During my long absence much had indeed changed, but the house had never been mine, though I had grown up there, and it had been so many years since I last lived there that it had become unfamiliar to me, so that I was surprised anew every time I recognised something from the past. There were glass panes in the windows and a wooden floor had been laid in the voorhuis; there were armchairs and a sofa, and a lamp had been suspended from the ceiling, and large framed photographs of Maans and Stienie, taken in Worcester, hung on the walls. In the kitchen there were more things than we would ever need and, where Mother and I got by with only old Dulsie for all those years, there were now more than enough women to do the housework. My old room was still the same, however, and I unpacked my things there, put my clothes in the drawers, the brush and comb on the chest and the Bible beside the bed, and I knew that this homecoming would be the end of the journey: for a moment I stood in front of the small, old-fashioned window and looked out over the familiar yard and veld, and with undeniable certainty I knew I would die in this room with its dung floor and wooden shutters.
“Tantetjie has not seen the beautiful stone we erected for Oupa, has she?” Stienie remarked at the table. “And Maans had one made for his mother too. We must go and show Tantetjie this afternoon.” I had been warned, however, and I followed the footpath alone, past the place where the shed, the outside rooms and the kraal used to be, to the graveyard beyond the ridge where a white marble stone had been erected over Tannie Coba’s grave with Sofie’s name and date of birth on it and the date of her death that I had entered in the family Bible years ago with Mother standing over me. It was then, as I stood in the graveyard alone, that I realised how completely the farm had passed into Maans and Stienie’s hands, and I accepted it: if this was how they wished to give meaning to this nameless grave and this arbitrary date, then this was what it would henceforth signify; only my memory contested this new interpretation, and it was up to me to keep silent and to see that this unsettling knowledge remained unspoken until the final threat disappeared along with me. What had happened was in the past, after all, and how the next generation wished to apply or interpret the relics of the past was their concern: the words, dates and facts they wished to remember were chiselled into the stone, in lead-filled letters, to be read and accepted, or one day to crumble and be lost together with the weathered stone, its last fragments never to be found among the rank bushes and shrubs.
That summer after my return to the farm was the summer of the long and bitter drought, and that also made it easier for me to adjust, for the unaccustomed barrenness rendered the familiar landscape alien to me, as if it were a strange new region that I encountered for the first time. Here along the fertile edge of the escarpment, with our ample fountains and dams, we were more fortunate than the farmers in the drier regions farther into the interior, and Maans still had enough grazing for his own sheep, but by the end of the year farmers from the Riet River district began sending their sheep flocks to us for grazing. By Christmas the veld was as dead as in winter, and we scarcely celebrated New Year, for though it was customary for Maans and Stienie to entertain all the neighbours on a grand scale, no one was in the mood for festivities this summer. Only the people standing on Maans’s land with their sheep gathered at the house for a glass of sweet wine; the young people danced a little to the rhythm of a mouth organ and an accordion, and the young men fired their rifles, but it was a joyless occasion and everyone soon departed again. The guests could not have felt very welcome in our home, for no matter how hospitable Maans always was and how willing to help others, Stienie made no effort to disguise her resentment of these uninvited strangers who were abusing her hospitality and destroying our grazing with their flocks, so that they tended to avoid the house. But perhaps I am not being quite fair to Stienie, for it was during this time that she fell pregnant and that might have been why she did not feel like entertaining: the time of the great drought was the time of Stienie’s pregnancy.
Nothing was mentioned to me, as usual, and it was taken for granted that I knew, or perhaps they thought I had no business to know. A few months after my arrival, Maans told me rather sheepishly how good it was to have me back, especially with Stienie being the way she was; it was not an easy time, I would surely understand … He left the sentence unfinished and gave no further explanation, but by then I had noticed that Stienie was less fastidious around the house, that she often complained, that she was wearing light, loose-fitting frocks and was spending more time lying down in her room.
How long had they been married at the time, Stienie and Maans? Fifteen, sixteen years, I would say, and never had there been any mention of a child, so that long before her death Mother had stopped speculating about the possible arrival of a great-grandchild, and even Stienie’s relatives had learned not to make any light-hearted allusions any more. Now, however, in these unrelenting months of heat and dust, the veld parched under the empty sky, the bushes shrivelled, the paths trampled to dust and the last fountains drying up, now her body suddenly became heavier and her movements clumsier, her hands and feet swelled with the heat and she lay on the sofa in the voorhuis, fanning herself, or sometimes failed to emerge from her darkened room at all. The child was due to be born only at the end of autumn or the beginning of winter, I gathered, for she said she did not feel up to the trek down to the Karoo in her condition, yet she made no attempt to prepare for the confinement, and at last I began to worry, for I knew enough about birth to realise that there were preparations to be made. There was no sense in discussing it with Maans, for what did men know about these affairs? And Stienie became annoyed and declined to be bothered with such matters. It was strange to see her like that, for I had never known her so listless and indecisive; on the contrary.
It must have been in May that Maans rode over to Komsberg to fetch old Tant Neeltjie Müller, who was the most skilful mid-wife in our parts: it was almost winter, for I recall how long the evenings seemed and how she and I sat in the voorhuis around the fire-pan and how she grumbled because she wanted to join her people in the Karoo, and with a pencil stub she would mark off the days in the back of her Bible. She and I finally made a few pieces of clothing and other items for the baby, but to me she did not seem very interested in this confinement and she took very little notice of Stienie, and when Maans asked how it was going, she just shrugged. He must have paid the old woman well to wait there for weeks on end with winter approaching, and it was probably only for the money that she stayed. At last she persuaded him to pour her a tot of brandy every evening, to which she added a few lumps of sugar, for the gout, she said. She would spoon this mixture from the glass, and soon be regaling us with tales about the difficult confinements and deaths she had witnessed over the years. How clearly I remember those last weeks of Stienie’s pregnancy, with the land caught up in a relentless drought, the shrivelled grey landscape of rock and dust and dry bushes under an empty white sky, the chill of the evenings as we sat waiting in the voorhuis together, the old woman with her cap, her fringed shawl and her little Bible, and the smell of the brandy-and-sugar concoction she was eating with a spoon.