It’s all about synergies, Jak, you tried to staunch the flow, a game one has to play. With nature. It’s subtle. Nature is subtle and complex.
Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift.
The deepest stone in the drift. That made you cry.
You’re a fine one to talk! Jak scolded. Subtle! Bah! Nature! And you can’t get pregnant!
I’ll go for tests, you sniffed, for treatment, there are modern aids. For men too.
Was that when Jak conceived his strange theories about you?
Over my dead body, he said, there’s nothing wrong with me. Nor with you. It’s in your head something is wrong. It’s because you wear yourself out like that, he said, just stop bawling, then things will come right, it’s because you complain about everything, because you flap about here on the farm with a long face. Where is the loving gentle Milla that I married? Look at you, pale as pale, as if you’re anaemic.
He thought you were putting it on when you said you were tired. Invited Beatrice and Thys in the evenings on purpose so that you should have to go and get dressed and made up.
Just see how much life there still is in her after a day’s toil, a real never-say-die, my little Kamilla.
And then he winked at you, and rubbed it in even further.
Just a short while ago she was hanging from a branch, furled like a bat, dead-tired, now she’s chattering like a finch. Goes to show what good friends mean to you here in the Overberg.
You saw Beatrice looking from him to you and back again. I’m here if you need me, she’d already whispered to you a few times, but you resisted her. She was more inquisitive than anything else. And greedy. For power, for status. Constantly comparing her husband’s position in the community with Jak’s. And the gossip over who was, was going to be or wanted to be chairman of this or treasurer of that. Mud-slinging. Jealousy. The secession of the Swellendam members of the National Party from the Bredasdorp branch was the latest, and how she’d had tea with the wife of Van Eeden, the new chairman. You in your own terms were not an item. Barren. Dry ewe. You felt that everybody was against you. Jak was starting to sound like your mother when he provoked you. And the gossips were agog for news from Grootmoedersdrift, for reasons, for scandal.
Ma was concerned on the one hand, but also critical of your childless condition. You could hear it in her voice on the telephone, sometimes sneering, you thought. Even so you phoned her every evening. With who else could you talk about it? She recommended traditional remedies. Like standing on your head afterwards, like drinking an infusion of stinging nettle.
Some evenings you couldn’t stop crying after putting down the phone. This infuriated Jak.
That mother of yours, he said, a violent tea cosy if ever there was one, cosy on top and down below she latches her claws into you.
Then you really cried. Jak was right. It wasn’t about what you could or couldn’t do. It was yourself, something in you that offended her. Your character.
I am who I am, how can I help it? you sobbed.
Jak slammed doors and stormed out of the house and drove off when you were like that.
Just don’t leave me alone, you pleaded.
You tried everything to prevent him from going. Played on his feelings, flattered him, nestled up against him.
Get out, out of my guts! he pushed you away, for heaven’s sake go and blow your nose!
But you knew that if he got rough enough with you, you could keep him with you. Then at least he was involved. You learnt to use his anger, the energy of it. It was less than nothing.
A smack in the face, a blow on the back.
Billing and cooing on Grootmoedersdrift.
You couldn’t stop crying about it all. Am I then never allowed to feel weak? you asked, but that only infuriated him further.
It went quickly. Two, three years. You no longer guided his hand over your body to teach him how to touch you. You were after something else. You bent your head and sucked him off and caught his semen in your hand and tried to inseminate yourself.
His preference in any case. I don’t want to see your face when you’re so miserable, he said. Often he didn’t even notice that you were crying.
You prayed every time that you would take, made pictures in your head of cells simultaneously shooting, a comet shower, a cataclysm, a fusion.
Why can the animals manage it so easily? Am I of the wrong nature, then? Comfort me then, just hold me, you pleaded at times.
But if he didn’t put a cushion over his head and turn his back on you, he took his blanket and went to sleep in the stoep room.
Weekends and holidays were worst, and the quiet times on the farm between seasons. Because then he wanted to go mountain-climbing or running or rowing, or to read his books by Ian Fleming and Louis L’Amour, always as far away as possible from you. You had to think up things to keep him on the farm. Painting, a new silage tower, large-scale yard clearance, the big compost project with the adjacent farms.
You saw to it that other people came to inspect the work at the most dramatic moment. When a project had just been completed, you arranged parties, lunches for the neighbours, agriculture days with information sessions for the members of the farmers’ associations.
Then Jak beamed in the glow of all the attention, his best foot well forward.
Let’s redesign the garden, you said, there’s nothing that makes a homestead look as attractive as a garden. You haven’t forgotten, have you, that you promised it to me, my paradise?
Don’t think I can’t see through you, he said, you’re more wily than the snake. That’s the only bit of paradise that there’ll ever be on this farm.
You thought, if we can’t be lovers, let us then at least be friends. Friends can learn to differ, even over paradise. But he was forever wanting away, to other people.
You tried to console yourself with work. When there was plenty of pressure on the farm, things that had to be done urgently and accurately, you were at your happiest. You liked working with people in a team, according to a fixed plan, with a predictable outcome, with a view to the long term. That’s the only way a farm can work, you’d learnt from your mother.
We can buy you an American saddle horse if the wool price is good, you said to Jak, or a new car if we sell the new Jersey heifers.
If you rewarded him, he helped you well at times. But simply to ask him for something, that wouldn’t do.
Why must I always hold your little hand in everything that you want done? After all, you’re the real farmer here, or so you’d have me believe.
It took you a long time to accept that if you wanted things done on the farm, you would have to think it all up yourself. And that you should turn to OuKarel and his son to help you take things in hand and make a start. They looked at each other and OuKarel wordlessly signalled to Dawid: Do as you’re asked to do. That Jak did not like. If he saw that they were helping you, he would make a show of lending a hand for a while. They soon discovered what was going on, pressed him for more pay.
They’d lost their sharecrop, was OuKarel’s argument, how was he supposed to support his dependants? Not that you knew who exactly he meant, he’d been a widower for most of his life, and Dawid was to all appearances a loner, but as Jak with time succumbed to the pressure and restored half of the Okkenels’ status by making them foremen on Grootmoedersdrift, the dependants came and presented themselves: OuKarel’s second cousins and their wives and children who couldn’t all live off the carpentry business that his brothers ran in Suurbraak. A never-ending influx it was. The houses were over-full, but Jak refused to build on and forbade them to construct shacks.