My wife Nombini is not being difficult; she’s merely holding herself apart. She lives her life on the edge of the household. She will sit with us and laugh at the table; she will laugh as long as it’s necessary. If Maria or I lambast her she listens with bent head. When the chastisement ends, she straightens that long neck and goes off to do what she wants to. I can talk to her about things I would never mention to the other two. She listens to me, she doesn’t judge; she guards my secrets. Whether she is indeed listening to my outpourings – in Xhosa or in Dutch – and if it’s of any moment to her, that I don’t know. Her life is something unknowable and regards me hardly at all. I’m an incidental, like a bothersome knee, something she thinks of only when it hurts.
When the Hottentots were still on my farm, they constructed an impressive system of canals to conduct water from the kloofs to the farmyard. Nevertheless Nombini persists in fetching, late every morning when the sun has seeped its warmth into the rocks, two pails of water from the river. The river is just here close by, in the evenings you can hear it rushing, but the woman stays away for hours with her pails. Three years ago I went to spy on my wife one morning.
Nombini with her pails comes out of her house in a daze, eyes staring straight ahead. She marches across the yard, almost steps on little Dirk who’s sitting building a kraal for his clay oxen. She strides into the veldt, me following. She keeps next to the river for a while, then she puts down the buckets on the bank and turns away up against the incline. The bushes and grass at her feet are green, but the trees around her are huge black spears, charred by last year’s fire. She walks fast, steps lightly and constantly looks about her, searching. The pathway she is following from the river is narrower than any antelope trail. She stands still, steps out of the path, picks up a stone and places it in the path and walks on. I don’t get close, just see at an angle how she touches her back, over the cloth of the dress she never looks at home in. How her hands find the bow of the laced-up dress, pulls it loose and how she steps out of the dress when it falls free and gets snagged in a sugar bush. See, her buttocks are two beating hearts. Once again into the bushes, once again the stooping and groping on the ground, once again the stone placed in the path and then on again. On with the path, overgrown since the buck no longer walk here, or forged open in the wilderness by something smaller and lighter. I get to the first stone in the path. It’s a tortoise turned on its back. So too the second one. She walks as if she’s urgently on her way somewhere, until she stops and bends down in the bushes and turns up a tortoise to lie kicking the air helplessly. Then she takes to the path again resolutely. I stop counting after the twentieth turned-over tortoise. She stops. After an hour’s walking she stands still, gazes in front of her for a while, turns around and comes walking toward me. I shrink away just in time behind the nearest milkwood. I lie knotted together behind the bush until she’s walked past me. When she’s some distance away, I stretch myself and fart the fart I had to hold in. I carry on along the path, want to see what made her turn round. The road stops. Where she came to a halt is where the path peters out in front of a collapsed anthill. I turn around. For the first time my farm is out of sight. I walk back, following her. The tortoises are gone. None of them are left lying in the path. I catch her up; see, over there she’s bending down in the path. She picks up the tortoise, puts it back on its legs and walks on. The tortoise starts walking along the path towards me. Behold: It’s not an antelope trail that she and I are walking. It’s a path she’s trodden for eight years. Every day for eight years she’s walked until she can no longer see the farm; every day she turns over every tortoise she comes across. Then the walk back, turning over the tortoises again and before the last bend putting on the dress again. I put my foot down before the tortoise waddling towards me. See, there she is, next to the river again, the hem of her dress soaked in the stream. She fills the buckets with water and walks back to the homestead. I pick up the tortoise and place the dumb creature down on its shell and follow my wife, back home.
I’m sitting with the book again, ticking off the last supplies on the lists. When the most important things have been ticked off, I make another list in the light of dusk. This is what I had to contend with here in the Couga:
bluetongue,
women,
children,
bloat,
Bushmen,
anger,
leopards,
gallsickness,
church councils,
heemraden,
heartwater,
Mad Martha,
liverfluke,
baboons,
comfort.
While I’m trying to think of more mortal enemies, Elizabeth appears in the yard. She’s been in the veldt gathering medicine for the journey. While living in the Couga I was at home most of the time. No revolutions or journeys of exploration or flights from authorities. I was with my wives and children. I saw the children growing up and the wives growing old. I did what I could around the house, even though I’m still not of much use with a hammer or a saw. My hands curled up more by the year, felt slightly less, cramped slightly more. I taught my sons to ride and to shoot. I taught my daughters about the plants and herbs in the veldt. But Elizabeth is the true doctor in the family. She knows a plant or an infusion for every complaint and her ears prick up when the people of the area tell about their cures. Over the years I’ve also learnt some cures by which the people of these valleys swear. I write them down in the back of the book, tear out the page and stuff it into the chest with Elizabeth’s herbs:
infused rue for fever;
wild dagga as prophylactic for colds, flu, wheeziness, gallstones;
infused goat’s dung or nettles for measles;
bread poultice for blood poisoning;
candlewax and lamp oil for chapped feet;
infusion of pomegranate peel for worms;
wormwood and the juice of sour figs for squitters;
warm cow dung and vinegar for open sores;
rhinoceros bush for pain in the side;
infusion of buchu or false buchu for bladder and kidney ailments;
smoked bitter apple or poison apple for toothache;
a few drops of rabbit piss for earache;
warm bran in a sachet for pain relief;
blue soap and sugar mixed with spit for boils; and always remember:
keep your trap shut and know your place and
wrap infections in warm cat skin.
There were cures for everything, except staying young and sitting still.
5
The sun sidles in under the leaves of the white stinkwood and catches me from the side. I take the Flatus book and seek shelter in Maria’s house. Before the long trail claims me, I want to linger here for the last time. It’s been months since I was in here. I see my children outside. Maria and I no longer really sleep together and we don’t eat together. As I step into the house, two clay dolls crunch under my feet. The gloom inside is cool. In the eleven years we’ve lived here, Maria gave birth to her last two children. Bettie was hardly married and out of the house when Eliza was born. Maria was missing her eldest child and wanted another Elizabeth. She was still upset that I’d named my wife Elizabeth as well, but she kept to Eliza for the little one. It wasn’t long before the confusion led to everybody’s calling the baby, who kept on making knocking noises with her tongue, Toktokkie, after the tapping beetle. After Doorsie’s birth four years ago – Theodorus in the Cape’s books, after my friend Kemp – Maria stopped bleeding. Is it her blood that makes a woman attractive? Now and again we still laugh and talk through the night, but sometimes I remain soft and wrinkly when her barren lap brushes against me.