Imaginings of Sand Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by André Brink

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  An Attempted Reconstruction of Ouma Kristina’s Family Line

  One: The Return

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Two: The House of Usher

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Three: Among Strangers

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Four: The Coffin

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Five: Shit-storm

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Six: Event Horizon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Seven: Not the End

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Author’s Note

  Glossary

  Copyright

  About the Author

  * * *

  André Brink is the author of several novels in English, including A Dry White Season, Imaginings of Sand, The Rights of Desire and The Other Side of Silence. He has won South Africa’s most important literary prize, the CNA Award, three times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

  ALSO BY ANDRÉ BRINK

  The Ambassador

  Looking on Darkness

  An Instant in the Wind

  Rumours of Rain

  A Dry White Season

  A Chain of Voices

  The Wall of the Plague

  States of Emergency

  An Act of Terror

  The First Life of Adamastor

  On the Contrary

  Devil’s Valley

  The Rights of Desire

  The Other Side of Silence

  Before I Forget

  Praying Mantis

  The Blue Door

  Philida

  Mapmakers (essays)

  A Land Apart (A South African Reader, with J. M Coetzee)

  Reinventing a Continent (essays)

  A Fork in the Road (memoir)

  For Mazisi

  dear friend, who knows about exile,

  and returning, and stories,

  and ancestors

  André Brink

  IMAGININGS

  OF SAND

  you fall from your body to your shadow not there but in my eyes

  in a motionless fall of cascade sky and earth join

  you fall from your shadow to your name untouchable horizon

  you rush through your likenesses I am your remoteness

  you fall from your name to your body the furthest reach of seeing

  in a present that never ends imaginings of sand

  you fall to your beginning scattered fables of the wind

  spilling on my body I am the column of your erosions …

  The unreality of the seen

  lends reality to the seeing

  OCTAVIO PAZ

  An attempted reconstruction of

  Ouma Kristina’s family line

  KAMMA/MARIA birth unknown – became a tree in c. 1770 [married ADAM OOSTHUIZEN]

  LOTTIE birth unknown – vanished in search of her shadow c. 1790 (other siblings unrecorded) [married BART GROBLER]

  SAMUEL born c. 1776 – disappeared, presumed drowned 1831 (+ 17 other SAMUELS) [married HARM MAREE]

  WILHELMINA 1805–1862 [married LEENDERT PRETORIUS, 1829; HANSIE NEL, 1841; BERTUS LINGENFELD, 1845]

  PETRONELLA 1839–1921 (+ BENJAMIN and 14 other siblings) [married HERMANUS JOHANNES WEPENER, 1863]

  RACHEL 1874-C. 1891 (+ EULALIE 1865–1902, WILLEM 1867–1901, BAREND 1871–1900, MARTIENS 1871–1901)

  KRISTINA (OUMA) 1891–1994 [married, for what it was worth, CORNELIS BASSON, 1921]

  LOUISA 1921–1990 (+ 8 other siblings) [married LUDWIG MÜLLER, 1949]

  KRISTIEN born 1961(+ ANNA b. 1952: married CASPER LOUW, 1977)

  ONE

  The Return

  1

  A BIG GIRL now; the stupid phrase careering through my head from the moment the plane took off from Heathrow. The great return. All these years of wondering how it would be; so many others have risked it, some to tumultuous crowds, toyi-toying, shouting, singing; others slinking home along back ways. Not I. The day I’d left the country I’d sworn it would be for good. And I’d held out, unyielding to all natural appeals. Then this phone call, and what else was to be done? I did not even stop to think. Only after I’ve already been assigned to a narrow fate on the plane, squeezed between two bulging businessmen – the one on my left, on the aisle, in textiles; the other a civil engineer; both drinking steadily, each intent on outwitting the other in setting up dates with me (the one on the aisle even suggesting moistly in my ear, at three in the morning, as the window-man, feigning sleep, attempts to slide his hand in under my blanket, that we decamp to a toilet) – it dawns on me that I am actually on my way home. Or whatever is now to pass for home. But this is how it has to be. Ouma Kristina is, has always been, different. And I have no choice but to obey, not just because I bear her name. (Had I obliged my father and entered the world a boy – he was convinced it would be second time lucky – I would have been, in honour of an array of his ancestors, Ludwig Maximilian Joseph Heinrich Schwarzenau an der Glon; seeing me born, like my predecessor, without the distinguishing appendage of the right sex, he retreated in disgust and pretended I hadn’t happened. Left to my mother, I would have been stuck with an operatic name, Aida or Lucia or Elvira or, who knows, Butterfly; thank God Ouma’s practical sense prevailed, as it had with my older sister, and I became a no-nonsense Kristien.)

  Death has this way (Dr Johnson’s words in the narrow attic above Gough Square where I went with Michael, the insipid light spilled on th
e floor like too-weak tea, on the day we became lovers) of concentrating the mind. But it isn’t death as such that hurls me headlong home. I have survived Father’s death, and Mother’s. Not ‘hardening my heart’, merely accepting inevitability. Then why succumb, now, to Ouma? Is it the shocking nature of the event, the gratuitous violence of it, coming at a time when everything is supposed to be returning to whatever in that remote place is regarded as normal? Or is it the fact that she wasn’t, when Anna’s call came, dead, but dying, which left me with a choice, a possibly fatal choice?

  It is the kind of experience that provokes memory. Fending off the encroaching hand from my right thigh as I become aware of another on my left, moving with Tarquin’s ravishing strides towards his design, I escape to memories of Ouma, to memories of memories.

  ‘How come you remember so much?’ I asked her once, years ago, interrupting the flood of stories.

  She merely smiled, her mouth a deeper fold among so many others (even when I was a small girl she was already incalculably old). And said, ‘I am a very ordinary person in most respects, Kristien.’ A lie, and she knew it as well as I. ‘But in one respect I know I am extraordinary. My memory. You’re right. I have an amazing memory. At times I even surprise myself. I can remember things that never happened.’

  The two male hands, resolute, mindless, are converging across my separate thighs: the predator on my left adorned with a carbuncle of a ring, the other sprouting small tufts of black bristles between the stubby joints (I’d checked on them, before, over dinner: I always notice hands). These little piggies going to market. Abandoning myself to Ouma, reclined, head leant back, in what they must interpret as the sign of ultimate surrender (I am female flesh, I may be invaded), I take the two advancing hands in mine and place them on each other in my lap.

  I count to three before the message reaches the two sets of intertwined fingers which then withdraw in unseemly haste. One of my neighbours hisses venomously in my ear. ‘Bitch’ is, as far as I can make out, the word used. Afterwards I am allowed to rest in peace.

  Hurtling through the night, Africa invisible below but omnipresent. How easily eleven years can be peeled from one, a shift stripped smoothly from an unresisting body, leaving me naked, approaching death. The loss of innocence. Now; here. Not that faraway day – twenty years ago? I was not yet thirteen – when I ran indoors from my hideout in the great loquat tree to raise my dress and show Ouma my soaked panties, the only grown-up I would ever dare to share it with: ‘Ouma Kristina! I’m bleeding inside, am I going to die?’ Calmly, efficiently, she took charge. Sent me to the bathroom with firm instructions, then ordered the handyman Jeremiah to drive her all the way to town, to the chemist, returned with the brownpaper parcel and withdrew with me into her own bedroom, sacrosanct to all but me, to ‘fit me out’ in bouts of giggles interspersed with solemn and amazing confidences. You’re a big girl now.

  On her dressing table the small oil painting in its frame, no bigger than an envelope, of the naked man gazing untroubled at the spectator (‘Mother, for God’s sake, you should put that thing away, the children are growing up’). We’d never dared to ask her about it. Not even I. Although we’d made, whenever we spent the summer holidays with her, furtive incursions into that all-but-forbidden half-dark room, simply to stare, and simper, and scuttle out again. On that afternoon amid the clutter of her shaded room deep inside the towering incongruous house that sat like a mirage on the white, hot plains, somehow the provocative picture on her dressing table witnessing the mystery of my bleeding became involved with my feeling for her; and if the riddle remained it was not because the naked man had no name or history but because she chose to keep the secret.

  She drew his body, not his identity, into her explanation of what was happening inside mine – not as a graphic lesson in sex, but as a story. Her stories always resolved everything, without disturbing the miraculous nature of the world. Which was why I could never have enough of them.

  – Ouma Kristina, tell me about the woman with the hair as long as a river – the girl who killed herself in the cellar – the woman who built the palace – the one who was as strong as a buffalo – the one whose tongue was cut out – the one who came from the water – the one who wrote in sand –

  If it won’t senselessly prolong your agony, please stay alive until I’m home. I’m on my way back, after these many years. I haven’t forgotten, you’ll see. I’ll listen to every single story you wish to tell me: don’t let them die with you. I’m coming home, to whatever remains of that improbable castle in the desert. I’m coming, you’ll see. I am a big girl now.

  2

  THE HOUSE ORIGINALLY came from a mail-order catalogue, chosen by Ouma Kristina’s mother Petronella about three-quarters through the nineteenth century, at the time the ostrich-feather boom lured most farmers in the Little Karoo into investing all their worldly wealth in birds. As it happened, my ancestors had something of a head start over everybody else as they had eradicated every vine on their near-limitless farm and changed to ostriches, prompted not by visions of wealth but by misplaced piety. In one of her legendary nocturnal conversations with God Petronella had been instructed by this Highest Authority (seated astride her ample bosom, which aggravated the poor woman’s asthma) to get rid of the sinful vines that had assured the family’s prosperity, and start anew. The climate ruled out wheat; it was a bad year for watermelons and there was no demand as yet for lucerne; it was the wrong kind of grazing for cattle or sheep; and after a number of ever more desperate trials and spectacular errors her husband Hermanus Johannes Wepener hit, from sheer audacity if not perversity, upon the idea of ostriches. Never one to tackle anything on a small scale, and more to ‘show’ his wife than for any rational reason, he covered his thousands of newly barren hectares with birds. And then came the boom.

  Not really knowing what to do with all their new-found wealth, they decided, well before any of their neighbours, to invest in the kind of palace only the Queen of Sheba or the builder of the Taj Mahal could dream up; in the aforementioned catalogue an illustration of just such an abode was spotted and recklessly ordered, and in due course all the parts and materials arrived on a long line of ox-wagons from Port Elizabeth. The problem (to Ouma Kristina’s glee in the retelling) was that the original plan had somehow been lost in transit; Petronella refused to wait another year for a replacement to be sent and proceeded to supervise the building herself. It took five years to construct, undergoing countless additions and modifications along the way; a seemingly unending succession of caravans from Cape Town and Port Elizabeth continued to bring in new materials from the most unlikely places on the globe – glass and wood and stone and sheets of iron, candelabras and chimney pots and sculpted shapes – as Petronella’s fancy took her on ever bolder flights. Her sizeable army of builders and handymen were driven more by enthusiasm than by proven skill or experience: crude practical men used to hammering a recalcitrant tin roof into shape or stacking a kraal wall or roughcasting a structure designed to withstand a hundred years of hellfire, tornadoes, hurricanes, and the occasional summer deluge. As a result the finished house resembled nothing else on this planet. Coleridge or Ludwig of Bavaria would undoubtedly have approved. Three storeys high, topped with turrets, minarets, flèches, campaniles, domes, what had started off as a High Victorian folly turned out as Boer Baroque. Sandstone and redbrick, delicate fluted iron pillars and broekie lace, interspersed with balustrades of finely turned Burmese teak, flashes of Doric and Corinthian inspiration and even a Cape-Dutch gable on the south façade, contributed by a homesick Malay team carted into the interior after a mixed gang of shady Italian and Austro-Hungarian bandits had had to be deported for wreaking havoc on the site.

  The interior, to us children, in the blaze of summer holidays, was an exhilarating maze of archways and branching corridors, magnificent marble or teak staircases and unexpected other, dingier, flights of steps leading to dead-ends or upstairs doors opening on the void; attics and rooms and cl
osets and cubicles with no obvious or imaginable purpose, hidden among halls and chambers more comprehensible, even ostentatious, in the proclamation of their functions. Each family visit brought to light new spaces, whose existence we had never before suspected; at the same time we invariably lost track of others, hideouts of secret delights for all the cousins who converged there every impossible summer. During any given holidays there might well have been thirty or more of us.

  Our games and explorations took us all over the place – from staid never-used sitting-rooms behind closed shutters, with mysterious bulky shapes shrouded in sheets; to kitchens and sculleries and shiver-cold coolrooms with the carcasses of slaughtered animals suspended from hooks; to bedrooms never slept in; up to the sprawling attic with its lingering smells of dust and dried fruit and feathers. In one corner we even discovered a stack of coffins, one chillingly described by Ouma, when we enquired, but without any attempt to offer an explanation, as ‘second-hand’; all of them filled with raisins and dried figs, bundles of faded plumes, and the empty shells of old ostrich eggs, some of them decorated with weird faces.

  But our favourite haunt was the basement, tall enough to stand upright in, and replicating with disconcerting exactness the plan of the ground floor, in the same way as, many years later, I discovered in Paris the warren of subterranean sewers repeating the street plan above. Each room and lobby and passage had its corresponding space down here, like a subconscious mind, a memory of the house above, in which each event and gesture, each coming and going from the official world could be echoed and mimed, in minor key or mirror-image, all clad in shadows and redolent of must and dry rot and mouse droppings and dust; a space frequented by the spirits of the dead – the Girl, and the two unknown men whose skeletons had once been found there, and God knows how many others – but as real to us as the strange but very tangible objects our treasure-hunts brought to light.

  Some parts of the underground cavern showed signs of earlier occupation: mouldy tables and chairs with the remnants of cloths and cutlery and crockery and cushions, two narrow rickety iron beds with the filthy remains of blankets and pillows and embroidered sheets and coir-stuffed mattresses, decayed cupboards and chests of drawers, tarnished brass or painted porcelain lamps, lanterns, candlesticks. Most intriguing of all were the markings on the walls – all the more fascinating as they were in such a state of decay that it was impossible any longer to make out what they had once been. Some of the unscarred patches suggested images of tantalising obscenity, a cavorting of fantastic sexual creatures, just enough to fire our dirty little minds without confirming anything. But who had made them? Who had lived here? We all presumed it must have been the Girl, whispered rumours of whom had haunted all the ramifications of the family for years. Ouma Kristina refused to divulge anything. Not even I was let in on the secret. ‘Later,’ she would say, ‘one day when you’re ready.’ ‘But when will that be?’ ‘Perhaps when you’re sixteen.’ And when I turned sixteen, ‘No, wait until you’re eighteen.’ Then, ‘Twenty-one.’ In the end I had to resign myself to waiting. Sooner or later, I believed with an unshakeable faith, she would tell me, when she felt the time was right. Ouma Kristina wouldn’t, ever, let me down. I was not only her favourite grandchild, but the one elected to take over, from her, the burden – or the delight, depending on how one looked at it – of the family’s memories, recollections, fantasies. The whole house was a living treasury of stories, unto each room its own, but all culminating in the ghostly presences and imaginings of that lugubrious cellar, inhabited – still – by the long-dead Girl, its walls bearing the Rorschach stains of those indecipherable paintings, her memory now stained and splotched by the markings of time and the droppings of rodents and of the odd bird that has blundered in there through crevices and broken airvents.