Nothing happened. Motionlessly the land encompassed us, colourless sky above colourless, dead earth, and motionlessly winter settled around us. Fine snow whirled in the sky for a minute or two, the ice-flakes visible for a moment as they caught the light before vanishing again. Old Tant Neeltjie sat counting the pencil ticks at the back of her Bible, muttering to herself as she counted and checked on her fingers, her feet on Mother’s foot-stove that we brought out because she complained so bitterly of the cold; with unmistakable resentment she sat muttering to herself, and pushed her glass across the table in Maans’s direction so that he could fill it up again.
What exactly happened, I do not know, for I was in the kitchen: it had been a restless night with recurring gusts of wind rattling the doors and shutters. Stienie had not slept well, and Maans had called the old woman to come and take a look at her, which had left her very ill-humoured. The wind was howling mournfully in the chimney and rattling the windows, chasing the dust across the arid veld to swirl in the yard and be blasted against the window-panes; the weather was threatening, yet it did not rain, the veld as desolate as it had appeared for months. It must have been during the tenth month of Stienie’s pregnancy that I heard the scream from her bedroom that morning as I was stooping in front of the stove, and we had been waiting for so long that I pushed the kettle over the fire instinctively to boil the water, and turned to fetch the cloths we had prepared. While I was standing there, I heard old Tant Neeltjie’s voice in the voorhuis, however, and realised that the two of them were shouting at each other, the old woman from the voorhuis and Stienie from her bed, with Maans trying in vain to restore the peace. There was just enough time to send the servants out of the house so that they would not hear the old woman’s language before I went to Stienie, now screaming and sobbing uncontrollably while Tant Neeltjie stood in the voorhuis firing off curses at the door I had closed in her face.
I never found out what had taken place, for Stienie was too upset to speak coherently, and later it was impossible to find out — as a matter of fact, no one ever referred to it again and later it was as if nothing had ever happened — but Tant Neeltjie must have told her that morning that there was no baby, for afterwards the old woman declared that she had stayed there long enough and insisted that Maans take her to town. While he was still hesitating, for a storm appeared to be brewing, she gathered her things — the little Bible, the nightcap and the sewing-case — wrapped in the grain-bag she had arrived with and tied up with string, and sat waiting in the voorhuis, the bundle on her lap, so that there was nothing for it but to have the Cape cart inspanned. I just had time to tell the servants to prepare some padkos, as I had to remain with Stienie: Maans came to say goodbye, but the cart was at the kitchen door and the old woman had already climbed in, thus he had no choice but to leave. I remember how I stooped, the moist cloth in my hands, to steal a glance from under the low eaves, and through the billowing dust and bushes I saw horses and cart struggling against the wind, already almost invisible under the lowering sky; but then I had to attend to Stienie, for during the next few days she demanded all my attention.
I remember the wind that day and the fine dust penetrating between window and casement, and how it became so dark that I had to ask for a tallow candle in the middle of the day, and how cold it was, how icy the water in which I wrung out the cloths to lay on Stienie’s brow and to wash her swollen body. I gave her stuipdruppels and made her an infusion of duiwelsdrek to drink, and gradually she calmed down, but I could not leave her alone. Towards the afternoon the wind brought the first raindrops and then the rain came down, obscuring the land from view and breaking the long drought: Maans had probably reached town, but I knew he would not be able to return in that rain; thus I had coals put in the tessie and, wrapped in a blanket and with my feet on the foot-stove, I kept vigil beside the bed. Nothing, I thought to myself; the baby and the pregnancy and the ungainly body, the shortness of breath and the nausea and the fainting spells, the cramps and the swollen feet; exhausted after her ordeal, Stienie slept, her nightgown and her hair clammy with perspiration. It rained all evening and during the night I heard the steady sound of rain when I awoke on the cot at the foot of the bed, alone in the house with the exhausted woman and the maid asleep on the floor in front of the kitchen stove.
The Cape cart did not return before the following afternoon, ploughing its way through the heavy mud churned up by the wheels and the horses’ hoofs, and Maans brought the doctor along, his mount tied behind the cart; he, too, would have been paid a lot of money to undertake the long journey to the farm in that weather. He examined Stienie without saying much, and from his silence I gathered there was a lot he was keeping to himself and not telling us. That evening he lay down on the bed in the guest-room, fully clothed and covered by only his coat, and at daybreak the following morning his horse was saddled and he rode back to town through the mud and the brimming streams. He still had not said much, but he left behind powders and drops for her to take.
After this, Maans took Stienie down to the Boland: he waited a few days to arrange matters on the farm and for the road to become passable again, and then they left. The sheep had not yet been sent down to the Karoo and he said he would get a message to Fisantkraal and ask Coenraad to come and help us, but what did Coenraad still care about us? He had probably already left for the Karoo himself but, be that as it may, nobody arrived and at last I arranged the trek myself. Fortunately Maans had dependable workers, something with which Father had never been blessed, and I made them carry out everything in the house and load the wagon, and so we left for the Karoo, Pieter and I and the herdsmen and their families, no longer down the rocky ledges and slopes of Vloksberg Pass, bouncing and jolting from ledge to ledge with the abyss looming below, but by way of the new road down Verlatekloof. The journey was quicker now but it still took a few days, and those few days were once again a time of freedom, with no one to give orders or demand explanations, no one to look and to ask and to wonder, only the silent, indifferent presence of the driver and the herdsmen with their families, and Pieter across from me at the camp fire in the evenings. I had to look after the wagon and the oxen, as Maans usually did, or Father or Coenraad in the old days, I had to make decisions and the farm-hands came to me for instructions, but the burden of responsibility rested lightly on my shoulders, and as our trek with wagon and sheep descended down the narrow kloof, it seemed to me as if our route had been reversed, the direction lost for a moment, as if in reality we were ascending, climbing up the slopes, to the cliffs where the wind swept across the rolling land of the escarpment, to the shadowless white brightness of the light, and I experienced a dizzying freedom as I had that day after Mother’s death, alone in our town house. A few days, that is all, that is all it ever was; a week or two at a time is all I was ever granted, but it was enough, and every time the gift of it left me delighted and surprised. We arrived in the Karoo, we settled into the little house Maans had built for them in the meantime as a winter residence, and in due course he returned from Worcester and joined us. He did not say much about Stienie, but she had stayed behind in Worcester where she had relatives and where the doctor knew her; later she went to the baths at Goudini for a while and she also spent some time at the seaside. She was away all winter and only in spring, when we had returned to the Roggeveld and had settled on the farm once again, did Maans fetch her from the Boland.
It was a good time for me, those winter months Maans and I spent together in the Karoo, for he had remained unchanged over the years, a quiet, grateful boy who made no demands, and it was no trouble keeping house for him. Yes, I still say “boy”, though he was a man of forty; as we sat together in the evenings in the glow of the candlelight, I suddenly noticed the first silver in his dark hair, and sometimes when he forgot about my presence and was deep in thought, he suddenly looked tired and defeated, so that my heart ached to see him, for what could I say or do to help? But still, during those few months of Stienie’s absence it was as if something of the old closeness between us had been restored and he became to me once more the child that had been given into my care on my return from death’s door, the child that I used to carry everywhere on my arm or lead around by the hand, and that I had come to regard as my own.