Rumours of Rain Read online

  “What do you really want to show me?”

  He laughed. “The inside of hell,” he said.

  After supper and evening prayers we spent the evening in front of the fire – Louis on the floor, fondling one of the dogs; Ma and I on two of the heavy easy chairs. There was no uneasiness in our conversation. Outside, the wind had come up, causing the chimney hood to spin this way and that with an unearthly screeching sound. Inside, we relaxed in front of the dancing flames, in which, from time to time, small bits of bark exploded sending sprays of sparks up into the chimney; on the ledge beside the grate the kettle of bush-tea stood hissing tranquilly. Ma had switched off the generator just after supper, and the only light we had was the gentle flickering of the flames. The day with its harsh, forbidding wintriness seemed to have subsided like a sea, leaving us stranded in silence and peace. Even our skirmishes appeared insignificant at this distance.

  Later, Louis selected a few magazines to take to bed with him; Ma and I remained, she with her crocheting. Even at her most relaxed she couldn’t leave her hands unoccupied. Occasionally one of us said something, or a dog groaned. Otherwise it was silent.

  Deep inside the blue and orange of the glowing coals I discovered Dad’s face, sallow and shrivelled as it had been the last time I’d seen him, wearing the odd little knitted cap to cover his hairless head, his nose disproportionately large in the sunken face and protruding like a beak, his eyes sunken. I’d looked in at his room once or twice a day and dutifully sat with him for a few minutes at a time; there was nothing left to talk about. At night, Ma and Elise took turns to watch him – not without some hidden tension, because, exhausted as she was, Ma didn’t like the idea of Elise taking over. But one night Dad called me in and insisted I stayed with him, refusing to allow one of the women near us, not even Elise. I spent the night in the chair beside the bed, half-dozing most of the time, going out occasionally to relieve myself or pour a drink. He appeared to be sleeping, yet every time I stirred he would open his eyes. Whenever he tried to say something in his shrill, hoarse whisper of a voice, it sounded disjointed if not totally incomprehensible. But by three o’clock in the morning a curious, unnatural clarity came over him and for the first time I had no difficulty in following what he said, however slowly and haltingly it came out.

  “That you, Martin?”

  “Yes, I’m here with you, Dad. Don’t worry. Go to sleep.”

  “No, I don’t want to sleep. One of these days I’ll have enough time for sleeping.”

  “You’re not afraid, are you?”

  “No, I’m not afraid.” A long pause. “Not afraid. I’ve made my peace.” Another pause. “I’m just sorry, that’s all. Such a pity.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything. I’ve been a failure, Martin.”

  “That’s not true, Dad.” I had to comfort and encourage him.

  He persisted, weary but with stubborn effort. “No use to pretend. When one’s got as far as I have, one can afford to be honest. I’ve been a failure, all right. In everything.”

  I felt the urge to put out a hand and take his, but something like revulsion held me back.

  “There was one short time,” he said, “during the war, you know. Just a few months. When it seemed, when I felt, I was going somewhere. But then I got scared. That’s what it was. I simply got scared. I could lose my job. I had a wife and young children. And so I left. I was a coward.”

  “It’s all in the past now, Dad.”

  “It’s never past. That’s why I wanted to talk to you tonight. Only, I’m so tired.”

  I offered him some water. He seemed to have forgotten what he’d been talking about. But after a while he took up the thread again.

  “Now it’s your turn. I’ve had mine and I failed.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll —”

  “You must go on, Martin. I want you to succeed. For my sake too.”

  “Of course I will.” I had no idea what he really meant.

  “You know, when I get to the other side, God may ask me anything He wants. I won’t mind pleading guilty and asking for His mercy. But I know there’s one thing He’ll never forgive me.”

  I prepared myself for a death-bed confession, not sure of what it would be, but certainly expecting something grave.

  And after a long time he came out with it: “I haven’t been a good Afrikaner, Martin. I failed. I left my people in the lurch.”

  “But what was it you did, Dad?”

  “Nothing. That’s what. I did nothing at all.” Another long pause followed, in which he seemed to drift off to sleep. Then he spoke again: “And I resisted. When I had to take over the farm, I resisted.”

  “Every man has the right to decide about his own life.”

  “No, Martin. History decides for us. And history is the way God has of making His will clear to us.” He made an effort to raise his hand, as if he wanted to reach out to me; then dropped it. “Whatever you do in your life, Martin, you must never let this farm go. It’s ours. It’s our sin and our redemption. You must promise me that.”

  “I promise, Dad.” After all, there were only the two of us. And his thoughts were already wandering.

  He refused to go to hospital. During his last months he clung to the farm he’d never wanted. Unable to live there, he seemed to have made up his mind to die there. And sitting at the fire that evening, with Ma crocheting peacefully and the chimney hood grinding outside, I think I understood something more of that irrational urge in him: something of that for ever incomplete, defeated man who’d been a stranger all his life but who, through his death, had finally reconciled himself with history and with the earth. To him it had been the only way he could atone for an obligation towards the past which he’d been unable to fulfil.

  The fact that he’d tried to transfer it to me had been quite unreasonable, of course: how could I be expected to compensate for whatever, in his view, he’d done wrong or left undone? I had my own life and my own responsibilities to look after. And there was nothing in his testament to stop me selling the farm – apart from the clause about Ma’s consent, that was. Juridically that was all that mattered.

  Going to my room later, I took Ma a hot-water bottle. With the plalt of her chignon undone, her grey hair fell over her shoulders down to the middle of her back.

  “Thank you, sonny.” She took the bottle from me. “You’ve always been such a considerate child.”

  Behind her the door of the wardrobe stood half open. Inside I could see one of Dad’s jackets, the faded corduroy ones he’d always worn on the farm. What struck me was that, even suspended among the other clothes as it was, the material had retained the shape of his body, the slope of his shoulders, the bending of the elbows, the slight stoop of the back.

  Louis was asleep already. I undressed and got into bed and blew out the candle.

  For the first time I realised just how tired I was. The long journey to the farm the previous day, the nearly sleepless night, Saturday with all its hidden tensions: everything seemed now to press down upon me with its accumulated weight. Voluptuously I abandoned myself to the sensation of sinking, sinking through layers of sleep. But suddenly there was fear too: the old panic because I was sinking into mud with no one near to hear me or to help.

  I felt overcome by the myriad of small superficial events of the day. The water diviner, lowing cattle, the breaking of my spectacles, the quarrel at table, Dad’s study, the frayed cane. Now all that appeared no more than the signs of a deeper anguish I couldn’t fathom. And beyond those incidents were others: Elise giving birth to Louis; a Caesarean scar; Cathy shuffling self-consciously from the many-flavoured shop, her panties lost among the groceries in the dark; Ndebele girls with bare breasts; Charlie offering to be my guide through hell. Bernard. (No, Bernard had to stay out of this.)

  I tried to pick at all the thoughts stirred up by the day; just as, writing it down now, I pick at the scabs on the wounds of the past. Stern old men marching across the barren vel
d of history: a giant with innumerable children, setting off into the wilderness in search of Monomotapa. A deaf, half-blind old patriarch with a Bible on his knees and a gun at hand to shoot at invisible foes on the horizon. A rebel taking an oath of vengeance beside the graves of his family and dying with an assegai in his heart. A Trekker looking for the new Canaan, and murdered in the night. A hunter stumbling home with the body of his son on his shoulders. A digger of gold, painstakingly writing down the story of his life in exile, dying before he’d uncovered the meaning of it all. An incorrigible dreamer, disappearing at intervals and reappearing unannounced whenever the lure of the farm had become too strong. Pa shrunken and shrivelled on his death-bed.

  Had they really all been losers only as I’d thought? Or had each in his own way succeeded in taming his small portion of the wilderness, paying for it with his life, as, gradually, they won the land for those who came after them? Conquerors of a farm, of a piece of Africa. Not calculable in terms of money; and therefore indisposable.

  In the end I must have drifted off into uneasy dreams, for suddenly, through the escape of sleep, something hauled me back to consciousness: a voice calling. For a while I had no idea of what was happening or where I was. Outside the dogs were barking. There was a deep man’s voice speaking to them on the stoep, calming them down. At first I didn’t recognise it. As I slowly woke up completely, a dull headache throbbing in my skull, I began to grasp what was happening.

  On the stoep the voice went on calling softly but insistently:

  “Nkosikazi! Nkosikazi! Nkosikazi! – Madam!”

  At last Ma’s voice, sleepy and surprised, answered: “Yintoni, Mandisi? – What’s the matter?”

  Mandisi. So something must have happened. I sat up to listen more clearly.

  “Kukho inkathazo enkulu ekhaya – There is big trouble at home.”

  Almost eerily in the night came her calm query: “Umlibazile na umfazi wakho? – Did you hurt your wife?”

  “Ewe.”

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  “Ufile, nkosikazi. – Dead.”

  I got up quickly. When I reached the passage door, Louis’s startled voice stopped me:

  “What’s happened, Dad?”

  “Trouble with one of the labourers.”

  Ma was on her way down the passage to the front door, carrying an oil lamp. I wanted to follow her, but the cold forced me to turn back first and put on something warm. I lit our candle. Louis got up too. Outside the chimney hood was still grinding away.

  When I arrived in the passage again, Ma was already turning the handle of the telephone beside the door to the sitting-room.

  “Where’s Mandisi?” I asked.

  “I sent him home. He’ll wait for us in the hut. I told him I’d send the police up.”

  “He can kill the lot of them in the meantime!”

  “No, he’ll wait. Don’t worry.” After a few more turns of the handle the exchange answered and Ma asked for the police. In another minute a sleepy voice replied.

  We rekindled the fire in the grate with pine-cones and firewood. Ma made some coffee, and the three of us sat drinking it beside the fire, waiting for the police to come. We didn’t talk. All round us darkness lay heavily in the rooms of the house and outside too, under the tiny pinpricks of the stars.

  Soon after the clock in the passage had struck three we heard a distant rumbling. The van stopped in the yard. The clear, loud clang of a metal door. Voices.

  A White sergeant and a Black constable appeared in the doorway.

  “It’s just up there on the hill behind the house,” said Ma. “The first hut you come to. You show them the way, sonny.”

  But I kept on stumbling in the dark, and twice my myopia made us lose the path up the bare slope.

  I’d expected to find everything in turmoil at the huts, but all was quiet. When the sergeant shone his bright torch into the first hut, we were paralysed for a moment. The body was lying on the ground, covered by a blanket, only one arm visible, stretched out above the head. Beside her lay four small children, fast asleep, one of them the baby. And next to them, Mandisi, sleeping just as peacefully.

  The black constable pulled away the blanket. It was Thokozile, the young woman I’d seen in the house, with the high cheekbones and delicate features. She was completely naked, her body like a bare brown statue, washed clean of all traces of blood – except for the bad bruise on the one cheek and the small dark slits of knife-wounds in the breasts and arm and belly.

  Bending over, the sergeant took Mandisi by the arm and shook him gently, almost as if he were reluctant to wake the man. Mandisi sat up and blinked, looking about him in surprise. Then he nodded. “It’s all right, nkosi.”

  Louis and I helped to carry the body downhill, wrapped in the grey blanket with the white stripes. Mandisi carried the baby. The three other children were left to sleep.

  There was something quite unreal about our small procession going down the slope in the immensity of that night: the sergeant leading the way with the torch, followed by the tall gladiator with the sleeping baby in his arms, then the constable and Louis and myself with the body. Unreal: not only because of my shortsightedness, but because of the solemnity and the quiet dignity of the occasion, as if we were moving in a silent movie.

  As we reached the gate to the yard, Ma came from the kitchen to take the baby from Mandisi.

  “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “I’ll look after him.”

  “Thank you, nkosikazi.”

  The Black constable opened the back door of the van for Mandisi to get in. Locking it, there was the rattling sound of a chain on metal. The engine started. A minute later the lights disappeared over the ridge of the rise.

  Ma had already gone inside with the child. Louis and I remained behind in the utter darkness of the yard. The wind had died down. It was very cold.

  Then Louis said, in a voice I barely recognised, almost in awe:

  “Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika.”

  SUNDAY

  1

  WHAT HAPPENED THAT weekend, including the murder, was not very important in its own right. I realise it more and more clearly. Not the events as such that were significant, but everything drawn into the whirlpool by them. And if I experience a sense of urgency in writing about it all it is not through any desire to come to the end of the weekend (there is no “goal” towards which I’m striving; and what awaits me at the end I am, in fact, reluctant to face). My urgency is of a different nature altogether: an awareness of the massive clearance involved, and of the fact that it cannot be done in haste, even though every moment is placed under pressure. My time is running out: I have been writing for five days now.

  I have never subscribed to the prognoses of the Club of Rome. But in their first report there was an image which expressed admirably my own feelings as I am writing here now. A children’s riddle, to be exact, used to demonstrate the suddenness with which exponential growth within a finite system reached its fixed limit: Suppose you own a pond on which a water-lily is growing. The lily plant doubles in size each day. If the lily were allowed to grow unchecked, it would completely cover the pond in thirty days, choking off the other forms of life in the water. For a long time the plant seems small, and so you decide not to worry about cutting it back until it covers half the pond. On what day will that be? – On the twenty-ninth, of course. By which time you have exactly one day left to save your pond.

  It was deadly quiet on the farm that night. Not a floorboard or a beam on the ceiling creaked; no dog sighed in its sleep; no nightjar shrilled in the silence. I couldn’t even hear Louis breathing. I must have slept for some time, troubled by confused and oppressive dreams; but then I woke up again. Fatigue pressed me down on the bed with a heavy hand, yet I found it impossible to fall asleep again.

  A few hours before someone had been murdered in this same dark, yet it now seemed improbable if not wholly impossible, part of the far-fetched dreams of the night. And yet I’d helped ca
rry the body down the hill.

  Beside the sleeping man and the small sleeping children, that naked young woman with the symmetry of her limbs, the full firm breasts and smooth belly, the satisfying curve of hips and long legs; the wounds like small wet mouths. There was a simplicity about the scene which had shaken me. Call it innocence.

  There had been no sensual motive in the back of my thoughts: my appreciation of the fine sleeping face and beautiful body had been detached, “aesthetic”. What had shaken me was, simply, the discovery that a Black woman could be as beautiful as that. Thinking back, lying in my bed, I found it difficult to believe the memory.

  As the night wore on, small smothered baby sounds could be heard from Ma’s room from time to time, followed by her own soothing voice in the dark, stirring up something atavistic in me and confirming the reality of what had taken place. It really was true, it had happened, the woman was dead.

  Would it have happened if I hadn’t reprimanded Mandisi? The thought was preposterous. Irrelevant.

  What intrigued me that night (what intrigues me now) was the mere fact of what had occurred: something so wild within a few hundred yards of the house. As if an entire primitive, invisible world had reached up, through that simple, barbaric act, to momentarily reveal itself. It was more than a discovery of “their” world, “their” way of life. It was something darker and more profound: something belonging to the very guts of the farm itself, as secret and as dangerous as the subterranean water courses beneath the house, of which we’d never been aware before.

  It is difficult to identify it more closely. All I know is that, in writing down the events of Saturday, it eluded me. I was blinded by Dad and our history. But there are other forces beyond him, different from him – forces related more closely, perhaps, to the boy-man who was sleeping on the narrow bed opposite me that night.

  My own childhood: holidays on the family farm, long weekends with my friend Gys on their farm ten miles out of town, among iron-stone ridges and bare koppies. There had always been something cruel about my experience of life, but not the sort of cruelty one could judge morally. More elemental. Walking across the veld to where one’d seen the vultures circling; finding the springbuck wounded yesterday and now dead and half devoured, the smelly green dung in the guts exposed, the tattered white-and-brown skin smeared with dirt. Or finding sheep that had strayed or fallen ill, the eyes gouged out by claws, bleeding holes gaping in the obtuse head; occasionally a tongue torn halfway from a mouth still groaning. Christmas in the village, when the farmers brought in lambs to be slaughtered for the Women’s Auxiliary, so that the meat could be distributed to the poor – tied in neat brown-paper parcels and packed into paraffin boxes, together with flour and sugar and coffee, candles, condensed milk, oatmeal and sweets and oil. For some reason – Ma must have been chairlady or secretary of the society – the lambs were generally slaughtered in our backyard. A labourer would be brought from the farm to do it, but I was always present; and sometimes he allowed me to hold the lamb’s head and pull it back, exposing the throat to the quick flash of his razor-sharp knife. The warm red blood spurting over one’s hands and arms and clothes. There was something voluptuous about the very horror of it. That smell of blood and manure and piss: death. At the same time there was a remarkable discovery of life in this encounter with death, something rich and stimulating. Primitive innocence. (That word again.)