Now I remember again: suddenly the thread running through the design becomes clearly visible in the dark. The women were saying what a beautiful child Maans was. Pieter had also been such a spindly little thing when he was small, Dulsie went on; Jakob was never like that. Yes, one of the women added, it is Jakob’s voice but Esau’s hands, and the people sitting at the hearth in the dark burst out laughing as if they understood the words, just as Mother entered the kitchen and overheard them. I did not understand, or perhaps I simply chose not to understand, just as I always did when a choice was possible for me; but in the end understanding was inevitable as the stories did the rounds, stories repeated with unexpected acrimony or slipping out before the speaker could help it, stories repeated because no one realised I was present or because they thought I could not hear; warp and woof woven together over the years into a tapestry in which I can finally make out the pattern. Could Maans have been Pieter’s child? In later years, when it became possible for me to ponder and to question, many years later, when I was growing older and Pieter himself was approaching the end of his life, I often reflected on this matter, and at times Maans must have wondered why I was gazing at him so quizzically, as if I were searching for something in his features. I never found anything, however, no, I never did believe that Maans could be Pieter’s child; but that must have been what people in those parts believed or wanted to believe and what they told each other, until even I became aware of it, until it became an accepted fact that no one questioned any more and in its own way the rumour became more important than anything that might actually have occurred. But who still remains that knew Jakob and Sofie, or cares about Pieter’s memory; who still speaks of these matters? Who remembers?
At the time we must have been the subject of a great deal of gossip, and what else could be expected, with Jakob’s death and Pieter and Sofie’s disappearance, with Gert and Jacomyn’s sudden and mysterious departure and, finally, my long illness as well; what else could be expected in our small, isolated world where everyone ended up knowing everything about everyone else, that miserable handful of white and coloured people in the boundless desolation at the edge of the mountains? Perhaps they tried to help, as people will in times of affliction or need, and perhaps they made offers of goodwill. I remember the people who helped search for Jakob and the neighbours who attended his funeral, lined up silently along the walls of the voorhuis, but I know that as a child I did not see their presence as a sign of sympathy, but rather as an intrusion. Oh, when I was a child it was just too rare for us to receive visitors, and possibly I was simply unused to it and the curiosity and distrust I remember were no more than imagination on my part. But the unspoken words that I remember just as clearly, the questions and the speculations that I overheard incidentally? Where did a group of men once talk about that day, and someone wondered who had searched for Jakob in the kloof without finding his body where it had been lying all the time? The details I no longer recall, but I remember overhearing the question and waiting for an answer that was never supplied. Those men all knew the answer, and the question and the silence that followed were an accusation, even though it was never uttered. Who searched in that kloof, and how did Jakob lose his footing and, with mangled face, fall down into the narrow cleft between the rocks? I shall never know; neither do I wish to know. It is better so.
Did the neighbours begin to avoid us again after these events, or were they simply discouraged from coming to our home? When visitors arrived, Father was always glad to see them, they were welcomed and coffee was served, or sweet wine or brandy but, just as they remained intruders to me, so they did to Mother as well, and even more so in the time after Jakob’s death and Pieter’s disappearance. People inevitably noticed that there was no welcome in her stiff hospitality and sparse words and gradually they stopped coming again. At last the only visitors who still came, were a neighbour in search of an absconded apprentice or a lost sheep, or a servant sent to borrow an awl or a bag of horseshoe-nails.
Only the small, familiar sounds of the house still filled the silvery days, and the howling of the wind around the corners of the building, against the shutters or in the thatch when I awoke at night and could not fall asleep again. Father still mounted his horse painfully and attended auctions to buy sheep or land; later he bought a black Cape cart in which he set off to attend funerals in the district, but I do not recall Mother often accompanying him, for it was as if she were more withdrawn than ever during those years, though the passion and the zeal and the sudden, unpredictable flashes of temper had intensified. No, actually I cannot remember Mother ever leaving the house in the years after Jakob’s death, except when the minister came from Worcester and there were church meetings on neighbouring farms.
Those meetings and the long journey to Worcester for Nagmaal I remember because they became an ever greater ordeal for me as I grew older. I felt strange and ill at ease among the children of my own age, and awkwardly I hovered at the fringe of their company until it was possible to escape. Once I was standing behind an outspanned cart when I heard a girl ask where I was, and someone said something I could not make out in a cold, disdainful tone. “Oh, that mad creature,” an older woman remarked; and that must have been how I appeared to them, the thin, shy, lisping girl with the scar on her forehead who fled from the people, the tents, the outspanned carts and wagons, to escape from the friendly interaction, shy as a deer in the ridges, dashing away from the people, the voices, the greetings and laughter and jesting, the nicknames, the whispering in corners and the incomprehensible jokes and innuendo, the girls with their arms around each other and the boys to one side with their impertinent glances and their nervous excitement, the approval and disapproval of the older women lined up against the wall, the entire united community of other people into which Mother and Father were briefly assimilated, but in which I could play no part. I turned and fled to the servants’ fire beyond the outspan, and I warmed myself and shared their coffee when it was offered to me, and soon enough they forgot about my presence and continued as if I were not there.
That winter after my illness we all went down to the Karoo as usual and when we returned that spring, Miss Le Roux came with us. Someone had probably brought her from Worcester and Father must have fetched her halfway with the cart, I do not know, for I was told nothing, and even Dulsie spoke only vaguely of the stranger who was coming. However, she came from Worcester to join us in the Karoo before we returned to the Roggeveld, for I was standing in front of our reed house with Maans on my hip when the cart came to a halt and Miss Le Roux climbed down slowly in her black dress. Mother’s formal welcome and my own mystified silence could not have put her at ease and, in fact, she probably never felt at home with us: as strange as she seemed on her arrival at our outspan in the Karoo that afternoon, so she remained to us, in spite of living in our house for two years. I soon found out all about her, but only because I was her sole companion in her loneliness, for I certainly never questioned her, nor did I show the slightest interest.