from the chants of tribal blacks, anyway. Listen to one of the farm boys singing the same phrase over and over to himself while he walks, or hear them singing when they’re drunk. — As they soon will be.
He takes a walk along the road past the compound and in the adjoining paddock the beasts are all lying down. It’s said that cows like music. They breathe in deep animal sighs.
No one shows a sign of life from the compound though he knows they’re all there. The L-shape of their shacks hides them and their mess and fowls and cooking-fires from the road. Some year the whole thing will have to be pulled down and decently rebuilt where it ought always to have been — up behind the house, near the public road, clear of the river frontage. There’ll be dissatisfaction because they were here when he came, they were squatting God knows how long before he bought the place and they’ll expect to have their grandchildren squatting long after he’s gone. Everyone pretends he’s not there, at the compound, but when he comes back to the house where his car, clearly as any flag run up, signifies his presence, Jacobus is hanging about obviously waiting for him, although his trouser legs are rolled and he’s carrying soap and a piece of towel as if he’s simply about to wash his feet at the yard tap. He doesn’t like an arrival in his absence or any wanderings about without his knowledge; that’s an old story. God knows what goes on when they’re left to themselves. Clever as a wagon-load of monkeys. He’s only got to see a cloud of dust to know from the shape the Mercedes’s coming, and he’s got the word out, it’s telepathic or witchcraft, they understand each other, they back each other up so well. Today Jacobus is expansive and reckless — had something to drink; well, hell, why not.
— Baas, I’m going wake you up twelve o’clock. Knock on the door. —
— Yes! then we drink whisky- He happens to be taking a bottle, sheathed in the twist of thin white paper in which they are packed by the case, out of the car.
— What, whisky…! — The laughter is turned towards a marginal presence; the nightwatchman. It beckons him like an encouraging hand. The offer — or joke — is explained in their language.
He has not thought about which party to go to until it is too late to make up one’s mind. Lightning in a soaring cave of black cloud on his right, and on the left a huge orange moon is turning yellow, as the skin of a bright balloon thins and lightens as it is blown up. An extraordinary sight; an extraordinary night. There are times when exactly the particular combination of degree of warmth, humidity, direction or absence of wind, occurring at exactly the right time of evening on precisely the right date after the vernal equinox, will bring winged ants floating out of the ground. Or (a completely different combination: high temperature in an early, dry spring) fireflies, running lines of burning thread through the reeds. They were captured in a school cap and put in an empty chocolate carton with cellophane windows, to make a lantern — a great success with a small boy. It happened only once. No one knows the formula. If the phenomenon should recur it would be too late, now. The air tonight is of the temperature and softness that will bring out women in flimsy dresses. They’ll all swim in the nude at midnight among the moths that have been attracted by the underwater pool-lights and fallen in. Those guests who have jumped clothes and all will have cloth pasted sodden against them like the water-logged wings. It is impossible to put any kind of shelter between oneself and such a night. He has moved away from the house, the neck of the whisky bottle still in his hand; he goes back to the house for a moment — the kitchen door is open, Alina is back and forth for those endless buckets of hot water they seem to draw — and he takes one of the thick cheap tumblers and a plastic bottle of water from the refrigerator.
With the glass resting capped over the water bottle in one hand, and the whisky swinging from the other he makes his track across a great field of lucerne. Behind him the moonlit pile is now cleaved diagonally by a narrow darkness where the pressure of his feet and the volume of his two legs at calf-height have furrowed through the tender plants. The sheet lightning dances and softly capers before him; it seems to touch about his body, to run over him. He does not know where he is making for but he too, on a night like this, will know exactly, when he reaches it — where all the qualities of such a night may be present to him in perfection. He has taken lately to sitting in the evenings on the roofless stoep of a stone outhouse where bags of fertilizer are conveniently stored, since it is in the middle of the lands. No one has ever lived there — who can say, people will squat anywhere — no one has used it to live in since he brought the place and he has not yet decided what use might be made of it. With a new roof, it would be a better house than any of them has at the compound, but that’s out of the question because he has discovered, coming there in the evenings, it has the best view of any spot on the whole farm. A guest cottage? — if one wanted such a thing.
There’s a metal folding chair whose plastic thongs are not all broken. That’s how he came to sit down here, the first time, in the first place. He has no idea how it got there; a ring never turns up again, but something no one remembers they’ve left will never be claimed: many months ago some guest afraid he might be expected to sit on the grass must have brought his own comfort along to one of the picnics down at the river. And he himself must have forgotten to fold the chair and throw it behind the fertilizer bags the last time he used it; it is placed at an angle just to the left of a stunted and much-hacked mulberry tree that has survived (somebody must have lived here at one time). It is strange to see a chair there as if it had been appointed. It is rather like being disembodied and seeing himself sitting there.
He inhabits — by filling — the place prepared for him. The whisky and water is delicious. Although one may eat like a pig when alone, drinking becomes a more careful and conscious pleasure when it’s not fuel for social intercourse. Every few seconds the whole night undulates with sheet lightning and now and then the pitchy sky on the left. cracks like a teacup from top to bottom in a blinding scribble whose running instant (complex as a capillary vein or the topography of a river) is branded upon the dark of eyelids blinked in reaction. But there’s no thunder. The fading call of his guinea fowl in the mealies comes quite clearly and all around — or the firing seems so, because the hills on the horizon throw a retort swiftly from one to another — De Beer and his kind are amusing their kids by letting off fireworks. All occasions are family ones for them. No thunder: that tremendous storm is miles away and it’s possible, just once, on a night like this, to sit at the point where its element ends and the absolutely calm, full-moon-lit element begins. It is really two nights at once; just as midnight will bisect two years.