I knelt next to the water barrel and watched their shirts turn dark with perspiration, and Jakob’s muscles bunch together as he continued rhythmically and relentlessly in order to finish and reach home before sunset, as if his irrational passion and fury had been translated into labour, while the other two men strained to keep up without showing that they were tiring. And when the last sheaves had been thrown aloft, Pieter took off his shirt as he stood above them on the wagon and wiped his face with it, and I remember his lean, slender body and how he stood there on the stacked sheaves, laughing and taunting the other two, Pieter with his quick tongue and his banter, and Jakob with his relentless silence: how clearly I remember my two brothers as they stood there in the cornfield. And Sofie, where was she? I do not see her, I cannot remember her; I can only presume she was still sitting there beside me on the ground and, like me, was watching Pieter on the wagon and Jakob down below. All I remember is her voice reaching me, without being able to say where it came from. “Come, Sussie,” she said, “let’s go”, and when I looked up, she was already walking away from us across the veld, so that I had to run after her. As we were leaving, we heard Jakob call after us, and after a while Pieter also began to shout at us to come back and ride home on the wagon, but Sofie gave no sign of hearing them, neither did Jakob make any attempt to follow us. We walked straight across the veld in the direction of the house, while the men on the wagon had to follow the track, and arrived only after us, but it was a long way for us to walk, and over the last stretch Sofie began to lean more heavily on my shoulder again.
Was I thrashed by Mother because I had disappeared from the house without permission? I do not know, because by that time I had learned to distance myself from Mother’s anger and her punishment. I do not remember whether anything more was said — the faces around the table and the angry voices could just as well have belonged to that evening as to any other; the chair falling over, the door being slammed — but it was our last excursion of that kind and Sofie’s last escape from the house, for very soon her condition became more of an impediment, confining her to the house increasingly. I know that she tried to occupy herself with sewing where she sat near the window in the voorhuis, but she had very little patience and she often pricked her fingers with the needle so that the item she was stitching was flecked with blood, and sooner or later she would let it fall, on to her lap or to the floor, and just sit staring through the window. Our lessons did not continue for long either, and later I would just sit down on the floor beside her with one of my books and try to read to myself as well as I could manage in the available light, my back resting against her chair: motionless she would sit there with her swollen body and her swollen feet and often she would cry to herself, tears streaming soundlessly down her cheeks. Why? Sofie at the window with Mother’s foot-stove under her feet, and Jakob leaning across the table, both hands resting on the tabletop, and the bitterness of their accusations and reproaches, so that Mother came from the kitchen to intercede — do I remember this, can I really remember it, did it really happen? Cobwebs, shadows, illusions; I shall never know, only that the separation and estrangement between them were real, however it may have been expressed, and that I knew about it and can still remember it to this day.
The baby was expected early in winter and it was out of the question that Sofie could go down to the Karoo with us: it was thus decided that, for the time being, only the men would go with the sheep, and that Pieter would return with the wagon and a load of firewood and would take us, together with the household effects, as soon as Sofie felt up to the tiring journey. It was the first winter I ever spent in the Roggeveld and that alone is reason to make it stand out in my memory. The men had left, the herdsmen and their families had gone, and only us women were left behind at home, Sofie with her shawl wrapped around her in the voorhuis where the fire-pan now burned all day, Dulsie and Jacomyn in front of the fire in the kitchen, and Mother and I. Dulsie was disgruntled because she would have to endure part of the winter here, but otherwise we co-existed mostly in silence, and silently we moved past each other, briefly united only for evening prayers, where Sofie read aloud from the Bible and Mother strung familiar phrases together into a prayer. After a while Pieter came back from the Karoo with the wagon and he occupied himself around the house, chopping wood for the kitchen and tending the oxen, but there was very little for him to do, and actually we were all just waiting for the child to come so that we could join Father in the Karoo. As I remember it, Pieter was mostly inside, and he often sat with us in the voorhuis, listening as I read aloud, or talking to Sofie.
How long did that waiting period last? I no longer know. I remember it as a lengthy, vacant, translucent time, cold and clear as glass, the violence of the wind against the locked doors and shutters, the sombre horizon with its leaden ridges and the low sky threatening snow, the intensifying cold, and the silence in which we waited. The night deepens, and only the tabletop and the small glass panes of the wall-cupboards deep in the twilight of the voorhuis still catch the light, until even these reflections grow dim and only the coals in the pan on the floor still glow in the dusk.
On one of those bitter grey days, as I was helping Sofie to her room, I discovered she was holding, hidden in the palm of her hand, the wilted red bell-shaped flowers of a plakkie, though it was long past the flowering season. “Boetie gave them to me,” she answered distractedly when I asked her, and he must have come upon them somewhere in the veld on one of those occasions when he disappeared from the house without telling anyone where he was going and without anyone even bothering to ask. Had she always called him “Boetie”, for that was my name for my younger brother; or was it only because she was speaking to me?
Sofie did not have an easy delivery: I know I was woken during the night by her screams and could not fall asleep again. Encapsuled in the dark of the room and the comforting warmth of feather mattress and skin-blankets, I lay listening to the regular recurrence of those screams, and towards daybreak I finally dozed off again from sheer exhaustion. All of the next day the screaming in the front room continued, and I could not escape or evade it, for I had to stay inside, though none of the women had time to take any notice of me. Rigid with fear and confusion, I withdrew into a corner of the kitchen beside the hearth, not so much for the warmth as that it was simply the farthest I could escape from Sofie’s room and her screams. What had my life been thus far? Grim, austere, sparse, even, without much tenderness, not to mention love, yet only periodically and partially had I been alarmed by things I did not understand, and only on that single occasion in the fog on the mountain pass had I experienced fear or terror without being able to supply a reason for it. Without the friendly cloak of the mist to hide the abyss from me, I now stared down into the darkness and vaguely realised I would have to choose before it was too late, that I should turn around and turn away and find my own way along the steep, rocky precipice. Was there truly a choice, had there ever been a choice? Considering my life, one would scarcely think so; but still, without being able to explain what I mean, I want to say that if ever I had the privilege to choose, it was at that moment as I sat alone in the corner of the dark kitchen, determining my own future blindly and unwittingly.