You were spoiling your wedding dress, it was starting to look like a fancy nightgown. You told your mother that the dress was too revealing. She narrowed her eyes to slits, she didn’t believe you. She knew how you dressed, revealing had never been a problem for you. Perhaps, she said, you’re not too taken with the idea of getting married in a bedspread, but as far as that’s concerned you’ll just have to get rid of your finickiness, because from now on you’re the bed.
The properly made-up wife, you thought, the squared-off, the folded-back, the freshly covered wife. A wife with inner springs and a solid headboard, a wife with copper mounting.
You worked the fine stitches, carefully pulled the thread through, stitch for stitch you sewed yourself in, into the concealing sleeves, into the collar that had to cover the bruises on your neck.
And as you worked, you sat and thought of the first time. The first time was before your wedding, that day when you almost had the accident with the watermelon lorry.
You neither of you wanted to wait, you were just as passionate, as reckless as Jak. But there where you sat sewing camouflage onto your wedding dress, you gained another perspective on that afternoon.
He carried you over the threshold and threw you onto the old bed in Ma and Pa’s sleeping-over room and had his way with you. Without ceremony or softness, nothing.
Wait, you still asked, wait a bit Jakop, slowly at first, but he couldn’t hear you.
The mites drifted from the broken ceiling and the floorboards creaked under the squeaking bedstead. You were dismayed. You thought, no, not like this, but you gathered yourself into yourself. From inside you protected yourself while he drove home his will. It will come right, you thought. You would get to know each other in time.
You were taken aback at the quantity of blood on the spread afterwards, but he shrugged it off.
It’s natural, he said with his back to you, you’re a boer woman, aren’t you? Now you’re well broken-in. A little crash course. Don’t be so namby-pamby. What did your mother say? An Afrikaner woman makes her way in silence and forbearance.
When you’d done finishing-off your dress, you were a different person. You thought you understood what you’d let yourself in for. You thought: It’s better that I should understand it now rather than later. You experimented in front of the mirror with your hairstyle so as to hide the damage. You could not share your new insight even with your mother.
Your cousins were all there, but you trusted nobody there enough to tell them. Beatrice, your friend from schooldays, looked at you enquiringly a few times. But you gave no quarter. You smiled and did everything right for the whole day of the wedding. It would not happen again. It was nobody else’s business. And you did love Jak and you were sorry for him amongst all your people, your father shaking his hand all too solemnly and your cousins slapping him on the back too hard.
Pretty Jak, they called him, Jak with the woman’s face.
They admired him for his way with words. Because he made a thunderous bridegroom’s speech, your Jak, as you’d known he would. You’d got to know his style. His toastmaster club at Stellenbosch to which he dragged you as student. You didn’t enjoy it much, but it was in exchange for the lieder evenings he in turn had to sit through in the little Conservatorium Hall. He always had the people at his feet, liked you to hear it. Just as with the wedding speech.
Once upon a time there was a most beautiful little farm, he started, and winked at you.
At the foot of a mountain, close to a stream, with a thatched house between the trees. But the yard was silent and deserted. In the evenings the trees sighed and the house creaked and the mountain whispered to the river: Now when are we getting an owner, a man and his wife who will bring life and laughter to the yard and will love each other above all?
Were you the only one who heard an undertone of mockery? You caught your father’s eye. He didn’t like it, that you could see, but he composed his face and smiled.
Perhaps Jak intercepted the glance. The mockery disappeared from his voice. He charmed himself and all the others, roused them even. In the end he had all two hundred wedding guests singing. O farm of my blood, o soil of my birth, it thundered over the yard of Grootmoedersdrift, yours I will be till the end of the earth.
When he had done, everybody believed fairy tales could come true.
Only after midnight, when the guests were starting to take their leave, you withdrew into your own space, but you did not cry, you pondered and planned and mustered your wits. Jak came to look for you. He was tipsy, full of talk, and amorousness itself after the commotion of the marriage feast.
He came and stood behind you in front of the mirror where you were sitting in your petticoat, caressed your neck.
Sweetheart sweetheart sweetheart, he sang to you, will you love me ever.
You hummed along for the occasion.
I could never marry a beautiful woman, he said, it would cost me too many a sleepless night.
You smiled. My dear husband, you said, what more could a boer woman ever wish for than a husband who leaps out of bed in the morning fresh and rested for his day’s duties.
how long do wild peas lie before they mould? how long does a sheep suffer a sick tongue before it turns blue? how long in my symphyses did the midges multiply? in what creases or folds of the collar and the crotch the invisible mite of the mange? how many years the incubation of terror? in what subterranean seams does history precipitate? a catchment of rain does not elect itself the mountains choose and a mouth for the stream is gifted by the sea how was I then reservoired so wrongly such a still mephitic pool?
Wednesday 12 May 1960
Everything is starting to seem more real now that I’m making the lists. Two processes (three!) they keep each other on track but there are many things to think of at the same time. As long as I think of the things and not of the reasons. Heaven help me sometimes it feels too much.
Kriel & Co. list 1
Baby (a little girl or a little boy?!)
Nappies & pins
Blankets (holding and covering,
woolsey) (5)
Vests (long-sleeved it will be win-
ter) (7) Ma says you can never
have enough of them.
Crawlers (button-front)
Nappy covers (waterproof)
Cradle (perhaps after all get my
old white cot from Ma? Or is it
still down in the cellar here?)
Push-chair (Dunlop adjustable)
Pillows & covers
2 baths (thick plastic)
Towels (4 large & 4 small)
Baby shampoo & soap
Bath oil
Baby powder
Cotton wool
Earbuds
Small scissors
2 x 4 bottles + rings + teats
Bottle-brushes 2 (Saw a little