Imaginings of Sand Read online

  ‘That one’s been asking for it, and she’s going to get it,’ said Casper, half-rising from his chair, dropping his serviette, preparing for hot pursuit.

  ‘Let her be,’ I said.

  ‘Look -!’

  ‘Please,’ said Anna.

  A precarious pause, all the other children waiting in suspense, the younger girl pale with trepidation, the boys with barely concealed eagerness. Then Casper changed his mind, bent down to retrieve his serviette, and banged the back of his head against the edge of the table as he rose. A titter from the youngest boy.

  ‘Who was that?’ thundered Casper.

  The two older boys responded as if they’d been rehearsing for an act: ‘It was Cassie, Pa!’ ‘Cassie, Pa!’ Whereupon the aforesaid Cassie subsided in a wretched wail.

  Violence seemed unavoidable.

  I had a bitchy remark ready on the tip of my tongue (something like, ‘Right, now that we all know who’s the strongest, how about finishing our meal?’) but managed to suppress it. ‘Please!’ I said. ‘Why don’t we just try to enjoy Anna’s great food?’

  He glowered for a moment, then took up his knife and fork again. The rest of the meal was rather strained, but without further eruptions. And over coffee, afterwards, the children out of sight if not entirely out of mind, Casper actually appeared to mellow.

  ‘I suppose you’re sleeping a bit easier now?’ he asked.

  Another prompt retort (‘Easier than those kids they arrested’) was suppressed in favour of blandness. ‘Yes. You too, I imagine?’

  ‘Ja. But of course one never knows. For every one they arrest there’s five new ones to take their places.’

  ‘Only two more days.’

  ‘You still believe that shit?’

  ‘If there’s no unnecessary provocation –’

  ‘You can’t trust those bastards,’

  ‘How peaceful are your intentions?’

  ‘My men have never looked for trouble.’

  ‘Come again.’

  ‘It’s that bunch of terrorists –’

  ‘They want peace.’

  ‘What makes you so sure about it?’

  ‘They’re sending a peace commission down here tomorrow.’ Sandile.

  ‘We’ll see about that.’

  ‘What kind of welcome are you going to give them?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You try to stop them with force, you may just get what you’re looking for. But if you’re prepared to sit down and talk you may be in for a surprise.’

  ‘Like hell.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘What the fuck should I be scared of?’

  ‘Casper, please,’ said Anna.

  He didn’t even look at her.

  ‘Of your own ghosts, perhaps,’ I replied. He looked at me; I met his stare. ‘I’m prepared to take a bet on it. If you can persuade your men to sit down with them tomorrow you may just be able to return this district to peace. If not, you’ll have to live with the blame.’

  ‘I’ll have to live with it? That’s rich.’

  ‘Are you willing to give it a chance?’ There was nothing very lofty about my intervention; it was strictly personal. It was Sandile I was pleading for, I realised. But at that moment I believed passionately that it would be worth it.

  He shrugged and took a swallow from the glass he’d brought from the table. He didn’t look at me.

  ‘Don’t underestimate our power,’ he said at last.

  ‘I don’t. But it seems to me that if you’re really sure of your power there’s no need to flaunt it.’

  He finished his wine in one last gulp. He looked at me again. ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Promise?’

  His upper lip wrinkled in a sneer. ‘I don’t have to promise you anything, Sis.’

  ‘You’re right. You don’t owe me anything. But perhaps for the sake of your family … If they really mean anything to you, it may be worthwhile giving peace a chance.’

  He grunted and got up. ‘Time for a nap,’ he said brusquely. ‘I want to get out of these clothes.’

  ‘I must be going too,’ I said, rising.

  ‘Please,’ said Anna, almost panicky. ‘Stay.’

  ‘Ouma may need me.’

  She bit her lip. ‘All right.’

  I waited until Casper had gone to the bedroom before I asked her for the tampons. Afterwards, she went outside with me to the hearse. There was no sign of the children. In our childhood, too, we’d been confined indoors on Sunday afternoons. In principle, at least; if only the grownups had had the faintest inkling of what we were really up to.

  ‘You going to have a nap too?’ I asked her as I got into the black monster.

  ‘Perhaps. I’ll wait until Casper is asleep.’

  ‘Self-defence?’

  She looked down, then back at me. ‘There’s no way out,’ she whispered. ‘I’m a prisoner. I always have been. I don’t think I’ve realised it as acutely as this last week, since you came. Always waiting for something to happen. Even at university: “When will he notice me?” “Is he going to ask me tonight?” “Am I going to get this job?” “Will I have more time after this baby –?” Waiting and waiting, from one event to the next. Until one day you discover that all that’s happened is that you’ve grown old. And then there’s nothing left to hope for.’

  ‘Why did you try to make your life so safe?’ I asked.

  ‘What has safety got to do with it?’

  ‘Because nothing is as safe as destiny. And once you’ve convinced yourself that what happens to you has nothing to do with you at all but is controlled by something you call destiny, you’re as safe as any corpse in any coffin. There’s no possibility of adventure left.’

  ‘Adventure is a romantic concept,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Is it? I’m not so sure. It can be bloody painful, I’ve found out. It’s confusing, unsettling, trying, dangerous. But it’s either that – or nothing at all.’

  ‘You’ve always dramatised extremes, Kristien.’

  ‘And I always get caught out by my periods.’

  ‘Because you know you have a big sister to run to?’

  I smiled slowly and turned the ignition key. ‘Perhaps I should swap some of my adventure for some of your safety.’

  ‘Shall we try?’

  I drove off, more prudently this time.

  10

  LATER IN THE afternoon, as the farm begins to emerge from its Sunday somnolence, a very dilapidated old car drives into the yard. Watching from my upstairs window I stare, flabbergasted, at the astounding number of people that spill out once the doors are opened (one door comes off entirely). They lounge about under the trees, abandoning the jalopy like a fowl roosting in the sand with wings outstretched, while a single corpulent woman goes round to the back. She shuffles along with difficulty, rowing with hefty arms against an invisible current. Soon afterwards Trui comes to call me, and I follow her downstairs.

  It takes us at least half an hour to extract from the visitor who she is and what she wants. Her name is Happiness Tsabalala. Her son, she explains at length, in a mixture of Xhosa, English and Afrikaans, interspersed with deep sighs (she seems to be suffering from a heart condition) and fits of crying, is the Karate Kid. Which does not take us very far, until at last Trui makes the connection: he is the youngest of the boys detained by the police for trying to blow up Ouma’s palace – that pitiful spindly little creature who wept most of the time he was here, yesterday morning.

  After we have led her indoors, and made her sit down, and helped her gulp down a glass of water (she turns down the offer of tea), she laboriously digs under her many layers of clothing to loosen her stays; only then does she become more coherent. She has come to see Ouma. I explain that she is in a bad state, and asleep; but she insists. She will not rest, she says, before she has seen the burnt woman.

  We help her upstairs. It takes several minutes, as she has to catch her breath at every step. But at last we are ther
e.

  The nurse rises briskly as we enter, clearly disapproving of the intrusion, but I motion to her that it is all right, which she accepts with bad grace, standing aside with the stiff movements of the mantis she so alarmingly resembles. (Were the resemblance to go any further I might entertain fears of her devouring her patient.) Happiness Tsabalala, belying her name, freezes in shock when she sees the coffin, pressing an ample fist to her mouth.

  ‘She is dead?’ she asks, followed by a stream of exclamations in Xhosa.

  ‘No, no,’ I interject hurriedly. ‘She is just sleeping.’

  ‘Why you put that box there?’

  ‘That is what she wants.’ I try to explain, feeling more than a little foolish.

  Although Happiness appears to draw some comfort from my explanation, it is with great diffidence that she approaches, brushing Ouma’s forehead with a hand, presumably to make sure she is still alive.

  ‘Au,’ says Happiness in a low voice. ‘She burn. She is bad. She will die.’

  ‘She is very old,’ I try to comfort her.

  ‘The Karate Kid do it,’ she adds. Another long discourse in Xhosa follows, of which I understand only odd phrases here and there; in Sandile’s time I knew it reasonably well, but I have lapsed in this as in so many other respects. ‘Now they kill him too,’ she says.

  For a moment I misunderstand and feel my heart contract; then I realise she is speaking in the future tense.

  ‘He’s only a little boy,’ I tell her, putting an arm round her shoulders as far as it will go. ‘I have already spoken to the police. And to a lawyer. Tomorrow I’m going to speak to the ANC. We will try to arrange bail for him.’

  ‘What is this bail thing?’ she asks, deeply suspicious.

  I try my best to explain. She bursts into tears again, such a wailing that Ouma starts in her sleep and briefly opens her eyes; but from her dazed look it is obvious that she has no idea of what is happening.

  ‘All this death, death, death,’ laments Happiness.

  ‘We must stop it now,’ says Trui unexpectedly. ‘We are the mothers. We must stop it.’

  ‘Your boy kill too?’ asks Happiness.

  ‘No. But I’m worried about him.’

  ‘We all worry,’ says Happiness. ‘Mandela must end it.’

  ‘He is only human,’ I try to reason, but I realise that I am out of place here.

  ‘The mothers. The children.’ Happiness is following a train of her own thought, not readily accessible to outsiders. ‘This old woman too. We all getting kill, we all suffering, it’s bad, it’s bad. So when to change? To do what?’

  ‘Where do you live?’ asks Trui.

  Happiness Tsabalala explains. In the black township at the far side of Outeniqua.

  ‘I’ll come to see you there,’ says Trui. ‘You give me your address, hey?’

  ‘Bad place,’ says the big woman. ‘We live small shack only, black plastic, no water, much shit. Bad place for little child to growing up in, Karate Kid. I try, I try, I try, what can I do? The lots other children, much children, bad children, they make tsotsi gangs, he small still, what can I do?’ She turns to me, suddenly engulfs me in her arms. ‘Ag, Madam, I’m so sorry, about the house, about the old madam, everything, everything, but I love my child, I cannot help, Madam, they so bad for him.’

  Ouma whines and cringes in her sleep. The nurse, having dithered in the background with increasingly evident annoyance, now makes up her mind and interposes herself between us and the patient.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘but I really cannot allow this any longer.’

  Happiness Tsabalala composes herself. With huge dignity she bends over and kisses Ouma on the forehead, then turns and shuffles out.

  As we leave in her wake I see the nurse officiously wiping Ouma’s forehead with a cloth.

  Downstairs, leaving the two mothers together for a while, I go outside to enquire whether the other visitors would like some refreshment, but they decline, avoiding my eyes or looking back with studied neutrality. Perhaps they do not approve of the visit; but if so, why did they come along? Once again there is a depressing realisation of understanding very little. Encamped below the blackened skeleton of the once proud palace, I realise in a wave of nausea, they must see this as the ultimate embodiment of what they abhor more deeply than anything else in the world.

  I’d like to plead with them, tell them that it was for them I left my comfortable life in this country and plunged into the risks and dangers and uncertainties of a struggle waged from afar; but how would they react? At best, they would look back with those neutral shallow stares. They did not go away: even that basic choice was a luxury they couldn’t afford. They were here. That is the crux of it. They were here. They saw it all. They lived through it all. Now this palace is on the verge of tumbling down. A boy from their midst has done it, and may die for it.

  I return to the two women, just in time to help Happiness Tsabalala shuffle across the threshold, back into the diminishing glare of the afternoon sun. Trui is clutching a piece of paper; she has taken down the address. We walk back, a female threesome, but I am not really acknowledged by them, They are the mothers; I have turned away from that, as from so much else. I feel an ache in my womb.

  11

  IN THE LATE afternoon I go for a walk. For a splendid hour, around sunset, no one needs me in the proud old ruin. I’ve left my shoes behind. My feet have become tender – those blessed childhood days when shoes were a confinement and a torture! – and to be honest I regret the decision after a while; yet the rediscovery of a peculiar kind of freedom is exhilarating in itself. To feel, again, the earth, its secret vibrations, the closeness of its seasons, a kind of peasant joy perhaps, an awareness of the gathering of time in the pressure of my soles. A painful and necessary intimacy. And the prickling in my nose. The smell of dust, as real as the intensity of the light on my arrival. Yes, Africa. I follow the dirt road past the ostrich camps, past the lucerne fields, until there is only space around me. For once there is something which hasn’t shrunk, or changed, since my childhood. A space impervious to chronology – or, rather, tuned in to a different kind of time, not that of days or weeks or years, appointments or contingencies, but a cyclic motion, summers that blend and merge, that repeat one another without ever being exactly the same, the kind of time that sculpts contours and moulds hills and gnaws away at ridges. Ouma Kristina’s landscape. This expanse, this spare beauty, this deceptive emptiness. I gaze at nothingness; nothingness gazes back. In an inexplicable atavistic reaction I go down on my haunches, find a twig, start scratching haphazardly on the hard, bare soil. It comes from the guts; it is all I can think of doing. To exorcise that emptiness. A dialogue beyond, or far below, language. And with a sense of reassurance I return to the clump of trees in the distance, against the gaudy sky, and to the phantasm of the palace which once was the centre of our universe, the spot from which all maps of the world took their bearing, the place where history began.

  FIVE

  Shit-storm

  1

  I RETURN FROM sleep with the memory of sex, but it is confused. There is the afterglow of an erotic dream, but whether it was Michael who was involved in it or a more distant shadow – Sandile perhaps – I can no longer tell. And the images behind my eyes, withdrawing like the small wavelets of a larger tide, are mingled with others, trailing the long hair of a woman submerged in water, streams of hair, then blurring into other images again, faint as the faded stains of a painting on a wall or an imprint in a mirror, the slight figure of a girl moving across the landscape like the shadow of a cloud, carrying memories to and fro, the sparks of fireflies exploding in a night. There is a remembered weight on my body, not that of a lover but perhaps of God, a nightly visitor; but his revelations, if revelations there were, have vanished, I grasp at them but there is nothing in my hand, only once again a smooth gliding movement as of hair, running through my fingers like water.

  I sit up and the world returns. And with the w
orld, the memory of last night. It takes time to realise that it was not part of the night’s dreams, but something that really happened, so crude, so violent, I’d like to exclude it from this day; but that is impossible. Hugging my knees, the blankets drawn up protectively around me, I try to grasp the whole improbable event, no longer sure of time or sequence, only of the nausea brought on by it.

  I must have dropped off during my watch beside Ouma’s bed. She lay snoring beside me. In the room next door, when I went to investigate, Trui and Jeremiah were also fast asleep. Yet something must have awakened me, that much I knew. A sound of birds perhaps? More than likely. That was why, stupidly, I didn’t take anything with me, only a torch, as I tiptoed along the passage, then down the staircase.

  All seemed quiet, but I had the uneasy feeling of a foreign presence; in my ears was still the confused memory of the sound that had awakened me, the sound of an object overturned, a glass or something broken. Perhaps it had been Jacob Bonthuys, I suddenly thought. He might have felt ill and gone in search of help, or of something to drink. Anxious now, I hurried down the stone stairs to the cellar.

  As I touched the door there was another sound, behind me. I swung round quickly, still expecting to see Bonthuys returning from the kitchen or wherever he might have gone. But it wasn’t. It was Casper.

  For a moment I was petrified. Then I relaxed; but I was annoyed.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I asked.

  ‘Just checking up that everything is all right.’

  ‘I told you this afternoon there was nothing to worry about any more. How did you get in?’

  ‘I’ve got a key.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘I had a duplicate made when they put in the new back door. It’s for your own safety’

  ‘Very considerate of you.’ I couldn’t quite keep the sneer out of my voice. ‘What time is it?’

  He made no reply to that.

  ‘Casper, I’ve told you before I don’t need you and your cowboys to look after me.’ An uneasy thought struck me. ‘Where are they?’