Abraham van Wyk soon married a widow of more or less my own age, and a year later she died during childbirth, both she and the baby. Abraham moved to the Bokkeveld and what became of him then, I never heard. He never came to our house again; I never saw him face to face or spoke to him again after that evening when I accompanied him to the front door with the candle.
Every year on Mother’s birthday the town ladies came for coffee and a few of the church councillors came to congratulate her, but she remained so proud and quick-witted and straight-shouldered that it was hardly noticeable that she was growing older. Only sometimes I was startled for a moment as I entered the voorhuis where she was sitting alone, but when she heard me she pulled herself together at once, as if it were only my imagination that had suddenly made her appear fragile and wasted, and naturally I asked no questions. How long did the pain gnaw at her before she finally yielded? I know I sometimes thought I heard her cry out in the night, but when I got up to listen at her door, all was quiet; when I knocked hesitantly, she answered after a while, as if she had been asleep, and then she said it was nothing and told me to go back to bed. It was a long time before she sent for old Tant Gesie who doctored with herbs, and even longer before I was allowed to boil or steep the herbal infusions because she could no longer do it herself. By that time she did not enter the kitchen or eat at the table any more; she mostly sat at the window in the voorhuis, and later she no longer left her bedroom. During all that time of her drawn-out deathbed she never said a word about her illness to me, however, or conceded that she was ill, and never amid the worst pain did she admit that she was suffering, refusing in her wordless pride and stubbornness to yield to the inescapable humiliation and defeat of death.
It seems easy to sum it up in a few words now, those last months or weeks of her life, though while I was a witness to her silent death it seemed an endless drawn-out passing, longer than the ten years that we lived in town together. No relief was possible by this time, though I continued to brew the herbal infusions: sometimes she allowed me to sit with her at night, or at least she did not object, until one night she shrieked with pain, so that I woke up where I had fallen asleep beside the bed, and she told me to fetch Tant Gesie. I still remember how I ran through the dark and knocked on her shutter, and how the bewildered old woman groped for the flint to strike a light, how she gathered her clothes and, panting and groaning, followed me with her medicine chest under her arm, but it was too late, and not even with her herbs and infusions could she provide a semblance of hope any more. It was so late that Mother even allowed the doctor to come, for she knew that he, too, would be unable to do anything, and so she was indifferent to his arrival.
Maans and Stienie came to bid Mother farewell before they went down to the Karoo for the winter. Afterwards Maans sat at the kitchen table, tears pouring down his cheeks, for he had always loved Mother, and Stienie looked away and chattered in a loud voice, impatient to get away and unwilling to show it. They had brought Pieter along, and I still remember how he sat next to Mother’s bed, stroking her bony hand slowly, carefully and distractedly, as if it were a strange object he had come upon somewhere in the veld, the feather of a spur-winged goose or the quill of a porcupine, for that seemingly intimate gesture nonetheless held no recognition.
She did not surrender, she did not surrender one step of the way, and to the end she battled with death, but on the inside she was being eroded by the pain, hollowed out like an anthill, and finally she succumbed wordlessly. I sat beside her bed in the motionless chill of the winter night and forced myself to stay awake. Was I expecting anything more, was I still hoping? But there was no word or sign, no gesture of supplication or reconciliation, no sign of love when the last breath in the small, wasted face on the pillow gave out and the end came.
By rights she should have been buried beside Father on the farm, but Maans was still in the Karoo and there was no one to arrange it, and so the funeral took place in town: her grave had to be hewn from the frozen soil with crowbars. There were few people left in town to attend the service and it was a struggle to find enough men to act as bearers. In the bitter eastwind the handful of mourners did not remain at the graveside long, and it was all over very quickly.
The neighbours pitied me for having been left behind so alone: they enveloped me with their sympathy, with small tokens of love, with words of consolation and efforts to help; they offered to sleep in the house at night and invited me to stay with them, they offered to send word to Maans to come and fetch me or to arrange transport so that I could travel to the Karoo. They dearly wanted to do something for me, and I could not tell them there was nothing I desired from them; disconcerted, they looked at me as I stood before them, wordless and tearless, uncomfortable in the presence of their unsolicited sympathy, waiting for them to go and to leave me alone, and at last they withdrew and did not bother me with their offers of help again. The young minister came regularly to support and console me with verses from Scripture and to pray that I might deal with my loss and accept my new solitary state, and I listened to his words of comfort and encouragement and expressed suitable gratitude for his visit. He was doing his duty as well as he could — for he was still young and did not know much about life — but I needed no consolation or encouragement, for there had been no bond between Mother and myself other than the one established by years of familiarity and habit, and as far as solitude went, alone in the big house after Mother’s funeral that winter I realised with amazement that I was not lonely and that I had never been conscious of loneliness. I could remember a moment of solitude and fear, with the fog billowing in the kloof, there was the long, dark emptiness after Pieter and Sofie had left us and another moment when I had knelt on the muddy banks of a fountain, but that was something else, something more than loneliness and at the same time also something less, and that memory came from long ago and was almost irretrievable in the distant past.
Our village had always been very small — I do not believe there were more than twenty or thirty thatched houses in those years, with their pear trees and vegetable patches lining the two streets that led past the church, and most of these were church houses, occupied only occasionally. A new parsonage had been built, there were a few shops and the little post office, and huddled together to one side at the foot of the ridge were the huts and shelters of the coloured people. Now that most residents in the district had moved away to the Karoo for the winter months, there were fewer visitors than ever: the itinerant traders from the Bokkeveld and the Boland no longer came, the transport-riders rode in from Matjiesfontein less often, and even the arrival of the post-cart was delayed from time to time by heavy snowfalls in Verlatekloof or Komsberg Pass. Few people had stayed behind in the village, and when I had no reason to go to the store, entire days sometimes passed when I spoke to no one except the woman who came to do the housework; when she left in the afternoon, I was alone in the clean, empty, waiting house.
Waiting — yes, I must admit. To the people around me with their fruitless sympathy it seemed as if with Mother’s death I had lost my drive and my purpose in life, and in their eyes it was all over: I had been left alone with nothing to look forward to except my own inevitable old age and death; their views did not touch me, however. So much had already changed or been lost over the years, that this was only one more change and loss in the long sequence; I had survived each change and each loss thus far, however, and I knew I would be able to endure this one too, regardless of their expectations.