I sat there for a long time, for I was tired, and I listened to the wind growing stronger. “The sorrow and the pain,” I remembered from long ago, “O the sorrow and the pain”, but I was unable to recall where I had first heard the song or who had sung it, for the voice of the singer had been forgotten, as insubstantial as the wind. There is no plant in the world that can offer a cure, I realised, no shrub that can guarantee oblivion. We are doomed to remember and to bear our burden, right up to the end.
After a while I realised I had to get up and go back, no matter how impossibly distant the house might seem, for the clouds had been gathering over the escarpment, and so I began to walk, shuffling and stumbling over roots, stones and gullies. The daylight grew dim in the wind; sunshine and shadows moved across the veld, and the landscape rippled before my feet; under the deep blue of the darkening sky and the threatening storm, in the shrouded light of the sun, the grey renosterbos glittered with a silvery gleam, radiant before my eyes, and I stood there blinded, so that the day surged over me and the earth was washed from under my feet. I stumbled over a root or a rock, my foot sank into a porcupine-burrow, and I fell.
When I was a child, they noticed my absence and searched for me and a herdsman found me in the veld and carried me home, reclaimed from death’s door; slowly and painfully, unaware of my surroundings, I had wrested myself from the dark depths and risen, back to the light, but that was a long time ago, and there was no reason why I should still desire to live. I would rather lie where I had fallen, close my eyes and listen to the rustling of the wind through the renosterbos, until the radiant landscape was cloaked in darkness and I could descend into the depths, noiselessly and without resistance, carried by the weight of my body. I was getting too old for these solitary journeys, I realised drowsily, and this would have to be the last one.
After a long time I got up painfully, my body stiff with weariness and bruised by the fall, and slowly I walked back through the rolling and surging light and shadows, the silver glow of the late afternoon and the threat of the approaching storm, amid a splendour I had not witnessed for many years, until I saw in the distance ahead the dams glittering in the sun, and I knew I was home. There was no one to witness my shambling return, my clothes dusty and torn, my hands and face bruised. In my room I made an attempt to brush off my dress, I put up my hair and poured some water to wash, but then my hands fell away from me, and I toppled backward into the darkness I had craved for so long, that merciful dark in which I could go to sleep right there on the floor of my room. But not yet: the maid discovered me and called Annie, and the women carried me over to Annie’s house, to the old house, to the house where I was born and the room where I had slept as a child. I was aware of their frightened voices, I saw their anxious movements in the candlelight, but I no longer heard their words. Cloistered with my thoughts and memories, I was waiting for the words to end and the candle to be snuffed out, waiting for the nightlight beside my bed to burn out, for even the regular breathing of the sleeping girl on the cot to quiet down. For a moment I was afraid of the darkness and the silence that was vaster than anything I had ever expected, for a moment I was afraid of what I had to remember, but now the anxiety has been conquered, the knowledge attained and the wisdom acquired, and with eyes wide open I behold the dark.
There is no daybreak any more, only the dark; first darkness, then sleep. The dark has obliterated the moonlight, the dark has snuffed out the candle-flame; Pieter falls wordlessly from the window-sill, back into the darkness whence he had come, and only Sofie’s black dress still glistens for a moment as she dances alone to the rhythm of the soundless music until she too disappears, a shadow in the shadows. They have found peace, and now this life can end too, the report delivered, the account given and the balance determined. The water has dried up and the soil did not retain the footprint. The darkness obscures it all.
I wished to get up and move through the sleeping house, I wished to go out in search of something, but that desire has also passed, as did the anxiety and the memories, and everything has been engulfed by the vast darkness, and surrendered. What could I still search for now? Let others come, other people one day long after us. Amongst the burgeoning undergrowth where the porcupines have dug their burrows they may find stones for which there is no apparent explanation and the weathered remains of inscriptions that can no longer be deciphered or understood: they may make out a single name or year, but who could determine its authenticity or say what it had once meant? Where the stacked stones of an old wall have fallen apart, among shrubs and stones and grass, no one will ever search for the remains of wood or metal that was once hidden there, and even if splinters or fragments should be found, who would still recognise them for what they had once been, a cross or a ring? The stones once stacked there, have broken up and fallen apart, and there is no sign of them among the rocky ledges, outcrops and ridges in the flat, faded landscape of stone.
GLOSSARY
BASTER: person of mixed race; half-breed (sometimes derogatory)
BASTERSFONTEIN: a place name, fountain where the Basters live
“BLINK JAKOB”: Shiny (Sleek) Jakob
BOERS: inhabitants of the Transvaal and the Free State in the time of the Anglo-Boer War
BOTTERBLOM: African daisy, Gazania krebsiana
BRANDSOLDER: fireproof loft
BROEDERBOND: fraternal society for Afrikaner men
BOEGOE: buchu, Agathosma species
BYWONER: share-cropper, person with no land of his own, farming on the land of others
DASSIE: rock-rabbit, Cape hyrax
DOMINEE: reverend, clergyman, also used as title
DUIWELSDREK: asafetida, a resinous plant gum with an ammoniac smell used for medicinal purposes
GEELBOS: yellow bush (lit.); Leucadendron salignum
GOUSBLOM: marigold; Namaqualand daisy; Arctotis species
HARPUISBOS: resin bush, Euryops species
HARTBEESHUISIE: mud-and-daub house, also known as wattle-and-daub hut
KAREE: Karoo tree, or bastard willow; Rhus lancea
KAROSS: blanket or mantle made of skins with the hair left on
KATSTERT: cat’s tail, Bulbinella species
KIST: box, chest
KLIPSPRINGERTJIE: small antelope, African chamois
KNEG (pl. KNEGTE): farm labourer with slightly higher status; overseer, foreman
KOLONIE: the Cape Colony
KRAAITULP: Homeria species
MEESTER: Master (title given to schoolmaster)
NAGMAAL: Holy Communion
PADKOS: provisions for a journey
PERDEUINTJIE: Babiana curviscapa
PLAKKIE: Cotyledon orbiculata
REEBOK: a small South African antelope with sharp horns
RENOSTERBOS: rhinoceros-bush, Elytropappus rhinocerotis
RIEMPIE: leather thong (used for making riempie-seat chairs)
SETIES: dance, also known as schottische, or Scottish polka
SJAMBOK: short, heavy whip, originally of rhinoceros-hide
SLAMAAIERMEID: Malay woman (derogatory)
SPEKBOS: shrub of the genus Zygophyllum
STUIPDRUPPELS: anticonvulsive drops
TESSIE: container with handles for hot colas, placed inside a foot-stove
TREK: long, arduous journey, especially on foot; can also refer to travelling by ox-wagon
TREKBOER, TREKKER: migrant farmer
VELDKOS: veld foods, edible wild plants and fruit